The Dustbowl

The play is set just after the event known as the "Dust Bowl" in America.  For almost 10 years, the Southern states of the US were covered in major dust storms which wiped out the crops and destroyed homes. History says "The simplest acts of life - breathing, eating a meal, taking a walk - were no longer simple.  Children wore dust masks to and from schools, women hung wet sheets over the windows in a futile attempt to stop the dirt, farmers watched helplessly as their crops blew away." Steinbeck wrote his novel The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 towards the end of the natural disaster.  

From History GCSE I know that on Black Thursday 1929 the Wall street Stock Market Crashed, so the Joan Family would have been very lucky to keep their homes anyway, putting the country in depression, then to further worsen conditions, a dust bowl swept across the southern agricultural states of America meaning that all crops were ruined and covered in sand, Houses and cars were ruined by the sand and land was dried up.
   

First hand accounts

“If you would like to have your heart broken, just come out here”
Ernie Pyle, Kansas
June 1936

“In the dust-covered desolation of our No Man’s Land here, wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and Vaseline in our nostrils, we have been trying to rescue our home from the wind-blown dust which penetrates wherever air can go. It is almost a hopeless task, for there is rarely a day when at some time the dust clouds do not roll over. 'Visibility’ approaches zero and everything is covered again with a silt-like deposit which may vary in depth from a film to actual ripples on the kitchen floor.”
Reader's Digest magazine, Oklahoma
June 1935