Rhonda L. Tintle

Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s

by Donald Worster. Includes commentsabout

Paul Taylor, Carey McWilliams,Robert Geiger,John Steinbeck,John Wesley Powell, DavidB. Williams, Russian Thistles, China’s dirt, Mary Jane Dunlap,Ian Tyrell,Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Western China, theOgallala Aquifer,andThe Joads.In

Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s

(Oxford University Press: NewYork, 1979) Donald Worster contends that the destruction of the southern plains was oneof the most terrible ecological disasters in human history. Human beings, not nature,heaven, or hell, created this ecological tragedy. It was the result of unbridled greed andarrogance on the part of expansion driven Americans and their erroneous assumptionsabout soil, plants, and rain. According to Worster, the dust bowl happened because "thesystem" worked, not because it failed. Farmers of the Great Plains were a varied group,they were not merely families that worked the land and grew crops. They wereindividuals and corporations who, because of greed and an unyielding attitude, set out to break the land and force it to provide the lifestyle they chose. They were successful intheir first goal; they did indeed break the land. The overwhelming failure and huge costof the second goal are the main topics of the book,

Dust Bowl

.The dust bowl was one of “the three worst ecological blunders in history.” Theother two were the deforestation of China’s uplands circa 3000 BC, and the destruction of Mediterranean vegetation by livestock. China’s deforestation produced centuries of silting and flooding. The ruin of Mediterranean flora left once fertile lands eroded andimpoverished. However, the big difference between the dust bowl and the other disastersis that the dust bowl took only fifty years to achieve. Robert Geiger, an associated pressreporter from Denver, coined the term “dust bowl” after traveling “through the worst-hit

part of the plains.”The irony of the label ‘dust bowl’ is that while some thought the termwas a satire on college football (“orange bowl”, “rose bowl”) Geiger was not referring tosports at all. He was not even referring to the ubiquitous sugar bowl. Geiger wasrecalling “the image of the plains pushed forth by another Denver man William Gilpin”who in the 1850s thought the continent itself was a “great fertile bowl rimmed bymountains, its concave interior destined to one day be the seat of civilization” (28). Drought was a major contributing factor to the dust bowl. Worster defines“drought” as a relative term dependent on one’s concept of “normal.” Climatologists of the dust bowl era defined drought as precipitation deficiencies “of at least 15 percent of the historical mean.” The difference between “earth” and “dust” is that dirt is consideredearth when it is in place growing food and offering humans a place on which to stand or build. Dust is that same dirt, loose and airborne. In the 1930s, once that dirt hit the air people in the dust bowl were on the look out for “black blizzards” and “sand blows.”Black blizzards were dust storms, or “dusters,” that rose off the plains like long walls of muddy water as high as 8000 feet. These dusters were caused by a “polar continental air mass” that lifted the dirt high off the ground. Sometimes the black blizzards wereattended by thunder and lightening storms, or worse an “eerie silence.” Sand blows weredust storms that were created by “low sirocco-like winds” that came from the southwestand caused sandy soils to form sand dunes.In the novel

The Grapes of Wrath

, John Steinbeck situated the Joad family inSallisaw Oklahoma; on the Arkansas border about 400 miles east of Guymon and the panhandle dust center. The Joads had been evicted from their farm in what Steinbeck presumed to be the Oklahoma dust bowl. (In reality, that region of Oklahoma was not2

part of the actual dust bowl). It was greedy wheat farmers and suitcase farmers withcombines and tractors that drove out people like the Joads. The homeless Joads migrateddown Route 66 to California where a brutal agricultural system abused, misused, andexploited migrant workers. In some ways, Steinbeck’s novel confirms discoveries made byPaul Taylor and Carey McWilliams when they investigated the origins of the manydisplaced agricultural workers who arrived in California. Taylor’s and McWilliams’research dovetails with Steinbeck’s novel. In California there was no longer a working bond between the farmer and the land. The agriculture there was based on business;crops were a product to sell. By their own statements people in the agriculture businessin California were not farmers, they were land companies. What surprised Taylor andMcWilliams was that industrial farming was not taking place only in California, “it wasspreading rapidly across the “flat midsections of the country as well.” “ Migrants werefleeing not only drought, but the machine as well.” Ultimately, the Joads were displaced by avarice as much as they were by dirt and machines.John Wesley Powell’s plan for the Great Plains settlement was far different fromthe one that was eventually put into effect. Powell insisted that there was not enoughrainfall for traditional farming in the region past the 100

meridian. He opposed the planthere for 160-acre homesteads. In Powell’s report on the

Lands of the Arid Region of theUnited States (1878),

he proposed dividing the plains into 2,560-acre sections used for livestock. Congress soundly rejected this provided homestead opportunities for only1/16th as many families, and the proposal. When Powel surveyed the area it was still“Indian country.” The last “Indian culture” to evolve in the United States was known asthe Plains Indians, and they came to symbolize all Indian cultures. En route to the Rio3