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Essay on the dust bowl
Effects of dust bowl
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The United States was in troubled times in 1929. In this year, during its already struggling economy, the stock market crashed. This one event created a domino effect, and other troubling events followed. One example of the tragedies was the drought, and the dust storms. James Gregory, the author of American Exodus writes, The most spectacular feature of the drought, the awesome dust storms which blackened the sky over much of the central United States on numerous occasions during 1933 and 1935, actually affected relatively few farms in the Southwestern states. The area of severe wind erosion, soon known as the Dust Bowl, compromised a section of the wheat belt near the intersection of Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma and Texas panhandles.”(Gregory,
The Dust Bowl had ruined any chance of farmers in those regions being able to farm, because of that they were forced to relocate to be able to survive. This created what is known as the Dust Bowl Migration. During the 1930’s and 1940’s these people decided to travel west to California in search of work. However, they did not receive the welcoming they might have
Mexican farm workers were demanding higher wages. Mexican women played key roles in the strike. Weber writes, “from the beginning of the strike women of all ages--older women,with long hair who wore the rebozos of rural Mexico, younger women who had adopted flapper styles, and young girls barley in their teens--went on the picket lines.”(Weber, 96). Their jobs were to stop the strike breakers. They would do things such as taunt them, and in some situations it would become very violent. The strike would end, but the stories of what these women did still
To begin with the “Dust Bowl” was one of the causes of economic fallout which resulted in the Great Depression because the “Dust Bowl” destroyed crops which were used to sell and make profit and the government had to give up a lot of money in order to try and help the people and land affected by the “Dust Bowl”. The “Dust Bowl” is referring to a time during the 1930’s where the Great Plains region was drastically devastated by drought. All of the including areas (Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico) all had little to no rainfall, light soil, and high winds, which were not a very suitable combination. The drought lasted from 1934 to 1937, most of the soil during the drought lacked the better root system of grass. Therefore it was easy for the
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 the name given to the Great Plains area in the 1930s. Much of the region was an agricultural area and relied on it for most of their economy. Combined with The Great Depression and the dust storms, farmers in the Great Plains area were severely hurt. These farmers were seeking opportunity elsewhere near the Pacific where they were mistreated by the others already there. The mistreatment is a form of disenfranchisement, by excluding and segregating a group of people from the rest of society. The disenfranchisement of the Oklahoma farmers during the 1930s was caused by a combination of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression which led to the farmers being forced to move west where they were mistreated because there were not enough jobs.
...t Bowl. Unfortunately the circumstances in the Great Plains all came to a head resulting in a horrific ten years for citizens of the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl caused government and people to look at farming practices and to evaluate their output. These policies resulted in overproduction of crops causing the prices to fall. The conclusion of World War I and countries that stopped importing foods added to the pain the farmers were already feeling. Yet with the establishment of government policies such as the Federal Relief Administration and the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act and with drought coming to an end, the Dust Bowl came to an end. The American people knew that they needed to do everything that was possible to end the Dust Bow. Tom Joad, the lead character in The Grapes Wrath best sums it up “ I know this... a man got to do what he got to do.”
“The dust storms that swept across the southern plains in the 1930s created the most severe environmental catastrophe in the entire history of the white man on this continent.”(Location 445.) Had the area never been over worked and farmed to produce mass quantities of wheat and other crops the dust storms would never had happened. This is much like the economical blunder that caused the stock market crash of 1929 resulting in the Great Depression. Had the banks not been so eager to grow and approve credit and loans, essentially over working the money market, at an unusually high rate the stock market most likely would not have crashed. The causes of both the dust bowl and stock market crash were caused by the American society’s greed for wanting more than what they needed to sustain their way of
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.
The drought caused a lot of unfavorable conditions for farmers in the southwest. In Worster’s book he says “Few of us want to live in the region now. There is too much wind, dirt, flatness, space, barbed wire, drought, uncertainty, hard work…” (Worster 105). The droughts caused many unfavorable condition throughout the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and neighboring sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Thus, roughly one-third of Texas and Oklahoman farmers left their homes and headed to California in search of migrant work. The droughts during the 1930s are a drastically misrepresented factor of the Dust bowl considering “the 1930s droughts were, in the words of a Weather Bureau scientist, the worst in the climatological history of the country.” (Worster 232) Some of the direct effects of the droughts were that many of the farmers’ crops were damaged by deficient rainfall, high temperatures, and high winds, as well as insect infestations and dust storms that accompanied these conditions. What essentially happened was that the soil lacked the stronger root system of grass as an anchor, so the winds easily picked up the loose topsoil and swirled it into dense dust clouds, called “black blizzards.” The constant dry weather caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The effects of the drought happened so rapidly and progressively over time that
The Dust Bowl was also known as the “Dirty Thirties” which took its toll (Dunn n. pag.). The decade from the Dust Bowl was filled with extreme conditions such as tornadoes, floods, droughts, and dirt storms. The Dust Bowl occurred in the midwestern states of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Within these states the conditions affected many peoples lives. The Dust Bowl had gotten its name after Black Sunday, April 14,1935( Ganzel n. pag.). While traveling through the midwest a reporter named Robert Geige, wrote, “Three little words achingly familiar on a western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the Dust Bowl of the continent- if it rains” (The Drought n. pag.). People back then used the term Dust Bowl to help describe the people that lived in the hard times of the drought stricken region during the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl is still a term we use today to describe the harsh times of the droughts and dirt storms. The Dust Bowl was a harsh time to live in, it affected many things such as: the way people lived and farming.
Gregory, James N. American exodus: the Dust Bowl migration and Okie culture in California . New
On a website called Drought Disasters, sponsored by Browing University, it was written “the seeds of the Dust Bowl may have been sown during the early 1920s. However, overproduction of wheat coupled with the Great Depression led to severely reduced market prices” (Black Sunday). In the ICE case study number 288 Noel Sanders writes, “The region of the Dust Bowl was an area most affected by the drought - Kansas, southeastern Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Northern Texas. But a much larger areas, all the way to the east coast felt the impact” (Sander). With the help of new mech...
After viewing different perspectives on all three events, the Dust Bowl seems by far the worst for several reasons. These reasons are: having trapped people with little supplies for 10 years long, losing loved ones and people they cared about, getting their crops abducted along with most of there animals they could not longer care for, and their financial investment was ravaged and so was most of their lives. The dust bowl was hard to get away from because you couldn't see you food storage died away dust killed whatever was outside for too long and it stretched for miles. We reflect on the past to survive to solve future problems the dust bowl could happen again.
The “Dust Bowl Odyssey” presented an initial perspective of why families migrated from drought-ridden, Dust Bowl, areas to California. Edward Carr cautions, “Interpretation plays a necessary part in establishing the facts of history, and because no existing interpretation is wholly objective, on interpretation is a good as another, and the facts of history are in principle not amendable to objective interpretation” (Carr, 1961, p. 31). Historians had to separate the prejudices, assumptions, and beliefs of the times in order to have a more objective reasoning of the migration. The migration had valid evidence that supported against the theory of the Dust Bowl being the only contributor. Rather there were other historical contributions to
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.
The Dust Bowl was a rough time for farmers in the 1930’s. The Dust Bowl was a drought that had many dust storms involved, which lasted about a decade.
During the war, men were off fighting for America, and the women were left behind to take over their jobs in the factories. Women proved that they can do almost all of the same jobs as men. Rosie the Riveter, a picture of a woman flexing with a caption of “We Can Do It,” became the symbol for women all across the nation. After the war, years later, women began to receive equal pay for the same jobs that the men were doing. Many other minority groups, such as African Americans, played a huge