The Dust Bowl Effect On The Great Depression

During the First World War, our farmers worked very hard to help to produce wheat for an ever-increasing demand. Many new inventions such as the disk plow and the steam tractor helped with this endeavor. The land was stripped of its root system that held the soil in place. The topsoil was ground down into the very fine sand. “On the Great Plains, extensive plowing while ignoring environmental risks set the stage for the dust bowl of the 1930’s”(Eric Foner published 2017 - 5th edition). The many lessons learned from the dust bowl years would change the farmer’s agricultural world forever.

The dust bowl was a tragic time in America for so many families and John Steinbeck does a great job at getting up-close and personal with one family to show these tragedies. In the novel, “The Grapes of Wrath”, John Steinbeck employed a variety of rhetorical devices, such as asyndeton, personification and simile, in order to persuade his readers to enact positive change from the turmoil of the Great Depression. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck tells the fictional narrative of Tom Joad and his family, while exploring social issues and the hardships of families who had to endure the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Steinbeck’s purpose was to challenge readers to look at

During the Dust Bowl and Great Depression migration in the United States impacted the nation just as much as immigration did in the early twentieth century. The Dust Bowl was the time in which severe dust storms occurred in the South because the ground was so infertile from all the years of farming on it the wind would blow it away. Along with other agricultural and economic reasons it was during this time that many Southerners began their migration North in search of work. John Steinman’s, “The Grapes of Wrath” and Jacob Lawrence's, The Migration Series demonstrate one characteristic of the American Dream, the pursuit of happiness, through the theme of family both during times of need and difficult situations.

In the year of 1939, the Great Depression affected the lives of many located within the United States. This was a severe, and most widespread depression which affected people across the world. For the reason that there was a fall of the stock market, a drought ravaged the agricultural heartland. Those who were dependent on their farmland to provide for their families became imposed by coercion to retreat and re-locate their entire families. This migration was a struggle during this period because the lack of resources and money to survive. Among other elements, starvation and homelessness caused many to die at an early age. John Steinbeck's, The Grapes of Wrath, exhibits the Joad's, a family who undergoes the collapse of the agrarian

In the years leading to 1930, the Great Plains experienced a healthy amount of rain. The drought began in 1930 when the rain ceased. That year proved tough for farmers in the Great Plains, but they had no idea what was yet to come. In 1931, dust storms began to sweep through the Great Plains. Behind the dust, families stayed hidden inside their homes using wet clothes and such to guard the window sills and door frames. The families affected by the Dust Bowl were trapped inside of their homes for the six years of raging dust storms. The Great Depression was a number of years that consisted of workers being laid off, no job openings available, and an overall economic low in the United States. The Great Depression, which started in the years leading up to the drought, resulted in poor living conditions, including little to no income, scarce food, and unclean water. The Dust Bowl amplified those conditions for the affected families. (Steinbeck, Lewis, “Dust Bowl”

John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, takes place during the Great Depression, a time when troubled and distressed American men and women lived; a time of poverty and an economic crisis. When change is thought upon, it is to be thought of new life and new experiences. The Great Depression is the kind of change that replaces a part of American living with “ Somepin’s happening. I went up an’ I looked, an’ the houses is all empty, an’ the lan’ is empty, an’ this whole country is empty” ( Steinbeck 94). In his work, Steinbeck presents the hardships that Americans had to go through by being mindful of particular aspects which makes the reader understand the characters’ distress. For example, the landscape of the farm lands. Even though the land has its brutality, it grows to be the scenery for humans to be able to recognize and consider their troubles about work and life in general. With these concerns, there are differences between the people who are accustomed to the landscape and admire it, and those who do not agree with it. In the novel, Steinbeck uses attributes of class conflict and injustice as a way of presenting and socially commenting that the Great Depression brought attention to more problems beyond the idea of poverty.

The Dust Bowl, battering the Midwest for nearly a decade with high winds, bad farming techniques, and drought, became a pivotal point in American history. The wind storm that seemed relentless beginning in the early 1930’s until its spell ended in 1939, affected the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and the broader agriculture industry. The catastrophic effects of the Dust Bowl took place most prominently around the Great Plains, otherwise known as the farming belt, including states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, which were hit extraordinarily hard. Millions of farming acres destroyed by poor farming techniques was a major contributor to what is considered to be one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in American history. This period resulted in almost a decade of unstable farming and economic despair. Thousands of families sought government assistance in order to survive. Luckily, government aid to farmers and new agriculture programs that were introduced to help save the nation’s agriculture industry benefited families and helped the Great Plains recover from the Dust Bowl. Furthermore, the poor conditions in the farm belt were also compounded by the Great Depression as it was in full swing as the Dust Bowl began to worsen. In addition, World War I was also underway which caused a high demand for agricultural products, such as wheat, corn, and potatoes to be at its peak, which lured many people to the farm belt with the false expectation that farming

The Great Plains was in the midst of a record breaking drought for 8 years, which further enabled the soil to be blown into air. Rapid mechanization of farm equipment and increased use of gasoline tractors and field plowing combines, contributed to farmers decisions to convert their grassland fields into plowed cropland. This increased the loose soil that was able to rise off the land with no trees as windbreaks, to stop the wind from ravaging the plains.

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,

The ‘Dirty Thirties’ is perhaps one of the most known time periods in American History. During the 1930s, the worst and longest drought occurred in the United States, this was also know as the Dust Bowl. According to Christopher Klein, the Dust Bowl is considered both a man-made and natural disaster. In fact, many events contributed to the Dust Bowl such as poor farming techniques, a severe drought, and economic depression.

The Dust Bowl, a series of severe dust storms in the 1930’s, left the southern plains of the United States as a wasteland. The storms occurred due to the lack of use of dryland farming techniques to prevent wind erosion. Powerful winds would pick up loose soil and carry the sediment around the countryside. Called “black blizzard” or “black rollers”, these storms had the potential to black out the sky completely. Due to the inability to grow and sell crops, banks evicted families and foreclosed their properties, leaving them homeless and without an income. The author of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, wrote his American realist novel to allow readers to understand the experiences of the migrants from the Dust Bowl era. Not many

The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the years of the 1930’s, which affected the Midwestern people, an example the farmers, which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. John Steinbeck wrote in his novel from 1939 The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, Caravans, carloads, and homeless. Totals of 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, and 200,000 people. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, food, and most of all for land." The early thirties opened with prosperity and growth. At the time the Midwest was full of agricultural

In John Steinbeck’s tragic, mangled novel, The Grapes of Wrath, the reader is shipped off into the heart of the great Dust Bowl in the American Midwest in the peak of American hardship. Through his use of realism in the era of the modern age, Steinbeck reveals the hardships that were faced by common American citizens during the Great Depression, and utilizes the Joad family in an effort to depict the lives of the farmers who had to flee to new land in the high hopes of a new and better life. The obstacles the family faces are similar to what countless other families had to face, with very little of the population able to successful thrive at the time. By utilizing the empowering endeavors unforeseen by these poor families and the meteorological catastrophes overlooking the Midwest, Steinbeck illustrates the nationwide panic faced by many Americans in an effort to delineate their confusion and uncertainty.

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.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck uses numerous literary techniques to advocate for change in the social and political attitudes of the Dust Bowl era. Simile, personification, and imagery are among the many devices that add to the novel’s ability to influence the audience’s views. Moreover, through his use of detail, Steinbeck is able to develop a strong bond between the reader and the Joad clan. This bond that is created evokes empathy from the audience towards the Joads as they face numerous challenges along their journey. The chapters go between the Joad’s story and a broad perspective of the Dust Bowl’s effect on the lives of Mid-western farmers in which Steinbeck illustrates dust storms devastating the land, banks evicting tenant