“You and me got sense. Them Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain’t human. Human beings wouldn’t live the way they do. Human beings couldn’t stand to be so miserable. – Needles, Calif., service-station attendant (played by Robert Shaw) to his co-worker (Ben Hall) in the 1940 film The Grapes of Wrath.”
To her dying day, my mother could never understand the gravitational-like pull that John Steinbeck’s work exerted on me. As far as she was concerned, he’d taken the name “Okie,” promoted it into a grossly unfair label indicating people of low intelligence and lower class, and then almost personally slapped it on her back and the backs of those around her for the world to see and scorn.
In a sense, she was right. The publication – released 75 years ago – and subsequent success of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath had shown, with relentless clarity, the horrible working and living conditions of the migrant farm workers and others who’d left the middle of America for California in the 1930s (while fiction, it was based on Steinbeck’s own observations). The popularization of “Okie” as a negative term became an unintended consequence of the novel’s runaway popularity.
Steinbeck, however, neither invented it nor made it a pejorative. That distinction goes to a California journalist who appropriated the word to describe a phenomenon he, like Steinbeck, witnessed first-hand. In an entry in the Oklahoma Historical Society’s online Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Carolyn G. Hanneman explains the origin of the label, noting, “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.”
