It was an uneasy time in America, late summer 1939. The Roosevelt Recession—in which industrial production had tumbled by 40 percent, unemployment had jumped by four million, and stock prices had plunged by nearly 50 percent—was barely more than a year past. The jobless rate hovered above 17 percent; personal income and total economic output were no higher than they had been a decade before; and the unemployed streamed in to California’s heartland, taxing public services of all kinds.

The exodus had been underway for nearly a decade, with as many as four hundred thousand folks from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and other states flocking to California in search of a better life. “Uncle Sam Has His Own Refugee Problem,” declared the Providence Journal that spring. “Lured to the West, They Find Misery, Squalor, Disease.” Collier’s magazine printed: “An army is marching into California . . . made up of penniless unemployed, desperately seeking Utopia. ‘Here we are,’ say the invaders, ‘what’re you going to do about us?’ And nobody knows the answer.”

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