The Great Depression By Mary Coin

Mary, Toby, and their family were forced to move numerous times throughout the novel, Mary Coin, constantly migrating to look for jobs across the state of California and the like. If a job did not pay well the family would load their belongings in the Hudson and drive off to another workplace with no questions asked. This happened very often because their services for them were no longer needed and they were forced to be laid off. The time period was the Great Depression, where the economy was in its biggest slump ever, leading to many Americans looking for work and overall being dirt poor. This was the most important reason as to why there was a great migration of the homeless, jobless, and the poor across the United States, many of whom were

In this era, there was little consumption of edible, or even textile, goods because of deflation, where the prices dropped at an unstoppable rate. The price of livestock and harvestable items fell exponentially and poorer farmers could not sell them fast enough

As said by Stearns, “the expansion of industries such as automobiles, construction, and mechanized agriculture reached levels that could no longer be sustained by customers ' demand” (Stearns, 2008). Sometimes work stopped altogether and this lead to empty fields, for example “in southeast Oklahoma and northeast Texas, cotton farms withered. In the western valley, sand replaced the soil” (Robin Cole-Jett, 2016). This wasn’t rare for the reason being that most of the once luscious fields were now abandoned farms with no one willing to work on

During the Great Depression, or the “dirty thirties”, the land had changed and definitely not for the better seeing that “severe drought and high winds degraded [the] farmland” (Gale, 2008). Although it was not nature’s fault for the Dust Bowl; the “years of overproduction and poor farming techniques had stripped the land of protective topsoil and left it vulnerable” to all patterns of western weather (Gale, 2008).

These conditions did not come swiftly and technically started during the 1800’s, when pioneers first started to settle there. Their “cattle overgrazed the land, stripping it of the shrubby grasses that had held the soil in place for centuries” and they “used growing methods common to the more humid eastern United States” because that’s all the pioneers knew about farming (Gale,