Naïve and adrift, the migrants were in the perfect position to be taken advantage of by the propaganda techniques of the large farm owners. Hundreds of thousands of handbills were distributed throughout the stricken land, promising bountiful opportunities for farm workers at good wages. These pamphlets targeted the sharecroppers' desire for land and respectability, enticing them westward with the lure of financial stability. With few other options available to them, the farmers loaded their families and their most precious belongings on battered automobiles and headed to California.
The legions of homeless families emigrating to California became something of a phenomenon. Previously, farm labor in California had been primarily the province of habitual migrant workers, mostly single men who followed the seasons and crops as a chosen way of life. The economic conditions of the 1930s had created a second type of migrant worker, the removal migrant. These dispossessed agricultural workers were forced into a nomadic existence and longed only to find a place to rest and settle. More than 450,000 people would eventually be forced to take to the road in search of employment. These desperate migrant families frightened the established citizens of California and were labeled Okies, a derogatory term referring to any outcast from the Southwest or northern plain states.
