Okie
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Okie is an sinonem, dating from as early as 1905, denoting a resident or native of Oklahoma. It is derived from the name of the state, similar to Texan or Tex for someone from Texas, or Arkie or Arkansawyer for a native of Arkansas. But in California and much of the Western US, the term came to symbolize an emigrant who left the South-central, Midwest and sometimes, Southeast US in the 1930s before World War II came to settle in masses and restarted their lives in the region's agriculture and manufacturing industries.
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[edit] Pejorative connotation
Historically, the term Okie (rather than "Oklahoman"), has had pejorative connotations. Residents of California and some politically motivated writers have used the term to describe white and mixed-race (or Cherokee and American Indians), poor or low-income migrant farm workers and their families forced to flee their farms during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Californians have also used the term to describe any poor person migrating to their state, not just those from Oklahoma or from the South-central states.
Over the decades, the pejorative nature of the term has begun to change; many from Oklahoma now consider the use of the term to be either neutral (a shortened term for "Oklahoma") or even a matter of pride. Whether the term is pejorative or not today depends upon the intent of the speaker and the circumstances of the term's use.
[edit] Great Depression usage
[edit] Dust Bowl era migrations
In the 1930s, during the horrible Dust Bowl era, large numbers of farmers, fleeing ecological disaster, migrated from the Great Plains and Southwest regions to California mostly along historic Route 66. More of the migrants were from Oklahoma than any other state, and a total of approximately 15% of the Oklahoma population left for California.
Ben Reddick, a free-lance journalist and later publisher of the Paso Robles Daily Press, is credited with first using the term Okie, in the mid-1930s, to identify migrant farm workers. He noticed the "OK" abbreviation (for Oklahoma) on many of the migrant’s license plates and referred to them in his article as "OKies". Californians began calling all migrants "Okies," regardless of whether or not they were actually from Oklahoma. The term was made famous nationwide by John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath.
[edit] California's "Anti-Okie Law"
In 1937, California passed the so-called "Anti-Okie Law" (Section 2615 St. 1937, p. 1406) which stated, "Every person, firm or corporation, or officer or agent thereof that brings or assists in bringing into the State any indigent person who is not a resident of the State, knowing him to be an indigent person, is guilty of a misdemeanor," The statute was eventually overturned in 1941 by Edwards v. California (314 U.S. 160). Edwards had brought his brother-in-law from Texas to California and was convicted and sent to prison for six months.
[edit] Changing usage of the term
Will Rogers, himself a rich Okie immigrant to California, once remarked jokingly that the Okies arriving in California increased the intelligence of both states.
In 1968, Oklahoma Governor Dewey F. Bartlett made Reddick, the originator of the California usage, an honorary Okie. In the early 1970s, Merle Haggard's country song I'm an Okie from Muskogee was a billboard hit on national airwaves.
By the 1970s, the term Okie became familiar to most Californians as a prototype of a subcultural group, just like the resurgence of Southern American regionalism and renewal of ethnic American (i.e. Irish American, Italian American or Polish American ) identities in the Northeast and Midwest states at the time.
Since the 1990s, the children and grandchildren of Okies in California changed the very meaning of Okie to a self-title of pride in obtaining success, as well to challenge what they felt was "snobbery" or "the last group to make fun of" in the state's urban area cultures.
[edit] Modern usage
In the later half of the twentieth century, there became increasing evidence that the pejorative meaning of the term "Okie" was changing; former and present "Okies" began to apply the label as a badge of honor and symbol of the Okie survivor attitude.
In one example, Republican Governor Dewey F. Bartlett launched a campaign in the 1960s to popularize Okie as a neutral term for Oklahomans; however, the Democrats used the campaign, and the fact that Bartlett was born in Ohio, as a political tool against him, and further degraded the term for a time.
It has been said that some Oklahomans who stayed and lived through the Dust Bowl see the Okie migrants as being quitters who fled Oklahoma; but there is hardly a native Oklahoman who does not have some family member who made the trip. Most Oklahoma natives are as extraordinarily proud of their Okies who made good in California as are the Okies themselves—proud even of the Arkies, West Texans, and others who got painted with the same brush.
Oklahomans usually use Okie without prejudice but it is often used jocularly too, similar to Hoosier by Hoosiers or redneck by rednecks, who also do not consider terms for themselves particularly denigrating.
In California, "Okie" is no longer common slang, yet still retains a meaning similar to "redneck."
[edit] Usage in American popular culture
[edit] Novels
Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, has often been criticized as a false portrayal of Okies intended to advance a leftist political agenda.[1]
Detractors point to his portrayal of Okies leaving because of bankers foreclosing on their farms of many generations. Many, if not most, of the migrants were tenant farmers and were constantly moving from farm to farm for their entire lives. Those who owned their own farms and left looking for work only sold them if they decided to stay where the jobs were. The novel was also banned by many libraries for its prurient portrayal of Rose of Sharon suckling a starving man. The more cynical observers opined that the scene was included just for the purpose of making his book controversial.
In the Cities In Flight series of science fiction novels by James Blish, the term "Okie" was applied in a similar context to entire cities that, thanks to an anti-gravity device, took flight to the stars in order to escape the Earth's economic collapse. Working as a migrant labor force, these cities came to act as cultural pollinators, spreading technology and knowledge throughout the expanding human civilization. The later novels focus on the travels of New York, N.Y. as one such Okie city, though there are hundreds more.
Also in On the Road, the road-novel written by Jack Kerouac between 1948 and 1949 (although it was not published until 1957), the term appears to refer to some of the people the main character finds while working on the cotton plantations of the south during his trips around the States.
[edit] Motion pictures
In the movie Chinatown, when Jack Nicholson's character, Jake 'J.J' Gittes is caught snooping in an orchard, he refers to one of the farmers as an "Okie" before being knocked unconscious by one of the farmers.
In Breakfast at Tiffany's, the agent character O.J. Berman says that when he first met Holly Golightly, he couldn't tell if she was a "Hillbilly or an Okie" due to her accent.
[edit] Television
In the HBO series movie Carnivàle, "Okies" form the majority of the followers of Brother Justin Crowe.
[edit] Okies in music
- California Okie - Buck Owens (1976).
- Dear Okie - Doye O’Dell/Rudy Sooter (1948)—"Dear Okie, if you see Arkie, tell ’im Tex’s got a job for him out in Californy."
- I Wanna Make Her Mine - Jeremy Castle (1998) "If the girl you love's an Okie, than ya' know that she's just gotta be the one."
- Lonesome Okie Goin’ Home - Merl Lindsay and the Oklahoma Nite Riders (1947).
- Oakie Boogie - Jack Guthrie and His Oklahomans (1947)—considered by many to be the first Rock & Roll song.
- Okie - J.J. Cale (1974).
- Okie From Muskogee - Merle Haggard (1969)—58th on the Top 500 Country Music Songs list.
- Okie Skies - The Bays Brothers (2004).
- Okies in California - Doye O'Odell (1949).
- Ramblin' Okie - Terry Fell.
- She's An Okie - Al Vaughn.
- The Streets of Bakersfield - Dwight Yoakam (1988)
- April the 14th - Gillian Welch (2001)
[edit] Okie poetry
- Cahill, Charlie. Point Blank Poetry: Okie Country Cowboy Poems. Midwest City, OK: CF Cahill, 1991. LoC Control Number: 92179243
- Harrison, Pamela. Okie Chronicles. Cincinnati: David Robert Books, 2005. ISBN 1-932339-87-6
- McDaniel, Wilma Elizabeth. California Okie Poet Laureate. All works.
- Rose, Dorothy. Dustbowl Okie Exodus. Seven Buffaloes Press, 1987. ISBN 9998546451
[edit] Other Okie fiction
- Charles, Henry P. That dumbest Okie, and other short stories: Oklahoma! "The land of honest men and slender women." Wetzel, c1952.
- Cuelho, Artie, Jr. At the Rainbow's End: A Dustbowl Collection of Prose and Poetry of the Okie Migration to the San Joaquin Valley. Big Timber, Montana: Seven Buffaloes Press, 1982. ISBN 0-916380-25-4
- Haslam, Gerald. Okies: Selected Stories. Santa Barbara, California: Peregrine Smith, Inc, 1975. ISBN 0-87905-042-X
- Hudson, Lois Phillips. Reapers of the Dust. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984. ISBN 0873511778
[edit] Trivia
- Call OKIE is a non-profit organization created to oversee underground utilities and excavations in the state of Oklahoma. It was created in response to the Oklahoma Underground Facilities Damage Prevention Act enacted in 1981. [1]
- Okie was the name of two P-47 fighter/bombers piloted by Maj. Quince L. Brown of the 84th Fighter Squadron, 78th Fighter Group, during World War II. Brown was one of the 8th Army Air Force's first aces and credited with 14.333 victories. His first P-47D was noted for its distinctive artwork. He was killed during his second combat tour. Brown's hometown was Bristow, Oklahoma, and he was inducted into the Oklahoma Aviation and Space Hall of Fame in 1994. [2], [3]
- OKIE (Oklahoma Israel Exchange) is an independent non-profit organization established to coordinate economic and cultural activities between the state of Oklahoma and the state of Israel. It was created 1992 by then Oklahoma Governor David Walters. [4]
- Okie Derby is the world's largest proficiency air rally. It is sponsored annually by the Oklahoma Chapter of the Ninety-Nines (International Organization of Women Pilots). [5]
- An OKIE pin, a promotional souvenir developed by Governor Dewey Bartlett, (and an Oklahoma flag) was placed in the Apollo 10 lunar module Snoopy by Commander Thomas P. Stafford before it was sent into orbit around the sun.
- A famous paradox says that "When the Okies left Oklahoma to California, they increased the average intelligence of both the states." Today, this paradox has been modernized to include any state that Okie may move to (typically applied to Texas and Arkansas).
- The state government of Oklahoma has posted on their webpage a 20 question quiz to test your "Okie knowledge" here [6].
[edit] See also
[edit] Additional reading
- Gregory, James N. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-504423-1
- La Chapelle, Peter. Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. ISBN 0-520-24889-2
- Lange, Dorothea; Paul S. Taylor. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. 1939.
- Morgan, Dan. Rising in the West: The True Story of an "Okie" Family from the Great Depression through the Regan Years. New York: Knopf, 1992. ISBN 0-394-57453-2
- Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar. Red Dirt: Growing up Okie. New York: Verso, 1997. ISBN 1-85984-856-7
- Sonneman, Toby F. Fruit Fields in My Blood: Okie Migrants in the West. Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1992. ISBN 0-89301-152-5
[edit] External links
- Okie—Oklahoma Historical Society
- The Okie Legacy—ezine
- One or Two Things I Know about Us: Rethinking the Image and Role of the "Okies"—Monthly Review, Vol 54, No. 3., July-August 2002
- An "Okie Knowledge" Quiz from the official web page of Oklahoma state government
- Embrace your "inner Okie"
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Windschuttle, "Steinbeck's Myth of the Okies": "Unfortunately for the reputation of the author [John Steinbeck], however, there is now an accumulation of sufficient historical, demographic, and climatic data about the 1930s to show that almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel [The Grapes of Wrath] is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief."Ashley disagrees with this.
[edit] Bibliography
- Windschuttle, Keith. "Steinbeck's Myth of the Okies". The New Criterion, Vol. 20, No. 10, June 2002.
