The United States Government's Role in the Dust Bowl
How the U.S. government contributed to both the downfall and recovery of the Great Plains and its farmers
Both the Cause and Solution
In the 1930s the Great Plains experienced one of the worst ecological disasters in American history: The Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms and prolonged drought that was exacerbated by a mass migration of farmers who were encouraged to over-till and deep plow their fields. This ecological disaster can be largely attributed to U.S. government policies coupled with misinformation that encouraged farmers to venture west and cultivate the plains using ineffective dryland farming techniques. While the U.S government greatly contributed to the Dust Bowl’s onset, the government was also ultimately the one able to help save many of the farmers from poverty and starvation. When FDR became president he enacted many New Deal policies and created agencies such as the Soil Conservation Service that helped bring farmers out of poverty and restore their land. With the help from soil scientists such as Hugh Hammond Bennet and Henry Howard Finnell, the U.S. government began slowly restoring the soil and earth that it had unintentionally aided in the destruction of.
How it All Began: 1900s-1930s
Example of poster encouraging farmers to move west
Homesteading
The large migration towards the Great Plains in the early 1900s can largely be attributed to government programs that encouraged farmers to move farther west. The Homestead Act was first created in 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln, and provided farmers with 160 acres of public land for only a small filing fee. In 1909, Congress enlarged this act by increasing the maximum permissible homestead to 320 acres. This enlarged homestead law encouraged more farmers to venture out west towards the Great Plains.
Many of these homesteaders were inexperienced with farming in general, and none of them had experience with the ecology of the Great Plains or really understood the environment they were entering. In addition, many politicians were making false promises about the climate of the semi-arid plains, claiming that the act of farming itself would increase precipitation under the false notion that “rain follows the plow.”
The Early 1900s
When farmers first arrived on the Great Plains in the early 1900s, they were initially very successful. The Great Plains have a challenging climate that changes frequently, but the region entered a wet period after 1905 that was conducive for farming and therefore encouraged even more settlement in the area. As shown in the figure to the right, 1905 was a rainier year where the semi-arid climate almost disappeared from the region altogether. However, this wet period was short-lived and by 1910 the region was already back to a desert climate.
The Great Plow Up
The time period from 1910 through the early 1920s was known as "the great plow up," as farmers began planting large amounts of wheat and ended up turning millions of acres of native grasslands into wheat fields. New technology aided in this process, with inventions such as the one-way plow that helped farmers plow at a faster rate than previously possible.
"Wheat Will Win the War"
When World War I broke out in 1914, German blockades cut off access to Russian wheat. President Woodrow Wilson coined the phrase "wheat will win the war," and wheat prices in America were set to twice their previous rate. This price increase incentivized farmers in the Great Plains to plant as much wheat as possible, and in the following five years more than 11 million acres of virgin soil were plowed by farmers and turned into wheat fields.
The 1920s
In the 1920s, the Great Plains continued to be advertised as a great place to live, and during the last five years of the 1920s alone, more than 5.2 million acres of native soil was turned over on the southern plains. After the war, wheat prices dropped but the plowing and planting only increased, and farmers were still able to remain successful for a couple more years.
A newspaper the day after the stock market crashed
The Great Depression
On October 20th, 1929, the stock market crashed and the United States descended into the Great Depression within the decade. Herbert Hoover was president at the time, and while he promised the nation that the crisis would run its course, things only continued worsening over the years following "Black Thursday." By 1930, over 4 million Americans were out of work looking for jobs, and by 1931 the number had risen to 6 million. In 1930, the price of wheat dropped significantly and farmers began planting more of it to compensate for their lost revenue. This created a surplus of wheat, and while the government tried to get farmers to reduce production, farmers instead did the opposite and plowed even more land to harvest more bushels. Wheat prices were dropping even before the depression, and the U.S. government had tried to stabilize prices through the creation of the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 but these efforts were futile once the depression hit.
Beginning of the Dust Storms
The winter of 1931-1932 was extremely dry in the Great Plains, as was the following spring. Since there were so many farmers who turned their soil in the previous decades, there were large amounts of loose topsoil susceptible to heavy winds. As wind blew through the plains in 1932, it began picking up land and soil from bare fields and moving it across the landscape. Both sand and dust storms became frequent visitors of the plains, reducing visibility up to a quarter-mile and damaging both land and cattle. The harvest of 1932 was a complete disaster due to the combination of these dust storms destroying crops along with low wheat prices across the nation.
Image of dust storm sweeping across Oklahoma
Worsening Storms
Unfortunately, the winter of 1933 was equally as dry as the winter prior, and dust storms were growing longer and more frequent across the plains. In 1933 there was one dust storm that lasted a full 24 hours, and some of the storms were as large as 150-200 miles wide and 100 miles high. Additionally, the speed of the storms was increasing and they were now moving as quickly as 40-60 miles per hour. The land was soon swept completely clean of top-soil and it became hard like cement and nearly impossible to cultivate. Cattle were dying of suffocation from the dust, and other livestock would wander off and get lost during the storms. These storms were also extremely harmful to human health, as people were unable to avoid breathing, eating, and drinking the dust. At the end of 1933, there was slight rain in Texas and farmers hoped the drought had broken, but 1934 ended up being even hotter and drier than the years before as the U.S. entered a nationwide drought.
NASA image of observed rainfall in the 1930s drought (the darker colors represent less rainfall)
Image of the sky on Black Sunday on the plains
Black Sunday
On Sunday, April 14, 1935, a cold front moving down from Canada clashed with warm air from the Dakotas, and in just a few hours wind picked up and created a dust cloud hundreds of miles wide and thousands of feet high headed south towards southwestern Kansas and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. The dust storm moved at 65mph, and it turned the sky completely black. The storm continued on for hours and was by far the worst storm of the Dust Bowl. The storm ended up displacing around 300,000 tons of topsoil with some of it blowing as far as the east coast. While things had been bad for farmers in the Great Plains long before Black Sunday, this particularly awful storm woke up the rest of the nation and made Americans more aware of the economic and ecological disaster occurring in the plains. This event also motivated the U.S. government to create new programs and put more resources into helping both the farmers and the land.
US Weather Bureau Surface Analysis at 7:00 am CST on April 14, 1935 (Black Sunday)
FDR's New Deal Programs
1932 Election
In 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, FDR defeated President Herbert Hoover in a landslide and became president in 1933. During his campaign, FDR promoted the New Deal and promised to bring America out of the depression and support farmers suffering in the Dust Bowl.
The Agriculture Adjustment Act
Immediately after his inauguration in 1933, FDR introduced the Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAA) to Congress which controlled the supply of seven basic crops (corn, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, tobacco, and milk) by offering payments to farmers in return for taking some of their lands out of production. While this act was controversial to some, it did help a lot of struggling farmers and also kept some vulnerable land from enduring further erosion.
The Great Plains Shelterbelt
In 1934, FDR created the Great Plains Shelterbelt which was a project that put the civilian conservation corps to work planting 20 million trees along the borders of farms and pastures in an effort to create windbreaks.
Poster describing the shelterbelt project
By 1940, the trees had grown into 1800 miles of windbreaks from Texas to Canada as shown on the map below. This project was successful in moderating the Dust Bowl's destructive winds, and it remains one of the greatest environmental success stories in the nation's history.
Map showing areas where the trees were planted
The Soil Conservation Service
In 1935, FDR created the Soil Conservation Service with the aim to educate farmers about better soil practices while offering incentives to farmers who utilized these new techniques on their land. This program was extremely successful as over 40,000 farmers signed up, and the amount of dangerously eroded land in the plains was eventually cut nearly in half.
The Farm Security Administration
In 1937, FDR created the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to help poor farmers by resettling them onto more productive land, promoting soil conservation, providing emergency relief, and loaning them money. The FSA also built experimental rural communities known as "Greenbelt towns" meant to provide farmers with affordable homes and easy access to nearby jobs.
Hugh Hammond Bennett
While FDR definitely deserves credit for all of his New Deal programs that aided farmers during the Dust Bowl, he didn't do this work all alone. One of the men who greatly helped FDR was Hugh Hammond Bennett, a soil scientist who later would be known as "The Father of Soil Conservation." Bennett had begun campaigning for soil conservation even before FDR was elected president, and he'd joined the Department of Agriculture in the early 1900s. In 1909, the Bureau of Soils made a notorious announcement stating that "the soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up," and throughout his career, Bennett worked to prove the falseness of this claim.
A photograph of Hugh Hammond Bennett
Throughout the 1920s, Bennett wrote extensively about soil erosion with one of his most influential pieces being a USDA bulletin he coauthored in 1928, titled "Soil Erosion: A National Menace." This bulletin wasn't meant as a manual for how to prevent soil erosion, but rather it was written to draw attention to the issue of soil erosion and show Americans that it was something they should be concerned about and therefore dedicate energy and resources towards solving.
“...Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race or people, barbaric or civilized.” - Hough Hammond Bennett
In 1933, Bennett was appointed director of the Soil Erosion Service and he worked with the agency to demonstrate soil conservation methods to farmers in watershed-based presentations. In 1935, Bennett was successful in promoting the passage of The Soil Conservation Act, the act which created the Soil Conservation Service and he served as its first chief until he retired in 1951. While working for the SCS, Bennett hired another soil scientist, Henry Howard Finnell, to work specifically in Oklahoma and with Dust Bowl farmers.
Bennett pointing to a map in his office with Finnell standing next to him; second from the left
Henry Howard Finnell
Henry Howard Finnell was an agronomist and soil specialist who studied ways to better grow crops in the semi-arid challenging landscape of the southern plains. Finnell discovered techniques to capture as much water as possible such as using terraces and contour planting to minimize runoff, keeping plant residues on the surface after a harvest, crop rotation, and using deeper rows with a lister plow. Like Bennett, Finnell was publishing reports throughout the 1920s about his findings but they were mostly ignored until the 1930s when the Dust Bowl began.
Example of contour cropping taken from "The Future of the Great Plains" report
Finnell's Success
During the Dust Bowl, Bennett put Finnell in charge of Region Six, the hardest-hit area of the country which was code-named "Operation Dustbowl." Finnell decided that areas not deemed suitable for cultivation would be turned back into grasslands, and thirteen other demonstration projects ended up successfully using Finnell's moisture-conserving methods and teaching them to farmers. By the end of 1936, 5.5 million acres of land were under new terraced and contour-listed cultivation, and 40,000 farmers had participated in his efforts.
After the Dust Bowl, Finnell continued serving as a research specialist for the SCS and kept studying wind erosion and land use in the Great Plains until his retirement in 1959.
"The Future of the Great Plains" Report
The Report
In 1937, the United States Great Plains Committee published a report titled "The Future of the Great Plains" where they explained the misuse of the land and described a necessary mental shift needed to restore this region.
The cover of the original report
FDR's Thoughts
In a letter transmitting this report to Congress, FDR explained the depth of the issue and how the disaster in the plains couldn't be entirely blamed on the depression and drought, by writing:
"Depression and drought have only accentuated a situation which has been long developing"
Drawings from the report showing the Great Plains of the past, present, and future
This image compares two drawings from the report. The drawing on the left shows the Great Plains of the past, pre-white settlement, and the one on the right depicts the Great Plains of the present.
This next image compares the same drawing from above of the Great Plains of the present (on the left) with a drawing of the committee's vision of the Great Plains of the future (on the right).
An Exodus from the Plains
While many farmers decided to stay on the plains after the dustbowl and implement their new-learned farming techniques, others decided to leave the plains altogether and start over somewhere else. In total, three-fourths of farmers ended up staying on their land, but in some areas, the population dropped as much as 40%. Overall, the Dust Bowl was the largest migration in American history and by 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the plains with 200,000 of them moving to California.
This map shows the populations in different counties in the Great Plains in 1920, 1930, 1940, and 1950. As seen with this map, the population decreased in most counties in Great Plains from 1920-1950, whereas the population increased in the counties in California where people were migrating towards. The dark green areas are counties with the biggest changes in population from 1930-1940, and the red counties are those with the least amount of population change during this time.
A famous Dorothea Lange photograph of migrant woman with her children in a pea pickers' camp in Nipomo, CA, 1936
A Difficult Life in California
Unfortunately, most migrants who went to California did not receive a warm welcome, and many of them struggled in California just as much as they had in the plains. Around 40% of migrant farmers ended up working in the San Joaquin Valley picking grapes and cotton under the hot sun for extremely low wages. Other Californians called these migrants "Okies" and discriminate against them in many ways. Many ended up giving up farming altogether and settling in "Okievilles" with other poor migrants. The Roosevelt administration tried to help these farmers and the Farm Security Administration built 13 camps to temporarily house 300 families in tents on wooden platforms.
FSA's Photography Program
In addition to their work helping farmers directly, The Farm Security Program ended up becoming famous for its small but influential photography program from 1935-1944. Photographers and writers were hired to document the plight of poor farmers. Roy Stryker headed the Information Division of the FSA and was the one who launched the FSA's photography movement. The division had a mission to "introduce America to Americans," and eleven photographers helped work on this project including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks. The FSA's photography program helped both documents and shape the image of the Great Depression in the United States.
Some Photos from the Collection
"Migrant Mother" by Dorothea Lange
"Tenant Farmer Family" by Walker Evans
"Government sign promoting land terracing" by Russell Lee
"Children on porch" by Marion Post Wolcott
What We Can Learn
Overall, it's clear that while the U.S. government did contribute towards the settlement and over-tilling of the Great Plains, it also deserves credit for its New Deal programs that helped poverty-stricken farmers and their eroded land. While there are many angles to the Dust Bowl story, looking through the lens of the U.S. government helps show how the nation as a whole worked to tackle this environmental, economic, and social issue that impacted millions of men, women, children, and animals. Although some Americans thought that the government was overstepping with its response to the Dust Bowl and others felt that it wasn't doing enough, the Dust Bowl and New Deal era serve as an example of a government taking accountability for its mistakes (in the case of farming and soil science) and attempting to remedy some of the problems that it had helped create. Some of these new deal-era agencies such as the SCS (now called the Natural Resource Conservation Service) still exist today and continue to provide assistance to farmers, and projects like the Great Plains Shelterbelt continue protecting farms on the plains from wind and storms. While thankfully the Dust Bowl is a story of our nation's past, environmental degradation still exists throughout the country, and just like in the 1930s, Americans need help from their government to work towards solving these large-scale environmental problems.
Sources:
Texts/Films
Burns, Ken, director. “The Dust Bowl.” PBS. 2012
Bradsher, Greg. How the West Was Settled - Archives. www.archives.gov/files/publications/prologue/2012/winter/homestead.pdf .
“Black Sunday.” American Experience – PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/dust-bowl-black-sunday/
“FDR and the Dust Bowl.” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. June 20, 2018. https://fdr.blogs.archives.gov/2018/06/20/fdr-and-the-dust-bowl/
“Hugh Hammond Bennett.” NRCS, https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/about/history/?cid=stelprdb1044395
“Overview: The Farm Security Administration.” Archives. https://www.archives.gov/files/atlanta/education/depression-curriculum/section-2.pdf
“Natural Resources Conservation Service.” NRCS, www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/about/history/?cid=nrcs143_021392 .
Thornthwaite, Warren. “Climate and Settlement in the Great Plains.” Climate and Man - Yearbook of Agriculture, USDA, 1941. https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/IND43893764/PDF#:~:text=In%201910%20desert%20climate%20covered,Great%20Plains%20experienced%20desert%20climate
Images
Title Image: Arthur Rothstein, PBS photo gallery http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/photos/
Homestead Poster: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.13401300/
The Early 1900s: Yearbook of Agriculture, https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/IND43893764/PDF#:~:text=In%201910%20desert%20climate%20covered,Great%20Plains%20experienced%20desert%20climate
The Great Plow Up: Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017770648/
Wheat Will Win the War: Growing America, https://www.growingamerica.com/features/2019/04/decade-ag-during-world-war-1-era-1910-1920
The 1920s: PBS, http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/media/photos/s1172-lg.jpg
The Great Depression Newspaper: The Guardian, https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/10/28/wall-140.jpg?width=1900&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=aaf2d648d1627316e1f397f11fe49351
Dust Storm: Glogster, https://edu.glogster.com/glog/dust-bowl-timeline/26lbjvamomu?=glogpedia-source
Weather Map: weather.gov, https://www.weather.gov/images/oun/wxevents/19350414/dailyweathermap-19350414.jpg
1932 Election: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-1932
The Agriculture Adjustment Act: Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Agricultural-Adjustment-Administration
The Great Plains Shetlerbelt: Forestrypub, https://forestpolicypub.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/shelterbelt4-1024x576.jpg
Shelterbelt Poster: Forestrypub, https://forestpolicypub.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/shelterbelt-1.jpg
Shelterbelt Map: https://lintel.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c5d3b53ef022ad3d4c60b200b-pi
The Soil Conservation Service: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/photos/9458856/Unknown.jpg
The Farm Security Administration: Library of Congress, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/fsa/8b15000/8b15200/8b15249v.jpg
Hugh Hammond Bennett: https://asiveolanoticia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/bio-st07072020.jpg
Bennett and Finnell: PBS, https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/media/photos/s1758-lg.jpg
Contour Cropping: “The Future of the Great Plains Report” https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015023164893&view=1up&seq=2
Images from the future of the great plains report: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015023164893&view=1up&seq=2
A difficult life in California: Dorothea Lange, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/photos/
Migrant Mother: Dorothea Lange, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/photos/
Tenant Farmer Family: Walker Evans, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/photos/
Government Sign: Russell Lee, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/photos/
Children on Porch: Marion Post Wolcott, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/photos/
