In one of the most powerfully felt scenes of his novel The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck indicts the private business system for engaging in a practice as foolish and wicked as the willful destruction of food crops while children went hungry. Did any of the novelist’s New Dealer friends inform him that it was in fact a deliberately planned element of FDR’s agriculture policy? [David Henderson; more from Henderson on John Kenneth Galbraith and the dire effects of FDR’s policy on tenant sharecroppers]
One Comment
“Did any of the novelist’s New Dealer friends inform him that it was in fact a deliberately planned element of FDR’s agriculture policy? ”
It would be an amusing irony if Steinbeck didn’t think that the government had that much power.