Oklahoma Route 66 - The Road Wanderer

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Through oral histories, biographies, photos, timelines, sound bites, and maps, this impressive companion site to a PBS documentary successfully captures the tragedy of the dust bowl.

Claudia McNeil as Lena Younger in A Raisin in the Sun, 1961

Some people left their farms and moved to the nearest urban center, while others packed their meager belongings and went west, especially to California. Migrant families struggled in the West as they moved throughout the region to find work. Many spent their nights in automobile camps near the agricultural fields where they earned what they could. Many more farmers stayed. These families faced a series of difficult decisions about whether they could survive on their farms. Historians estimate that seventy to eighty percent of people in the region of the Dust Bowl remained on their land.

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Steinbeck, thus, adopted the technique of interspersing the intimate individualized suffering of the Joads with the larger universal suffering of the migrants. He interweaves the narrative chapters of the Joads with the interchapters presenting the larger context of the Dust Bowl tragedy. The Joads do not appear in any of the interchapters. But there is a close relationship between the two types of chapters. The interchapters serve many artistic and symbolic functions. They are what Steinbeck called the “repositories of all the external information in the novel." They present the broad picture of the suffering of the migrants, and also provide the essential background information, such as the pattern of land ownership in California, which helps the reader to understand the novel better. This segregating of two distinct types of chapters could have resulted in an imbalance in the narrative structure, and the novel could have fallen into two distinct parts. But Steinbeck avoids this by skillfully linking narrative chapter and interchapter. The interchapters sometimes serve to comment on the main action and also foreshadow later events about to occur in the novel. Steinbeck was influenced in his narrative structure by the newsreel technique of John Dos Passos. The technique of interspersing interchapter with narrative chapters had also been used earlier by Fielding in and by Tolstoy in

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The most popular piece of art from the Dust Bowl period remains John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Published in 1939, the novel portrays the experiences of the Joad family, a group of migrants from Oklahoma to California. Despite differences from the typical Dust Bowl experience, the trials of the Joad family cemented a popular conception of the Dust Bowl as a disaster for common people from the middle of the United States. Steinbeck’s novel also started the process of understanding the tragedy. Who had caused this disaster: humans, God, capitalism, or something else?

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It follows the life of the Joad family; a family directly affected by the Dust Bowl tragedy, and their journey to California in an attempt to leave their shattered life behind them and forge a new livelihood for themselves.

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Marg Scruggs remembered trying to figure out how the market for wheat affected her farm. “One of the first things that happened, the price for farm products was terribly low, partly because of over-production.” These letters and memories point to the mental strength of those who lived through the Dust Bowl and also speak to the farmers’ concern about the economic system. Some farmers turned to the government for support. Soon farmers in the Plains would see a wide array of government programs aimed at their farms, and aimed at the dust.

Government Programs
State and federal programs to aid farmers in the Dust Bowl region increased in the late 1930s. The Drought Relief Service purchased cattle at risk of starvation, processed the cattle fit for consumption, and distributed the meat to needy families. The Farm Security Administration ran camps for migrant workers. The Soil Erosion Service, established in 1933, purchased land most susceptible to erosion and set it aside for what would eventually become part of the United States National Grasslands. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 subsidized farmers for leaving some plots of land fallow in an effort to boost commodity prices.

During what decade did the Dust Bowl tragedy take place

The novel outwardly ends in tragedy. The Joads, like all the migrant workers, are continually plagued and threatened from the start of their journey to California. Their lives progressively deteriorate until the novel's ending when the family is considerably reduced in number, and Rose of Sharon's stillborn child is seen floating downstream. They have no money or no food for the winter, and have no idea how they will make it. Tom Joad, the protagonist, fully shares in the family’s suffering from intense poverty.