The Dust Bowl

Podcast Transcript

The Great Depression inflicted an economic disaster on the United States, driving unemployment to a staggering 25%.

While urban areas faced widespread unemployment, poverty, and food scarcity, farmers in the Great Plains were grappling with an equally devastating crisis: the Dust Bowl.

Short-sighted farming practices and historic droughts led to a decade of soil erosion, creating a series of suffocating dust storms that triggered a mass exodus from the region.

Learn more about the Dust Bowl, its causes, and its impact on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Life on the Great Plains has never been easy. The region faces a never-ending cycle of droughts, blizzards, hailstorms, flash floods, and tornadoes.

Driven by Manifest Destiny, the Great Plains became a highway for westward pioneers. Many of these pioneers believed the Great Plains offered the agricultural promise they sought.

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered opportunities for westward migration in the form of free land to those who migrated to the United States or were living in the East.

Under the act, anyone could claim 160 acres of land if they committed to cultivating the land, living on it for five years, and building a home. These homesteaders flocked to the West, claiming more than 270 million acres.

Technological breakthroughs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries made farming in the region possible

Homesteaders were motivated by advertisements in Eastern newspapers highlighting the possibility of turning a homestead into a paradise using the McCormick Reaper or new steel plows powered by modern tractor technology.

Despite the challenges, the upside appeared worthwhile for many settlers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The price of wheat, the primary crop grown on the Great Plains, remained steady after the Panic of 1893 and even experienced a brief boom in the late 1890s.

The outbreak of World War I changed the fortunes of Great Plains farmers. The price of wheat nearly tripled during the war years, rising from 87 cents a bushel in 1913 to $2.12 a bushel by the time the United States entered the war in 1917.

The struggles of farming the plains were finally bearing fruit.

A migration of eager farmers armed with heavy loans and new equipment flocked to the region, determined to gain their piece of the fortune. Seeking to capitalize on surging prices, farmers in the region doubled down. The price of wheat drove a movement called the “Great Plow Up”.

Driven by the mantra “the rains follow the plow,” farmers plowed under nearly 32 million acres of sod between 1910 and 1930. Most of the plowing was done by new settlers to the region, who lacked experience with the region’s ecosystem and climate.

The end of World War I saw the inevitable decline in wheat prices. As the war ended, European farmers returned to their fields. Global demand declined, and wheat prices collapsed.

Faced with falling prices, farmers were faced with two choices.

Option one: They could cut back and reduce acreage to reduce supply and drive up prices, or option two: they could plant more and rely on the increased supply to offset the damaging decline in prices.

Most farmers chose option 2, and the environmental consequences were dire. The plan may have worked, but rainfall in the region had been steadily declining, and by 1933, a full-blown drought had set in on the plains.

Plowing the grass cover in the region was a dangerous game. When they plowed up the indigenous grasses on the plains, they removed the root systems that had held the soil in place.

The region’s soil is notoriously light, and with minimal tree cover to block the great plains’ powerful winds, a prolonged drought spelled disaster.

The great plains combination of persistent fires, a dry climate, and relentless winds impeded tree growth since Native Americans first settled the area.

This lack of trees, coupled with the overplowing, accelerated the erosion crisis of the 1930s. In their quest to capitalize on the high wheat prices during WWI, the farmers on the Great Plains pushed the land beyond its limits.

There was a steep price to pay for this miscalculation.

In 1932, 14 dust storms occurred, many lasting for days; that number climbed to 38 in 1933.

The dust storm’s impact on plants was catastrophic. During a long storm, the plants were sandblasted.

They were often so dried out by the wind that the outer layer of the plants’ flesh was ripped off, making a natural recovery impossible.

Storms also disrupted photosynthesis. In storms lasting more than 24 hours, the dust and debris in the atmosphere blocked sunlight from reaching the plants.

Unlike on a cloudy day, when humidity may be high and plants are offered an alternative water source, in a dust storm, the air is so dry that it suffocates plants.

The severe dust storms literally buried plant life, often forming massive dunes that could occasionally reach the height of a barn. Consequently, the vegetation could not survive the onslaught of the dust.

In 1934, the storms were intensifying, and the damage statistics from that year paint a grim picture.

According to the Yearbook of Agriculture, erosion rendered 35 million acres of farmland incapable of crop production, an area the size of Wisconsin.

The Yearbook also suggested that an additional 100 million acres had lost most of their topsoil, an area the size of California.

The storm that most people remember from the Dust Bowl was unleashed on Sunday, April 14, 1935. A storm that became known as Black Sunday. It was already the 49th storm of that year, and summer hadn’t even started.

Before Black Sunday, the most famous storm occurred just a month earlier, shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisor, Hugh Bennett, took the podium in the House of Representatives to call for action to address the dust storms.

Storms from several days earlier actually reached the Nation’s capital. Leaving Bennett only to say, “See, this is what I have been talking about!”

Black Sunday, the worst dust storm in American history, pummeled the Panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. The day had started with beautiful weather, but by late morning, two fronts had collided, gusting to 50 mph and dropping the temperature by 30 degrees.

What surprised even veteran observers about this storm was the color. It was as black as night.

Dust Bowl survivors always said you could tell where a storm originated from by the color of the storm. The gray storms originated in Colorado, the red storms in Texas and Oklahoma, and the black storms in Kansas.

Ava Carlson, a survivor of the storm, told the New Republic, “People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep”.

The Dust Bowl got its name in the wake of the Black Sunday storm, when Associated Press writer Robert E. Geiger wrote a series of articles on the disaster and referred to what he had seen as the Dust Bowl.

The Spring of 1935 was the worst part of the crisis. Dalhart, Texas, survivor Melt White recalled the misery, saying, “In the spring of 1935, the wind blew 27 days and nights without quitting.”

The storm’s effects on animals were as profound as those on plants. Cattle, a lifeblood of the region, suffered terribly during the Dust Bowl. During intense storms, the cattle were blinded by the relentless wind and dust.

Many cattle suffocated from the storm’s power. Cattle that were lucky enough to survive the storms often died of starvation because the winter wheat they depended on did not survive and because nost ranchers could not afford to feed their cattle hay.

One animal that did flourish in the Dust Bowl was the jackrabbit. The jackrabbit population was so prolific and damaging to the region that communities organized jackrabbit drives.

Hundreds gathered, often after church, and marched towards the hundreds of thousands of jackrabbits and caught them in pens and whacked them over the head with a small bat or heavy stick.

What little grain was left after the storms was attacked by the rabbits.

After the Black Sunday storms, the government intervened because the suffering was immense.

Aside from the economic costs, the greatest scourge was dust pneumonia. Death certificates from the time did not list this as a cause of death; instead, it was just cited as pneumonia, but doctors in Texas and Oklahoma estimate that the toll was in the hundreds in 1935 alone.

Children were particularly susceptible and were kept under the watchful eyes of nervous mothers. During the Dust Bowl, children often missed school due to fear of the storms.

Schools across the Texas Panhandle reported widespread absenteeism, as parents kept their children home to protect them from the dust clouds.

Just two weeks after Black Sunday, the Roosevelt administration labeled the dust storms a “national menace” and established the National Soil Conservation Service under the leadership of Hugh Bennett. Hugh Bennett launched a campaign to reverse the effects of the Dust Bowl.

The Roosevelt administration produced films that were candid in explaining the causes of the storms. They explained that plowing the region’s virgin soil made it vulnerable to the extreme weather. The films also highlighted how the relentless pursuit of higher yields had overtaxed the land, resulting in permanent damage across the Great Plains.

One of the most significant impacts of the Dust Bowl was mass migration out of the region.

Estimates of migration indicate that nearly 2.5 million people left the Great Plains. Packing all they could in their jalopy cars, they fled with what little hope they had left to California, often to the Salinas Valley, the home of author John Steinbeck.

This migration had enormous impacts on California. The arrival of an estimated 1,000,000 Oklahomans, known as Okies, to California significantly affected California’s socioeconomic conditions.

The arrival of this many people in such a short time depressed wages and created a shortage of land. For many, the optimism of California gave way to the stark reality of a state that lacked the infrastructure to absorb so many workers, so quickly.

The migration of people from the plains was documented in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.

The Dust Bowl did not end until the rains returned in 1940 and the government’s programs to reshape the region’s geography could take hold.

President Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives focused on several programs pertaining to the Dust Bowl and its impacts. In addition to Bennett’s soil conservation programs, new farming strategies, such as contour-terrace farming, were introduced to reduce soil erosion.

The government also undertook to improve tree cover in the region, as the Works Progress Administration planted more than 200 million trees. The goal of the massive tree-planting campaign was to reduce the wind via wind breaks that had such devastating effects.

Despite the massive migration of people out of the Great Plains, not everyone left. Many people were determined to stick it out and survive.

The “Last Man Club” was formed in Texas during the Dust Bowl by a group of local men who pledged to remain in their drought-stricken town regardless of how severe conditions became, even as many neighbors abandoned their farms and headed west.

They agreed that whoever was the last surviving member would close the club and symbolically “turn out the lights.”

The Dust Bowl was a disaster that befell the people of the Great Plains in the midst of the tragedy that was the Great Depression. It was a one-two punch that caused millions of people to leave their homes, resulting in a demographic transition that can still be felt today.

In the almost 100 years since the storms of the 1930s, there have been other droughts, some just as bad, but thanks to the lessons learned, the region has never had to experience another Dust Bowl.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

Research and writing for this episode were provided by Joel Hermansen.

Today’s review comes from PapaDuck704 from Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write:

Completionist Club in the can.

With the episode on Canned Food, I emptied the cupboard of previous episodes and became eligible for the Completionist Club.

I drive a lot for my work, and this podcast helped to make the time behind the wheel go a little faster.

So, with that goal “in the can,” tell me where the closest clubhouse to Gastonia, NC might be and what amenities await me there? I’m sure there is pork BBQ, but is the sauce tomato or vinegar-based? Or do you have both?

Thanks, PapaDuck! All of the local completionist club chapters around the world will serve dishes in accordance with the tastes of their local members.

Which type of BBQ sauce you find will depend on which clubhouse in the Carolinas you visit. We have not only tomato and vinegar based sauce, but you will also find mustard based sauces in parts of South Carolina.

Remember, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you can have it read on the show.