The Dust Bowl Essay was the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains, (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book The Dust Bowl. It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930’s.
It’s cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society’s need for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature’s work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to take all it could from the earth while giving next to nothing back. The Dust Bowl existed, in its full quintessence, concurrently with the Great Depression during the 1930’s. Worster sets out in an attempt to show that these two cataclysms existed simultaneously not by coincidence, but by the same culture, which brought them about from similar events. Both events revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other in economic.
(pg. 5) Worster proposes that in American society, as in all others, there are certain accepted ways of using the land. He sums up the capital ethos of ecology into three simply stated maxims: nature must be seen as capital, man has a right/obligation to use this capital for constant self-advancement, and the social order should permit and encourage this continual increase of personal wealth (pg. 6) It is through these basic beliefs that Worster claims the plainsmen ignored all environmental limits, much like the brokers and investors on Wall Street ignored a top-heavy economy. Worster explains that our business-oriented society began to transform farming into a mass-producing industrial machine, becoming another excess of free enterprise that not even Roosevelt’s New Deal could remedy.
The dirty thirties, as many called it, was a time when the earth ran amok in southern plains for the better part of a decade. This great American tragedy, which was more devastating environmentally as well as economically than anything in America’s past or present, painstakingly tested the spirit of the southern plainsmen. The proud folks of the south refused at first to accept government help, optimistically believing that better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but from the new machine-controlled agriculture.
As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller The Grapes of Wrath, it was not nature that broke the people-they could handle the drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on land investments and buying tractors to pursue it, that had broken these people, smashing their identity as natural beings wedded to the land. (pg. 58) The machines, one-crop specialization, non-resident farming, and soil abuse were tangible threats to the American agriculture, but it was the capitalistic economic values behind these land exploitations that drove the plainsmen from their land and created the Dust Bowl. Eventually, after years of drought and dust storms, the plains people had to accept some form of aid or fall to the lowest ranks of poverty in the land, and possibly perish.
The government set up agency after agency to try and give federal aid to the plains farmers. Groups such as the Farm Credit Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Land Utilization Project, and the Agricultural Adjustment program, among others, were formed to give the plainsmen some sort of relief from the hardships of the Dust Bowl. In Cimarron county, Oklahoma 306 households were drawing government relief in June 1934: 60 of them were paid entirely in commodities, the rest mostly in cash (pg. 131). Roosevelt and the government continually contrived ways to give the plains aid, and when the Supreme Court ruled that a certain agency was unconstitutional, Roosevelt simply created another one in its place. In the end, Worster argues, the government agencies did not improve the lot of the large number of poor, marginal farmers, and in fact, none of the federal activities altered much of the factory-like culture of the plains..
