(2) One of the most effective techniques used by the press to discredit the novel involved letters to the editor from supposed "
Okies" protesting that the conditions depicted in the novel did not really exist.
Only with the coming of World War II and the boom in California's war production industries did the
Okies escape their plight as migratory farm workers.
Not All
Okies Are White: The Lives of Black Cotton Pickers in Arizona by Geta LeSeur
Pinkos who did not bat an eye when the Soviet Government exterminated 3,000,000 peasants by famine, will go for a good cry over the hardship of the
Okies. But people who go to pictures for the sake of seeing pictures will see a great one.
Henry Fonda (Tom Joad) and Jane Darwell (Ma Joad) capture Steinbeck's gritty but frail "
Okies" quite nicely, reminding us of the humanity of the poor--and the inhumanity of poverty.
But the problem with understanding the mercurial
Okies does not lie only with Steinbeck-to-Haslam literature, rather with U.S.
This is really the biggest hick town in the country because it was nothing but
Okies that moved out here.
These mats are ethnic inheritances that the Scots-Irish brought with them from Northern Ireland in the 18th century and took with them as they moved from the Appalachians to the Ozarks to finally, Southern California ha the 1930s as "
Okies." The historian David Hackett Fischer, the journalist Kevin Phillips, and others, including myself, have written at length about this topic, so Micklethwait and Wooldridge have no excuse for recycling the discredited "frontier" thesis at this late date.
The familiar images of Oklahoma are rural: the land rush of 1889,
Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, and 'the wind comes sweeping down the plain' in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.
In the 1985 Orange Bowl - I was covering it for a Seattle-area paper - the
Okies made a field goal during a comeback attempt.
What the
Okies did to the Split-T was similar to what the veer would do to the
Okie defense later on.
With the Texas Comanche territory as his arena and Antebellum days through Reconstruction as his timeframe, Wier tracks the destiny of a motley army of Americans from displaced Northerners to desperate
Okies. This is indeed the Great Texas Novel.