CALIFORNIA The Okies
Around Salinas, Calif., the dark, rich soil is crossed with vivid green avenues of lettuce that stretch almost unbroken from one side of the valley to the other. On the south they end at the base of dry, rocky hills. On the north they end at the shining waters of Monterey Bay, where coves and inlets penetrate, unseen until a watcher is almost upon them, between the level cultivated fields. At the height of the season the 4,500 pickers who swarm over these fields, to take from them their average annual yield of 500,000,000 heads of lettuce, seem diminutive and remote in the immensity of dark earth and bright green leaves, the hills and the Bay.
To Salinas, as to most California agricultural communities, swarms of migrants began to come early in Depression. They were Okies. They swarmed over the State in vast tidal waves, drawn by reports of men needed for the cantaloupe harvest in the Imperial Valley, foe cotton picking in the San Joaquin Valley, for the asparagus and celery of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta.
Though California knew the Okies well, most of the U. S. heard little of them until the book and movie of The Grapes of Wrath fixed a picture of them in the public mind. It was a powerful, melodramatic picture of simple, poetic-speaking, well-meaning, violent people, relentlessly harried by hard times, whose efforts to organize were smashed by vigilantes, whose will was not broken although all society was against them, all growers their mortal enemies.
How much truth is in that picture? Leathery-faced Philip Bancroft, well-hated member of the executive committee of California's Associated Farmers and a fluent hater of John Steinbeck, says, "About as much as there was in Prohibition beer." Owlish, bespectacled California Commissioner of Immigration and Housing Carey McWilliams, who enrages growers by plumping for collective farms to solve California's farm problem, says, "It was true two years ago, is not so true now."
Little Oklahoma. Watching the coming of the Okies as closely as Novelist Steinbeck was a Salinas grower named Elton Hebbron, a middleaged, easygoing man who owned about 120 rolling acres east of Salinas that could not be profitably farmed. He cut it up into small lots, sold it to migrants for $300 to $400 a lot on easy terms, made money. By 1935 the plot was a swarming, crowded, unsightly assemblage of trailers, tents, rusting jalopies, shacks, like innumerable other Little Oklahomas beside farm towns.
Now Little Oklahoma has become East Salinas, unincorporated, with a population of some 6,000, half of them former migrants. The original Hebbron tract has become Hebbron Heights with new stucco or brightly painted five-room frame houses crowding out vestiges of the old tar-paper shacks.
East Salinas is better established than most migrant-built towns, because Salinas packing sheds provide steadier work. Californians do not like to talk about migrants successfully absorbed into California life, for fear of attracting more migrants. Social workers worry about the danger that Little Oklahomas may become "rural slums." But they note that health statistics are normal, juvenile delinquency shows no upping in Little Oklahomas, that such towns are "teeming with hopeful life. . . .