A Little Memoir and Some Questions It Raises
February 20, 2008
Robert Higgs
I was born in what the local rulers represented to be the sovereign state of Oklahoma. This circumstance was not my fault. I suppose I might blame my parents, but they had a similar excuse, my father having been born in the same jurisdiction and my mother having been brought there as an infant. In any event, by virtue of my birthplace, I became a citizen of that state and, as such, I bore a heavy burden of misfortune.
Our part of Oklahoma, you see, was not exactly at the cutting edge of economic and social development in those days. Good jobs were not easy to find, and even a resourceful workingman who was willing to labor long and hard, as my father was, could not earn much. Many of the schools were primitive. When I began the first grade, in 1950, the school comprised about fifty students in grades 1–8. My first-grade class met in a little shack along with the second-grade class, while the rest of the students met in a larger, one-room building with a removable divider in the middle of the room. With the divider put in place, grades 3–5 met on one side of it, grades 6–8 on the other side. Three teachers made up the entire staff, except for the cook, who happened to be my mom. I won’t say that I couldn’t possibly have remained in that environment and still become an astronaut. Maybe I could have. But the odds did not look promising.
For a time during the war, when I was an infant, my father had taken the family to Portland, Oregon, where he worked in one of Kaiser’s shipyards as a welder until the war ended. So he had tasted the sweet nectar of West Coast wages. Of course, after the war, such elevated wages were no longer available for the asking, yet West Coast wages still stood well above those in Oklahoma, as my father knew from the accounts of friends who had migrated to California earlier and sent back glowing reports.
In 1951, a old friend of my father’s who worked on a ranch near Mendota, California, a dusty little town 35 miles west of Fresno, arranged for the ranch owner to hire my father and my older brother as tractor drivers during the summer—my father had several months of accumulated vacation time. So the family packed a few of our belongings and headed west on Route 66, as so many Okies before us had done during the previous twenty years.
Reaching our destination at the Encher Ranch, we moved into a small living area walled off at the end of a larger structure built originally as a bunkhouse for immigrant Japanese workers before the war. There was no extra charge for the outdoor toilets and showers. In those days, such labor camps dotted the San Joaquin Valley thickly, housing not only the migrant Okies, Texans, and other wretched refuse of the Dust Bowl, but also an abundance of migrant Mexicans. A sprinkling of Italians, Portuguese, Basque, Chinese, and Japanese spiced the area’s population.
At the end of the summer, my father’s work having proved more than satisfactory to the employer, and the wages more than satisfactory to my father, we returned briefly to Oklahoma, arranged for the shipment of our household belongings, such as they were, and moved back to California permanently.
Lest you wonder about the point of this mundane little narrative, I hasten to emphasize that my father had done something quite remarkable: he had left the sovereign state of Oklahoma, crossed the sovereign states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and entered into and established permanent residence in the sovereign state of California, all without the permission of any of the rulers of these states. Imagine that!
Ho-hum, you say; any American can do the same whenever he wants. Well, yes, that’s true. But Americans can do so only because the sovereign states that belong to the federal umbrella state known as the United States of America have worked out a system of essentially unimpeded cross-border passages, and their laws recognize that in general anyone with permission from the U.S. authorities to be in the United States may move freely within the constituent states of the union. No law forbade my father to leave Oklahoma without approval by the Oklahoma government, and no law forbade him to enter California without approval by the California government. (Earlier, in 1937, California did enact a statute that became known as the “anti-Okie law,” aimed at preventing certain Americans from entering the state, but the law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1941 in Edwards v. California [314 U.S. 160].)
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2126
February 20, 2008
Robert Higgs
I was born in what the local rulers represented to be the sovereign state of Oklahoma. This circumstance was not my fault. I suppose I might blame my parents, but they had a similar excuse, my father having been born in the same jurisdiction and my mother having been brought there as an infant. In any event, by virtue of my birthplace, I became a citizen of that state and, as such, I bore a heavy burden of misfortune.
Our part of Oklahoma, you see, was not exactly at the cutting edge of economic and social development in those days. Good jobs were not easy to find, and even a resourceful workingman who was willing to labor long and hard, as my father was, could not earn much. Many of the schools were primitive. When I began the first grade, in 1950, the school comprised about fifty students in grades 1–8. My first-grade class met in a little shack along with the second-grade class, while the rest of the students met in a larger, one-room building with a removable divider in the middle of the room. With the divider put in place, grades 3–5 met on one side of it, grades 6–8 on the other side. Three teachers made up the entire staff, except for the cook, who happened to be my mom. I won’t say that I couldn’t possibly have remained in that environment and still become an astronaut. Maybe I could have. But the odds did not look promising.
For a time during the war, when I was an infant, my father had taken the family to Portland, Oregon, where he worked in one of Kaiser’s shipyards as a welder until the war ended. So he had tasted the sweet nectar of West Coast wages. Of course, after the war, such elevated wages were no longer available for the asking, yet West Coast wages still stood well above those in Oklahoma, as my father knew from the accounts of friends who had migrated to California earlier and sent back glowing reports.
In 1951, a old friend of my father’s who worked on a ranch near Mendota, California, a dusty little town 35 miles west of Fresno, arranged for the ranch owner to hire my father and my older brother as tractor drivers during the summer—my father had several months of accumulated vacation time. So the family packed a few of our belongings and headed west on Route 66, as so many Okies before us had done during the previous twenty years.
Reaching our destination at the Encher Ranch, we moved into a small living area walled off at the end of a larger structure built originally as a bunkhouse for immigrant Japanese workers before the war. There was no extra charge for the outdoor toilets and showers. In those days, such labor camps dotted the San Joaquin Valley thickly, housing not only the migrant Okies, Texans, and other wretched refuse of the Dust Bowl, but also an abundance of migrant Mexicans. A sprinkling of Italians, Portuguese, Basque, Chinese, and Japanese spiced the area’s population.
At the end of the summer, my father’s work having proved more than satisfactory to the employer, and the wages more than satisfactory to my father, we returned briefly to Oklahoma, arranged for the shipment of our household belongings, such as they were, and moved back to California permanently.
Lest you wonder about the point of this mundane little narrative, I hasten to emphasize that my father had done something quite remarkable: he had left the sovereign state of Oklahoma, crossed the sovereign states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and entered into and established permanent residence in the sovereign state of California, all without the permission of any of the rulers of these states. Imagine that!
Ho-hum, you say; any American can do the same whenever he wants. Well, yes, that’s true. But Americans can do so only because the sovereign states that belong to the federal umbrella state known as the United States of America have worked out a system of essentially unimpeded cross-border passages, and their laws recognize that in general anyone with permission from the U.S. authorities to be in the United States may move freely within the constituent states of the union. No law forbade my father to leave Oklahoma without approval by the Oklahoma government, and no law forbade him to enter California without approval by the California government. (Earlier, in 1937, California did enact a statute that became known as the “anti-Okie law,” aimed at preventing certain Americans from entering the state, but the law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1941 in Edwards v. California [314 U.S. 160].)
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2126
