Title Dust bowl migrants in the American imagination / Charles J. Shindo

Published Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, ©1997

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Description 1 online resource (xv, 252 pages) : illustrations Series Rural America Rural America (Lawrence, Kan.) 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 Summary 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 Analysis Arts, American 20th century California Rural conditions Depressions 1929 United States Droughts Great Plains Dust Bowl Era, 1931-1939 Dust storms Great Plains Great Plains Rural conditions Labor camps California Migrant agricultural laborers History United States Migrant agricultural laborers in art Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-246) and index Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL Print version record digitized 2017 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL Subject Migrant agricultural laborers in art. Arts, American -- 20th century. Migrant agricultural laborers -- United States -- History Depressions -- 1929 -- United States. Dust Bowl Era, 1931-1939. Dust storms -- Great Plains Labor camps -- California Droughts -- Great Plains Dust Bowl Era, 1931-1939 Migrant agricultural laborers in art Arts, American Depressions Droughts Dust storms Labor camps Migrant agricultural laborers Rural conditions Saisonarbeiter Landarbeiter Künste SUBJECT Great Plains -- Rural conditions California -- Rural conditions Subject California Great Plains United States Great Plains -- Süd USA Genre/Form History Form Electronic book

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