About Springfield, Ohio and a popular hymn

Complaints by the locals about imported migrant labor is not new to the U.S. Native born Californians were very hostile to the dust bowl agricultural workers (remember the Joads in Grapes of Wrath book?). In those days, and even when my family lived in Alameda in 1944, they were called Oakies and Arkies, pejorative terms then. Even my mom who was from Illinois didn't like them as she tried to stretch Dad's military pay while they bought what they wanted with government vouchers (or so she thought). In 1942, the Farm Security Administration (part of FDR's "New Deal") operated ninety-five camps with housing for seventy-five thousand people in California. The Library of Congress has an archive of photographs and books about those years and one photographer claimed in 1940 that the FSA camp at Visalia, CA had miserable weather and the local residents were grifters and corrupted. "I like it the least of the western states. My impression is that everything is commercialized, the police & city officials are corrupt grafters, there is little of that gracious western hospitality & most of the people are of that reactionary, super-patriotic, fascist-minded type. Practically every newspaper features a daily red-baiting article with 2 inch headlines that condemn [Democratic] Gov. [Culbert L.] Olson, the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], or Pres. Roosevelt."

Sounds like a true 2024 Democrat journalist, doesn't he? California and Minnesota even then had very active Socialist and Communist parties.

I know little about California's history or migrant labor. It's just one of those serendipitous things you find in the amazing LC collection while researching a hymn, and find it had been recorded in a migrant labor camp in Visalia in 1940, "Just a closer walk with thee." No one knows who wrote it, but it was the most popular and most recorded hymn of the 20th century.

https://genius.com/Patsy-cline-just-a-closer-walk-with-thee-lyrics  Patsy Cline

https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000132/  Library of Congress FSA recording

https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/just-a-closer-walk-with-thee    Details of publishing history