In 1936, John Steinbeck visited squatters’ camps in California. His observations of this population of refugees from the Great Plains Dust Bowl vividly depict the horrors of their living conditions:
The next-door-neighbour family, of man, wife and three children of from three to nine years of age, have built a house by driving willow branches into the ground and wattling weeds, tin, old paper and strips of carpet against them. A few branches are placed over the top to keep out the noonday sun. It would not turn water at all. There is no bed.
Such was the life for dispossessed farming families who fled the desolation of the Dust Bowl. However, theirs was the popular choice. During the decade of what historians have said was this country’s worst prolonged environmental disaster, two thirds of the population of the southern plains never left their homesteads despite the drought, and then the unrelenting dust that overwhelmed their lives. All told, the Dust Bowl cut a swath of despair that spread from Texas to California, a direct affront to the ideal of the American West. The Dust Bowl and subsequent Californian migration was too much for any western American resourcefulness to handle. In the 1930s, the ideal of the American frontier is firm was still firm in the nation’s psyche. Reactions to the living conditions of Anglo-Americans in the Dust Bowl and the migrant camps of California, notably the journalistic documentation of them, clearly illustrate that power.
I like the fact that you plan to look at the journalistic documentation of the Dust Bowl. I think it would be great to look at the differences between experience (primary sources from families who lived and worked in these conditions) and the writings about this experience (that perhaps did not always capture the real truth). I'm a bit confused about what you're arguing though - what about power and western American resourcesfulness (I would use a different word here, maybe) and the American frontier?
ReplyDeleteI think it would be helpful for you to simplify and clarify this introduction. Focus more on your thesis- is it that the ideal of the West persisted through the Dust Bowl era, though that ideal was not a reality? How exactly do you define the ideal of the West? I like the Steinbeck quote, but I think it's more appropriate for a body paragraph.
ReplyDeleteAlso- remember that the Western frontier effectively closed in 1893 with Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis and the census taken around that time.
what are you arguing?
ReplyDeleteDo you plan on using John Steinbeck as part of some sort of analysis/examination/argument within the body of the paper? Seeing as Grapes of Wrath is not journalism, you might want to be more topic with your opening quote and include something from a writer that you will discuss in the body of your paper.
ReplyDelete