Rising in the West

...Morgan's book does for the Okie migration west what Nicholas Lemann did for the more important Mississippi migration north in The Promised Land (1991)—it draws not just comparisons but identities...

...Federal water projects—starting with the Central Valley Project of 1933—have made California's Central Valley as pork-glutted and government-dependent as any micro-economy in the country, but that was just the beginning...

...And the Tathams—ironically, considering the role they were to play as bedrock members of the Reagan coalition in the 1980s—took part in every boondoggle and government works project the state pushed their way...

...Evidently," Morgan writes, "Pentecostal and other fervent religion was seen by social reformers as standing in the way of molding Okies into a more progressive force in California politics...

...They brought with them a cornball sense of humor and an earnest sentimentality that manifested itself not only in Woody Guthrie songs but also in popular California radio shows like "Dog Talk...

...Drake's Prairie, the broad sweep of foothill farmland around Sallisaw, was known as the "prayin'-est place in all Oklahoma...

...Pentecostals and other Republican fundamentalists are perennially underempowered, for their own party cannot afford to embrace them: As the controversies over last summer's delegate selection at the Republican convention make plain, the Pentecostals are a problem for Republicans much as the black left is a problem for the Democrats: they scare the rest of America to death...

...Morgan asserts that Pentecostalism, not jazz, was the first major black influence on the white middle class...

...These Christians are viscerally terrified of government, even if they do see it as a source of economic advancement...

...To a much lesser extent, he covers a smaller family, the Tacketts...

...Part of this is the willful stupidity of people who cannot tell a charismatic from an evangelical and cannot distinguish Jerry Falwell from David Duke...

...Ultimately, their plutocratic triumphs led them to a big-time involvement in Republican politics...

...Their anti-Communism is really an opposition not so much to an economic system or even to authoritarianism per se as to the religious persecution that always accompanies Communism...

...Over the years, Oca would take advantage of his horse trader's instincts and lucrative real estate deals to turn himself into a multi-millionaire...

...In the 1980s, Republicans saw them as forming part of the backbone of a supply-side revolution—which they did not...

...Along typical minority-politics lines, the media leads the wider public to feel Okies are arguing for special treatment when they feel they're arguing for basic rights...

...in turn, "their suspicions of higher authority meant that they created a patchwork of minimalist authority everywhere they went...

...Through "brush-arbor" revivals, populist religion entered the warp of Oklahoma culture, and the various Pentecostal sects quickly proved not only the most controversial but also the most durable...

...He entered the fledgling nursing home business just before the rash of government legislation—the Public Assistance Medical Care Program (1957), Medical Assistance for the Aged (1960), and Medicaid (1966), to name just the federal programs—that would turn nursing home operators into millionaires at virtually zero risk...

...The Joads get involved in radical labor politics as soon as they arrive in California, but Morgan shows that Okies, particularly those from the "Tri-State" area around Sallisaw, were a "fluid proletariat" not only disinclined to stage strikes but renowned for breaking them...

...More recently, their devout religiosity has led some on the left to view them as reactionaries willing to turn back the clock on such issues as racial integration—which they are not...

...All the Tathams benefited from the defense buildup that has made California the prime destination of federal largesse for the last half-century...

...They gave their children odd nonce names like Brenee and Caprice...

...If the book is a bit too long and discursive, if Morgan is occasionally too patient with hokey anecdotes, it is only because he has important sociological work to do here: detailing the position of a major group inside the tribal pluralism that is becoming the modus vivendi of California society...

...And the "tolerant" objection raised against Okie religion is the same one that foes of immigration often level at newcomers: they have so little historical experience with democratic institutions that they have not yet learned to adjust their political goals to constitutional realities...

...Oca got remarried seven monthsafter his wife Ruby's death...

...Bill and Billy contributed to Al Gore when his interest in an NFL franchise for Memphis dovetailed with theirs...

...They arrived in California when it was still offering the most liberal social payments of any state in the country, and Oca immediately went on the dole...

...Morgan tells the story in painstaking detail: while hardly typical in either their ambitions or their fortunes, the Tathams experienced virtually all of Okie migrant life in microcosm...

...Baptists in particular saw this enthusiasm as leaving ample room for spiritual fraud and "cheap grace...

...Young Billy's hobby in his twenties was selling—in bulk, without a license—Ingram MAC-10s, the machine pistols designed for, and used almost exclusively by, cocaine dealers...

...The same individuals," Morgan writes, "who spoke in tongues, experienced healing, read the signs in a deer crossing a cornfield, and saw flames shooting down from heaven, could jury-rig a truck, fix a motor, and repair a wagon with baling wire...

...Tathams describe their reception in California by saying, "It was sort of like how the colored people felt...

...If we give religion its rightful place in the Tathams' political worldview, their voting patterns become more logical: they are part of a conservatism directed more against the Warren Court than against the New Deal...

...In fact, of the slightly more than 100,000 Okies who came annually to California in the mid-1930s, only 2-3 percent came from the six panhandle counties of the state's Dust Bowl...

...It's an irony worthy of a Richard Rodriguez essay that the religion the Okies "brought" to Southern California was in fact launched there...

...Steinbeck had a political axe to grind, portraying the Joads as having been "dusted" off their land by a combination of fluke weather and rapacious bankers...

...Specifically, the idea on which both poles of the argument rested—that the Okie migration had been driven by drought—was simply not true...

...It was at this point that the Tathams crossed the important line between merely taking advantage of laws in place, and trying to influence politics...

...Influenced by African...

...And just as Lemann showed us that much of the northern underclass is merely Delta sharecropper society bricked in, Morgan gives us a vivid portrait of Midwestern hardscrabble farm society aired out...

...and they courted both Arizona senators—McCain and DeConcini—when they were trying to put an expansion team in Phoenix...

...Oca Tatham had been drifting from tent cities to migrant farms to welfare hotels, getting in trouble with women and running afoul of the law, until he married and was "saved...

...And the Tathams don't fit the conservative profile in terms of traditional family values, either—much as the media has cast that most visible Pentecostal Pat Robertson as the point man for that tendency in the Republican party...

...He chronicles four generations of one of the most successful Okie families, the Tathams, who left Sallisaw, Oklahoma—hometown of "Pretty Boy" Floyd and starting point for Steinbeck's Joad family—in 1934...

...Importantly, they are not—as it has been fashionable to caricature conservative Republicans—casting "coded" votes for a return to an "earlier America," by which liberal commentators most often mean segregation...

...His son Bill would multiply Oca's fortune several times by operating nursing homes, leasing firms, and professional sports teams...

...Oca owned a transport truck, which gained him not only a draft deferment but also the most lucrative contract of his life to that pointtransporting water to and from the Hanford nuclear site in Oregon, where the Nagasaki bomb was being built...

...Even today, the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath is the source of most of the Okie stereotypes, and almost all of them are false...

...during one five-year period in the 1940s, he sent his children to eleven different schools in four states...

...Their opposition to federal efforts to end segregation stem primarily from a fear that at some point the federal government will act to dilute the religious—not racial—composition of their own communities...

...The family is riddled with social problems, from the fact that most of Oca's grandchildren's marriages ended in divorce to Ruby's brother's conviction for molesting his thirteen children...

...Specifically, since most Pentecostals do not at any level believe in the separation of religion and politics, they cannot assuage liberal fears that they do not believe in the separation of church and state...

...He is a rich man who put none of his children through college...

...Thus, Pentecostalism became a fringe religion before most Americans had even heard of it...

...With a big stake once the war ended, Oca began to profit handsomely from real estate investments...

...The nursing home business, of course, is one of those callings—along with divorce law, day care, and the abortion industry—that have as their very raison d'être the weakening of familial bonds...

...Once Oca's son Bill and grandson Billy began trying to muscle their World Football League franchise, the Memphis Grizzlies, into the NFL in the late seventies, Bill befriended Tony Coelho...

...Willy-nilly, the Okies were the beneficiaries, Morgan writes, "of the greatest infrastructure program ever undertaken by the federal government' and probably by any government in the history of the world...

...Republicans favored relief cuts and actual "repatriation...

...Debates in Congress about how to resolve California's "Okie Problem" centered on two strategies that were equally anti–free market: Democrats favored increasing relief...

...And this after his little brother has accidentally shot a playmate dead with a target rifle...

...Young Billy even supported the daffy "Ev" Mecham during his term as Arizona governor...

...hese are important distinctions T for anyone seeking to understand how the huge Reaganite coalition has been reduced to a rump of people more or less like the Tathams...

...At dead-center of Okies'—at least the Tathams'—cultural life was their religious faith...

...F or Morgan, the Okie migration is an immigrant story, and the consequences of the culture of the old country for California were profound...

...to take part in what most perceived as a small-government revolution, seems to be gall worthy of Ross Perot—peeling millions out of taxpayer contributions and then complaining that the federal government is profligate...

...The latter became the trademark of Pentecostalism and almost immediately earned its adherents the opprobrium among Christians that it would later suffer among the public at large...

...Those who worry about an American farm policy set by Hollywood actresses testifying before Congress will find an instructive early parallel here—the entire debate was driven by Steinbeck's non-existent Oklahoma...

...Pentecostal politics is, after all, minority politics...

...F or a nursing home magnate with powerful Washington connections to become a Reaganite, i.e...

...Aside from the deep black roots of their own church, which repudiated the Ku Klux Klan as "unChristian and un-American" in 1925—when the Klan was not to be trifled with—Tathams of all generations have not merely tolerated or even befriended blacks: they have gravitated to them...

...But neither was the competing Okie myth that arose after World War II: that the group had pulled itself up by its own bootstraps...

...And while no one would doubt that the Tatham family is strong and value-soaked, those values are hardly traditional...

...For all their larger-than-life frailties, Morgan is fond of these people, whom he portrays as moderns, not reactionaries...

...Oca's father Walter Tatham supported Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California platform in 1934...

...The congressional studies were the most comprehensive done on poverty until the Johnson administration, and it's fortunate that they were shelved by World War II...

...This is not to say that the Tathams are thoroughly hypocritical, or do not recognize their problems as problems...

...The Okies were beset with slanders and misunderstandings from the first, and it was religion that led to most of them...

...The Okies grew the tobacco they smoked...

...But Pentecostalism became widespread in California at about the same time as radio, and soon took on many of the "Middle American" trappings by which we recognize it now as the Assemblies of God: televangelists, broadcast faith healings, modern churches in the middle of gigantic parking lots, and Christian spin-offs, from vacation resorts to dating services...

...Pentecostalism modeled itself on Luke's description of thedays following the Resurrection, and sought "spiritual gifts" that were evidence of "Baptism in the Holy Spirit"—including prophecy and speaking in tongues...

...Importantly, as Morgan notes, they never stayed in any one place long enough to become part of the power structure...

...Washington Post reporter Dan Morgan—who developed a lifelong obsession with the Okies after his own reading of Steinbeck's novel, even spending a college summer picking fruit with them—sets out in Rising in the West to discern their motives and measure their impact...

...In 1934, he loaded his truck with fifteen others, including his wife and two children and his parents, and set off for California...

...After several mishaps—including the overturning of his truck—Oca wound up in Delano, just north of the Okie capital of Bakersfield and just south of Fresno, which would be the family's base by the end of the century...

...worship and Wesleyan Methodism, the modern Pentecostal movement was launched by the black Texan William Seymour at the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles in 1906...

...They ponied up for campaign contributions to House Ways and Means chairman Wilbur Mills after he secured passage of a bill benefiting nursing-home operators...

...Steinbeck distrusted Pentecostalism, and portrayed it as something smarter Okies considered fanatic and risible, not as the strongest common bond uniting the various Okie subcultures which it so clearly was...