A Very OK Podcast
Episode 18: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
September 20, 2022
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson, and I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society. And with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. How are you doing today, Bob?
Dr. Bob Blackburn: Doing great, Trait, and enjoying the weather this September, and looking forward to a new year coming towards us.
Thompson: Well, as we’re recording this, it’s just after Labor Day, and I had a chance to get out on my kayak a couple of times and went out on Lake Arcadia and then went out on Lake Thunderbird and got to see some beautiful sunrises, and you can start to feel that little change in the air a little bit. And I’m ready for fall. After the summer that we’ve had and how hot it’s been, I’m definitely ready for a little bit of cooler weather now, for sure.
Blackburn: Me too.
Thompson: Well, one of the things that we are going to talk about today is the Great Depression in Oklahoma and the impact of the Great Depression. And of course, you know, we like to talk about pop culture, and I wanted to talk about some of the pop culture that’s impacted both of us in terms of movies, but also what was going on in pop culture in the 1930s in Oklahoma. And do you have any movies that particularly resonate with you, that really kind of identify this time frame for you?
Blackburn: Well, of course, there’s one movie that had a huge impact in Oklahoma—negative reaction— but is probably one of the great pieces of cinema art as well as literary art, and that is Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck. Beautiful novel. I’ve reread the novel many times. To me, Ma Joad is this woman of a huge heart, holding the family together. Strength, perseverance, all the things we think of as the Oklahoma standard. And so, I love the Ma Joad character, and I love Tom Joad a little bit, being the baby boomer generation, you know, kind of saying, well, we’re not going to accept everything just because it’s there. Well, Tom Joad, he was fighting the man, and this resilience and this perseverance that Tom Joad had. The book is just wonderful. But then, a couple of years later, John Ford, the great director, who would go on to make some great movies during the war. But of course, all of his John Wayne movies. John Ford was such a brilliant filmmaker. He took the story and turned it into a different kind of art, and he used the drama of the Dust Bowl inappropriately. It’s not a history. And when people start criticizing John Ford, I said, wait a minute. John Ford was not a historian. It’s not a Ken Burns documentary. It is a piece of art, and so he used that effectively. But so many people in Oklahoma were upset by the depiction of these families who are down and out as if they were derelict, and they were thrown away and, here they go off on the road to California. The way they were treated in California was insulting. So that generation of Oklahomans during the Great Depression really reacted strongly to it. Still a negative feeling among people today in their 90s. But to me, and I think a lot of baby boomers agree, it’s a wonderful novel of hope and perseverance, and just hanging on and doing what you have to do to get by, and family and all of that. So that happens to be one of my favorite movies of all time, as well as expressing this depression.
The other one more personal, and that’s the story Woody Guthrie captured in cinema, loosely based on his life. Again, it’s art, not history, not a biography. But David Carradine played the Woody Guthrie character in Bound for Glory. And it’s where Woody is growing up in Okemah. His dad is a prosperous real estate developer, owns many farms, a lot of houses, loses it all in the Great Depression. Here Woody goes off as a sign painter, trying to make his way west, painting signs in these little towns. He gets to the middle of the Dust Bowl out in the Oklahoma or Texas Panhandle and works his way out, playing a little music, writing poetry. Gifted literary agent. At one point we were naming centennial literary stars in Oklahoma’s history, and I was an advocate for it. And we finally agreed on the commission that Woody Guthrie is going to be number one in terms of literary arts. We’ve had very few artists as perceptive, and they captured some of that spirit of Woody Guthrie in that movie. And it’s all about the Great Depression and putting a lot of people on the road, testing a lot of families, and how people adapted. And Woody Guthrie, of course, ended up with this great career in music and writing and influencing an entire generation of musicians in America. But those are two of my favorites from that time period.
Thompson: You know, it’s interesting about Woody Guthrie because, you know, Oklahomans over the years haven’t necessarily embraced him, largely because of some of his political views over the years, and that have been expressed in some of his songs. He was definitely a friend of the common man, a friend of the common laborer. He felt like that a lot of times the poor people were exploited at the expense of the rich people. And I remember hearing his story, you know, because there’s a great portrait of Woody Guthrie in the State Capitol, and Charles Banks Wilson painted that portrait. And what I understand is at the time, it was fairly controversial. Now, I don’t think it’s as controversial as it used to be. In fact, in Okemah, Oklahoma, which is his hometown, they have a festival every year, the Woody Guthrie Festival, and musicians come from all over the nation. Until recently, his son Arlo would come and play there as well. And so, you know, it’s important time politically in, not only in Oklahoma, but across the United States. And yes, that Grapes of Wrath image stuck with Oklahoma long after. In fact, I remember reading that John Steinbeck, he didn’t want to write about this era. And he was really kind of, someone convinced him to, and he went and came to Oklahoma, and he went out and visited some of the migrant camps in California. And he said, I can’t write this as a journalist. He said, there’s too much heart and there’s too much feeling going on here. He said, I have to do this in a novel. And that’s what spurred him to write the novel The Grapes of Wrath.
But yeah, and then some other movies that came out during that time period of the 1930s, and in fact, some very iconic films. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs came out in 1937, one of the first full-length animated features to come out. Now, there had been short-length animated features that had come out before, but this was the first full-length movie, and it was revolutionary for its time. And this was Walt Disney, of course, who was the pioneer and went on to make many, many other movies that were in this same vein. 1939 was a banner year for cinema. You had movies like The Wizard of Oz, still I think airs every year on television and still gives me nightmares about those flying monkeys (laughing) and the Wicked Witch of the West.
And then you had Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the classic tale of the man who goes up to, you know, the innocent man that goes up to Washington, DC, and isn’t used to the wiles of the politics of that, of that stage. And you have Stagecoach, the John Ford Western filmed in Monument Valley, really gave John Wayne his first introduction to real stardom. He had been a B-movie actor for about ten years before that, and that launches him into the career that he has. And so a lot of great movies. Gone With the Wind came out 1939, also. And so, but movies were important, weren’t they, during the Great Depression. We had a lot of, it was a hard, hard time for Oklahomans and for people across the nation. How did movies help us during that time?
Blackburn: Well, movies were an escape from the realities of the day. At one point, almost a third of all Oklahomans were unemployed or underemployed, just barely getting by. And the movies, and you could get into the movies for a quarter or less. Kids, I remember getting into movie theater in the ’50s for 10 cents, and you’d have, you know, if you had a quarter, you could get a Coke and some popcorn with that quarter that you were sent with. So people went to movies, and movie houses in these small towns around Oklahoma, where the Great Depression was more visible probably than in the cities in a lot of ways, because farmers were suffering the most. And so those rural communities were suffering. But many small towns had two or three movie theaters in a town of a thousand people. And so, every movie theater would change movies at least twice a week, sometimes three. And so you could go to a movie on Monday night, go to a different movie in the same theater on Thursday night, another on Sunday afternoon, and sometimes a double feature. And movies were very popular, and with that rising demand, the free enterprise system is going to provide the supply. So the demand is there.
People wanting this escapism; they want to be moved by the Will Rogers stars of the time or the Shirley Temples or, you know, the Jimmy Stewarts, whomever it might be. They wanted to see Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and that generation of great actors, and they were willing to spend their money to do it. And the movie studios in Hollywood were churning them out, and they had all these stars on contract. At one point, Will Rogers is making three movies a year. You know, and today we think about a movie every two years. Well, they were cranking those babies out, and here they were being distributed on the railroad system. They were coming to Oklahoma City there on Film Row, where people could come in and watch and say, I want that movie, that movie, and that one. Take them back. This was the age of, the golden age of cinema in many, many ways.
Thompson: Right. And, you know, we don’t talk about music very often on this podcast. But I do want to mention there’s an iconic song that really captures the heart of what’s going on during the Great Depression. It was released on November 26, 1932. It’s called “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” And the lyrics were actually written by a man named E. Y. Yip Harburg, who also wrote “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which was one of the famous songs that Judy Garland sang in The Wizard of Oz. But this song was recorded by Bing Crosby, later by Rudy Vallée, and the lyrics are just, they’re so sad, and they’re so poignant about capturing really the heart and the feeling of what’s going on. “They used to tell me I was building a dream. And so I followed the mob. When there was earth to plow or guns to bear, I was always right there on the job. They used to tell me I was building a dream with peace and glory ahead. Why should I be standing in line just waiting for bread?”
Blackburn: Wow. That’s moving.
Thompson: Powerful, powerful stuff about someone that had everything going in the American dream. And then it’s over, and you’re reduced to nothing, financially, at least. And so officially, the Great Depression begins October 29, 1929, when the stock market crashes. But conditions, particularly in Oklahoma, had been worsening for quite some time. Can you set the scene for us, Bob?
Blackburn: Right, Trait. I like to look at the Great Depression within the bigger context. What had happened? Why do we have such a reaction to that? And you almost have to go back to the American frontier being settled, all the way from the 18th century to the 20th century. Land was always available, and if you were burned out or you were, you know, couldn’t make it on the farm, you could always go to the next state over or the next county over, get another piece of land, start over. And that was a tradition of starting over, and land was always the central part of that story.
And then in 1898, and that’s important for Oklahoma, because in 1898 was the Curtis Act that forced the Five Tribes to allot their land and severalty, so goes from public ownership, or communal ownership, to private ownership. So from 1898 and 1889 to 1907, all of Oklahoma goes from communal ownership, either the government or tribes, to private ownership. So, suddenly, people have the means of wealth. And fortunately, for those farmers and ranchers moving Oklahoma, and we were largely an agricultural economy at the time, especially before oil, in that they got lucky. The rains came back to the Southern Plains in 1897, 1898. The price of crops were going up because of international relationships in this world market the farmers have always dealt in. With fresh land, cotton could be planted here. The boll weevil had not come to Oklahoma yet, so cotton was king, the cash crop, and you could grow wheat in western Oklahoma. Cattle, horses, mules everywhere. And so the farm economy really entered what historians call the golden age of farming from 1898 to 1918.
And as you get, of course there are a few years in there that are bad, like crop failure in 1911, and there were some other tough years. But generally, these were good years when the American dream seems to be working for American farmers in rural areas, when a family could make it on 40 acres and a mule, because before tractors, it was a before mass production. And so if you had 40 acres, you’d put 10 acres in corn to feed the livestock, you’d have a garden to feed the family, you’d have a few animals for the milk, and some chickens for the eggs, and then you put as much as you could into cotton or a cash crop, and that provided you to $200 a year that you needed to survive. And so, the Jeffersonian dream seemed to be working for a lot of Oklahomans. So the farming community kept growing, and people kept moving farther out onto the plains. A lot of people were still homesteading land and the Oklahoma Panhandle and even Woodward County.
My wife’s family started homesteading out there about 1903, 1904. There was still unoccupied land. So, you get more land in production. Railroads are being built throughout the state, more railroad lines built between 1900 to 1910 than all the other decades combined. So right in the middle of this, you get the railroads coming out of these little towns, which makes it more efficient to get your crops to market. And then that makes it cheaper to buy the manufactured goods for quality of life. Here come the movies later, as we mentioned earlier. So times are good. This is the golden age of farming. People’s hopes are, oh, it’s always going to be great. And then you get to post–World War I. The overproduction. Europeans start producing again. Those markets dry up. You don’t have to feed millions of men in the ranks, and suddenly the demand for agricultural products doesn’t just decline—it goes off the cliff.
Thompson: Well, and you have, in the early 1900s, you have people that are really moving out into the Great Plains, and the farming is good. And, like you said, during those World War I years, those were banner years. We were getting rain. And then also, Europe stopped producing wheat because of World War I, when everybody was off. Not only were the farms getting bombed to heck, but all of the men were off fighting the war. And so in the Great Plains, from 1909 to 1929, 32 million acres of sod are plowed up on the Great Plains, not only in Oklahoma, but all around in that region. And so we’re really moving out to become farmers, and we think times are great. More and more land, people are buying tractors, and everything’s becoming mechanized. And we’re planting more and more wheat, and everything seems like it’s never going to get bad.
Blackburn: Right. I just recently wrote a book about Fred Jones and his car dealerships, in both Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and he had a small Ford dealership in Blackwell, Oklahoma, and he was selling almost as many Fordson tractors in 1920 as it was Ford cars. And he could not get enough Fordson tractors because the farmers wanted them because they could afford them, pay it out on installments. And so farmers were doing pretty well up to that time. But then the prices start to decline. Then you get overproduction. So one good, hard-working farmer with a tractor, who can do more production than four farm families all combined, suddenly can go out onto the Great Plains and bust the sod and produce these great crops on hundreds of acres, rather than tens of acres. And you get overproduction with prices going down, production going up. That accelerates the decline of the prices.
And in the end, the railroads, will use their business model to charge more during harvest season than they did the rest of the year. The farmers look at that and say, oh, you’re gouging us. It causes a lot of disillusion. People are upset with banks that seem to be taking their land when they can’t make their payments, with the railroads that are charging more during offers. And as the prices go down, you know, as you said, cotton, in a couple of years, we get down to three to five cents a pound. Well, if you hired a crew to pick your cotton, you’re paying two and a half cents just to have it picked. Didn’t leave much of a margin for paying for the seed, for the plowing, for all the labor. And so basically, there were no cash crops. And as production goes up and people couldn’t make their mortgage payments, they’re set adrift.
They’re going into towns like Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Wichita, looking for industrial jobs. That’s happening during the ’20s. And that’s one reason Oklahoma City and Tulsa are still growing in the ’20s, is people are beginning to leave the farms where they can’t make it anymore, and they’re coming to get these jobs in Oklahoma City and Tulsa and Wichita and other surrounding towns. And then the stock market crash in October of 1929 leads to bank failures. It leads to bankruptcies, the vast unemployment in the urban areas. And as urban people can eat less, consume less, the demand goes down for what the farmers are producing. So we get in this cycle, downward cycle, starting on the farm, spreading to the city with the collapse of the financial system. People are in over their heads with mortgages, with bank notes. And as people go bankrupt, and you can’t pay the people down the line, your vendors, your workers, and until almost a third of Americans are unemployed in the cities, and people are still adrift, unable to make it on the farm, looking for that next chapter where they see a little hope, and so many of them saw that as California.
Thompson: Yeah. And in the 1930s, one half of all of Oklahoma’s farms went under, including in 1930, the Miller Brothers Ranch went under. They were losing $300,000 a year, ultimately ended up getting auctioned off, the famous Miller Brothers Ranch. And so that just speaks to how bad it was. As you mentioned, the tenant farmers in the eastern part of the state, cotton prices got so low that, you know, there wasn’t any money to be made. And get your crop in, pay your landlord. There wasn’t any money to be made from there. So, we’re in pretty dire straits in Oklahoma moving into the early 1930s. And then on top of that, there was no governor, in terms of having a limit on drilling oil, and so we have a glut of oil on the marketplace. And in fact, in 1931, oil prices got down to as low as $20 cents a barrel for oil, and that’s when Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, he declared martial law 1931 to 1933. And he says if the price of oil doesn’t rise to a dollar a barrel by August 1, 1931, he’s going to basically quarantine all the wells. He’s going to shut down production. Now, it didn’t end up having that much of an impact on that, but they were trying to do anything that they could to get prices back up. And so, times were dire.
Blackburn: Well, and to continue the impact of “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, and whether you like Murray or not, it’s hard to like him. He was a racist.
Thompson: It’s very hard to like him. He is not a likable person.
Blackburn: He’s not. But in terms of impact on this state, huge. And he represented such a strong element of who Oklahomans are, this conservative populism that seems to still be with us today. But “Alfalfa Bill” was elected governor in 1930, takes office 1931, and he does not like the federal government. He is the old Jeffersonian Democrat, fearful of centralized authority, does not like the federal government, the regulations that come with it, doesn’t want the so-called stimulus money, turns it down. And he basically keeps the New Deal from coming to Oklahoma. Now, one exception was the CCC. The Civilian Conservation Corps is actually run through the army, did not require local match, did not require governors to get involved.
So the CCC, through the army, sent soldiers to Oklahoma, recruited these young people who were underemployed and suffering, a lot of farm kids. I had second cousins in Arkansas who got into the CC, and most of those CC kids will say it changed their lives, gave them structure, gave them food. They could send 20 bucks or their monthly stipend back to support the family, and $20 could make the difference in starvation or eating. And here in Oklahoma City, and in Tulsa, and towns like El Reno and Ponca City, you still see the work of the CCC. They did a lot of conservation work. If you go down an old Platt National Park, now Chickasaw Recreation Area, it’s all over the place. If you go through any small town, if you see those sandstone structures, a lot of that is going to be built by the CCC.
So, it employed people, gave them hope, and “Alfalfa Bill” kept the rest of the New Deal pretty much out of the state until E. W. Marland was elected in ’34. Marland was from Pennsylvania. He didn’t come out of this cloth of conservative populism, more of a mid-Atlantic liberal in many ways, and came in and said, hey, we want that stimulus money. And he campaigned on it, that he’ll bring the New Deal to Oklahoma. And the year that he started that, the city manager of Oklahoma City, Red Mosier, had a swath of land right down the heart of Oklahoma City, that had been created when they took the railroad tracks that went along Second Street east and west and moved them to the south side of town, where the Union Depot is now. Well, they had this big scar of open land right in the middle of the city. No one had redeveloped it because of the Depression.
Red Mosier says, hey, look at that land. We can get money from the federal government to employ unemployed workers. Went to the citizens in Oklahoma City in 1935 and said, if you’ll pass a bond issue that we can use to buy the materials, these federal stimulus grants will pay all these unemployed people. We’ll get them back to work, and we will have a new city hall, county courthouse, municipal auditorium, and a new jail. All of those things were opened by 1937, employed a lot of people, architectural firms. Gave people sense of hope again. So the New Deal had a real, positive impact on a lot of communities in Oklahoma. Left a lot of infrastructure that we’re still enjoying today.
Thompson: Yeah, you’re right about “Alfalfa Bill” Murray wanting to have control of everything. In fact, the Federal Emergency Relief associate, or Administration sent down a representative because typically all of those funds were run through the governor’s office. But they were distrustful of Murray, and so they sent someone down to meet him. Now, you have to remember the story about “Alfalfa Bill” is that he chained all the chairs in his office to the radiator, so people couldn’t scoot their chairs up and get close to him. He didn’t want people in his face. And the story is, is that when the representative came down to talk to him about this program, he served him a cup of tea that had been strained through a dirty handkerchief. And the administrator went back to Washington, and he said, hey, guess what? We’re not going to run these funds through the governor’s office like we’re doing in every other state.
So, Oklahoma and Louisiana were the only states where FERA funds came directly from the federal government and bypassed the governor’s office. But eventually, the New Deal did come. But really, what drew us out of that Great Depression was, of course, the Oklahoma spirit of, you know, hunkering down, saving, you know, keep working hard. But finally, the war in Europe is really what got the machinery going again. And as markets improved in Europe, the financial system was on sound footing by the end.
The FDIC was created during Roosevelt’s administration. So you had insurance where people weren’t going to lose their life savings when a bank went under. There was insurance through FDIC, and real estate had been rebounding, and as the market for farm production, again, you can almost always, you can chart Oklahoma’s economic vitality or depression to farm and ranch. That’s always been a central part of our economy. And as the markets improved in Europe and in urban areas of the United States, farmers are doing better with greater production, consolidation of many farms. So a lot of people were still leaving the farms. In fact, not a lot of people know it, but more Oklahomans left the state in the 1940s than they did in the 1930s. So we kept losing people because farms were being consolidated, but farm and ranch families were doing better. And as we get to ’39, a war breaks out in Europe, and Roosevelt finally is trying to get Congress to say, we need to prepare, we need to rearm. We need to make sure we have the machine shops and the materials, and to pull all this together to fight a war. And that’s when the economy starts to take off again, and people can find jobs, and people can leave the little towns and coming to the Oklahoma Cities and Tulsas of the world in finding this employment.
Thompson: My high school history teacher used to always drill it into our heads and say that the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression, that World War II did. And I think he was right about that, because it changed the nature of the economy, and we all had to go to work. But I think what the New Deal did was, like you said, it provided a mechanism for hope, and it provided a way to get money into the economy to keep it going, because otherwise, without the New Deal, it would have been total and utter collapse.
Blackburn: Well, and too, I’ll never forget. My grandmother, we’d call her granny. Born 1893, farm family, tough times, but she lived into her 90s. And when I was in high school, sitting on the couch with her, watching Lawrence Welk or something that she liked, I said, Granny, what was the biggest change in your life? I was thinking airplanes, radio, television, movies, all these things that had happened since 1893. She said, the electric iron. And she thought Roosevelt walked on water because he brought rural electric service to people like her in the country, where suddenly she didn’t have used those old heavy irons on a woodburning stove to keep her kids looking good. Even if they were overalls that had patches, they were going to look neat when they went to school. And that electric car, she said, it made more of a difference in her life than any other thing. And Granny might have had, and a lot of people did, have a portrait of FDR in their house, and that was common. Many people saw him as a savior figure.
Blackburn: And I look at the New Deal, too, as an impact of kind of unifying the country in a central. We had one enemy—the Depression. How do we fight the Depression? And so, it unified Americans a lot. Well, then, you put that on steroids with World War II. How do we defeat Hitler? How do we defeat the Japanese Empire? And by pulling together, and that sense of community would survive into what we call the greatest generation. Those people who banded together to win the war, came out of the war. Still, what can we do together? You still see a lot of that going into the 1950s and ’60s, but it started in the Great Depression, fighting that common enemy, fighting the common enemy during war, coming out, saving the world, rebuilding the world. This sense that yes, we know what we’re doing, and that we have something to give to the world. And of course, that starts changing in the 1960s. And today, it’s still evolving in new directions. But the New Deal is just part of the bigger story, linking it to the past to the decades following, and we still see the impact of that in our culture today.
Thompson: I want to talk a little bit about the Dust Bowl, because we can’t really talk about the 1930s in Oklahoma without getting into what is really one of the worst ecological disasters in the history of the world. And I’m sure a lot of people listening to us have watched the Dust Bowl documentary that Ken Burns did a few years ago. If you haven’t watched that, you absolutely should. There’s a great book by Timothy Egan called The Worst Hard Time that really dives into those personal stories about the Dust Bowl. But this was a situation where, as we mentioned, people in the 19-teens and the 1920s were plowing up the Plains at a great level. Those grasses that were plowing up had a deep root system. We replace it with crops like wheat that have a shallow root system. And when the drought comes, and the drought came in the 1930s, things get terrible. And there’s a quote here from The Worst Hard Time. It says, “The land convulsed in a way that had never been seen before, and it did so at a time when one out of every four adults was out of work.” This is a seminal event in our state’s history. Some thoughts on that?
Blackburn: Yes. Of course, agriculture has always been changing, you know, over the last 10,000 years or however long we’ve had agriculture, and it’s still evolving today. Today, if you don’t have several thousand acres of pretty productive land, you’re a hobby farmer. You have to have a job off the farm. Well, it’s come that far. And I did a project in Colony, Oklahoma, recently, in western Oklahoma, and I was talking to a group of farmers who came in to help. And I said, you know, how’s the wheat crop? It’s not very good. How’s the cotton grow? Not very good. And basically, their attitude was they were not going to make any profit. You know, they’d make enough to replace the seed and keep the tractor running. But it was the cattle that they put on the wheat that was their profit margin. They said, well, if the cattle prices will stay up, we’ll be okay, was their attitude.
But again, you have to have more land. You have to be able to afford, you know, a several-hundred-thousand-dollar tractor with GPS and changes the amount of fertilizer you put on it depending on the soil content. Farming has changed so much over the years, and obviously, the Great Depression was the turning point. Whereas up to that time, the family farmer, that Jeffersonian ideal of self- sustaining ability to grow what you need, to produce what you need, a little bit of cash you can get by. Well, those days were long gone after the Great Depression. World War II provided some support for a while, but even after the war, you still get the consolidation of farms, people leaving rural areas. And even today we can look a lot of our rural towns, and they are shrinking because the farming population is still leaving the land.
Thompson: It was estimated that 300 million tons of soil were removed from that Dust Bowl region in May of 1934 and spread over large portions of the eastern United States. By 1935, an additional 850 million tons of topsoil was blowing in 101 counties of various states. And another great quote here is talking about the dust. And this is from The Worst Hard Time also. “When the dust fell, it penetrated everything. Hair, nose, throat, kitchen, bedroom, the well. A scoop shovel was needed just to clean out the house in the morning. The eeriest thing was the darkness. People tied themselves to ropes before going to the barn just a few hundred feet away, like a walk in space tethered to the life support center. Chickens roosted in the mid-afternoon because it got so dark.” I mean, this sounds otherworldly to me. For me being, I was born in 1978. I can’t even imagine trying to live through it. And you see some of the pictures from out of there. It looks like the surface of the moon.
Blackburn: You know, things were out of balance. We had abused the environment, and we have these eight-, ten-year cycles of wet and dry. And, that caught the farmers of the 1870s and ’80s. That caught the farmers of the 1930s. And since then, I would say this summer has been a drought. We’ve been in an extended drought, and central Oklahoma more so than eastern Oklahoma. But you still see that today, and we have to learn to live with the land and how to take care of it. And, of course, Soil Conservation Service popped up in the 1930s as a reaction to the abuse of the soil. And so, conservation’s story is something that we need to understand and continue to find ways to balance the natural environment with what we need to drive the economy.
Thompson: Well, Bob, let’s continue this conversation, and we’ve got a great guest today with Dr. Al Turner. And he’s going to continue our talk about the Great Depression and some of the stories that he’s collected over the years.
Blackburn: Well, Trait, I’m very pleased to introduce our guest today, who’s been a friend for almost 50 years. It’s hard to believe that we’re old enough to say we’ve been friends for 50 years, but it goes back to the mid ’70s. When I enrolled at OSU, there was one of the senior graduate studies students who we looked up to as an intellect, as someone who was taking his history degree very seriously. It’s Al Turner. Al grew up in central Oklahoma, you know, sharing time in both Guthrie and Oklahoma City, completed his PhD at OSU, and then a career in and out of higher education.
For a while, he was head of the Oklahoma Museums Association, leading that effort in the early days when it was really turning from a mom-and-pop industry to more professional standards. He was there. He joined us here at the Historical Society for a while as director of museums and sites. Again, while we were trying to make that transition to more professional staffing, higher standards. Al was part of that. Ended up at El Reno Junior College, Northwestern; worked with a lot of the historians in the state on a variety of projects. His interests have been wide-ranging over the years. In fact, if anything, has kind of limited Al’s time, it’s that he’s interested in too many things, and he collects memoirs of Oklahomans who wrote their story, so, really an extension of oral history. He understands the importance of that. A study on Baptist church baptismal scenes that are painted around the churches of Oklahoma. He and I co-authored a book in the 1980s on the history of First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City. Worked with a great man there, the minister at the time. And Al has impressed me over the years with his dedication to finding the truth, of high standards, and being able to work in a variety of situations to still be productive. So our welcome to our Very OK Podcast.
Dr. Al Turner: Thank you, and thanks for the introduction, Bob. And I should say also Al’s son, Nathan, is our regional director for our Museums and Sites Division and the director of the Oklahoma Territorial Museum. So we still have part of the family working at the house here.
Blackburn: Yes, we do. And of course, I’ve always admired him, and you did a good job raising him, Al.
Turner: I had two children. One of them was interested in history, and Nathan was. And my daughter always gagged when we started talking about history.
(laughter)
Turner: Well, she’s the one who’s made money, so.
Blackburn: Well, we historians are known for being in the in the wealthy occupation, aren’t we? Yeah. We work for reasons other than the bottom line.
Thompson: Hundreds of dollars a year sometimes. Well, Bob, we want to talk about the Great Depression today, and Al has particular expertise in this area because of some of the research and some of the passion that he’s had for Oklahoma history. So let’s get into the conversation a little bit.
Blackburn: Yeah. Al, I know that you’ve been collecting memoirs. Before we get to your documentary that you recently released on a Dust Bowl family, talk about some of your favorite memoirs that you found in dusty places, and limited edition copies, and some of these stories of the people who lived through the Great Depression. Could have been in urban areas, could have been in farm areas. But what are some of your favorites and some of those stories? And really, what do they do for us historians as we look at a variety of sources?
Turner: The first one that I hit on was a book that I found in the Guthrie Public Library, and I’m dropping the name on him right now. I’ll think of it here probably in a minute. But it talks about the early history of the settlement around Guthrie and so forth. And I immediately recognized that I was seeing something different than I had read in conventional narratives, and then I went from that and started looking at others. Travis Anthony’s stories have stuck in my mind over the years. He wrote columns for the, I think the Lawton paper, for a period of time. School teacher. Hard, hard existence, you know, worked his way through college, one time applying for a teacher’s job. He couldn’t get a ride. He walked 10 miles and then got a ride in a cattle truck.
You know, I think that it may not be fair to even think about them in terms of the major examples themselves, but the breadth of the concerns and topics they address. I got a different picture of life. And maybe, you know, I’ve always kind of express it in terms of much of my historical research has been geared towards answering the questions of the mind, questions of chronology, questions of relative importance, and so forth. The memoirs, for me, answered the questions of my heart. They are, by and large, 80 plus percent of them are small town-based. I think that probably reflects Oklahoma at the time most of them were written. One of the questions that is kind of in my mind now is: will we see a comparable outpouring of those in subsequent generations? Because I think that, for the most part, they were people who wrote about life and the settlement period through the 1930s. And there’s not that much that I found since that time. And it may be, you know, that I haven’t explored. I think the project about 10 or 15 years ago. Yeah. I’m trying to oh, the page here, but yeah.
Blackburn: No, Al, that rings true to me as well. To me, these memoirs and first-person accounts allow us historians to get into their lives to understand these people and the reaction they had to the hard times, but to neighbors as well and the joy of a Saturday night sing-along on the front porch or going to church, and this sense of community, and I think what will be missing is not just that people are not recording their memories that way anymore. But until the 1930s, communication was largely oral in a community. You sat around the campfire during hunting season. I heard the same stories every year. They could be passed down. They sit around the house. They didn’t have radios and television and movies, and the internet, and this oral tradition was so strong among that generation. In the 1930s, in the Depression, I think they expressed their own times as well as the accumulated emotions of their parents and their grandparents, and coming to a new land with hope and hard work, and then the hard times. To me, that drama comes out in a lot of these memoirs.
Turner: Definitely. And they connect to two larger perceptions—neither of which I’ll take credit for. But Elliott West and I have talked about this in a different context. Elliott, I think you recognize from the University of Arkansas, major Plains historian, and Elliott talks about the importance of the memoirs of what he called the geyser generation. And I will even move that further back and think about it from the standpoint of the kinds of analysis that the analysts in the French historical tradition brought to their study of long-term, they talked about mentalities, sets of mind, and so forth, over centuries. I don’t think that by definition that these memoirs give you that century-long perspective, but it does get to the heart of the people and what they valued. And one thing that just always leaps out at me is how disconnected they were from the world in which we tended to study academics. You know, we see the relative insignificance of events in a lot of their lives.
Thompson: So, for some of the ones that you’ve read about people that lived through the Great Depression, what were some common experiences or themes that they went through during those times?
Turner: Yeah, one of the things that that they dealt with, and there is an interesting bias maybe, in what I see in them. A lot of them did not deal with the kinds of questions that I could get them to talk about when I went and interviewed them or when I did an oral history project. And so, for instance, there was not much discussion of individual defeat. Now, I read a number about families that were just, you know, went from one hard place to another, and the family struggled, and the children were, you know, were farmed out and all of those kinds of things. I read about that sort of stuff. But in terms of a specific content on the era, I didn’t get that. You had to ask about, well, what about that? Did everybody maintain hope? You know, you talk about friends being friends and neighbors being neighbors. Did that standard hold? Well, of course it. And there were always people who gave up, who quit, who you know, who just, seemed to have alcohol or whatever else. But those stories they did not tell, except if they were raised in that situation, and they told it, but they did not tell it as a part of their life story as moving through the passage of time. They didn’t deal with it broadly.
Blackburn: You know, Al, the way a lot of people said that to me, and I’ve read in so many places, is that we didn’t know we were poor. That is such a common refrain from that generation in the Great Depression. Well, we did know we were poor. We were happy. We had enough food to eat. We had animals around the place. We had friends nearby. We had school. They wanted to talk about the joy of school, even in the middle of the Great Depression, or one good cotton crop they got when the price went as high as 11 cents a pound. They wanted to talk about those good times.
That’s what they tend to remember, I think, coming out of those hard times. And I think part of us baby boomers, who were the grandchildren of those pioneers that survived and stayed in Oklahoma, didn’t you know, go off to California or elsewhere, is that they brought that sense of sustained hope and perseverance that, yeah, times might be tough, but hey, do what you can get along.
Turner: And you got to remember that they came for pioneer stock to start with, and so, I mean, they weren’t expecting things to be easy. The Depression represented a continuity for a lot of people in Oklahoma. I mean, they had just barely broken out of the hard times of frontiering, and then they had a little bit of respite with World War I economy and so forth, and then back to where they were. So it was not that unusual to them. I think, though, that we need to remember that the people who went through that, however they understand the narrative, you can look at it from another perspective and understand that they were scarred. I think, for instance, of you know, the shame that you would get people to talk about, that being called names as Okies, and in the California migration, the shame of poverty. They did experience that. And my father-in-law, for instance, he would still talk about the sense of absolute betrayal felt as a kid. He had earned some money picking cotton and put it in a bank, and the bank drafted him money, and the bank went under. He could not understand it, and it shaped his whole approach to life as a foundation. And I think that is understood. He understood that was happening to him, and many of these narratives do as well.
Blackburn: Well, you know, and now one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that, you know, today we baby boomers and younger people, and Trait and I talked about this a little earlier, the impact of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and then even more so than that, because not many people read, but a lot of people went to the movies, several movies a week, and watching John Ford’s piece of art based on Steinbeck’s novel really insulted a lot of Oklahomans that all of a sudden, they see that poverty and that, you know, that isolation of being on the road where the hearth is now, you know, the car itself, and that sense of injustice. And a lot of Oklahomans were insulted by that as their image to this day. Governor George Nigh, who’s 94 now, he and I cannot agree. I love Grapes of Wrath and Ma Joad and Tom Joad fighting back against the man. To George Nigh and his generation, that was an insult, and they will never get over that.
Turner: I think that there is a fundamental historical understanding that is derived. But Steinbeck actually gets it right. It’s the interpretation of what we did with Steinbeck. Steinbeck says that Okies were tractored out. They were not Dust Bowl–driven per se, but we conflate that with the Dust Bowl story, and the Joads come from eastern Oklahoma. Not the Great Plains, Dust Bowl region, and so forth.
Thompson: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve been reading up and getting ready for is the interesting facts is that in eastern Oklahoma, many of the farmers were tenant farmers. And so when cotton prices dropped, and they dropped as low as 5 cents a pound. When they dropped so much, they didn’t have the ability to sell their crops and to make their payments on their tenant. So that’s what caused a large migration. A lot of the Dust Bowlers, they ended up lasting through a lot of the Dust Bowl. But a lot of that migration ended up coming from eastern Oklahoma, and it was it was driven largely in part because of the tenant farming system.
Turner: Yeah. I tell a story, and I did a southwest oral history project, and one of the stories that came out of that was the man talked about the fact that his father, I think, had owned four sections of land down there around Altus. And in the late ’20s, he had a tenant farmer on every 40 acres. And in the late ’20s, he called in his tenants, and he hired the four best ones and bought four tractors. And that was, and the rest of them were without. And so that was what I meant by, and what Steinbeck talked about, being tractored out, and that came from western Oklahoma, but it was all over eastern Oklahoma as well.
Blackburn: Al, talk about when you discovered the memoirs that led to the documentary. Tell us about her, the documentary project, working with Dr. Deena Fisher on that, and what really pleased you about getting that production finally made?
Turner: You know, that goes back to the book, and that was one of those beautiful stories, is that pure serendipity, and, you know, flailing around, and you’re like, I always have a different file and different leads and so forth. I read one of those memoirs. In fact, I read Eli Jaffe’s memoir. I’m not pulling the title of it either. It’s something Oklahoma Odyssey or something like that. And Eli Jaffe wrote about that, coming to Oklahoma, intending to help organize the state for communism. He was caught up in the Oklahoma City book raid and that sort of stuff. But he wanted to write a definitive Dust Bowl book, and he’d been reading Caroline Henderson’s stuff, and he went out and met Caroline Henderson and spent time with her, continued to correspond with her through their respective lifespans. And while there, but that’s when this other stuff started unfolding with the Oklahoma City book raid and that sort of thing. But in any case, I was interested in that book. I’m pretty sure it is Oklahoma Odyssey. And I contacted, and I said, do you have the letters that you correspond with Caroline? And he said indeed he did, and he’d be more than happy to share it with me. We eventually put them in the archives at the Western History Collection, and so I picked those up and thought, well, you know, I’ve got a nice little article here.
Well, then I got to thinking, you know, this lady was noted for writing everybody and about everything. So I thought, I wonder if there’s any other letters. And I rattled around, and everybody told me that the family was very difficult. And I, in fact, talked to her daughter or wrote her daughter. Never got a response and thought, well, that’s what’s happening. That’s going to be it. And then I had somebody say, I don’t remember who it was, said, well her son is, her grandson is an academic, teaching up at Temple, and maybe you can talk to him. And sure enough, I did. And she and his mother had just been burned. She was a physician that had had a very painful professional career and so forth, and then kind of isolated and stuff. So I called her, with his encouragement, and she said, oh, yeah, I’ve got a basement full of letters.
Thompson: Oh, wow.
Turner: I went to Canada, Amherstburg, Canada, and picked up those letters, put them in two large boxes of letters. And I borrowed a friend’s car in Detroit, drove over to Amherstburg and drove back across the border with those letters and declared them at customs and all that sort of stuff. And then checked them home, and Carmelita and I sat out in the garage and read through those that were molding. We both got horrible cases of bronchitis.
But anyway, we realized that we had a had a marvelous story in what later became Letters From the Dust Bowl, and that book is still in print. It’s been in print now for over 20 years. So anyway, I felt that told the story, but I also had always thought, I originally again, thought that it would make a neat program for somebody to do the living history with, you know, like some of the ones that they do on Kate Barnard and so forth. And so I thought I’d write up something like that, and then I’m pretty sure is Deena at that point, who said let’s do a documentary. And so I thought, well, okay. And so we contacted the Historical Society, and I hired an actress and pretty much wrote the script, just excerpting things from the book, and then we put it into production. You know, COVID kind of threw a little bit of a block for us, but we eventually got it out, and I’m real pleased with that effort. That was, you know, I kind of thought, at that stage, I thought I was through with the academic writing, and that represented a chance to kind of keep my hand in.
Blackburn: Tell our listeners about her life, just kind of summarize it, and her reaction to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.
Turner: Caroline was born in a prosperous Iowa farm family. Name was Boa, Caroline Agnes Boa, an outstanding student, went to Mount Holyoke College, which at that time was the leading liberal arts college for women, and graduated and began teaching in the public schools of Des Moines. But her class prophecy had said that they saw her at some point on a ranch in the West. And she did not like public school teaching. She had about a bout of diphtheria and decided it was time to fulfill her dream. So she started homesteading in Texas County, and in fact, taught at a nearby school to help her subsidize her homesteading effort, and met Will Henderson in that time, whom she married. He drilled a well for her, and he claimed that it was the best well he ever drilled, and he wanted to keep her. He took the schoolteacher that went with it. And they stayed there until their near death in the mid-1960s. And she wrote, a couple of different careers in writing, around the first World War she wrote some for Ladies’ World Magazine, had a very popular column, but her heart was in the land. She loved the land. And she was, you know, that Jeffersonian vision of the plowing up the land and reaping the soil and the benefits of it, and that sort of stuff, she was a true believer of that.
Thompson: You know, Al, watching that documentary, I was struck by—you’re exactly right. It’s hearing her words through the actress. It’s just palpable how much she loved the Panhandle, and she talks about the sunrises and sunsets and just being out there in the wide-open spaces. And as we know, as Oklahomans, the Panhandle is not for everybody, right? Some of us like the trees, and some of us like mountains, but there’s a certain breed of people that just absolutely love the freedom and the wildness of the wide open spaces, and boy, that comes across. She absolutely loved it out there.
Turner: Yeah. And in fact, just on a personal note here, I’m thankful that I didn’t have to live in the Panhandle. I’ve got some family connections out there and so forth, because of the distance and so forth, but I start getting in the Panhandle, and I start thinking poetically. I start writing poetry in the back of my head. So, anyway, to get back to Caroline’s story, the drought, I think 1913 drought, about broke them. That’s when she started one of her writing careers. She makes a very important point about the Dust Bowl and the Depression, and that is that they’re not the same thing; in fact, they were suffering from the hardships of the Depression long before the Dust Bowl, and they had a bumper crop in 1929, I think, and they didn’t really reap another crop for about 10 years. But by that time, she was already claiming she was losing her self-respect because they were having, they had built their home at one time a really fine, I never could establish, but I think it was a Sears home. But he did all the work on it. It was a home. It had plumbing in and so forth, and they had given that stuff up. They cut off the electricity, and so even before the Dust Bowl hit, because of the declining agriculture prices, and she writes very eloquently of that in those letters between two women farmers.
Thompson: Yeah, and what the other thing that comes across in the documentary is just sort of that slow demoralization, if you will. You know, that, you know, okay, this year we’re going to have a great crop, and it’s more drought, and next year we’re going to have a great crop. And it’s that cycle of having optimism and hope, but then just the land beats you down. And you know, we have years of drought out there, and of course, the whole reason it’s called the Dust Bowl is just those terrible dust storms that rise up and coat everything in that process. And, and yet they persevered, and yet they stayed through it all.
Turner: Yeah, and in some respects, she was broken in spirit to some extent, but she didn’t quit. And she maintained some perspective on it. But she really mourned the loss of hope, or the loss of what she called forward-looking thoughts and so forth. So, and when the dust came back in the ’50s, it really hit her hard. But again, she maintained some hope and some faith in the land. I lost the point there. I can’t remember where I was going with that.
Blackburn: Well, Al, for the viewers who may want to share her story, tell us again the title of the book, and then the name of the documentary, and how people can find it from their homes.
Turner: I don’t know how to find the documentary. But the name of the book is Letters From the Dust Bowl. The author is credited to Caroline Henderson, and I’m shown as the editor. It’s from OU Press, and it’s available on Amazon and most typical markets. The documentary is entitled Dust to Eat, and it’s been shown, I think, three times through OETA. And I do not know what the plans are now for its future.
Thompson: Yeah, I’d just encourage people to watch for their local OETA listings, and they’ve aired it a few times, and I anticipate that they may air it going forward as well.
Blackburn: And maybe in the future we can put it on the Historical Society’s YouTube channel.
Thompson: Yes, we will. We will look into that for sure.
Blackburn: Well, Al, do you have relatives? Many of us Oklahomans, you know, have Great Depression, Dust Bowl stories. My grandparents were starving out from the Great Depression on the farm back in Arkansas, where granddad could not make it as a sharecropper any longer. Came out to pick a cotton crop in Grady County in ’25. Good crop, 23 cents a pound for cotton, 160 acres. Three families made enough money out of that to stay in farming or to find jobs. And so most of us have stories. Do you have a family story that you share that kind of represents your family odyssey?
Turner: I do. Just perspective here. My mother’s family were among those people who had—they managed to hold together. Granddad managed to keep finding some kind of work, and so they never missed food. They never did own land. They didn’t have much, but they had maintained a good quality of life. And my maternal grandmother referred to those years as the happiest ones of her life. So that was her, that was one side. The other side was the Turner family. The Turner family, grandfather was borderline alcoholic, fled Seminole under the cover of darkness, is trying to get away from law. Grandmother hitchhiked from Seminole to Perkins, where her family was with the three infant children. This is a hard, hard life, and the definitive story, I mean, poem about this, but the story is of the periods of time that they lived on water gravy. Now, the ones who tell the story most vividly and have it the longest amount of time of living on water gravy are the ones who were probably born after that. But nevertheless, it did happen. There was a sequence of periods, of sustained periods of time in there in which they were literally on the verge of starvation, and to some extent, depended on the the mercy of the church in the community, and of course that was part of the reason that family got very strongly identified with the Baptist.
Blackburn: Al, when I had a chance to do a museum exhibit on cotton culture in Oklahoma, I focused it on my family’s story. I took personal privilege, and the title I put on it. When granddad came west to Oklahoma in ’25, I titled it Money in the Pocket, Food on the Table because that’s what it meant for him. Having a little bit of walking around change and enough food for the kids where they didn’t have to live on biscuits and gravy.
Turner: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I’ve had to explain to my grandchildren what water gravy was. It was just the grease and the flour, and water.
Blackburn: And the soup that would normally feed four people could feed eight because you just put more water in it.
Turner: Put more water. Throw another bean in.
Thompson: Well, Dr. Turner, it’s been so great to talk to you today, and thanks for sharing your memories and all of your research about the Great Depression. And we appreciate you coming on to be with us today.
Turner: I’d like to, if you ever get around to it, I’d like to talk about the the perspective of a local historian.
Blackburn: We will do that.
Thompson: Yeah, we would love to do that.
Blackburn: History at the grassroots. That’s what I love too, Al.
Turner: I’ll outline more of that to you at some point, Bob, what I’ve got in mind. Very good, and tell Carmelita hello for me. Give her a hug.
Turner: Thank you much.
Thompson: All right. Thank you.
Blackburn: Take care. Bye-bye.
Turner: See you, Trait, even over the phone.
Thompson: Yes, sir. Bye-bye. Well, Bob, I enjoyed that conversation with Dr. Turner quite a bit. I love all of the memoirs that he’s collected over the years and some of the stories that he can tell. And I’m going to look forward to having him back on the show sometime.
Blackburn: Well, Al is one of those historians who spend an entire career uncovering the sources that we need as historians. You know, what Al has done is to leave a legacy behind that future historians will use to come up with their views of our times and the times that Al’s looked at. So, I love those historians who are out there like Deena Fisher, and Bill Corbett, and Tim Zwink, and Tom Easton; that entire generation of historians who have really dedicated their lives to collecting, preserving, and sharing that story.
Thompson: And don’t forget historians like Dr. Bob Blackburn.
Blackburn: Thank you.
Thompson: Well, this has been a wonderful show, and I’ve had a great time talking with you. And so until next time, folks, we will see you down the road.
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