Dust Bowl Era
“The Dust Bowl or the dirty thirties was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940), caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation or other techniques to prevent erosion. It was caused by an abnormally severe drought combined with the deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains, which killed the natural grasses. These grasses normally kept the soil in place and trapped the moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.” (From: Wikipedia, Dust Bowl)
The following is an excerpt from Donald Worster’s book, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s:
Introduction:
“All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil.” --Karl Marx, Capital
THE SOUTHERN PLAINS are a vast austerity. They sprawl over more than 100 million acres, including parts of five states—Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. Nothing that lives finds life easy under their severe skies; the weather has a nasty habit of turning harsh and violent just when things are getting comfortable. Failure to adapt to these rigors has been a common experience for Americans, so that the plains have become our cultural boneyard, where the evidences of bad judgment and misplaced schemes lie strewn about like bleached skulls. Few of us want to live in the region now. There is too much wind, dirt, flatness, space, barbed wire, drought, uncertainty, hard work. Better to fly over it with the shades pulled down.
Yet the plains have had their place in American dreams, back when the West was new and the grasslands offered unexplored possibilities. In fact they were, for a while, at the front edge of our collective imagination. Walt Whitman called them "North America's characteristic landscape," suggesting that here would be played out the true heroic drama of our history. Some time ago we spoiled that hope and lost it. When we look at the plains today, we are amazed that previous generations could have found so much excitement in so bare a country. The promise of the land was real, personal, and extravagant to them. For us, however, promises are harder to believe in, and the land is not where we would look, anyway.
But remote and unappealing as they may be, the plains are still important to us all. They remain, after much abuse, one of our greatest agricultural treasures— a crucial source of food, not only for ourselves but for an undernourished world. They are also a land with which we have not fully learned to be at peace, where our institutions, even after 100 years, do not fit in and belong. This failure of adaptation may be the region's most important value—as a model from which we can learn much about the ecological insensitivity of our culture. Out on the high tableland of the plains occurred one of the most tragic, revealing, and paradigmatic chapters in our environmental history—one with increasing relevance to mankind's future. And such matters are what this book is about. It will not offer new mythologies of the American West to replace those that have been discarded. Perhaps it will not convince every reader that the plains can still be a place of overwhelming grace and beauty. But I would like to succeed in making the region and its destiny a part of the reader's concern, as it is of mine.
The Dust Bowl was the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains. The name suggests a place—a region whose borders are as inexact and shifting as a sand dune. But it was also an event of national, even planetary, significance. A widely respected authority on world food problems, George Borgstrom, has ranked the creation of the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological blunders in history.1 The other two are the deforestation of China's uplands about 3000 B.C., which produced centuries of silting and flooding, and the destruction of Mediterranean vegetation by livestock, which left once fertile lands eroded and impoverished. Unlike either of those events, however, the Dust Bowl took only 50 years to accomplish. It cannot be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulation or social disorder. It came about because the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to. Americans blazed their way across a richly endowed continent with a ruthless, devastating efficiency unmatched by any people anywhere. When the white men came to the plains, they talked expansively of "busting" and "breaking" the land. And that is exactly what they did. Some environmental catastrophes are nature's work, others are the slowly accumulating effects of ignorance or poverty. The Dust Bowl, in contrast, was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth.
The Dust Bowl came into being during the 1930s, as fulvous dirt began to blow all the way from the plains to the East Coast and beyond. That was also the age of the Great Depression. Coincidence, some might say, that the two traumas should come at the same time. Few who have written on either affair have noticed any connection between them. My argument, however, is that 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. Both events revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other in economic. Both offered a reason, and an opportunity, for substantial reform of that culture.
That the thirties were a time of great crisis in American, indeed, in world, capitalism has long been an obvious fact. The Dust Bowl, I believe, was part of that same crisis. It came about because the expansionary energy of the United States had finally encountered a volatile, marginal land, destroying the delicate ecological balance that had evolved there. We speak of farmers and plows on the plains and the damage they did, but the language is inadequate. What brought them to the region was a social system, a set of values, an economic order. There is no word that so fully sums up those elements as "capitalism." It is of course a common epithet, often undefined and pejorative; but if the historian eschews the word, to paraphrase R. H. Tawney, he may also ignore the fact. That is what has usually happened in writings about Americans and the land, and, indeed, in much of our historical literature.2 If I seem to exaggerate in this case, it is only because the arguments have been so gingerly stepped around by others. Capitalism, it is my contention, has been the decisive factor in this nation's use of nature. To understand that use more fully we must explain how and why the Dust Bowl happened, just as we have analyzed our financial and industrial development in the light of the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing factory shutdowns.…
…The implications of this should be obvious, though it is not my intention here to spell out detailed remedies or even dwell at length on the contemporary situation. Many have assumed that the New Deal found a sufficient cure for the excesses of free enterprise. From an ecological point of view that confidence seems grossly misplaced, if the evidence of the last several decades counts for anything.America is still, at heart, a business-oriented society; its farming has evolved even further toward the Henry Ford example of using machinery and mass production to make more and more profits. We are still naively sure that science and technique will heal the wounds and sores we leave on the earth, when in fact those wounds are more numerous and more malignant than ever. Perhaps we will never be at perfect peace with the natural order of this continent, perhaps we would not be interesting if we were. But we could give it a better try.
[Excerpt from: Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, by Donald Worster, New York : Oxford University Press, 1979.]
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