From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California

In this monograph, Ebel explores the religious dynamics in the eighteen farm labor camps that the Resettlement Administration operated in California from 1935 to 1943. He argues that the planners and managers of these camps sincerely sought to understand and assist migrant workers, yet they also worked to modernize their religions and enlighten their worldviews. Ebel's study is the story of “one group desperate for help” and another “eager to provide it, though not unconditionally” (20).Ebel organizes the study by examining the main elements of the migrant camps. First, the camp gate symbolized “an official desire to address the vulnerability and the ‘savage’ living conditions” of workers (42). For decades, California's transient workers had lived in ad hoc shelters and faced vigilante violence, yet the whitening of farm labor during the Dust Bowl pushed officials to intervene. Given the tremendous need—150,000 migratory workers and a camp system that, at its height, could accommodate only 15,000—the camp gate became a filter that let in mainly “white” workers who seemed most likely to temper their beliefs with a new faith in science, medicine, and the government's bureaucratic order.Second, the camp office became the center for producing and disseminating knowledge. On the one hand, ideas about proper hygiene, child development, and medicine—“the light of modern rationality”—flowed from the federal government through the office to the migrants (96). On the other, data about the migrants flowed out of the office to the government and helped progressive managers justify the camps’ existence and study the families that they sought to serve and reform. Camp manager Tom Collins's reports had an anthropological flavor, and they shaped John Steinbeck's negative portrayals of migrant religion in The Grapes of Wrath.Third, the tent platform symbolized the opportunity to rebuild American homes, even if canvas was the only material. In this rebuilding, managers harped on domestic order and cleanliness, and they established myriad rules against drinking, swearing, and littering. Home Management Specialists became proselytizers who taught cooking and sewing classes with the dual goals of imparting new skills and changing migrant women's ideas of what constituted decent and righteous domestic behavior. Although most migrant women appreciated these classes, Ebel argues that the imposition of domestic standards often burdened them unfairly and intruded into their lives.Fourth, the sanitary unit, the camps’ most technologically sophisticated element, became the location for the “enforcement of norms on, through, and around the body” (182). In a rich discussion of race, religion, and environment, Ebel examines government ideas that associated foreign workers with physical dirtiness and questionable morals and “white” American workers with cleanliness and righteousness. Local ordinances and attitudes viewed ad hoc migrant camps, especially their privies, as public health hazards and sought to regulate, even criminalize, waste disposal. These ideas culminated in the establishment of large, centrally located, and strictly run camp sanitary units.Fifth, the community center provided a space for camp managers to “model and impart a restrained, mature approach to leisure” (228). Many managers believed that “the idle hands of migrants, no matter how calloused, were the devil's playground” (233). They also believed that religion became unhealthy when it was the migrants’ only social and emotional outlet. Thus, they encouraged migrants to participate in games, sports, and theatrical productions, and they scheduled religious services alongside these activities with the hope of containing worship within these modern forms of recreation.Finally, the newspaper provided a space for “camp pastors” and others to express Protestant theologies. Like the community center, however, it also contained and ordered these ideas in a way that managers hoped would “marginalize the primitive and mainstream the modern” (281).Thoroughly researched and skillfully written, Ebel's study deepens readers’ understanding of New Deal programs in the American West and the history of migrant labor in California prior to World War II. Ebel is particularly gifted at turning over “archival fossils,” especially camp managers’ rules and reports, and considering migrants’ lived experiences (260).Since it is a religious history, some readers may have unanswered questions about the theologies of “Holy Rollers,” “Jehovites,” and other sects from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas that clashed with New Deal progressivism. Nevertheless, Ebel's interpretation of how camp managers and other officials sought to impart (and sometimes impose) their worldview on migrants is convincing. While he analyzes this process closely, Ebel, to his credit, never loses sight of managers’ genuine humanitarianism, nor does he underplay migrant voices that indicate their need and gratitude for the services that the camps provided. The result is a balanced study that both credits and critiques New Deal reformers for their work in rural California.