Dust Bowl

In the years following the civil war farmers settled in the great plain regions of north america, although it had lack of trees and water. The fields were unsuitable for agriculture but farmers still began cultivating them. But in the 1930s a dreadful drought and dust storm struck the plains which became known as the Dust bowl. The Dust Bowl according to document C, was a natural disaster that could not be prevented because the weather can not be controlled. This means that there’s no one to blame for the storm but mother nature.

In “Black Blizzard” from Scholastic Scope it describes how people survived the Dust Bowl during The Great Depression. Dust storms could be as high as 7,000 feet and were similar to tidal waves, but made from dirt, dirt so thick that people would be able to taste it and could suffocate from inhaling it. States on the Great Plains, such as Kansas and Oklahoma, suffered from hundreds of these destructive storms that destroyed the land, economy, and forced people to move west, mainly to California. In the early 1900’s people moved to the Plain states and successfully grew crops and raised cattle, destroying something they didn’t realize would save their lives. When farmer’s invaded they wiped out the native grasses and replaced it with cash crops,

During The great depression, African Americans had to pretend to be white in order to get and keep a job. (Malcolm's mother had to do this in order to keep her job)

Although many people believe that the Dust Bowl of the 1830’s was not something that could be prevented by the farmers, the Dust Bowl could have been prevented and it is the farmers fault that the Dust Bowl happened. This is because they cut down anything that was holding the soil together and acting as windbreaks, the farmers used dryland farming techniques, and they used the wrong types of plows.

The printed work of the Dust Bowl written by Donald Worster tells of the devastating man-made events that occurred between 1929 and 1939. Worster described this time in history as the darkest moment life in the southern plains encountered in the twentieth-century (4) which was a time where drought, poverty, and famine were of concern. Worster also ties the Great Depression with the Dust Bowl and said that the same society produced them both because of the weakness of America (5). He strongly believes that the Dust Bowl was not a disaster created by nature, but a crisis created by man due to capitalism. Dust Bowl gives a powerful stance on how man ignored the limits of the land which led them into the dirty thirties; however, his beliefs cause him to disregard the disaster as the fault of nature, and specifically blamed man.

The Dust Bowl pushed hundreds of thousands of people out to the west, where life was gloomy and blue. The lack of jobs crushed the hope for new life. Jobs were extremely limited and with thousands of people coming in to California, they were snatched up in a snippet. If one were lucky, they would get a few coins for a full day out on the acers of farmland. California finally struck out as

(Nelson). Thousands of people were moving out from this tragedy from all around the states, weakened, willing to do any type of work for just a meal. An amount of people had put up for sale there belongings that they weren’t able to take with them, most of the migrant workers wished “...to become hired hands on California farms, learning how to grow fruits and vegetables while living on the farms where they worked” (“Dust Bowl Migration”). “The attempts of these displaced agricultural workers to find other work were met with frustration due to a 30 percent unemployment rate” (Fanslow). Several people were heading west, millions of people were leaving from the Midwest in hopes of finding a job in California.

Migrant workers worked on many different farms as they migrated to California trying to find better jobs and better payment to support their families. While they were migrating from farm to farm they received a payment of 15 to 20 cents per hour and worked 12 hours a day. Thats about a dollar a day! Most of the migrant farmers also had their kids working on the farm too. The men and the kids were both expected to work 12 hours a day.

World War 1, the first global conflict of the world (lasting 4 years), came to an end. The war itself has claimed the lives of 9 million to 13 million men and has caused an unbelievable amount of damage to all countries. Germany surrendered, and all other nations agreed to end the war while the terms of peace were being negotiated. President Wilson set fourth his plan for “just peace” following his fourteen-point outline which vison a safer world. Although President Wilson wanted peace, the nation leaders ignored his proposal—Europe especially.

A major drought, over-cultivation, and a country suffering from one of the greatest depressions in history are all it took to displace hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners and send them, and everything they had, out west. The Dust Bowl ruined crops all across the Great Plains region, crops that people depended on for survival. When no food could be grown and no money could be made, entire families, sometimes up to 8 people or more, packed up everything they had and began the journey to California, where it was rumored that jobs were in full supply. Without even closing the door behind them in some cases, these families left farms that had been with them for generations, only to end up in a foreign place where they were neither welcomed

If I was part of one of the families living on the Southern plains during this time, I think I would have stayed. I would have tried to stay just to say that I had made it through the Dust Bowl, and could share my experience with many others. I would have also liked to see how it was like being in the Last Man Standing club. Next, if I was part of one of the families, I would have probably thought that the dust storms were going to end soon enough, and it would have been a waste to move then. It would probably be very nerve-wracking, stressful, and depressing to see the people leaving each day, but I think it would still be worth staying. Finally, I think you would become mentally stronger and braver since you would try to survive in one of

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.

Before the Nationality Act of 1965, many migrants came from the mid region of the United States to California for economic prosperity. In the 1930’s, during and after the Great Depression, the Mid states of America went through severe dust storms and droughts known as the Dust Bowl. Resultantly, the dust storms destroyed the ecology and agriculture of the land itself. This caused farmers to be financially in debt due to not being able to make money. The debt and poor land quality led many people to lose their property and

Other asylums included Oregon, Washington, Arizona, and New Mexico. The vast majority of Dust Bowl migrants stayed on the West Coast permanently.

The Dust Bowl events, exacerbated the effect of the concurrent Economic Crisis on the Southern States' peasant families, causing its progressive economic exhaustion, culminating in the largest migration event in the American history; hundred of thousands of families from the Southern Plain and surrounding states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico) migrated mainly westward to California, in search of land and labor opportunities to restore them dignity.