The “New Deal era” of American history has long been imagined primarily in secular terms, with themes of politics, labor, and state-building dominating the historiography. In recent years, however, works like Colleen McDannell’s Picturing Faith and Alison Collis Greene’s No Depression in Heaven have begun to alter our accounts, unearthing the ways in which religion permeated New Deal culture. Jonathan Ebel’s excellent From Dust They Came, a rich interpretation of the religious meaning of government-sponsored camps for California agriculture workers, situates itself squarely in this lineage and adds to our understanding of religion in the New Deal era.
Following environmental and economic catastrophe, thousands of Texans, Oklahomans, and other Americans found themselves uprooted from the plains; many sought farm work in California, where they encountered grim housing and living conditions. The federal government responded to the crisis by erecting camps throughout California’s agriculture heartland, places that could allow migrant families not only access to food, sanitary and medical services, and a place to pitch a tent but also a chance to recreate a semblance of dignified community. The outlines of this story will be familiar to anyone who has encountered John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath – indeed, part of Ebel’s book is a direct and useful contextualization, and critique, of Steinbeck’s novel.
Central to Ebel’s analysis is his sense that government camps in 1930s California fit a pattern of planned community throughout American history – like New England “praying towns,” or Freedmen’s Bureau settlements, or Gilded Age boarding schools for Indian pupils, or Progressive-Era settlement houses; the camps were, in Ebel’s words, “most certainly spaces for evangelism” (p. 7). They functioned, in Ebel’s reading, as “small cities on a hill” (p. 51) that modeled “properly ordered communities and righteously lived lives” (p. 53) to destitute and disordered people. New Dealers like Harry Drobish and Tom Collins viewed the camps as tangible expressions of their “progressive, modern faith,” which “connected to a generally scientific approach to knowledge” (p. 96). Many Dust-Bowl refugees, by contrast, brought with them more pugnaciously sectarian, emotionally volatile, or supposedly “otherworldly” religious enthusiasms; a variety of fundamentalism, apocalypticisms, and Pentecostalism shaped the religious world of many migrants. One major function of the camps, then, was the construction of what Ebel calls “two disciplinary regimes, the behavioral discipline of living within the camp system’s communal norms and the religious discipline of worshipping within its Protestant norms” (p. 329).
Ebel uses the physical layout of the camps themselves as the inspiration for his book’s structure. We enter “the gate” at the edge of camp and proceed, in subsequent chapters, to explore spaces such as the tent platform, the sanitary unit, the community center, and the camp newspaper. Each space was an opportunity for camp managers to instruct migrants on New Deal norms of modernity, and for migrants to perform their receptivity (or resistance) to such lessons. Struggles over the proper nature of religion, and the proper boundaries between the religious and secular, between faith and science, between ecumenical harmony and sectarian conflict, emerged in all these spaces. In making one of his central points, Ebel acknowledges that the 1930s was indeed a “secular age” – but he also insists that looking for a clear line of separation between the secular and religion in the camps “is to see instead their utter inextricability” (p. 27).
From Dust They Came is a model of interpretive history. Working primarily out of Record Group 96 at the National Archives in San Bruno, California, Ebel discovered reams of reports, memos, and personal accounts. Rarely does he allow any source to speak for itself, instead conducting close and careful readings throughout. Ebel’s goal is not to create a narrative history of the camps but to excavate religious meaning from sources that were often created for very different purposes, and he excels at that pursuit. His chapter on the camp’s newspapers is particularly enlightening; I would especially advocate assigning that chapter to graduate students, as it offers a masterclass in transparently thinking through how and why to use primary sources. Many historians use newspapers; Ebel deconstructs the camp paper. He employs a similar approach with sources as diverse as Steinbeck’s novel and a 1940s-era master’s thesis that was probably the first scholarly study of migrant religiosity.
Where the book is strong on interpretation, it has less interest in other issues that historians often prioritize. Chronology is relatively unimportant, for instance, and change over time is difficult to establish for such a short and narrow period. Similarly, readers have little sense of the world beyond the camps. While Ebel references standard works of religious history, his bibliography is missing key studies of working-class religion in the 1930s – like Jarod Roll’s study of Missouri sharecroppers – published in labor history series. This blind spot is disappointing, as one of the most important aspects of Ebel’s book is its blurring of secular and religious viewpoints. The audience that would learn the most from Ebel’s book, after all, is probably not the readers of Church History but scholars who imagine religion to have evaporated as a motive force in American history sometime after the Civil War. To that idea, Ebel offers an eloquent refutation.
