Title: Dust bowl migrants in the American imagination /
Authors: Shindo, Charles J.
Publisher: University Press of Kansas,
Year: 1997
Subjects: Migrant agricultural laborers in art.; Arts, American; Arts, American; Migrant agricultural laborers United States History.; Depressions United States; Dust storms Great Plains.; Labor camps California.; Droughts Great Plains.; Arts, American; Dust Bowl Era, 1931-1939; Great Plains Rural conditions.; California Rural conditions.
Abstract: More than any other event of the 1930s, the migration of thousands of jobless and dispossessed Americans from the Dust Bowl states to the "promised land" of California evokes the hardships and despair of the Great Depression. In this innovative new study, Charles Shindo shows how public memory of that migration has been dominated not by academic historians but by a handful of artists and reformers. Shindo examines the images of Dust Bowl migrants in photography, fiction, film, and song and marks off the various distances between these representations and the realities of migrant lives. He shows how photographer Dorothea Lange, novelist John Steinbeck, Hollywood filmmaker John Ford, and folksinger Woody Guthrie, as well as folklorists and government reformers, sympathized with the migrants' plight but also appropriated that experience to further their own aesthetic and ideological agendas. Lange's "Migrant Mother" and other photos, the powerful story of the Joad family in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Ford's poetic cinematic adaptation of that novel, and the gritty plainfolk lyrics of Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads have all combined to portray the migrants as down-and-out victims of the Great Depression. Shindo, however, contends that these artists failed to fully grasp the essence of "Okie" culture and were more concerned with promoting views and agendas that the migrants themselves might have found inaccurate or unappealing.
Contents: Displaced voices : the migrants as American victims -- The ideals of American democracy : New Deal reformers and the migrant -- The passion and the humanity : Dorothea Lange and Migrant worker -- The perfectibility of man : John Steinbeck and The grapes of wrath -- Photo essay: Introducing Americans to America : the image of the migrants -- The world-old desire to tell a story : John Ford and The grapes of wrath -- The things that you fight for : Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl ballads -- The uses of American culture : folklorists and the migrant -- The ghost of Tom Joad : the persistence of Dust Bowl representations.