How Did The Dust Bowl Affect The South

The Dust Bowl’s Impact on the South

The famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is known for the history over the racial status of the people in the South during the 1930s; however, it also contains the South’s history of the environment and economy, known as the Dust Bowl.

The Dust Bowl is, in other words, the stupidity of humanity. It all began when the first tractors were invented, we, humanity, were so fascinated with the fact what we could grow almost as five times as many crops with a tractor than with a simple plow, started to play with the idea of intensive agriculture, and to do that more land is required. And what better place than the Great Plains. Millions of acres were cultivated in what was called the Great Plow-Up. A

horrible decision on our part, which is stated by Junior Scholastic/Current Events,” The grass, which had been there for centuries, was the ‘the organic material that knitted the soil together,’ Bonnifield says.

Without it, trouble was bound to come”, meaning that this will play a role later on and it did. At first, it wasn’t so bad everything went well, there was plenty of rain and wheat, but when the first World War was over everything went to dookie. Farms began to fail, to a point that farmers just started to leave their land, then it just stopped rain, which is actually natural in the Great Plains, but since the soil lacked a strong root system it was easy for the wind to pick up loose topsoil and swirled it into dense dust clouds, which they called ‘black blizzards’. Slowly this started to spiral out of control, as Jay Fitzgerald explained,” There is little disagreement that the Dust Bowl was the result of an almost perfect storm of environmental and economic events, starting in the early 1930s with a drought, and compounded by the enormous economic hardships caused by the Great Depression ”, not only was the Dust Bowl a horrible time period for the farmers, it also led to was the

Great Depression: meaning that the farmers weren’t the only ones affect. This is explained by Leslie McManus,” This disaster - which displaced thousands of people, turned cities into ghost towns and affected 100 million acres of land.” Not only does this event make our textbooks, but also in our literature.
In the book To Kill a Mockingbird, the year that it took place was in the same time period that the Dust Bowl had commenced. One of the important characters that was affected by this event were the Cunninghams. This is shown in Chapter 2, Page 23,”’ The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them hardest”, Atticus is implying the Dust Bowl as the ‘crash’, and he’s explaining to Scout that, that’s why they can’t pay him back with money and instead they pay Atticus back with stovewood, hickory nuts and a stack of turnip greens:with this the author is foreshadowing that Maycomb County is slowly losing money since no one can afford anything. In the story it explains ,”’Atticus said professional people were poor because the farmers were poor. As Maycomb County was a farm country, nickels and dimes were hard to come by for doctors and dentists and lawyers”’, this shows that not only was Maycomb County has already affected by the Dust Bowl, but they were already showing the signs of the Great Depression, and how it affects people that are well off and poor people.
The Dust Bowl a catastrophic event that will forever be remembered in history and expressed through our most known literature.