February Meeting, "Orphan Train" by Christina Baker Kline / April Meeting, "Whose Names Are Unknown" by Sonora Babb

I’m breaking with tradition here and reviewing two books at once. They’re both from a few months ago, one in February and the other in April. But they both deal with similar topics – the Great Depression in America and its drastic effect on the lives of ordinary people.

The first one, “Orphan Train” by Christina Baker Kline, details the orphan train system, run by the Children’s Aid Society (CAS), in which over 200,000 orphaned, abandoned, or homeless children were transported across the country, mostly from the East Coast to the Midwest, to be adopted by other families. This sounds like a good idea in theory. Needless to say, it didn’t work out in quite the fairytale way that Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the program, thought it would.

A child’s fate was determined by pure luck, usually bad luck. Some were adopted by kind, loving families but many more were taken in by their new “parents” to be used as farm workers doing hard labor or as indentured servants. In Kline’s story, a young Irish girl loses her entire family in a New York City tenement fire. First, she’s placed with a childless couple that only wants the extra pair of hands to work in their sweatshop-like clothing factory. Then she’s put with a dirt-poor couple with four children and is expected to work as a mother’s helper. Finally, after being starved, infected with lice, almost frozen to death from sleeping without blankets during the winter, and sexually assaulted, she is saved when the Nielson family takes her in and eventually adopts her, bequeathing their burgeoning general store to her. She lives a long, happy life.

Interestingly, The National Orphan Train Complex, located in Kansas, is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and disseminating knowledge about the orphan trains and the children and agents
 who rode them. The museum’s collections, exhibitions, programming, and research are open to riders, researchers, and the general public to create awareness of
 the Orphan Train Movement that operated from 1854-1929. There’s even a TV movie, made in 1979, and a book series for children called the “Orphan Train Adventures.”

The second book, “Whose Names Are Unknown,” by Sonora Babb, chronicles the hardships faced by the high plains farmers in the 1930s. The Dunne family struggles to survive in a one-room dugout in the Oklahoma Panhandle while drought and dust storms decimate their crops. The severe weather conditions eventually forces them to abandon their fields and head to California. Expecting to find lush valleys filled with crops, they discover an abusive labor system that labels them worthless “Okies,” pays almost nothing for their back-breaking work, and exposes them to early death from disease and famine; malnutrition causes Julia to miscarry. If any of the workers complain about their horrific working and living situations, they are subjected to beatings and price gouging. As conditions worsen, the migrants actually go on strike, attempting to improve things through democratic organization and collective protest. Sounds hopeful but it is not. The book ends on the same wretched note with which it began. The revolt fails, many are evicted from their huts, and most are forced to move on to similar camps.  

What is fascinating is that the dust bowl was man-made. Poor agricultural practices and years of sustained drought caused the severe dust storms. The land that had been ploughed and planted with wheat flourished during the years of adequate rainfall. But once the drought began, nothing would grow because the farmers had over-ploughed the land, leaving unanchored soil. The fierce wind whipped across the fields and raised huge, billowing clouds of dust that smothered everything.

Babb was a child of the period. Written with empathy for the farmers’ plight, the narrative is based on the author’s firsthand experience of the dust bowl. She eventually began working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the California refugee camps, helping uprooted farmers rebuild their lives. On a side note, Babb submitted her manuscript to Random House in 1939. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish it but when John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” swept the nation, Babb’s book was felt to be redundant since Steinbeck had "already adequately explored the subject matter." Rumor has it that Babb’s FSA boss, Tom Collins, was sharing her reports with Steinbeck. By the time she was ready to publish her work in 1939, Steinbeck had beat her to it. Suspicious coincidence, I’d say! At least she lived to see her book finally published when she was 97 years old. And, filmmaker Ken Burns produced a two-part miniseries for PBS that expands on Babb’s story about the environmental catastrophe of the 1930s.

Now, the reason I’m lumping these two books together is not just that they deal with depression era hardships, but that the authors address it in such markedly different ways. Whereas Kline finds hope and happiness for her orphan, Babb’s family finds desolation and hopelessness. Kline acknowledges that a lot of the orphans suffered horribly despite the good intentions of the CAS but many of them did go on to lead normal lives and even great success. Babb tries to offer a glimmer of hope that the workers’ effort to organize will have some future benefit but we’re left with an overwhelming sense of crushed dreams and hunger. In a nutshell: Kline – suffering, redemption, and love; Babb – misery, starvation, and exploitation.

My other reason for lumping is that I knew very little about these two events in history prior to reading these books. So, thanks to the book group members who suggested them! Here are a few of the things I learned:

• Orphan trains stopped at more than 45 states, as well as Canada and Mexico.
• The social experiment begun by Loring led to the establishment of foster care services in the U.S. The program also resulted in the success of child welfare reforms, child labor laws, and public education.
• The last generation of Orphan Train riders is still living in towns across the country and keeps in touch with each other through the National Orphan Train Complex and Children’s Aid Society.
• The term “Okie” referred to the migrants who came from Oklahoma, as well as those who had lost everything and were struggling during the Great Depression.
• The 1930s drought was the worst in U.S. history, covering more than 75% of the country, severely affecting 27 states, and reaching as far as Canada.
• Although the initial attempts at organizing and striking failed, in 1933 a group of farm workers finally led the largest strike in American history, forcing the growers to recognize the union and give workers a significant raise.