DUST, DROUGHT, AND DREAMS GONE DRY
A Traveling Exhibit and Public Programs for Libraries about the Dust Bowl
Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm, 1936 Arthur Rothstein, photographer Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Resources
Related Readings: Please visit ala.org/ Sanora Babb. Whose Names Are Unknown. University of programming/dustbowl Oklahoma Press, 1979. for a complete list of Geoff Cunfer. On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment. library host sites. Texas A&M University Press, 2005. Timothy Egan. The Worst Hard Time. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Caroline Henderson. Edited by Alvin O. Turner. Letters From the Dust Bowl. University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.
R. Douglas Hurt. The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition History. Nelson-Hall, 1981. do not necessarily represent those of the Bison herd at water, circa 1905 National Endowment for the Humanities. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Pamela Riney-Kehrberg. Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas. University Press of Kansas, 1994. The Geography and People of the Plains John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath. Viking Press, 1939.
Donald Worster. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Living on the Plains depended on rainfall, but many people Oxford University Press, 1979. and animals thrived there. Bison shared the Plains with other Music: animals and with different groups of indigenous people for Woody Guthrie. Dust Bowl Ballads. RCA Victor, 1940. thousands of years. Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and others On the Web: called the Southern Plains home. After 1800, Native Americans The Dust Bowl: A Film by Ken Burns had to share the Plains with other people. An increase in http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/ hunting led to the decline of the bison, and as the human The National Drought Mitigation Center http://drought.unl.edu/DroughtBasics/DustBowl.aspx presence in the region grew, towns and ranches occupied more Library of Congress Teacher’s Guide to the Dust Bowl Migration of the Plains. Humans came to rely more on agriculture, and http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/ farming made them dependent on the rain. The fields, the primarysourcesets/dust-bowl-migration/ grass, the bison, and the dramatic swings in weather inspired Documentaries: several distinct traditions of art based on the ecology and Ken Burns, director. Dust Bowl. Florentine Films, 2012. cultures of the Great Plains, from Native American artists to Chana Gazit, producer. American Experience: Surviving the novelists like Willa Cather. Artists who captured the intense Dust Bowl. Steward/Gazit Productions, 1998. connection of people to their environment in the Plains spoke Dan Tyrrell, producer. When Weather Changed History: Dust Bowl. The Weather Channel, 2008. for the many migrants, farmers, and shop keepers who had 1 little time to draw or write fiction. 6 “It All Went Black”
A period of prosperity between 1900 and 1920 seemed to vindicate changes to the land. Although farmers did not know it at the time, this boom period relied on temporary conditions. Parts of the Plains received record rainfall in the 1910s and 1920s. The temporary environmental and economic conditions that encouraged the boom on the Plains ended in the early 1930s when an epic drought started. No longer protected by the grass and its deep roots, the soil dried and turned to a fine dust that the winds spread everywhere. The lack of rain destroyed the sense of control over nature that Plains farmers had enjoyed during the boom years. The winds and the dry fields produced monumental dust storms. Perhaps the largest Living Through the Dust Bowl one occurred on April 14, 1935, a day known as Black Sunday, when the sunlight grew dim and the sun was blocked by the In the absence of a dramatic storm, dust still swept through great dust-filled maelstrom. farms. Dust blocked roads, buried fences, destroyed tractors, and accumulated like great snow drifts against buildings. In response to the hostile conditions, farm families created self-help groups to save their way of life. They made a virtue out of staying on their farms through the dark years. Women often added new duties to their already extensive work. Some people left their farms and moved to the nearest urban center, while others packed their meager belongings and went west,
(Background) A Texas farm endures in the dust, 1938 especially to California. Many more farmers stayed. Historians Dorothea Lange, photographer Courtesy of the Library of Congress estimate that seventy to eighty percent of people in the region of the Dust Bowl remained on their land. The intense physical and psychological experiences of living through dust storms inspired many artists to try to capture the essence of the Dust Bowl. For example, Woody Guthrie sang ballads about A man walks around his car during a dust storm, undated H.H. Finnell Collection 3 Courtesy of Oklahoma State University Library, the suffering of ordinary folk on the Plains. 4 Special Collections & University Archives The Legacy of the Dust Bowl
Farmers who stayed in the Plains during the Dust Bowl thought about the economics of agriculture and wondered what the government might do to help. State and federal programs to aid farmers in the Dust Bowl region increased in the late 1930s. The Drought Relief Service, the Soil Erosion Service, and the Agriculture Department all provided aid to farmers. Government scientists tried to understand the causes of the Dust Bowl, a tradition of investigation that continues
today. Scholars now have a better understanding of the Prairie grasses being plowed under, Kansas, 1930s U.S. Soil Conservation Service Courtesy of Oklahoma State University Library, economic forces driving agriculture in the Plains during the Special Collections & University Archives period, and scholars understand the endurance, cooperation, and creative responses of local communities to the harsh conditions. Railroads, Farming, and Machines Change the Land Our best bulwark against another ecological crisis on the Plains inhabitants faced a complex and highly variable Plains remains our collective knowledge. How do we build environment featuring periods of wet weather and periods of strong communities? How do we reimagine economic and drought. People on the Plains also endured hostile weather social systems that fit with the natural environment? The Agricultural fields and abandoned farmstead, phenomena such as tornados, blizzards, floods, hail storms, history of the Dust Bowl can inform these discussions. eastern Montana, date unknown Terry Sohl, photographer Courtesy of United States Geological Survey dust storms, and the constant wind. The short-lived tornado or the hail storm both posed less of a threat than the most serious weather hazard on the Plains: drought. The Plains has episodic, recurrent drought: periods of average or above average rainfall alternate with periods of drought. Despite the challenges with rainfall, economic conditions in the Plains changed dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth
century with the expansion of railroads into the region from the east. The railroads, government scientists, and land speculators all repeated the same phrase: “The rain follows the plow.” They used this phrase to convince farmers that plowing the land released moisture into the atmosphere which, in turn, 5 produced more rain. 2