Dust Bowl

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Dust Bowl produced its most famous day on the 14th of April 1935, and the morning gave no warning. The sky was clear and the air was warm, with temperatures in the 80s. The air was completely still, and many people let down their guard. Then the strange signs began. Static electricity snapped in the air, and flocks of screeching birds and rabbits streamed south. Then the dust arrived. This documentary asks how farmland on the American and Canadian prairies became the source of storms that blackened the sky. It asks why so many families were working ground that could not hold itself together. And it asks what a nation already deep in the Great Depression did when the soil itself began to leave.

  9232244

• 2. Grass Under the Plow

  ›

  West of the 100th meridian, the High Plains receive less than 20 inches of rain a year, and that thin supply supported only shortgrass prairie. Early explorers judged the region unfit for European-style farming and called it the Great American Desert. With little surface water or timber, it drew fewer pioneers than other places.

  The Homestead Act of 1862 changed the calculation by offering settlers 160-acre plots known as quarter sections. The end of the Civil War in 1865 and the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 brought waves of migrants and immigrants. Cultivated acreage grew quickly. An unusually wet stretch fed a belief, popular among real estate promoters, that "rain follows the plow." Settlers and the federal government both assumed the climate had permanently changed.

  Cattle ranching came first. Harsh winters beginning in 1886, a short drought in 1890 and general overgrazing pushed many landowners toward planting crops instead.

  Congress kept enlarging the offer. The Kinkaid Act of 1904 granted 640 acres to homesteaders in western Nebraska. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 granted 320 acres elsewhere on the Great Plains. Mechanized plowing and harvesting, small gasoline tractors and combine harvesters then let a family work bigger properties without raising labor costs.

  The First World War and the disruption of the Russian Revolution cut the supply of wheat and other commodity crops. Prices rose, and farmers planted more. On the Llano Estacado of eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas, farmland doubled between 1900 and 1920. It then tripled between 1925 and 1930.

  Deep plowing displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that had trapped soil and moisture through drought and wind. Much of the converted grassland received no more than 10 inches of precipitation a year. Cotton farmers left their fields bare through winter, when High Plains winds are strongest. They also burned stubble to control weeds, which stripped the soil of organic nutrients and surface cover.

  The 1920s brought fairly good rainfall and moderate winters, which only encouraged more people to plant.

  56223376

• 3. Black Blizzards

  ›

  The first recorded dust storm arrived on the 14th of September 1930, and observers treated it as a meteorological oddity. Unlike a sand storm, its cloud was black or gray rather than beige or red, and it rolled across the ground. Inside it, people could not see a hand held in front of their faces.

  That storm opened an unusually dry era that began in the summer of 1930. The drought came in three waves, in 1934-1936 and 1939-1940. Parts of the High Plains stayed dry for as long as eight years. The northern plains suffered four of their seven driest calendar years since 1895, and Kansas had four of its 12 driest. From there south to West Texas, no stretch of above-normal rainfall appeared until record rains in 1941.

  The dried topsoil became friable, and in places it was reduced to powder. With no native grasses to hold it, the high winds of the plains lifted it into massive storms. Researchers later traced the droughts to ocean temperature anomalies. Pacific sea surface temperatures seem to have had the most direct influence, while Atlantic temperatures acted indirectly on atmospheric circulation.

  On the 11th of November 1933, a strong storm stripped topsoil from parched South Dakota farmland. It was one of a series that year. A two-day storm beginning on the 9th of May 1934 ranked among the worst. Its clouds blew all the way to Chicago, where they dropped 12 million pounds of dust. Two days later the same storm reached Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C. Dust worked its way into well-sealed homes and coated food, skin and furniture. That winter, red snow fell on New England.

  In Spearman, in Hansford County, a local account described a week of constant wind and dirt. When the wind briefly eased, the air stayed so thick with dust that the town looked wrapped in fog. Many residents developed sore throats and dust colds.

  Black Sunday arrived when a cold front diving down from Canada kicked up mountains of dust in the Dakotas. The front plowed south across the Great Plains at 60 miles per hour. People called such clouds "black blizzards" or "black rollers." On the plains, they often cut visibility to 3 feet or less.

  Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger was in Boise City, Oklahoma, to witness that day. His three-part story carried the first appearance of the term Dust Bowl. Edward Stanley, the Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press, coined it while rewriting Geiger's copy. The phrase first named the region and now usually names the event, which is also called the Dirty Thirties.

  The affected zone covered 100 million acres, centered on the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma Panhandle. It touched adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas. Those were the farms that many families would soon leave behind.

  262724259

• 4. On the Road West

  ›

  After a single storm in 1935, more than 350 houses had to be torn down. Banks foreclosed on many homesteaders, and others decided they had no choice but to abandon their land and look for work. More than 500,000 Americans were left homeless. Tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families could neither pay their mortgages nor grow crops.

  Parents packed "jalopies" with their families and a few belongings and headed west. Between 1930 and 1940, about 3.5 million people moved out of the Plains states. In just over a year, more than 86,000 of them reached California. That was more than the number who came during the 1849 gold rush. Migrants from Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas were called "Okies," "Arkies" and "Texies," though many came from other states too. They often found that the Great Depression had left California little better off than the places they had fled.

  Most migrants did not travel far. They moved from counties hit hard by the dust to counties that suffered less within their own states. So many families were moving that migrants and residents were nearly equal in number across the Great Plains states.

  A 1939 survey by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics covered about 116,000 families who arrived in California in the 1930s. It found that only 43% of the Southwesterners had been doing farm work just before they left. Nearly a third of all migrants were professional or white-collar workers. Leaving farming often brought greater social mobility, since former farmers were more likely to move into better-paid semi-skilled or high-skilled jobs. Those who fell in status usually dropped into semi-skilled work, which still kept most of them out of poverty. By the end of the Dust Bowl, migrants were generally better off than the people who stayed behind.

  The 20 counties that the Soil Conservation Service named as the worst wind-eroded region held 16 million acres in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. They were home to the majority of the migrants. Yet migration from the southern plains had risen only slightly since the 1920s. The Great Plains population fell mainly because newcomers stopped arriving, not because huge numbers left.

  After the Great Depression ended, some migrants returned to their home states. Many others stayed where they had resettled. As of 2007, about one-eighth of California's population was of Okie heritage.

  3738405421

• 5. Washington Steps In

  ›

  In August 1933, Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes established the Soil Erosion Service under Hugh Hammond Bennett. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration had moved quickly on soil conservation after taking office. In 1935 the service was moved to the Department of Agriculture and renamed the Soil Conservation Service. Today it is the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

  Different agencies attacked different parts of the problem. The Soil Conservation Service made detailed soil maps and took photographs of the land from the air. The Prairie States Forestry Project of the United States Forest Service planted trees on private land to slow erosion. The Resettlement Administration, which later became the Farm Security Administration, encouraged small farm owners in drier areas to move to other land.

  To stabilize prices, the government paid farmers under the Agricultural Adjustment Act and ordered more than six million pigs slaughtered. It paid to have the meat packed and handed to the poor and hungry. The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation steered apples, beans, canned beef, flour and pork products to relief organizations. Cotton goods were added later to clothe the needy.

  In an address on the 14th of May 1935, Roosevelt argued that the government program had saved millions of head of livestock from dying on the range and the farm. That year the government also formed a Drought Relief Service. In counties designated as emergency areas, it bought cattle for between $14 and $20 a head. At the start, more than half the animals were judged unfit for human consumption and were killed. The rest went to the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation for distribution to families nationwide. Giving up a herd was hard, but one account called the buying program "a blessing to many farmers." It helped many avoid bankruptcy.

  The Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936 required landowners to share government subsidies with the laborers who worked their farms. Benefit payments continued, but Congress now funded them directly and justified them as soil conservation measures.

  Roosevelt also ordered the Civilian Conservation Corps to plant the Great Plains Shelterbelt. It was a belt of more than 200 million trees running from Canada to Abilene, Texas, meant to break the wind and hold water and soil in place. Farmers were taught crop rotation, strip farming, contour plowing and terracing. In 1937 the government began an aggressive campaign to spread these methods, paying reluctant farmers a dollar an acre. By 1938 the effort had cut the amount of blowing soil by 65%. The land still failed to yield a decent living.

  In the fall of 1939, after nearly a decade of dirt and dust, regular rainfall finally returned. The government urged farmers to keep using conservation methods. The programs of those hard years helped sustain a friendly relationship between farmers and the federal government.

  4349424445

• 6. The Lasting Bill

  ›

  By 1936, losses had reached $25 million per day. In many regions, more than 75% of the topsoil had blown away by the end of the 1930s. Damage varied widely from place to place, but the economic consequences were severe and long-lasting.

  By 1940, the per-acre value of farmland had fallen 28% in high-erosion counties and 17% in medium-erosion counties, compared with low-erosion counties. In the most heavily eroded areas, less than 25% of the original agricultural losses were ever recovered. The economy adjusted mainly through large relative population declines in the more-eroded counties. Those declines continued through the 1950s.

  A Kansas agricultural experiment station issued a bulletin in 1941 suggesting that native grasses be reestablished by the "hay method." Developed in 1937, the method aimed to speed up and profit from a recovery that would otherwise take 25-40 years in Kansas.

  Farmers largely failed to switch to crops better suited to damaged land. With less topsoil, shifting from crops and wheat to animals and hay would have been more productive. Some of the failure may reflect ignorance about the benefits of changing land use. Banks failed in the Dust Bowl region at a higher rate than elsewhere, so farmers also lacked credit to pay for the change. Profit margins on animals or hay were still thin, which gave farmers little reason to try.

  Historian Donald Worster returned to some of the worst-hit counties in the mid-1970s, as Patrick Allitt recounts. Deep wells into the aquifer, heavy irrigation, pesticides, fertilizers and giant harvesters were producing immense crops year after year, rain or no rain. The farmers he interviewed believed technology had ended the old troubles. Worster saw high-tech farmers who had learned nothing, burning cheap subsidized energy to grow food in an unsustainable way.

  Historian Mathew Bonnifield took a more hopeful view. He saw the Dust Bowl's lasting significance as "the triumph of the human spirit in its capacity to endure and overcome hardships and reverses."

  A 2023 study in the Journal of Economic History found that the Dust Bowl had large and enduring effects on agricultural land but only modest effects on average wage incomes.

  4054525351

• 7. Art From the Dust

  ›

  The Farm Security Administration hired photographers to document the crisis, and Dorothea Lange benefited from the salaried work. Among her best-known images are Destitute Pea Pickers in California and Migrant Mother, taken in 1936. Another portrait, Mother of Seven Children, showed a gaunt woman named Florence Owens Thompson holding three of her children. It raised awareness elsewhere in the country of the human cost of the crisis. Decades later, Thompson disliked how widely the photo had circulated and resented that she received no money from it. She felt it made people see her as a Dust Bowl "Okie."

  Author John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, borrowing closely from field notes taken by Sanora Babb, a Farm Security Administration worker and author. Babb wrote her own novel about migrant workers, Whose Names Are Unknown, in 1939. Steinbeck's success eclipsed it, and it sat shelved until it was published in 2004.

  Folk singer Woody Guthrie traveled with displaced farmers from Oklahoma to California and learned their traditional folk and blues songs. Many of the songs on his 1940 album Dust Bowl Ballads draw on those experiences. They earned him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour."

  The migrants changed the music of the places they settled. Oklahoma migrants carried the country music of the rural Southwest to California. That blend became known as the Bakersfield Sound. It also inspired a spread of country dance halls as far south as Los Angeles.

  The Dust Bowl kept inspiring later artists. The HBO television series Carnivàle, which ran from 2003 to 2005, was set in the period. Director Christopher Nolan's 2014 film Interstellar imagines America scoured by dust storms again, caused there by a pathogen that attacks every crop. Nolan drew on interviews from the 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl.

  In 2017, Americana artist Grant Maloy Smith released the album Dust Bowl - American Stories. The music magazine No Depression compared its lyrics and music to Woody Guthrie and to the trials of Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath.

  5557606462