The entire point of the Grapes of Wrath was about the Joads venturing to California in search of work. The movie mentioned that the same things were happening to other families and the Joads were originally living in Oklahoma, so I wanted to look at how many other people had the same ideas. What happened to the population of Oklahoma during the Great Depression? What happened to the population of California.

This Business Insider article has some cool maps about the relative growth and decline of populations of these states by county. Some counties in Oklahoma lost over 25% of their population in the 1930s. In comparison, some places in California had on over 75% increase in their population. Los Angeles county gained over 100,000 people, which is the largest population gain for anywhere in the 1930s. Imagine having your home county get over a hundred thousand new residents, all competing for work. It’s not impossible to see why the locals became irate at this.

If you look at the map above this, the effects of the Great Depression’s population move can still be seen. The East Coast is obviously crowded because that’s where people first settles, and then as you go to the middle of the country (especially to where the Joad family would have lived), the population begins to drop off. It gets red again at the West Coast. This is consistent with what was talked about above. About 80 years ago, everyone moved from the middle of the country to the western side, and they’ve been living there ever since.

Also, one last point that isn’t really important, but I feel like it should be brought up. The movie made it seem like everyone in the Joad’s area was getting forced to move to California. It also mentioned that they’re from Salisaw. Well, I started searching around, and Salisaw is in Sequoyah county, one of the few counties in Oklahoma that actually grew in population during the Great Depression. So, either a lot of people moved back to Oklahoma after there weren’t many jobs in California or Steinbeck picked a county that wasn’t representative of Oklahoma as a whole.