Strength in numbers and love in a large community
There were more than a hundred families in the camp shown, not to mention the countless camps across California. This is similarly described within "California on the Breadlines : Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and the Making of a New Deal Narrative" as they speak of how it was "To be raised, with the physical soil on which homestead transfer land title into single homes, which multiply into community. Through all of this he wove the pinoneer story of westward migration cast historically back a hundred years and more—thousands of years back to the first pioneers, Adam and Eve, seeking out a new home following that first exile. Taylor believed that the building of any new order, to use the phrase on which Steinbeck would later base his dream in The Grapes of Wrath, would begin with government housing." They may not tell but they sure do show the one thing these people had left. After leaving their homes, belongings and even some of their family members behind, the love for one another and "togetherness" wasn't left back in Oklahoma, Texas, or anywhere else these families came from. John Steinbeck's novel, "The Grapes of Wrath" might have given us a fictional glimpse into the life, yet these photographs bring reality to the story of the Joads and their quest through struggle.