Jonathan H. Ebel's "From Dust They Came"

Jonathan H. Ebel is Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and author of G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion.

Ebel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California, and reported the following:

From Dust They Came is a study of the religious dynamics in and around the migratory farm labor camps established by the federal government in California during the Great Depression. Each of its seven chapters focuses on a particular space in the camp and examines its role in the camp’s program of cultural and religious catechesis. The spaces include the gate, the office, the tent platform, the sanitary unit, the community center, the camp newspaper, and, once again, the gate. My argument is that these camps operated as missionary spaces for the conversion of white migrants to more modern ways of living in the world and interacting with the divine, as they also worked to protect migrants from the dehumanizing environment of industrialized agriculture in California.

Page 99 is a snapshot of the soul of the book. It falls in the middle of the chapter on the camp manager’s office, in a section that presents a close reading of an inspection report from the Arvin Camp in the summer of 1936. The author of the report, Herbert Mensing of the Resettlement Administration, is describing the process by which migrants who enter the camp are registered, counted, and given permits to live there. This process involved an extended interaction with the camp’s manager - - Thomas Collins at the time - - and, through him, with the New Deal bureaucratic structure of which the camps were a part. Mensing wrote,

Upon arrival at the camp each family is registered upon a form containing the following information - - name, number in party, date of arrival, race, origin, probable destination, previous occupation, type of automobile, relationship of others in the party to its head...

This might seem an odd source and even an odder subject for a book on the religious history of North America. But part of my point on page 99 and throughout the book is that religion, understood as a set of beliefs and meaning-making practices related to an understanding of truth, appears in surprising forms, surprising ways, surprising places if we take the time to look.

Learn more about From Dust They Came at the NYU Press wesbite.

--Marshal Zeringue