The Real Dust Bowl

From 1931 through 1938 the rainfall of the Great Plains fell by half.  In Oklahoma’s panhandle annual rainfall averages 18 inches but was 8 inches in this period.  Since 15 inches will induce desertification, the land struggled to sustain groundcover.  No one to this day has explained this enormous drought.  But a lot of people wrote about it.  People left the area known as the Dust Bowl, NE New Mexico to SW Kansas in droves abandoning land which only blew more dust.  “Okies” went to California and settled in the San Joaquin valley by the thousands as pitiful refugees.  Only after the federal government saved the day with made work jobs and assistance, conservation practices, and market controls, did the fool Okies survive.  Steinbeck’s book “Grapes of Wrath” is taken as gospel around the country.

But governors from Texas to Kansas protested Steinbeck’s sob story.  First of all, it is a myth that people left in droves.  Meade Co. KS , the heart of the dust bowl, actually gained population in the 1930s. Unemployment in OK was 22.5%, a few percent lower than the national average.  Remember there was a severe recession going on! We know from postal records that 445,000 people left Oklahoma during the decade (gorss, not net).  About half went to the Pacific Northwest where big dam projects were in the works and many of these Oklahomans were skilled welders.  60,000 went to CA and only 1/3 of these settled in the Great Valley.  Yet curiously, people in CA swear that most all the newcomers in the 30’s were “Okies”.  The reason for the myth is that AR had 48% and MS had 52% unemployment at this time.  The reason is that FDR’s Ag program, AAA, paid farmers to leave land idle. So the land barons took their checks and told most of the sharecroppers to hit the road, which they did to the San Joaquin Valley.  They had a similar accent to the Okies who were well known in the Bakersfield area in the oil industry.  So the label stuck. There were actually two other areas from which people migrated.  Western Dakotas and Montana had an equally horrid drought and many of these farmers went bankrupt and disprersed throughout the northern states.  Afro-Americans in the South, forced out as sharecroppers went to northern cities and settled in ghettos.

Just to serve the narrative of victimhood, Steinbeck has his characters beaten and taken advantage of by the CA landowners and farmers.  Naturally his Okies threatened to strike and get violent.  But the true story of labor unrest was from communist leaders of Mexican union workers who worked the fields.  State troopers had to put down the riots. In actual fact about 40,000 Oklahomans resettled in the Los Angeles area.  Their skills as horsemen and with livestock made them valuable in the movie industry which lived of horse operas.  And there were many others who found other jobs.

Nor did the Dust Bowl drive people off the land.  About half the farmland was farmed by seasonal farmers who came to plow and plant wheat, then returned to harvest.  Many lived in Denver or a farm in the east.  When fields began to blow, they were absentee to manage the dry earth.  It was well-known by many farmers in the area that strip plowing stops the dust from growing into a storm, but they were powerless to dictate to their neighbors.  Also many were well aware of the cause.  Farmers the world over love to fall plow.  Old Man Winter freezes and thaws and breaks up clods until by spring you have perfect texture like a flower bed. Trouble is, the climate of the panhandle freezes and thaws almost every day and night and the land breaks into dust.  Soils there are particularly friable and prone to blow. Cover crops, fallowing, listing, strip farming were not the invention of the federal government, but of farmers of the area. And remember, these were the days when farmers were virtually self-sufficient. I interviewed one 90-year old woman who said they didn’t raise any field crops but always had a garden.  They took gutters off the house and pumped well water into an irrigation system served by the gutters.

So if the farmers were scraping by, who wasn’t?  It was the cities where workers lost jobs and formed bread lines, wrote down-in-the-mouth novels like Studs Terkel did.  Like angry Woodie Guthrie sang.  And the armchair theorists and philosophers who were rich enough to still have a Packard, thought Steinbeck and Hoover/FDR progressivism must be right.  In fact, FDR is now credited with furthering the Depression with NHRA and dozens of foolish government programs which sucked funds out of the private sector.  Thus USA had a 12 year Depression while other countries didn’t.  In 1934, unemployment reached 25% nationwide.  In 1936 FDR proposed the Shelterbelt system.  His plan, conceived by himself and ignoring the warnings of botanists, was to plant a 100 mile wide strip of forest from ND to TX.  99% of the millions of trees planted died the first year. They build Hoover and Grand Coulee dams which will be filled with silt in another 75 years—the Colorado River carries ¾ of the sediment of North America. And at one point, the progressives wanted to force at gunpoint, all people to leave western KS to NE NM to the TX panhandle to leave and the federal government would make it into a National Park.  I think the 5 Civilzed tribes of OK thought, “We’ve heard this jive before.”             In the end, the absentee farmers blew out, Many people who left left for respiratory health reasons, the kids of the Depression who were so resourceful in the face of Dust became leaders in the fight against Axis powers, stunning the Nazis who believed the hang dog stories about pitiful Americans who were divided racially and surely wouldn’t fight together.  And the rains came back.