DECADE of DISCONSOLATION by Tom St
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DECADE OF DISCONSOLATION By Tom St. Martin INTRODUCTION An estimated 500 farmers, some armed, stormed the business district of England, Arkansas demanding food and threatening to take it forcefully. The business community appealed to the American Red Cross which responded by authorizing $2.75 for each of the families involved. The farmers came from a rich agricultural region ravaged by drought. Army engineers reported that the Mississippi River was an extremely low stage. Water in the Mississippi River is at a lower level that at any time in the last seventy years. More than 3,000 firefighters are now in the northern Minnesota woods area. Parched soil and dried out underbrush have created a fire hazard in every northern county according to A. F. Oppel, deputy state forester. Hundreds of small blazes reported. A thin pall of smoke hangs over the entire northern portion of the state. There is an impending threat of a roaring inferno. Dust borne on northwest winds of high velocity shrouded the sun in Minnesota in neighboring states . It was the worst storm of its kind in recent years. It turned day into dusk and halted vehicular traffic. Office buildings and homes could not hold the dust out. Grasshoppers, tiny but vigorous and with ravenous appetites invaded grain fields in the Argyle locality in great numbers and with a suddenness that caught the grasshopper fighting organizations unprepared. The drought has held back growth of vegetation in the hatching grounds and the hungry grasshoppers have moved into the fields and are devastating tender grass, leaving no signs of growth behind. Open rebellion among Stevens County farmers on the progress of drought relief flamed up during the past week. Thirty five farmers presented their complaints to Governor Floyd B. Olson. The county is not getting the amount of drought relief that was promised. More than one thousand persons attended a mass meeting in Montevideo in the interest of obtaining more adequate relief for Minnesota drought areas. Normal crop is believed impossible: many areas beyond the help of good rains. Secretary of Agriculture Wallace says drought will not cause a food shortage. Budding bushes and trees and lawns were a verdant green this morning as a thirty minute rain late yesterday washed off the dust with which they have been laden the past few weeks. Many area lakes are dry and others are five to six feet below normal levels. Subsoil water has receded from ten to twelve feet below the ground. The drought has brought a calamity never before experienced in this county. Nearly all pastures are barren of grass and many farmers are without feed of any kind for their livestock except only that which they can obtain through drought relief. Cattle are dying of starvation. Other cattle are being made ill by the dust and dirt that coats every mouthful of grass. As another heat wave headed into the northwest the federal Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) officially classified 352 counties in eleven states as drought stricken. During the past months the severe dust storms have piled up so much dust in the ditches that drainage will be retarded. Ditches in places are filled to a depth of three feet. There has been no rain to speak of in Brown County since the forepart of April. The foregoing excerpts --some of them paraphrased, most of them direct quotes are taken from various Minnesota newspapers during what, whether from a meteorological, economic or sociological standpoint, was indisputably one of the most disconsolate, miserable eras in the history of the United States, the Upper Midwest and the Plains states in particular. During the entire ten year period beginning in 1930 and ending in 1939, wide areas of the country were afflicted by extended periods of extreme drought, frequent dust storms and unprecedented summer heat waves. Tragically, this ten year siege of perverse weather was more or less coterminous with a prolonged economic depression which began with the Great Stock Market Crash of 29 October 1929 and which persisted, a few intervening but weak, short lived economic upturns notwithstanding, until the outbreak of World War II in the autumn of 1939. The result, of course, was widespread and intense human suffering, political turmoil and, in some instances at least, the threat, if not the reality, of mass violence. The political, economic and sociological aspects of the latter of what is now called the Great Depression have, of course, been treated extensively in literature (e.g. Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath") and in numerous economic and political treatises. So far as I know, however, the meteorological/climatological dimension of the so-called "dirty thirties" has been neglected, seemingly even forgotten by a generation which, in many quarters, has become blindly caught up in controversies engendered by the worldwide warming trend which began in the 1980's, the causes and implications of which, at the time of this writing, are the focus of a lively debate involving climatologists, environmentalists, politicians and business interests. It is my hope, then ( and a modest hope it is) that what follows will jog the memories of those who might read it, thereby helping them to see that "global warming" is neither a new nor a unique phenomenon. I would hasten to add, however, that this particular contemporary concern is only one of several factors which prompted me to write a meteorological history of the 1930's. It is, rather, a secondary factor which, in my view at least, is a concern of little relative importance. Which is to say that the climatic anomalies of the 1930's even if they are now seen as little more than a backdrop for contemporary controversies --- are of intrinsic historical significance, having substantively influenced and even shaped many aspects of American life, not only in the years immediately preceding World War II but in the years beyond. Or, to put it differently, the dust storms, the droughts and the heat waves of the 1930's, although most certainly providing a perspective helpful in gauging the magnitude and extent of the changes taking place in today's global climate, warrant consideration in their own right, an episode not be forgotten or dismissed as something peripheral to the American experience. With this in mind, I have attempted to compile an integrated but by no means exhaustive -- account of the meteorological events of the 1930's. What follows is, however, more than a mere compilation or aggregation of climatic statistics. Any account of the anomalous climatic events of the "dirty thirties" must, of course, include large amounts of quantitative data. My account, however, will, in addition to the indispensable numbers, include a large amount of qualitative material gleaned from newspapers and other sources material which will focus on the human dimension of the Dust Bowl years. I have, moreover, included a considerable amount of information pertaining to states other than Minnesota, information emphasizing an obvious fact, namely the fact that many other parts of the nation were afflicted by the 1930's drought and heat, some clearly experiencing adverse weather conditions worse than those experienced by Minnesota residents (e.g. Minnesota escaped the worst ravages of the massive drought which afflicted much of the southern, central and eastern parts of the United States in 1930). As noted, much of the material contained in the ensuing account was obtained from various Minnesota newspapers, particularly those published in communities with reliable, complete 1930's weather records and/or published in communities whose records were assumed to be representative of weather conditions in a larger geographical area (e.g. the Moorhead and Argyle records were assumed to be representative of 1930's weather conditions in the Red River Valley region). Other sources include the Monthly Weather Review published by the United States Weather Bureau, then part of the United States department of agriculture (now the National Weather Service, United States department of commerce); Minnesota Monthly Climatological Data, vols. XXXVI through XLV, also published by the United States Weather Bureau; the daily local record (consisting of Weather Bureau forms 1001, 1032 and 1014) kept during the 1930's by observers at the Minneapolis Weather Bureau office; a book entitled "Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930's" by Donald Worster (Oxford University Press, 1979); and "Climate and Man: Yearbook of Agriculture, 1941" published by the United States department of agriculture. With the exception of Worster's book, all of the foregoing source documents were provided courtesy of the Minnesota State Climatology Office, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Minnesota History Center (MHS). Any attempt to gauge the extent and intensity of the climatic anomalies of the 1930's must, of course, entail comparison of specific monthly, yearly and/or decennary totals and averages with long term normals and trends. In all instances, the normal temperature and precipitation values cited herein are those established by the U.S. Weather Bureau for the period, 1891 (when the Weather Bureau was established) through the 1930's. So far as can be determined, all individual station normals are the simple averages of temperature and precipitation as recorded at each of approximately ninety sites during this period of record (or for a shorter period for stations which were established after 1891). Annual statewide averages, moreover, are a simple, aggregate average of the values recorded at the various individual station during any given month and/or year. And long term statewide normals, accordingly, are the simple average of the annual averages recorded during the years, 1891 through 1939. Regrettably, however, the 1891-1939 averages, whether for a particular station, for the state as a whole and/or for the entire period of record, differ in many important respects from the Minnesota climatological normals now used by the National Weather Service.