The Grapes of Wrath: Connections to the Great Depression

The United States encountered many ordeals during the Great Depression (1929-1939). Poverty, unemployment and despair clouded the “American Dream” and intensified the urgency for solutions to address and control the nationwide damage. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the New Deal to detoxify the nation of its suffering. It can be argued that the New Deal was ineffective due to the inability to end the Great Depression with its short-term solutions and created more problems, however; it was successful in regards to providing direct relief for the needy, economic recovery and some structural reform for the majority of the general public in the severity of the Great Depression.

The America in the 1930s was drastically different from the luxurious 1920s. The stock market had crashed to an all time low, unemployment was the highest the country had ever seen, and all American citizens were affected by it in some way or another. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was effective in addressing the issues of The Great Depression in the sense that it provided immediate relief to US citizens by lowering unemployment, increasing trust in the banks, getting Americans out of debt, and preventing future economic crisis from taking place through reform. Despite these efforts The New Deal failed to end the depression. In order for America to get out of this economic

The "dirty thirties," as many called it, was a time when the earth ran amok in southern plains for the better part of a decade. This great American tragedy, which was more devastating environmentally as well as economically than anything in America's past or present, painstakingly tested the spirit of the southern plainsmen. The proud folks of the south refused at first to accept government help, optimistically believing that better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but from the new machine-controlled agriculture. As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller The Grapes of Wrath, "it was not nature that broke the people-they could handle the drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on land investments and buying tractors to pursue it, that had broken these people, smashing their identity as natural beings wedded to the land."(pg. 58) The machines, one-crop specialization, non-resident farming, and soil abuse were tangible threats to the American agriculture, but it was the capitalistic economic values behind these land exploitations that drove the plainsmen from their land and created the Dust Bowl.

An artist who compares the Dust Bowl to nowadays’ air pollution is Heather Watts. Her best known picture is the “New Dustbowl Blues”.

During the 1920’s, America was a prosperous nation going through the “Big Boom” and loving every second of it. However, this fortune didn’t last long, because with the 1930’s came a period of serious economic recession, a period called the Great Depression. By 1933, a quarter of the nation’s workers (about 40 million) were without jobs. The weekly income rate dropped from $24.76 per week in 1929 to $16.65 per week in 1933 (McElvaine, 8). After President Hoover failed to rectify the recession situation, Franklin D. Roosevelt began his term with the hopeful New Deal. In two installments, Roosevelt hoped to relieve short term suffering with the first, and redistribution of money amongst the poor with the second. Throughout these years of the

In the 1930’s disaster struck the Midwest. The tragic event, known as the Dust Bowl, records the worst man-made and natural ecological disaster in American history. The phenomenon lasted about a decade, ruining over 100,000,000 acres in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas touching neighboring sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. These areas are known for having little rainfall, light soil, and high winds, which was a potentially vicious mixture. The Dust Bowl required thousands of families to abandon their farms, which for most of them was their life. Leaving behind livestock to suffocate, crops to die, and homes to be deserted. This disaster affected American history ecologically, socially, and even medically.

Shortly after the Great Depression began, society began to fail quickly. The stock market crashed, the unemployment rate skyrocketed, business’ and banks were closing and people were losing their homes they had worked so hard for. Although President Hoover was attempting to help society, he believed that instead of governmental interventions you should be self-reliant and would not fund welfare programs that may incentivize not working. Hoover’s “attempts” to aide the economy were not enough to turn it around, and people began to set their sights on Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the oncoming election. FDR made it his goal to ensure relief, recovery and reform were provided for the country to counteract the Great Depression and to make up for all of the years of negligence and non interference from the government, collectively called the “New Deal” 15 major laws were created in just the first 100 days he was in office, and his “New Deal” was coming into fruition and the governments role was now to step in and take care of it’s people, and to neglect them no longer.

The structure of American society was slowly crumbling as a result of the Great Depression and Roosevelt enacted a series of reforms to help and fight off the decaying state of the United States. Roosevelt informed that nation that " the country was dying by inches” (Document B). New Deal was not just economic

Imagine all of a sudden being out of a job and becoming bankrupt, and your country going into a depression. In 1929 until the late 1930's the Great Depression took place and many countries were affected by it, the Great Depression was an economic depression. The cause of the Great depression was the crash of the Stock Market in 1929. The Great Depression affected the US in a way that increased unemployment by 25% and increased the amount of homeless people. In this essay I will be analyzing the responses of President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration to the problems of the Great Depression. I will also be talking about how effective these responses were, and how they changed the role of the federal government. I believe that the responses to the Great Depression were very effective in bringing the country out of the Great Depression.

The late 1930s were a time of great suffering and uncertainty in the United States. The country was crippled by effects of the Great Depression; the result was a massive decline in jobs and economic stability that dramatically impacted both rural and urban communities. Millions of Americans were out of work, unable to support their families. State organizations and charities were unable to meet the growing needs of the people and many were left to fend for themselves. The Great Depression brought with it a legitimate, tangible fear about the future of America and its citizens. Upon the outcry of the American people a “New Deal” was struck giving the citizens of America a lifeline of hope in the ever-growing State. The New Deal was a succession of programs, organizations and laws, enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, directly addressing the issues of jobs, welfare and uncertainty through direct federal involvement. The creators of the New Deal worked across party lines to reshape the norms of state involvement whilst making a great legislative effort to turn the declining economy around. The New Deal reshaped the federal government’s relationship with its citizens in a time of economic uncertainty helping to grow the State in a time of peace.

The Grapes of Wrath is set in the horrible stage of our American history, the Depression. Economic, social, and historical surroundings separate the common man of America into basically the rich and poor. A basic theme is that man turns against one another in a selfish pride to only protect themselves. For example, the landowners create a system in which migrants are treated like animals and pushed along from one roadside camp to the next. They are denied decent wages and forced to turn against their fellow scramblers to simply survive.

The 1920s seemed to promise a future of a new and wonderful way of life for America and its citizens . Modern science, evolving cultural norms, industrialization, and even jazz music heralded exciting opportunities and a future that only pointed up toward a better life. However, cracks in the facade started to show, and beginning with the stock market crash of 1929 the wealth of the country, and with it the hopes and expectations of its people, began to slip away. The Great Depression left a quarter of the population unemployed and much of the rest destitute and uncertain of what the future held. Wealth vanished, people took their money out of banks, and plans were put on hold. The most significant way in which the Great Depression affected Americans’ everyday lives was through poverty because it tore relationships apart and damaged the spirit of society while unexpectedly bringing families together in unity.

The 1930s were a time of hardship for many across the United States. Not only was the Great Depression making it difficult for families to eat every day, but the Dust Bowl swept through the plains states making it nearly impossible to farm the land in which they relied. John Steinbeck saw how the Dust Bowl affected farmers, primarily the tenant farmers, and journeyed to California after droves of families. These families were dispossessed from the farms they had worked for years, if not generations (Mills 388). Steinbeck was guided by Tom Collins, the real-life model for the Weedpatch camp’s manager Jim Rawley, through one of the federal migrant worker camps. He was able to see for himself,

“Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments” (Steinbeck). The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is a classic book read by millions in high school due to its simple prose, clear symbolism, and its heartwarming story of perseverance against the odds. However, this novel is far more than a heart-tugging story, but is actually a historically correct interpretation of the Great Depression of the 1930’s in the United States. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath’s plot and characters reflect the Great Depression environmentally,

America’s Great Depression is believed as having begun in 1929 with the Stock Market crash, and ending in 1941 with America’s entry into World War II. In order to fully comprehend the repercussions and devastating effects of the Crash of 1929, it is important to examine the factors that contributed to the catastrophic event which led to The Great Depression. The Great Depression was the worst economic slump in U.S. history, and it spread to most of the industrialized world. Many factors played a role in bringing about the depression; however, the main cause for the Great Depression was the combination of the greatly unequal distribution of wealth throughout the 1920s, and the