CHAPTER 1
Introduction
John R. Wunder
The Dust Bowl experience was a seminal event for at least two generationsof Americans, whose lives it shaped or reshaped. The experiencewas felt especially by those directly involved in agriculture inportions of the Mississippi Valley—the farmers of Iowa, Minnesota,Missouri, and Arkansas—and it deeply touched the farmers and ranchersof the American Great Plains—the agriculturalists of North andSouth Dakota, Wyoming and Montana, Nebraska and Colorado, Kansasand Oklahoma, and New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. The1930s in the heartland were difficult times.
This book is about those Americans of the Dust Bowl. The bookseeks to foster an understanding of the physical and mental dimensionsof the disaster. Through original documents of the times, it offers a glimpse into the human response to the Dust Bowl. The firstsection of the book includes contemporary accounts of the plight offarmers. Dust Bowl distress and anger, farmer strikes, and the farmers'march on Washington are captured in memoirs and news reportsof the times. The human response to this environmental catastropheis next observed in letters of self-doubt, attempts to find solutions inscience, and reflections on religious faith.
This volume also includes analyses of the Dust Bowl by historians,and they, too, focus on the human dimension of this environmentaldisaster. The first articles concern the personal responses of men,women, and children to their predicaments. The different ways menand women sought to cope with the Dust Bowl, the fact that somefarmers had to pursue extralegal activities, and the way religion triedto explain the disaster are probed. The history of farmer strikes, theFarm Holiday Movement, and the United Farmers League are described;the use of the media to provide political explanations is alsodiscussed. Finally, three historiographical articles explain the differentdimensions of the Dust Bowl and the farm revolts during the 1930s.Thus, both the documents and the articles search for explanations andanswers to such basic questions as why did the Dust Bowl happen,why did Americans react as they did, and how did the Dust Bowlaffect those who actually witnessed it, as well as their children andgrandchildren.
The first inkling of trouble came in the late 1920s. Prices for farmproducts steadily dropped. When drought conditions began to appearin several areas, many farmers had little, if any, capital reserves. Somefarmers, such as a Harrisburg, Arkansas, family of five who slept onthe floor of a one-room shanty, battled starvation. They survived onrabbits or by stealing a neighbor's hog. Others were very angry aboutthe economic squeeze and the seeming government indifference.
Indeed, the government sometimes appeared to make the problemsworse. Take Iowan Sam Krotter's difficulties, for example. Inspite of his observation that "the most hopeful animal in the world" isthe farmer, even Krotter began to doubt whether he could survive.Iowa and federal laws requiring tuberculin tests for milk cows weresteadily resisted by Iowa farmers. Krotter's jersey calf had been subjectedto a test, and the calf became sick and, eventually, worthless.Farmers saw themselves as being shafted; if their herds were deemedinfected by the test—a test most farmers saw as defective—they suffereda loss of two-thirds of their investment.
The cow war emerged from this distrust and from a showdownbetween farmers and government agents at William Butterbrodt's farmnear West Branch, Iowa, the birthplace of President Herbert Hoover.In a show of force, organized farmers threw veterinarians and thesheriff off the Butterbrodt homestead. The cow war accelerated.
As is the ease with social upheavals and unexpected events, peoplewho in normal times appear abnormal suddenly seem rational. Takethe ease of Norman Baker, hypnotist, cancer curer, and manufacturerof calliopes, who took to the radio to defend the farmers in the cowwar. Baker stirred up the pot of confusion, anger, and frustration. Afrightened Governor Dan Turner called out the National Guard, around1,400 strong. Everyone—1,000 farmers, the National Guard troops,and the Bakerites—converged on the Eversman farm a few miles northof Burlington, Iowa. It was a standoff. Vaccinations occurred, but thefarmers rubbed the cows' lumps so they couldn't be detected, and Iowanspaid $100,000 for the National Guard's holiday. This situationwas an omen in 1932.
The next two years were complicated by extreme drought, governmentparalysis, and farmer panic. Milo Reno organized the Farmers'Holiday Association, which spread throughout the northern Plainsand the Midwest. Farmers took a manifesto and agreed to hold theirproducts off the market until prices rose to cover production costsand to protect each other from those who would confiscate their land,equipment, animals, crops, and belongings.
Farmers went on strike in Plymouth County, Iowa. Milk trucksbecame a focal point because they carried milk produced by farmerswho were not honoring the strike. The strike had little effect on themarket and only increased farmers' frustrations. Some farmers brokeoff from the Farmers' Holiday Association and other farmers' organizationsand started their own local groups, which favored immediatedirect action. In Nebraska, trucks seized from a farmer by a NewmanGrove company were forcefully taken back by a group of farmers.When a tenant farmer near Petersburg died and his $400 mortgagewas not paid by his two sons, the bank foreclosed and ordered an auctionof the farm and the equipment. Farmers marched on the farmand intimidated those at the sale so that only a total of $7.10 was bidat the entire auction.
Committees of Action throughout Nebraska experienced someshort-term successes and generated a great deal of reaction. Theywere called the "Soviets" of Nebraska, and the state was compared to1917 Communist Russia. Businesspeople and the Catholic Church wereprominent in their opposition to the farmers; on at least one occasionthey used force to drive out farmers intent on rigging an auction. Aboveall, farmers wanted to avoid being "put on the road," losing everythingto a bank or creditor. Banding together seemed to help sootheand sometimes placate those fears.
In 1932, farmers' groups decided to march on Washington, D.C.,to explain their plight to Congress. Other groups had recently marchedon Washington, with very mixed results. A contingency of Westernfarmers was to meet in Madison County, Nebraska, and go on to Washington.Not related but called at the same time were a hunger marchby the Communist Party and a renewal of the Bonus Army March byunemployed veterans in the East. Washington, D.C., girded itself forconfrontation.
There were problems along the way. The marchers were harassedin many ways. Housing and food were denied. In Wilmington, Delaware,police violently attacked the marchers, and Washington, D.C.,proved an inhospitable host. The farmers' march broke up, an unmitigatedfailure.
If they could not petition the government, what remained for thedesperate farmers? Violence? Extralegal activities? The violence camein short, unexpected bursts. Chicago schoolteachers set the stage inApril 1933 by demanding back salaries and storming City Council headquartersand the banks. In Le Mars, Iowa, District Judge Charles C.Bradley was dragged from his courtroom and nearly hung by a mobbecause he refused to stop foreclosures on farms. Violence occurredat an auction in Primghar, Iowa, and at a foreclosure near Denison,Iowa. Iowa Governor Clyde Herring blamed hoodlums and urban Communistsfor these activities, and Iowa's farmers laughed.
The weather, however, was no laughing matter. Drought, heatwaves, and dust storms converged on the Great Plains. In April 1931,a dust storm reached the Pacific Ocean, and an even greater dust stormextended to the Atlantic Ocean in May 1934. New Yorkers saw someof the 300 million tons of Plains topsoil that was airborne drift pasttheir windows; the dust was so thick that streetlamps had to be litduring the daytime. As one weatherman commented, it was an amazingtime of "opacity." The Deutschland, a German ship off the Canadiancoast, reported a dust storm at sea.
Farmers were in despair. They joked in macabre fashion abouttaking their Vitamin K—dust—each morning. They were forced toharvest thistles to feed their cattle. Even photographers, like MargaretBourke-White, found dust a formidable foe. The dust storms causeddeaths, including a young Hays, Kansas, boy found suffocated after hehad been lost in the dust. Still a resilient lot, farmers, like CarolineHenderson of the Oklahoma Panhandle, persisted. She wrote of thedust everywhere, of how she thought she was supposed to pretendthings were okay, and of wanting to be optimistic. But there wereominous signs. People in her community were leaving, even thewealthy, long-term settlers. There were simply no crops and no markets.She realized that farmers were a minority and concluded thatthe country no longer eared about them.
Henderson remained committed to farming. She and her husband,Will, changed their farming habits and accepted government conservationefforts. They experimented with livestock and crops. They resistedtaking relief while worrying about their loss of individualism.And they tried to contain their anger at those farmers who gave up orwho refused to try new ways to solve the problems created by theDust Bowl.
Through it all, what was desperately needed was rain. Farmerstried machines, offered prayers, and fought to retain a faith in America,their religion, and their land. The new U.S. president, Franklin DelanoRoosevelt, visited North Dakota and admitted his ignorance aboutthe problems caused by the lack of rain. He promised to try to helpsolve the farming dilemma, and, miraculously, he brought rain.
So, in the end, the evolution of new farming sciences, a renewedAmerican economy secured by federal government intervention, anda means of sustaining the life blood of the farmer—water—ended thegreatest crisis those in the heartland had experienced in the twentiethcentury.
Any historical assessment of the Dust Bowl must consider thehuman factors. Gender is an important differentiation. Many womenin Nebraska and South Dakota, for example, responded to the crisiswith innovations, such as producing new farm products and takingnew jobs, and by limiting their child bearing. Many men and somewomen in Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas became politicallyradicalized. Their desperation dictated a political response.
Prior to the 1930s, troubles on the Plains had led farmers to beattracted to Populism, the Socialist Party, and the Non-PartisanLeague. The 1930s brought a renewal of the Non-Partisan League,the Farmers' Union, the Farmers' Holiday Association, the UnitedFarmers League, the Communist Party, the Farmers National Committeefor Action, and the Farmer-Labor Party. Even the Ku KluxKlan entered the political fray.
Throughout the economic, environmental, and political turmoil,answers were sought: Why had this crisis happened? The media hadexplanations. Radical newspapers, such as the Producers News ofPlentywood, Montana, described business leaders as "greedy Kaisers"and farmers as "selfless patriots," and its publishers eventually toutedcommunism as the solution. The federal government under Rooseveltsought to explain the crisis to the American people through film. ThePlow That Broke the Plains offered the controversial explanation thatthe government itself was primarily to blame because it had encouragednew farmers to attack the unbroken sod of the interior Plains asif another world war necessitated doing so.
Historians do not agree about why the Dust Bowl occurred. Explanationsrange from viewing the Dust Bowl as a purely natural disasteror as the product of farmers' ignorance about the environmentand their misuse of technology to the theory that the application ofenvironmentally unsound capitalism destroyed the farmers' traditionalrelationship to the land or that failed federal government policies andthe happenstance combination of the right kinds of soils, new drylandfarming techniques, world economic incentives, and a migratory laborforce converged at one place during one time—the Great Plains inthe 1930s.
There is probably no clearcut answer, although some possibilitiesring more true than others. One can state with certainty that thereare no simple solutions to prevent future Dust Bowls. Given the natureof the delicate Plains environment, it is crucial that the lessonslearned from the Dust Bowl experience be absorbed by all, lest we bedestined to repeat one of the world's worst environmental calamities.
