In Give Me Liberty! Eric Foner provides excerpts from Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fireside Chats and John Steinbeck's The Harvest Gypsies that present an idea of liberty that migrant workers during the Depression were definitely not enjoying. Let's explore this in more detail.

According to Roosevelt, real liberty happens when "the average man" has security in life. Sometimes, the president maintains, the government has to give some help to private businesses to curb the problem of unemployment and put the unemployed back to work. Having high numbers of unemployed people is not liberty, Roosevelt implies.

We can see, then, that the people Steinbeck describes were not living a life of liberty. These migrant workers found themselves out of a job and out of their homes because of drought and economic failure in the Midwest. They lost their farms and were forced to take to the road to try to find any work they could. They ended up traveling from place to place, working long days for low pay, living in squalid conditions, and being sent on their way when the work was finished. This is nothing like liberty as Roosevelt describes it, for these people had no security in their lives.