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 1962.
• 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 1937.
Photographer: Dorothea Lange.
"At the bus station."
Durham, North
Carolina, May
1940.
Photographer:
Jack Delano.
The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange just after the crash of 1929. 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. 1937. 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, 1934-1937. 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 1937. Photographer: Dorothea Lange
Could you live here?
Freight car converted into house in "Little Oklahoma," California.
February, 1936. Photographer: Dorothea Lange
“The
American
Dream”