Word: steinbeck
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Most Americans still think of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and the Okies who left it, in the bleak terms of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The long drought of the 1930s seared the land, while recurring winds swirled away the topsoil and black blizzards choked crops and cattle. During that decade, more than 350,000 farmers fled the state, leaving a legacy of deserted homes, barren lands and bitter people. In recent years the Dust Bowl has changed dramatically. TIME Correspondent David DeVoss, who revisited the region, tells how and why in this report...
...nights when subfreezing winds knife through the empty streets of Beaver and Boise City, "those who stayed" sometimes still hear the ghostly whimpers of thirsty children and the plaintive bleats of dying calves. Yet today Steinbeck's crucible of dust and storm is a wild and beautiful country, made fertile by deepwell irrigation. Clean, brisk air, coming more in waves than gusts, buffets the winter wheat and corn that thrust above the occasional snows and seem to sway in time to the thumping of the irrigation pumps. Everywhere a new spirit of enthusiasm and industry is at work...
...becoming one of the most attractive in the Southwest, and sharply increase land values. The port of Catoosa (pop. 906), 750 river miles inland, already enjoys a parade of new mercantile buildings along U.S. 66, the route over which the Goad family (changed to Joad by Steinbeck in his book) made its westward flight...
...conditions under which farm laborers toil have improved somewhat since the squalid Depression era so well evoked by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle; yet field work remains one of the most unpleasant of human occupations. It demands long hours of back-breaking labor, often in choking dust amid insects and under a flaming sun. The harvesttime wage for grape pickers averages $1.65 an hour, plus a 250 bonus for each box picked, while the current federal minimum wage...
...Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck awakened the American conscience to the hapless life of the migrant farm worker. That was exactly 30 years ago. The stoop laborer in the fields today is still a forgotten man among U.S. workers, often little better off than he was at the time of the loads' tribulations in Depression-era California. In 1969, the field worker is more likely to be a Chicano-a Mexican-American-than an Okie. And the grapes of Steinbeck's title are at the focal point of one of the decade's longest and most wrathful...