Environmental Disaster
Dust Bowl, Great Plains, Great Depression Era
During World War I U.S. farmers planted an abundance of crops to feed the hungry in Europe during Turkish blockades. Twenty years later over plowing proved disastrous.
Prior to the 1929 American stock market crash, Midwest farmers were producing high quantities of grain. The production continued until 1932 when a large drought commenced over the wide-open space of the prairie.
The drought added to the United States’ economical woes. In the urban areas, people were without jobs and therefore could not feed their family and in the Midwest farmers lost their farms due to the drought’s effect on crops. Many farmers left their farms behind and traveled to California with hopes of finding work. John Steinbeck’s book, Grapes of Wrath, depicts the fictitious Joab family leaving Oklahoma for California in the 1930s.
The worst period of the drought in the Midwest occurred during 1934 and 1935. This is when dust storms continually blasted the plains with tons of dust. People and animals died of suffocation. There was no escaping the dust. Sometimes the dust storms traveled as far as New England and to ships off the coast of the United States.
What caused the Dust Bowl?
When farming in the Midwest was at its greatest demand farmers plowed under all the available topsoil. This decision meant getting rid of all the perennial prairie grass. Once the prairie grass was destroyed, there was nothing to hold the dry dirt down.
Where did the term “Dust Bowl” come from?
April 14, 1935, was the worst day of the 1930s drought. It was Palm Sunday. The day began as a beautiful day with the sun shining; by noon the weather changed. Robert Geiger was traveling through Guymon, Oklahoma when a large black cloud from the north darkened the sky. Temperatures dropped 40 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius) within an hour. In the middle of the day people had to use flashlights to get from place to place. The earth being so dry and no crops or grass to hold dirt down stirred and became the worse dust storm in United States’ history. Geiger in writing his article for the Associated Press about the storm coined the phrase “Dust Bowl.” Within hours, the press repeated the coined phrase nationally and internationally.
When did the Dust Bowl end?
Throughout the 1930s a little rain came and went without relief. In fact, it was not until 1941 when the Midwest found relief from the drought with a downpour of rain that lasted for several days. The rain, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Program, and World War II brought the plains people out of the drought and out of the Great Depression.
With the New Deal Program, farmers were taught how to keep the earth from eroding by rotating crops and leaving ields fallow in order to give the land a break. Trees and prairie grass were planted in order to break the wind and hold the earth in tact.
Sources:
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.
Lookingbill, Brad D. Dust Bowl, USA. Athens, Ohio University Press, 2001.
Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains In the 1930s. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979.
