Repeating History: The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression

Looking to the past for inspiration.

It looks a bit bleak, doesn’t it? I don’t want this to be our future. | Photo by Samantha Sheppard on Unsplash

It was like something out of an apocalyptic novel.

The Great Depression was in full swing; families in the cities were crushed into cramped one-room flats, jobs were scarce and hardship was rampant. People were desperate to make everything last as long as possible, stretching food and supplies to the limit just to make ends meet.

The advent of the 1930s had struck with all the force of a runaway train.

It was an especially bitter pill to swallow following the brief period of plenty that was achieved during the Roaring 20s, and some folks went as far as to blame the debaucherous youth for breaking out of the rigid structure of traditional roles and dress.

Clearly, it was the fault of young people getting too uppity. They went and threw all of the money away on flapper dresses and Harlem drag balls.

The economic collapse was all-encompassing. The shambling husk of the United States financial system dragged most other nations down with it; the instability and fear it caused would contribute to the rise of fascism in Europe.

Uncertainty and fear breeds anger and desperation. As Yoda once said, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.

There we go, another stamp on my nerd card! Forgive me for a touch of humour, you’re going to look back on it fondly in a minute.

At the height of the Depression, a domino effect began out in the breadbasket regions of the United States and Canada. The seeds sown by the U.S. policy of Manifest Destiny were sprouting all over the West, right about the time that a calamitous drought was taking shape.

With extreme poverty on the rise, the world could hardly take another disaster. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what was coming down the pipe.

And what’s worse is, thanks to a very brief period of excellent luck, nobody saw it coming.

They didn’t know how to make overnight oats back then. They were missing out. | Photo by Jocelyn Morales on Unsplash

It began with the farmers.

The Homestead Act of 1862 gave American citizens — those who hadn’t taken part in the South’s secession in the Civil War — the right to claim land and settle it. They were granted 160 acres apiece, provided they were willing to live on and cultivate the land for farming.

This was part of Manifest Destiny, the policy of expansion that the United States government was using to push people to settle the Western Frontier.

There were some obvious problems with this. For one thing, the native inhabitants were not particularly thrilled about a foreign government handing the land away to a bunch of puritanical strangers.

They had weapons, and they were more than willing to use them in defense of their ancestral homelands. The settlers were invaders trying to push them out, and they weren’t interested in being driven off.

The conflict was relentless and brutal, with mass casualties on all sides.

Just getting out to the western lands was ridiculously difficult and dangerous. We’ve all heard about the Donner Party. But by 1869, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad made the trip considerably easier.

By the 1930s, the lands out west were pretty well covered. Both in the United States and Canada, there were thriving farmlands dotting the landscape hither and yon.

But for every fertile, wonderous agricultural success story, there were dozens of colossal mistakes.

The gift of 160 acres was given to every male American citizen, regardless of their level of skill and education in the arts and methods of farming. Anyone who thought he could make a living by working the land could try his hand at it, even if he had no idea what on Earth he was doing.

These guys thought that by cultivating the land, they would essentially be letting God know that he needed to give them rain, good weather, and good rich loam to plant in.

They figured it’d take care of itself in the end. “Rain follows the plow,” as it were.

They were wrong.

This is a lot harder than people think it is. This is not ‘the simple life’. | Photo by Scott Ymker on Unsplash

Farming is difficult, costly work.

I spent a chunk of my childhood surrounded by farmlands and livestock, owing both to my family’s habit of moving every year or two and seeking cheap lodging and also to my dad’s fondness for country living.

When my parents split, nothing really changed. We eventually moved to the city, but I still wound up surrounded by cows for parts of the summer.

I lived with my mother, but visiting my dad meant going with him and helping his neighbours around the farms, especially with feeding their cows and horses. I was fine with this; I share a lot of my father’s affection for gardening and spending time at the local farmer’s market that he ran.

Occasionally getting to feed a bagel to an adorable little calf was a definite bonus in my books. The local bakery would often sell stale, day-old breads and bagels to the beef farmers as a treat for the livestock.

It was a delicious snack for them, and the fact that it was fattening certainly didn’t hurt.

I once watched a cow eat a piece of bread right off her calf’s face where it got stuck, and I made sure the little guy got a snack right out of my hand when I could. Poor thing.

So with this experience in mind, let me tell you something right now; those who tell you that farming is ‘the simple life’ are morons. They’re people who live online and haven’t touched a hayfork in their lives.

Farming is brutal, back-breaking work. I only visited off and on to help out Dad’s neighbours, I wasn’t there full-time. Those people were tough, hardened folks.

Things were constantly going wrong, people were constantly getting hurt, and they were constantly struggling to make a good living off of the land.

I could not, and still cannot, keep up with them.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you will not succeed at farming. Even if you do know what you’re doing, ol’ Mama Nature can still turn up and whip you from one end of the yard to the other.

Now, most of the settlers out in the West at this time weren’t trying to build what we picture when we think about farms. We picture big, factory farmland producing food for whole communities, but this wasn’t what most of them were after.

Rather, these were homesteaders. According to the Homestead Act, if you could keep the land successfully for 5 years, it was yours to do with what you wanted.

You just had to cultivate crops on it to keep it properly in accordance with the law.

These people were just trying to grow enough food to sustain themselves and their families until they could sign the final papers; they weren’t trying to construct an industry like we have today.

One thing a lot of them didn’t take into consideration is the cost of getting started. They didn’t know what they needed to succeed, and they didn’t know how much money it was going to take.

They set themselves up for failure right from the get-go.

Tractors did exist in the 1930s, but most homesteads could not afford them. They did that work by hand. | Photo by Kateryna Ivanova on Unsplash

It wasn’t all their fault, though. Owing to a period of excellent rainfall and fantastic weather, the initial rush of settlers was met with great conditions.

The government assured people that this was the norm and that things would only continue to improve as they continued to turn the land into farms and homesteads.

Given this initial burst of success, the Homestead Act gained some updates; the Kinkaid Act expanded the offer to 640 acres in certain parts of Nebraska in 1904.

In 1909, the Homestead Act was expanded to include 340 acres granted to those who were willing to take marginal lands that were difficult to irrigate and manage.

More additions over the years continued to make expansions and introduce incentives to bring industrial farmers out to the Great Plains, including some that encouraged people to establish ranches and livestock herds.

All of this led to a massive boom. It was akin to the old Gold Rush, a giant flood of people all heading west in the hopes of earning their own lands and making great profits.

When World War 1 broke out in 1914, the demand for wheat and other foodstuffs shot up. It seemed like the farmers couldn’t lose. There was great prosperity out in the plains, and life was good.

At least, it was good on the surface. But the inexperienced and ignorant folks who were trying to build their funds didn’t understand the damage they were doing.

They snubbed ol’ Mama Nature, and one day, she came calling.

Healthy crops need healthy soil. You have to know how to build it up and manage it. | Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash

Nature is a closed system that exists in careful balance. It has evolved to function the way it does, and the consequences of disrupting an ecosystem can be severe and unpredictable.

The thousands of new homesteaders that flocked to the plains did not understand that.

They didn’t know that plowing deeply into the earth would kill the wild grasses around their lands — and they didn’t know what that meant. They didn’t know that the interlacing roots of these wild grasses were what was keeping the surface soil from washing away in the rain.

They didn’t know how to preserve topsoil, or that crop rotation was necessary for the health of their harvest.

In their rush to earn money, they planted bumper crops — they covered their lands from end to end in plants, leaving no inch of ground unsown. They didn’t leave their lands fallow for off-years. They just kept planting and did nothing to enrich the soil over the cold months.

Any gardeners reading this, I feel your pain; I winced pretty hard when I hit this point in my research.

So, the inevitable happened; the soil died.

For those who don’t know, soil is usually chock full of living organisms. Fungi and microbes, worms, and other insects contribute to the cycle of life and death, all kinds of little critters that provide nutrients and aeration to the earth under our feet.

Healthy loam — the black, rich earth that farmers and gardeners prize — requires lots of rotting organic material and a healthy biome of these critters and bacteria. That’s what creates the food that plants eat through their roots.

This is why gardeners go nuts for good compost and animal manure; it enriches the soil and keeps those critters and fungi happy and healthy.

Healthy soil, healthy plants.

It’s this organic matter in the soil that makes it spongy and capable of holding on to water; without this diversity of life in the soil, it dries out and won’t absorb moisture.

You know when you leave a houseplant sitting for a long time, then try to water the dry soil, it takes forever to sink in? It just gathers in puddles on the surface, right?

That’s why. And that’s basically what these would-be farmers did to the entirety of the Great Plains region of North America.

The lean times officially begin. | Photo by Diane Picchiottino on Unsplash

And now we return to the scene I painted in the introduction.

In 1929, the Great Depression began. The economic collapse sent the markets tumbling down, and the previous prosperity that the homesteaders experienced went with them.

Their crops were suddenly unable to make them any profits; nobody could afford their old prices, and so the costs of production suddenly swung far higher than the money they were earning back. The see-saw tipped against them without warning, and they were knocked off of their feet.

In 1930, the disaster was compounded. Mama Nature took away their precious, life-giving rains.

The first of many droughts rolled through the prairies, and the untethered topsoil was left completely exposed as the farmers stopped planting to save money and water.

The soil of the Great Plains is naturally very fine and light. Combined with the high winds the prairies are famous for, it created a perfect storm.

Specifically, it created the dust storms that would go on to plague the whole continent for almost a decade.

Dust filled the air, blocking out the sun and leaving exposed skin with friction rashes from the blasting sand carried by the wind. Breathing it in could be deadly, causing a form of Pneumoconiosis that they dubbed ‘dust pneumonia.’

“The Red Cross established a relief setup for dust sufferers. The headquarters was in Liberal Kansas. According to Red Cross officials, 17 deaths had been reported in Kansas from dust pneumonia and three died from dust suffocation.” — National Weather Service, 88th anniversary of the 1935‘Black Sunday’ dust storm.

Schools and workplaces were shut down every time a storm rolled through — some teachers even battened down the hatches and kept kids in the building all through the night instead of sending them away.

It was safer than sending the little ones out into the pitch blackness with no way to find their way home.

The storms, work closures, and intense poverty of the Great Depression became an endless cycle.

Many people living in the once-prosperous West had little choice but to pack up and flee, surrendering to the land and giving up on the homesteading dream that had suddenly become a horrible nightmare.

This mass exodus would later be crowned as the largest homegrown refugee crisis in American history.

It made for a very bleak picture. The derogatory term ‘Okie’ comes from this period in history, referring to the people fleeing from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. | Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

Amidst the apocalyptic destruction of the Dust Bowl, the government was scrambling. They’d caused this mess, and they now had to fix it. It was time for a course correction.

Alongside the Great Depression, solving the Dust Bowl became priority number 1 for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. This was not a quick fix; the problems in the Plains persisted up until the end of the Great Depression in 1939.

It took years to get nature back on track, just like it took years to knock it off balance in the first place.

FDR’s New Deal was the first step in this long, winding process. As a bonus, he managed to create a relatively sound checklist for government response to future natural disasters. Go, him!

The agricultural reforms laid out in the New Deal — such as regulations for water use and soil conservation — were a direct response to the missteps that caused the Dust Bowl.

It was a complete rehaul.

He created programs to educate farmers and homesteaders to prevent basic mistakes and corner-cutting. He provided financial incentives for them to adopt more sustainable farming practices.

He established the Civilian Conservation Corps, hiring thousands of out-of-work citizens to plant trees across the Great Plains to help with water retention, provide windbreaks, and arrest soil erosion.

It gave Americans paid work, did wonders for the environment, and helped establish the system of National Parks that the country boasts to this day.

The measures were simple, common sense, and highly effective. There was a near-immediate drop in the intensity of dust storms thanks to the planting scheme, even though the drought persisted for years after the fact.

If you needed more reasons to respect FDR, there you go. The man saved America twice over.

Modern farming hasn’t solved all of its problems yet. | Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash

You’d think that after the Dust Bowl years, we’d have learned our lesson about getting mouthy with ol’ Mama Nature.

You’d be wrong. We’re still begging to get our knuckles rapped with a wooden spoon, and she’s more than happy to deliver.

Modern-day agricultural practices aren’t much better than the ones adopted by the old homesteaders of the 1930s, and they’re mostly still designed to deliver profit over long-term sustainability.

It turns out that dumping nitrate fertilizers on fields instead of building up the soil is tantamount to literally salting the Earth. It winds up damaging the soil, polluting groundwater, and even poisoning people when it leeches into drinking wells.

It creates dead zones. It destroys ecosystems. It can even damage the ozone layer, believe it or not. It’s not the only nasty thing we do in our modern farming industry, but it’s definitely up there. It’s one of the reasons that agriculture is driving Climate Change.

We haven’t learned.

And now that Trump’s administration has decided to scrap Climate Change protections and start treating America’s natural resources like a free buffet, things are going to get a lot worse.

We’re watching the same issues starting to creep up around the West, too. California’s aridification is well underway, and water conservation is becoming a massive problem all over North America.

Wildfires are worsening and spreading further than before, and they’re contributing to topsoil erosion and loss of biodiversity. Farmland soils are unhealthy and dying. Drought conditions are getting worse all over the world, with large bodies of water starting to shrink.

The cycle is starting to wobble. We’re ramping up to a Dust Bowl 2.0.

Take a moment to really let it sink in. What would the next Dust Bowl look like? | Photo by Matthieu Joannon on Unsplash

Are we doomed? Let me get back to you on that. I hope not, but I’m not optimistic.

As a species, we’re really bad at taking the appropriate steps to curb potential disaster before it gets here; we don’t react until it's on our doorstep and trying to pick the lock.

Scientists have been warning us about Climate Change since 1896, and there are still alarming numbers of people who think it’s a hoax, because…reasons, I guess?

I’m not clear on it. Most of the people I question about climate denial just mumble something about weather cycles and big business. On one memorable occasion, one older gentleman informed me that it doesn’t matter because, quote: “The government controls the weather anyway!”

Yikes.

That said, if we manage to get our act together and take steps now, we won’t be doomed. We’ve already done enough damage to cement current and future problems, but we’re not doomed.

Much like the programs implemented in the New Deal, there are still common-sense actions we can take to turn things around! Scientists and experts have spent years warning world governments and giving very specific blueprints of how to achieve exactly that.

We know what we need to do. It’s just getting the governments and the public to take those steps that we’re having trouble with. Short-term corporate profits are still winning, but if we can get past that, we’ve got a shot.

We don’t have much space left at the end of the runway, but this plane hasn’t crashed yet.

We still have time to learn from the past, change our ways, and make sure that a new Dust Bowl never happens again.

Solidarity wins.

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