hat his joblessness was the result of his own inadequacy (Leuchtenburg, 1963, pp. 118-19).
Middle-class men "fought frantically" to maintain their status as employed persons and, above all, as persons who would not seek out government assistance (at the time called "relief"), but many members of the middle class had to yield to the inevitable. "A Birmingham engineer," writes Leuchtenburg, "put it more directly: 'I simply had to murder my pride'" (1963, p. 120). The experience of joblessness was soon enough exacerbated by what came to be the experience of homelessness for millions.
Two images of massive homelessness have been associated with the Great Depression, one rural and one urban in character. The rural version of the phenomenon is associated with the Dust Bowl, the name given to a widespread drought in the lower Midwest and upper South in the 1930s, which transformed hundreds of thousand of sharecroppers and other tenant farmers into migrant farmers, or more exactly farm laborers. Leuchtenburg cites the plight of "Arkies" and "Okies" who had lo
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