Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California

by Peter La Chapelle

Overview

Proud to Be an Okie brings to life the influential country music scene that flourished in and around Los Angeles from the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s to the early 1970s. The first work to fully illuminate the political and cultural aspects of this intriguing story, the book takes us from Woody Guthrie's radical hillbilly show on Depression-era radio to Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" in the late 1960s. It explores how these migrant musicians and their audiences came to gain a sense of identity through music and mass media, to embrace the New Deal, and to celebrate African American and Mexican American musical influences before turning toward a more conservative outlook. What emerges is a clear picture of how important Southern California was to country music and how country music helped shape the politics and culture of Southern California and of the nation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520248892
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/03/2007
Series:	American Crossroads , #22
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	364
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Peter La Chapelle is Assistant Professor of History at Nevada State College in Henderson, Nevada.

Read an Excerpt

Proud To Be an Okie

Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California

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By Peter La Chapelle

University of California Press

Copyright © 2007 The Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-24889-2

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Chapter One

At the Crossroads of Whiteness

Antimigrant Activism, Eugenics, and Popular Culture

My people are not quaint They're not colorful They ain't odd nor funny nor picturesque. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It makes me sore to hear or to see or to read How you big long haired writers Whack away at my people Chew and cut and saw away at my people Trying to make like you are their savior Or their way shower Or their finder, Or their discoverer, Like Balboa, like Colombo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . setting your maps and your charts and your pens, And stumbling onto my people Like they was some sort of a new piece of land Sticking up out of an old body of water. WOODY GUTHRIE, "My People"

If Dwight Yoakam is correct in insisting that the cultural ethnicity of country music is the "Grapes of Wrath culture," then we must begin by considering how that "ethnicity" came into being. In some respects, Okie country music emerged on a sour note in the mid- to late 1930s: a time of privation, worrisome migration, and intense media scapegoating in California. Although much of this book is concerned withthe images and sounds that migrant musical performers created, this chapter focuses on the images that others produced to malign the migrants. So relentless were these attacks, in fact, that migrants' social status began to founder, leaving many to assume a class position so low it appeared racialized or otherwise unsuited for "white" citizens. Recoiling from these attacks, migrant performers did what musicians around the world have done in times of ethnic or cultural persecution. They weathered the barbs and fashioned personalized responses-the prideful, sorrowful, angry, joyous, and sometimes rebellious songs that would come to characterize much of the Okie music repertoire.

Looking back today through the lenses of the film directors John Ford and Pare Lorentz, the Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothea Lange, and our own nostalgia, it is easy to see the Okies as an oppressed lot, the dutiful displaced citizen-farmers of Steinbeck or Ford's Grapes of Wrath, the victimized stalwarts of Lorentz's Plow That Broke the Plains, or the hardened Madonna-heroines, like that of Lange's iconic, incessantly reproduced photograph "Migrant Mother." Indeed, with Ford, Lange, and Steinbeck as our chief chroniclers, it is difficult to even imagine that the poor Okies of the late 1930s and early 1940s might stir up hatred, much less an antimigrant campaign.

Not so at the time, particularly for "native" white Californians, who were likely to speak of the migrants as a plague, often employing the same hysterical sort of rhetoric that sometimes surrounds discussions of Mexican immigrants today. Doomsdayism and hyperbole abounded. "No greater invasion by the destitute has ever been recorded in the history of mankind," Thomas W. McManus, high chieftain of the anti-Okie movement in California, warned readers of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1940. "It has overwhelmed us; they will soon control the political destiny of California. We must stop this migration or surrender to chaos and ruin."

Historians, in fact, have long puzzled over the amount of animosity that native white Californians leveled at the more than 350,000 migrants who entered the state during the 1930s. Dust Bowl migrants were, after all, mostly native-born American citizens of European ancestry and of Protestant faith. Traveling from drought-ravaged Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri, the economic migrants of the Depression formed a legion of what would have been celebrated in an earlier age as sturdy pioneers or "pathfinders of civilization." Instead they were threatened, ridiculed, exploited, shunned, and encouraged to return to their native states. In the eyes of native white Californians, poor whites from the Ozark and Ouachita mountains, the southern plains, and the prairie Southwest had transformed from model frontiersmen into unwanted Others.

Scholars have traditionally explained the hostility of white Protestant Californians toward white Protestant migrants as a product of tension over the local distribution of relief. Migrants, according to this view, were overloading county and municipal welfare systems and therefore were subject to criticism and political contention. An examination of the prevailing depictions of "the migrant problem," as well as the actual track record of antimigrant activism, however, indicates that negative representations of migrants and poor whites were as potent, if not more so, in provoking antimigrant sentiment. Although arguments that migrants misused relief did raise alarm, native Californians were also inundated with stereotypical images and reminders that members of the migration from the southern plains were "white trash" and Tobacco Road-like misfits-economic and hereditary inferiors who engaged in uncontrolled reproduction, lacked a proper work ethic, and destabilized functional structures of political and social control. Native white Californians learned to revile the Dust Bowlers much as they had earlier "learned" that people of Asian, African, Mexican, and Native American ancestry posed a threat to civilized society.

The result of this onslaught was a rather remarkable circumstance in the history of American prejudice: a group of ostensibly white citizens became so stigmatized that its members became fodder for the kind of race talk and eugenic baiting normally reserved for racial minorities or immigrants. This race talk took the form of a major political and media campaign that drew from phenotypic and behavioral stereotypes to racialize migrant bodies and actions. As a system imbued with "scientific" authority, eugenics-the effort to beget well-born, or "eu-genic," children as opposed to poorly born, hereditarily deficient offspring-was also an important part of this equation. Eugenics and race talk allowed native white Californians to create myths that downgraded the status of white Dust Bowlers to such an extent that migrants were subjected to forms of harassment typically faced by racial minority groups.

Migrants, in fact, began to assume a liminally white status that clashed with existing mythologies of whiteness celebrated by Los Angeles and Southern California elites. These mythical regimes of whiteness-known variously as the "Mission myth," the "Nordic outpost" argument, and the "seaport of Iowa" legend-were a set of fictional stories that sought to make the region more attractive to middle-class newcomers by emphasizing the white heritage of Los Angeles. The Mission myth did this by highlighting the white Spanish roots of the former Mexican city, while later Nordic and seaport-of-Iowa myths emphasized the lily-white "Aryan" complexions, midwestern roots, and western European origins of the region's later American settlers. A complex set of beliefs often based on notions of social hierarchy, whiteness mythologies of the 1930s found Dust Bowlers to be an indigestible population of poor or displaced persons, leaving migrants at the periphery, the most liminal edge of white status in "Anglo-Saxon" Los Angeles. Although migrants were never forced to forfeit the right to vote, for a time they confronted obstacles typically faced by racial and cultural minorities, including police harassment, vigilante attacks, discrimination in public relief, and legal and extralegal restriction on movement across borders.

My suggestion that white Californians saw Dust Bowlers as liminally white builds on a body of work that examines racial hierarchies and whiteness in the United States. Responding to W. E. B. DuBois's and Frantz Fanon's calls for an exploration into how and with what results a people comes to define itself as white, scholars of whiteness such as David Roediger, Karen Brodkin, and Matthew Frye Jacobson have rejected racial essentialism, the notion that race operates as a fixed biological characteristic independent of cultural and political variables. Instead, they have shown how racial categories-especially white or Caucasian classifications-have served as fluid, socially constructed identity markers that can change over time and place. Much of their work has focused on how the Irish or eastern and southern European immigrants exchanged a low-status, ethnic, "not yet white" existence for the privileged condition of assimilation, higher status, and "whiteness."

Dust Bowl migrants similarly saw their whiteness fluctuate, but rather than trading upward, as had Jews or the Irish, they regressed in social and phenotypic standing. Before the migration, the 43 percent of migrants who had had farm occupations, and the 46 percent with blue-collar experiences, could subscribe to what Roediger has called a "white workerism," or what Neil Foley has phrased as "white agrarianism," widely held notions of white superiority that gave would-be migrants real advantages over people of color at home, a region still deeply segregated. After the drought and exodus of the mid-1930s, native Californians described and treated migrants as a pariah-like substratum of liminal whites. Although this metamorphosis was uneven, generally mitigated by migrants' occupations and economic backgrounds, it often had an impact that superseded individual class positions, linking Okies as an entire ethnoregional group with a shared set of seemingly racial character flaws. The duration of this racialization, however, should not be exaggerated. The most vehement forms of scapegoating began to wane after the outbreak of World War II, when demand for migrant labor peaked and migrants achieved some measure of economic stability.

That the Okies oscillated within a spectrum of whiteness-proving themselves pronouncedly white in their home states, liminally white in California, then acceptably white again after the war-further undermines universal essentialistic approaches to the history of race. Whereas the victims of racial categorization have typically been racial minorities, the cultural fictions surrounding the idea of whiteness can turn on their owners by providing elites with a weapon to scapegoat lower-status white groups who traditionally profited from such classifications. Such oscillations also challenge Frederick Jackson Turner's model of socioeconomic development, which has been correctly expunged from recent histories of people of color in the West, but which remains an important element in discussions about westward-bound European-Americans. That descendants of Turner's celebrated white frontiersmen could be subject to a collapse in ethnosocial status as they traveled along Route 66 suggests something that Turner failed to predict: that the westering process could actually debase the social standing of the very people it was supposed to uplift.

BUILDING THE WALL: ANTIMIGRANT ATTITUDES AND THE LEGACY OF RACIAL SCAPEGOATING

So flagrant was Depression-era Okie baiting that even visiting Europeans began to take note. Blaise Cendrars, a French filmmaker and journalist imbued with a certain Tocquevillean knack for commentary on life in the United States, traveled through California in the mid-1930s and took to satirizing the nativist mood. The piece he penned, which found its way into the newspaper Paris-Soir, suggested that Okies were nothing less than barbarians in the eyes of the Southern Californians: "Can the hillbillies from the interior be kept from coming to seek their fortunes in ... Hollywood? When will they build their Chinese wall?"

Workmen never broke ground on a "Great Wall of Los Angeles," of course, but Cendrars's imaginative phrasing does raise important questions: How did the figurative wall between one group of white Protestants and another become so formidable that one was temporary excluded from fair passage from one U.S. state to another? And if this campaign was so powerful, where did its support come from?

California's turbulent history of racial and ethnic scapegoating offers some answers. Here it is worth considering antimigrantism as an organized political movement. Political anti-Okie activism was unable to choke off the flow of migrants, but it proved an overwhelming success in making the Dust Bowl migrant the social threat of the moment. Although nowhere near as brutal or as protracted, white Californian reaction to the Dust Bowl exodus corresponded with, and in some ways mimicked, earlier demonization of racial minorities in legal code and public discourse.

Racial demonization in fact was the harsh flip side of the California Dream, a long and shadowy legacy of twisted logic in which a Yahi Indian could be displayed in a museum highlighting his "savagery" after previous generations of white Californians had systematically hunted and slain all his kin. Though vitally important to the economy, immigrant Chinese workers similarly faced mob violence and an Exclusion Act, frequently decried as a "Yellow Peril" that endangered white jobs, democracy, and public health. Alternately portrayed as compliant peons and violent aggressors, those of Mexican ancestry were also thrall to this inverse dream, being relieved of much of their hereditary land in the 1860s, restricted at the border in the 1920s, and even illegally repatriated to Mexico in the early 1930s. White California could prove similarly nightmarish to African Americans, who faced restrictive housing covenants, accusations of criminality, and rounds of Ku Klux Klan and police brutality.

Demonization of the Okies, in fact, seemed a logical extension of earlier forms of racial ostracism. Faced with a comparatively small black population, restricted Asian immigration, and the forgone repatriation of hundreds of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, that California selected the Okies for vilification does not seem surprising. Journalistic accounts of the migration, furthermore, emphasized that, within the labor structure, white migrants were "filling in" for earlier vilified Mexican or Asian workers, with these reports often suggesting the shared undesirability of the Okies and earlier groups whose threat had now been neutralized. Country Gentleman, a nationally prominent farm magazine, for instance, began a July 1938 article by comparing the Morenos, an impoverished Mexican family of "fruit tramps" being repatriated by train to Mexico, with their replacements, the bottom-rung Williams family of Arkansas. Although Mexican workers and their Okie replacements shared some flaws, such as having too many children, they offered trade-offs in other areas. The outgoing Mexicans, the article warned, had been "easily aroused emotionally," while Okies and Arkies were lazy and just plain filthy, tossing "garbage and rubbish outside the kitchen door" and defecating through "a hole in the floor to avoid going outdoors to toilet facilities."

Surprisingly, Okies actually fared worse in many journalistic comparisons, which often waxed nostalgic about departing minority workers' purported skill, humility, and servility. The Moreno-Williams piece, for instance, argued that Okies lacked Mexican workers' "instinctive touch" for finding ripe fruit, and that Okies were absolutely barbaric in their treatment of their own homes: "Wood is provided for the chopping on most of the ranches, but the migrants tear out partitions between rooms, and even the floors, for firewood-something no Mexican family ever did." Another article challenged the very citizenship of the Okies, arguing that migrants knew less about "Americanism" than "the foreigners who come to live in our community": "Our migrants from the cotton lands have been Americans always, and many generations of ancestors before them, but they have never understood what America means."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Proud To Be an Okie by Peter La Chapelle Copyright © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction

PART I. BIG CITY WAYS
1. At the Crossroads of Whiteness: Antimigrant Activism, Eugenics, and Popular Culture
2. Refugees: Woody Guthrie, "Lost Angeles," and the Radicalization of Migrant Identity
3. Rhythm Kings and Riveter Queens: Race, Gender, and the Eclectic Populism of Wartime Western Swing

PART II. RHINESTONES AND RANCH HOMES
4. Ballads for the Crabgrass Frontier: Suburbanization, Whiteness, and the Unmaking of Okie Musical Ethnicity
5. Playing Second Fiddle No More? Country Music, Domesticity, and the Women’s Movement
6. Fightin’ Sides: “Okie from Muskogee,” Conservative Populism, and the Uses of Migrant Identity

Reprise: Dueling Populisms: The Okie Legacy in National and Regional Country Music
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index