3-023-322 - British Pathe Ltd/Heritage Images

Displaced Farmers Known As 'Okies' Packing up and Leaving the Area, 1932. USA. 'On the land, things don't go so well. Because of ruthless timber-felling and unplanned agriculture, precious topsoil had been blown or washed away from millions of acres. In the middle west, a new and fearful name: the Dust Bowl. To the bad prices of a sagging market are added drought and failure. For as the land dies, so too dies all that men live by. Cattle, crops, the very roots of life. Only one thing to do - pack up and go. They called them Okies - displaced farmers, migrant workers. Westward they went in search of work, just as their forefathers had done in the old days. And so they moved on, or waited and hoped, existing only on the Grapes of Wrath'. From "Time To Remember - Around the Corner", 1932 (Reel 2); diary of events in 1932 in the United States of America - Franklin Roosevelt becomes the President.