John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath captures a facet of American history, but it does not truly explain the horrors of the 1930’s Dust Bowl. It had extreme short term effects along with a few long term effects on the terrain and the lives of the people impacted by it. It is such a terrible disaster that one could publish a full sized encyclopedia volume on the many hardships of the people living in the Dust Bowl and those who moved away when they were foreclosed upon. There are so many causes of so many different factors of the Dust Bowl that it can only truly be told as a grizzly horror story.
Although The Grapes of Wrath focused on the migrants, it still shows the Dust Bowl and how it affected the lives of so many people; therefore, to truly understand the problem, one must look at its roots. It started with the Enlarged Homestead act of 1909. The government wanted people to start expanding farmlands out west (Burmester). When the first people to till the land came, they didn’t realize that there were long periods of alternating rain and drought that could last for years. There were promoters from banks advertising that the land as an amazing place to live and own land and they put out pictures of watermelons the size of small cars, basketball sized grapes, hulking ears of corn, and cotton bolls the size of large boulders. The promoters said that it was a “garden of Eden. If only they would have the courage to go out challenge the land. The people went, claimed their land, and started work. The first years were bountiful. New technology comes with every era and soon tractors came out in the 1920’s and could plow up to fifty acres a day (Chana). Bankers came to the Great Plains. “Suitcase farmers” they were called. The suitcase ...
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...ot to the publisher, Steinbeck had published The Grapes of Wrath and the publisher had to refuse her novel because of Steinbeck’s novel’s success. Two novels of the same subject on the market would not have sold as well. Babb’s novel was eventually published in 2004, a year before she died (Burns).
The drought did eventually end and new farming practices helped the people of the southern plains reclaim their land, though the Dust bowl left a lasting imprint on society as we see it today. The facet of the Dust Bowl captured by The Grapes of Wrath was terrible indeed, but some of the realities were more terrible and gruesome.
Works Cited
Burmester, Charles. Interview. Personal interview. 23 April 2014.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992.
Surviving the Dust Bowl. By Gazit Chana. 1997. DVD.
The Dust Bowl. Dir. Ken Burns. 2012. DVD.
The Grapes of Wrath explicates on the Dust Bowl era as the reader follows the story of the Joads in the narrative chapters, and the migrants in expository chapters. Steinbeck creates an urgent tone by using repetition many times throughout the book. He also tries to focus readers on how the Dust Bowl threatened migrant dreams using powerful imagery. As well as that, he creates symbols to teach the upper class how the Dust Bowl crushed the people’s goals. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck utilizes imagery, symbolism, and repetition to demonstrate how the Dust Bowl threatened the “American Dream.”
When times get tough, many people turn away from everyone and everything. It must be part of human nature to adopt an independent attitude when faced with troubles. It is understandable because most people do not want to trouble their loved ones when they are going through problems, so it is easier to turn away than stick together. Maybe their family is going through a rough patch and they reason they would be better off on their own. This path of independence and solitude may not always be the best option for them or their family, though. Often times it is more beneficial for everyone to work through the problem together. It is not always the easiest or most desirable option, but most times it is the most efficient and it will get results in the long run. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck makes this point very clear through several characters. Many characters throughout
To begin with, the “Dust Bowl” was one of the causes of economic fallout which resulted in the Great Depression. Because the “Dust Bowl” destroyed crops which were used to sell and make profit, the government had to give up a lot of money in order to try and help the people and land affected by the “Dust Bowl”. The “Dust Bowl” refers to a time during the 1930’s where the Great Plains region was drastically devastated by drought. All of the areas (Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico) all had little to no rainfall, light soil, and high winds, which were not a very suitable combination. The drought lasted from 1934 to 1937, most of the soil during the drought lacked the better root system of grass.
The Joad’s were facing many conflicts and in the process of losing their house. They heard there was going to be work in California and wanted to take the risk and move out there to find a job to provide. The Dust Bowl and The Great Depression were pretty huge topics in history and the novel about The Grapes of Wrath had some pretty raw details about their journey and similar to both histories. The Joad family pushed each other to have a better life in California and did everything they could to have a job to provide and eat, and mainly survive to live another day. In the novel, the beginning, the Joad family faced and struggled with nature, dust nature, just like the people that experienced this during the Dust Bowl. The people in the Southern plains dealt with a huge dust storm and the Joad family were also faced with this storm but struggled from these dust storms because of no work. No work means you can’t eat and
One of America’s most beloved books is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The book portrays a family, the Joads, who leave Oklahoma and move to California in search of a more prosperous life. Steinbeck’s book garnered acclaim both from critics and from the American public. The story struck a chord with the American people because Steinbeck truly captured the angst and heartbreak of those directly impacted by the Dust Bowl disaster. To truly comprehend the havoc the Dust Bowl wreaked, one must first understand how and why the Dust Bowl took place and who it affected the most. The Dust Bowl was the result of a conglomeration of weather, falling crop prices, and government policies.
When Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, our country was just starting to recover from The Great Depression. The novel he wrote, though fiction, was not an uncommon tale in many lives. When this book was first published, the majority of those reading it understood where it was coming from-they had lived it. But now very few people understand the horrors of what went on in that time. The style in which Steinbeck chose to write The Grapes of Wrath helps get across the book's message.
The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the 1930's, that affected the midwestern people, for example the farmers, and which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." The early thirties opened with prosperity and growth. At the time the Midwest was full of agricultural growth. The Panhandle of the Oklahoma and Texas region was marked contrast to the long soup lines of the Eastern United States.
(Worster12) but neglects the fact that at the time of the Dust Bowl many of the farmers weren’t fully educated in preventing most of the natural disasters that occurred. The drought has caused a lot of unfavorable conditions for farmers in the southwest. In Worster’s book he says “Few of us want to live in the region now”. There is too much wind, dirt, flatness, space, barbed wire, drought, uncertainty, hard work.”
John Steinbeck’s acclaimed novel, The Grapes of Wrath, embodies his generation’s horrific tragedy. John Steinbeck’s writing gives insight on the devastating effects of the Dust Bowl on thousands of families and those who helped them. While Steinbeck's novel focuses on the Joad's family journey, he also includes writing of the general struggle of many families at the time. In John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, the usage of the term “Okies” degrades the workers, while the personification of the cars help depict the struggle of the journey, to exemplify the adaptation the migrant workers had to make to survive the new life.
The Crusades were a call to action from the Roman Catholic Church to go and free the Holy Land, Jerusalem, from other religious groups living there, such as the Muslim and Jewish people. At the time, The Church played an influential role in every aspect of a person’s life, and people looked to The Church to see how they should act. The Crusades were motivated by ideas of wealth, Heaven, and power. People were promised all of those things by The Church and Pope Urban II. According to Document B, the Crusaders treated the Jewish people and other groups harshly. These cruel actions led to bad relationships between The Church and other groups. The Crusades introduced a new way of living for the Europeans. After the Crusades, Europeans began to trade with the areas of the Holy Land. The Europeans wanted the new goods they had been introduced to, such as spices, sugar, and silk. The Crusades were caused by power and religious reasons, and they changed the European trade system and their interactions with other groups.
In his award-winning account of the devastating environmental and cultural effects of the Dust Bowl that enveloped America’s Midwest in the 1930’s, Timothy Egan attributes the disaster to the collective cause of reckless man-made agricultural practices, even as he surveys the tragic individual stories of the people who suffered from it. He argues that the combined effects of drought and a heat wave in the early 1930s, and man’s hubris and environmental ignorance and irresponsibility throughout the decade caused the Dust Bowl, and yet finds compassion for the small homestead farmer and the weak and powerless families who inhabited the region and lived through the disaster rather than picking up stakes and moving on. His story is a traumatic
Throughout the book Letters From the Dust Bowl by Caroline Henderson, there was a common theme of survival. Everyone had a different way of coping with the disastrous events that came during The Great Depression. Some people had hope for the future, while others had given in to the dust and lost all hope or decided to leave. One of the only things that influenced people to stay, was the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), who offered checks to farmers willing to stop farming portions of their land. It was, “[I]n reality the only thing that [had] saved the country side from complete abandonment and the small towns from ruin,” (Henderson 158). Most of these people survived off of their hope and the belief that life would get better.
The Dust Bowl was "the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains," (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book "The Dust Bowl." It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's "need" for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to take all it could from the earth while giving next to nothing back.
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel by John Steinbeck that exposes the desperate conditions under which the migratory farm families of America during the 1930's live under. The novel tells of one families migration west to California through the great economic depression of the 1930's. The Joad family had to abandon their home and their livelihoods. They had to uproot and set adrift because tractors were rapidly industrializing their farms. The bank took possession of their land because the owners could not pay off their loan. The novel shows how the Joad family deals with moving to California. How they survive the cruelty of the land owners that take advantage of them, their poverty and willingness to work.
The Crusades were great military missions embarked on by the Christian nations of Europe for the purpose of rescuing the Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the hands of the Moslems. The Crusades were considered Holy Wars (1). Their main target was the Moslems not the Jews, although campaigns were also waged against pagan Slavs, Jews, Russian and Greek orthodox Christians, Mongols, Cathars, Hussites, Waldensians Old Prussians, and political enemies of the popes (2). There were many Crusades some more significant than others, but in general the Crusades was an important event in the history of Medieval Europe.