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 to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." The early thirties opened with prosperity and growth. At the time the Midwest was full of agricultural growth. The Panhandle of the Oklahoma and Texas region was marked contrast to the long soup lines of the Eastern United States. Farming was the major growing production in the United States in the 1930's. Panhandle farming attached many people because it attracted many people searching for work. The best crop that was prospering around the country was wheat. The world needed it and the United States could supply it easily because of rich mineral soil. In the beginning of the 1930's it was dry but most farmers made a wheat crop. In 1931 everyone started farming wheat. The wheat crop forced the price down from sixty-eight cents/ bushels in July 1930 to twenty-five cents/ bushels July 1931. Many farmers went broke and others abandoned their fields. As the storms approached the farmers were getting ready. Farmers increased their milking cowherds. The cream from the cows was sold to make milk and the skim milk was fed to the chickens and pigs. When normal feed crops failed, thistles were harvested, and when thistles failed, hardy souls dug up soap weed, which was chopped in a feed mill or by hand and fed to the stock. This was a backbreaking, disheartening chore, which would have broken weaker people. But to the credit of the residents of the Dust Bowl, they shouldered their task and carried on. The people of the region made it because they knew how to take the everyday practical things, which had been used for years and adapt them to meet the crisis.
Because if the stock market crashing in 1929, many people sold their stocks and rushed to the banks to retrieve their money. Because of the faulty banking system, many banks failed. This led to the many people who have very little left. A significant thing is the unemployment and the homelessness of the people. In 1929, 3% of the people have unemployment while during the Great Depression, it was around 25% of the people. The farmers of Oklahoma and Kansas was struck the hardest when The Dust Bowl started. The huge dust storms changed the way people lived their lives more than the rest of the US. THe rural farmers in those states are forced to move inward toward the urban areas to escape the harsh conditions of the dust
The dust bowl was a very tedious time to live in. It was also a time when money could be made very quickly and can be lost just as fast as it was gained. The problems of the dustbowl were caused by a cascade of events. The biggest of these events would undoubtedly be because of drought. There was no rain, no moisture and that meant that no farmer in the plains could plant any crop there to make a profit for his or her family.
One of America’s most beloved books is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The book portrays a family, the Joads, who leave Oklahoma and move to California in search of a more prosperous life. Steinbeck’s book garnered acclaim both from critics and from the American public. The story struck a chord with the American people because Steinbeck truly captured the angst and heartbreak of those directly impacted by the Dust Bowl disaster. To truly comprehend the havoc the Dust Bowl wreaked, one must first understand how and why the Dust Bowl took place and who it affected the most. The Dust Bowl was the result of a conglomeration of weather, falling crop prices, and government policies.
In the “Black Blizzard” by scholastic scope the article describes how people lived during the “Dust Bowl.” The dust storms are like a tidal wave but instead of water, it has dust and dirt. Some of these dust storms could go 7,000 feet high. Animals ran in fear of the storms. During the 1930’s Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado were hit by hundreds of storms. This natural disaster destroyed the economy of the whole area. Families moved to the Great Plains. With hard work farmers were able to grow corn and wheat. In 1931 there was a terrible drought in the middle of the nation. For five years in a row crops failed and people couldn’t pay their mortgages. With no rainfall soil became loose, dry, dusty, and blew away. Dust buried
To conclude, During the 1930's, there was the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought left many southern families. John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath talks
The 1930’s, a time in American history not to be forgotten for its eventful hardships now known as the Great Depression. It was during this time that the United States was at its all time low economically in years, and much of the American people were beginning to feel the pain of such issues. In addition to being financially unstable the U.S was also undergoing a great weather disaster soon to be known as the Dust Bowl. A time in American history where the farms of the west from, North Dakota, to Texas and Oklahoma were destroyed due to topsoil being blown away from over harvesting of the ground. It was during this time period
The Dust Bowl, mainly a result of drought and poor agricultural practices, was a phenomenon where massive clouds of dust battered the Great Plains, particularly throughout western Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle. The severe dust storms killed crops and livestock, which in turn heavily impacted the agricultural industry. The effect of the dust storms on the crops is illustrated in The Grapes of Wrath, when the author writes, “During a night the wind raced faster over the land, dug cunningly among the rootlets of the corn, and the corn fought the wind with its weakened leaves until the roots were freed by the prying wind and then each stalk settled wearily sideways toward the earth and pointed the direction of the wind”(Steinbeck 4). Farmers looked to the federal government for financial aid, which was given to them by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). To help the agricultural industry, the AAA paid farmers to reduce the production of wheat and cotton. Even though the AAA helped to raise farm income, it did little to help tenant farmers, like the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, and only benefited large farmers. Soon, tenant farmers found themselves evicted off their land, and this happened to the Joads: “And at last the owner men came to the point. The tenant system won’t work anymore. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families”(22). As a result of the Dust Bowl, thousands of tenant farmers, like the Joad family, lost all of their money and all of their
Throughout the book Letters From the Dust Bowl by Caroline Henderson, there was a common theme of survival. Everyone had a different way of coping with the disastrous events that came during The Great Depression. Some people had hope for the future, while others had given in to the dust and lost all hope or decided to leave. One of the only things that influenced people to stay, was the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), who offered checks to farmers willing to stop farming portions of their land. It was, “[I]n reality the only thing that [had] saved the country side from complete abandonment and the small towns from ruin,” (Henderson 158). Most of these people survived off of their hope and the belief that life would get better.
The 1930’s brought about great changes to some families of Oklahoma causing them to have to change their way of living. The drought and the overused farm land causing the crops to dry up and die make it hard to make a living. The Dust Bowl brings great winds creating great storms of dust making life miserable and unbearable. John Steinbeck makes a link between the atmosphere and the Dust Bowl in his novel The Grapes of Wrath. The atmosphere concerning not just the land but the people as well is the focus of the essay at hand. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck uses the harsh conditions of the farm land in Oklahoma, the attitudes of the people, and the life changes the people have to make to create a novel that lets the reader view the hard times for some families in the 1930’s.
In many ways, Steinbeck manages to accurately capture the suffering experienced by countless laborers during the dust bowl by chronicling the Joads’ trying journey. His novel, The Grapes of Wrath, he covers the extensive journey of the Joads. Their adventure is long, occasionally needing to be propelled by coincidences, for Steinbeck to deliver many of his broad messages about unity, power, and politics. Yet, even though his story takes a more “bigger picture” stance on the dust bowl period, Steinbeck doesn’t fail to forcibly capture the difficulties that many faced.
The Dust Bowl was a huge impact on the U.S. in the 1930’s, it was also called the dirty thirties. It took place right after the stock market crashed and put many families that lived in the Great Plains out of their homes. The giant cloud of dust came from unanchored topsoil on the ground and carried it far away, and after the wind settled down, all of the dust that was carried, dropped and buried some homes and vehicles, even with families inside of them. It ruined crops and farms and damaged many homes. The storm mainly affected the states of Texas and Oklahoma, and touched the sides of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. The drought that came with the dust bowl lasted for several years but came in three different waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939 through 1940. Some regions in the high plains experienced it for as much as eight years. “The Dust Bowl was the name given to the Great Plains region devastated by drought in 1930s depression-ridden America” (History.com Staff, 2009).
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.
Have you ever seen those little Dust Devils on a windy day? Well in the story, “The Grapes of Wrath,” the author talks about a bigger threat in the 1930’s. A disaster so bad It made people leave the place and move to the West.
In the 1930s, America was having difficult times, and the economy was failing. Farmers in the Dust Bowl region had the worst troubles. In the Great Plains, people were continually hit by dust storms. The arrival of inexperienced farmers led to the creation of the Dust Bowl. Poor farming techniques, technological advancements, and severe drought were all major contributing factors to the Dust Bowl.
Amid the grim conditions suffered by Americans during the Great Depression, such as unemployment and famine, some were forced to suffer an additional peril: the devastating effects of the Dust Bowl plaguing the midwest in the 1930’s. A disastrous combination of factors, including severe drought, inattention from the government, and improper farming techniques made the storms inevitable. The dust storms had the potential to cause unfathomable damage to property and crops, furthering the abuse that farmers experienced throughout the Great Depression. Whether it was the economic crisis afflicting the country that forced tenant farmers off of their land, or