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The great depression free essay history
The great depression free essay history
Essays comparing and contrasting dust bowl
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The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan gives the account of the Great Plains and the hardships the people who tried to conquer this land survived. People flocked to the Great Plains in search of prosperity. The land was ripe for the taking. The Homestead Act of 1862 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 attracted many people to this area. The land was unknown to most Americans, and the climate was not understood. The Native Americans had been long removed along with their livestock. The whole area was an endless sea of grassland. The climate was different than the urban areas on New York and Chicago. Some people were even given diagnosis that this desert climate could only cure. “Doctors prescribed a remedy: go west, to the southern plains, …show more content…
go west to breathe” (6). There was no way of predicting the weather so the climate of the next few decades was an unknown that would change the lives of the incoming populous. Egan gives a commanding introduction on the hardships faced by the people of the Great Plains. His journalistic observation into the lives of the Dust Bowl starts out with a powerful message about life in “No Man’s Land”. The willingly sacrifices made by those in the grasslands seems meaningful until Egin sets a pretense for human error. The story takes a drastic turn of events which set a course on human made error and the punishment for greed. He gives the account of several families that live within several different areas of the Dust Bowl. These accounts are revealing to the circumstances that bring them there, the treachery of the weather, and why those conditions could not deter these great people from their destiny: Controlling the Great Plains. Egan introduces his readers to a variety of people who settled or had already settled in the Great Plains. Ban White, an out of work cowboy looking for work in the glamorized XIT ranch which turns out to be a bust. The Whites were already down on their luck searching for the glorious life as farm hands when fate led them to Dalhart, Texas. Dalhart’s resident doctor, Dr. George Waller Dawson and his wife, Willie. Doc Dawson was also intrigued by the allure of the land so as to establish his retirement from medicine and become a man of the land, so to speak. Uncle Dick Coon is the “for-father” of Dalhart. He survived the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and was a testament to the town. John McCarty is established the Dalhart Texan newspaper and is a giant voice to the people. Boise City, on the other hand, was much more different than Dalhart in terms of enchantment. This city attracted people on the belief of a paradise in the Great Plains in Oklahoma. The place was barren and had no hope of glory. This was a land that outlaws went to hide and were also forgotten. Hazel Lucas’s family brought her with them to this seemingly awful place which was so barren, windmills were used to irrigate water for the agriculture. Hazel became a devoted teacher and often had to be more of a protector than teacher for her children when the storms decided to interrupt class. Trains brought Fred and Katherine Folkers to the Oklahoma Panhandle. The “nesters” looking for their place in the Great Plains. The Great Plains also had its share of immigrants looking for the American Dream in the grasslands of the Great Plains. George Ehrlich, a man that survived the tyranny of Russia, was also hassled in his new country. Then there is Ike Osteen. A boy with a vision that embodied the life of the wheat farmers. Plowing up the land as fast as you can and keep going. These are some of the major players in The Worst Hard Time that Egan highlights. Their stories are told with the hopes of unraveling the idea of what can be so great about the Great Plains. These people give harrowing tales of hardship, resentment, and ultimately the sacrifices in which Egin makes you wonder: Was all this worth the trouble? The stories captivate the reader with a sense of patriotism. The American Dream in its finest. A new-found purpose for a forgotten land. But where are the guinea pigs? I can’t help but notice that Egin gives off an aroma of a land so undesirable that the people are begged to colonize this land by the government. During most of the migration, the weather was not undesirable, but content. Content for farmers to plant their crops and make a harvest worth bragging about. The tractor came and with it a boom of agriculture so great, Congress passed the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916. World War I brought a demand of wheat that took the farmers to a new level of hierarchy. They were America’s backbone for the new few years. Few people worried about the industrialization of the land or the health of the soil. After all, the Earth was nothing more than soil and water. “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses” (51). Families prospered under the innovative design the Great Plains was overtaking. Egin goes into depth explaining how the production of wheat changed the course of several of the families lives. Some were skeptical of this new-found glory and decided not to invest of this “destroying” of the soil. Egin eases the hardship brought on by the drought with the introduction of the Great Depression. The Worst Hard Time creates a picture of suffering from the “dusters” that ravaged the land harshly for close to a decade. He gives a great prelude to the storms by showing the hardships that prepared the people for the worst times the United States had faced economically. These people knew challenging times and when the times got harder, so did the people. While Egin spreads the joys of the people who profited from the Great Plains, he still portrays the land as a savage landscape which consumes those trespassing upon it. The Great Depression turned the tide on the abundance of wheat, well it’s prices, that is. “In September 1929, just over 1.5 million people were out of work; by February of that following year, the number tripled” (95). With the downturn of the economy came the stalemate of crop purchasing. There was no money to buy crops, but production didn’t cease. The people of the Great Plains took to the land and plowed just as hard as ever. If they produced it, surely it would sell. Egan shows this optimism in some of the residents as a last-ditch effort before having the realization of their situation. Next the drought came swallowing up the rainy seasons of years before. The dry heat made the land more cumbersome than ever. Timothy Egan creates a story of how the land decided to punish those for their greedy investments and destruction of the soil. The winds picked up bringing dust-storms upon dust-storms with no end in sight. The Great Plains residents started to eat their own agriculture because it was going nowhere. Most of it was stockpiled, and when those stockpiles were full, the government did not want anymore. The winds picked up more and more each day. These dust-storms were now nasty, horrific winds of dust picked up from different areas of the Great Plains leading to a path of destruction. The soil was deprived of the nutrients that kept it stable for so many years and the wind was ripping it away layer by layer. Winds blew constantly and different now. There was always wind in the Great Plains, but now the dirt was leaving and causing hardships on the people. Days passed on end where people were not able to leave their homes, children could not go to school, and even stopped production of wheat. Many thought was the point. People started to live in different ways, calculating their interests in the land. Trying to have children was a huge concern. Newborns and Elderly people were more easily to succumb to dust-inhalation. This created a layer of dust in the lungs which makes it hard to breathe. Respiratory problems were severely on the rise. Finally, President Roosevelt decided to get involved by sending experts to other arid lands to learn the nature of the storm. Livestock was eroding from the weather so the government devised a buyback or destroy plan to help the farmers. Other places organized rabbit hunts to eliminate the creatures, weather permitting. The restructuring of the land due to dirt relocation was phenomenal. Landscapes were totally reshaped by the amount of soil displaced by the storms. When you talked of the Great Plains in the 30s, the was not hardly mention of it without the words dirt or storm. Hugh Bennet was President Roosevelt’s key player in turning the tide for the Dust Bowl. It would take time, but the great error the humans made with the land could somewhat be reversed. A great detail into the thoughts and plans put into action are depicted by Egan with less detail than the actual plague that was destroying the Great Plains. The problem is presented to Congress, but is not deemed any harsher than the rest of the United States. “Still, many politicians thought other parts of the country needed more help” (226). The programs implemented were a start but would never bring the Great Plains back to the stable grassland it once was. The droughts, heat, and dust-storms took its toll on almost every resident of the Dust Bowl.
Still, people were determined to tough it out. We are shown how people overcame horrible living conditions, severe depression, and even come to find peace with the land. Several people believed they were called to this land and it was there home. Many of the “nesters” packed up once the dust-storms started to destroy the land. John McCarty went so far as to his commitment was by starting the “Last Man Club”, which ironically years later, he eventually left Dalhart. This was brought on by incentives the government had given to leave the Dust Bowl. People tried to migrate to other areas just to be turned away. The details of sign like the ones in California not welcoming “Okies” show how the rest of the world was suffering and did not want any more added to their pain. People were determined to survive the storms and get back on with their farming. Only, the storms never stopped, the weather did eventually change, but too little too late. Many of the residents had decided they had had enough of the torment. A migration that brought people into the land also saw another migration out of the land. Many people had to leave for health reasons. Mainly dust-inhalation and the loss of property due to no income. The Great Plains never did recover from the initial farming that tore the land up. Recovery efforts have eased the problematic dust-storms, but the weather is still unpredictable. The grass has returned in certain areas, but many of those areas are not inhibited by people, but livestock. The way the land was before human intervention,
pure. The interviews made by the author provide vivid detailing to the story as it pertains to the Dust Bowl. The use of census and weather information backs up the reports of the population shifting during these years. Diary excerpts from several witnesses of the Great Plains show the mentality of their situation. These people came on the promise of good fortune. While these demands were met, at first, they were not prepared or knowledgeable of the mistakes that loomed ahead. The journalistic approach is maybe one reason I believe Timothy Egan portrays the people as the evil destroyers of land. Yes, they destroyed the land in hopes of what they thought was the American Dream. This great country and also industrialization was a semi-new entity in terms of the great wheat boom in the Great Plains. This was a dark period in American history, so I can understand the gloom that resonates throughout this book. I still feel like more optimism could be shown towards the people of the Dust Bowl. Americans are relentless, and if nothing more, enduring.
Many believe the Dust Bowl was caused solely by bad weather, but Egan shows a multitude of factors that led to the catastrophe. In Timothy Egan’s book, The Worst Hard Time, Egan believes that the syndicate and government, overproduction of the land, and drought were all factors that caused the Dust Bowl.
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
The “Dust Bowl Odyssey” presented an initial perspective of why families migrated from drought-ridden, Dust Bowl, areas to California. Edward Carr cautions, “Interpretation plays a necessary part in establishing the facts of history, and because no existing interpretation is wholly objective, on interpretation is a good as another, and the facts of history are in principle not amendable to objective interpretation” (Carr, 1961, p. 31). Historians had to separate the prejudices, assumptions, and beliefs of the times in order to have a more objective reasoning of the migration. The migration had valid evidence that supported against the theory of the Dust Bowl being the only contributor. Rather there were other historical contributions to
From all over the country, from professional doctors, chefs, maids, and even more farmers came to the club held in the dust bowl area to bring more support. With this no meetings or ranks were ranged to handle all this people. It was just a mass of meek and outgoing Americans willing to help. This effect had sustained three-quarters of the original dust bowl area farmers to stand still in their damaged land. If all those people migrated to different states, it would be a bigger catastrophe then the time’s current migration. Through the possibly most horrific time of American history, the free people came together to help one another, gathering for each other, in poverty or in riches. There was no distinct difference in the people or actions, for that club had no shame for making America stand taller than the dust storms and dirty thirties. That is what the power of the Last Man’s Club was and possibly still is.
In the 1830's the Plains Indians were sent to the Great American Deserts in the west because the white men did not think they deserved the land. Afterwards, they were able to live peacefully, and to follow their traditions and customs, but when the white men found out the land they were on was still good for agricultural, or even for railroad land they took it back. Thus, the white man movement westward quickly began. This prospect to expand westward caused the government to become thoroughly involved in the lives of the Plains Indians. These intrusions by the white men had caused spoilage of the Plains Indians buffalo hunting styles, damaged their social and cultural lives, and hurt their overall lives.
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
Although early nineteenth century Kansas was vast in territory, the land was mostly unpopulated. This cheap abundant land along with the dream of a better life lured farmers from the east to start their lives in Kansas. Many people were driven to pack their belongings and start their westward bound journey. Floyd Benjamin St...
"Chapter 2 Western Settlement and the Frontier." Major Problems in American History: Documents and Essays. Ed. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Edward J. Blum, and Jon Gjerde. 3rd ed. Vol. II: Since 1865. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012. 37-68. Print.
...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.”
At the core of understanding the Dust Bowl is the question of whose fault it was. Was it the result of farmers tilling land beyond what the environment could bear, or is it just a natural fluctuation in the atmosphere? These questions have intrigued historians and started a new evolution of theories. The Dust Bowl grazed across the Midwest of the United States, destroying the ecology and agriculture of the United States and Canadian Prairies"1.
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 Dust Bowl existed, in its full quintessence, concurrently with the Great Depression during the 1930's. Worster sets out in an attempt to show that these two cataclysms existed simultaneously not by coincidence, but by the same culture, which brought them about from similar events. "Both events revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other in economic." (pg. 5) Worster proposes that in American society, as in all others, there are certain accepted ways of using the land. He sums up the "capital ethos" of ecology into three simply stated maxims: nature must be seen as capital, man has a right/obligation to use this capital for constant self-advancement, and the social order should permit and encourage this continual increase of personal wealth (pg. 6) It is through these basic beliefs that Worster claims the plainsmen ignored all environmental limits, much ...
The opening chapter paints a vivid picture of the situation facing the drought-stricken farmers of Oklahoma. Dust is described a covering everything, smothering the life out of anything that wants to grow. The dust is symbolic of the erosion of the lives of the people. The dust is synonymous with "deadness". The land is ruined ^way of life (farming) gone, people ^uprooted and forced to leave. Secondly, the dust stands for ^profiteering banks in the background that squeeze the life out the land by forcing the people off the land. The soil, the people (farmers) have been drained of life and are exploited:
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.
Truly it was a living “nightmare” for anyone living around these lands. The conditions created from these dust storms proved to be deadly, “ those who inhaled the airborne prairie dust suffered coughing spasms, shortness of breath, asthma, bronchitis and influenza” (History Channel Staff). Evacuating the area seemed to be the only plausible option for people in this time. With 400,000 people leaving the great plains, With no chances of making a living in their current situation farm families abandoned their homes leaving westward to become migrant