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MIGRATION

During the Great Depression more than two and one-half million Americans, many of them povertystricken, took to the road. They moved from country to city and sometimes from the city back to the country, from the South to the North and from the North and South to the West, within states and from state to state, leaving one region for another, in pursuit of elusive opportunities elsewhere. Families as well as single individuals set forth with what little they had, stealing rides in boxcars, bartering their few remaining possessions to obtain gasoline for decrepit jalopies, hitchhiking down dusty highways. In general, they left areas affected by declining manufacturing output, adverse weather conditions, soil erosion, farm foreclosures, boll weevil ravages, mechanization forcing laborers off the land, and stifling racial segregation.

The trend toward interregional migration began before the Depression. Migration rates were considerably higher in the United States from 1920 to 1930 than from 1930 to 1940. In the 1920s the population of the Northeast and North Central states grew, in part because of an influx of immigrants from abroad. During the same period nativeborn migrants headed to the North and West, fleeing drought and other agricultural devastation in the middle and southern portions of the nation. African Americans left the South in response to both adverse changes in farming and legalized discrimination.

Manufacturing cutbacks of the 1930s brought net declines in population to the Northeast and North Central regions as closed factory doors prompted migration from industrialized states. At the same time migrants continued to head out of the South and the parched Dust Bowl of the Southwest where howling winds scooped up dry topsoil. With its promise of orange groves and fertile fields, California beckoned as a particularly attractive destination for some 400,000 migrants called Okies. These were farmers, blown off their land in Oklahoma and parts of Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and Texas, who headed west on Route 66 in old automobiles.

In a 1944 report, the federal Social Security Board estimated population shifts in the United States due to migration totaled more than 5,800,000 from 1920 to 1930. This figure was cut nearly in half during the Depression, with the comparable estimate given as 2,576,000. Nevertheless, the fact that migration remained significant from 1930 to 1940 showed that thousands of Americans saw no way to improve their plight except to move.

Different and confusing names characterized those who crossed state lines looking for work from 1930 to 1940. Initially, interstate migrants were somewhat differentiated from seasonal migrant laborers who traditionally had moved from place to place to harvest crops. In the early days of the Depression, those on the road commonly were called transients. They also were referred to by such terms as nonresident indigents or the unattached. Sometimes they were lumped together with hobos and tramps, social outcasts who were long-term wanderers.

When the New Deal pushed through its Federal Emergency Relief Act in May 1933, it contained provision for a Federal Transient Program to help those who had left their homes. The program lasted for two years, functioned in forty-four states, and, at its height, offered assistance to more than 300,000 persons. It ended when the Roosevelt administration changed its approach to relief from direct aid to work-oriented projects centered in local communities. This left the floating population without legal rights to benefits, although the Resettlement Administration (which became part of the Farm Security Administration in 1937) provided some camps for migrants.

As the 1930s unfolded, the term migrant was used increasingly in place of the word transient. In 1940 the U.S. House of Representatives looked into the problems facing migrants. Its Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens held hearings from New York to California. Its five hundred witnesses dealt with deplorable conditions faced by transients, some of whom had become migratory agricultural workers. The hearings had little impact on legislation because the advent of World War II ended mass unemployment, but the committee's work made it plain that migration was changing the face of the United States.

DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERNS

The 1944 Social Security Board report provided a statistical picture of migration within the United States for the two decades prior to World War II. It pointed out that twenty-one states and the District of Columbia gained population from 1930 to 1940, acquiring a total of 2,567,000 new residents due to migration. At the same time the majority of states, twenty-seven, lost population as residents left to seek improved circumstances. In the early years of the Depression, migration in the Northeast took place from large cities and industrial areas, where workers had lost their jobs, to selected agricultural areas where migrants hoped to be self-sufficient. This trend shifted back somewhat toward the end of the decade with improvements in business and industrial conditions.

During the 1930s the industrialized Northeast and the North Central states lost population, as did most of the South with the exception of Florida. Virginia and Maryland grew in population, benefiting from the expansion of government employment in the neighboring District of Columbia. But it was the West, including both the mountain and Pacific states, that scored the biggest increase, adding a total of 1,322,000 residents. California alone gained l,052,000 residents during the 1930s. Figures included both foreign-born and native persons, although immigration into the United States and emigration from it offset each other from 1930 to 1940. This contrasted with the previous decade when immigrants from abroad played a pronounced role in population growth. Clearly, during the Depression, when birth rates were particularly low, states that gained population did so due to interregional migration.

From 1930 to 1940 relatively modest migration increased the population of New Hampshire, Connecticut, Indiana, Minnesota, Delaware, Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. Many of these states served as magnets for the unemployed from industrial areas. Only a few states added more than 100,000 individuals. These included Maryland, Oregon, and Washington, along with the District of Columbia. Florida attracted 334,960 new residents by the end of the decade.

With some exceptions these migratory trends represented a continuation of patterns already in place. The nine states that had the largest gains in population from 1930 to 1940—California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Indiana, Connecticut, Maryland, and Florida—also had the largest increases in the preceding decade (from 1920 to 1930). While the annual rate of migration to these states declined during the Depression, it picked up again during World War II. From 1920 through 1940 a total of twenty states had continuous losses in population—Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, West Virginia, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Montana; this trend also continued into World War II.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN MOVEMENT

The Depression slowed, but did not stem, the general movement of African Americans from the South to the North and from rural to more urban areas within Southern states. Journalist Lorena Hickok, an undercover investigator of Depression conditions for the Roosevelt administration, noted the latter phenomena. She reported that white Southerners claimed that New Deal relief programs drew low-paid agricultural workers, many of them African Americans, out of the cotton fields and into nearby cities where they found little employment. More to the point, many white planters pocketed money paid to them by Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Administration for taking land out of production. By refusing to share payments with their tenants and sharecroppers, as they were supposed to do, planters forced them off the land. In some cases they replaced laborers with machinery. Thus, the New Deal unwittingly contributed to displacements that encouraged migration already underway.

Nearly 500,000 African Americans fled the South from 1910 to 1920 when jobs opened to them in northern industry. The following decade an additional 750,000 exited to escape harsh economic and social conditions. During the 1930s the South lost about 350,000 African Americans, less than half the previous decade's total. The mass exodus of African Americans from the South did not come until the 1940s and 1950s when about three million people moved North and West, initially drawn by work in World War II defense plants. Nevertheless, the Depression did not halt redistribution of the African-American population outside the South, a movement that led to sweeping political changes and the end of segregation.

MIGRATION SYMBOLISM

No group of migrants captured the feel of the Depression in the popular imagination to as great an extent as the Okies. The documentary photographer Dorothea Lange took a widely reproduced picture of a toil-worn Okie mother and her hungry children. Titled "Migrant Mother," it appeared in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939), a book written by Lange and her husband, economist Paul Taylor. Lange's photograph still is used to symbolize the destitution faced by millions during the 1930s.

John Steinbeck's best-selling novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), subsequently made into a popular movie, familiarized the nation with the tribulations of the penniless Joad family as they strove to find a new life in California. The Joad family's fictional travails represented those of thousands of uprooted individuals who tried to better themselves by moving. Although many eventually established themselves in their new surroundings, the chronicles of downtrodden migrants in the 1930s remain a heartwrenching part of American history.

See Also: DUST BOWL; GRAPES OF WRATH, THE; MIGRATORY WORKERS; OKIES; TRANSIENTS.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Asch, Nathan. "Cross-Country Bus." New Republic 87 (April 25, 1934): 301–304.

Committee on Care of Transient and Homeless. Records of the National Urban League. Part I. Series 4, Box 3, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Conrad, David E. The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal. 1965.

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. 1999.

Lange, Dorothea. "The Making of a Documentary Photographer." Oral history interview with Suzanne Riess. University of California Regional Oral History Office, Berkeley, 1968.

Lisca, Peter. John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth. 1978.

Lowitt, Richard, and Maurine Beasley, eds. One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports the Great Depression. 1981.

Olson, James S., ed. Historical Dictionary of the New Deal: From Inauguration to Preparation for War. 1985.

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Shindo, Charles J. Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination. 1997.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The New York Public Library African America Desk Reference. 1999.

Smith, Jessie Carney, and Carrell Peterson Horton, eds. Historical Statistics of Black America. 1995.

Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America.1973.

Woytinsky, W. S. "Internal Migration during the War." Report prepared for the Bureau of Employment Security, Social Security Board. Records of the National Urban League, Part I. Series 3, Box 18, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

MAURINE H. BEASLEY