“The Grapes of Wrath” — The Great Depression — Modern Hard Times
In the 1930s the whole world was hit hard by the inflation that was to become known by the phrase the “Great Depression” in later years. To this day the stories and the awe at bankers and stakeholders committing suicide by the hundredfold are part of the legends.
The novel John Steinbeck wrote about those times entitled “The Grapes of Wrath” belongs among the great works of US-American literature:
With acute and precise observation and wording that renders the descriptions like images in the reader’s mind, he captured the desparate and often cruel working and living conditions the unemployed and homeless faced.
The main subject being the homeless that had been farmers in states like Kansas or Oklahoma.
At that time, something was noticed in huge dimensions nobody had really paid much attention to before:
The topsoil in states like Kansas or Oklahoma always had been thin. They were to become famous and known for their natural disaster, and named after that, the “dust bowl”:
The native American peoples never had done any farming there, for centuries, because of that thin soil and rather hot and windy climate.
In the course of the 19th century more and more immigrants from Europe and other parts of the world not only fled hunger and social injustice but also realized they might make a fortune owning land nobody seemed to lay a claim to.
Farming those huge plains in the traditional European manner led to catastrophic results, because wind and heat rendered the climate dry and just blew away that thin layer of soil, making earning a livelihood there impossible.
We are lucky, still, in these times, in many places around the globe.
Over here a working social security system will take care of those that lose their jobs due to economic failure. By no mistake of their own they suddenly face unemployment.
In those days people perhaps for the first time in large droves started to realize that business is not only man-made, but also can be frail — therefore unemployment is no shame — and also that people should be taken care of by a social security system.
An economic crisis is not always easily overcome. But most important are the sense of community we keep, or develop, or remember — because that’s modern civil society for you:
Social conscience and the realization that we all depend on each other.
Because — without people there perhaps would not be any crises — but there wouldn’t be any business either…
