Grapes Of Wrath Reflection

Today as students, reading in our expensive textbooks and attending very costly schools, we seldom get a look into just how hard it must have been to live in a time when every penny counted. The problems experienced then were different to those today. And the problem was not what outfit to wear, but one of ‘Are my only clothes too worn out to wear?’ The 1930s during the Great Depression were very trying years in the United States, a period depicted John Steinbeck’s famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath truly does give an inside look on the trials of too many people in the Great Depression, and puts a human face on this era. This book follows the Joad family through the frustrating times of farmers in the Great Depression. Once able to harvest from their land as they pleased, the farmers of this time were thrown out like a bad …show more content…
Today we have relief programs at work, and although many still suffer it is not as chaotic as then. The government appeared to do little to nothing, sitting back while its people cried out in hunger. Something happened to the bank that seemed almost impossible to fix at the time. The bank died, and when it came to trying to keep it viable we made it worse. As Steinbeck so perfectly put into words, “The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.” (Pg 33) This utter lack of control is what ultimately sent our nation into a spiraling depression, with jobs dissolving into thin air and wages almost non-existent. It seemed that a man could work for a year and still not feed his family for a week. Not only did wages drop cruelly low, but most workers soon became indebted to their