The answer on the wind
Those who didn't escape scrabbled for a living. But how did the Dust Bowl happen?
- Reviewed by Elizabeth Corcoran
Sunday, January 8, 2006
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived
the Great American Dust Bowl
By Timothy Egan
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN; 312 Pages; $28
On April 14, 1935, a freakish storm barreled through the Texas Panhandle, sweeping up 300,000 tons of topsoil. The dirt sailed through the air, choking people and animals, blanketing houses and cars. All told, the duster ripped up twice as much dirt as was dug out of the Panama Canal during seven years of construction. The storm, however, needed only a Sunday afternoon to do so.
Even worse: "Black Sunday" was simply the worst day of the protracted Dust Bowl era, an almost decadelong period of drought and killer dirt storms that beat down the settlers of the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma. The reward for those who stuck it out? A chance to keep scratching a meager living out of the ground.
Timothy Egan's "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl" masterfully depicts the bitter life in the Great Plains in the 1930s. John Steinbeck in "Grapes of Wrath" painted a searing portrait of the Okies who fled the Plains. But far more people clung to their farms, hoping that the next season would be better.
At a time when advertising jingles coax us to "reward" and "indulge" ourselves, the gritty realities of life during the Dust Bowl era are jarring. Children died of "dust pneumonia." Families chewed through canned tumbleweed for dinner. The schools that managed to stay open were heated with cow chips and relied on whatever ragged books they had on hand for education.
Egan's underlying message, however, is even more disconcerting: namely, that the Dust Bowl era was brought on by reckless misuse of the land. Egan's point is fundamental. Weather (like much of life) has cyclical patterns, sometimes kind, sometimes vicious. If we ignore these fluctuations when we harness the land by laying out farms or constructing levees, nature will strike back.
Egan, who is a national correspondent on environmental issues for the New York Times, rolls out his story with linguistic flourishes that echo his belief that the land around us is as alive as any furry creature. For instance, a dugout, Egan writes, "is just that -- a home dug into the hide of the prairie." Egan's dust storms are alive, too, although in a gruesome way. The dust "could penetrate like a spirit, cascading down the walls or slithering along the ceiling until it found an opening."
The story is a classic tragedy, with all the elements of ambition, pride and retribution. Before the farmers (or the "nesters"), there were cowboys who managed herds of cattle; before the cattle, there were buffalo and the thick native grasses. "As long as the weave of grass was stitched to the land, the prairie would flourish in dry years and wet," Egan writes. "The short grass, buffalo and blue grama, had evolved as the perfect fit for the sandy loam of the arid zone."
But fields of wild grasses and roaming buffalo never made a developer rich, nor did it make the U.S. government believe that its hold on the territory was secure. Speculators trumped up the opportunities for wannabe farmers, offering free train rides from Kansas City to the Texas panhandle. "Get a farm in Texas while land is cheap -- where every man is a landlord!" proclaimed one developer.
Rain on the Plains in the late 1920s made farms flourish. Wheat shortages elsewhere in the world drove up prices. Farming in Texas looked like a sure bet. In 1926, a woman in Kansas proudly said she had made a profit of $75,000 on her 2,000 acres of "bony" soil -- more than the salary of President Calvin Coolidge.
The more that people make money, the more money they seem to want to make. Between 1924 and 1929, the acreage plowed in the Texas Panhandle rose by 300 percent (to 2.5 million acres). Then the rains stopped. Few farmers had lived in the area long enough to know the Great Plains' cycles of drought and wet. The droughts coincided with the Depression and plunging wheat prices. Farmers ripped up more land to compensate for falling prices. Then the winds kicked in, hurling the land into their faces.
Even as Egan blames farming for ravaging the land, his portraits of individual farmers and families are tenderly poignant. Hazel Shaw, a young mother, is brave and tragic, betrayed by the land she loves when her baby daughter and grandmother die within hours of each other of dust pneumonia. Bam White, cowboy turned ambivalent farmer, becomes a star-crossed icon for the farmers when the government puts him in a movie aimed at justifying the enormous federal government intervention in the region.
"The Worst Hard Time" is not a cool, academic assessment of the farming policies of the 1930s. It is not a complete history. Egan ends his story in July 1938 as President Franklin Roosevelt parades through the streets of Amarillo, Texas, blessed by an unexpected rainstorm. It's a tidy, cinematic ending, even if it leaves the fate of the Panhandle vague. (How much did the government's plan to plant trees help? How did farming patterns change? What happened the next time drought rolled around?)
But the most vivid stories should plant questions in our minds. Egan has admirably captured a part of our American experience that should not be forgotten.
Elizabeth Corcoran is a contributing editor at Forbes magazine.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/08/RVG73GF0801.DTL
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