Imagine awaking to the first rays of dawn, finding yourself lying on a tattered scrap of cardboard beneath a highway overpass. Your empty stomach churns with numbing hunger and you know today will be yet another listless scramble for survival. Homeless, jobless, and hungry, you glare with fervent jealousy at those clothed, groomed, and pompous passers-by grasping their purses and wallets tightly when they catch sight of you. Ashamed and enraged, you feel cheated and wonder how it is possible for such financial diversity to exist within the same city. You pitifully prop yourself against a wall on a busy street corner and await the morning rush hour that will supply your meager breakfast. The extreme poverty experienced by the unfortunate farmers who were forced into vagrancy during the Great Depression is not unlike the neediness that exists in American ghettos today. Such widespread destitution is a direct result of an inadequate economic system. Through tales of helpless families’ tribulation, Steinbeck and Kotlowitz disclose the defects of the capitalist system in The Grapes of Wrath and There Are No Children Here, meanwhile alluding to an alternative economic structure: socialism.Throughout the novels, disadvantaged families become helpless victims of the lack of effective government aid in their area, an adverse effect of extreme capitalism. The Chicago Housing Authority actually hired “private security guards [who] searched out the squatters and physically removed them” (Kotlowitz 79). By kicking homeless people back out on the street, this government outfit coldly disregarded the basic human need of shelter in order to preserve their right to the decrepit property of the Henry Horner Homes. Such self-interested procedures are frequent and permitted through the capitalist ideas of personal property ownership. The “salesmen, neat, deadly, [with] small, intent eyes watching for weakness” dep...
