Dust Bowl Research Paper

During the 1900’s a lot of devastating events occurred that led to the Dust Bowl. Some of these events were the stock market crash and the Great Depression. Specifically, the 1930’s was a period that held very severe dust storms. The dust storms remained extremely critical for about 6 years; this period of time became known as The Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl had tremendously negative effects on both the people in the region and the land in which the dust storms were located.

You’re a kid living in the Dust Bowl. “Cough-cough.” You try to force down. Moving your plow back and forth you try to look over the barren wasteland you call home. Wind roaring in your eyes as you see a brown funnel full a dirt and dust less than a mile away. Driving for cover your world fads black. The Dust Bowl was made by a drought and high winds. The drought killed the prairie grass keeping the soil down and the high winds picked it up to make dust storms. The Dust Bowl was harmful to children that affect their education, how they had fun, their health, and spilt families apart.

Fine powder coating people's lips, inhaling dust with every breath you take. That is what it was like during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. On Thursday. April 18, 1935, a huge, black, billowing cloud piled up on the western horizon. The people in the Southern Great Plains called the the dust storms dusters. It darkened the midday sky and carried off valuable topsoil and made topsoil erosion. Children and the elderly died from breathing in the dust they called it “dust pneumonia.” Cattle such as chickens and cows couldn’t protect and defend themselves from the dust. They ran around in circles until they fell and died from breathing in so much dust. While humans could cover their mouths and eyes with cloth, scarves, and goggles to protect themselves. Some people had even considered that it was the end of the world. Some of the many factors that caused the Dust Bowl to happen were, over plowing the soil and the cows and buffalo over grazing the grass and, the lack of rainfall or drought in the great plains region.

The overuse of the new technology developing in the 1930s played a significant role in the Dust Bowl phenomena. Many farmers purchased plows and other farming tools- more than 5 million acres of unfarmed land was plowed. This meant that farmers took advantage of technology and abused the land by doing so. In (Doc C), the reader is informed that the famous tractor led the harvest up to 10,000 bushels of wheat, plowing nearly an entire square mile; shocking, right? Not only did this expose the land but it also caused the land to be carried in the wind, causing a dust storm as

The Dust Bowl occurred during The Great Depression in the 1930's. Which was an especially dreadful time for it to happen. Many people were impoverished or were on the brink of poverty. Making the man-made natural disaster all the more devastating.

Aside from the Great Depression that caused the majority of Americans to fall into the lower class, ecology and military action altered the American class alike. Citizens bore unjustifiable prejudice against fellow citizens and thus divided the nation. Because of this, people were classified into privileged and the unprivileged. The Dust Bowl and the attack on Pearl Harbor assumed a significant role in reshaping social structure in the mid-1900s America, and the resulting burdens from such class differences were substantial.

The documentary, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s by Donald Worster paints a surreal mosaic of life on the Great Plains during the dirty thirties. He does this by illustrating various causations and correlations as well as specific rural towns in the Dust Bowl that exhibit them, and public institutions whose objective was the restoration of the Great Plains to a fertile state as before the coming of the Capitalistic agriculturist that wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. Worster then uses the above as a fulcrum to his main argument, “…there was in fact a close link between the Dust Bowl and the Depression – that the same society produced them both, and for similar reasons. (p.5) He further goes on to explain that the crisis in the Great Plains was primarily caused by man and not nature (Worster, p.13). This was primarily due to the fact that man had never truly lived in equilibrium with the land on the high plains; they exploited the prairies to produce beyond their capacity, thus causing severe environmental breakdown. The fault was not all the agriculturists of course, part of the blame, as Worster points out, is rooted culturally in our capitalistic, industrialized values and ideals. One spokesman stated, “We are producing a product to sell, and that profitability of that product depended on pushing the land as far as it could go.” (Worster, p.57) To fully illuminate the problems at hand, he uses Cimarron County in the Oklahoma panhandle, and Haskell County,

Though most everyone has heard of the Dust Bowl, many people don’t actually know what it is. “When rain stopped falling in the Midwest, farm fields began to dry up” (The Dust Bowl). Much of the nation’s crops couldn’t grow, causing major economic struggle. "The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909” (Dust Bowl). This caused many inexperienced farmers to jump on this easy start of a career. Because of this, farmers in the Midwest had practiced atrocious land management for years. This included over plowing the land and using the same crops year after year. In this way, lots of fertile soil had gotten lost. This helped windstorms gather topsoil from the land, and whip it into huge clouds; dust storms. Hot, dry, and windy, almost the entire middle section of the United States was directly affected. The states affected were South

What made the Dust Bowl really bad? The Dust Bowl caused many problems for people of the South. “The dust killed livestock and children alike” (Burns). What made this already bad situation worse was “Boise City was the place where the dust storms were the worst” (Burns). This resulted in many southern cities being abandoned in favor of California.

The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the 1930's, that affected the midwestern people, for example the farmers, and which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place

The timeline of the dustbowl characterizes the fall of agriculture during the late 1920s, primarily the area in and surrounding the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl was created by a disruption in the areas natural balance. “With the crops and native vegetation gone, there was nothing to hold the topsoil to the ground” (“Dust Bowl and” 30). Agricultural expansion and dry farming techniques caused mass plowing and allowed little of the land to go fallow. With so little of the deeply rooted grass remaining in the Great Plains, all it took was an extended dry season to make the land grow dry and brittle. When most of the land had been enveloped by the grass dust storms weren’t even a yearly occurrence, but with the exponentiation of exposed land, the winds had the potential to erode entire acres. This manmade natural disaster consumed such a large amount of the South's agriculture that it had repercussions on the national level. The Dust Bowl was a “97-million-acre section

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

With many farmers having such high yields, there was an abundance of crops so the prices fell and a farmer had to plant more in order to have enough money to support their families. The Enlarged Homestead Act guaranteed 320 acres of land to farmers who were willing to take land that were considered to be marginal and could not be irrigated well. They plowed up the virgin soil and planted acres and acres of golden wheat, leaving the land vulnerable to the elements after the yearly harvest. The farmers also implemented the use of fossil fuel ran machinery that made it easier to plow up hundreds of acres in a short period of time, which exposed even more soil than what would have been open to the elements had the farming been done by an animal pulled plow. The massive influx of farmers because of that act caused major soil erosion which was made worse by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

The Dust Bowl was a series of devastating events that occurred in the 1930’s. It affected not only crops, but people, too. Scientists have claimed it to be the worst drought in the United States in 300 years. It all began because of “A combination of a severe water shortage and harsh farming techniques,” said Kimberly Amadeo, an expert in economical analysis. (Amadeo). Because of global warming, less rain occurred, which destroyed crops. The crops, which were the only things holding the soil in place, died, which then caused the wind to carry the soil with it, creating dust storms. (Amadeo). In fact, according to Ken Burns, an American film maker, “Some 850 million tons of topsoil blew away in 1935 alone. "Unless something is done," a government report predicted, "the western plains will be as arid as the Arabian desert." (Burns). According to Cary Nelson, an English professor, fourteen dust storms materialized in 1932, and in 1933, there were 48 dust storms. Dust storms raged on in the Midwest for about a decade, until finally they slowed down, and stopped. Although the dust storms came to a halt, there was still a lot of concern. Thousands of crops were destroyed, and farmers were afraid that the dust storm would happen

One major cause of that Dust Bowl was severe droughts during the 1930’s. The other cause was capitalism. Over-farming and grazing in order to achieve high profits killed of much of the plain’s grassland and when winds approached, nothing was there to hold the devastated soil on the ground.