"...10 percent of Oklahoma farmers lost their land to foreclosure, and tenant farmers (who comprised more than 60 percent of Oklahoma farmers in the 1930s) had little incentive to endure poor crops and low prices year after year. Mechanization of farming began to consolidate small farms into larger ones. "Just as the Joads had struggled to maintain income sufficient to live on at their farm, so did the rest of the tenant farmers during their time period. The large corporations such as the ones that took over the Joads were forcing many of the small farmers off their land with no regard or care as to what would happen to these people and their families

"In larger ranches, they often had to buy their groceries from a high-priced company store." The lack of ethics was not uncommon during this period. Many of these stores made it so that the farmers were eternally in debt to them and were then forced to continue working for them for less and less. The Joads experience with this was no different.

"But there was not enough work for everyone who came. Instead of immediate riches, they often found squalor in roadside ditch encampments." This was exactly the problem for most of the migrant workers, including the Joads. They had false hope of finding a better life in California when in reality they had just been deceived by the higher ups .

The article speaks to how well Steinbeck was able to put the real struggles that the average migrant farmer was enduring into a fictional novel.

"California was emphatically not the promised land of the migrants' dreams" This was the common misconception that the migrant workers had, they believed and with good reason that when they reached california all of their struggles would disappear. This was not the case because of the 30% unemployment rate and the constant scheming of their employers to find the cheapest workers available, even if it caused children to starve.