“No one had any money. We were all in the same boat (Quoted in Reinhart, Gazel).” Everyone at the end of the 1920s, everyone was thrown into the same class of poverty and lower class. Farmers were hit especially hard because throughout the twenties they were already practically living in a depression of their own. In the thirties there was a man who went from farm to farm in the thirties named Pete Wettach, who would later become known for the photos he took. The Dust Bowl is mostly what people think of when farmers had to deal with in the Depression. They believed that was the only bad weather they had to deal with, however imagine living through not only that, but, blizzards, floods, drought, and many more things. After all, throughout the …show more content…
On the farm children and women helped with everything ranging from the butchering of livestock. To helping harvest the fields in the fall. Small children during harvest often brought their fathers’ and older siblings lunch out from the house that their mother had made or that they helped make. One of the most often things that children and women raised were chickens from chicks, in order to sell eggs to make a little bit of money. On most farms around one hundred chickens would be butchered a year, twenty five for each of the four seasons of the year. Most boys would help with field work whereas the girls helped out their mother with housework. However for the families who only had girls, they split jobs, a few would help their father with the work that needed to be done in the field and one would help their mother with household chores. For a woman named Verna Grant Johnson she would always say, “I look like my mother but I’m a daddy’s girl.” Due to she helped her father with farm work while her sister helped her mother. Girls would often even go on threshing crews in the fall since they were what the family had to help with chores like that. This was shown by one of Pete Wettach’s famous farm photos, a little girl in a pile of soybeans. That little girl was Patty Doak who tagged along with her father taking with her whatever her mother had prepared that morning such as cakes and other baked goods. Patty was a very common child since she tagged along with her father like most children did in this time period bringing food and such. Pete Wettach was very famous for his photos he took during the Depression of farm life and the photos he took during WWII. There was a documentary used for a source on this paper because of how all the people in this documentary were the ones in the photos each with a story to tell
To begin with the “Dust Bowl” was one of the causes of economic fallout which resulted in the Great Depression because the “Dust Bowl” destroyed crops which were used to sell and make profit and the government had to give up a lot of money in order to try and help the people and land affected by the “Dust Bowl”. The “Dust Bowl” is referring to a time during the 1930’s where the Great Plains region was drastically devastated by drought. All of the including areas (Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico) all had little to no rainfall, light soil, and high winds, which were not a very suitable combination. The drought lasted from 1934 to 1937, most of the soil during the drought lacked the better root system of grass. Therefore it was easy for the
The period between 1870 and 1900 was a time to change politics. The country was for once free from war and was united as one nation. However, as these decades passed by, the American farmer found it harder to live comfortably. Crops such as cotton and wheat, once the cash crop of agriculture, were selling at prices so low that it was nearly impossible for farmers to make a profit. Improvements in transportation allowed larger competitors to sell more easily and more cheaply, making it harder for American yeoman farmers to sell their crops. Finally, years of drought in the Midwest and the fall of business in the 1890s devastated the farming community. Most notably, the Populist Party arose to fight what farmers saw as the issues affecting the agricultural community. During the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, many farmers in the United States saw railroads and banking enterprises threaten their way of life; their work to fight these elements eventually led to a change in national politics.
Because if the stock market crashing in 1929, many people sold their stocks and rushed to the banks to retrieve their money. Because of the faulty banking system, many banks failed. This led to the many people who have very little left. A significant thing is the unemployment and the homelessness of the people. In 1929, 3% of the people have unemployment while during the Great Depression, it was around 25% of the people. The farmers of Oklahoma and Kansas was struck the hardest when The Dust Bowl started. The huge dust storms changed the way people lived their lives more than the rest of the US. THe rural farmers in those states are forced to move inward toward the urban areas to escape the harsh conditions of the dust
The time period between 1880’s and 1900’s was generally good for politics. The U.S did not face the threat of war and many of the citizens were living peacefully. However, as time went by, the farmers in America found that life was becoming very rough for them. The crops they planted such as, wheat, cotton, etc. were once the sustenance of the agriculture industry, but now they were selling at such a low price that it was hard for farmers to make a profit. Rather many of the farmers were falling deep into debt. Furthermore, the improvement in transportation helped the foreign market gain an upper hand. Farmers often had to pay rebates and drawbacks to railroad companies to ship their goods. Railroad companies used rebates to win over the large business owners and made up the loss in profit by charging smaller shippers way more. During the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, farmers considered monopolies, trusts, railroad, and loss in silver backed dollar as threats to their agrarian lifestyle. Overall, the farmers blamed their problems on two things; the money supply, and the railroads which were valid complaints.
The Dust Bowl was the name given to the Great Plains area in the 1930s. Much of the region was an agricultural area and relied on it for most of their economy. Combined with The Great Depression and the dust storms, farmers in the Great Plains area were severely hurt. These farmers were seeking opportunity elsewhere near the Pacific where they were mistreated by the others already there. The mistreatment is a form of disenfranchisement, by excluding and segregating a group of people from the rest of society. The disenfranchisement of the Oklahoma farmers during the 1930s was caused by a combination of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression which led to the farmers being forced to move west where they were mistreated because there were not enough jobs.
Farm life of the 1930s was really hard for all the farmers. They did lots to get through the 1930s without starving. In York county they didn’t indoor bathrooms, light or, heat unlike the people who lived in the towns of the 1930s.(Reinhardt n. pag.) to feed there family’s many raised their own food like chicken which gave them eggs, cows which also gave them beef and milk to drink. They grew vegetables for there from there garden. (Reinhardt n. pag.)Which families didn’t do it alone they had help from there neighbors to help them along the way.
The Dust Bowl hurt many different people in many. And in many different ways negatively affected people who lived there in a personal way. By over its time that it occurred affected many things living or nonliving, many people had to flee because of the Dust Bowls destruction, the Dust Bowl occurred for many reasons, most all our fault and Because of all of what the Dust did to the people it affected them a lot.
...t Bowl. Unfortunately the circumstances in the Great Plains all came to a head resulting in a horrific ten years for citizens of the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl caused government and people to look at farming practices and to evaluate their output. These policies resulted in overproduction of crops causing the prices to fall. The conclusion of World War I and countries that stopped importing foods added to the pain the farmers were already feeling. Yet with the establishment of government policies such as the Federal Relief Administration and the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act and with drought coming to an end, the Dust Bowl came to an end. The American people knew that they needed to do everything that was possible to end the Dust Bow. Tom Joad, the lead character in The Grapes Wrath best sums it up “ I know this... a man got to do what he got to do.”
The “Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s”, was written by Donald Worster, who admits wanted to write the book for selfish reasons, so that he would have a reason o visit the Southern Plains again. In the book he discusses the events of the “dirty thirties” in the Dust Bowl region and how it affected other areas in America. “Dust Bowl” was a term coined by a journalist and used to describe the area that was in the southern planes in the states of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, between the years of 1931 and 1939. This area experienced massive dust storms, which left dust covering everything in its wake. These dust storms were so severe at times that it made it so that the visibility in the area was so low to where people
Farming was the major growing production in the United States in the 1930's. Panhandle farming attached many people because it attracted many people searching for work. The best crop that was prospering around the country was wheat. The world needed it and the United States could supply it easily because of rich mineral soil. In the beginning of the 1930's it was dry but most farmers made a wheat crop. In 1931 everyone started farming wheat. The wheat crop forced the price down from sixty-eight cents/ bushels in July 1930 to twenty-five cents/ bushels July 1931. Many farmers went broke and others abandoned their fields. As the storms approached the farmers were getting ready. Farmers increased their milking cowherds. The cream from the cows was sold to make milk and the skim milk was fed to the chickens and pigs. When normal feed crops failed, thistles were harvested, and when thistles failed, hardy souls dug up soap weed, which was chopped in a feed mill or by hand and fed to the stock. This was a backbreaking, disheartening chore, which would have broken weaker people. But to the credit of the residents of the Dust Bowl, they shouldered their task and carried on. The people of the region made it because they knew how to take the everyday practical things, which had been used for years and adapt them to meet the crisis.
The drought caused a lot of unfavorable conditions for farmers in the southwest. In Worster’s book he says “Few of us want to live in the region now. There is too much wind, dirt, flatness, space, barbed wire, drought, uncertainty, hard work…” (Worster 105). The droughts caused many unfavorable condition throughout the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and neighboring sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Thus, roughly one-third of Texas and Oklahoman farmers left their homes and headed to California in search of migrant work. The droughts during the 1930s are a drastically misrepresented factor of the Dust bowl considering “the 1930s droughts were, in the words of a Weather Bureau scientist, the worst in the climatological history of the country.” (Worster 232) Some of the direct effects of the droughts were that many of the farmers’ crops were damaged by deficient rainfall, high temperatures, and high winds, as well as insect infestations and dust storms that accompanied these conditions. What essentially happened was that the soil lacked the stronger root system of grass as an anchor, so the winds easily picked up the loose topsoil and swirled it into dense dust clouds, called “black blizzards.” The constant dry weather caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The effects of the drought happened so rapidly and progressively over time that
The United States was in troubled times in 1929. In this year, during its already struggling economy, the stock market crashed. This one event created a domino effect, and other troubling events followed. One example of the tragedies was the drought, and the dust storms. James Gregory, the author of American Exodus writes,
Students are always taught about slavery, segregation, war, and immigration, but one of the least common topics is farm women in the 1930’s. Lou Ann Jones, author of Mama Learned Us to Work, portrayed a very clear and clean image to her readers as to what the forgotten farm-women during the 1930’s looked like. This book was very personal to me, as I have long listened to stories from my grandmother who vividly remembers times like these mentioned by Jones. In her book Mama Learned Us to Work, author Lou Ann Jones proves that farm women were a major part of Southern economy throughout the content by the ideology and existence of peddlers, the chicken business, and linen production.
During the late nineteenth century, the agrarian movement evolved into a political force that energized American farmers to voice their political and economic grievances like never before. Although the movement essentially died after William Jennings Bryan's loss of the 1896 Presidential election, many of the reforms they fought for were eventually passed into law.
The Dust Bowl was "the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains," (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book "The Dust Bowl." It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's "need" for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to take all it could from the earth while giving next to nothing back.