American Drought In The 1930's

that the topsoil beneath it was entirely exposed to the wind. Chase, ..., states, “Grass it what

But when the Dust Bowl came the american economy dropped. For instance to explain more about the Dust Bowl, in a article written by Marcia Trimarchi, who studied English at Skidmore College wrote. “They settled there to farm. They were prosperous in the decades that followed, but when the 1930s rolled in, so did strong winds, drought and clouds of dust that plagued nearly 75 percent of the United States between 1931 and 1939, The era became known as the legendary Dust Bowl.” (Trimarchi). In a article made by Robin A. Fanslow a writer for the American Folklife Center it illustrates about what the Dust Bowl did. “In 1932, many of the farms dried up and blew away creating what became known as the "Dust Bowl." (Fanslow). Most of the dust from the Dust Bowl created many storms as said in a page written by Cary Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois. “In 1932, The number of dust storms increase. Fourteen are reported this year; next year there will be 38.” (Nelson). These dust storms were called black blizzards and they came often, then the worst dust storm came in 1935 on April 14. “Black Sunday. The worst "black blizzard" of the Dust Bowl occurs, causing extensive damage.” Writes Cary Nelson (Nelson).

The Dust Bowl, battering the Midwest for nearly a decade with high winds, bad farming techniques, and drought, became a pivotal point in American history. The wind storm that seemed relentless beginning in the early 1930’s until its spell ended in 1939, affected the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and the broader agriculture industry. The catastrophic effects of the Dust Bowl took place most prominently around the Great Plains, otherwise known as the farming belt, including states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, which were hit extraordinarily hard. Millions of farming acres destroyed by poor farming techniques was a major contributor to what is considered to be one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in American history. This period resulted in almost a decade of unstable farming and economic despair. Thousands of families sought government assistance in order to survive. Luckily, government aid to farmers and new agriculture programs that were introduced to help save the nation’s agriculture industry benefited families and helped the Great Plains recover from the Dust Bowl. Furthermore, the poor conditions in the farm belt were also compounded by the Great Depression as it was in full swing as the Dust Bowl began to worsen. In addition, World War I was also underway which caused a high demand for agricultural products, such as wheat, corn, and potatoes to be at its peak, which lured many people to the farm belt with the false expectation that farming

The Dust Bowl occurred during The Great Depression in the 1930's. Which was an especially dreadful time for it to happen. Many people were impoverished or were on the brink of poverty. Making the man-made natural disaster all the more devastating.

The ‘Dirty Thirties’ is perhaps one of the most known time periods in American History. During the 1930s, the worst and longest drought occurred in the United States, this was also know as the Dust Bowl. According to Christopher Klein, the Dust Bowl is considered both a man-made and natural disaster. In fact, many events contributed to the Dust Bowl such as poor farming techniques, a severe drought, and economic depression.

Farmers did well after the Civil War and into the 1880s with plentiful rainfall and easy credit from banks. In the 1890s, however, American farmers suffered from drought, poor harvests, restrictive tariff and fiscal policies, low commodity prices, and competition from abroad. A downward swing in the business cycle exacerbated their plight, and many farmers in the Plains filed for

The documentary, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s by Donald Worster paints a surreal mosaic of life on the Great Plains during the dirty thirties. He does this by illustrating various causations and correlations as well as specific rural towns in the Dust Bowl that exhibit them, and public institutions whose objective was the restoration of the Great Plains to a fertile state as before the coming of the Capitalistic agriculturist that wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. Worster then uses the above as a fulcrum to his main argument, “…there was in fact a close link between the Dust Bowl and the Depression – that the same society produced them both, and for similar reasons. (p.5) He further goes on to explain that the crisis in the Great Plains was primarily caused by man and not nature (Worster, p.13). This was primarily due to the fact that man had never truly lived in equilibrium with the land on the high plains; they exploited the prairies to produce beyond their capacity, thus causing severe environmental breakdown. The fault was not all the agriculturists of course, part of the blame, as Worster points out, is rooted culturally in our capitalistic, industrialized values and ideals. One spokesman stated, “We are producing a product to sell, and that profitability of that product depended on pushing the land as far as it could go.” (Worster, p.57) To fully illuminate the problems at hand, he uses Cimarron County in the Oklahoma panhandle, and Haskell County,

The timeline of the dustbowl characterizes the fall of agriculture during the late 1920s, primarily the area in and surrounding the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl was created by a disruption in the areas natural balance. “With the crops and native vegetation gone, there was nothing to hold the topsoil to the ground” (“Dust Bowl and” 30). Agricultural expansion and dry farming techniques caused mass plowing and allowed little of the land to go fallow. With so little of the deeply rooted grass remaining in the Great Plains, all it took was an extended dry season to make the land grow dry and brittle. When most of the land had been enveloped by the grass dust storms weren’t even a yearly occurrence, but with the exponentiation of exposed land, the winds had the potential to erode entire acres. This manmade natural disaster consumed such a large amount of the South's agriculture that it had repercussions on the national level. The Dust Bowl was a “97-million-acre section

No rainfall led to a decrease in crop growth, affecting everyone in the Great Plains. For example, the amount of rainfall in Dullen County, Texas decreased significantly after 1923 (Doc E). The crops were not able to grow, meaning that the decreasing amount of rainfalls led to the livestock dying. Indeed, the individuals were drastically affected; the annual rainfall for the five Dust Bowl towns had an average of 17 inches- describing how rain was slowly disappearing. John Wesley Powell, a great Western explorer determined that the 20 inches of rain annually were the minimum for successful farming in the plains, this gives us the idea on the amount of rainwater need to farm. Once rain came to an end in the summer of 1951, many farmers experienced struggles with

Great western explorer, John Wesley Powell, wrote that 20 inches was the minimum amount of rain needed annually to grow crops (Doc E). Randy Francis, a Texas Dust Bowl historian, showed that from 1931 to 1940, 9 out of those 10 years received less than 20 inches of rain (Doc E). This showed that for at least a decade, there wasn’t enough rain for farmer’s crops to grow successfully. There was now drought in the west.

This picture shows one of the many dust storms that the Mid-West encountered in the Dust Bowl. In

With high winds, no rain, and loose soil, The Dust Bowl era was ready to

During the 1900’s a lot of devastating events occurred that led to the Dust Bowl. Some of these events were the stock market crash and the Great Depression. Specifically, the 1930’s was a period that held very severe dust storms. The dust storms remained extremely critical for about 6 years; this period of time became known as The Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl had tremendously negative effects on both the people in the region and the land in which the dust storms were located.

Thesis: The Dust Bowl of the 1930s forever changed how Americans thought of and treated our farm lands in the Great Plains.

By 1929, America had harvested an average of 105 million acres of crops in the Southern Great Plains (Document D). This amount had more than doubled the mean amount harvested in the area from thirty years earlier, when the US had been sitting at around 50 million acres (Document D). Farmers were also completing more work in less time. With the help of new farming supplies, the combine, plow, and tractor, agriculture had become much easier to accomplish, with a fraction of the work (Document C). Combined with the farmers’ little experience, this means extra loose dirt, which is not being held together by any grass. The wind would pick up the sand and dust to create the Dust Bowl in America as we know