OKIEISM FOREVER :

Proud to be an Okie (H. D. Miller, 6/27/02, Travelling Shoes)

In the case of Okies, I can actually claim a certain amount of first-hand knowledge, you see, I'm an Okie. Or at least, I'm a third-generation California Okie. My maternal Granny was born in the Okalahoma Territory in 1903, and grew up in a tiny West Texas town just south of the Oklahoma border. In the mid-1940s, my grandparents upped stakes and moved to Garden Grove, California, so my grandfather could find work in the Los Angeles defense plants. They weren't Dust Bowl refugees, rather they followed a more common migration pattern, one [Keith] Windschuttle identifies in this passage:

"The real mass migration of Okies to California actually took place in the 1940s to take advantage of the boom in manufacturing jobs during World War II and its aftermath. In this period, about 630,000 of them went to the west coast. It was not the Depression of the 30s but the economic boom of the 40s that caused an abnormal increase in Okie migration."

H. D. Miller has more on that New Criterion piece that put paid to the notion that Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath portrays the reality of the Great Depression. Read it and admire what Mr. Miller refers to as "the central philosophy of Okie-ism: dogged, stubborn, bloody-minded determination". Posted by Orrin Judd at June 28, 2002 7:35 AM