<i>From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California</i> by Jonathan H. Ebel

Ebel compellingly shows that the federal workers camp projects were not simply a secular endeavor. The federal migrant camps, although not the project of any particular religious denomination, Ebel argues, were unmistakably sites of evangelism for the religion of reform in New Deal California. The camps, a Depression-era project, presented yet another project in the broader American Protestant missionary enterprise in which the goal was the reformation or redemption of a group of people. In this case, the people in need of reform in the western United States were not Chinese, Native American, or Mexican; rather, they were dispossessed Dust Bowl Okies. The ministers of the New Deal gospel were not denominational or seminary-trained ministers but were camp managers, who “pastored” or led the migrants in the camps in a way similar to formal religion.This book is structured to mimic an experience of walking into the camp. All fifteen “fixed-site camps” along the state’s interior included shared elements after which Ebel titles each chapter. More than some neat literary move, the shared elements do in fact cohere in how these good neighborly gospel reformers attempted to carry out the religion of the New Deal in California. “The Gate” (chapter 1) marked a spatial point of entry. New rules and a regime of religious reform came into play upon passing the threshold of the gate. “The Office” (chapter 2) housed the “reformer” or the camp manager who kept careful records of the doings, happenings, and “progress” in the camp. Chapters 3 and 4, “The Tent Platform” and “The Sanitary Unit,” respectively, invite the reader to see how this religion of New Deal reform was practiced and challenged by camp residents, providing readers insight into how domestic and hygiene regimes sought to inculcate values of reform.Chapter 5, “The Community Center,” and chapter 6, “The Paper,” examine some of the camp’s communal endeavors, and it is here that the more explicit conventions of religious practice (understood writ large) came into conflict with the reformers’ plans. It was in the camp newspaper and the community center that competing visions of religion, reform, and redemption could be most clearly articulated. Finally, chapter 7, “The Gate, Revisited,” invites readers to step outside the camp and into spaces where many of the Pentecostal Okie faithful congregated, that is, in churches outside of the camp. Pentecostal practice (in all its stentorian, demonstrative, anti-medical, and eschatological fervor), in particular, butted up against the end-goals of the religion of reform. Inside the gate, Pentecostalism posed nothing short of a problem for reformers (75).Ebel thoroughly engages the mother lode of farm labor camp materials at the National Archives and Records Administration in San Bruno, California, as well as other Bay Area collections. Every chapter is chock-full of these sources of government correspondence. Moreover, the fifty images in the book allow readers to envision the very spaces that Ebel invites his readers to examine with him.One way to situate this book is in the broader historiography of rural religion during the Great Depression. Here, one can see, as Ebel does, how the book complements the works of Greene and McDannell (15).1 With its focus on Okies in California, this book sheds light on an obvious aspect of life—religion—that classics in the field of California Dust Bowl literature have only partially or rather minimally commented upon. Ebel’s sophisticated conceptualization of religion in this book sets a new high bar for any historian studying religion and reform in Depression-era America and religion in California.