Many of the back-handed dealings that would be addressed in John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath are illustrated in the attached photo-essay titled, "Slavery in America". This article is about the cruel world of the Deep South that existed in the Twenties and Thirties. It was an agrarian fiefdom where generations of White planters and factory owners practiced the most un-American system of exploitation and feudalism that developed and was perpetuated from the chaos wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction. It was a nasty place where the working people of both races labored under conditions of peonage and bone-crushing poverty with no hope in sight.
Click here to read more about the American South during the Great Depression.
When FDR's first term reached the half-way mark the editor of New Outlook, Francis Walton, sat down at his typewriter and summarized the new president's record:
"It is a record of action - mostly ill-considered. It is a record of astounding failures. It is a record of abandoned experiments smilingly excused and apologized for by their perpetrator even before they were undertaken... It is a record against which natural recovery is waging a super-human struggle to reach us." In this article, Dorothy Dunbar Bromley (1896 – 1986) addressed one of the preeminent issue of her day: the rapidly decreasing salaries of the American worker:
"If we are fatuous optimists, it is because we have only the vaguest idea of how appalling the situation is. We have read a great deal about the return of of the garment sweatshop of fifty years ago, with the same abominable conditions and the same exploitation of women and children for a few cents an hour, or for no pay at all..."
More on this exploitation can be read here... This article recorded portions of the battle on Capitol Hill that were waged between the Spring and Winter of 1937 when Congress was crafting legislation that would establish a minimum wage law for the nation's employees as well as a maximum amount of working hours they would be expected to toil before additional payments would be required. This legislation would also see to it that children were removed from the American labor force. The subject at hand is the Black-Connery Bill and it passed into law as the Fair Labor Standards Act.
In order for FDR's Federal Government to layout their planned economy they had to be able to forecast the future trends in unemployment, and with that in mind it was deemed suitable that a committee be convened to study the matter. The board of brainiacs called themselves the National Resources Committee and their study was boundless and all encompassing. This article summarizes the findings of one of the organization subcommittees; their 450,000-word report was titled "Technological Trends and National Policy, Including the Social Implications of of New Inventions". The head of this subcommittee was the famed sociology professor William F. Ogburn, and as the title implied, the report studied the blessing and the curse that is the nature of technological innovation.
A report from the regional directors of the Resettlement Administration (an arm of the FDR's Department of Agriculture) stated that:
"15,000 farmers have moved out of the Dakotas, Western Kansas and Eastern Montana, leaving soil which because a aridity or exhaustion could not yield any crop... [Having moved to the states of the Pacific Northwestern] Some of them are squatting in shacks and makeshift dwellings made of tree branches, stray boards [and] strips of tin." | 
