Homework 3: "Dust and Blues"
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3112520Dust2520Bowl2520Landscape.pptxThe Dust Bowl Landscape of Depression America
“As the day went forward the sun became less red. It flared down on the dust-blanketed land.” -- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Across 100 million acres of land and a half dozen states or more…
Years of drought, 1930-36, brought on an ecological and human disaster.
Once regarded by whites as a “Great American Desert” …
Designated by the United States as an “Indian Territory”
Nevertheless, white people’s hunger for land changed all that …
The president of Oklahoma’s State Board of Agriculture wrote in 1907, "agriculture is, and will be for years to come if not forever, the leading industry in our State."
… the Homestead Act (1862) and future federal land give-a-ways, such as the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, encouraged migration into the region. Oklahoma Territory organized in 1890, becoming a state in 1907.
A stretch of wet winters seemed to teach farmers that “rain follows the plow.”
Agriculture “took off” in the early 1900s
The federal census reported that in Oklahoma between 1890 and 1900 the number of farms increased from 8,826 to 108,000.
Oklahoma farmers produced a wide variety of crops including corn, cotton, winter wheat, oats, maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, broomcorn, cowpeas, alfalfa, wild hay, and others. They also produced and sold poultry, eggs, cheese, butter, and garden and orchard products.
Mother nature had different ideas…
… in 1930 the rains ended.
An extended and severe drought began which caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The fine soil of the Great Plains was easily eroded and carried east by strong continental winds.
Immense dust storms swept across the southwest…
A dust storm rolling up on Stratford, TX, April 18, 1935
Dust storm approaching Elkhart, Kansas in May 1937
“Black Blizzards”
… and “Black rollers”
And turned the farmer’s landscape into a nightmare…
A black blizzard over Prowers Co., Colorado, 1937.
Woody Guthrie, Dust Storm Disaster (1935)
Singer Woody Guthrie composed his Dust Bowl Ballads in the 1930s while living and traveling throughout the region.
Dust storm in Amarillo, Texas April, 1935. By 1935 dust bowl covered 100 million acres.
Woody Guthrie recalled that the dust storms felt like doomsday. . .
Dust Bowl farmer, 1930s
Farmer and sons walking through a dust storm, Cimarron County, OK, 1936.
“This dust, blowin’ so thick ya cain’t breathe, cain’t see th’ sky, that’s th’ scourge over th’ face of th’ earth!” -- Woody Guthrie, Bound For Glory
“I looked at their hair, and it was dry, wind-blown, gritty, and full of the dust out of the storm, and not any certain wave or color – just the color of the whole country. I had seen thousands of men that looked just the same way, and could usually tell by the color of the dirt where they were from.”
-- Bound For Glory
A Landscape of dust…
Red Cross volunteers wearing dust masks, Liberal, Kansas.
“Men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their eyes.”
-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“Dust Can’t Kill Me”
Abandoned farm equipment lays buried in the dust.
“The dust from the roads fluffed up and spread out and fell on the weeds besides the fields . . . Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind fell over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away.
-- The Grapes of Wrath
“Houses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes.” -- The Grapes of Wrath
For many the battle with nature was too great…
“Where ya headin’?
“California,” I said. “Hustlin’ outta this dam dust!” “Fer piece down th’ road, ain’t it?” ‘Enda this dam highway! Ain’t a-lookin back!” -- Bound For Glory
And so began the “Okie” migration to California…
“… the world turned into such a thick green garden of fruits and vegetables that I didn’t know if I was dreaming or not.” – Bound For Glory
“Maybe we can start again, in the new rich land – in California, where the fruit grows. We’ll start over.”
-- The Grapes of Wrath
“Yeah,” Tom said. “they is a whole country movin’. We’re movin’ too.” A California reporter noticing the “Ok” on license plates from Oklahoma, referred to the people in the cars as “Okies,” and soon the term was used to refer to all California-bound Dust Bowl migrants no matter the state from which they had come. The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history within a short period of time. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states.”
Depicted in books and movies,
The Grapes of Wrath was a prize winning novel written by John Steinbeck in 1939, and the following year made into an Academy Award winning movie starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.
The story of an American family’s migration from the Dust Bowl to California during the Great Depression…
Depicted in song and story….
…in Woody Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl Ballads”
Born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912, Woody Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression, and learned traditional folk and blues songs. Many of his songs are about his experiences and those of the people he met.
Guthrie tried to correct the impression that California was a “Garden of Eden” that was an answer to everyone’s problems, an idea made popular in songs like Blue Yodel No. 4, by Jimmy Rodgers, known as the “father of country music.” (right).
California dreamin’. . .
Ranch Near San Luis Obispo, Evening Light, c. 1935
“But I like to think how nice it’s gonna be, maybe, in California. Never cold. An’ fruit ever’place, an’ people just bein’ in the nicest places, little white houses in among the orange trees. I wonder – that is, if we all get jobs an’ all work – maybe we can get one of them little white houses..”
--The Grapes of Wrath
“Bindlestiff” – Napa Valley, California, 1938
“Bakersfield into Fresno. Just this side of Fresno, the men piled off and walked through the yards, planning to meet the train again when it come out the north end. We took off by ones and twos and tried to get hold something to eat. Some of the men had a few nickels, some a dollar or two hid on them, and others made the alleys knocking on the back doors of bakeries, greasy-spoon joints, vegetable stands. The meal added up to a couple or three bites apiece, after we’d all pitched ours in . It was something to fill your guts.” -- Bound For Glory
Hard travelin’ in California….
“If you ain’t got the do re mi…..” Woody Guthrie
“Migrant agricultural workers family” Nipomo, California, Dorothea Lange Photograph (1936)
“Then about every few feet down the jungle hill you’d walk past a shack just sort of made out of everything in general – old strips of asphalt tar paper, double gunny sacks, an old dress shirt, pair of overhauls, stretched up to cover half a side of a wall; bumpy corrugated iron, cement sacks, orange and apple crates took apart and nailed together with old rusty burnt nails from the cinder piles…. Gunny sacks, old clothes, hay and straw, fermenting bedclothes, are usually piled full of kids playing, or grown-ups resting and waiting for the word ‘work’ to come.” -- Bound For Glory
Migrant workers’ California reality …
Labor posting, California
“Well, this here fella’s got a contract to pick them peaches – or chop that cotton. You see now? The more fellas he can get, an’ the hungrier, less he’s gonna pay. An’ he’ll get a fella with kids if he can . . .” -- The Grapes of Wrath
The politics and economics of poverty and hard times…
“Pa said, ‘S’pose he’s tellin’ the truth– that fella?’ The preacher answered, ‘He’s tellin’ the truth, awright. The truth for him. He wasn’t makin’ nothin’ up.’
‘How about us?’ Tom demanded. ‘Is that the truth for us?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Casy. ‘I don’ know,’ said Pa.”
-- The Grapes of Wrath
“Cotton Pickers Wanted”
Was the Dust Bowl disaster man-made?
U.S. government’s Resettlement Administration paid for a documentary film called “The Plow That Broke The Plains.”
Filmmaker Pare Lorentz rejected the “mother nature” argument and instead suggested that man’s misuse of the prairies, including over farming and erosion, destroyed an ecosystem leading to the Dust Bowl phenomenon. Critics charged that the film was “propaganda” and farm leaders said it unfairly blamed the victims.
FDR’s New Deal deals with the dust…
President Roosevelt ordered the Civilian Conservation Corps to plant a huge belt of more than 200 million trees from Canada to Texas to help reduce soil erosion by increasing water levels in the soil and providing a wind break. The New Deal undertook educating farmers on soil conservation, and paid reluctant farmers a dollar an acres to practice new techniques, including crop rotations, contour plowing, terracing, and other improved farming practices. By 1938 the amount of dust in the air was significantly reduced, but only in the fall of 1939 when rainfall returned to pre-drought levels did farmers once again earn a livable income.
And the ghost of Tom Joad?
They sat silent in the coal-black cave of vines. Ma said, “How’m I gonna know ‘bout you? They might kill ya an’ I wouldn’t know. They might hurt ya. How’m I gonna know?”
Tom laughed uneasily, “Well, maybe like Casey says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one – an’ then –’”
“Then what, Tom?”
“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Whever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there… I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ – I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there.
-- The Grapes of Wrath
A modern ode to Tom Joad…
“Families sleepin' in their cars in the southwest. No home no job no peace no rest”
Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello perform The Ghost Of Tom Joad, Anaheim, California in 2009
