The day the Dust Bowl came to Washington, D.C. Source: Natural Resources Conservation Service
So if drought combined with farmers’ poor understanding of the particular needs of Great Plains land caused the disaster, how did it stop? A soil conservationist named Hugh Hammond Bennett testified to Congress about the problem in May of 1934. He heard that a dust storm was heading toward D.C., so he stalled the proceedings until it arrived. He pointed out the window and said, “This, gentlemen, is what I’ve been talking about.”
Once DC bigwigs experienced the terrible power of a dust storm, they began to listen. By the end of the year, Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act, which set out to teach farmers practices that would reduce wind erosion.
The storm they called Black Sunday, the worst on record, approaches Ulysses, Kansas Source: WSIU
It took several years of soil conservation efforts to begin to curtail the disaster. Then, in the fall of 1939, it rained, breaking nearly a decade of drought, and the dust storms finally abated.
Dust Bowl refugees Source: Blogspot
Three million people gave up before the 1939 rains and migrated west to find farm work in other states. But most families stuck it out. They were starving and dying from dust, so why did they stay? Perhaps stubbornness, but it was their land. It’s hard to leave the business you own to go work for someone else. Besides, they remembered how lush it had been when they arrived and kept hoping the tide would turn.
Have we truly learned from this experience? Well, yes and no, as the video above explains.
Songwriter and American legend Woody Guthrie, who you may know best for another song he wrote in the 1930s, “This Land Is Your Land,” happened to move to the Texas panhandle in the spring of 1931, right when the storms began.
This song by Mumford & Sons tells the tale of a man who loses his mind for a terrible moment in the midst of those dry years. The song was inspired by John Steinbeck’s novels, including the classic story of the Joad family’s migration from the Dust Bowl to California, “The Grapes of Wrath.”
For more on the Dust Bowl, try either of these two stellar PBS documentaries: “Surviving the Dust Bowl” or the 2012 Ken Burns masterpiece, “The Dust Bowl,” available on iTunes or Netflix streaming.
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