THINKING
ABOUT THE WEATHER
They
swept over the plains at speeds of 100 miles an hour, outracing
cars and shorting their ignitions; forcing down planes and stopping
trains in their tracks. They were accompanied by lightning and
thunder, or they moved in awesome silence, driving hundred of
panicked birds before them—clouds of dust 10,000 feet high,
the prairie winds carrying off the rich topsoil of the American
heartland.
These
were the dust storms of the 1930s, and they seemed like a judgement
from God. “This is ultimate darkness. So must come the end
of the world,” a Kansas woman wrote in her diary. “The
nightmare is becoming life,” another observer wrote, as
what seemed like a curtain of black mud descended over everything.
The storms and the wreckage they left behind—both agricultural
and human—would become the very emblem of the Great Depression.
The high plains dust seemed to say not only that the land had
failed, the farms had failed, but that America had failed.
“There
was always the grass ahead of us on and on./ Father to father’s
son./ The meaning of the dust storms was that grass was dead,”
wrote Archibald MacLeish in his book-length poem, The Land
of the Free.
“We
wonder whether the great American dream/ Was the singing of locusts
out of the grass to the West and the/ West is behind us now…/
We wonder if the liberty is done:/ The dreaming is finished.”
It
is impossible to imagine any such environmental breakdown, or
any such crisis of confidence, overtaking us today. Or is it?
Over
the last five years, drought has gripped many of the Plains states
and the dust has again begun to blow. Not, to be sure, like it
did during the plague years of the 1930s—but enough for
Congress anted up $6 billion in emergency drought relief last
summer. As the region plunges deeper into another one of its dry
periods, it is important to remember that the terrible dusters
of that time were by no means a wholly natural disaster.
The
Great Plains have always occupied a choice spot in the American
psyche. Their sheer beauty and immensity seemed to embody our
nation’s limitless abundance and potential. Donald Worster,
in his brilliant history, Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in
the 1930s, points out that Walt Whitman called them “North
America’s characteristic landscape,” and suggested
“that here would be played out the true heroic drama of
our history.”
A more accurate description might have been found in another early
term for the area: “the Great American Desert.” For
thousands of years, even before the arrival of the American Indian,
the Plains have been dry, windswept grasslands. This has always
been a tenuous ecosystem, much of it officially classified as
“semiarid,” and subject to periods of drought that
could last up to a quarter-century.
One such dry spell wrecked much of the local cattle industry back
in the 1880s, and there were dust storms recorded as far back
as the 1860s, but none of this detered the “sodbusters,”
the small farmers who followed the cattlemen into the region.
With incredible endurance and innovation they clung to their small
claims, fulfilling their dreams of living free on their own land.
They believed with a religious fervor in Charles Dana Wilber’s
contention that “rain follows the plow,” and the new
pseudo-science of “dry-farming,” and they dreamed
of threading the plains with railroads and even building cities
full of skyscrapers on the prairie vastness.
In
the 1910s their perseverance was reward with a worldwide grain
boom, facilitated by the outbreak of World War I, and a host of
new, mechanized farm machinery that reduced the time it took to
bring an acre of wheat to the granary from 58 to 3 hours.
This
would prove to be the beginning of the region’s undoing.
The bottom dropped out of agriculture after the war ended and
the farmers were left with heavy debt on their shiny, modern machinery.
The laissez-faire America of the 1920s had little to
offer them beyond Calvin Coolidge’s suggestions that failing
farmers needed to find a new line of work.
The
farmers themselves responded in the only way they knew how, by
plowing up still more—and more marginal—land, and
planting it with wheat, the leading cash crop. Yet with each new
bushel dumped on the market, farm prices dropped ever lower. The
sod had been busted all right, the grasses plowed under, and now
there was little to hold the dirt in place. Then the droughts
returned, worse than ever. Something had to give—and it
was the soil.
The
dust began to blow in 1932, and by 1933 there were 179 dust storms
in a single month, some of them carrying Plains soil all the way
to the Eastern seaboard. But it was the following spring that
the storms turned into a truly terrifying phenomenon. A storm
that began in Montana and Wyoming on May 9, 1934, drove some 350
million tons of dirt east; dropping an estimated four pounds of
soil for every inhabitant on the citizens of Chicago, blackening
the midday sky over Buffalo. By the morning of May 11 it was sweeping
through Boston, New York, and Atlanta, finally settling on the
decks of ships 300 miles out to sea.
The
storms kept returning every spring, and they would not stop until
the end of the decade. In 1935, several counties in Kansas, Texas,
and Oklahoma went six weeks without a day entirely clear of dust.
A single storm “carried away from the plains twice as much
earth as men and machines had scooped out to make the Panama Canal,”
and that year alone there were 40 dusters that reduced visibility
to less than one mile. There were 68 more such storms in 1936,
72 in 1937, 61 in 1938. As late as March, 1939, an Oklahoma duster
put enough dirt in the air to cover an estimated five million
acres one foot deep.
The
damage done to the land was awful. The region lost some 850 million
tons of topsoil just in 1938. Saharan dunes of sand covered homesteads,
and animals both wild and domesticated died in droves.
The
damage done to the people was worse. The farmers of the Dust Bowl
told jokes about the storms and called the blowing dirt “vitamin
K.” But it killed them, too; an estimated 33 dead in a single
Kansas county during April, 1934, from the “dust pneumonia,”
the silicon particles settling in their lungs. Adults and children
alike, taken on the road, wandered blind and choking, and smothered
in the drifts. Farmers worked their field in goggles and homemade
gas masks, looking like soldiers who had somehow wandered out
of the trenches of the Great War. Those who survived could do
little but sit inside, through storms that lasted as long as three-and-a-half
days; unable to read, to talk, to sleep, to do anything but watch
the dust drift in past closed doors and windows, and the wet towels
and newspapers they stuffed into the doorjambs.
It
was an ecological disaster with few parallels, akin only to the
ancient deforestation of China, or the ruin of the old Mediterranean
bread basket, or the Soviet Union’s destruction of the Aral
Sea. The New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt at least
responded with alacrity, creating the first national farm policy
in our history. Farm subsidies were begun, and billions of dollars
in federal aid were poured into the Dust Bowl to prevent further
erosion, and to restore the land; to save family farms and provide
farmers with public works jobs, or resettlement money, or home
relief. For the first time, some marginal lands were permanently
restricted from cultivation. A favorite program of FDR’s
even had 220 million trees planted in “shelterbelts”
along the edges of the western prairies.
All
of these programs helped to restore the human and physical ecology
of the Southern Plains—but in the end the people left anyway,
a total of 3.5 million of them during the 1930s; the Okies and
the Arkies and the exodusters of The Grapes of Wrath,
heading West again, this time in ramshackle cars and trucks. They
were widely despised and feared, even prevented from entering
California at first. Professional geniuses such as H.L. Mencken
proclaimed, “They are simply, by God’s inscrutable
will, inferior men.” But eventually, with the help of the
social welfare state and the war boom, and the postwar boom, and
the same tenacity with which they had clung to the Plains, the
exodusters realized their dreams in the suburbs of Orange County,
and a thousand other California subdivisions.
Those
who remained behind quickly forgot any lessons the thirties might
have taught them. World War II sent agricultural prices soaring
again, and soon the farmers of the Plains were chafing against
government “restrictions” and plowing up marginal
grasslands. And soon enough, the dust storms returned, to the
point where, from 1954-1957, twice as many acres of the Plains
were damaged every year by wind erosion as there had been from
1934-1937. Sales of wheat to the Soviet Union sparked another
boom in the 1970s—and still more dusters.
None
of it was anything like the 1930s. There were new methods of conservation,
and deep-well irrigation, and the hybrid crops of the “green
revolution,” to fight off the consequences of ignoring the
natural environment. The West, too, was fundamentally different.
The vast exodus never really ended, and over the course of the
1990s, 60 percent of the counties in the Great Plains states lost
population. The region has now returned to the old definition
of a “frontier,” with six or fewer people per every
square mile. The small, yeoman farmers have been largely replaced
by “agribusiness,” and other industrial concerns.
Can
we can count on these large, multinational corporations to be
any better stewards? In the spring of 2002, Congress passed a
brand new, omnibus farm-subsidy bill to the tune of $180 billion.
Are such subsidies, once intended to preserve small family farms,
still appropriate for big business, or should we adopt other methods?
These
are the sorts of questions we will have to decide in the years
ahead. The new water sources of the Plains states are not likely
to be infinite and we may well have to face a much greater drought
threat, the prospect of global warming. The blindly optimistic
among us refuse to acknowledge that nature can offer any limits
to our ambition. The dust storms of the southern plains sing a
different tune.
