The Dust Bowl Quick Check
The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken southern plains region of the United States, which suffered severe grit storms during a drought in the 1930s. Every bit high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. The Grit Bowl intensified the crushing economic impacts of the Bang-up Low and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of piece of work and improve living conditions.
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What Caused the Dust Bowl?
The Dust Basin was caused past several economic and agronomical factors, including federal country policies, changes in regional atmospheric condition, farm economic science and other cultural factors. Subsequently the Civil War, a series of federal country acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Great Plains.
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. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Swell Plains.
Many of these tardily nineteenth and early on twentieth century settlers lived by the superstition "rain follows the plow." Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agronomics would permanently bear on the climate of the semi-arid Slap-up Plains region, making it more conducive to farming.
Manifest Destiny
This false conventionalities was linked to Manifest Destiny—an attitude that Americans had a sacred duty to expand west. A serial of wet years during the period created farther misunderstanding of the region's ecology and led to the intensive tillage of increasingly marginal lands that couldn't be reached by irrigation.
Ascension wheat prices in the 1910s and 1920s and increased demand for wheat from Europe during World War I encouraged farmers to turn upward millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat, corn and other row crops. Just as the United States entered the Not bad Depression, wheat prices plummeted. In desperation, farmers tore upward fifty-fifty more grassland in an attempt to harvest a bumper crop and pause fifty-fifty.
Crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, exposing the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to agree the soil in place, information technology began to blow away. Eroding soil led to massive dust storms and economical devastation—especially in the Southern Plains.
When Was the Grit Bowl?
The Dust Bowl, too known as "the Muddy Thirties," started in 1930 and lasted for almost a decade, but its long-term economic impacts on the region lingered much longer.
Severe drought hit the Midwest and southern Great Plains in 1930. Massive dust storms began in 1931. A series of drought years followed, further exacerbating the environmental disaster.
By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated country had been rendered useless for farming, while another 125 million acres—an area roughly three-quarters the size of Texas—was rapidly losing its topsoil.
Regular rainfall returned to the region past the end of 1939, bringing the Grit Bowl years to a close. The economical effects, however, persisted. Population declines in the worst-striking counties—where the agricultural value of the state failed to recover—continued well into the 1950s.
'Black Blizzards' Strike America
During the Dust Bowl period, severe grit storms, often called "black blizzards," swept the Keen Plains. Some of these carried topsoil from Texas and Oklahoma as far east every bit Washington, D.C. and New York City, and coated ships in the Atlantic Ocean with dust.
Billowing clouds of dust would darken the sky, sometimes for days at a time. In many places, the dust drifted like snow and residents had to clear it with shovels. Dust worked its mode through the cracks of even well-sealed homes, leaving a coating on food, peel and furniture.
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Some people adult "dust pneumonia" and experienced breast hurting and difficulty animate. Information technology'southward unclear exactly how many people may have died from the condition. Estimates range from hundreds to several thousand people.
On May 11, 1934, a massive dust storm two miles high traveled two,000 miles to the East Coast, blotting out monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.Southward. Capitol.
The worst dust storm occurred on April xiv, 1935. News reports called the event Black Lord's day. A wall of blowing sand and dust started in the Oklahoma Panhandle and spread east. Every bit many as 3 million tons of topsoil are estimated to have blown off the Slap-up Plains during Black Sunday.
An Associated Press news study coined the term "Dust Bowl" after the Blackness Sun dust storm.
New Bargain Programs
President Franklin D. Roosevelt established a number of measures to assistance alleviate the plight of poor and displaced farmers. He likewise addressed the environmental deposition that had led to the Dust Basin in the kickoff place.
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As role of Roosevelt'due south New Deal, Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Slap-up Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, at present called the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and promoted new farming techniques to gainsay the problem of soil erosion.
Okie Migration
Roughly two.v 1000000 people left the Dust Bowl states—Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma—during the 1930s. Information technology was one of the largest migrations in American history.
Oklahoma alone lost 440,000 people to migration. Many of them, poverty-stricken, traveled west looking for work. From 1935 to 1940, roughly 250,000 Oklahoma migrants moved to California. A tertiary settled in the land's agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley.
These Dust Bowl refugees were called "Okies." Okies faced bigotry, menial labor and pitiable wages upon reaching California. Many of them lived in shantytowns and tents along irrigation ditches. "Okie" soon became a term of disdain used to refer to any poor Dust Bowl migrant, regardless of their state of origin.
READ MORE: How the Grit Basin Made Americans Refugees in Their Ain Country
Dust Bowl in Arts and Culture
The Grit Bowl, and the suffering endured by those who survived it, captured the hearts and imaginations of the nation'due south artists, musicians and writers.
John Steinbeck memorialized the plight of the Okies in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. Photographer Dorothea Lange documented rural poverty with a serial of photographs for FDR's Farm Securities Assistants, and artist Alexandre Hogue achieved renown with his Dust Bowl landscapes.
Folk musician Woody Guthrie, and his semi-autobiographical showtime album Grit Bowl Ballads of 1940, told stories of economical hardship faced by Okies in California. Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, left his home country with thousands of others looking for work during the Grit Basin.
Sources
FDR and the New Deal Response to an Ecology Ending. Roosevelt Institute.
About The Grit Bowl. English Department; University of Illinois.
Dust Basin Migration. University of California at Davis.
The Great Okie Migration. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Okie Migrations. Oklahoma Historical Society.
What we learned from the Grit Bowl: lessons in scientific discipline, policy, and adaptation. Population and Surround.
The Grit Bowl. Library of Congress.
Grit Bowl Ballads: Woody Guthrie. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
The Dust Basin. Ken Burns; PBS.
The Dust Bowl Quick Check,
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl
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