Because they arrived impoverished and because wages were low, many lived in filth and squalor in tents and shantytowns along the irrigation ditches. Consequently, they were despised as “Okies,” a term of disdain, even hate, pinned on economically degraded farm laborers no matter their state of origin.
Who were Okies?
The migrants included people from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Colorado and New Mexico, but were all referred to as “Okies” and “Arkies”. More of the migrants were from Oklahoma than any other state, and a total of 15% of the Oklahoma population left for California.
Who were the Okies why were they given this name?
But many decided to head west. In fact, during the 30s hundreds of thousands left the plains for the West Coast. So many migrated from Oklahoma that they were dubbed “Okies” in the popular press. For years, California, Oregon and Washington had been growing.
Who were the Okies and what did they do quizlet?
Who were “Okies”? “Okies” was the name given to the migrants from the Great Plains. Although only about 20 percent of the migrants were Oklahomans, the name “Okies” stuck to them all. “We was living on it [a dollar a day wages].
What did the Okies do?
“Okies,” as Californians labeled them, were refugee farm families from the Southern Plains who migrated to California in the 1930s to escape the ruin of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.
What happened to Okies?
So-called “Okies” and “Arkies,” sporting once-insulting nicknames that Okies later reclaimed as their own, fled the natural and man-made ecological disasters that swept through Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri during the farm crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression that followed.
How many Okies were there?
An exact count does not exist, but one study estimates that as many as 3.75 million Californians, one-eighth of the state’s 30 million population, claim Okie ancestry. Few of the children of that impoverished, homeless army attained the wealth of Scales, although a surprising number did.
What did Okies eat?
Physicians at the time blamed the Okies’ poor health on their traditional diet of pork, beans, biscuits, gravy, and potatoes- foods rich in salt and fat (Faverman, Dickie, Jones). In 1938, Dr.
What ethnicity were the Okies?
“Okie” usually described “white” migratory agriculture workers; “Okie” was never, or at least rarely used, about African American migrants during the Great Depression. Most migrant agricultural workers, or “Okies,” were white and traveled westward from the midwestern drought and cotton-growing states.
What route did the Okies take?
They were “Okies,” “Arkies,” and “Texies” (in time all would be lumped together in California under the name “Okies”) and the highway they traveled West was U.S. Route 66, the road of desperation described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath as “the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land
How did the Dust Bowl affect Okies family life?
These Dust Bowl refugees were called “Okies.” Okies faced discrimination, menial labor and pitiable wages upon reaching California. Many of them lived in shantytowns and tents along irrigation ditches. “Okie” soon became a term of disdain used to refer to any poor Dust Bowl migrant, regardless of their state of origin.
What were the villages the Okies lived in known as?
As the Depression worsened and millions of urban and rural families lost their jobs and depleted their savings, they also lost their homes. Desperate for shelter, homeless citizens built shantytowns in and around cities across the nation. These camps came to be called Hoovervilles, after the president.
Why were Dust Bowl migrants often referred to as Okies quizlet?
Terms in this set (32) Why were the migrants to California during the Great Depression often known as “Okies”? They came from Oklahoma and other regions of the Midwest ravaged by the Dust Bowl.
What effect did Dust Bowl refugees have on California?
California: The Promised Land
The arrival of the Dust Bowl migrants forced California to examine its attitude toward farm work, laborers, and newcomers to the state. The Okies changed the composition of California farm labor. They displaced the Mexican workers who had dominated the work force for nearly two decades.
Who were the Okies do you think that nickname was a positive or negative name Why or why not?
In the early twentieth century people from Oklahoma were occasionally nicknamed “Okies,” a special appellation that seemed a natural shortening of the state’s name. With the publication of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, however, “Okie” took on negative connotations.
