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8: California Between the Wars, 1919–1941

  • Page ID
    127008
    • Robert W. Cherny, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, & Richard Griswold del Castillo
    • San Francisco State University, Saint Mary's College of California, & San Diego State University via Self Published
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    Main Topics

    • The Rise of Los Angeles: Twentieth-Century Metropolis
    • Prosperity Decade: The 1920s
    • Depression Decade: The 1930s
    • Summary

    California is a garden of Eden,
    A paradise to live in or see,
    But believe it or not
    You won’t find it so hot,
    If you ain’t got the Do Re Mi.

    So sang Woody Guthrie, who was born in Oklahoma in 1912 and came to California in 1937. Throughout the 1920s, California seemed to some like a paradise. Then the nation’s economy turned sour after 1929. A long-lasting drought began in 1931, affecting much of the nation and turning Oklahoma, Kansas, and surrounding areas into a “Dust Bowl.” Farm families from the Dust Bowl and farm families displaced from their farms by technology, the Depression, or new

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    governmental policies headed for California, hoping to start over. Guthrie described his trip to California:

    I got what you wood call disgursted, busted, and rooled me
    up a bundel of duds, an’ caught a long-tail, frate-train that
    had a California sign on the side of it…. I was headin’ out
    to see some relatives, but I diden’t know for shore wich r.r.
    bridge they was alivin’ under…. I seen about 99 44-100 of
    California’s great senery, from Tia Juana to the Redwood
    forests, from Reno, an’ Lake Tahoe, to the Frisco bay. I
    finally … found my relatives up at Turlock, Calif., and et
    off of them till we all picked up an’ moved down to Lost
    Angeles—where we’ve been ever since.

    In Los Angeles, Guthrie was one of many Okies—an epithet applied to all those from the Dust Bowl who came to California. Some estimated that as many as 200,000 had come. Many

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    By the time that Woody Guthrie arrived in California in 1937, he had already identified with those most hard hit by the economic and environmental catastrophes of the 1930s, and his politics quickly moved far to the left, in sympathy with the outcast and suffering. After spending a few years in California, he continued to travel around the country, singing his affection for the people and the land, and his criticism of the economic system. What is your reaction to Guthrie's effort to reproduce the language and spelling of someone with little education? What do you think the reaction was in the 1930s?

    found work as seasonal agricultural workers, harvesting crops up and down the Central Valley. Few Californians greeted them warmly; the LA police chief sent police to the state border to encourage Okies to turn back. Woody sang about that too:

    Lots of folks back east, they say,
    Leavin’ home ev’ry day,
    Beatin’ the hot old dusty way to the California line.
    Cross the desert sands they roll,
    Getting out of that old dust bowl,
    They think they’re going to a sugar bowl
    But here is what they find:
    Now the police at the port of entry say,
    “You’re number fourteen thousand for today.”
    Oh, if you ain’t got the do re mi, folks,
    If you ain’t got the do re mi,
    Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas,
    Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.

    Woody found a job singing on radio station KFVD, where he tried many of the songs that later became classics of the Depression and the Dust Bowl. His politics moved left. By 1939 he was writing for the People’s World, a daily newspaper of the Communist Party in California. As he put it in his first column,

    Don’t be bashful a bout writing to me if you know of a job.
    I play the guitar…. If you are afraid I woodent go over in your
    lodge or party, you are possibly right. In such case just mail me
    $15 and I wont come. When I perform I cut it down to $10.
    When for a good cause, $5. When for a better cause, I come
    free. If you can think of a better one still, I’ll give you my
    service, my guitar, my hat and 65¢ cash money.

    Woody’s songs transformed the folk ballad, making it an instrument of social protest, showing the way for such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Tracy Chapman.

    The image of California in the 1920s included some of the things Guthrie said about it—a Garden of Eden, a paradise. Many Americans in the prosperous 1920s imagined California by picturing movie stars driving convertibles down palm-lined streets under a sunny sky. During the hard times of the 1930s, that image changed. Now California became a place inhabited, as Woody described it, by “the [Dust Bowl] Refugees a livin’ in the various Trailer Cities thet are strung around over the country, the conditions in which the children must live in destitution, want, filth and despair.” Both images contained elements of truth, but neither was complete. Nonetheless, everyone who lived through those times drew a sharp distinction between the 1920s and the 1930s.

    Economists think in terms of alternating periods of expansion and contraction in the economy. During expansion, the economy grows, demand for products rises, stock market prices rise, unemployment is low, and wages often rise. Expansion phases are periods of prosperity. But every expansion is followed—though not on any easily predictable basis—by contraction, a time when the economy shrinks, demand for products decline, stock market prices fall, and employers lay off workers or cut wages in response to declining demand. In the 1920s, the economy expanded, based largely on the demand for consumer goods such as automobiles, radios, and electrical appliances. Consumer purchases were encouraged by the introduction of installment buying—making a down payment and paying off the remaining cost (plus interest) in “easy monthly payments.” During the 1930s, the nation experienced the most serious contraction of the 20th century—the Great Depression. All these national patterns had parallels in California.

    Questions to Consider

    • What explains the rapid growth of Los Angeles in the early 20th century?
    • How did Los Angeles develop differently from older cities?
    • What are the connections between California politics in the 1920s and progressivism?
    • What role did the federal government play in the economic and social changes of the 1920s?
    • What role did the federal government play in the state’s economic and social changes during the 1930s?
    • How did the Great Depression change state politics in the 1930s?


    This page titled 8: California Between the Wars, 1919–1941 is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Robert W. Cherny, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, & Richard Griswold del Castillo (Self Published) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.