Of Mice And Men

John Steinbeck’s Life and Times (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) As the author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories, Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in Born, raised, and spent most of his life in California

The Dustbowl Years Severe dust storms of the 1920’s Major economical and agricultural damage Families and farmers were forced to move (hundreds of thousands) Mid-West was focal point Over 100,000,000 acres affected

The Great Depression Severe world wide depression in the 1930’s and 40’s Stock Market crash of 1929 International trade plunged over 50% Unemployment over 25% Public works, prep for WWII (1939)

Migrant Workers Traveled around looking for work (individually and as a family Usually high labor jobs in the fields of farms Paid very little No job security

Additional Themes: Intellectual Disabilities and African Americans and Women in the 1930s

Jim Crow – Fair but Equal? Leland, Mississippi, in the Delta area, June Photographer: Dorothea Lange.

"At the bus station." Durham, North Carolina, May Photographer: Jack Delano.

The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange just after the crash of On Black Tuesday, October twenty-ninth, the market collapsed. In a single day, sixteen million shares were traded--a record--and thirty billion dollars vanished into thin air. Jack Dempsey, America's first millionaire athlete, lost $3 million. Cynical New York hotel clerks asked incoming guests, "You want a room for sleeping or jumping?"

Unemployed men vying for jobs at the American Legion Employment Bureau in Los Angeles during the Great Depression.

World War I veterans block the steps of the Capital during the Bonus March, July 5, 1932 (Underwood and Underwood). In the summer of 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, World War I veterans seeking early payment of a bonus scheduled for 1945 assembled in Washington to pressure Congress and the White House. Hoover resisted the demand for an early bonus. Veterans benefits took up 25% of the 1932 federal budget. Even so, as the Bonus Expeditionary Force swelled to 60,000 men, the president secretly ordered that its members be given tents, cots, army rations and medical care. In July, the Senate rejected the bonus 62 to 18.

The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:

Migrant Mother I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

We might not have much but at least we have each other. Toward Los Angeles, California Perhaps 2.5 million people abandoned their homes in the South and the Great Plains during the Great Depression and went on the road Waiting for the semimonthly relief checks at Calipatria, Imperial Valley, California. Typical story: fifteen years ago they owned farms in Oklahoma. Lost them through foreclosure when cotton prices fell after the war. Became tenants and sharecroppers. With the drought and dust they came West, Never before left the county where they were born. Now although in California over a year they haven't been continuously resident in any single county long enough to become a legal resident. Reason: migratory agricultural laborers. March Photographer: Dorothea Lange

Could you live here? Freight car converted into house in "Little Oklahoma," California. February, Photographer: Dorothea Lange

“The American Dream”