The broken arc of history

A vivid, poignant picture of an era, Radio Diaries: American Migrant”, reports, as if it were unremarkable, that when dust bowl migrants Pat Rush and her family reached the end of their hard journey from Arkansas to California—and before they could find housing or work—the government provided resettlement camps.

“In these camps for a nominal rent, payable in money or in work hours, the refugees found sanitary shelter sites,” Radio Diaries reported.

Children under a sign for one of the farm worker communities. Library of Congress

Rush, a small girl then, was part of

“one of the largest migrations in U.S. history. Millions of desperate Americans abandoned their homes, farms and businesses during the dust bowl of the 1930s. The last drought ended by 1940. Pat Rush's family were farm laborers exhausted by trying to make ends meet. So they left Arkansas and followed the hundreds of thousands who had traveled Route 66 to the San Joaquin Valley in California. There, the federal government had built resettlement camps to help deal with the influx.”

“In response to the influx of migrants to California, the federal government built a series of camps to provide safe housing, clean drinking water and other services. Some camps had their own schools for the migrant workers. Rush would later go to grade school at the Weedpatch Camp (above), which was memorialized in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,” South Carolina Public Radio reported. Library of Congress 1936

“RUSH: I know Mama thought, when we got to California, her and her kids would be fine - plenty of work for everybody, places to live - but that wasn't true. It was a sad situation, you know? But the big crisis would be trying to find a place to live. And that's when we moved into a camp that - it was a government camp.”

“RUSH: When we first pulled into the camp, I remember and - people sitting outside kind of staring - you know what I'm saying? - looking like, more new people coming in or whatever. There was tents. There was cabins. There was this row of cabins here, a row here. It looked huge to me. …And there were showers and toilets, and that's the very first time I'd ever seen a indoor toilet. So I thought we had moved to the big time.”

And here we are, almost a century later. Homelessness is rampant; compassion and solutions are in short supply. Meanwhile Trump and his minions routinely scapegoat the down-and-out not only for systemic societal failures, but for spreading their woes, like an infection, to “innocent” others.

A century after Rush’s journey, some things are certainly better, but that arc of justice we expected to bend toward justice has not only broken, it has fallen hard on America’s vulnerable.

Each doorway on a downtown NYC street serves as a sleeping place. Terry J. Allen

An unhoused man on Main St. in Vermont’s capital seeks “work 4 $.” Terry J. Allen