EFFECTS OF THE AMERICAN

DUST BOWL
Lyndsie R. Cook

APRIL 16, 2015

LATE AMERICAN HISTORY
McDonald-TR 12:30

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It all started in Oklahoma. The days were hot and rain was non-existent. Americas
economy had hit an all-time low. Small business owners and farmers were going out all across
the nation when the dust bowl hit. The nation wasnt prepared for the severity of the dust bowl
and its devastating effect. Oklahomans today wouldnt recognize the land because of the mass
destruction brought upon the area. The extended drought destroyed the land in the Central Plains.
Farmers were unable to harvest their crop and there was no water left for the livestock that they
owned. Small business owners didnt have customers, so they made no profit. Foreclosure spread
throughout the states like an epidemic. Residents described it as a vast simmering caldron
(Worster, p.12) because of the scolding heat and dry air. People began to panic and started taking
their money out of banks, causing them to close due to lack of business. People slowly began to
lose their belief in the government and also in the American dream.
In the late 1800s the agriculture business began to expand on the American Plains and
several crops were being taken in from harvest. Beginning in the 1930s, a severe drought took
over the central plains of the United State, and began to get worse and worse as a few years
passed. This lead to widespread crop failure, water erosion, and wind erosion. Black Sunday in
1935, a storm that blanketed East Coast cities into a haze is an example of a storm that took
enormous amounts of topsoil off of the ground (Hornbeck). These dust storms made the people
fear that the American Plains were going to turn into the American Deserts. The storms were so
severe and unexpected that nobody ever knew when dust storm was going to blow through and
cover everything in its path. Just the thought of such a torrential storm could give anyone an
anxiety attack. The storms lasted from the early 1930s to about 1938, when they were blessed
with some precipitation from the sky, wetting everything down a little bit. This wetter weather
increased ground cover and made it easier for farmers to cultivate their crops.

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The Dust Bowl resulted in several areas of eroded farmland. Karl Marx quotes that All
progress is capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer
(farmer), but of robbing the soil (Worster, p.1). The land was so eroded that the grass was not
growing back on it. So a method was proposed to help the grass grow a little faster and it was
still a natural process. They used what is called the Hay Method to speed up the process and
increase returns from pasture (Hornbeck). The farmers were encouraged to change their fields
from wheat and other crops, such as maize, into hay pastures. This was less likely to cause added
erosion to the soil that had already been eroded from the dust storms. The initial motivation was
to raise prices of livestock and crops so it would be easier to restore the fields and increase farm
income but the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act paid the farmers to lower their prices and the
government would purchase their livestock from them (Hornbeck), so they were making the
money either way and not getting ripped off. However, the Supreme Court shot down that
option and declared aspects of these programs unconstitutional. Federal agriculture policies
continued to attempt to support the prices of the land crops but limit the expansion of crop
acreage because the land conditions werent quite back to where they needed to be. In a ballad by
Woody Guthrie about the soil in the Dust Bowl it says In order to cultivate plants man must
disturb the upper or surface soil by tillage operations. By stirring the soil man accelerates the
normal geological weathering that has been going on for ages under normal conditions- which is
part of the whole soil forming process- and exposes it to devastatingly rapid gravity, wind, and
water erosion, which removes in short time, the rich surface layer that took centuries to build up
(Guthrie). He is exactly right. That is why it was so hard to get the soil back to where it began. It
took centuries to get it to where it was and it should take centuries to get it back to that state of
health and efficiency.

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Another large effect of the American Dust Bowl is the migration of so many residents in
the Central Plains. Several families in the area took the famous Route 66 and migrated to the
West Coast, especially California. This caused major decrease in population in the Central Plain
states such as Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas. Most of the people that were migrating were
farmers who had lost their plantations. They were looking for work in the West Coast because
they had lost all their money from their crops being ruined in the dust storms. The families who
were victims of the Dust Bowl were also victims of poverty and hunger (Porter). They had no
money, all they had was each other until they found a new place to call home and a new job to
support their families. Many hoped to become hired hands on California farms, learning how to
grow fruits and vegetables while living on the farms where they worked. However, California
farms typically hired seasonal workers only when they were needed, and used farm workers to
perform specific tasks rather than learn how to become farmers in their own right (Dust Bowl
Migration).
The article that I chose to review explores the repercussion of the soil conditions during
the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The Dust Bowl is defined as a grim nickname for the
Great Plains region devastated by drought and dust storm during the 1930s, causing the
migration into California and thousands of displaced Okies and Arkies (Kennedy). A
plethora of huge dust storms took a good amount of the topsoil from the land, making it hard for
farmers to cultivate their crops and keep their livestock healthy. By the 1940s the plains had lost
about three fourths of their overall topsoil coverage. This loss of topsoil decreased agricultural
production and immediately capitalized into lower land values, which meant the country was
losing a substantial amount of money. The article explains that the Dust Bowl is estimated to
have a significant effect in agriculture costs in more-eroded areas in the long run, more than less-

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eroded areas; The per acre value of farmland declined by thirty percent in high-erosion counties
and declined by seventeen percent in medium-erosion counties, relative to change in low-erosion
counties (Hornbeck). The overall population declined drastically between 1930 and 1940
because of the weather condition and because the agriculture production was so low. The
consequences of encroachment on the American grasslands remain inescapable. The loss of
wildlife, habitat, native biodiversity, and soil biomass was enormous (Sylvester). Overall, the
Dust Bowl has proved that in the kind of situation, there will be more damage done to moreeroded areas than to less-eroded areas because of the amount of topsoil that can be taken from
the more-eroded areas; causing more damage to the health of the soil, making it considerably
harder to be successful in the agriculture business.
The effects of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s has been a largely populated topic to
scholars all over the world because of the mystery of it all. Recent events such as the drought in
the Corn Belt, the 2008 financial crisis, and the release of a popular documentary film have
spiked the public interest of the Dust Bowl, how it came about and whether it could be a missing
piece in theory to them all. There have been several debates on whether this incident could have
been more controlled if the farmers or others that were working the soil had done something
different, but overall, the answer was never really stated for sure. Some say yes, some say no,
and some arent sure. Scientists, climatologists, and ecologists in particular, may one day be
able to tell the historian why this drought happened (McLeman) but as of 2013, when that piece
was published, no scientist had an answer for it. It is something that the world may never figure
out, but will always be a topic of interest. The effects of the Dust Bowl will forever be a big setback on the United States, especially the central region. Who knows what America could have
amounted to if they hadnt experienced such a tragic event? I guess we will never know.

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Annotated Bibliography/ Work Cited

"Dust Bowl Migration - Rural Migration News | Migration Dialogue." Dust Bowl Migration Rural Migration News | Migration Dialogue. N.p., Nov. 2008. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

Guthrie, Woody, and Woody Guthrie. Dust bowl ballads. Rounder, 1988.

Hornbeck, R. (2012). The enduring impact of the american dust bowl: Short- and long-run
adjustments to environmental catastrophe. The American Economic Review, 102(4),
1477-1507
This article explains how the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s eroded a large portion of
land used for cultivation and farming in the central region of the United States. It
demonstrates that the Dust Bowl reduced the values and revenues of agricultural land in
more eroded and less eroded counties in several ways. The information in this journal
articles states that not much of the initial agriculture damage costs were recovered in the
counties that were more eroded than others. There was also a large population reduction
after the Dust Bowl and again in the 1950s.

Kennedy, David M., and Lizabeth Cohen. The Amercian Pageant. Fifteenth ed. Vol. 2: Since
1865. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2013. Print.

McLeman, R. A., Dupre, J., Berrang Ford, L., Ford, J., Gajewski, K., & Marchildon, G. (2014).
What we learned from the dust bowl: Lessons in science, policy, and adaptation.
Population and Environment, 35(4), 417-440
This article gives an evaluation and amalgamation of educated information on the
droughts throughout the North American Great Plains, where the American Dust Bowl of
the 1930s occurred. Previous situations and events have sparked an interest over the
Dust Bowl and how it transpired in the United States. This journal article exhibits how
scholars in recent years have had substantial interest and produced extensive research
over such phenomena and global happenings because of the Dust Bowl.

Porter, J. C. (2014). What was the dust bowl? assessing contemporary popular knowledge.
Population and Environment, 35(4), 391-416

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This journal article illustrates The Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the effect it had on the
United States of America. It also thoroughly describes in detail what the Dust Bowl was
and how it happened. The Academic Journal given, reports on a valuation of modern
general information and insight on the American Dust Bowl. It concludes that knowledge
of the Dust Bowl and, how it happened, can help prevent similar situations in comparable
regions.

Sylvester, K. M., & Rupley, E. S. A. (2012). Revising the dust bowl: High above the kansas
grasslands. Environmental History, 17(3), 603-633
This journal article shows antique photos from the air looking down on Kansas where
part of the Dust Bowl occurred. These photos displayed land cover patterns and
compared crop fields from the 1930s to modern crop fields today. The comparison of
these photos produced and helped support an argument over the absence of basic science
causing an overestimated amount of impractical land use. They found that the use of
unfertile land for farming and cultivating was rather uncommon across most of the plains
in the central United Stated but demonstrated that it was especially rare in the region
where the Dust Bowl occurred.

Worster, Donald. Blizzards Roll In. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York:
Oxford UP, 1979. Print.