The Great Depression: The Grapes Of Wrath

Though most everyone has heard of the Dust Bowl, many people don’t actually know what it is. “When rain stopped falling in the Midwest, farm fields began to dry up” (The Dust Bowl). Much of the nation’s crops couldn’t grow, causing major economic struggle. "The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909” (Dust Bowl). This caused many inexperienced farmers to jump on this easy start of a career. Because of this, farmers in the Midwest had practiced atrocious land management for years. This included over plowing the land and using the same crops year after year. In this way, lots of fertile soil had gotten lost. This helped windstorms gather topsoil from the land, and whip it into huge clouds; dust storms. Hot, dry, and windy, almost the entire middle section of the United States was directly affected. The states affected were South

The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the 1930's, that affected the midwestern people, for example the farmers, and which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place

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

During the 1930s, the United States faced various struggles such as The Great Depression- a time in which farmers suffered severely through many challenges. One of the challenges faced by farmers was the Dust Bowl tragedy; a dust storm affecting many farms throughout the midwest. The tragic Dust Bowl was a consequence due to lack of rainfall in the dry prairie lands, decreasing crop growth, and overproduction in farming causing more exposed land. It occurred because of advancements in farming technology, drought in the Great Plains, and the harvesting of grasslands.

People who lived in the Dust Bowl region lost their homes, jobs, and some, even their families. The dust storms were a result of years of treating farmland poorly. Mass migrations of Midwesterners began to occur as dust storms blew away whole houses. The Dust Bowl was an American catastrophe leaving millions of people homeless and jobless. The United States was left in panic as millions of westerners migrated in search of new jobs and homes.

The Dust Bowl was an American travesty that not only affected the people living in the Midwest, but throughout the entire country in many ways. The Dust Bowl had a series of things that provoked it, along with the great depression that was going on at that time. It also caused many people to disperse all across the country in order for them to try and escape the deadly dust. Just to make everything worse, the current president at the time, Herbert Hoover, didn’t do much in order to help. The Dust Bowl caused a great deal of loss to many people, not only their loss of crops, but their loss of families and farm animals.

What led to that event was the drought, bad farming techniques and strong wind gusts (Rosenberg, 2014). First, dry weather reduced the amount of precipitation annually; as a result, crops withered from no water supply. The drought followed by farmers who continued to abuse their farms led to topsoil being exposed on the land’s surface. Finally, once wind gust came into the Great Plains, the topsoil was blown from the land’s surface into the dry air (Documentary, 2014). From there, the topsoil accumulated in the air and formed dust clouds, which the winds carried across the nation. This marks the beginning of the dust bowl. It proved to be hazardous to anything in its path, for it was similar to foggy weather, but worse. Instead of blinding eye vision, the dust storm caused an array of issues, such as burying cars, getting into people’s houses, conflicting with oxygen levels in the air and bombarding people’s mouths (Rosenberg, 2014). The dust was everywhere to exact. So much dust pushed farmers to the decision of migrating west or staying and adapting to the dust storms (Documentary, 2014). Such a decision was not simple, for either way would lead to hardship and suffering. The dust bowl was no simple storm.

“The Dust Bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster” (Klein, 2012). “[The catastrophe] revealed the darker side of entrepreneurialism, its tendency to risk long-term social and ecological damage in the pursuit of short-term, private gain, (Worster, “Dust Bowl”). Like stated previously in the Library of Congress article the Dust Bowl was caused primarily by the overgrazing of cattle as well as dry farming by farmers. During the first world war wheat farmers need to fill in the demand of crops for the allied forces in Europe. While this worked for the period of time after the war ended the fields were plowed down to the bare minimum. With no wheat or grass to hold the soil together and nothing to protect the water and

The Dust Bowl brought about substantial negative effects on the economy and agriculture of the Great Plains and aggravated what was left of the American economy during the great Depression. The dust storms ruined everything on the Great Plains including crops and entire farms, hence ruining the careers and livelihoods of many farmers (Egan, 2). As a consequence, the American economy collapsed even more during the Great Depression. The help of the government and training on better farming techniques greatly helped the farmers to get back on their feet. A combination of human actions and environmental factors were responsible for causing the dust storms and in turn, the Dust Bowl made numerous people abandon their homes, suffer, and eventually

The Dust Bowl was a time during the 1930’s when a drought and over-farmed land caused years of dust storms to ravage the American southwest.Loose topsoil was picked up by strong winds to form black storms of dust and dirt. Farmers had to board up their houses in preparation for when the growing black cloud on the horizon would come crashing down on their houses. Thousands of farmers couldn't pay their loans due to lost crops and banks foreclosed on their farms. This event coincided with the height of the Great Depression, strengthening the effects of both terrible phenomena.

The dust bowl is another name for the southern plains of the United States which suffered from severe dust storm during the 1930s. As high winds stormed through Texas, Nebraska, and other states many people died and millions of dollars were suffered in damage. During this period of time, the United States was suffering the effects of the Great Depression and this dust storms worsened the actual economic status of the United States. Many people were forced to leave their homes and move to other states in search of a better way of living. The dust bowl was caused by many reasons but the biggest reason is the excessive use of land

The dust bowl was a devastating time in the United States history that occurred during the 1930s, caused by atypically high temperatures, perpetual drought and new farming methods. Vigorous winds disturbed the topsoil, resulting in overwhelming dust storms which destroyed an immense amount of farms, in upwards of 100,000. These storms devastated the source of income for the farmers affected. The dust bowl was located in the Great Plains region, which includes the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Northern Texas. Thousands of workers were faced with an impasse, become a laborer, doing mindless work for miniscule wages, or move away and search for better work. (San José State University) The people brought to these decisions that chose to

The Dust Bowl was the most exceedingly awful man made environmental disaster in American history. The term 'Dust Bowl ' was a term instituted by the general population who lived in the dry spell stricken southern Great Plains amid the Great Depression. The Great Plains were opened to cultivating by new gadgets, for example, the steel furrow. The appearance of tractors empowered much more serious cultivating. World War I in particular encouraged agriculturists to build creation. After the War there was dejection in rustic regions notwithstanding during the Roaring 20s. Agriculturists did not, however utilize required soil protection measures. Incomprehensible ranges of area had been changed over to homestead arrive on the Great Plains. This had evacuated the normal vegetation which held the top soil set up. A scope of cultivating practices in this way made ranches on the fields helpless. This and unfavourable climate conditions, amplified dry spell, brought about the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl. The as of now declining markets were exacerbated by the Dust Bowl. Agriculturists literally watched their ranches, the valuable top soil blow away.

While the drought was happening the farmers were trying to plow and plant and nothing was growing

After the stock market crashed millions of people lost all their money and savings. This crisis lasted for about a decade.