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OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — "Okie."
It started as a derogatory term for the thousands of impoverished Oklahomans who left the state for Arizona and California in the 1930s, seeking a better life.
As a relative newcomer to Oklahoma, I wondered: If Okie is a slight, why is the word turning up on bumper stickers and T-shirts all over town?
What does it mean now? And, is it offensive or not?
I began by tracing the word's origins.
I contacted William Savage, a University of Oklahoma history professor emeritus. For many years, he assigned his students "Grapes of Wrath," a story about the Joad family, destitute, Depression-era Oklahomans who migrated to California in search of a better life.
Savage told me that the San Francisco News published a newspaper series by Steinbeck in October 1936 called "The Harvest Gypsies," describing the lives of the Oklahoma migrants in California. That series didn't include the word "Okie," but it inspired "Grapes," which does.
Steinbeck got the credit — or blame — for originating the term. He didn't originate it, though, Savage said.
Before his death in a plane crash in 1935, Will Rogers, himself an Oklahoman, allegedly quipped, "When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the I.Q. of both states." But Rogers apparently didn't originate the term either.
A 1968 article published in The Oklahoman states a reporter for a Los Angeles paper on assignment on the Arizona-California border in the 1930s was the first to coin the term, in part because of all the Oklahoma license plates he saw passing through. He tagged his photos from the assignment "Okies."
"That seemed to fit and was left in final copy," states the article by Roy P. Stewart. "So that's how 'Okie' was born."
But with the publishing of "Grapes" in 1939 and a movie release a year later, Okie hit the mainstream.
Public lectures on "Grapes" sold out, libraries stocked up on copies and academics heaped praise. The popularity of the book and movie kicked up a controversy as Oklahoma civic leaders denied heavy migration and accused Steinbeck of smearing the state.
The anti-Steinbeck sentiment eventually turned to the Okie image, Savage said.
The push-back, all around, missed the mark, Savage said, with the critics failing to grasp that the book portrayed Oklahomans in a noble light.
"Lost in that is that these were people trying to better themselves, and that's why they left," Savage said.
The Oklahoma migrants Steinbeck met in California were wet, hungry and miserable, but "they were fine, brave people."
"They took me over completely heart and soul," Steinbeck wrote in an essay published in a collection of his work, "America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction." ''I wrote six or seven articles and then did what I could to get food to them."
Steinbeck won a Pulitzer Prize for "Grapes" in 1940, The Oklahoman (http://bit.ly/1yd85pb ) reports.
You can feel free to call Tom Hoskison, 77, an Okie — just as long as you're not from California.
Hoskison migrated from the Sooner State with his family to California in 1946, he said, in a post-war economic slump. Technically, it wasn't the Dust Bowl era any longer. But the bitter feelings between Californians and Oklahomans still rang true at the time, said Hoskison, whose father worked as a farm laborer. Kids at school called him an Okie, along with other choice four-letter words.
"If you lived anywhere north of Bakersfield, Calif., and you worked the fields, we were referred to as 'Hey Okie, get over here,' and worse," said Hoskison, now an economic development consultant for the city of Bethany.
His family, like scores of others, eventually moved back to Oklahoma.
In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his works, including "Grapes."
That same decade, the stigma still bound to the Okie term prompted then-Gov. Dewey Bartlett to spearhead his own campaign to redeem the word and instill positivity and pride in Oklahomans.
As part of that campaign, 60 people who ordered personalized plates bearing the word "Okie" received pins from the governor's office. The governor sent Okie pins to 35 foreign exchange students when they stopped at a Lake Texoma lodge during a tour of America in 1969. He bestowed the Okie title on the Texas governor and on the reporter he said coined the term.
The campaign never took off, Savage said.
"I don't know a single person except politicians who fell for that," he said.
Music icon Merle Haggard likely had better luck instilling state pride, though he did so by accident.
He was born in 1937 in a converted boxcar and reared in a Bakersfield, Calif. "Hoover Camp," where unemployed and migrant workers lived in cardboard shacks. His father and grandfather were fiddlers before moving away from Oklahoma.
Haggard sang "Okie from Muskogee," the title song from the same-named album released in 1969. The hit song restated redneck values in the face of college campus disturbances. But his state pride campaign was an accidental one — he wrote the song as a joke after he overheard a comment one of his band members made while traveling through Muskogee, according to a November 1979 article in The Oklahoman.
"I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, a place where even squares can have a ball," so the tune goes.
Then in 1974, the word made another Hollywood appearance.
In the movie, "Chinatown," private detective J.J. "Jake" Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, calls a California orange grove laborer a "dumb Okie" and is promptly knocked out cold. Dust storms in Oklahoma peaked in the mid-1930s; the Roman Polanski film is set in 1937.
In more recent times, tragedies made the term a badge of pride.
Savage, the OU professor, recalled a resurgence in the popularity of Okie after the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
"Within two hours after the Murrah bombing, there were lines of people outside of blood banks, every race, creed and color, waiting there," he said. "That is the sort of thing you find in Oklahoma."
And then, with the tornadoes and storms that struck the state in May 2013, Okie got another boost, as evident at DNA Galleries in Oklahoma City's artsy Plaza District, which sells local artists' wares and displays urban contemporary works.
The weather events inspired artists to create many new slogans and products, reports Hannah Royce, 23, DNA's social media director. Three different types of "Okie Dokie" shirts sell fast.
Another top seller is a simple black T-shirt emblazoned with OKIE in tall, chest-spanning type. A print depicts the phrase 'Okie dokie' over a picture of an artichoke — get it, it kind of rhymes — Okie dokie artichoke (e). An enterprising young artist who goes by the moniker The Little Bubble — she's 10 — sells Okie soap, red dirt included. At present, it's sold out.
Products like these aren't just about state pride, Royce said; the progressive-minded artists who make them want to make a point in a deep-red state long known for social conservatism, she said. They're not going anywhere.
"Oklahoma is a safe place for everyone, and not just the right wing it was built on," she said.
Being an Okie is a good thing, in other words.
"This is our state, and we can make it exactly what we want it to be," she said. "And Okies, we're full of love."
Go ahead, then. Call me an Okie. As long as you're not from California.
An AP Member Exchange shared by The Oklahoman
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