In his award-winning account of the devastating environmental and cultural effects of the Dust Bowl that enveloped America’s Midwest in the 1930’s, Timothy Egan attributes the disaster to the collective cause of reckless man-made agricultural practices, even as he surveys the tragic individual stories of the people who suffered from it. He argues that the combined effects of drought and a heat wave in the early 1930s, and man’s hubris and environmental ignorance and irresponsibility throughout the decade caused the Dust Bowl, and yet finds compassion for the small homestead farmer and the weak and powerless families who inhabited the region and lived through the disaster rather than picking up stakes and moving on. His story is a traumatic …show more content…
Farmers overturned every available square acre of the vast great plain to plant wheat, without realizing and perhaps without caring that they were thereby removing the grassland covering that had historically held the soil in place and gave it nutrients needed for fertility. Therefore, when the drought and harsh weather hit in the early 1930s – weather that Egan calls “perhaps the most violent and extreme on earth” at the time (p. 2) – the soil was left cracked and devastated. Having spent so much of their effort turning over the land by plowing it under to plant crops, Egan argues that when the heat and wind and drought occurred, the people found that “the earth turned on them” (p. 2). Great plumes of dust kicked up in the rampaging winds that swept across the plains, suffocating people and livestock alike. This caused people, during the time of the Great Depression, when almost a quarter of the population were unemployed, to double down, plowing more land and planting more crops in order to try to survive the economic hard times. A downward spiral of sorts resulted, with the uncooperative weather leading to crop failure and more dust, and the people growing …show more content…
Children died of a disease the doctors called “dust pneumonia” – that is when they were not given away by parents who could not afford to feed them. These and other effects of the impenetrable dust in the air during the massive storms were found devastating because they involved the threat of death in the most natural of actions, breathing. The Dust Bowl therefore changed the way people related to their environment, to their own health, and to their fellow man. Egan even argues that such a simple act as shaking hands was prohibited because of the unexpected effects of the dryness, which caused static electricity that could knock both men down. He claims that those who lived through it described the Dust Bowl as worse in its nightmarish effects than similar horrors such as the Flu Epidemic of 1918 and either World War I or II (pp. 5-6). His book is an account of the recollections of those people as both a type of people’s history and an environmental
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.
Gregory, James N. "Dust Bowl Legacies." University of Washington. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2013.
The Dust Bowl over its time that it occurred affected many things living or nonliving.
Steinbeck’s book garnered acclaim both from critics and from the American public. The story struck a chord with the American people because Steinbeck truly captured the angst and heartbreak of those directly impacted by the Dust Bowl disaster. To truly comprehend the havoc the Dust Bowl wreaked, one must first understand how and why the Dust Bowl took place and who it affected the most. The Dust Bowl was the result of a conglomeration of weather, falling crop prices, and government policies. The Dust Bowl, a tragic era lasting from 1930 to 1939, was characterized by blinding dust storms.
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
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.
The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the 1930's, that affected the midwestern people, for example the farmers, and which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." The early thirties opened with prosperity and growth. At the time the Midwest was full of agricultural growth. The Panhandle of the Oklahoma and Texas region was marked contrast to the long soup lines of the Eastern United States.
Throughout many student’s school career they will have read various books for several of their classes. Out of the Dust might have been one of those books, but for those who haven’t read it yet I recommend you make an effort to read it as soon as possible. This novel gives you great insight into what it was like to live during The Dust Bowl and all the hardships people went through in that time period. Furthermore, it displays the story in free-verse. Another thing that this novel shows is to persevere through hard times.
The area of severe wind erosion, soon known as the Dust Bowl, compromised a section of the wheat belt near the intersection of Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. ”(Gregory, 11). Along with Gregory, John Steinbeck in his book, The Harvest Gypsies, and Debra Weber in her book, Dark Sweat, White Gold, also write about these events, and in particular the people who were affected by it. The Dust Bowl had ruined any chance of farmers in those regions being able to farm, because of that they were forced to relocate to be able to survive.
While with horses, a farmer could only plow three acres of land in a day; with a tractor, he would plow up to 50 acres. As a result of the tractors, farmers plowed up too much and eventually caused the lands to dry up. In the summer of 1931, the rain stopped. Whirlwinds began to dance across the fields, but nobody seemed to notice that everyday they were becoming thicker, larger, and faster. None of these residents imagined these random whirlwinds would become destructive storms. Victims of these gruesome storms stated that the clouds of dust would slowly come closer and end up surrounding them. They brought pure darkness. Residents thought it was the end of the world. Animals were found dead in the fields with stomachs coated with up to two inches of dirt. Dust would enter people’s ears, mouths, noses, and eyes, causing it to be difficult for them to see and breath. An epidemic, known as dust pneumonia, arose in these areas. One third of the population in this area died due to the pneumonia. The Red Cross eschewed dusk masks to help prevent sickness. The weather Bureau reported thirteen dust storms in 1932 and thirty-eight in 1933. However, the worst recorded storm was on April 14, 1935. This day
Sander, Noel. "American Dust Bowl." American Dust Bowl. American University, May 2013. Web. 09 Mar. 2014. . (Sander).
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
The effect from both the Dust Bowl drought and the Great Depression made it hard on farmers in the early 1900’s; it was hard for farmers to produce crops (“The Ultimate AP US History”). Farmers with small businesses were forced to end
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.
Being a kid in Oklahoma during the dust bowl wasn’t the greatest. Every morning, no matter the weather conditions, the kids would have to milk their cows, and feed all the farm animals (A Child's Life During the Dust Bowl). The walks to and from school were never easy. They would walk several miles, and it would always be very windy. Sometimes the kids would have no choice but to walk backwards because the wind was that bad.