Stay and starve or escape on Route 66
A true American story on grit and perseverance. Happy Thanksgiving!
If you were a farmer in middle America during the 1930s, life was tough.
Depression, drought, disease and default combined to create traumatic times in the United States like no other.
John Steinbeck’s depiction of a victimized family, the Joads, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Grapes of Wrath, told a sad tale with captivating prose. They were Okie’s from Oklahoma trying to survive the times and live another day.
The Dust Bowl was produced by lack of rain and howling winds sweeping over the land, stripping what little fertile topsoil the southern plains had.
Families had suffered with poor crop yields and low prices for years. Now, the weather and banks made properties unsurvivable, properties owned by men whose fathers and grandfathers probably planted their roots their during the 1895 Oklahoma land rush. To vacate the family claim meant you failed both, loved ones and your ancestors.
My father and I didn’t see eye to eye on many things through my early years. We, however, became best buds once he finally grew up and started to appreciate my dry humor and insincerity.
As age crept in, around Christmas we would play a game. I would come up with a really cool gift for us to do together, usually involving venturing to someplace of mutual interest, preferably by train. Then, gratefully, at the end of our adventure he would slyly slip me a check covering the costs, thanks Dad!
One year we took Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, going from Kansas City to Los Angeles, then the Coast Starlight north along the Pacific shore towards San Francisco.
As a side note, Amtrak’s tracks along the coast near Santa Barbara were inside Highway 1, right on top of the beach. We were having breakfast just outside of LA when I thought I saw it ... no, it's early, I shook my head. Then as I stared out over the beautiful blue Pacific, there it was again and again.
Turns out it's a thing in Southern California when you are on the beach to moon Amtrak! Who knew! I saw new moons, half moons, full moons and craters!
Sorry, let me back up, I was a little too excited to get that story out.
Once we got to Albuquerque the train basically paralleled Route 66 for the next 800 miles across open desert on our way to Santa Monica.
Crossing the Mojave Desert at night was like being on the moon, staying up till dawn, I was mesmerized. Never had I seen so many shades of grey. The bright stars cast shadows in artful designs and rock formations reaching for those stars standing like statues. I thought of the Joads on that dark lonely highway.
Steinbeck brilliantly described what those starving yet striving modern nomads had to endure in those incredible years. The depression affected the poorest class the hardest. Ma Joad did everything she could to keep her family together through death, desertion and discord. To her it was all about the family.
This was yet another great migration in U.S. history, such as those roaming west in the mid-1800s and southern Blacks heading north to industrial cities for work in the early 20th century.
It’s all about making the commitment and getting started. In the bluffs on the California Trail one day out from a wagon train's starting point, St. Joseph, is a cemetery with several pioneer graves. Perhaps those buried family elders accepted death willingly knowing their loved ones were on their way, taking the risk and heading off to a better life.
Like most others, the Joads had lost their farm in the Dust Bowl to wind and drought, then finally foreclosure, which meant the bulldoze. It seems like such a thing couldn’t happen in this country to our fellow Americans, but it did.
Steinbeck came under scrutiny for his book. The Grapes of Wrath was banned in several library districts including many in California where he described “Hooverville Camps,” for displaced workers more like inhumane Labor camps.
Farm Labor associations' brutal tactics were also outed and they fired back. Steinbeck received death threats. He started carrying a gun as instructed by his local sheriff.
Politicians weren’t happy about the book either, Oklahoma Congressman Lyle Borem denied that this could happen in his state, “A lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.”
Nonetheless, the Joads and 200,000-plus anguished families saw heading west on Route 66 as their only salvation, adapt or die. Steinbeck called the Route the Mother Road, I like to call it the Highway of Hope, we humans always have to have hope.
The act of relocating under such conditions is heart wrenching. Some in a family no doubt realize they have no choice, while others held on, not believing all the promises those cherished hand bills from California professed. Men in particular struggled with leaving, no matter who’s fault it was.
The Joads along with thousands of other poor migrants piled their earthly belongings into the family “bucket of bolts,” and headed out on 66.
Steinbeck didn’t mince words, there were breakdowns, hunger, death and discrimination on the road. At times humanity seemed to be lost.
The first half of the exodus was bearable, but coming up for the Joads in their rickety jalopy were 100 miles of isolation, the Mojave Desert.
Join us next time on Route 66, a highway that answered many people's dreams. —————————————-
Bob Ford’s History will appear in each edition of the Weekender, Midweek and Corner Post. You can find more of Bob’s work on his website bobfordshistory.com and videos on YouTube, TikTok and Clapper.
