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How did the aspects of the dust bowl affect the lives of americans during the 1930s
The lives of migrant workers in 1930s America
Lives of migrant workers in america
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During the 1930’s, 1.3 million Americans from the Midwest and Southwest migrated to California, which had a population of 5.7 million. In 1937, there were between 200,000 and 350,000 migrant workers traveling yearly throughout the United States. Many migrant workers worked in California where some were displaced by impending Dust Bowl migrants ("Farm Labor in the 1930s - Rural Migration News | Migration Dialogue."). During the 1930’s the migrant workers lost their homes because of the Dust Bowl so they had to move. They became homeless.
A series of droughts in southern mid-western states like Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas led to failed harvests and dried-up land. Farmers was forced to move off their land: they couldn’t repay the bank-loans which had helped buy the farms and had to sell what they owned to pay their debts.(Citation?)
The increase in farming in the great plains also caused the rich soil to lose it’s ability to contain moisture and nutrients. This caused what we now call the Dust Bowl. Many dust storms and droughts caused thousands of farmers to move away to
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california.("Migrant Workers of the 1930's - Of Mice and Men.") Migrant Workers of the 1930's - Of Mice and Men. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.) During the Dust Bowl migration, more than half a million people left the American Plains and migrated to the western United States. John Steinbeck’s (1902-1968) novel The Grapes Of Wrath (1939) describes vividly the large migration of poor whites from Oklahoma to California during the 1930’s. His book captures how individuals were affected by dramatic changes in agriculture. Industrialization in the United States in the late nineteenth century set the stage for changes in agriculture during the early twentieth century. The increase in the amount of farming meant they had to spend more money, leading to many farmers being low on money, when the stock market crashed in 1929, many farmers lost their farms. (Migrant Labor." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 2008, Candace; Zuroweste Edward L. Kugel, "migrant Labor." The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th Ed.. 2015, and "Migrant Workers." Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. "Migrant Labor." Encyclopedia.com. HighBeam Research, 01 Jan. 2008. Web. 15 Mar. 2016.) When migrants reached California and found that most of the farmland was tied up in large corporate farms, many gave up farming. Migrant labor was not just a West Coast phenomenon. For example, thousands of Mexican and Mexican-American migrant workers toiled throughout the nation from the cotton fields of Texas to the sugar beet fields of Colorado, Michigan, and Ohio. And finally, thousands of other migrant workers traveled less clear paths throughout dozens of states in search of work. (Citation?) They built their houses from scavenged scraps, and they lived without plumbing and electricity. Migrant workers did production, cultivation, growing, and harvesting of any commodity grown on. Migrant workers made crops, greenhouses, and Nurseries.(Citation?) Polluted water and a lack of trash and waste facilities led to outbreaks of typhoid, malaria, smallpox, and tuberculosis.
Migrant workers were not treated very well. They lived in very poor conditions. They all lived in the same place and didn’t always get enough food. They were barely paid anything. They only earned about 15 to 20 cents per hour, that’s only about 5 dollars per day. The migrant workers labored for 12 hours a day, at least 6 days a week. Even children had to work this hard. Farming for 12 hours a day would be horrible, especially if you were a young child. Migrant workers had a lot of restrictions. For one, they were not allowed to leave the state unless their employer gave them permission to. They didn’t really get any free time and the food supply was pathetic. Barely any of the workers had an education. It wasn’t necessary. Life for migrant workers would have been very
hard. Migrant workers are having a hard time during the 1930s. Losing their homes because of low money and stock market crashing causing them to lose their farms. They were payed very low, farmed 12 hours a day, at least six days a week, and farming for 12 hours was horrible. Especially if you were a child. Another thing is that they didn’t get any free time and the food supply was very bad. They were not allowed to leave without permission, and they barely had an education. Migrant workers shouldn’t have been treated like this because they are humans just like us, they are no different to us except that they are poor. I believe that everyone should be treated equal no matter how poor or rich you are because at the end of the day we are all the same in our own ways. “We’re a migrant nation made up of people who’ve been torn out of other worlds, and you’d think we would have some compassion.” (Richard Flanagan) (Migrant worker)
Before the strike for higher wages began, migrant workers worked in very horrible conditions. Men, women, and children would work on these farms for only a dollar an hour. The
The migrants came from the midwest, in search of a job. The foreign workers came from different countries, such as China, Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines. The demand for peon workers was increasing dramatically, foreign workers were just what the farmers needed. The foreign workers were also treated much worse than the migrants. They worked for little pay, but there was not really another way they could get money. The migrants were paid more, possibly because they are foreign born. When foreign workers came to the United States, they had to adapt to the languages, traditions, wages, etc. As for the migrant workers, they were raised in the United States, so they have a better understanding of how to live. Foreign workers had a very poor standard of living and often faced discrimination. In The Harvest Gypsies, the first sentence of the sixth article is, “ The history of California’s importation and treatment of foreign labor is a disgraceful picture of greed and cruelty.” Steinbeck had a strong belief that foreign workers were treated different from migrants, which is true. Another example is when the article talks about how the whites could not compete with the foreign workers anymore. “ Mexicans were imported in large number, and the standard of living they were capable of maintaining depressed the wages for farm labor to a point where the white could not compete.” This quote is saying that the wages and standard of living got so low, that whites gave up on trying to get a job in the fields. Some may say that the migrants and foreign workers were treated very similar, but this is untrue. They both had to live in very poor conditions, but the foreign workers had it much harder than the
The Dust Bowl was the name given to the Great Plains area in the 1930s. Much of the region was an agricultural area and relied on it for most of their economy. Combined with The Great Depression and the dust storms, farmers in the Great Plains area were severely hurt. These farmers were seeking opportunity elsewhere near the Pacific where they were mistreated by the others already there. The mistreatment is a form of disenfranchisement, by excluding and segregating a group of people from the rest of society. The disenfranchisement of the Oklahoma farmers during the 1930s was caused by a combination of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression which led to the farmers being forced to move west where they were mistreated because there were not enough jobs.
The Dust Bowl occurred for many reasons, most all our fault. “Some of the reasons that the Dust Bowl occurred were over-farming, livestock overgrazing, drought and poor farming practices.” (Dust Bowl facts and summary) Because of this negative experience it now teached us to be careful and now we know what to do to prevent this.“When drought struck from 1934 to 1937, the soil lacked the stronger root system of grass as an anchor.”("Dust Bowl Facts and summary") That's really bad for the farmers because then the wind can easily pick up the dirt off the
The dust bowl was the worst environmental disaster in the U.S history. Farming practices changed as a result of the Dust bowl. Farmers changed how they plow / take care of their field.There are also many conservation programs and measures implemented as a result and many farmers have fixed drought problems so their soil does not get to dry.
The Dust Bowl in the 1930s was a very horrific event in the Southern Plains region of the United States. This was a period of severe windstorms & dust-storms that would blow over hundreds of miles. This stripped the soil of nutrients, and damaged the ecology and agriculture of these American lands. The 2012 drought in the Central Great Plains was a period that lasted only 4 months, through May to August, that eclipsed the record of the Dust Bowl, for the driest period. The Dust Bowl and the 2012 drought compare and contrast in many ways.
Blacks were driven out of skilled trades and were excluded from many factories. Racist’s whites used high rents and there was enormous pressure to exclude blacks from areas inhabited by whites.... ... middle of paper ... ...
Migrant workers have the stereotype of hard workers that are desperate for money. They are usually not very well educated. Most of them were strong but some weren't. Take Lennie and George for example. George wasn't very strong but was smart and Lennie was strong but dumb as a fence post. Like Lennie and George, all migrant workers wanted their own land to farm. They had few possessions and were independent. The workers liked to cuss a lot, get drunk on Friday nights, and were usually very poor.
Unfortunately, the circumstances in the Great Plains all came to a head, resulting in a horrific ten years for citizens of the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl caused government and people to look at farming practices and evaluate their output. These policies resulted in overproduction of crops, causing the prices to fall. The conclusion of World War I and countries that stopped importing foods added to the pain the farmers were already feeling.
Farming was the major growing production in the United States in the 1930's. Panhandle farming attached many people because it attracted many people searching for work. The best crop that was prospering around the country was wheat. The world needed it and the United States could supply it easily because of rich mineral soil. In the beginning of the 1930's it was dry but most farmers made a wheat crop. In 1931 everyone started farming wheat. The wheat crop forced the price down from sixty-eight cents/ bushels in July 1930 to twenty-five cents/ bushels July 1931. Many farmers went broke and others abandoned their fields. As the storms approached the farmers were getting ready. Farmers increased their milking cowherds. The cream from the cows was sold to make milk and the skim milk was fed to the chickens and pigs. When normal feed crops failed, thistles were harvested, and when thistles failed, hardy souls dug up soap weed, which was chopped in a feed mill or by hand and fed to the stock. This was a backbreaking, disheartening chore, which would have broken weaker people. But to the credit of the residents of the Dust Bowl, they shouldered their task and carried on. The people of the region made it because they knew how to take the everyday practical things, which had been used for years and adapt them to meet the crisis.
(Worster 105). The droughts caused many unfavorable conditions throughout the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and neighboring sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Thus, roughly one-third of Texas and Oklahoman farmers left their homes and headed to California in search of migrant work. The droughts during the 1930s are a drastically misrepresented factor in the Dust Bowl considering “the 1930s droughts were, in the words of a Weather Bureau scientist, the worst in the climatological history of the country.” (Worster 232)
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.
Because the wages at this time were next to nothing, immigrants were forced to spend hours upon hours to make enough money to give what little s...
a great rift between the social classes. The poor were treated very badly before the
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.