The Joads and America, 1918-73

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The Joads and America, 1918-73

• Intro
• Behind The Grapes of Wrath
• The Grapes of Wrath and the Great Depression
• A happy, unwritten, fourth act the Joads and
  Postwar Prosperity

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Behind The Grapes of Wrath

• What led up to the situation the Joads found
  themselves in?

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Report of the Presidents Commission on Recent
Social Trends, 1933

• Modern life is everywhere complicated, but
  especially so in the United States. The
  tendency to seize upon new types of machines,
  rich natural resources and vast driving power,
  have hurried us dizzily away from the days of the
  frontier into a whirl of modernisms which almost
  passes belief.

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Modern Times the 1920s

• How did society change in the 1920s?
• Heyday of big business
• The Roaring 20s
• 1 in 8.5 Canadian families with a car by 1930
• Mass culture
• Radio (CRBC, 1936)
• Movies

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Modern Times the 1920s

• Time-space compression
• Rural -urban divided eased
• Rural exodus
• Emphasis on the family

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Migrations

• Rural-urban migration
• The Great Migration (African-Americans)
• Flight to the Suburbs
• Flight to the Sun
• Canada
• Regionalization
• American culture

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Capitalism the Great Plains

• How did the Gilded Age capitalism affect the
  Great Plains?
• Tractors, 1920-55
• Unusually wet period after 1897

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The Economics of the Depression, or, What the
Hell Happened?

• The Weaknesses of Western Capitalism
• wages lag behind productivity
• inflated profits
• inflated stock prices

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The Economics of the Depression, or, What the
Hell Happened?

• The Onset of the Depression
• starts in US
• 1US industry declining by 1929
• 2investors move money out of stock market
• Black Tuesday, 29 October, 1929
• 3Smoot-Hawley Act (sharp increase in tariffs)

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The Economics of the Depression, or, What the
Hell Happened?

• Canada and the Economics of the Depression
• Value of Canadian Exports
• 1,152,000 in 1929
• 529 million in 1933
• Canadian Auto sales
• 205 million in 1929
• 45 million in 1933
• Unemployment approximately 50

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The Dust Bowl
The sod had been destroyed to make farms to grow
wheat to get cash - Donald Worster
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Okies Exodusters
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The Grapes of Wrath as History

• How were the problems of the size and complexity
  of the capitalist system dramatized?
• Why are the Joads treated as they are by gas
  station attendants, the authorities, and others?
• How does Tom transform into a socialist?
• Who does the Wheatpatch camp attendant look like?
  Why?

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Postwar

• What would have happened to the Joads after the
  war?
• a happy, unwritten, fourth act
• Fordism
• Suburbs highways
• Industrial California