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The great depression free essay history
The great depression free essay history
Essays comparing and contrasting dust bowl
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The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan gives the account of the Great Plains and the hardships the people who tried to conquer this land survived. People flocked to the Great Plains in search of prosperity. The land was ripe for the taking. The Homestead Act of 1862 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 attracted many people to this area. The land was unknown to most Americans, and the climate was not understood. The Native Americans had been long removed along with their livestock. The whole area was an endless sea of grassland. The climate was different than the urban areas on New York and Chicago. Some people were even given diagnosis that this desert climate could only cure. “Doctors prescribed a remedy: go west, to the southern plains, …show more content…
Still, people were determined to tough it out. We are shown how people overcame horrible living conditions, severe depression, and even come to find peace with the land. Several people believed they were called to this land and it was there home. Many of the “nesters” packed up once the dust-storms started to destroy the land. John McCarty went so far as to his commitment was by starting the “Last Man Club”, which ironically years later, he eventually left Dalhart. This was brought on by incentives the government had given to leave the Dust Bowl. People tried to migrate to other areas just to be turned away. The details of sign like the ones in California not welcoming “Okies” show how the rest of the world was suffering and did not want any more added to their pain. People were determined to survive the storms and get back on with their farming. Only, the storms never stopped, the weather did eventually change, but too little too late. Many of the residents had decided they had had enough of the torment. A migration that brought people into the land also saw another migration out of the land. Many people had to leave for health reasons. Mainly dust-inhalation and the loss of property due to no income. The Great Plains never did recover from the initial farming that tore the land up. Recovery efforts have eased the problematic dust-storms, but the weather is still unpredictable. The grass has returned in certain areas, but many of those areas are not inhibited by people, but livestock. The way the land was before human intervention,
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, 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” refers to a time during the 1930’s where the Great Plains region was drastically devastated by drought. All of the 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.
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
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.
From all over the country, from professional doctors, chefs, maids, and even more farmers came to the club held in the dust bowl area to bring more support. With this no meetings or ranks were ranged to handle all this people. It was just a mass of meek and outgoing Americans willing to help. This effect had sustained three-quarters of the original dust bowl area farmers to stand still in their damaged land. If all those people migrated to different states, it would be a bigger catastrophe then the time’s current migration. Through the possibly most horrific time of American history, the free people came together to help one another, gathering for each other, in poverty or in riches. There was no distinct difference in the people or actions, for that club had no shame for making America stand taller than the dust storms and dirty thirties. That is what the power of the Last Man’s Club was and possibly still is.
In the 1830's the Plains Indians were sent to the Great American Deserts in the west because the white men did not think they deserved the land. Afterwards, they were able to live peacefully, and to follow their traditions and customs, but when the white men found out the land they were on was still good for agricultural, or even for railroad land they took it back. Thus, the white man movement westward quickly began. This prospect to expand westward caused the government to become thoroughly involved in the lives of the Plains Indians. These intrusions by the white men had caused spoilage of the Plains Indians buffalo hunting styles, damaged their social and cultural lives, and hurt their overall lives.
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
Although early nineteenth century Kansas was vast in territory, the land was mostly unpopulated. This cheap abundant land along with the dream of a better life lured farmers from the east to start their lives in Kansas. Many people were driven to pack their belongings and start their westward bound journey. Floyd Benjamin St...
...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.”
Many believe the Dust Bowl was caused solely by bad weather, but Egan shows a multitude of factors that led to the catastrophe. In Timothy Egan’s book, The Worst Hard Time, Egan believes that the syndicate and government, overproduction of the land, and drought were all factors that caused the Dust Bowl.
At the core of understanding the Dust Bowl is the question of whose fault it was. Was it the result of farmers tilling land beyond what the environment could bear, or is it just a natural fluctuation in the atmosphere? These questions have intrigued historians and started a new evolution of theories. The Dust Bowl grazed across the Midwest of the United States, destroying the ecology and agriculture of the United States and Canadian Prairies"1.
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.
The Dust Bowl existed, in its full quintessence, concurrently with the Great Depression during the 1930's. Worster sets out in an attempt to show that these two cataclysms existed simultaneously not by coincidence, but by the same culture, which brought them about from similar events. "Both events revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other in economic." (pg. 5) Worster proposes that in American society, as in all others, there are certain accepted ways of using the land. He sums up the "capital ethos" of ecology into three simply stated maxims: nature must be seen as capital, man has a right/obligation to use this capital for constant self-advancement, and the social order should permit and encourage this continual increase of personal wealth (pg. 6) It is through these basic beliefs that Worster claims the plainsmen ignored all environmental limits, much ...
"Chapter 2 Western Settlement and the Frontier." Major Problems in American History: Documents and Essays. Ed. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Edward J. Blum, and Jon Gjerde. 3rd ed. Vol. II: Since 1865. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012. 37-68. Print.
Truly it was a living “nightmare” for anyone living around these lands. The conditions created from these dust storms proved to be deadly, “ those who inhaled the airborne prairie dust suffered coughing spasms, shortness of breath, asthma, bronchitis and influenza” (History Channel Staff). Evacuating the area seemed to be the only plausible option for people in this time. With 400,000 people leaving the great plains, With no chances of making a living in their current situation farm families abandoned their homes leaving westward to become migrant
The opening chapter paints a vivid picture of the situation facing the drought-stricken farmers of Oklahoma. Dust is described a covering everything, smothering the life out of anything that wants to grow. The dust is symbolic of the erosion of the lives of the people. The dust is synonymous with "deadness". The land is ruined ^way of life (farming) gone, people ^uprooted and forced to leave. Secondly, the dust stands for ^profiteering banks in the background that squeeze the life out the land by forcing the people off the land. The soil, the people (farmers) have been drained of life and are exploited: