The Real Story of the Dust Bowl Migration

BY: Becky Potter

Much of the music of Woody Guthrie is inspired by the rough-and-tumble times of the Dust Bowl Diaspora.  “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “Do Re Mi” are just a few of the songs that sing the plight of the migrant workers as they roamed the American heartland in the 1930s to escape the Great Depression and regional droughts in the Midwest.

But the actual Dust Bowl was a small region of dry land that stretched from the Kansas-Colorado border to the Texas panhandle.  And what we think of as the Great Dust Bowl Migration involved a much larger group of people. Between 300,000 and 400,000 residents of the plains moved west during that era -- most ending up in California.

Economist Paul Taylor took an interest in the migration and was the first to use the terms “refugee” and “dust, drought, and protracted depression.” Journalists of the time latched onto those colorful turns of phrase and the “Dust Bowl refugee” was born – a label that not only misrepresented the region in question but also the people doing the migrating.  Actual occupants of the Dust Bowl accounted for a very small number of the total refugees.  Most of the migrants were from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri, where there was a great deal of Depression and drought but not all that much dust.

The picture of the typical Midwest to California migrant wasn’t necessarily what you would expect.  Nearly 95 percent of them were white.  A majority weren’t even farmers.  Many were blue-collar workers left unemployed by the drought and Depression.  Most found employment and stable lives fairly soon after arriving in the Golden State but it is the migrant farmer we remember from the evocative photographs, books, and songs of the time. The white migrant worker took the place of the Mexican-American field worker and traveled up and down the state living out of trucks and tents. It is their struggle that is captured forever in Dorothea Lange’s striking pictures, the writings of John Steinbeck, and of course, the songs of Woody Guthrie.