1. The Depression
The period, lasting roughly from
1930 to the start of World War II in
1939, is known as the
Depression.

2. The Depression
• Unemployment brought with it poverty,
hunger and homelessness.
• Firms and banks went bust and people’s
savings disappeared when the banks
closed
• It was hard to buy food and pay the rent

3. A Philadelphia storekeeper told a reporter of one
family he was keeping going
• Eleven children in that house. They’ve got
no shoes, no pants. In the house, no
chairs. My God, you go in there, you cry,
that’s all.

4. California or Bust
• In the country, especially in the states of
Oklahoma and Arkansas, things were almost
worse than they were in the cities
• Farmers were being driven off their land
• There had been a series of droughts which had
ruined the crops and dried up the soil, and
farmers could not afford to re-pay the bank loans
which had helped them buy their farms.
• When the banks took the land back, whole
families had to move – but where to?

5. California or Bust
• People headed to California, where the soil was
good and there was supposed to be plenty of
room.
• Steinbeck didn’t mention these farmers directly
in ‘Of Mice and Men’. Instead, he makes George
and Lennie dream of a little piece of land/
• The two men come to represent in a simple way
the hunger for land of many millions of people,
and their dream of being able to settle down.

6. Reality
• For most of the farmers the dream never
came true
• They were driven away by the Californians
who thought they were going to be
overrun.
• They had nowhere to go back to, and
many lived in vast camps like refugee
camps in the California valleys.