by John Steinbeck

 In one decade, America went from the top to the bottom.  Prohibition of 1919 Sale of alcohol outlawed Bootlegging Speakeasies Gang warfare  Booming Economy: nation on fast-moving binge Advent of radio, jazz, movies Roaring 20’s  Literaries F. Scott Fitzgerald: glamour & dirt of American Dream Eugene O’Niell: playwright on same topic

 Stock Market Crash  October 29, Black Tuesday  From the years 1929 to 1932, about 5,000 banks went out of business.  13 million people became unemployed.  Over one million families lost their farms between 1930 and  273,000 families had been evicted from their homes in  There were two million homeless people migrating around the country.  Over 60% of Americans were categorized as poor by the federal government in 1933.

Photo depicts destitute pea pickers in California, centering on Florence Owens Thompson, a mother of seven children, age 32, in Nipomo, California, March 1936.

Crowd at New York's American Union Bank during a bank run early in the Great Depression.

Crowd gathering on Wall Street after the 1929 crash.

Power farming displaces tenants from the land in the western dry cotton area. Childress County, Texas, 1938.

Buried machinery in a barn lot; South Dakota, May The Dust Bowl on the Great Plains coincided with the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl was an ecological and human disaster caused by misuse of land and years of sustained drought. Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes; many of these families (often known as "Okies,” since so many came from Oklahoma) traveled to California and other states, where they found economic conditions little better than those they had left. Owning no land, many traveled from farm to farm picking fruit and other crops at starvation wages. Author John Steinbeck later wrote Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath about such people. The latter won both Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. The Dust Bowl

Bonnie and Clyde were notorious bank robbers during what is sometimes referred to as the "public enemy era" between 1931 and During the Depression bankers became so unpopular that bank robbers, such as John Dillinger, became folk heroes.

John Steinbeck, in 1939, proclaimed Route 66 as the “Mother Road” in his classic novel The Grapes of Wrath. When the movie was made just a year later, it immortalized Route 66 in the American consciousness. Shortly thereafter, more than 200,000 people migrated to California to escape the Dust Bowl of the Midwest, symbolizing the highway as the “road to opportunity.”

On November 11, 1926 Route 66 was born. It followed the old trails laid out by the early explorers and railroad. Route 66 became the twentieth century version of the Oregon Trail, the golden road to the promised land. It provided hope to the farmers of the dust bowl era going west to find a new life.

The Arvin Migratory Labor Camp was the first federally operated camp opened by the FSA in The camps were intended to resolve poor sanitation and public health problems, as well as to mitigate the burden placed on state and local infrastructures. The FSA camps also furnished the migrants with a safe space in which to retire from the discrimination that plagued them and in which to practice their culture and rekindle a sense of community. Although each camp had a small staff of administrators, much of the responsibility for daily operations and governance devolved to the campers themselves. Civil activities were carried out through camp councils and camp courts. Children of Mexican migrant workers posing at entrance to El Rio FSA Camp, El Rio, California, Photo by Robert Hemmig.