American History Tellers - The Great Depression - Dust | 4

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

The Great Depression wasn’t the only crisis facing the country when Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933. Following a decade-long drought that had shriveled crops, massive dust storms were pummeling huge swaths of the Midwest, the Great Plains, and the Northwest. Years of poor harvest practices had worsened the crisis, pushing farmers already strained by the financial hit of the Great Depression off their land. Only when a lifelong soil scientist made a dramatic testimony before Congress did the government finally begin to develop a solution.Many of those unmoored by environmental calamity searched for opportunity elsewhere — particularly in California. But when a controversial Los Angeles police chief sent armed officers to block access to the Golden State, he would launch a constitutional crisis and a showdown with a rural sheriff.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's April 14th, 1934. Massive, black clouds roil towards your farm. When the storm arrives, it is like nothing you or your parents have ever experienced. Darkness sweeps over the prairie, and suddenly the storm slams into your house with a freight train's rumble. When it's finally over, you spit dirt from your mouth. You open the door, step over an ankle-high mound of dust piled against your house like a snowdrift and head outside.

Your farm looks like it's been transported to the middle of the Sahara. An enormous dune buries half the barn. You remember the cows in the pasture. You turn toward the field and find one slumped over, its hide cut and scraped. The wounds make it appear as if someone took sandpaper to it. Pa's voice startles you as he approaches from behind. She's dead. Must have suffocated. How do you know? Just look at all that mud coming out of her mouth.

Looks like she fell in a pit of quicksand. Anyway, she's dead. Suppose that's one more we won't have to feed. One way or another, this dust is going to destroy us. You're shaken. We'll take care of the cow in a bit. But right now, I need to talk to you. About what, Pa?

Son, we can't do this anymore. Do what? This. The farm. Just costs us too much money. You know how it is. Hell, sometimes it seems like you've been driving the tractor since before you could walk. Don't you see how little we're harvesting?

Let alone how much we can actually sell. But this can't last forever. It's just a drought. It's got to rain one day. It hasn't rained in four years. And it's been, what, three years since we last turned a profit? No. We can't keep putting off the bankers.

And the AAA wouldn't pay us enough, even if we were eligible. You look to the house and see Ma is already hard at work. putting off the bankers, and the AAA wouldn't pay us enough even if we were eligible. You look to the house and see Ma is already hard at work. She's at the door, shaking out a rug. But where are we going to go? Does it really matter? Arizona, maybe. California, if we're lucky. Just not here. There's nothing for us here. I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. Nothing for us here. influencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery comes a new series about a lawyer who broke all the rules. Need to launder some money? Broker a deal with a drug cartel? Take out a witness? Paul can do it. I'm your host, Brandon Jinks Jenkins. Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers.

Our history, your story. When Franklin Roosevelt began his presidency in 1933, the country wasn't just in the middle of the Great Depression. It was in the third year of a decade-long drought. While Roosevelt focused mainly on putting America back to work, the worsening drought shrank crop yields and forced banks to foreclose on farms. A combination of dry conditions and decades of ill-advised farming practices contributed to immense dust storms. The crisis pushed millions of Americans from their farms and across state lines, where the epic migration tested an anxious response

from locals. This is episode four of our six-part series on the Great Depression, Insubordination of the Soil. At first, the dust storms hit occasionally and were localized to remote portions of the northern plains. But each year they became worse. Soon they would move south and become immense dry blizzards, as one newspaper called them, that ravaged thousands of square miles and spread darkness over huge swaths of the country. By the spring of 1930, everyday Americans saw the first hints of the damage. Dry winds swept up the soil and formed huge, churning clouds of dirt. Carried higher by air currents, these clouds gathered across the flat plains, unobstructed by mountains and skylines.

The wind pushed the dust across the landscape like a sandblaster. It pelted farms, cities, animals, and people with a painful and blinding ferocity that could strip the paint off a car and the hide off a cow. The clouds were often thick enough to blot out the sun in an eerie black, yellow, or red haze. Sometimes the dust was so thick, the day seemed to instantly darken to night, the skies remaining an inky black for hours. The drought conditions even caused massive infestations of locusts and hungry jackrabbits. Livestock starved and suffocated. Sometimes, so did people, like seven-year-old Kyle Salmon,

who in 1935 suffocated after he got lost in the dust outside his Kansas home. Static electricity generated by the swirling dust was so powerful that it silenced radios, stalled cars by shorting their electrical systems, and sometimes produced lightning. People could carry static charges so strong that shaking someone's hand might knock them to the ground. These ever more frequent dust storms were the most visible element of one of the country's worst and widest-reaching environmental disasters. And they were just one piece of a larger human disaster. Drought, dust, and depression combined to erode soil and the economic security of farmers. The country had been warned. Hugh Hammond Bennett, a soil scientist from North Carolina,

was probably more obsessed than anyone in the government with what was happening on the country's farms. He'd been focusing on erosion for more than a decade before the Depression began, and he was one of the first to call it a national menace. Bennett was a lifelong scientist, but he also knew how to play the game in Washington. For photo ops out in the field, he wore a suit and tie. It wouldn't shy away from theatrics. His career began in 1903, after Bennett graduated from the University of North Carolina,

where he went to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His first task at the USDA was studying local soil profiles. Two years in, one of his survey areas included a region of north-central Virginia where farmers complained about declining crop yields. Bennett realized that differing erosion rates in the region could be correlated with how farmers planted crops and managed their land. This discovery led Bennett to explore the intersection of erosion and farmers' livelihoods. Over the next two and a half decades, he became one of the country's foremost soil scientists. The work brought him all around the United States and

on expeditions throughout the Western Hemisphere. Eventually, he earned a reputation as the father of soil conservation. Bennett insisted that erosion threatened farmers more than anything else, identifying the problem well before the Depression. During World War I, with food supplies disrupted by the fighting, demand grew for American wheat and other food products. So to satisfy that demand, U.S. farmers mechanized their operations, using tractors instead of draft animals, to plow larger areas of their fields in shorter time. But that wasn't enough. As they planted field upon field of annual grains like wheat,

they replaced the perennial prairie grasses that were native to the region. They also stopped rotating crops and letting land lie fallow seasonally in order to recover nutrients. Instead, they replanted year after year, thinning the soil, which was never particularly deep in this part of the country to begin with. Each harvest and plowing scattered more of the topsoil. Nutrients essential to plant growth, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, were leached from the soil season after season. Potassium oxidized as ever lower layers of dirt were exposed to the air. Then, in 1930, the rain stopped. Over the next nine years, hot, dry air parched and thinned the soil, turning it to a powdery, loose dust.

With perennial vegetation cleared out, no root systems remained to anchor the fertile soil. And when the wind picked up, it swept the thin soil aloft, leaving the fields even more exposed and less productive. That same year, 1930, stories about extraordinary dust storms started appearing in newspapers throughout the Great Plains, the Midwest, and the inland Northwest. In March 1930, a series of dust storms formed near northern Idaho and Spokane, Washington, a region that should have been in the middle of a rainy season. Only a handful more of these reports appeared that year, though in a wide range of places from the Midwest, through the plains, into the Northwest, still nothing changed about farming practices.

Intensive plowing and harvesting continued, and still more nutrients were stripped from the soil. Ever more dust got swept into the sky, too, and was pushed hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away. At first, the storm seemed like little more than annoyances. People would complain of dust sweeping into their houses right after cleaning up from the previous storm. But it wasn't long until the consequences of these storms became more serious. In 1931, places like Des Moines, Iowa, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Bismarck, North Dakota, experienced storms simultaneously. This wasn't a coincidence. It was clear these storms covered significant distances all at once and that the area they affected was

growing. Now, newspapers call the dust storms the worst in four decades. In April 1931, people in Minnesota's Twin Cities reported the dust being so thick that it blocked out the sun and made it impossible to see skyscrapers from just a few blocks away. The visibility was so bad that a driver in St. Paul mistook a three-year-old boy for a piece of paper caught in the wind. Unconcerned, he struck the child and killed him. Elsewhere in the region, three other people died in another dust-related car accident. Another fatality occurred during the same storm in North Dakota. A farmer herding his sheep got lost in the dust.

Unable to see and amid a deafening roar of wind, he stepped onto the rail tracks that bordered his pasture and into an oncoming train. Reports of these storms came from well beyond Minnesota and North Dakota. Some were reported as far west as Bend, Oregon, and east to Chicago, south to Texas, and points in between. In 1933, a man named Charlie Spurlock had been living in Kennefic, Oklahoma. Spurlock lived through one storm that blew in from the west, knocked down small buildings, tore the roofs off larger ones, blew windows out, and flipped cars over. He later described his experience to the Farm Security Administration,

a Roosevelt New Deal program that collected oral histories. The dust was so thick that you could see nothing at all. You just absolutely couldn't see through it at all. Just dark as it could possibly be. And it was that way for about 14 hours. It blowed steady that way. It seemed like there was no letup at all. It was as strong as it could be.

You couldn't walk in it. Spurlock was surprised his home had survived the storm. A layer of dust a quarter of an inch thick blanketed his house. And the storms only got worse. Over time, they shifted southward from the northern plains to a region that radiated from western Oklahoma to the Texas Panhandle, eastern Colorado, and through western Kansas into parts of Nebraska. The drought conditions also shifted southward. With the parched, stripped soil, dry, hot air, and swirling, destructive

clouds of dust, writers began calling this area the Dust Bowl. Science writer Dr. Frank Thone wrote in a 1934 syndicated article that the dust storms came to seem commonplace, but he called it an impoverishing commonplace. He wrote, for when the peeved housewife re-vacuums her rugs and dusted her furniture after the dust had passed on, she was throwing bread out of the house. Not this year's bread. Next year's. Bread that might have grown as wheat on a farm in Kansas or western Iowa, but can now never be harvested or milled or baked. Lost bread. The storms, the deaths, and the dire conditions were finally too much for the government to ignore. In 1933, the Roosevelt administration created the Civilian Conservation Corps.

It also requested $5 million from Congress for the Corps to conduct erosion control work under the direction of the USDA. Bennett, the longtime soil expert, heard about this appropriation and realized he had an opportunity to attack the national menace he'd long ago identified. Bennett approached a supervisor at the USDA with ideas for how to use the money. He found a willing audience, and the Soil Erosion Service was established. Bennett hired staff and directed a national survey of soil erosion. He also funded a project to build 40 demonstration projects with labor provided by CCC workers. These projects would test various erosion control practices, such as planting trees to block winds from sweeping up soil or forming dust storms. Over the next seven years, 18,000 miles of windbreaks would be planted on 30,000 farms.

Still, dust bowl conditions persisted. In May 1934, Bennett used news of major dust storms reaching New York to declare that erosion was a national problem that clearly needed the entire country's attention. Over the next year, he tirelessly lobbied Congress to respond to this Then, his moment finally came. In March 1935, he was brought before Congress to testify on the crisis. As he sat before the lawmakers, the skies outside the Capitol building darkened. It was still the middle of the day. Until that point, most of the senators seemed bored by Bennett's meticulous recitation of soil science.

But then someone pointed out that the clouds didn't look like a rainstorm. It was dust. A dust storm had just swept into the Capitol. The national crisis the Dust Bowl represented literally appeared, looming and sinister, right in front of legislators' eyes. For many lawmakers, it was a turning point. But to Bennett, the dramatic moment wasn't just chance. Before the hearing, Bennett had paid close attention to weather reports and newspaper accounts from other parts of the country. He figured if he could time his statement just right, he might underscore his testimony at a climactic moment. All day, step by step, wrote a biographer of Bennett's. He had built his drama, paced it slowly, risked possible failure with his interminable reports, while he prayed for nature to hurry up a proper denouement.

For once, nature cooperated generously. Bennett's showmanship was all the drama he needed to convince legislators of the importance of soil conservation. On April 27, Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act and set up a new soil conservation service under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Bennett became the service's first director, and he served in the role until 1952. Bennett's soil conservation efforts marked the first time that the federal government worked with private landowners to conserve national resources. Their efforts changed the very character of farmland throughout the country. Still, the drought and the dust bowl conditions it wrought persisted for five more years. While the dust spread east from Oklahoma to Washington, D.C. and New York,

people abandoned their farms, taking great risks along the way, and headed west in the other direction. The dust and drought continued to ravage the country, and far more than crops and soil were uprooted, so too were millions of lives. How did Birkenstocks go from a German cobbler's passion project 250 years ago to the Barbie movie today? Who created that bottle of red Sriracha with a green top

that's permanently living in your fridge? Did you know that the Air Jordans were initially banned by the NBA? We'll explore all that and more in The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boys. This is Nick. This is Jack. And we've covered over a thousand episodes of pop business news stories on our daily podcast. We've identified the most viral products of all time and their wild origin stories that you had no idea about. From the Levi's 501 jeans to Legos. Come for the products you're obsessed with. Stay for the business insights that are going to blow up your group chat. Jack, Nintendo, Super Mario Brothers, best-selling

video game of all time. How'd they do it? Nintendo never fires anyone, ever. Follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814.

Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition wherever you get your books. Imagine it's May 1935. Your old jalopy rattles around a curving, unpaved stretch of Route 66. After the Black Sunday dust storm, you abandoned the fields you farmed, sold your chickens and hogs, practically gave them away. You made just enough money for a few days of groceries, a full tank of gas, and a spare tire. Now you're a few miles east of Gallup, New Mexico, and about to reach Arizona,

pretty far from where you started in liberal Kansas. Assuming nothing goes wrong, you might reach California in just two more days. Up ahead, you see an overloaded flatbed truck pulled over along the side of the road. Two boys, a little girl, and a woman take shelter beneath a canvas sheet draped across two-by-fours propped against the truck. A few feet away, a man struggles with the rear wheel. You stop your car and roll down your window. Hey, everything going okay? Need anything? The man doesn't answer, so his wife does. John's too stubborn to admit it, but yes, we have a flat.

Well, where are you trying to get? Wherever we can, really. Hopefully somewhere with a job. John used to work at a service station in Little Rock. That's why he's not asking for help. John shakes his head grumpily. The woman continues. I thought we'd find a job in Amarillo or Albuquerque. Figured I could even work in a diner if John can't find a job.

After all, people need to eat on the road. Well, I can't help you with a job. Where are you headed? Got room for passengers? No, no. I'm packed to the gills in here. No way I'd fit all of you. Especially not all the way to California. California? In that? She laughs as she eyes her car and its mismatched tires,

dented fender, busted rear window, and stripped paint. Oh, yeah. Well, it brought me this far, though. But hold on. I do have a spare. It might fit. Oh, we don't have anything to pay you, though. I don't need money. But, um, have any spare gas?

The woman looks at her husband. His hands are stained in grease, his face in sweat. He looks back at her and gives her a little nod. Then she lugs a gas can off the bed of the truck, grinning. Well, it might be that John bought a little extra when we left town. How much do you need? Over the course of the Depression, more than half a million Americans migrated west in search of a better life. It was an arduous journey. The vast majority of those undertaking it found only a hardscrabble existence of low pay, squalid conditions, and hostility.

Often they had to barter for services or string together low-paying work just to earn enough money to travel from one town to the next. They were migrating, not just to escape the dust and drought, but enduring poverty. By 1932, a fifth of the country's population was jobless. A year later, a quarter of all Americans were. But these stats left out farmers. Farmers typically weren't counted among the job market, even though a farmer without a farm couldn't earn any income. Long before the Depression began, farmers who wanted to produce enough from their land to stay in business had to buy the modern equipment necessary to meet demand.

Most small farmers had to borrow money to afford that equipment. And when the market crashed, it became a lot more difficult to pay back their loans. And the drought arrived just as crop prices cratered. That meant that farmers needed to grow more and more crops just to break even, but their farms were less viable than ever. The lenders, of course, didn't care. Farmers still owed money on their loans, so banks foreclosed on farmers who couldn't keep up. In some parts of the country, farm foreclosures reached 20%. Small farm owners weren't the only ones in trouble either. Many farmers didn't

actually own their land. Instead, they rented land from large landowners but used their own equipment to farm it. Since most of these tenant farmers made large outlays on equipment in the hopes of farming as much of their rented land as possible, they struggled to pay both rent payments to landowners and to pay back their loans. If a tenant farmer couldn't afford rent, he didn't just lose his home, he lost his source of income. Nothing remained for these farmers but to leave behind the fields they farmed, pack up whatever belongings they did own, and search for opportunity elsewhere. For many of these farmers, elsewhere was West, and typically California.

During the 1920s, more than 2 million people traveled from other parts of the country to California, attracted by marketing materials that touted beautiful weather, fertile soil, and growing cities. Once the Depression hit, the marketing stopped, but people kept coming. As many as 300,000 people migrated to California in search of work in the years that followed the stock market crash. 20% of these migrants came from Oklahoma. Many came from other Dust Bowl states like Texas, Nebraska, and Kansas. Some came from places that were further east, like Missouri and Arkansas.

Regardless of where migrants arrived from, though, residents of California dismissed them collectively as Okies. For many Americans of the time, one woman's face stood out as an emblem of the migrants' plight. Her name was Florence Owens Thompson, and a black and white photograph of her became an undeniable symbol of the era. But it turns out she wasn't actually a Dust Bowl refugee. The photograph is iconic. Thompson's weathered skin, the deep lines traversing her furrowed brow, the tattered sleeves of her shirt, two children turned away to hide their faces,

and a third, a baby, clad in stained clothes, held close in Thompson's arms. In early 1936, Dorothea Lange made five photographs of Thompson, a 32-year-old mother of six whose car had broken down near a labor camp in Nipono, California. One of these photographs became the most famous image of the Great Depression, an image known as Migrant Mother. Lang, then a 41-year-old photographer, made the image while on assignment with the Farm Security Administration. Originally a studio photographer, Lang grew tired of her commercial work when the Great Depression took hold of San Francisco. She couldn't ignore the economic crisis's impact

on the city as she went to work every day, so she started taking her Graflex camera with her wherever she went. The city's street life, especially the hardscrabble conditions of the poorest, became Lange's subject. She began making pictures of breadlines, laborers, and down-and-out job seekers. In the summer of 1934, Paul S. Taylor, an economics professor from the University of California, Berkeley, saw Lange's iconic picture in a San Francisco gallery. The image riveted Taylor. He tracked Lange down and arranged to meet her. The pair quickly realized how closely their interests aligned. They started talking about the possibility of working together

to document the conditions migrant workers faced. And so in 1935, Taylor and Lang began working on a five-part report for California State Emergency Relief Association. They focused on two migrant camps, one east of San Diego in the Imperial Valley and one in Nipono, just inland from the coast north of Santa Barbara. Lang and Taylor's connection exceeded professional synergy. They fell in love. By the end of 1935, they divorced their spouses and married one another. Their work continued as it would for the rest of their lives, with Lang taking pictures and Taylor writing the captions and accompanying essays.

In a 1939 collection of their work, the couple wrote, We have let them speak to you, face to face. The image of Thompson's face told a powerful story, and it won sympathy and aid for domestic migrants. And though Thompson may not have emerged directly from the Dust Bowl, she did dispute details of her story, as told by Lange. She did personify the environmental catastrophe and human tragedy affecting the country, and not just farmers. Some scholars argue that at least half of the

migrants arriving in California had been city and town dwellers, and that they sought work, mostly blue-collar, in the Golden State's urban areas, not its farms. And there they ran into resistance. The Depression didn't skip over California. Banks failed, businesses closed, and people lost jobs there too. By 1933, a third of California's population was unemployed. But agriculture in the Golden State continued to thrive. Vineyards, citrus plantations, almond orchards, and other farms in California desperately sought labor. Until 1931, foreign workers, especially ones from Mexico, provided much of California's agricultural labor force. But anti-immigrant sentiment following the Depression's onset

depleted that workforce. In particular, the deportation program developed during the Hoover administration scared hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers into repatriating to Mexico. This demographic shift left a labor vacuum at California's large farms, and many of the Dust Bowl migrants were willing to work for even less than the 20 to 25 cents an hour many Mexican laborers had received. Californians who were out of work didn't want to work for that little, and they grew resentful of the migrants because they believed they were driving wages down. But rather than direct their anger toward the farm owners, who paid the abysmal wages, they attacked the migrants. Flooded with migrants, by 1935, California received more federal emergency relief funds

than any other state. California officials used some of this money to build migrant relief camps. The first two included one in Marysville, in the northern part of the state's massive agricultural-rich San Joaquin Valley, and another in the southern part of the valley, in Arvin, about 100 miles outside of Los Angeles. But the camps could only house a few hundred of the roughly quarter million people who came to California looking for work in the mid-30s. So newly arrived migrants formed informal camps throughout California. Living conditions were often squalid, with newcomers straining the state's public medical facilities and schools. And so hundreds of thousands of migrants didn't end up in Arvin, Marysville, Lepono, or other sanctioned camps.

Instead, they landed in the cities. And as federal money ran out, pressure on the state and municipalities increased. This pressure made many middle-class Californians anxious about migrants. In February 1936, that anxiety erupted into full-blown panic. That panic turned to anger and violence.

For years, American Scandal has taken you deep inside the biggest controversies and shocking events in U.S. history. And now you can listen to exclusive seasons on Wondery Plus. Go beyond the headlines with jaw-dropping stories and immersive reporting that unveils the complex truth behind these scandals. In our exclusive season, The Hare Krishna Murders, dive into the twisted world of a rogue sect of Hare Krishnas. When devotees mysteriously disappear, the trail leads to a dark web of deceit, greed, and even murder. Or explore the sordid tale of Enron as we reveal the shocking depths of corporate fraud that led to one of the biggest bankruptcies in American history. From political conspiracies to corporate corruption, these in-depth investigations will keep you on the edge of your seat. Experience American scandal like never before, with exclusive seasons that you won't find anywhere else.

And on Wondery+, you can binge entire new seasons before they're publicly available. Start your free trial of Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify to start listening today and uncover the real story behind America's most notorious scandals. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked it all, the critical moments that defined their journey,

and the ideas that transformed the way we live our lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life. Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation. And Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Imagine it's March 6th, 1936.

You're riding in the back of a van. It's dark, but the mood is jovial. You share the space with three others, plus a mattress propped on its side, a small cabinet, and piles of clothes. It's been a bumpy ride since you left Klamath Falls, Oregon this morning. But by midday, you should be a hundred miles into California. But suddenly, the van starts to slow down. There are three quick metallic thuds on the wall between you and the cab.

That's the signal that the driver, Curtis, said he'd use if he spotted trouble. There's a rustle as the four of you try to squeeze behind the mattress, and the van creaks to a stop. Warning, officer. Los Angeles Police Department. Where are you headed? Los Angeles? You must be six, maybe 700 miles from L.A. Well, sir, I'm fixing to reach Yuba City, but I think today I might only go as far as Alturas. Maybe Susansville, if I can make good time. Why Yuba? Yunoke? Well, no, sir. I grew up in Lamar, Nebraska. But I've been traveling around, doing odd jobs the last couple of years.

Just down from Columbia right now. My brother's working on those dams they're building, and he let me stay with jobs the last couple of years. Just down from Columbia right now. My brother's working on those dams they're building, and he let me stay with him for a couple of weeks. Nebraska, huh? He sounds unconvinced. Well, wherever you're coming from, sounds like you don't got much money.

Or a job. Can't have anyone coming to California who can't take care of himself. Well, officer, I don't understand. I heard there's an FSA camp in Yuba and a chance to work in the Central Valley. Here they need workers in the almond orchards. California doesn't need anything or anyone. What's in back? Clothes? A dresser? An old mattress?

You hear footsteps heading toward the back of the van. Suddenly bright, blinding sunlight floods in, and the officer glares right at you. All right, get out, all of you, or I'll get you out. Shading your eyes from the morning sun, you and the other two riders step out. And I don't suppose any of you have a job waiting for you either, do you? You all shake your heads.

You think you can just come into our state and take our money? I'll give you a choice. You can come with me and go to jail. For what, officer? We didn't break any laws. Don't argue with me, Oki. I said you can come with me or you can turn around, head back across the border, and just stay out of our state. The officer's eyes stare right at you. Now, what's it going to be?

Five years after controversial deportation policy split Los Angeles, the city again became the epicenter of anti-outsider sentiment. This time, it wasn't foreign immigrants that Angelino's targeted. Instead, they turned against the tens of thousands of Americans coming to California in search of a better life. Hoping to keep domestic migrants out of Los Angeles, James E. Davis, the architect of some of the city's most notorious law enforcement initiatives, devised a new plan to target indigent transients. Davis was a migrant to California himself. He'd grown up poor in Texas, where he picked cotton until he joined the Army in 1909.

After two years in the Army, Davis moved to Los Angeles. He didn't have any money saved, nor did he have any job prospects. Within a year, though, Davis joined the Los Angeles Police Department. Fourteen years after that, he became the youngest police chief in the city's history. Davis earned the nickname Two-Gun Davis after he won right-handed and left-handed shooting competitions, developed firearms training programs, and urged officers to more readily fire their guns on duty. But he became a nationwide name on February 4, 1936, the day Davis launched the LAPD's notorious bomb blockade. With the blessing of local business leaders as well as city and county officials,

Davis dispatched 138 police officers to the California state line. He ordered this force, some newspapers called it a foreign legion, to man entry points along the Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon borders. Davis instructed his armed officers to stop cars and trucks from entering California. He told officers to block anyone they believed to be indigent. Anyone caught in Davis' blockade and unable to provide proof of a job or sufficient income was detained, fingerprinted, and subject to warrant checks. They then had a choice. They could turn back and head across the border to wherever state they entered from, or they could

go to jail and perform hard labor at their sentence. Officers also stopped and boarded trains inside the state's borders. With rail operators' blessings, Davis' patrolmen searched boxcars for stowaways and checked passenger trains for unticketed riders. The railway and border checkpoints manned by Davis's blockade were hundreds of miles removed from Los Angeles. Nevertheless, Davis claimed his officers had authority to operate in these locations because they were charged with enforcing California's state laws. And Davis had many allies. Railroads and some newspapers supported him. The Los Angeles

Chamber of Commerce was on his side, as was most of the city council. Some relief agencies even sided with Davis because they claimed migrants sapped their ability to help locals. Frank Merriam, the state's governor, didn't expressly condone the blockade, but he didn't actively oppose it either. Instead, he accused other states of foisting migrant populations onto his constituents. Davis told newspapers when he announced his plan that a large number of migrants entering California intended to ultimately settle in the LA basin. He also claimed, without providing much detail or evidence, that these migrants were responsible for surging crime. He argued that keeping potential criminals out of

Los Angeles was his responsibility as the city's police chief. Through much of the state, Davis's operations started off as planned. He dispatched his border officers to 16 checkpoints along the Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon borders. Most sheriffs in those regions deputized the officers, enabling them to enforce California law in their counties. But things didn't go as easily in Modoc County, about as far as one can get from Los Angeles without leaving the state. Modoc was a sparsely populated county in the remote northeastern corner of California. In the early 1920s, a few years before Two-Gun Davis first became LA's police chief, Modoc County voters elected John Christopher Sharp

to serve as their sheriff. In contrast to Davis, who migrated to California, Sharp grew up in the state, raised in Surprise Valley. Given its remote location, Modoc County became a popular transit point for smuggling alcohol during Prohibition. For the first 11 years he was sheriff, Sharp built his reputation busting

bootleggers and distillers. He was a popular sheriff who voters re-elected five times, but he was little known beyond Modoc County. Then, two-gun Davis sent 14 officers to Modoc to enforce his blockade. When Sharp heard about the LAPD officer' arrival, he was apoplectic. He insisted Davis' plan was unconstitutional, and he refused to deputize any of them. Then on February 11th, he ordered the LAPD officers to clear out of Modoc County by nightfall. He said, I've stood a lot and tried to be fair, but you have violated all the rules of decency. If you are still here by tonight, there will be consequences. said, I've stood a lot and tried to be fair, but you have violated all the rules of decency.

If you are still here by tonight, there will be consequences. Sharp didn't specify what those consequences were, but as an elected sheriff, Sharp was also a shrewd politician. He launched his own creative strategy to counter the crackdown from LA. He declared Modoc County open to tourists, sent a letter to newspapers saying so, and invited visitors. There was little for tourists to see in Modoc County, especially in the cold winter months. Still, Sharpe's statement positioned Modoc County as a welcoming access point for anyone who wanted to visit or enter California. And he was explicit on another point.

Addressing transience in his letter, Sharpe said, I can assure them my office will see that their rights as citizens of the United States are not violated, and all that we ask is that they conduct themselves as good citizens and do not abuse our hospitality. Others in the state challenged the blockade as well. Some California state legislators decried it. A deputy attorney general said poverty wasn't a sufficient constitutional basis for barring migrants from entering the state. A newspaper publisher claimed Davis tried to suppress critical news stories. And one Los Angeles City Council member called Davis L.A.'s Mussolini and demanded that he explain what

authority he had for the operation. And then the showdown in Modoc County came to a head. On the 9th of March, six LAPD officers who were part of Davis' blockade stopped a freight train six miles south of the Oregon border. The officers pulled out three laborers stowed away in one of the boxcars. They allegedly beat one of the migrants with a flashlight. Two of the officers were also drunk, at least according to sworn affidavits the laborers provided Sheriff Sharp. Three days later, Sharp demanded by

Telegram that Davis withdraw his officers from Modoc County, threatening to arrest them if Davis didn't comply. Davis did, though he wouldn't concede that Sharp was the reason. Instead, Davis claimed that there was no point in keeping his officers there since the sheriff wasn't complying and, compared to other parts of the state, few arrests had been made there. Davis's other 15 border checkpoints remained intact. But another challenge to the blockade was unfolding near California's border with Arizona. A notorious LAPD captain named Earl Kinnett stopped John Langan as he returned home on Route 66 from a mining expedition in Arizona. At the stop, Kinnett harassed Langan, accused him of being an okie, and threatened to place him on a work detail. Langan sued in federal court, and soon the ACLU joined the fight.

But then, at the end of March, Langan didn't appear in court. Instead, he instructed his lawyer to read a written statement saying he changed his mind and regretted accusations he made. The mystery deepened when the lawyer said that he hadn't gotten the chance to see his client. He claimed that someone was preventing him. Concerned by these allegations, the judge in the case ordered Justice Department officials to investigate. Two years after the blockade, California legislators heard testimony that LAPD Captain Kinnett had terrorized Langen in the weeks following Langen's arrest, trying to smear Langen as a communist, to have his wife committed to a psychiatric hospital, and threatening his three-year-old daughter. But at the time, the publicity of Langan's case, even though he withdrew it, combined with Sharpe's high-profile opposition,

forced Davis to withdraw his officers from the state's borders. Six months later, he began a new blockade around Los Angeles city limits. Two-gun Davis's deployment and the migrant crisis overall split Californians. Just four years earlier, that state's delegation was instrumental in President Roosevelt's nomination to the presidency, setting him up for his resounding victory in 1932. But now, as the Depression dragged on, new divisions emerged. Opposition to Roosevelt came from his right, and now also his left. With his re-election on the line, some of the very people who helped him reach office

and launch the New Deal became enemies. Meanwhile, a charismatic figure rose in prominence, whipping up popular support for the dark forces of nativism and prejudice. On the next episode of American History Tellers, the president launches an ambitious new public works program as he prepares for re-election, while a Catholic priest turned populist demagogue counters President Roosevelt's fireside chats with increasingly vitriolic, anti-Semitic, and massively popular radio broadcasts. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey

at wondery.com slash survey. I hope you enjoyed this episode of American History Tellers. If you're listening on a smartphone, tap or swipe over the cover art of this podcast. You'll find the episode notes, including some details

you may have missed. And if you do like this show, we'd love you to give us a five-star rating and leave a review. You can also find us and me on Twitter and Facebook. Follow the show at A.H. Tellers, and I'm at Lindsey A. Graham. And thank you.

American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. Sound design by Derek Behrens. This episode is written by Bill Lasher, edited by Dorian Marina, produced by Jenny Lauer Beckman. Our executive producer is Marshall Louis, created by Hernán López for Wondery. Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neurolinguistic programming. Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict

and murder suspect, and you can't help but wonder what his true intentions were. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. We recently dove into the story of the godfather of modern mental manipulation, Richard Bandler, whose methods inspired some of the most toxic and criminal self-help movements of the last two decades. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening.