Archive for the ‘Dust Bowl’ tag
One of the past century’s most shameful stories of economic rejection and human displacement was the drought-induced collapse of Midwest farming during the Depression commonly called the Dust Bowl. The black blizzards that devoured the heartland’s precious topsoil sent the starving exiles (fewer than half of whom were actually farmers, the U.S. Census Bureau later learned. The rest were merchants, teachers, and even professionals like attorneys and physicians) west. More than 2.5 million were forced to leave the wasted farmland, many with all their remaining possessions lashed aboard rickety automobiles, some 200,000 gone to California alone along roads such as U.S. Route 66.
Untold thousands were forced into migrant labor camps, there to be humiliated and abused by planters. In a purely American way, their struggles with discrimination ultimately became a tale of triumph. The Dust Bowl transplants transformed California. They became engineers and technicians in the burgeoning World War II aircraft industry. After the war, they hotly grabbed onto early drag racing, dry lakes runs and sports cars, defining California’s storied car culture. The suburbs that exploded around Los Angeles, most of all the San Fernando Valley and South Bay areas, became their new homesteads.
Of late, consciousness has been refocused on the Dust Bowl via the new Ken Burns documentary series on PBS. Now, the motorized element of this unprecedented migration is being retold in a new Dust Bowl exhibition at the wonderful Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners, Michigan, near Kalamazoo. In both display cars and archival photography, the exhibit frames the ardors of the journey – like Grampa and Ma Joad in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, countless Dust Bowl refugees died along the highways before reaching California – against the ostentatious wealth that rubbed the new arrivals raw in their supposed Promised Land. Vehicles on display range from a 1929 Duesenberg to an authentically weather-beaten 1927 Model T. The Gilmore Museum is a fabulous place, laden with history, and a must-visit. For more information, visit GilmoreCarMuseum.org.