Which showed that the economy was weaker than the stock market indicated during the 1920s?Californians called many migrants ""Okies"" because
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In the early decades of the twentieth century, California agriculture expanded greatly. In 1900, there were 72,000 farms in the state, valued at a total of $708 million. By 1925, California boasted 136,400 farms, worth more than $3 billion. This growth was spurred by the spread of irrigation, which enabled farmers to cultivate fruits and vegetables on a large scale in the arid Central Valley. The era of "factories in the field" had truly arrived.
The rapid expansion of California agriculture, especially seasonal crops, called for a large, migratory agricultural proletariat. To an extent, this need was met by Japanese, Mexican, Filipino, and other minority workers. During the 1920s, however, the Alien Land Acts and other factors greatly reduced the number of Japanese workers in California agriculture. Mexican immigrants, in particular, helped to make up the shortfall, but even their increasing numbers failed to meet the labor demands of California agriculture. During the 1920s and 1930s, these demands were met from a more indigenous source.
While California agriculture continued to expand during the interwar period, this was not the case in many other states. Low prices, foreign competition, mechanization, soil erosion, drought, pestilence, and New Deal farm programs all combined to drive millions of farmers off the land in this period. No area of the country was as hard hit as the American Southwest. By 1950, 23 percent of all people born in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri lived outside the region. These states lost 50 percent of their agricultural work force between 1910 and 1950.