Dust Bowl Criticism

The Worst Hard Times by Timothy Egan conveys the story of farmers who decided to prosper on the plains during the 1800s, in places such as Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. They decided to make living, and some stayed during the worst droughts in the United States in 1930s. High temperatures and dust storms destroyed the area, killing animals and humans. This competently book reveals the prosperity for many, later revealing the time of the skinny cows. The story is based on the testimonies of the survivors or through their diaries/journals and on historical research. The author describes the struggles of the nesters, in which Egan clearly blames these catastrophic events on the settler’s hubris.

According to the Great Plain Drought Area Committee Report (Doc. D), in 1879, 10 million acres of crop were harvested. 20 years later, in 1899, 50 million acres of crops were harvested, 5 times more crops than in 1879. In 1929, that number more than doubled to a 105 million acres of crops that were harvested. How did happen? Farming technology advanced rapidly from 1879 to 1929. In “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan (Doc. C), Egan wrote, “A tractor did the work of ten horses. With his new combine, Folkers could cut and thresh the grain in one swoop, using just a fraction of the labor.” The new farming technology made farming faster and it required less labor. Farmers had this new technology and used it to plow more land. Millions of acres were being plowed and farmed on and with the dry soil and no grass to keep it on the ground the dust became airborne and started grouping together and creating terrible storms.

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 was a series of devastating events that occurred in the 1930’s. It affected not only crops, but people, too. Scientists have claimed it to be the worst drought in the United States in 300 years. It all began because of “A combination of a severe water shortage and harsh farming techniques,” said Kimberly Amadeo, an expert in economical analysis. (Amadeo). Because of global warming, less rain occurred, which destroyed crops. The crops, which were the only things holding the soil in place, died, which then caused the wind to carry the soil with it, creating dust storms. (Amadeo). In fact, according to Ken Burns, an American film maker, “Some 850 million tons of topsoil blew away in 1935 alone. "Unless something is done," a government report predicted, "the western plains will be as arid as the Arabian desert." (Burns). According to Cary Nelson, an English professor, fourteen dust storms materialized in 1932, and in 1933, there were 48 dust storms. Dust storms raged on in the Midwest for about a decade, until finally they slowed down, and stopped. Although the dust storms came to a halt, there was still a lot of concern. Thousands of crops were destroyed, and farmers were afraid that the dust storm would happen

The "dirty thirties," as many called it, was a time when the earth ran amok in southern plains for the better part of a decade. This great American tragedy, which was more devastating environmentally as well as economically than anything in America's past or present, painstakingly tested the spirit of the southern plainsmen. The proud folks of the south refused at first to accept government help, optimistically believing that better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but from the new machine-controlled agriculture. As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller The Grapes of Wrath, "it was not nature that broke the people-they could handle the drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on land investments and buying tractors to pursue it, that had broken these people, smashing their identity as natural beings wedded to the land."(pg. 58) The machines, one-crop specialization, non-resident farming, and soil abuse were tangible threats to the American agriculture, but it was the capitalistic economic values behind these land exploitations that drove the plainsmen from their land and created the Dust Bowl.

One major cause of that Dust Bowl was severe droughts during the 1930’s. The other cause was capitalism. Over-farming and grazing in order to achieve high profits killed of much of the plain’s grassland and when winds approached, nothing was there to hold the devastated soil on the ground.

This is something that leads up to the dust bowl from happening. “Dry land farming on the Great Plains led to the systematic destruction of the prairie grasses. In the ranching regions, overgrazing also destroyed large areas of grassland. Gradually, the land was laid bare, and significant environmental damage began to occur. Among the natural elements, the strong winds of the region were particularly devastating.”("The Dust Bowl") What it is explaining is that all the dust that gathered up by the farms and plantations, was a cause to the dust bowl since farmers had left their productivity, of growing their crops, behind. Most of the families had been their for centuries, so it was really hard for them to leave most of their homes and natural elements behind as they tried to travel north. Although farms and industries were forced to plant in the dry plain, it caused a mass corruption in almost every state in the United States. Having to be forced to plant caused a mass corruption after the dust bowl. Cattle died and farmers had to give up their land and find somewhere else to live, this analyzes that farmers were uncomfortable with working in these

“We watched as the storm swallowed the light. The sky turned from blue to black, night descended in an instant and the dust was on us…Dust lay two feet deep in ripply waves across the parlor floor, dust blanketed the cookstove, the icebox, the kitchen chairs, everything deep in dust.” -Karen Hesse’s Diary, April, 1935 (Dust Bowl Diary Entries). In the 1930s, a phenomenon called the Dust Bowl swept the people of the Great Plains off their feet. This paper defines the Dust Bowl and its impact on the US economy and American citizens.

Rays of golden sunlight were piercing the blue sky. Today was a hot day. There had been no rain in the last month. A young child was playing in the field while his father was harvesting the crops. The boy was playing among the newly harvested golden vegetables. There were a lot more vegetables than he remembered from years past. The boy knew they were going to sell most of this harvest. Where are the other plants that he remembered? Why was corn the only thing growing? Why is it in straight lines instead of winding around the property like it normally did? He pondered these questions on the way to school. Today, unlike normal, his teacher let him out of school early. Though he thought nothing of it at the time the sky was turning dark. It

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.

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,

Natural disasters can cause massive damage, but few realize that many barely last a few days. If so much can be done in such a minute amount of time, imagine what a decade would do. The dust bowl was a weather event that lasted for the entirety of an eight-year drought and lingered for multiple years after. The result: Economic devastation for the agriculture of the area. The dust bowl was a large contributor to agriculture’s role in the great depression and defines how we approach environmental protection today.

In decades previous to that there had been a technology boom as far as farm equipment went. “…some observer blame the dust storm of the 1930s of the misuse of this single implement.” (Worster pg 91). Western farmers had used plows to kill the grass. Greed and this disruption of nature is what Worster sees as the primary cause of the Dust Bowl. We used the earth as a form of capitalism; worked it to make money for us and gave nothing back. (Similar to what caused the Great Depression.) He felt that as a nation we had deceived ourselves so we would feel vindicated for our actions, thereby alleviating any responsibility to fix what we broke.

In what was one of the most fertile areas of the United States, one of the Nation’s worst agricultural disasters occurred. No rain came so crops did not grow, leaving the soil exposed to the high winds that hit the area in the 1930s. Stretching over a 150,000 square mile area and encompassing parts of five states—these being Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico—the Dust Bowl was a time where over 100 million acres of topsoil were stripped from fertile fields leaving nothing but barren lands and piles of dust everywhere (Ganzel). While things were done to alleviate the problem, one must question whether or not anyone has learned from this disaster. If not, one must look into the possibility that the United States may be struck

For my project, my goal was to illustrate the sorrow and grief many farmers and their families experienced as they were evicted from their homes and land; due to the tremendous impact of the Dust Bowl. Additionally, I wanted to demonstrate the struggles of their journey westward toward California, where they sought work to provide for their families who usually were already starving, exhausted, and grieving for what they lost back home. I chose these particular lines from John Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies since they encompass the entire motif that I decided to express. Steinbeck’s lines clearly explain the migrants’ backgrounds hearty, self-sufficient American farmers; men and women who are “resourceful and intelligent” (Steinbeck, 5). He