Chapters 1-10 option "A"*

The Grapes of wrath (chapters 1-10 "A")*

The Great Depression was a period of sorrow in Americans' lives. There were several reasons for this incident, some of them are the stock market crash followed by poor decision by the federal reserve board and increased taxes. Most of these actions decreased the the flow of revenue which put us into a even deeper depression. Most of the reforms under Franklin D. Roosevelt left out many small farmers and tenant farmers such as the Joad family. The Agricultural adjustment Act payed farmers to decrease production, Roosevelt thought that his would raise prices and benefit farmers but instead it created controversy among citizens and hurt tenant farmers and share-croppers due to the decrease in necessity of labor. The Grapes of Wrath describes several situations that American farmers from Oklahoma had to endure, such as in Chapter five a family of tenant farmers is asked to leave due to insufficient production of crops. When the farmer demands for an explanation, the men reply: "The bank owns it[the land]. You'll have to go. This is an example of what caused the enormous migration of farmers from the Dust Bowl to California. The Great Depression forced thousands of banks to close, and the ones that were still open were struggling to do so. This led to banks demanding tenant farmers to repay their loans and increase production, which seemed impossible due to the period of drought that the great American Plain were going through. This eventually led to thousands of farmers being forced to move out of the land and replaced with big machinery. These are the kind of hardships that Joad describes at the beginning of The Grapes of wrath

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Background Info. on The Great Depression