FREE ESSAY ON THE DUST BOWL

THE DUST BOWL

The Dust Bowl was the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains,
(pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book The Dust Bowl. It was a time of
drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents
in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic
capitalistic society's need for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of
the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust
Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working
exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society,
which deliberately set out to take all it could from the earth while giving next to
nothing back. 
The Dust Bowl existed, in its full quintessence, concurrently with the Great Depression
during the 1930's. Worster sets out in an attempt to show that these two cataclysms
existed simultaneously not by coincidence, but by the same culture, which brought them
about from similar events. Both events revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional
culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other in economic. (pg. 5) Worster
proposes that in American society, as in all others, there are certain accepted ways of
using the land. He sums up the capital ethos of ecology into three simply stated maxims:
nature must be seen as capital, man has a right/obligation to use this capital for
constant self-advancement, and the social order should permit and encourage this
continual increase of personal wealth (pg. 6) It is through these basic beliefs that
Worster claims the plainsmen ignored all environmental limits, much like the brokers and
investors on Wall Street ignored a top-heavy economy. Worster explains that our
business-oriented society began to transform farming into a mass-producing industrial
machine, becoming another excess of free enterprise that not even Roosevelt's New Deal
could remedy.
The dirty thirties, as many called it, was a time when the earth ran amok in southern
plains for the better part of a decade. This great American tragedy, which was more
devastating environmentally as well as economically than anything in America's past or
present, painstakingly tested the spirit of the southern plainsmen. The proud folks of
the south refused at first to accept government help, optimistically believing that
better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but
from the new machine-controlled agriculture. As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller
The Grapes of Wrath, it was not nature that broke the people-they could handle the
drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on land investments and buying
tractors to pursue it, that had broken these people, smashing their identity as natural
beings wedded to the land.(pg. 58) The machines, one-crop specialization, non-resident
farming, and soil abuse were tangible threats to the American agriculture, but it was the
capitalistic economic values behind these land exploitations that drove the plainsmen
from their land and created the Dust Bowl. 
Eventually, after years of drought and dust storms, the plains people had to accept some
form of aid or fall to the lowest ranks of poverty in the land, and possibly perish. The
government set up agency after agency to try and give federal aid to the plains farmers.
Groups such as the Farm Credit Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the
Land Utilization Project, and the Agricultural Adjustment program, among others, were
formed to give the plainsmen some sort of relief from the hardships of the Dust Bowl. In
Cimarron county, Oklahoma 306 households were drawing government relief in June 1934: 60
of them were paid entirely in commodities, the rest mostly in cash (pg. 131). Roosevelt
and the government continually contrived ways to give the plains aid, and when the
Supreme Court ruled that a certain agency was unconstitutional, Roosevelt simply created
another one in its place. In the end, Worster argues, the government agencies did not
improve the lot of the large number of poor, marginal farmers, and in fact, none of the
federal activities altered much of the factory-like culture of the plains. Simply stated,
the government programs failed to induce the changes that were needed to save the
southern plains.
Other groups outside of the government tried to help the plains with their own plan of
attack. Local women's groups were organized in places like Haskell County, Kansas. These
groups were aimed at strengthening the most common counterforce of the outside consumer
society-the family. Ultimately though, as Worster writes, the effect of the magnetic
outward pull of the capitalistic ideals was stronger than the principals of the family.
Post-Progressive Conservationists, such as Lewis Gray also tried to lend a hand in
correcting what went wrong in the Dust Bowl. Gray wanted to do things such as end
homesteading completely, add unprofitable private lands to the public domain, and extend
agricultural conservation. Again though, Worster claims these attempts were not enough,
calling men like Gray problem-solvers, often bogged down in the immediate issues of
Depression America...and did not give enough attention to the broader issues, nor did
they talk boldly enough about the dimensions of change.(pg. 196) Then there were the
ecological conservationists, such as Paul Sears, who brought their expertise to the
problems like the Dust Bowl and made important suggestions to cure the problems. Worster
argues, though, that the conservationists would evaluate the problem, make a diagnosis,
and then back off leaving the plainsmen to fix the problems. Ecologists were doomed to
futility and self-deception as long as they supposed that man's use of the land was
controlled by disinterested reason alone or that recommendations served up with
scientific credentials would necessarily be adopted.(pg. 209) And finally the agronomists
took their best shot by introducing new farming techniques, such as terracing and
planting shelterbelts of trees, as an attempt to recapture the essence of the land. The
agronomists, although they were more successful in getting their version of conservation
translated into action, were ultimately ineffectual, too.
In the end, Worster claims that neither the federal land-use planners, ecologists, nor
the agronomists made a lasting impact on the region. Conservation as a cultural reform
had come to be accepted only where and insofar as it had helped the plains culture reach
its traditional expansionary aims.(pg. 230) The Dust Bowl, even more so than the Great
Depression, became the dominant national symbol of bankruptcy and ecological decay-the
irony is that it was the capitalistic values that our country holds so highly that
ultimately facilitated both the creation of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
Worster's Dust Bowl is a very informative work that makes a great contribution to
understanding the effects that a consumer society can have on the land. Worster set forth
a strong argument and supported it finely with great details. I agree with his views for
the most part, but I feel like the southern plainsmen did what they had to do to keep up
with the big city industries. In this society, the axiom root, hog, or die holds true in
every aspect of the culture. So, in my opinion, the only way for the Dust Bowl to have
been curtailed sooner would have been for the people there to stop breaking the land all
together and let mother nature take over and fix herself. Of course, that would be asking
the impossible since it would mean the plains people would have to give up, and lose to
the capitalistic society of which they were trying to keep up with. Ultimately, every
remedy that was attempted merely assisted in the growth of the Dust Bowl and of
consumerism itself. Droughts and famine will come and go during our time here on earth,
but we must learn to look to the earth for the remedy and give back to the earth what is
rightfully hers-for capitalism cannot fill the needs of human life without the resources
of the land.
Bibliography
Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
by Donald Worster