The Plains and The Dust Bowl Disaster - Research Paper Example

A Deadly Symbiosis: ‘Nesters,’ the Plains and The Dust Bowl Disaster “God didn’t create this land around here to be plowedup. He created it for Indians and buffalo. Folks raped this land. Raped it bad.” Melt White in ‘The Worst Hard Time’ In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan evocatively describes an apocalyptic natural disaster the likes of which modern-day Americans cannot comprehend. For most people, it seems apt fare for PBS or The Discovery Channel, but as a phenomenon that ordinary people were forced to cope with every day, it is unimaginable. Yet it happened right here in the United States: cattle that starved with stomachs full of dust; people who died of dust pneumonia; plagues of snakes and Tarantulas stirred up by Nature’s wrath. Over it all loomed rolling mountains of dust, which felt like steel wool. Egan describes it “as if a curtain were being drawn across a vast stage at world’s end.”1 Much of Egan’s prose has this biblical tinge to it, and it strikes the proper tone for a disaster that seemed like a foretaste of Doomsday. A catastrophic symbiosis occurred. The region’s residents suffered crippling economic and personal privation from which most never recovered; similarly, the region sustained a devastating physical transformation from which it has never fully recovered. And there is irony of biblical proportions at work here, in that the people who endured such abject misery were the same ones who were responsible for the most spectacular climactic shift in American history. The land that farmers so freely exploited was part of an exquisitely delicate eco-system. The pristine grasslands which massive herds of buffalo had kept in check created a root system that held fine, fertile soil in place. When the buffalo were exterminated, the plains Indians whose subsistence depended on them moved further west, leaving only white settlers concerned with profiting from the richness of the land. That meant clearing away the grasses. When the Depression hit and wheat prices fell, farmers were forced to increase their yields, clearing more and more grass in order to do so. Millions of tons of dust were picked up by the highest winds in the United States, rendering bare survival problematic. Farmers found themselves incapable of adjusting to the situation, and agricultural profitability in the region suffered. “During the Depression and through at least the 1950s, there was limited relative adjustment of farmland away from activities that became relatively less productive in more –eroded areas.”2 In the more-eroded counties, attempts at agricultural adjustment resulted in a recovery of less than 25 percent of initial losses.3 One of the most remarkable aspects of the Dust Bowl, and which speaks to the sheer magnitude of the disaster, was the persistent downturn that resulted in the agricultural sector. The people who farmed there simply did not recover. Hornbeck notes that the per-acre value of farmland declined by 30 percent in highly eroded counties; consequently, farming revenues declined precipitously and basically remained in a degraded state. Gradually, those who survived left the most devastated areas, though during the worst of it there was simply no getting out, as the cloying dust caused cars to stop running and made breathing hazardous. Egan describes a Texas landscape rendered impassable by giant sand dunes created by dust and high winds. “There were dunes ten feet high and hillocks of red dust from New Mexico and heaps of…sickly yellow sand that blew in from other parts of Texas.”4 The federal government, acting in the guise of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, took unilateral action to relieve suffering and provide financial aid to farmers. Farmers in the Dust Bowl interacted extensively with representatives from the Civilian Conservation Corps, which administered aid throughout much of the Southwest. In fact, this part of the country received more federal aid, “in monetary form,” than any other part of the economically depressed United States during the 1930s.5 However, cultural norms prevented many needful farming families from taking advantage of this relief, which exacerbated the economic disaster. Many residents “disliked the types of assistance they received…rural Americans were much less inclined to ask for assistance than were city-dwellers.”6 The agony these people suffered was made all the more poignant by their simple pride and quiet dignity, qualities which John Steinbeck famously chronicled in The Grapes of Wrath. The situation reached a critical mass in 1935, when the worst of the dust storms descended on the region. On April 14, known as “Black Sunday,” a day that had begun with blue skies and sunshine, a wall of dust descended on unsuspecting farmers, who were already suffering from drought and economic want. “Dodge City went black. The front edge of the duster looked two thousand feet high. Winds were clocked at sixty-five miles an hour…It was like three midnights in a jug,” according to one old “nester,” or farmer.7 Black Sunday had been preceded by 12 consecutive days of dust storms in Kansas, and dust clouds rolled as far east as New York and Boston. The effect on Dust Bowl farmers was crippling. The federal government had taken an activist position, perhaps moreso than at any other time in the nation’s history. However, the delicate economic equilibrium in the region did not always benefit from the Roosevelt administration’s attempts at social engineering, well-intentioned though it was. In 1933, the Agricultural Administration put into practice a law aimed at controlling farm prices. It paid farmers to withdraw land from cultivation, and the government intended that farmers would share the funding with their tenants and sharecroppers, however, most kept the money for themselves, a predictable outcome given the time and place.8 One Oklahoma farmer explained that he had let all of his tenants go. “I bought tractors on the money my government gave me and got shet o’ (rid of) my renters.”9 Evicted sharecroppers and tenants were joined by farmers who had suffered foreclosure and been forced from their lands. By 1932, almost one-third of the plains farmers were forced into foreclosure by back taxes or debt; violence was the result in many parts of the region, and ordinary, law-abiding farmers found themselves charged as criminals. “Farmers charged a courtroom in LeMars, Iowa, demanding that a judge not sign any more foreclosure notices. He was dragged from the courthouse and taken to the empty county fairgrounds,” where he narrowly avoided being hung from a tree.10 These were “real-life” versions of the Joads, “Okies” who found themselves utterly vulnerable to the hard, bottom-line financial reality of the situation. Even those who benefited from sympathetic creditors often could not escape the inevitability of foreclosure and ruin. Nevertheless, it may be unfair and inaccurate to focus solely on the misfortune and suffering of the Dust Bowl “nesters.” Some historians of the period note that the people of the plains were accustomed to hardship, and that turning bad situations to their advantage was a necessity of survival. In fact, some farmers during the Dust Bowl period actually invented quite useful tools. The “Dust Bowl” farmers were “builders for tomorrow. During those hard years, they continued to build their churches, their businesses, their schools, their colleges, their communities;” as such, it can be said that they created a future out of disaster.11 The experience of the Plains farmers serves as a cautionary tale for the present day. Acting out of ignorance, motivated by profit, they exploited the soil without thought for the consequences. It is difficult to contemplate their fate without thinking of the consequences of global warming, of rising sea levels, tsunamis and the increasing occurrence of catastrophic hurricanes. In that light, perhaps the most disturbing legacy of the Dust Bowl experience is its irreversibility, the impossibility of restoring an eco-system, any eco-system, which is by definition the product of a delicate balance. Beyond the human element, the story of the Dust Bowl is one of natural catastrophe, of depredations committed against the natural world. Like most cautionary tales, the Dust Bowl experience is part of a long link of connected circumstances. And like any eco-system, those circumstances are supremely important because they allow for sustainability, for life itself. The buffalo herds that once covered the high plains were a supremely important natural resource for the Plains Indians. This cornerstone of Indian society was slaughtered in droves by white hunters and settlers who routinely ignored treaties in the interest of greed for land and money. “Seven million pounds of bison tongues were shipped out of Dodge City, Kansas, in a single two-year period…at a time when one government agent estimated the killing at twenty-five million.”12 The U.S. government encouraged and aided the killing of buffalo in the full understanding of what it meant to the Indian tribes that were in the way of America’s advancing civilization. Egan comments that it took barely 10 years to empty the high Plains of bison and Indians. Once they were gone, the prairie became “a lonely place,” lain wide open to the white settlers the government expected would plant farms and raise families.13 It was a radical change, and one that took place with startling speed. In less than a decade, the region was transformed into a heavily concentrated agricultural system, one which was profoundly dependent on the soil. As the grasslands that the buffalo once helped fertilize and maintain began to disappear, the Plains were irremediably changed. There are very few examples of such a radical change, at least not one that occurred so quickly. The loss of the centuries-old, Indian-bison link, which preserved the character of the Plains proved disastrous – primarily because the white “nesters” could not be restrained in their agricultural practices. The prairie states attempted to recover what the Dust Bowl had taken away, employing some of the most cutting edge agricultural theories then in circulation. In Kansas, a key agricultural experimental station circulated a bulletin in 1941 on regenerating native grasses using something known as the “hay method,” an approach aimed at speeding up the process of regrowth which, it was thought, could take up to 40 years.14 In Colorado, agricultural scientists advocated a somewhat more natural approach, turning to reseeding in an effort to convert lost farmland back to pasture as part of an initiative to help bolster attempts at revegetation.15 Accounts from the post-Dust Bowl period seem to concur as to the best means of restoring balance to the region in hopes of gradually returning it to its former agricultural productivity. This disconnect is particularly ironic in that, while there seems to have been a widespread comprehension of what caused the disaster, there was general agreement that the region could be made abundantly productive once again. “Afterward, some farmers got religion: they treated the land with greater respect, forming soil conservation districts, restoring some of the grass, and vowing never to repeat the mistakes that led to the collapse of the natural world…”16 In his article on the long-term effects of the Dust Bowl, Hornbeck writes that the predominant feature of adaptation in the region was not agricultural innovation or federal patronage, but migration. Profits recovered marginally through the reallocation of farmland for other economic activities, such as the development of local industry, though this could not, from an economic standpoint, replace what had been lost.17 This leads Hornbeck to consider what may have accounted for the general abandonment of agriculture in much of the region. For one, access to credit was severely restricted due to the Great Depression and, with the Dust Bowl having virtually obliterated what farmers might have used for collateral, many once-productive farmers had virtually nothing to offer the banks. Of course, there was a negative economic symbiosis at work; with so many farmers going into foreclosure, banks were far less capable of lending than they once had been.18 “Agricultural costs from the Dust Bowl appear to have been mostly persistent,” with the Dust Bowl having “permanently reduced the productive potential” of the region’s most-eroded and productive areas.19 Tenant farmers were particularly hard hit, with droves of them having opted for migration and uncertainty. Tenants flooded out of the “drought-crushed eastern half of Oklahoma and from Arkansas and Missouri, where cotton farming had crashed.20 These small farmers had very little incentive to remain once things got bad. This was the plight of Steinbeck’s Okies, whose concern was with their crops first, which were their primary means of subsistence. The erosion of tenant farming in the region gained tremendous momentum throughout the 1940s until, by 1950, a once-thriving aspect of the Southwest’s economy was barely a fraction of its former importance, barely large enough to be measurable. This is hardly surprising when one examines the federal government’s continued presence in areas that were most affected. Funding levels still reflect a pattern that began in the 1930s. Hornbeck points out that as late as 1992, the most- eroded Dust Bowl counties were still receiving a considerably higher proportion of funding from the federal Conservation Reserve Program, an initiative begun in 1985, which paid farmers to take still erosive, unproductive lands out of cultivation.21 Seen in retrospect, with some counties still closely tied to federal aid, the Dust Bowl becomes an event so vast in its scope and effect that it is difficult to grasp the enormity of its impact. An estimated 75 percent of the Southwest’s topsoil was literally blown away, a shocking figure that places the individual human tragedies of which Egan writes in stark perspective. The destruction of Pompeii lies thousands of years in the past, which gives us the vantage point of history and science from which to view an event the victims of which could not have comprehended. The Dust Bowl, which caused widespread death, destruction and ongoing hardship, took place over a vast section of North America, something on the order of 100 million acres. The sheer magnitude of this tragedy prevents us from fully understanding its true impact on American agricultural practices, and on the country’s collective psyche. The sheer scope of the disaster is undeniable. The fact that it is relatively recent may, in part, answer the question of why its impact is not yet fully understood. The truth may lie with the country itself. “It was a lost world then; it is a lost world now. The government treats it like throwaway land, the place where Indians were betrayed…the only growth industries now are pigs and prisons.”22 Egan goes on to note that the Southern plains have always been a place where twisters and grassfires are endemic and often make for spectacular news coverage. But for all that, nothing can compare to the Dust Bowl. Down to the present day, the experts are in agreement. Meteorologists have rated the Dust Bowl the “number one weather event of the twentieth century,” while historians are resolute in their belief that it was the nation’s “worst prolonged environmental disaster.”23 The Dust Bowl altered the land so profoundly that the land has still not recovered. On the other side of the equation, neither have the people who once populated the region. Egan points out that a surprising number of people remained despite the consequences, although the Dust Bowl changed forever the relationship between them and the land. And yet it was the interrelationship between the soil and the farmers who tended it that caused Nature to rise up and bury an era, and a way of life. In Dalhart, Texas, banker Lon McCrory commented poignantly that “We need somebody to save us from ourselves.”24 Efforts at relief failed because the farmers had for generations been encouraged to use the land as they saw fit, that profit and productivity were what mattered. The legacy they all handed down was one of environmental rapaciousness and human recklessness on a shockingly self-destructive scale. References “Dust Bowl Exodus: How Drought and the Depression Took Their Toll.” Constitutional Rights Foundation – Bill of Rights in Action, 21(3), Summer 2005. Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006. Grill, Samantha. “Dust Bowl Days: A Study of Women’s Lives and Experiences.” Thesis. Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary, 2009. Hornbeck, Richard. “The Enduring Impact of the American Dust Bowl: Short- and Long-Run Adjustments to Environmental Catastrophe.” Harvard University, 2009. Harry C. McDean, “Dust Bowl Historiography.” Great Plains Quarterly, 1986. Read More