Scared and Vigilant

Minutemen: MinutemenIt is clear that during the Great Depression people feared for their lives. People’s actions were driven by fear whether it was those with land or those without it. Owners, banks and businessmen turned risk-averse in fear of livelihood while the workers took risks they likely shouldn’t have. It was a strange rare time in this country when people feared for their lives not because of war or violence but because of hunger. We are familiar now with the response that the poor make towards this fear and desperation and the wrath that has caused it, be it social or economic or environmental. Until the Joads arrive in California the desperation had been largely unorganized—few had a solid grip on what had happened to them and their country. But in California the Joad’s find organized workers and organized farmers equally fearful of their fates and futures. But while the book takes the perspective of the workers, who share little understanding with the farmers, I’ve become curious about the fear felt by one group in particular—the Farmers’ Association. If more desperate acts are committed by more desperate people then the distress felt by the local farmers-turned-vigilantes must be large and cannot be ignored.

Unfortunately my research turned up little save for one dissertation written on the topic. All other mentions of vigilante justice in Great Depression-era farming communities referenced Grapes of Wrath rather than any specific militias or mobs active at that time. None the less, it is not hard to believe that organizations like the Farmers’ Association, or the real-life “Farmers’ Protective League” existed. After all, there is one major parallel. Like the locals fearful that the cheaper, out-of-town labor will come in and disturb the existing economic and cultural dynamic of California and the West, many people still share that concern today. And famously the most motivated of these people have set up vigilance squads, not unlike the one that surrounded the Joads on their way to Weedpatch, on the Mexican borderland. It is conceivable that these border squads today are motivated less by fear and desperation than by ideology—it is hard, in any case, to have both hunger and politics on your mind at once. But in the years of the Great Depression, jobs and lives we’re immediately at stake on both sides of the fence. According to the aforementioned dissertation, the San Francisco Examiner claimed the whole valley was a “smoldering volcano ready to erupt.” It seems easy for us today to regard any gun-wielder as radical. Then they were only hungry. When a deputy shook his fist at an Okie, he was all to ready to ready to throw his soiled knuckles in return.