How Did The Dust Bowl Affect The Economy

543 Words2 Pages

Presently, the United States is considered to be the country with the largest economy. According to the latest World Bank figures "[The United States] represents a quarter share of the global economy (24.3%)", but the country hasn't always been financially superior. From 1929 to 1939, America had been going through the Great Depression, where people all over were struggling financially. In 1929, the Stock Market crashed, having a dreadful impact on all Americans, starting the Great Depression; this was then worsened by the Dust Bowl in the Midwest making life hard, and affecting the economic prosperity for all Americans. During the Roaring Twenties, life was great: the economy was increasing rapidly, and people could “buy now, pay later,” yet it wasn’t always going to stay that way. In 1929 approximately four million Americans invested in stocks using credit. …show more content…

As a result of these droughts, along with inadequate farming practices, topsoil became dust. Intense winds carried 300 million tons of dirt across America; this was the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl doubtlessly made life more difficult than it already was. The Dust Bowl destroyed around 100 million acres of land, ruining crops and leaving 3 million farmers unemployed. If that wasn’t already awful enough, the dust storms suffocated livestock and wildlife to death, there were plagues of grasshoppers, crickets, spiders, and centipedes. As for humans, according to Avis D. Carlson, “The impact [from the Dust Storm] is like a shovelful of fine sand fling against the face.” due to the dust carried across the country. The dust bowl also led to many cases of dust pneumonia; where the lungs can’t function accordingly because of thick layers of dust that lay deep in the

Show More
Related

  • Dust Bowl Dbq

    585 Words  | 2 Pages

    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, 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” refers to a time during the 1930’s where the Great Plains region was drastically devastated by drought. All of the 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.

    Read More

  • How Did The Dust Bowl Affect People

    790 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Dust Bowl occurred for many reasons, most all our fault. “Some of the reasons that the Dust Bowl occurred were over-farming, livestock overgrazing, drought and poor farming practices.” (Dust Bowl facts and summary) Because of this negative experience it now teached us to be careful and now we know what to do to prevent this.“When drought struck from 1934 to 1937, the soil lacked the stronger root system of grass as an anchor.”("Dust Bowl Facts and summary") That's really bad for the farmers because then the wind can easily pick up the dirt off the

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast The Dust Bowl

    453 Words  | 1 Pages

    The Dust Bowl in the 1930s was a very horrific event in the Southern Plains region of the United States. This was a period of severe windstorms & dust-storms that would blow over hundreds of miles. This stripped the soil of nutrients, and damaged the ecology and agriculture of these American lands. The 2012 drought in the Central Great Plains was a period that lasted only 4 months, through May to August, that eclipsed the record of the Dust Bowl, for the driest period. The Dust Bowl and the 2012 drought compare and contrast in many ways.

    Read More

  • President Herbert Hoover As The Cause Of The Great Depression

    733 Words  | 2 Pages

    Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas were all victims. They suffered for hours on end of dust blowing through the air into their eyes, mouths and noses. Life could not survive the dustbowl either. Trees were once planted in hopes of collecting the dust, but instead the trees sucked all the water out of the ground. Making the dust even worse. Many tried to leave and find land elsewhere but nobody wanted them there because of low amounts of money.

    Read More

  • Fsa Photography During the Great Depression

    936 Words  | 2 Pages

    The 1920s were a time of leisure and carelessness. The Great War had ended in 1918 and everyone was eager to return to some semblance of normalcy. The end of the war and the horrors and atrocities that it resulted in now faced millions of people. Easily obtainable credit and rapidly rising stock prices prompted many to invest, resulting in big payoffs and newfound wealth for many. However, overproduction and inflated stock prices increased by corrupt industrialists culminat...

    Read More

  • Key Factors Of The Dust Bowl

    712 Words  | 2 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Babylon Revisited

    406 Words  | 1 Pages

    The 1920s were a time of leisure and carelessness. The Great War had ended in 1918 and everyone was eager to return to some semblance of normalcy. The end of the war and the horrors and atrocities that it resulted in now faced millions of people. This caused a backlash against traditional values and morals as people began to denounce the complex for a return to simplicity and minimalism. Easily obtainable credit and rapidly rising stock prices prompted many to invest, resulting in big payoffs and newfound wealth for many. However, overproduction and inflated stock prices increased by corrupt industrialists culminated until the inevitable collapse of the stock market in 1929.

    Read More

  • Causes And Effects Of The Dust Bowl

    1383 Words  | 3 Pages

    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,

    Read More

  • The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural Disaster Caused by Lack of Knowledge

    739 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Dust Bowl delivered an immense agricultural and economic blow to the Great Plains and exacerbated what was left of the U.S economy during the great Depression (NASA). Massive dust storms destroyed just about everything from crops, devastating farms, thus destroying the livelihood and careers of thousands of farmers. This resulted in even more downfall of the U.S. economy during the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl happened around 1930 in the Great Plains due to the farmers over cultivating the land and causing soil to erode. Only with the help of the government and learning proper farming techniques were the farmers able to get back up on their feet.

    Read More

  • How Did The Dust Bowl Affect The Economy

    209 Words  | 1 Pages

    The US was hit the  hardest because of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 with wiped out millions of investors and also the Dust Bowl with affected the severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930’s.  Over the next several years, consumer spending and investments dropped, causing steep decreases in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed.

    Read More

  • Essay On The Dust Bowl

    1579 Words  | 4 Pages

    Throughout the history of the United States, never before was there a longer period of dust storms to occur as The Dust Bowl, most commonly known as “the dirty thirties.” The Dust Bowl affected farmers in parts of the United States and Canada, but it was most commonly found in the Southwest/Midwest. Unlike other severe catastrophes which caused damage to ones ecology and agriculture, “Georg Borgstrom, has ranked the creation of the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological blunders in history” (Worster 4) due to the fact it only took fifty years to accomplish. Many living in the Southern plains during this time of period struggled to maintain a living, “The bank, the fifty-thousand-acre owner can’t be responsible. You’re on land that isn’t yours. Once over the line maybe you can pick cotton in the fall. Maybe you can go on relief. Why don’t you go to California? There’s work there, and it never gets cold” (Steinbeck 23). The greed within the farmers during the 18th century unfortunately led to the Dust Bowl because they were too focussed on obtaining available rich acres to expand their industry and business for money. Ultimately, this led to the occurrence of “Black Sunday,” the migration of farmers fleeing to the Western parts of America, and the economic factors of those affected by the Dust Bowl.

    Read More

  • How Has The Dust Bowl Changed Agriculture

    760 Words  | 2 Pages

    The dust bowl was the worst environmental disaster in the U.S history. Farming practices changed as a result of the Dust bowl. Farmers changed how they plow / take care of their field.There are also many conservation programs and measures implemented as a result and many farmers have fixed drought problems so their soil does not get to dry.

    Read More

  • The Dust Bowl

    1050 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Life During the Dust Bowl

    753 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Dust Bowl was a rough time for farmers in the 1930’s. The Dust Bowl was a drought that had many dust storms involved, which lasted about a decade. What was life like for the people in the dust bowl? People spent a decade of their lives trying to survive in a drought, having to fight diseases, shoveling dust out of their homes, and watching as all their crops get blown away. Some residents thought it was the end of the world.

    Read More

  • The Great Depression in "Cinderella Man"

    1586 Words  | 4 Pages

    The stock market crash of 1929 is the primary event that led to the collapse of stability in the nation and ultimately paved the road to the Great Depression. The crash was a wide range of causes that varied throughout the prosperous times of the 1920’s. There were consumers buying on margin, too much faith in businesses and government, and most felt there were large expansions in the stock market. Because of all these...

    Read More

More about How Did The Dust Bowl Affect The Economy

Open Document