YEAR 10: JOHN STEINBECK: Historical Background

The 1930s in the United States began with an historic low: more than 15 million Americans–fully one-quarter of all wage-earning workers–were unemployed. President Herbert Hoover did not do much to alleviate the crisis: Patience and self-reliance, he argued, were all Americans needed to get them through this “passing incident in our national lives.” But in 1932, Americans elected a new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who pledged to use the power of the federal government to make Americans’ lives better. Over the next nine years, Roosevelt’s New Deal created a new role for government in American life. Though the New Deal alone did not end the Depression, it did provide an unprecedented safety net to millions of suffering Americans.

The Migrant Mother
We've all heard the famous expression that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, how about one that's worth 169,000 words and 20,000 pounds of food? Of the photographs that came out of the Great Depression, few had as immediate or timeless impact as the one colloquially called Migrant Mother. Captured by documentary photographer Dorothea Lange in 1936, the image of a worried but resilient mother was so powerful that it prompted the government to send 20,000 pounds of food to relieve starvation in a migrant worker camp, and may have helped inspire John Steinbeck's literary classic The Grapes of Wrath. That's a picture that's certainly worth another thousand words.