Dust Bowl Dbq

While being able to survive hurricanes and emotional roller coasters, a human can still only take so much. Enter the era of the Great Depression. People, families, lost everything important to them. It seemed as though only the wealthy would thrive, and for some, that was true. Most thought that this situation could not get much worse. In the early 1930’s,what was said to be the worst man made disaster came into play. Dust Bowl, noun, an area of land where vegetation has been lost and soil reduced to dust and eroded, especially as a consequence of drought or unsuitable farming practice. When this calamity struck Oklahoma, an already failing state, people believed that fate had once again eluded them. No one saw this coming, they had turned

a blind eye toward everything that had been happening around them, but they could see clearly now.
The Great Depression took money, sometimes most prized possessions, the Dust Bowl took lives.

It ripped apart homes, killed off livestock, rendered vehicles undriveable, and more often than not leaving your home was not even an option. During this time people suffered greatly. They had no money, and they had no jobs. The people had been surviving off of almost nothing, and this new concept gave them something that their grip had been slowly slipping on, hope. This “new concept” coming in the form of the Presidential elections that had taken place in 1932. Franklin D. Roosevelt was voted into office and finally gave these citizens what they had been looking for. He brought to light in one of his famous fireside chats a proposition. This proposition being the New Deal. With this new deal, and the various programs under it,several job opportunities were given to the

unemployed.
Most were quite suspicious of this “new deal” for it supposedly discriminated against African Americans. This was fairly true, for whites were provided with more privileges such as first choice in jobs, and sometimes even a higher pay scale. While whites got more, this did not mean that African Americans got nothing either, they were much more well off under the new deal than they had ever been. As more people started to realize this, the new deal seemed to rapidly turn into a rather large success. Unemployment rates had skyrocketed, and with this deal, they dropped drastically all the way to single digits. Protesters had not much more to protest about, for they too finally seemed to accept the new deal.
One program that had bloomed under the new deal was the Work Progress Administration (WPA).

The WPA provided over one million undernourished children with one hot meal every day at lunch for free. Not only did this ease the hardships of those who were not able to account for their children, it also provided several job opportunities to women who may not have been able to work elsewhere. These programs did not just help women but also gave job opportunities for engineering, architecture and business.

It took several years to pass over the angst that the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl caused, but eventually those bridges were crossed. In 1939, a novel was published. The title of this novel was “The Grapes of Wrath”, written by John E. Steinbeck. Once found, this story blew up world-wide for it was not just a dramatic romance or an unsolvable mystery but an explicitly detailed novel based on the difficult time that people had faced during the Dust Bowl while also including a compelling fictional narrative about a family living in the midst of the Dust

Bowl.
“The Grapes of Wrath” is a story of love and loss that follows a family, the Joads, through every bump in their long, winding road. Forced to leave their home in Oklahoma, the Joads pack up and make a break for Route 66, the mother road of America. They slowly start climbing their way along to California, where they had heard all about the beautiful landscape and seemingly abundance of job opportunities. The Joads journey was not easy, and did not go on without fault. Several times problems arose and continuously discouraged the family nearly to the point of throwing in the towel and going back home.