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Refugees In John Steinbeck's Grapes Of Wrath

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An argument can be made that this photograph does not offer a complete or accurate picture of the migrants who had lived during the time. The audience is given little background into the lives of the actual events that have created these native “refugees”. Even with the popularity of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” that painted the harsh reality of migrant workers, it did not completely encapsulate the, “ segregation and oppression ... nearly identical to those employed by Hitler during the Holocaust, which was happening at the same time.” Although many media portrayals had characterized these awful conditions, the metaphor to the Holocaust and invoking the ideas of refugees is mainly hyperbole to incite an emotional response. But from the …show more content…

Her supporting works such as, The Plow that Broke the Plains portrayed only the worst side of the Dust Bowl by how the works minimized the role of the drought in their turmoil. The blame for the Dust Bowl migration was put on the farmers who plowed the land instead of natural cause. Seeing a family have to endure their conditions by something that many believed was self-inflicted may not create sympathy for them considering the general public did not want them to be a part of their community and repeat the same destruction. For the migrant farmers, There was a motto in many Oklahoma farming towns: “if it rains”, which determined much of the life of people who did not migrate out of the Dust Bowl. The Okie farmer subjects of Family in Barn, is an interesting choice considering, “farmers in the Dust Bowl were the least likely to move,” and only 36 percent had resided on farms as of that earlier date.” That being said this photograph seems to suggest that the family lost hope that their conditions are going to get better and forced themselves to leave. Those who moved were mainly motivated by wages and moved for money following the Great Depression and the main contributing factor were that places that offered employment,

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Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in the 30’s written by Donald Worster and published in 1979, is an informative text on the Great Plains during the Great Depression. Donald Worster is a credible author because he not only earned a Ph.D. from Yale in environmental history, but he also had previously written a book on the environment and the economy. This book was written well and Worster did a good job of revealing how people and how they live have effected the areas environment. He spoke of places including, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and many more.

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From our textbook we are able to learn the base information of the depression and migrant workers. The document provides a deeper insight with first hand views on the mistreatment of workers by wealthy landowners. First hand photographs allow a real view of how the impoverished migrant camps actually looked. The photos, along with Steinbeck's firsthand observations and genuine concern for the human suffering that was taking place allows for students to be further engaged into the topic. Our Texbook, Give Me Liberty, describes how the depression transformed American life.

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As long as they can earn money, the farmers will continue in these practices. Worster spends several chapters focusing on the different solutions to the Dust Bowl and how those solutions were utilized only when the farmers were being paid through President Roosevelt’s New Deal. However, once the quality of the land started to improve or it rained the farmers abandoned the practices in favor of more profit. He focuses on the solutions proposed by the conservationists, ecologists, and agronomists.

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On paragraph 11, in “Letter from the Dust Bowl,” Mrs. Caroline A. Henderson writes to a friend that the dust storms have destroyed their barley, buried mulberry hedges that protected their shelters from north west winds, wiped out pastures, and turned their locust grove into fence posts. Despite these conditions, why did Mrs. Caroline A. Henderson and her husband decide to stay, while the rest of their fellow settlers left? The song “I’d Rather Not Be in Relief” opens with these lines: “We go around all dressed in rags While the rest of the world goes neat,”

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The interview of LeRoy Hankel, who was a farmer during the dustbowl, really stood out to me because his words painted an image in my head. In his interview, Hankel recalls his time on the farm during the dust storm by saying that “it was just a cloud coming right over, that’s what it looked like. And it was all black.”

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In Chapter Three of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck explores the migrant workers’ journey, revealing that although foes and adversaries rail into them, both those with purpose to injure and those blind to their presence, shattering and flinging them off course, abrupt changes in their course cause no true harm; migrant workers come face to face with success at the close of their journey and ultimately they plant a seed, an idea, a revolution that will blossom along their voyage. Steinbeck establishes a metaphorical journey in Chapter Three, shaping the migrants as turtles, to hail them as the jewels of American society, and to reveal their true characteristics, which are usually muddled with dirty connotations and stereotypes.

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Dorothea Lange was an amazing photographer, she captured many significant pictures during the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma. Her most famous picture is the “Migrant Mother,” a mother surrounded by her 3 sons, one in her arms and two holding on to her for support. The picture describes how bad times were, the worry on her face showed how many feared that they wouldn’t be able to sustain their family by providing them with food. The Dust Bowl affected many other states, people tried to go to California, the promise land, for jobs. Linda Gordon, a writer and historian, looks up to Mrs. Lange as a role model, a woman who overcame a physical and an emotional obstacle in her life.

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The Dust Bowl was both natural and human disaster, which some of it provoked by human activities. In the 1920’s the weather was favorable with plentiful of rain and technology such as tractors. This helped Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado’s great plains. Yet, farmers gave little consideration of the prairie grass that secured the topsoil. The topsoil was a great source for crops to grow.

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They’re a big family who are also farmers, but not for long when the dust bowl hits their land. Their crops are destroyed and covered in a layer of dust. The family doesn’t have enough money to regrow their crops or buy a new

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According to the University of California at Davis, during the 1930’s “roughly 2.5 million people left the dust bowl states” due to the desolate conditions. The story The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, shows the hardships of the fictitious Joads family who left Oklahoma, during the dust bowl, in search of more opportunities. Throughout the story, Steinbeck claims that the “elite” control the money and power and use it for the wrong reasons, while the migrants are given less and have greater needs. In the beginning, Steinbeck describes the elite landowners as harsh, ignorant and altruistic.

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1170 Words | 5 Pages

Dust storms in the Dust Bowl area wreaked havoc on the Great Plains and Southwestern United States and caused the death of many. Once upon a time (The 1930’s to be exact), there was a bright young fellow named Bob. His family consisted of six people: Bob, June (his sister), Billy (his one year-old brother who was very sick), his older brother (Eric), Bob’s dad, and Bob’s mom. They lived in a rural area of Oklahoma. In the “Dirty Thirties,” their lives changed drastically.

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Over farming, lack of grass, and drought are the main causes of the dreadful period of american history called the Dust Bowl. The early 20th century was a time of innovation, the vast majority of those innovations were awesome for America, but a select few were not. One of them was the tractor. In the book, “The Worst Hard Time,” Timothy Egan wrote, “A tractor did the work of ten horses.”

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The Dust Bowl, beginning in the 1930s, added to the struggle of American farmers as lands out west in states such as Oklahoma and Kansas were over-plowed, causing the topsoil to become uprooted, creating massive dust storms. These dust storms left the land unusable to farm, displacing many Americans in the agricultural industry. Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies displays the struggles these farmers faced when moving west to California, hoping to find some sort of work. Many displaced farmers lived in squatters’ camps, temporary dwellings for those looking for work. Steinbeck described these camps as having awful living conditions, saying that “From a distance it looks like a city dump, and well it may, for the city dumps are the sources for the material of which it is built.”

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358 Words | 2 Pages

As the Dust Bowl renders farmlands in the Midwest barren, thousands of farmers are forced to move west

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These dust storms, largely due to severe drought and wind erosion, caused many farmers in the prairies to experience extreme poverty for as long as eight years. In an effort to escape the storms, starvation, and poverty many farmers and their families left their farms to look for work and food elsewhere as a means of survival. Migrant workers on the other hand were compromised by the overwhelming number of the unemployed during the depression. Largely these migrant workers worked as migrant farm workers planting and harvesting crops, moving throughout the seasons. Due to low wages, high poverty, and transient lifestyle migrant

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