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The dust bow was a devastating event that was caused by drought, over plowing and over grazing. People moved into the great plains from other wetter areas and were not equipped for dealing with drought conditions. Without the appropriate drought farming knowledge, severe dust storms devastated much of the plains. Four waves of droughts only worsened the conditions.

Click on the link to learn more about the dust bowl. To view the video, click on "view original" when you expand the post.

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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. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. 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 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.

The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains.

Many of these late nineteenth and early twentieth century settlers lived by the superstition "rain follows the plow." Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agriculture would permanently affect the climate of the semi-arid Great Plains region, making it more conducive to farming.

This false belief was linked to Manifest Destiny -an attitude that Americans had a sacred duty to expand west. A series of wet years during the period created further misunderstanding of the region's ecology and led to the intensive cultivation of increasingly marginal lands that couldn't be reached by irrigation.

Rising wheat prices in the 1910s and 1920s and increased demand for wheat from Europe during World War I encouraged farmers to plow up millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat, corn and other row crops. But as the United States entered the Great Depression, wheat prices plummeted. Farmers tore up even more grassland in an attempt to harvest a bumper crop and break even.

Crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, exposing the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away. Eroding soil led to massive dust storms and economic devastation-especially in the Southern Plains.

When Was The Dust Bowl?

The Dust Bowl, also known as "the Dirty Thirties," started in 1930 and lasted for about a decade, but its long-term economic impacts on the region lingered much longer.

Severe drought hit the Midwest and Southern Great Plains in 1930. Massive dust storms began in 1931. A series of drought years followed, further exacerbating the environmental disaster.

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. The economic effects, however, persisted. Population declines in the worst-hit counties-where the agricultural value of the land failed to recover-continued well into the 1950s.

'Black Blizzards' Strike America

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.

Billowing clouds of dust would darken the sky, sometimes for days at a time. In many places, the dust drifted like snow and residents had to clear it with shovels. Dust worked its way through the cracks of even well-sealed homes, leaving a coating on food, skin and furniture.

Some people developed "dust pneumonia" and experienced chest pain and difficulty breathing. It's unclear exactly how many people may have died from the condition. Estimates range from hundreds to several thousand people.

On May 11, 1934, a massive dust storm two miles high traveled 2,000 miles to the East Coast, blotting out monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. Capitol.

The worst dust storm occurred on April 14, 1935. News reports called the event Black Sunday. A wall of blowing sand and dust started in the Oklahoma Panhandle and spread east. 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.

New Deal Programs

President Franklin D. Roosevelt established a number of measures to help alleviate the plight of poor and displaced farmers. He also addressed the environmental degradation that had led to the Dust Bowl in the first place.

Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) implemented new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion.
READ MORE: Did New Deal Program Help End the Great Depression?
Okie Migration

Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states- Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma-during the 1930s. It was one of the largest migrations in American history.

Oklahoma alone lost 440,000 people to migration. Many of them, poverty-stricken, traveled west looking for work. From 1935 to 1940, roughly 250,000 Oklahoma migrants moved to California. A third settled in the state's agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley.

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.
READ MORE: How the Dust Bowl Made Americans Refugees in Their Own Country

Dust Bowl in Arts and Culture

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. Artist Alexander Hogue painted Dust Bowl landscapes.

Folk musician Woody Guthrie's semi-autobiographical first album Dust Bowl Ballads in 1940, told stories of economic hardship faced by Okies in California. Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, left his home state with thousands of others looking for work during the Dust Bowl.

SOURCES

FDR and the New Deal Response to an Environmental Catastrophe. Roosevelt Institute.
About The Dust Bowl. English Department; University of Illinois.
Dust Bowl Migration. University of California at Davis.
The Great Okie Migration. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Okie Migrations. Oklahoma Historical Society.
What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation. Population and Environment.
The Dust Bowl. Library of Congress.
Dust Bowl Ballads: Woody Guthrie. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
The Dust Bowl. Ken Burns; PBS.

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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. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region.

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The first wave of drought affected cotton farming. Crops died, people began to go hungry and the rains were scarce. This first wave of drought brought on the Great Depression in the great plains.

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Barren land caused massive dust storms. Fourteen total dust storms occurred. By the end of 1934, forty-eight dust storms had occurred. Dust covered everything as far as the eye could see. Dust clouds were so massive, one such dust cloud reached New York.

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In 1934, one hundred days passed before there was rain. It was the hottest year on record at that time. Eighty percent of the country was impacted by this drought. In effort to stop dust bowl conditions, President Roosevelt passed the Soil Conservation Act to help education farmers. In 1936, the temperatures rose to 100+ degrees with little rain. 115 days without rain had passed. By this time people were looking for a way to escape the dust storms.

Click on the link to learn more about the Soil Conservation Act. You may have to click "view original" to go to the weblink.

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" Back to Glossary Index

President Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation Act on April 27, 1935 [1]. The law was designed "To provide for the protection of land resources against soil erosion, and for other purposes" [2].

A driving force behind the creation of the Soil Conservation Act was the severe drought that was occurring in the Great Plains: "Perhaps no event did more to emphasize the severity of the erosion crisis in the popular imagination than the Dust Bowl. Beginning in 1932, persistent drought conditions on the Great Plains caused widespread crop failures and exposed the region's soil to blowing wind. A large dust storm on May 11, 1934 swept fine soil particles over Washington, D.C. and three hundred miles out into the Atlantic Ocean" [3].

In addition to the disaster of the Dust Bowl, prominent figures like President Roosevelt and soil expert Hugh Bennett pushed natural resource conservation to the forefront. Bennett, who has been called "the father of Soil Conservation" [4], wrote an influential article with William Ridgely Chapline in 1928 titled, "Soil Erosion: A National Menace." The men included dramatic photographs of soil erosion in their article and in Part I Bennett wrote: "Removal of forest growth, grass and shrubs and breaking the ground surface by cultivation, the trampling of livestock, etc., accentuate erosion to a degree far beyond that taking place under average natural conditions." Bennett warned that unless soil erosion was properly addressed there would be "an enormous increase in the abandonment of farm lands" [5].

It would take a number of years for the nation to heed Bennett's warning but, with the New Deal, the federal government acted decisively. With funds from the newly-passed National Industrial Recovery Act, a Soil Erosion Service (SES) was created in 1933, with Hugh Bennett in charge. Next, after continued drought and further advocacy by Bennett, the Soil Conservation Act was passed in 1935, creating a more permanent Soil Conservation Service (SCS) [6]. The law had a sense of urgency and even used a word from the title of Bennett and Chapline's famous article: "It is hereby recognized that the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands of the Nation, resulting from soil erosion, is a menace to the national welfare..." The Soil Conservation Act called for the protection of America's soil to "preserve natural resources, control floods, prevent impairment of reservoirs, and maintain the navigability of rivers and harbors, protect public health, public lands and relieve unemployment..." [7].

In 1936, the nation further refined its soil and agricultural policy with the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, which amended the Soil Conservation Act in order to enhance federal-state coordination, discourage the over-use of land, assist tenants and sharecroppers, and help create stable and adequate prices for farm goods [8]. Roosevelt signed the law on February 29, 1936, and the next day stated: "The United States, as evidenced by the progressive public opinion and vigorous demand which resulted in the enactment of this law, is now emerging from its youthful stage of heedless exploitation and is beginning to realize the supreme importance of treating the soil well" [9].

For more details on how America's soil was protected during these critical years, see our summary of the Soil Conservation Service (SCS).

Sources: (1) "80 Years Helping People Help the Land: A Brief History of NRCS," Natural Resources Conservation Service, https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/about/history/?cid=nrcs143_021392, accessed August 22, 2015. (2) Soil Conservation Act (full text), The National Agricultural Law Center, https://nationalaglawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/farmbills/soilconserv1935.pdf, accessed August 22, 2015. (3) See note 1. (4) Ibid. (5) H.H. Bennett and W.R. Chapline, " Soil Erosion: A National Menace," U.S. Department of Agriculture, Circular No. 33, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, April, 1928, pp. 1 and 22. (6) See note 1. (7) See note 2, emphasis added. (8) Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, The National Agricultural Law Center, https://nationalaglawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/farmbills/soilconserv1936.pdf, accessed August 22, 2015. (9) "Statement on Signing the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act," American Presidency Project, University of California - Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15254, accessed August 22, 2015.

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Soil Conservation Act (1935) - Living New Deal

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President Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation Act on April 27, 1935 [1]. The law was designed “To provide for the protection of land resources against soil erosion, and for other purposes” [2]. A driving force behind the creation of the... read more

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Droughts returned once again. By this time people had lost their crops, animals and eventually their means to survive. This marked a important time for a change in farming. Thankfully, by 1942, the rains returned and this marked the end of the dust bowl. However, it left a mark that is still remember as a lesson to our citizens today.

The documentary below shows some of the lessons learned from the dust bowl.

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Assessment: Translate this presentation into Spanish. 

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Assessment: Translate this presentation into Spanish. 

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Flipgrid is where social and emotional learning happens! The leading video discussion platform for millions of PreK to PhD educators, students, and families.

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Watch this video to learn about how people were affected by the dust bowl.