GoW Travel Journal 2 - Chapters 1 - 10 Part D

Chapter 7 in the book reveals much about the nature of selling cars in the formidable Dust Bowl during the 1930s. As thousands of people seek to leave the inescapable clutches of the dust, they buy any cars they can find. As most of them are just simple farmers, they are not car experts and get cheated by many crooked car salesmen.

The picture above depicts a line of broken down cars. Many people would pay extremely high prices for cars that were worth much less, by mistakingly trusting the car salesmen, who would convince people they were getting quality cars, when in fact they were getting old cars with sawdust in the engines that would hold together just long enough for people to drive away from the car lot.

Cars those days were relatively underpowered vehicles compared to todays engines. A higher powered vehicle of the time was a 60 horsepower engine, while today a low powered engine is considered to be about 110 horsepower. Looking at this link, we can see some specs of cars from the time period. Carrying a trailer full of household items even in a new working car would be difficult, while today most cars can manage a small trailer attached to the back. While cars from the 1930s are admittedly sexy cars, many people could only afford the broken down kind that would only get them stranded in the middle of the highway, just like the tenant farmers in Chapter 7 of Grapes of Wrath.