The Dust Bowl

The southern Plains, where Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico meet, get little rain, and wet and dry years come and go. For thousands of years, deep-rooted prairie grasses held the soil in place. Bison and, later, cattle grazed on them.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, homestead laws drew settlers onto the dry land. Many believed a slogan, “rain follows the plow”: farming would somehow bring more rain. A run of wet years seemed to support the idea, but the region’s climate had not changed. Those wet years were part of a natural cycle, and dry years would return.

During World War I, Europe needed food, and the government guaranteed wheat prices above $2 a bushel. Farmers plowed more land, and in the 1920s new tractors and combines let one family farm far more acres than horses ever could. Historians call these years the Great Plow-Up: millions of acres of native sod were turned under for wheat. When prices fell after the war, many farmers plowed even more to make up the difference, and they borrowed to buy land and machines.

In 1931 farmers harvested a huge wheat crop just as the Depression drove prices down to well under half a dollar a bushel. Many could not pay their costs and left fields bare. Then the rain stopped. Drought gripped much of the Plains, with only a few breaks, until 1939, and the heat set records in 1934 and 1936.

Without grass or crops to hold it, the dry topsoil blew away. Dust storms grew larger, and their number rose and fell from year to year, peaking at 72 regional storms in 1937. Some, called black blizzards, turned noon as dark as night. In May 1934 a storm carried Plains dust all the way to Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., and onto ships far out in the Atlantic. Estimates of the dirt it carried run to hundreds of millions of tons.

The worst storm came on Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. After a clear, warm morning, a wall of dust swept south from the Dakotas and Nebraska. The Weather Bureau in Dodge City, Kansas, recorded its arrival at 2:49 in the afternoon and estimated the cloud at 500 to 600 feet high and moving 50 to 60 miles an hour. It reached Boise City, Oklahoma, after 5 p.m. and Amarillo, Texas, after 7. The next day, an Associated Press reporter wrote about the “dust bowl,” and the name stuck.

Families stuffed wet rags around windows and doors, yet dust still covered beds, food and dishes. People wore masks or damp cloths over their faces. Static electricity from the storms could short out car engines. Cattle went blind or choked, and swarms of grasshoppers and jackrabbits ate what little grew.

Breathing the fine dust caused a lung illness that people called dust pneumonia. It was most dangerous for babies and the old. After Black Sunday, the Red Cross reported 17 deaths from it in Kansas alone. No one knows how many died across the whole region.

Farmers who could not pay their mortgages faced foreclosure. In the farm belt, especially in the Midwest, neighbors sometimes fought back with penny auctions: at a foreclosure sale they kept other buyers away, bid a few cents for the land, animals and tools, and gave them back to the owner. Federal programs bought starving cattle in 1934, and relief work kept many families going.

Many families stayed through the whole decade. Many others gave up. Historians estimate that about 2.5 million people moved out of the Plains states during the 1930s. Not all of them came from the dust-blown counties. Many were tenant farmers and sharecroppers from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Missouri, pushed off by drought, low prices and landowners who replaced them with tractors.

Hundreds of thousands drove west on Route 66 to California, often in old cars piled with everything they owned. Californians called them “Okies,” wherever they came from, and many treated them as unwanted outsiders. In February 1936 the Los Angeles police sent officers to the state’s borders to turn back poor travelers. Critics called this “bum blockade” illegal, and it ended that spring.

Most migrants found only seasonal work picking crops for low pay. They lived in roadside camps and ditch-bank shacks. The federal government built a number of clean migrant camps, such as the one at Arvin, with tents or cabins, showers and a camp council run by the residents.

Most Americans learned about the Dust Bowl from photographs, films, books and songs. The Resettlement Administration, which later became the Farm Security Administration (FSA), hired photographers to record rural poverty and to build support for its programs. In March 1936 Dorothea Lange stopped at a pea pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California, and photographed a mother with her children. The picture, now called “Migrant Mother,” became one of the most famous images of the Depression.

In 1936 the government also released The Plow That Broke the Plains, a short documentary by Pare Lorentz. In 1939 John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, a novel about the Joads, a fictional Oklahoma family who lose their farm and travel to California, where growers exploit them. It became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize, but some California officials burned or banned it, calling it unfair to their state. A film version followed in 1940.

The folk singer Woody Guthrie grew up in Oklahoma and lived in Pampa, Texas, when Black Sunday hit. He traveled west with the migrants and wrote songs about the storms, the camps and the people. In 1940 he recorded them on the album Dust Bowl Ballads.

The government responded in several ways. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 paid farmers to plant less, to raise prices. Federal drought programs bought millions of starving cattle and gave relief jobs and loans to farm families.

The soil scientist Hugh Hammond Bennett had warned for years that erosion was a national danger. In September 1933 he was put in charge of a new Soil Erosion Service in the Department of the Interior. In March 1935 the service moved to the Department of Agriculture, and on April 27, 1935, Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation Act, which made it the permanent Soil Conservation Service (SCS), with Bennett as its chief. A story often told says that, while Bennett spoke to Congress that spring, a dust storm from the Plains darkened the Washington sky.

The SCS paid and taught farmers to farm in new ways. Contour plowing followed the curves of the land so furrows caught rain. Farmers planted cover crops and grass, left stubble on the fields and plowed strips that broke the wind. Starting in 1937, states let farmers form soil conservation districts to plan this work together. The Forest Service’s Shelterbelt project planted rows of trees across the Plains, an estimated 220 million trees by 1942.

Rain returned in the fall of 1939, and by the early 1940s high wartime prices brought good times back to Plains farms.

The Dust Bowl was one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. Drought was natural, but the damage was not only nature’s doing. Plowing up the grassland, farming for quick profits and the collapse of prices all left the land exposed. Many historians see it as a lesson in what happens when people farm against the limits of the land.

The Soil Conservation Service still exists as the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Droughts struck the Plains again in the 1950s and later, but conservation methods kept them from becoming another Dust Bowl. Today scientists also watch the falling water in the Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates much of the region. Unit 4 looks at the New Deal, the larger program that created the SCS and many other agencies.