A Classic picture of the Depression era captures the poverty and loss of hope of a now almost forgotten time in America



          John Steinbeck wrote the American Pulitzer Prize winning classic The Grapes of Wrath about a family who loses their farm during the great drought of the dust bowl. This tragedy that has sometimes been called the American holocaust, was not unlike another famine that happened in Ireland, where people starved to death while the government stood by and did nothing. This great American tragedy had politicians out on the steps of the Capitol Building, staring in wonder, as they were awed by the dark black wall out on the far horizon. It took this sighting from the steps of the Capital building in Washington for politicians to realize the almost biblical proportions of this great tragedy. Only then did they feel the scope of this famine. In Steinbeck's novel, starting out from Oklahoma, the family migrates west to California, detailing along the way the great poverty of the depression period, were workers try to unite to get a decent wage to feed their families.

                                                                                           Robert Falvey

   This is the depression era photography of Dorothea Lange

                            Dorothea Lange, 1939

(Picture from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.) Farm Security Administration: Children of Oklahoma drought refugees near Bakersfield, California. (Circa June 1935)

'