Quote:
Originally Posted by tonypeoni
But even farmers are landowners.
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Not all farmers were land owners. Aside from the sharecropper system initiated during reconstruction, the post WW I farm depression bankrupted many white farmers and turned them into tenant farmers on what had been their land. By 1935 less than half of the people who earned their living on the land owned the land. The New Deal helped land owning farmers get richer and sealed the fate of tenant farmers. The Grapes of Wrath was more than a novel, much of it was history.