Don Wildman

Now we have the federal government, all these things.

And so that's really why it becomes such a dark hour for America, isn't it?

I want to circle back to the farming issue, so widespread in America in those days.

The Depression really marks the end of the small-scale farming economy, doesn't it?

I mean, they hadn't been part of the previous boom that had been happening.

It had been a struggle for farms for a long time.

Tell me about the effect on agriculture from the Great Depression that leads us to grapes of wrath, essentially.

Which was really a land management problem and a farming science problem of just not rotating your crops and all that sort of thing.

And that ends up blowing the soil away, essentially.

As a result, prices of food go way up.

But those farmers aren't getting that money.

Yep.

Right.

All of this, these various instabilities in this storytelling that we're doing here leads to epic homelessness, as we talked about.

250,000 people unable to pay their mortgages by 1932.

Shanty towns are called Hoovervilles, sarcastically about Hoover.

Those are up everywhere, including Central Park in New York.

There's a general sense of migration in the country as people are going to look for work, especially in the agricultural sector.

Around 2 million men traveled in America.

My point is this is the cultural impact of this economic crisis.