The Struggles of Families in Poverty in The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

Poverty is everywhere; it’s in your backyard, at the front of your door, it can even be in your very own home. In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, poverty is the most important theme in the book because it negatively influenced Junior’s life. Poverty is the main theme because it affected Junior’s decisions, his family, and the whole Indian community. First of all, poverty was already in Junior’s family. Being poor can affect you in many ways, but poverty affected Junior’s family because they couldn’t afford anything.

The Smolinsky family was living in the time of the Great Depression. They had left Russia in order to escape the poverty and harshness only to reach America and find themselves in a similar situation. The Great Depression engulfed many families, drowning them in poverty and forcing them to become desperate enough to beg for food. The Smolinsky family was no exception. The depression was difficult enough for the original American citizens much less the immigrants with nothing but the shirts on their backs.

Overall, great societies fall because of internal problems such as, unemployment which leaves people begging for money, political corruption that has government officials constantly fighting, and fast expansion making it very difficult for soldiers to be at all of the borders protecting the whole empire. One of the main reasons great societies fall is because of unemployment. Wealthier people owned farms and had slaves work, making their goods cheaper. However, farmers who had freed men that they had to pay could not sell their goods for very cheap, because they needed the money to pay the workers with. Eventually, the farmers couldn’t keep up with the cheap goods and eventually lost their farms leaving them unemployed and the freed men working for them.

It put millions of people out of work, and made people homeless and hungry. Food and job lines were nearly endless in the cities. The Great Depression was a horrible time for most of Americans. Many people lost their jobs and a lot of businesses closed. This job loss forced many Americans to becoming migrant workers.

American loans were costly for America and it took them time and favors from other countries to get them back on track. Inequality and unequal income and wealth was a big benefactor as well because the rich became richer and the workers lives didn’t change and the big businesses carried on speculating on the exchange with all their money eventually to the destruction of the once so lavish life of America.

The Grapes of Wrath sheds light on the discrimination and prejudice behavior towards migrants traveling to California during the dust bowl and exhibited the unfair treatment the Okies faced. Work seemed impossible to find while the migrants traveled across the United States and into California and because of this they were not eating as much as they needed. They were desperate to find a job. The Joad family, the main family in the novel, stumbled across an a ragged man. “His black coat dripped torn streamers.

The Great Depression affect American Workers by people lost their savings in bank and home foreclosures, and it was increased in unemployment from 3,216,000 in 1930 to 13,689,000 in 1933. The Great Depression made the economy so bad that they blame Republican Herbert Hoover for the hard times that he put on the African Americans. Despite that it collapse on the African American, but it also worse cash-crop production. African Americans and have to suffered from their living standards. They lost their jobs and they have to gain tenuous foothold because The Great Depression made the economy worst.

They had to labor for long hours with low wages and many suffered physically and mentally from low-quality food, segregated housings, lack of water and rest, and terrible housing conditions. Flores explains in “A Town Full of Dead Mexicans” that Mexican-American activists and civil rights organizations opposed the Bracero Program because Mexican Americans still endured discrimination in their daily lives, and the Braceros threatened their livelihood such as taking jobs away from them and their social citizenship and acceptance in the United States (pg. 143). The United States praised the Bracero Program as the solution to unregulated Mexican immigration to the

Many of the larger corporations and banks who fared better contributed to the amount of depression among the people by forcing people who could not pay for their mortgaged land off of it. These “big dogs” could not understand the situation and wants of the common people. The cruelty that these people, who ultimately became migrants, faced at the hands of others, is the crux of the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Steinbeck focuses on presenting the hardships and the cruelty that migrants faced through the central character in his novel: Tom Joad. The Joad family as a whole represents a prime example of the sort of family that endured hardships during this trying era.

This means that most citizens are choosing to employ these less expensive workers. If all the illegal immigrants are doing the work, all tradesmen who have worked hard for there money for so long and become skilled at their profession will lose there jobs and become penniless. Most of these honest workers have built families and unfortunately if they are not getting employed for work they will not be able to provide and feed their families. An enormous amount of old war veterans have been denied council houses because of the rising amount of asylum seekers who are claiming asylum, these people all have to be given houses and are in large numbers so they take up huge estates of houses. These old people who once fought for this country deserve a house a lot more than these people who are entering the country illegally.