The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan, made a phrase in history come alive. I knew that drought in the 1930s ravaged parts of the midwest, and I’ve read Grapes of Wrath like most American high-schoolers. But I did not comprehend that the “Dust” in “Dust Bowl” was so shockingly literal. I had no idea that the area of the country known in the 1800s as the Great American Desert was, during the 1930s, literally awash in dunes of dust.
The trials endured by those who stayed — because this book chronicles those who stayed, and suffered — went beyond crushing poverty and straight into illness and death, whether from dust pneumonia, getting caught outside in a dust storm and getting lost within shouting distance of shelter, or (at times) loss of hope.
Much of this devastation was brought on by a blind optimism (in the face of historical weather trends) and accelerated by the plowing of the prairies. Ecological devastation writ large, but instead of floods of water claiming New Orleans, the Dust Bowl saw the land — and the prosperity of the 1920s — simply blow away. Some of these storms carried enough dust to blacken the sky as far away as Washington DC, as Egan brings home during a Congressional hearing on possible relief measures for the area. Only when the East Coast literally saw the topsoil of Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Texas arriving on their doorstep was a true measure of the crisis accepted by those in power. Of course, the Dust Bowl had to compete with the entire country’s economic devastation, so there was reason to hesitate, and wonder whether farmers in an area that many thought shouldn’t be farmed deserved a helping hand.
The stories and pictures here demonstrate the crushing need, and also share the loneliness. So many left, and those who stayed either felt bound to endure, or simply gave up. In a country which (at least in its myths) is optimistic and all about growth, personal and patriotic, the tale of the Dust Bowl reminds that not every resource can withstand the onrush of human greed.
Today, of course, the parallels are clear, and An Inconvenient Truth rattles through top-level warnings around the world where human choices are making a difference…usually for the worse. But Al Gore’s breadth in sounding the alarm about environmental crisis is reinforced by the depth and personal stories of The Worst Hard Time.
The 1936 documentary mentioned in the book, The Plow That Broke The Plains, was funded, extraordinarily, by the United States Government. The Internet Archive has it online, about 25 minutes long, and I’m going to watch it now.