230 ChaPter^4
fronts a banker who arrives on his land to tell him to leave and threatens to
kill him. The banker explains that he is not the landholder and some banker
in Tulsa owns the farm— “He got his orders from the bank. The bank told
them: Clear those people out or it’s your job.’” The Okie was not satisfied
with that answer; “Well,” he said, “there’s a president of the bank. There’s a
Board of Directors. I’ll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank.”
Again, the banker told him that the bank who held the title to the land was
owned by another bank in the East, a common condition often called “absen-
tee ownership” in post-Civil War America. Finally, the exasperated and tear-
ful Okie made a plea, “but where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t
aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.” The Okie, like
the Joad family, never did know who took his land from him, and he headed
out to a life that promised nothing but more dust and more hardship.
In addition to the environmental crisis facing farmers every day, political
problems with the New Deal disaster relief program were common as a result
of local-level control over the federal aid programs. Local control of federal
funds left room for petty politicians, mismanagement of relief funds, and
sloppy administration of aid. For example, local leaders in eastern Kentucky
simply ended federal aid because they considered the people in need to be
“all poor white trash and communists.” The relief supervisor in that area of
Kentucky, Miss Caroline Boone was more sympathetic; she estimated there
were at least 150,000 starving Dust Bowl victims in the area. “Every morning
little groups of the people—those who still have enough strength to walk
anywhere from one to ten miles—came straggling in and stand staring help-
lessly,” she lamented. On one occasion, Boone took all of the money in her
purse to the bank, had it changed into 50-cent pieces, and gave it to the hun-
gry people.
In the end, the Dust Bowl episode demonstrated how the federal govern-
ment desired to preserve and repair Capitalism during times of emergency,
illustrating a political economy that gave priority to agribusiness. Never
before had the federal government spent so much money on natural disaster
aid. The WPA and the AAA managed to incorporate millions of Americans
into a national welfare state. Millions of farm families survived the Dust Bowl
due to WPA jobs and AAA loans. But those who received direct assistance
from the federal government were only a certain class of Americans living in
the Dust Bowl region: land-owning farmers and their families. Time and time