A ‘Dust Bowl
Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes caused the phenomenon. The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the high plains experienced drough…
Where did the Dust Bowl refugees come from?
But those refugees weren’t from other countries, they were Americans and former inhabitants of the Great Plains and the Midwest who had lost their homes and livelihoods in the Dust Bowl. Years of severe drought had ravaged millions of acres of farmland.
Who were the migrant farm workers of the Dust Bowl?
Narrated by Edward R. Murrow and focusing on migratory farm workers who were by then mostly Mexican American in the West and African American in the East, the program worked with images and sympathies that Dorothea Lange and John Steinbeck had helped to create. Race has always been central to the story of the Dust Bowl migration.
How many people were affected by the Dust Bowl?
The exact number of Dust Bowl refugees remains a matter of controversy, but by some estimates, as many as 400,000 migrants headed west to California during the 1930s, according to Christy Gavin and Garth Milam, writing in California State University, Bakersfield’s Dust Bowl Migration Archives.
What was the Dust Bowl?
The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a dry period in the 1930s.
What does Dust Bowl refugees mean?
These Dust Bowl refugees were called “Okies.” Okies faced discrimination, menial labor and pitiable wages upon reaching California. Many of them lived in shantytowns and tents along irrigation ditches. “Okie” soon became a term of disdain used to refer to any poor Dust Bowl migrant, regardless of their state of origin.
Where did the refugees of the Dust Bowl move to?
The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states; of those, 200,000 moved to California.
Why did Dust Bowl refugees go to California?
Relatives living in California encouraged family members back home to move to California. They had moved to the state in the 1920s and were doing well. Word of their success spread and set the migration in motion. California's climate, relief, and chances for work attracted the Dust Bowl migrants.
Why did people migrate because of the Dust Bowl?
The one-two punch of economic depression and bad weather put many farmers out of business. In the early 1930s, thousands of Dust Bowl refugees — mainly from Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico — packed up their families and migrated west, hoping to find work.
Where are the Dust Bowl Refugees?
Dust Bowl Refugees near Bakersfield, California. In a past Friday Footnote ( Black Blizzards) we examined the economic factors and natural events (drought, dust storms, grasshoppers) that farmers endured during the 1930s which led to the establishment of the Soil Conservation Service. However, we focused on the events, not the people.
What was the impact of the Dust Bowl era on farmers?
As the depression worsened in the 1930s and the drought and dust storms continued, many farmers were hanging on by a thread. Often a family didn’t know where the next meal or dollar would come from. During the dust bowl era, many farmers in the plains were ready to quit farming, but that was all they knew. Approximately 900,000 farmers had an annual income of less than $400. The federal government stepped in and started buying the small farms that were not economically viable.
What was to be done with the displaced farmers?
What was to be done with the displaced farmers? Moving to the city was not a viable option since unemployment was rampant in the cities. The solution was to establish farming communities and migrant camps across the country. Two federal agencies facilitated these initiatives – the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (created by the Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933) and then the Resettlement Administration (created by Executive Order 7027 on May 1, 1935). Later the Farm Security Administration took over the work of the Resettlement Administration.
Where did the resettlement administration build relief camps?
The Resettlement Administration went about accomplishing its mission utilizing two different approaches: Build relief camps in the western states for the migratory worker, especially refugees from the dust bowl states of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and surrounding states.
How much did farmers make in the Dust Bowl?
During the dust bowl era, many farmers in the plains were ready to quit farming, but that was all they knew. Approximately 900,000 farmers had an annual income of less than $400. The federal government stepped in and started buying the small farms that were not economically viable.
What song did Woody Guthrie sing during the Great Depression?
This is seen in Woody Guthrie’s song Dust Bowl Refugee. Woody sings:
What were the shanty towns that sprang up across America at the start of the Great Depression?
The shantytowns that sprang up across America at the start of the Great Depression were often known as “Hoovervilles”. These shantytowns were built by the homeless and were named after Herbert Hoover, the U.S. president who was widely blamed for the depression. Newspapers were known as Hoover Blankets, a Hoover Flag was an empty pocket turned out, and cardboard placed in shoes when the sole wore out was called Hoover Leather.
Who documented the Dust Bowl?
The Dust Bowl captured the imagination of the nation’s artists, musicians and writers. John Steinbeck memorialized the plight of the Okies in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. Photographer Dorothea Lange documented rural poverty with a series of photographs for FDR’s Farm Securities Administration.
What Caused the Dust Bowl?
The Dust Bowl was caused by several economic and agricultural factors, including federal land policies, changes in regional weather, farm economics and other cultural factors. After the Civil War, a series of federal land acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Great Plains.
What was the name of the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States that suffered severe dust storm?
New Deal Programs. Okie Migration. Dust Bowl in Arts and Culture. SOURCES. The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a dry period in the 1930s.
How much topsoil was blown off the Great Plains during Black Sunday?
As many as three million tons of topsoil are estimated to have blown off the Great Plains during Black Sunday. An Associated Press news report coined the term “Dust Bowl” after the Black Sunday dust storm.
What was the impact of the Dust Bowl on the economy?
The Dust Bowl intensified the crushing economic impacts of the Great Depression and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of work and better living conditions.
What was the name of the storm that swept the Great Plains?
During the Dust Bowl period, severe dust storms, often called “black blizzards” swept the Great Plains. Some of these carried Great Plains topsoil as far east as Washington, D.C. and New York City, and coated ships in the Atlantic Ocean with dust.
How many acres of land were lost in the Dust Bowl?
By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had been rendered useless for farming, while another 125 million acres—an area roughly three-quarters the size of Texas—was rapidly losing its topsoil. Regular rainfall returned to the region by the end of 1939, bringing the Dust Bowl years to a close.
What were the shelterbelts in the Dust Bowl?
The wind erosion was gradually halted with federal aid. Windbreaks known as shelterbelts—swaths of trees that protect soil and crops from wind—were planted, and much of the grassland was restored. By the early 1940s the area had largely recovered. Dust Bowl: windbreaks.
Who was the woman who left the Dust Bowl?
Dorothea Lange —Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-USF34-T01-016453-E) Thousands of families were forced to leave the Dust Bowl at the height of the Great Depression in the early and mid-1930s.
What is the Dust Bowl poster?
Dust Bowl: USDA poster. A U.S. Department of Agriculture poster from the Dust Bowl era urging farmers on the Great Plains to plant windbreaks (also known as shelterbelts) to halt erosion. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now.
What was the song that characterized the Dust Bowl?
Their plight was characterized in songs such as “Dust Bowl Refugee” and “Do Re Mi” by folksinger Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoman who had joined the parade of those headed west in search of work. That experience was perhaps most famously depicted in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath(1939).
How many people fled the Plains?
…whole area into a vast Dust Bowl and destroyed crops and livestock in unprecedented amounts. As a result, some 2.5 million people fled the Plains states, many bound for California, where the promise of sunshine and a better life often collided with the reality of scarce, poorly paid work as…
Where is the Dust Bowl?
Dust Bowl, section of the Great Plains of the United States that extended over southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and northeastern New Mexico. Abandoned farmstead in the Dust Bowl region of Oklahoma, showing the effects of wind erosion, 1937.
Who sang "Do Re Mi" and "Dust Bowl Refugee"?
Their plight was characterized in songs such as “Dust Bowl Refugee” and “ Do Re Mi” by folksinger Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoman who had joined the parade of those headed west in search of work. That experience was perhaps most famously depicted in John Steinbeck ’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
Where did the Dust Bowl migrants move to?
At least half had been living in a town or city and doing some kind of blue-collar or less frequently white-collar work before unemployment or stories of California opportunities encouraged them to pack the car and hit the road. Most of these migrants headed for the cities of California where they usually found jobs and a decent standard of living in fairly short order. They were the overlooked half of the illnamed Dust Bowl migration; their urban stories lost in the concern and fascination that centered on the relocating farm families who had chosen to look for work in the agricultural valleys of California.
What was the significance of the Dust Bowl migration?
The Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s plays an important and complicated role in the way Americans talk about the history of poverty and public policy in their country.
What was the significance of race in the Dust Bowl?
Race has always been central to the story of the Dust Bowl migration. Paul Taylor knew in 1935 when he wrote his first article about the "drought refugees" that their white skins and Anglo-Saxon names could win attention and sympathy that would not so readily attach to the Mexican and Asian farm workers who normally struggled in the valleys of California. Steinbeck too used the paradox, emphasizing in a dozen ways that Americans of their pedigree were not supposed to experience what the Joads experienced.
How did the Dust Bowl affect poverty?
If the poverty associated with the Dust Bowl migration was transitory, the impact on public policy and on popular understandings of poverty was more lasting. This high-profile episode with its sympathetic white victims and its powerful storytellers helped reshape the terrain of poverty-related policymaking in various ways, especially around the issues of interstate migration and farm labor. Poor people crossing state lines would have a clear set of rights in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl migration, and the plight of farm workers would be more visible even as the Joads left the fields to families with darker skins and different accents.
What is the Dust Bowl saga about?
The continuing fascination with the Dust Bowl saga also has something to do with the way race and poverty have interacted over the generations since the 1930s. Here is one of the last great stories depicting white Americans as victims of severe poverty and social prejudice.
Why is race important in the Dust Bowl?
The continuing fascination with this subject over the decades has had as much to do with racial politics as with the events themselves. As poverty became more and more racialized, and as struggles over social welfare programs increasingly contentious, the Dust Bowl migration took on new meanings and new functions. By the 1970s an aging generation of former migrants and their upwardly mobile offspring where ready to memorialize the experiences of the 1930s and another set of storytellers were ready to help. A new round of journalism, novels, history books, TV documentaries, and country music songs has been the result, much of it fed by a late 20 th century need for stories of poverty, hardship, and eventual triumph where the victims are white. These latter-day Dust Bowl accounts have sometimes promoted conservative agendas, as in the collection of songs that Merle Haggard produced in the late 1960s and 1970s celebrating the struggles of his parents and implying that the poverty of their generation was more noble than the poverty of contemporary America. Unwilling to acknowledge kinship with the Mexican-Americans who replaced them in the fields or admit the importance of government assistance in Dust Bowl survival strategies, some former migrants constructed self histories that added to racial distances. But others among the new storytellers see the meanings differently. In keeping alive the Dust Bowl migration saga, they remind America that poverty has had many faces, that disparaging the victims is senseless and cruel, and that the poor and helpless of one era will hopefully escape that fate in the next.
Why is the Dust Bowl important?
The Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s plays an important and complicated role in the way Americans talk about the history of poverty and public policy in their country . For almost seventy years the story of white families from Oklahoma and neighboring states making their way to California in the midst of the Great Depression has been kept alive by journalists and filmmakers, college teachers and museum curators, songwriters and novelists, and of course historians. Although it was but one episode out of many struggles with poverty during the 1930s, the Dust Bowl migration became something of synecdoche, the single most common image that later generations would use to memorialize the hardships of that decade. The continuing fascination with the Dust Bowl saga also has something to do with the way race and poverty have interacted over the generations since the 1930s. Here is one of the last great stories depicting white Americans as victims of severe poverty and social prejudice. It is a story that many Americans have needed to tell, for many different reasons.
Who developed new evidence on how many people left the Dust Bowl region?
More than 70 years later, Jason Long and Henry E. Siu develop new evidence on how many people left the Dust Bowl region, who they were, and where they went. Their findings challenge conventional wisdom. In Refugees From Dust and Shrinking Land: Tracking the Dust Bowl Migrants (NBER Working Paper No.
What book was the Dust Bowl?
Tragic images of the Dust Bowl's desolate farmlands and destitute migrants were ingrained into the American consciousness by John Steinbeck's classic novel The Grapes of Wrath and by the iconic photos of Dorothea Lange. Huge swaths of the Southern Great Plains were devastated in this human and environmental disaster of the 1930s.
What states were hardest hit by the Dust Bowl?
Census and other sources such as Ancestry.com, the researcher focus on individuals living in the 20 hardest-hit counties in four states: Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. They analyze data from 1920 through 1930, before the Dust Bowl, and 1930 through 1940, during the dramatic events.
What was the in-migration rate in the 1920s?
However, they also discover that the 20 counties had undergone tremendous migration "churn" in the years immediately after World War I, experiencing an in-migration rate of 47.3 percent in the 1920s, as the area boomed. In-migration fell to only 15.5 percent in the 1930s.
What was the rate of in-migration in the 1930s?
In-migration fell to only 15.5 percent in the 1930s. The researchers conclude that depopulation was largely the result of falling numbers of new residents moving to these counties and "was not due to an extraordinary exodus relative to historical norms.".
Was the out-migration rate higher in the Dust Bowl?
They find that the out-migration rate was much higher from the Dust Bowl region than from other parts of the Depression-stricken country, and farmers were the least likely to leave impacted areas. Moreover, total out-migration was only slightly higher than in the previous decade.
Did the Okies move to California?
Contrary to the enduring image of "Okies" fleeing en masse to California, the research finds that migrants from the Dust Bowl region were no more likely to move to California than migrants from other parts of the U.S., or those from the same region ten years prior.