Whose Names Are Unknown

Written in the late 1930s, Sanora Babb’s novel Whose Names Are Unknown (2004) was slated for publication, but the publication John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath caused the publisher to kill the title.

Once again, the Dunne family has a good harvest of broomcorn, sold at a good price, but when their debts are paid and next year’s seed purchased, they have almost no money left over. This is not an unusual scenario—in fact, almost every year sees dry farmers left with almost nothing to show for their labor.

Milt Dunne, who lives on and works the farm with his wife, Julia, and their children, Lonnie and Myra, convinces his father to try growing winter wheat, having observed other farms in the area have some success with the crop despite the dangers of a poor harvest due to the drought conditions. Milt moved his family to his father’s dugout one-room house in hopes of making a better life. Using the small amount of money they had put aside to purchase clothes, Milt goes with several other local farmers to buy wheat seed, and Julia writes to her cousin, asking if she has any old clothes she could send the family for the winter. However, when the clothes arrive, they are not very useful or appropriate.



The family endures the winter, and the wheat grows well. The harvest is plentiful and the family makes a lot of money from it. They are not rich, but Milt’s father can pay his taxes and there is enough money left over to buy clothes and some luxuries. When the warmer weather comes, they go back to broomcorn, but then the dust storms begin. A hot, dry summer makes the plains dirt spin up into huge clouds that then settle on everything, destroying crops and making the people who breathe it sick. The crops fail, and the Dunne family cannot absorb the financial blow. All around them, their neighbors are sinking into incredible amounts of debt, as they increasingly borrow more just to stay alive.

The Dunnes decide to try their luck elsewhere. Like all the other ‛Okies,’ they have heard that there are work and opportunity in California; so Milt takes his family west. In California, there is, indeed, a lot of job opportunities, but the flood of cheap labor means conditions and pay are very poor. There is no health care and if people do not have money, there is no way to feed themselves.

The Dunnes initially stay in tents in the work camps as they move from farm to farm seeking a decent working and living situation. They begin on a pea farm, then move to an apricot farm, a prune farm, a peach farm, and finally to a cotton farm. On the cotton farm, they live crowded in with other refugees, eventually sharing a single room with several other people—all they can afford, it is a depressing, terrible way to live. They earn very low wages and are required to shop at a company store which charges inflated prices, leaving them perpetually in debt. Many in the camps are dissatisfied and angry about these conditions, but no one wants to complain for fear of losing the meager earnings they’ve managed to scrape together.



Finally, however, conditions become so bad that the workers begin to organize. They move slowly and carefully, however, because they believe some of the workers are being paid by the owners to be spies. Finally, a general strike is called, and when they are called back to work in the fields they all sit down as one, refusing to work.

The owners respond by bringing in guards to kick all of the workers off the farm, knowing that they will easily find new workers who will be glad for the low pay and poor conditions. The workers form a camp a few miles away, but they are soon forced to move to a government-approved location, which is carefully chosen to be awful in order to encourage the Okies to move on. Their lives in the camp are even worse than before. Without the essentials provided at the farm, many become ill, and many starve.

Babb concludes the novel with the fundamental question the Okies pondered—what is the value of a man’s labor, a man’s life? How can anyone be expected to work for less than the simple cost of keeping themselves and their families alive? She asserts that every man wants the same thing—not simply the necessities of life, but the opportunity to live with simple dignity, because their lives have merit.