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“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. Africa for the Africans… at home and abroad!” -Marcus Garvey

This quote explores the deep meaning of ancestry and what it means to the decedent that follow in the following generations. Marcus Garvey emphasizes that if one doesn't recognize or is unfamiliar with where and what they came from, then there is so growth on your own. Garvey argues that it is important to look outside of yourself and acknowledge your roots. I personally agree with this, as someone with some knowledge of my roots, I feel the more one would embrace it, the more appreciative one would be with themselves.

Marcus Garvey, dressed in military garb, is driven around in New York City in 1922. He was a pioneer in celebrating Black nationalism, even in a Jim Crow-divided nation.

Bettmann Archive

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965503687/marcus-garvey-pan-africanist

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"Please help us. My mother is sick three year and was in the hospital three month and she came out but she is not better and my Father is [paralyzed] and cannot work and we are poor… We have no one to give us a Christmas presents and if you want to buy a Christmas present please buy us a stove to do our cooking and to make good bread." -letter to FDR from a 10-year-old girl, 1936 in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letter from the Forgotten Man

Here is a letter from a 10-year-old girl who sent this piece of writing to FDR pleading for help. She is desperately asking for a helping hand in this forlorn situation she is in with her mother in the hospital due to an unknown reason and her father not being able to provide as he is paralyzed. She is essentially alone in her life now at 10 years old. This illustration connects to the quote as this girl is hoping now to be forgotten and left behind by her government and her president, FDR. FDR brought this to light as he proposed as a solution called the New Deal. Programs within this New Deal helped these people out for the most part and put them to work for a wage.

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"The rag town lay close to water; and the house were tents, and weed-thatched enclosures, paper house, a great junk pile. The man drove his family in and became a citizen of Hooverville-always they were called Hooverville…. And when the rains came the house melted and washed away. He settled in Hooverville and he scoured the countryside for work, and the little money he had went for gasoline to look for work." -from The Grapes of Wrath

This quote allows the reader to connect with how the lifestyle of many victims of the Great Depression was. It gives the reader a clear visual of how a failure of a period has caused so much distraught in the lives of thousands. The article above, dives deep into how these people fell into a ditch of quicksand and how they were failed by their country. The quote also illustrates how even though these people had close to nothing, they would still spend their time and the money that they have left on ways to find and search for opportunities.

A "Hooverville" dweller, Circleville, Ohio, c. 1938. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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The Great Depression Sets In

The Great Depression was the most severe and enduring economic collapse of the 20th century, and included abrupt declines in the supply and demand of goods and services along with a meteoric rise in unemployment. 1933 is generally regarded as the worst year of the Depression: One-quarter of America's workers-more than 15 million people-were out of work.

Did you know? As America's housing and economic crisis worsened through 2009, homelessness was on the rise. Encampments and shantytowns often referred to as tent cities-with similarities to Hoovervilles-began appearing in parts of California, Arizona, Tennessee, Florida, Washington and other states.

Multiple factors led to the Great Depression, including the U.S. stock market crash in October 1929 and the widespread failure of the American banking system, both of which helped destroy confidence in the nation's economy.

Additionally, although the 1920s, also known as the Roaring Twenties, had been a decade of prosperity, income levels varied widely and numerous Americans lived beyond their means. Credit was extended to many so that they could enjoy the new inventions of the day, such as washing machines, refrigerators and automobiles.

As the optimism of the 1920s gave way to fear and desperation, Americans looked to the federal government for relief. However, the country's 31st president, Republican Herbert Hoover, who took office in March 1929, believed that self-reliance and self-help, not government intervention, were the best means to meet citizens' needs.

In his estimation, prosperity would return if people would simply help one another. And although private philanthropy increased during the early 1930s, the amounts given were not enough to make a significant impact. Many Americans in need believed the resolution to their problems lay in government assistance, but Hoover resisted such a response throughout his presidency.

Hoovervilles Appear Nationwide

As the Depression worsened and millions of families lost their jobs and depleted their savings, they also lost their homes. Desperate for shelter, homeless citizens built shantytowns in and around cities across the nation. These camps came to be called Hoovervilles, after the president. Democratic National Committee publicity director and longtime newspaper reporter Charles Michelson is credited with coining the term, which first appeared in print in 1930.

Hooverville shanties were constructed of cardboard, tar paper, glass, lumber, tin and whatever other materials people could salvage. Unemployed masons used cast-off stone and bricks and in some cases built structures that stood 20 feet high.

Most shanties, however, were distinctly less ambitious: Cardboard-box homes did not last long, and most dwellings were in a constant state of being rebuilt. Some homes were not buildings at all, but deep holes dug in the ground with makeshift roofs laid over them to keep out inclement weather. Some of the homeless found shelter inside empty conduits and water mains.

Life in a Hooverville

No two Hoovervilles were quite alike, and the camps varied in population and size. Some were as small as a few hundred people while others, in bigger metropolitan areas such as Washington, D.C. and New York City, boasted thousands of inhabitants. St. Louis, Missouri, and Seattle, Washington, were home to two of the country's largest and longest-standing Hoovervilles.

Whenever possible, Hoovervilles were built near rivers for the convenience of a water source. For example, in New York City, encampments sprang up along the Hudson and East rivers. Some Hoovervilles were dotted with vegetable gardens, and some individual shacks contained furniture a family had managed to carry away upon eviction from their former home.

However, Hoovervilles were typically grim and unsanitary. They posed health risks to their inhabitants as well as to those living nearby, but there was little that local governments or health agencies could do. Hooverville residents had nowhere else to go, and public sympathy, for the most part, was with them.

Even when Hoovervilles were raided by order of parks departments or other authorities, the men who carried out the raids often expressed regret and guilt for their actions. More often than not, Hoovervilles were tolerated.

Most Hoovervilles operated in an informal, unorganized way, but the bigger ones would sometimes put forward spokespersons to serve as a liaison between the camp and the larger community. St. Louis' Hooverville, built in 1930, had its own unofficial mayor, churches and social institutions. This Hooverville thrived because it was funded by private donations. It maintained itself as a free-standing community until 1936, when it was razed.

Although a common factor among Hooverville residents was unemployment, inhabitants took any work that became available, often laboring at such backbreaking, sporadic jobs as fruit picking or packing. Writer John Steinbeck featured a family who lived in a California Hooverville and sought farm work in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel " The Grapes of Wrath," published in 1939.

Hoover Mocked

In addition to the term "Hooverville," President Hoover's name was used derisively in other ways during the Great Depression. For example, newspapers used to shield the homeless from the cold were called "Hoover blankets," while empty pants pockets pulled inside out-demonstrating no coins in one's pockets-were "Hoover flags."

When soles wore out of shoes, the cardboard used to replace them was dubbed "Hoover leather," and cars pulled by horses because gas was an unaffordable luxury were called "Hoover wagons."

Bonus Army

Tensions between destitute citizens and the Hoover administration climaxed in the spring of 1932 when thousands of World War I veterans and their families and friends set up a Hooverville on the banks of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C.

In June, many of the so-called Bonus Army marched to the Capitol to request early payment of the government bonuses they had been promised for their military service-money that would have alleviated the financial problems of many families.

The government refused to pay, citing Depression-era budgetary restrictions. When most of the veterans refused to leave their shacks, Hoover sent in U.S. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur to evict the Bonus Army.

MacArthur's troops set fire to the Hooverville and drove the group from the city with bayonets and tear gas. Hoover later claimed that MacArthur had used excessive force, but his words meant little to most of those affected.

Hoover Out, Roosevelt In

Hoover also received criticism for signing, in June 1930, the controversial Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which imposed a high tariff on foreign goods in an effort to prevent them from competing with U.S.-made products on the domestic market. However, some countries retaliated by raising their tariffs, and international trade was hampered. Between 1929 and 1932, the value of world trade declined by more than half.

By 1932, Hoover was so unpopular that he had no realistic hope of being re-elected, and Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York won that year's presidential election in November by a landslide.

Roosevelt's recovery program, known as the New Deal, eventually reduced unemployment, regulated banking and helped turn the ailing economy around with public works projects and other economic programs. By the early 1940s, with the economy rebounding during World War II, many Hoovervilles had fewer residents and most were torn down.

Sources

Hoovervilles and Homelessness. University of Washington: The Great Depression in Washington State.
Hoovervilles in Seattle. City of Seattle.
Americans React to the Great Depression. Library of Congress.

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Hoovervilles: Definition & Great Depression - HISTORY

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Hoovervilles, named after unpopular President Herbert Hoover, were encampments of crude dwellings for poor and homeless people during the Great Depression.

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"We ain’t no paupers. We hold ourselves to be decent folks. We don’t want no relief. But what we do want is a chanst to make an honest living like what we was raised." -One of the down and out, in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man

A time where migration/immigration numbers are skyrocketing, meant that more people would be victims of the Great Depression as life was already hard enough for the millions of American citizens. The video above shows a secondary source where author Amity Shlaes explores the time period of the Great Depression. She dives deep into migrant stories who struggled greatly during this time.

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The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

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"During the first quarter of the century the Mexcicano had been needed as a laborer. Many historians believe that the Southwest would have reverted to a desert without the Mexican. He had reduced the cost of labor for agribusiness, working at stoop labor which few Anglo-Americans, even the poorest, would perform. The 1930’s, however brought hungry hordes of Arkansans and Oklahomans to the SouthWest, displacing the Mexicans in the farm and in the city. Many Mexicanos were ford to go on relief." - from A Mexican American Chronicle

A Mexican immigrant explains the America's necessity of Mexican workers as they are needed as laborers during this time of the Great Depression. He also emphasizes a great move of farmers to the West to avoid the droughts and storms. The piece of fine art above shows and emphasizes the farm land that these laborers migrated to and had to work on. These farm lands were most prominent in California or the Midwest.

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"When these winds hit us, we and our misery were suddenly covered with dust. Here in the Texas Panhandle we were hit harder than most anywhere else. If the wind below one way, here came the dark dust from Oklahoma. Another way and it was the gray dust from Kansas. Still another way, the brown dust from Colorado and New Mexico. Little farms were buried. And the towns were blackened." - Texas farmer, in This Fabulous Century

The life of people in rural areas was extremely difficult in this period of time because so many factors attacked them at a time. On top of the Great Depression devastating effects which included the drastic fall in value of farm products, they had were also tackled by dangerous dust storms. These storms would destroy farms and take lives of thousands of farmers. The quote above from a Texan farmer describes these dust storms as "dark dust" and emphasizes how they buried farms and blackened towns. Furthermore, the poem provided above illustrates the dust storms seasonal appearance.

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"For the last three or four years we have had depression and suffered with my family and little children severely….I am living in this house for about ten years and when times were good we would put our last cent in the house and now I have no money, no home, and no wheres to go. I beg of you ro please help me and my family and little children for the sake of a sick mother and suffering family to give this your immediate attention so we will not be forced to move or put out in the street." - letter to F.D.R from Mrs. E.L., 1934, in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man

A mother illustrates her and her children's suffering in the Great Depression. She pleads for a change as she cried out to FDR for his attention. Everything but her children has been swept away as she doesn't have any money or place to call home. She calls for FDR's help because she is worried that her and her children would need to move to the streets. She hopes that FDR can find a way to open up opportunities such as a job to be able to at least provide a roof for her children. The news article above shows the livelihoods of many women during this time and the opportunities that were slowly opening for them.

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Sanora Babb spent her life dealing with all the multifarious daily perils that prevent writers from writing. She was raised in poverty by a mother who was only 16 when she gave birth to her and an abusive father who spent his days playing semi-pro baseball and gambling. From the age she could walk, she was running errands for her parents' bakery and, later, helping them raise crops until drought put their mortgaged farm out of business. She rarely had time for school (or even enjoyed easy access to one) and learned to read from pages of The Denver Post that were pasted to the crude walls of their dugout home in East Colorado. (Her father described the place as looking "like a grave.")

Babb's observations of rural poverty, particularly during the Depression and the Dust Bowl, would filter through the imaginations of millions of Americans in years to come-though indirectly and often without credit. Babb knew intimately of what she wrote. Even when her parents started making better money, and she worked hard enough to earn a rare scholarship to the University of Kansas, her first teaching job depressed her so deeply that she couldn't keep it for long. She was often required to do janitorial work as well as run classes, and couldn't bear to see children come to school as poorly clothed and fed as she had been at their age. By the time she moved to Los Angeles and found work as a radio and print journalist and screenwriter in the late 1920s, the Depression hit and she spent several months sleeping rough in Lafayette Park with other out-of-work writers.

The first few decades of her life were an endless round of desperate exigencies. When she finally started making a decent living, her passion for political causes took up even more of her time. She joined the John Reed Club, traveled throughout Europe and postrevolutionary Russia, and attended one of the first League of American Writers Congresses in New York City in the mid-1930s, driving there cross-country with Tillie Olsen and driving back again with Nelson Algren. In her twenties, she became the primary carer for her younger sister, who suffered from mental illness; and in later years, from 1971 to '76, she cared for her husband, the great cinematographer James Wong Howe, after he suffered a major stroke. Whatever the decade, and whatever the year, it was rare for Babb to scrape up more than a few hours here and there to focus on the great stories, novels, and poems she had in her.

And yet she managed to wrestle several hard-won achievements into the world: She wrote probably the greatest novel ever written about the Dust Bowl, Whose Names Are Unknown, only published many decades after she sold the first chapters and outline in 1938; she excelled in several different literary forms-from journalism (she co-edited a radical newspaper with Claud Cockburn in London in the 1930s) and field notes from California migrant camps to memoir, lyric poetry, short stories, and even screenwriting; and despite her tendency to be more openly supportive of other writers than they ever seemed to be of her, her life was so rich with good work that almost all of it eventually achieved publication.

The most profound obstacle Babb faced in her strenuous life was a case of bad writerly luck of now-legendary proportions. Although she took the cautious upward route of many self-taught young writers, she never caught the decisive break she needed.

The most profound obstacle Babb faced in her strenuous life was a case of bad writerly luck of now-legendary proportions.

Just when her carefully composed early short stories and essays began attracting the attention of New York editors, she signed a contract for a novel about the Dust Bowl, based on her youthful experience in Red Rock, Oklahoma; and in order to further research the westward migration of her fellow Oklahomans, she took a volunteer job with the Farm Security Administration in Southern California, helping to move refugees into state-funded, self-governing resettlement camps. Initially, Babb only intended to gather information; but as in everything she did, she soon developed a passionate concern for the people she met and the stories she heard, hurling herself into the project with the fierce intensity of a woman who always seemed to be working twice as hard as everyone around her.

Her supervisor, Tom Collins, summed up her achievement in a letter he wrote to Babb at the conclusion of her work:

1. You visited tents, shacks, cabins and hovels. 472 families or 2175 men, women, and children.2. You interviewed and signed up 309 families or 1465 men, women and children.3. Total families you met and know 781.4. Total individuals you met and know 3640.

5. You, therefore, spread happiness and hope to all these-and we thank you with all our hearts.

Her work for the FSA yielded hundreds of pages of notes and photographs, many of which were posthumously gathered in On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps (2007). These laboriously accumulated pages would testify to two overriding aspects of Babb's character: that she wasn't afraid of work and that she possessed an almost bottomless compassion for everybody she met who led a tougher life than she had.

When a friend of her supervisor arrived at the camps to research his own novel, Collins convinced Babb to turn over a copy of her extensive field notes. The writer's name was John Steinbeck; he had plenty of talent and compassion of his own; and he knew how to make quick use of good material when he saw it. Much of Babb's work went straight into Steinbeck's next draft-especially the portions set in a California refugee camp. And after The Grapes of Wrath became a bestseller, Babb turned in the final draft of her own Dust Bowl novel to Bennet Cerf, only to be told that the bookstores weren't big enough for two novels on the subject. And so Babb's novel, titled Whose Names Are Unknown, lay unpublished-despite continuous revisions and submissions to alternate publishers-for nearly half a century.

Which is not to say that Steinbeck didn't acknowledge how much he was aided by Babb's field notes. In fact, he dedicated Grapes to the individual who he felt had most helped him secure those valuable pages: Sanora Babb's supervisor, Tom Collins.

Even if Names had been allowed to compete with Grapes of Wrath in the literary marketplace, it would almost certainly have failed to outsell or outshine it. Babb's work was largely antithetical to that of Steinbeck, and its "message" was a lot more complicated. While Steinbeck focused on the road trip carrying the Joads away from their already collapsed farmland, the entire first half of Babb's novel describes several years of the travails of the Dunne family, who struggle to grow broomcorn and wheat while their land grows increasingly parched, dust-storm-ridden and uninhabitable. In the second half of Babb's novel, the Dunnes don't simply submit to the California farm growers, or lose their temper, like Tom Joad, and flee, but bear down and become increasingly involved with labor organizers and strike actions.

Steinbeck dedicated The Grapes of Wrath to the individual who he felt had most helped him: Sanora Babb's supervisor.

Steinbeck's prose infused the landscape with almost heavenly ambience, seeming to argue that the world was bountiful enough for everybody, if wealthy landowners could be forced to stop hoarding its riches. Babb's prose, however, doesn't exude the same effulgence; and while Steinbeck's characters never really surpass their essential nature (whether they're the drunken, well-meaning paisanos of Tortilla Flat or the always-striving Joad family who can never outstrive an exhausting world), Babb expects more from her principal characters than to die, lose hope, relapse into natural weaknesses, or wither away. Her characters are never beaten down so hard they don't find a way to climb up out of their failures and give life another chance.

The conclusions of Grapes of Wrath and Names couldn't make this distinction more clear. Steinbeck's Joads are ultimately beaten down to little more than their barely pulsing biologies-huddling together for warmth while the bereaved mother, Rose of Sharon, breastfeeds a starving man. Babb's characters struggle to their last narrative breath to envision a future that will have them. In the concluding paragraph of Names, confronted by corporate forces that own "guns and clubs and tear gas and vomit gas and them vigilantes paid to fire the guns," Babb's Julia Dunne sees one thing "as clear and perfect as a drop of rain. They would rise and fall and, in their falling, rise again."

It's hard to recall a writer who writes more vividly and affectionately about American landscape than Babb; her characters journey across its vastness with an almost invulnerable affection for what surrounds them, whatever cataclysms erupt. Early in the novel, when Julia and her daughters are pushed out of a neighbor's home into an oncoming dust storm, the true violence isn't that of nature but of the neighbors, who have ejected them from their home so they can take care of themselves. And nature is always beautiful, even when it's at its most threatening:

They were almost a mile way, walking in the hollow, when the rain began in large slow drops, and the far horizon quivered with sheet lightning. Fork lightning snapped suddenly, splitting the moving clouds, flashing close to the wires. The whole flat world under an angry churning sky was miraculously lighted for a moment. A strange liquid clarity extended to the ends of the earth. Julia saw the trees along the creek and animals grazing far away. The bleak farmyards with their stern buildings, scattered sparsely on the plains, stood out in naked lonely desolation. A sly delicate wind was rising. Their dresses moved ever so little. Thunder clapped and boomed. They were afraid of the electricity that speared into the ground with a terrifying crash after. Julia stopped for a moment to get her breath and look at the approaching storm. Then she took Lonnie from the bumping cart and pulled her along by the hand, while Myra pulled the cart and clung to the pail of milk. They moved off the road away from the wires, going through the open hollow.

There is no Steinbeckian pantheistic force in Babb's landscapes that joins human beings into a continuous environmental oneness; there is only nature's vast beautiful indifference across which people live, love, struggle, and yearn. When her daughter asks if a cyclone might be forming, Julia consoles her: "It's only an electric storm.... Rain won't hurt us. It's just scary." Nature is neither malign nor consolatory; it's implicitly nothing more or less than itself. And fear doesn't arise from the world; it arises from individuals when they are bereft of one another.

The failure of Names wasn't the only event in Babb's long event-filled life that was difficult to distinguish from legend. Iris Jamahl Dunkle's compassionate and respectful biography,Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (largely based on stories recounted by Babb and her family, as well as passages from Babb's work), is filled with tales of a life that was lived to almost tall-tale proportions. At the age of 5, Babb earned the nickname "Cheyenne-Riding like the Wind" from an Otoe chief after the pony he gave her went galloping wildly out of town while unyielding young Babb held on tightly, bareback. And though she was unable to start school full time until age 10, she worked hard enough to be named class valedictorian-only to have her graduation speech cut at the last minute when the school authorities decided not to honor the daughter of a notorious local gambler.

As a young woman in Los Angeles, she went out to MGM looking for screenwriting work, where she caught the always-roving eye of Irving Thalberg, who invited her back to his office to sign up for a different career entirely-one that probably required spending at least some time on the casting couch. She turned down both offers and, when later asked if she was an actress, replied, "No. I've just had a narrow escape." At one point, when she was out on a date with her eventual husband, James Wong Howe, a "finely dressed" woman drove up behind them in her car and, angered by the sight of a white woman with an Asian man, shouted abuse. In reply, Babb engaged in a street altercation that, by the end, left the woman shouting "My hat! My $100 hat!"

This absorbing biography, written with both affection and admiration, shows Babb as one of the most indefatigable characters in American literary history. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poet who most inspired her, Babb "wasn't someone who believed in monogamy," and she happily shared her passions with many notable men-such as William Saroyan and Ralph Ellison. (In fact, her second novel, The Lost Traveler, is one of the few naturalistic novels in which the sexually adventurous young woman isn't punished for moral failure, as Theodore Dreiser's antiheroine is inSister Carrie or Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier is inThe Awakening.) She traveled extensively, often hitchhiking alone across country and through Mexico; she wrote the lyrics for a popular song, which were then "swiped" by someone who published them under their own name; and she organized a walnut growers' strike in Modesto, California, which caused her to spend at least one night in jail.

It was only when Babb began suffering bouts of ill health-partly the result of an impoverished childhood diet and partly from a nervous breakdown set off by learning that her former lover Ralph Ellison had remarried-that she finally settled down exclusively with Howe. But even then, she always seemed to be doing the work of three or four women. She helped him buy and manage a Chinatown restaurant and took charge of long visits from his family while he was working on movie sets. They surreptitiously bought a house together in the Hollywood Hills, and after California's ban on interracial marriage was found unconstitutional , they married in 1949. But even then, it wasn't easy to find a judge who would perform the service.

She was clearly as passionate in her political activism as she was in her personal relationships. After many challenging years of marriage, when her relationship with Howe had not been entirely monogamous, she eventually settled down, and the two would often write "small sweet love notes" and leave them around the house for each other to find. One of her best short stories, "Reconciliation"-about a married couple coming together again after a separation to tend their neglected garden-reads like an homage to their long, often difficult, and just as often devoted, relationship.

While Babb endured more than her share of bad luck in publishing, she developed many devoted friends and fans who saw her through decades of darkness into a late middle-aged period that approached modest fame. Her short stories were regularly published in various significant journals and reprinted in "best of the year" volumes; she found an agent, and eventually sold and published her second novel, The Lost Traveler, based on childhood memories of growing up with a sometimes brutal, errant father. Her 1970 memoir,An Owl on Every Post, earned a brief time on bestseller lists, adorned with quotes from her longtime friends and admirers Ralph Ellison and Ray Bradbury.

Dunkle's biography likewise relies on the work of Babb's friends, scholars, and especially her late-life agent, Joanna Dearcrop, who helped Babb finally get Whose Names Are Unknown published after a half-century delay in 2004, while Babb was lying in bed with an exhausted body that couldn't carry her much further. And eventually, her remarkable field notes, cited by Ken Burns in his Dust Bowl documentary on PBS, led to new editions of her poetry and prose.

The major question about Babb's remarkable work is not "Why did she write so little?" but rather: "How did she find the time to write anything at all?"

While she is best known for a novel that wasn't published until she was almost dead, her gifts are beautifully displayed in numerous short stories and poems that carry readers through regions of memory, landscape, and experience. On one journey through Mexico and South America, Babb gathered material for "The Larger Cage," about an orphan who finds a home (of sorts) with a family that sells wild local birds to tourists; they teach him to "train" the birds by filling their bellies with buckshot, which inevitably kills them. But human cruelty is never the subject of Babb's fiction-rather it's the human ability to bring kindness into the world, and the protagonist of "The Larger Cage" learns that there are better ways to train beautiful birds than by tormenting them.

It is perhaps the most remarkable (and unsatisfactory) fact of Babb's life that while she failed to produce big novels at times that were acceptable to the publishing industry, she spent her life succeeding in far less commercial forms-such as the short story, the lyric, and the memoir. Many writers are recalled for the great things they achieved in life apart from their living of it; but Babb's greatest genius may have been her ability to produce lasting work without leaving anyone in her life behind.

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The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression

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John Steinbeck based "The Grapes of Wrath" on Sanora Babb's notes. But she was writing her own American epic.

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"All that dust made some  of the farmers leave; they became the Okies.. We stuck it out here. We scratched, literally scratched, to live. We’d come to town to sells our cream for nine cents a pound. If we could find a town big nough away from the dust, we could sell eggs at ten cents a dozen. Despite all the dust and the wind, we were putting in crops, but making no crops and barley living out of barnyard products only. We made five crop failures in five years."

- Oklahoma farmer, in This Fabulous Century

An Oklahoma farmer shares his first hand experience he was a witness and victim of during these distressing times. He emphasizes how nature ran out many of his fellow farmers who moved westward from the drought and storms. The image above is a graph in which illustrates how devastating these storms were. Midwest states such as the agricultural area of Oklahoma, the panhandle, was greatly affected by the drought and dust storms. It puts you in a perspective of how terrible this period of time was for rural areas as many elements of devastation piled on top of each other.

The Dust Bowl: Severe Drought during the Great Depression, 1930-1939. Courtesy of the Texas General Land Office.

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"As a result of the depression, by early 1930 a change had began to take place in the Anglo-American stereotype of Mexicans, at least in the SouthWest. Many Angelos in the SouthWest considered Mexican as a foreign, short-term laborer, who had no rights to welfare benefits. They thought the answer was ridiculously simple: send Mexicans back to Mexico. Many repatriated Mexicans had been living in the United States for decades and had children who were United States citizens by birth, who  therefore could not be legally departed. The surprising aspect of repatriation is that very few Americans spoke out in defense of the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens, and a majority condoned these repartition programs."

- from The Chicanos: A History of Mexican American

In the West, a city I am familiar with and call home, Los Angeles was home to hundred of thousands Mexican immigrant workers. In the 1930's, a growing issue rose as Angelo-Americans considered the Mexican worker as a short-term worker who had no rights in many factors whatsoever. They wanted these workers deported as they no longer found use of them, which sets this time period even more backwards than it already was. The gif above shows migrant workers working in farms gathering crops and taking care of livestock, which took a huge hit in value in those years.

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"These storms were like rolling black smoke. We had to keep the lights on all day. We went to school with headlights on and with dust masks on. I saw a woman who thought the world was coming to an end. She dropped down on her knees in the middle of Main Street in Amarillo and prayed out loud: “Dear Lord! Please give them another chance.” -Texas schoolboy, in This Fabulous Century

From a boy from Texas who goes to school through the Texan farmlands describes the measures that the rural area people have to take when these dust storms hit their area. He emphasizes the necessity of light as these storms essentially makes everything dark and not visible to the eye. He also illustrates how the stress of the Great Depression, the sorrowful droughts, and terrible storms has pushed many to the absolute limit. Obviously, these times were a great test to not just individuals, but America as a whole.