Empathy In Harvest Gypsies

The United States experienced both the Great Depression and harsh weather conditions during the 1930’s causing Americans to suffer through extreme hardship and impoverishment. Many of the migrant farmers were bankrupt, destitute, and struggled to survive. Photographer and photojournalist, Dorothea Lange, captured the dangerous conditions migrant workers and their families endured through her photograph, Migrant Mother. The photograph not only displays a woman and children suffering, but also reveals the determination and willpower the woman had to provide for her family.

Curtis begins this article by describing how Lange was a little different from traditional documentary photographers. Tradition was honesty, directness, and a lack of manipulation. Lange and other influential photographers like Walker Evans, knew that they had to document life with a purpose but in order to really convey their message they had to include artistic elements. Aesthetic was an important part of her work, she wanted her photos to have an artistic value which could help capture the universal struggle of those living in poverty. In order to do this she had to do many different shots with different angles, different positions of the subjects, and sometimes including or excluding certain sitters. For example the teenage daughter of the family was excluded in some of the photos because it presented awkward questions. According to Curtis, “While middle-class viewers were sympathetically disposed to the needs of impoverished

The 1930's were a decade of great change politically, economically, and socially. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl wore raw the nerves of the people, and our true strength was shown. From it arose John Steinbeck, a storyteller of the Okies and their hardships. His books, especially The Grapes of Wrath, are reflections of what really went on in the 1930's. John Steinbeck did not write about what he had previously read, he instead wrote what he experienced through his travels with the migrant workers. "His method was not to present himself notebook in hand and interview people. Instead he worked and traveled with the migrants as one of them, living as they did and arousing no suspicion from employers militantly alert against

The bestselling author, Daniel H. Pink, who was named one of the top fifteen business thinkers of the world and earned his BA at Northwestern University and his JD at Yale, stated “empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes.” The author of “The Harvest Gypsies,” Steinbeck, expresses a similar idea. In the excerpts from The Grapes of Wrath and “Tuesday Siesta,” both authors convey empathy efficiently. Nevertheless, the author of “The Harvest Gypsies” best evokes empathy in the reader by utilizing appeals to logos, auditory and visual imagery, and a grim metaphor.

In chapter 19 of The Grapes of Wrath, author John Steinbeck uses a variety of rhetorical strategies to describe the plight of the migrants in the 1930s as they moved from the Midwest to California in a desperate search for new land and a new life. Steinbeck hopes to convey his feelings of pity and sympathy towards the migrant’s situation through rhetorical strategies such as similes, symbolism, allusions, and parallelism. Steinbeck describes the migrants being “restless as ants” and “like ants scurrying” (233), using this simile several times with a tense and uneasy tone in order to show how the migrants were constantly on the move, for which Steinbeck has pity. In addition to this, Steinbeck wishes to emphasize the migrants being powerless

The 1930’s were a decade of great change politically, economically, and socially. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl wore raw the nerves of the people, and our true strength was shown. From it arose John Steinbeck, a storyteller of the Okies and their hardships. His books, especially The Grapes of Wrath, are reflections of what really went on in the 1930’s. John Steinbeck did not write about what he had previously read, he instead wrote what he experienced through his travels with the migrant workers. “His method was not to present himself notebook in hand and interview people. Instead he worked and traveled with the migrants as one of them, living as they did and arousing no suspicion from employers militantly alert against

During the early 20th century, the United States was going through various changes in a short period of time that molded into this modern America we know today. The United States was swept away by an economic boom in the 1920's that was filled with promises of abundance and prosperity. The mass-production and mass-consumption flourished during this time and as a result, the United States went through a process known as Urbanization . However, this economic growth came to an end in 1929 when the stock market crashed, resulting in billions of dollars to evaporate. This led to the infamous Great Depression. The 1930's was a challenging time in American history. Not only was America going through this economic crisis but the 1930's was also met with one of the worst environmental disaster in the Central Plain known as the Dust Bowl . Large numbers of Americans had to evacuate and many of these of refugees moved to California to look for work. The book The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck, illuminates on the social injustices and the struggles many of these refugees had to face in western agriculture. He provides detailed articles of descriptions of the workers daily lives which he observed personally and argues that migrant workers are American citizens who deserve equal treatment and rights just like any other natural born citizen and discusses various ways to end the migrants' poverty and suffering.

Dorothea Lange was an employee of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). It was a program designed during the Great depression to raise awareness of and provide aid to impoverished farmers. It was created in 1937 under the Department of Agriculture, helped with rural rehabilitation, farm loans, and subsistence homestead programs. The FSA was not a relief agency, but instead it relied on a network of cooperation between states and county offices to determine which clients needed loans that could not get this credit somewhere else. One of the most memorable programs of the FSA is the collection of photographs that document the rural conditions from the Information Division of the Resettlement Administration. These photos helped to not only promote

She tried to ignore the sign and drive on, but after twenty miles she was compelled to return to the camp, “following instinct, not reason.” She shot six photographs in a very short period of time of the woman and members of her family, starting at a distance and working her way closer and closer after the fashion of a portrait photographer. The one thing I love about the images of Lange is they are not posed. She truly wanted others to see what she was seeing through her lens. She was there to record and to report, but what made her different is that she did it with a compassionate eye. Lange said she had to get her camera to register the things that were more important than how poor the Migrants were, she wanted her camera to also register their pride, strength, and their spirit. I believe she shows this in the image above. The young lady does not hide her face in shame as the images were being taken, even as Lange moves in closer to get more detailed images. Her pride keeps her head up, the strength to carry on for her children or they will starve. This is what Dorathea Lange shows in her images. Dorothea took her images with great thought. She had to work to get the message through the lens of something other than these are poor people. She always captured the correct amount of light and shadow, and even the angles and distance to tell

John Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to The Grapes of Wrath The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to The Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck, is a series of seven articles to document the shifted lives of the migrant workers during the catastrophic agriculture drought, the Dust Bowl in 1936. In each article, John Steinbeck illustrates the different aspects of these new migrants’ lives. Throughout the book, Steinbeck argues that the new migrants should be given a fair chance because they are “intelligent, resourceful”, and useful individuals/families, even though they were not view as such.1 Although the migrant workers are much needed, they are never treated correctly because of the common misconceptions that surrounded them.

As a major literary figure since the 1930s, Steinbeck displays in his writing a characteristic respect for the poor and oppressed. In many of his novels, his characters show signs of a quiet dignity and courage for which Steinbeck has a great admiration. For instance, in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck describes the unrelenting struggle of the people who depend on the soil for their livelihood. One element helping give this novel an added touch of harmony is Steinbeck’s ability to bind these two ideas into one story: the never ending struggle to survive and primacy of the family.

Experiencing the horrible and panful misfortune that many people faced in the 1930s due to the great depression John Steinbeck wrote one of the most critically acclaimed novellas Of Mice and Men. The novella follows the story of two migrant ranch workers George and Lennie who while trying to find work develop a close friendship and share a dream of one day owning their own land. But beneath the surface of what seems like a simple tale of two unlikely friends is a much deeper story and inside of those who were accepted and those who were marginalised. John Steinbeck has ability in his writing to touch the readers and convey his messages of friendship, race, alienation and misogyny that were very present in the 1930s throw his characters Crooks,

During the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of lives were changed. These changes resulted in financial ruin, loneliness, and loss of hope. Loneliness plagued many, as their farms were taken and they were forced to migrate to find a better life. John Steinbeck traveled around the country and worked as an unskilled laborer, working in the shoes of those he would later write about. Although Steinbeck grew up in a middle-class family in Salinas, California, he came to recognize the toils and hardships of laborers when he was a high school student, as he worked on a sugar beet farm alongside migrant workers. The bleak human condition of loneliness and the importance of community is shown throughout John Steinbeck’s

Lange had an uncanny ability to put a subject of the subjects being photographed during that time. She did whatever she could do to make the men , women, and children, to feel comfortable with her and the camera. She felt that by speaking and spending time with them was what she needed to do. Lange helped families stranded by only capturing their faces and sending them into the city editor, which then she got thousands of supplies sent to migrants. Out in the

Dorothea Lange is an experienced photographer, born on the 26th day of March 1895. Her works have been a source of insight for many people and this has proved very effective to contemporary photographers. There are many works that this woman did during her time and it is important to acknowledge them. Migrant Mother is one of these works and the applause that it has gotten from the viewers clearly portrays expertness at its best. The photo revolves around the life and family of one Florence Owens Williams and was taken in 1936 in California Florida. Going through the various elements of this photograph is effective in ensuring that one understands the deep concepts that revolve around it.