Remembering the Dust Bowl

Excerpts from an article in Harper's:

By the 1930s, five sixths of the original indigenous animal population that existed in the United States when the Europeans arrived had been wiped out. Seven eighths of the original woodlands had been cleared. One sixth of the topsoil in the United States would shortly blow away in the ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl.

The dust storms were very much a man-made disaster, the result of the heedless booms and busts that had succeeded one another for decades on the High Plains...

Unlike the dirt-poor farmers of the Tennessee Valley, the plowmen of the High Plains were able to obtain the latest motorized combines and tractors, thanks mostly to cheap bank loans, and during the wheat booms of the 1920s they used their machines to tear apart the fragile ecosystem of the land around them. As prices kept declining due to the glut of crops they kept producing, they ripped into even more marginal lands, still funded by the local, undercapitalized banks that forked over loans with low interest rates on almost no collateral...

“The tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought, no epic siege of frost, no prairie fire, nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done,” Egan noted.

They had removed the native prairie grass, a web of perennial species evolved over twenty thousand years or more, so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land—thirty-three million acres stripped bare on the southern plains.

Before long, the dust began to blow. There were 14 dust storms in 1932, another 38 the next year, a record 134 in 1937...

A fresh storm blew up on May 9, 1934, this one out of the freshly turned earth of Montana and Wyoming, an estimated 350 million tons of dirt suddenly airborne. It dropped more than 12 million tons of grit on Chicago, then covered the East Coast from Boston to Savannah. In New York City, it cut the sunlight of a lovely spring day in half for five hours. Nor did it stop there, since there was nothing to stop it. The duster did not dissipate until it had blown over three hundred miles out over the Atlantic Ocean, startling sailors when it rained dirt on the decks of their ships...

When birds and snakes all but disappeared from the Dust Bowl, they were replaced by a biblical plague of locusts, unseen in the West for decades, with as many as 14 million of the ravenous grasshoppers to a mile. At least one state government responded by sending out the National Guard to coat the land with up to 175 tons of insecticide per acre, thereby finishing off any life the drifting dirt or the grasshoppers might have left behind...

Along with the men from the Agriculture and Interior departments, the federal government sent out boys from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)—a huge new program created to absorb the thousands of destitute, homeless young men who had previously been riding the rails, living in hobo camps, and idling in cities, with nowhere else to go.

Many criticized this and other New Deal programs as socialist or fascist, but the CCC paid the three million young men it employed over the years thirty dollars a month (twenty-five of which they were required to send home to their families) and provided them with decent meals, a good place to sleep, education, exercise, and some training in woodcraft. In return, they planted thousands of acres of new buffalo grass and other, experimental drought-resistant grasses garnered from around the world. Before the program ended with World War II, they had also constructed more than eight hundred state parks and planted nearly three billion trees, many of them in the shelterbelts FDR had insisted upon, to tie down the soil. Together with Bennett’s experiments they had restored more than half of the damaged land by the time the war began.

Much more at the link.  And I highly recommend the series of programs presented on American Experience regarding the Dust Bowl, and Ken Burns' documentary on the subject.