The Dust Bowl

Krysta Howard
Jeffrey Schulze
History 1302, Section 001
2 March 2012
The Dust Bowl Donald Worster believed the Dust Bowl 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”(Worster, 4). He investigated this phenomenon, which took place in the “dirty thirties”, and came to the conclusion that capitalism was to blame. The inhabitants of the Great Plains responded quite differently than the government after the disaster finally subsided. Both the reaction to the Dust Bowl and the events leading up to it are good representations how greedy the American culture was at the time. When the Great Plains were first taken over by Americans in the early twentieth century, people saw opportunity. This land consisted of miles and miles of fields, and farmers knew they could prosper. Worster believed “what brought them to this 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’”(Worster, 5). The families who moved into the area were not to blame for the eventual disaster because, as Worster states, “the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to” (Worster, 4). Families migrated into Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and the surrounding areas and did what they do best. They farmed. Capitalist ideals made them believe it was acceptable to consider nature as capital (Worster, 6). While Americans in other part of the country were doing business selling clothing or cars or groceries, the people occupying the plains turned their farms into businesses in order to make more than enough money needed to simply survive. They farmed and farmed until the land was exploited beyond its means. It only took 50 years for the once prospering farmland to turn into a layer of dust (Worster, 4). While the rest of the country was feeling the effects of the stock market crash, farmers in the rural area were still managing. “Then the droughts began, and they brought the farmers to their knees” (Worster, 10), argues Worster. The 1930s brought very little rain, turning the already overused land into a desert. On top of the massive drought, destructive dust storms held a very large presence in the area for the greater part of the decade; however, had the farmers not had the capitalistic idea that land should be used until it could be used no more, the Dust Bowl may not have been such a substantial event. Worster thought “the storms were mainly the result of stripping the landscape of its natural vegetation to such an extent that there was no defenses against the dry winds, no sod to hold the sandy or powdery dirt” (Worster, 13). The farmers found themselves with a huge problem and no way to fix it. When the dust storms finally subsided at the end of the “dirty thirties”, the Great Plains was left in shambles, and the locals handled the disaster a little differently than Washington. The federal government, and more specifically members of the Works Progress Administration, ventured out to the Dust Bowl to survey the damage (Worster, 35). They examined everything from the crops to the livestock to the quality of the land and determined which locations were hit the hardest (Worster, 35). According to Worster, “by 1936, in each of the counties, federal aid for agricultural failure had already totaled at least $175 per person” (Worster, 35), and that was only the beginning. Although Roosevelt ignored the catastrophe in the Great Plains for the first year of his presidency, he devised a drought relief package once he received enough complaints. As Worster stated, “the President asked Congress for $525 million in drought relief, and it was promptly given” (Worster, 39). Although the emergency funds were helpful, they did not produce instant results. Roosevelt knew the dust was still blowing on the plains, so to manage the immediate problem, he adopted a program that required farmers to use listers to dig up the ground; their purpose was to break up the hard surface, so it could slowly erode (Worster, 40). The government was doing everything they could to aide the area now referred to as the Dust Bowl, but some suggestions did not go over well with the locals. After hearing talk of being relocated to other areas, Worster said one angry resident cautioned, “they’ll have to take a shotgun to move us out of here. We’re going to stay here just as long as we damn please” (Worster, 42). Even though the land had nothing more to offer, the communities affected by the Dust Bowl considered it home. They were unwilling to leave and were even skeptical of receiving aid at first because, as Worster states, “to ask for aid implied personal and providential failure” (Worster, 35); however, when they realized the magnitude of the disaster, they caved. Many people offered up solutions for how to get the land back to its previous conditions, such as covering it with asphalt, wire netting, or rocks, but, as Wooster argues, “for the plains residents the most widely favored panacea was, understandably, water” (Worster, 39). With water, they could create lakes and lagoons by building dams to redirect the water (Worster, 42). They believed that was all they needed to move on with their lives, but any reasonable person knew that was not enough. When offered millions of dollars in drought relief, they readily accepted the money. Even after receiving all the assistance, many families still moved to other places, such as California, because the conditions in the Great Plains were not suitable for survival. Worster believed “the people did not stop to shut the door – they just walked out, leaving the wreckage of their labors…9 million acres of farmland turned back to nature” (Worster, 49). They were not easily accepted in California and were segregated just like the African Americans. Things got so bad Worster said many Americans felt “they had reached the end of their road” (Worster 53.) The “dirty thirties” are a good example of American culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. Worster observed that, along with the Depression, the Dust Bowl “revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America” (Worster, 5). Americans were fortunate enough to have a plethora of resources, but the culture they lived in forced them to use those resources to the point of spoiling them because if they did not, someone else would. Worster explained their actions by three capitalistic “maxims”: “nature must be seen as capital, man has a right, even an obligation, to use the capital for self-advancement, and the social order should permit and encourage this continual increase of personal wealth” (Worster, 6). These were the rules the people of the Great Plains lived by, and they turned the society into a greedy culture that took more than it needed and failed to evaluate the risks simply because it knew it could make more than a living. Worster concluded, “the American Dust Bowl of the thirties suggests that a capitalist-based society has a greater resource hunger than others, greater eagerness to take risks, and less capacity for restraint” (Worster, 7). It took multiple disasters such as the stock market crash and creation of the Dust Bowl for the country to realize it needed to change, but first it had to deal with the immediate problem: cleaning up when the storms died down. The inhabitants of the area and the government both reacted differently, but in the end, they were able to cooperate. Worster sums up the Dust Bowl and the “dirty thirties” when he says, “when the white men came to the plains, they talked expansively of “busting” and “breaking” the land. And that is exactly what they did”(Worster, 4).