# data[].attributes.body
This political cartoon illustrates the grueling, and dry conditions of the dustbowl. The Dust flying behind the farmer and his plow doesn't just demonstrate the literal dust, it demonstrates the human impact on our environment. This image also illustrates the need for sustainable agricultural practices, not just back then but today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The current drought in the Southwest bears echoes of the 1930s, when Nation writers and illustrators evoked what it was like to have "nice hot dust in your nose, eyes, and throat."

This week's cover story by Sasha Abramsky, " Dust Bowl Blues," explores the severe drought that has afflicted the American Southwest for the past few years, devastating crops, communities, and climates. "Just like in the days of the Dust Bowl," Abramsky writes, "a way of life is under threat here, as are the livelihoods of millions of people."

In the summer of 1937, with the original Dust Bowl and the second wave of the Great Depression in full effect, The Nation published four features, once each month, by the radical cartoonist and painter William Gropper, who, using Works Progress Administration funds, went on a tour around the country to document the resilience with which ordinary people were facing those twin man-made disasters. Gropper's simple, evocative sketches and crisp paragraphs have the same effect as more famous artifacts of creative reportage from the American West of the late 1930s, like John Steinbeck's novels or Woody Guthrie's songs: that of making the reader or listener feel dusty just by reading or listening.

His first Nation dispatch that summer, " Gropper Visits Youngstown" (July 3, 1937), derived from the same visit to the Ohio city that produced his most famous painting, Youngstown Strike-recording the tumultuous scene at a major labor walkout led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. But it is his August page, " The Dust Bowl," that provides a remarkably poignant and sympathetic account of what the Southwest was like in those years:

When the wind blows, you get a blow of nice hot dust in your nose, eyes, and throat. The landscape is simple-sky and sand for miles. At night you can get some sleep with a wet cloth over your face, or if you're prepared with a mask you can manage to get by until you get used to it. In Elkhart, Kansas, I saw a farmer plowing. No sooner did he pass with the plow than the dust blew over and covered up the earth as if nothing had happened. I asked him if he got any crops, and he said, "No." "Then why plow?" And he said, "Been doin' it fer years; it's a habit now," and went on with his plowing.

Popular

"swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe →

Another blurb tells a story that any American reader, thanks to Steinbeck and Guthrie, can relate to-though Gropper, because he is using a weekly magazine and not a novel or a song, manages it with perhaps more immediacy:

More than once on the road I've seen families packing their belongings in old Fords and leaving the old homestead. Many of them, I've been told, are migrating to California-not because they want to, but because they have been evicted.

* * *

The Nation's next and, until Abramsky's piece this week, last article about the Dust Bowl was written by Kunigunde Duncan (a pseudonym for the Kansan writer Flora Isely) in 1939. In " Reclaiming the Dust Bowl," Duncan wrote about how farmers on the high plains were using technology and grit to reconstitute the soil and finally beat back the dust storms of the previous six years. As Abramsky details the ways in which human-caused global climate change have contributed to and exacerbated the present drought in the Southwest, Duncan reported that the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was similarly attributable to human actions:

The Dust Bowler, seeking means of combating these terrible conditions, went first into causes and found that he was having to fight more than super-temperatures, water shortage, and constant wind-whipped dust. He was having to fight the mistakes of his predecessors.

Duncan blamed railroad tycoons and the settlers they brought in by the hundreds, who forced the land to produce crops from the East; cattle ranchers who overgrazed the prairie; and the World War I demand for bread which led farmers to replace drought-resistant native buffalo grass with fields and fields of wheat. Her description of the disaster that ensued has echoes of Gropper's-and Steinbeck's, too:

The high plains have never had abundant rainfall. But when the annual precipitation of from fourteen to twenty inches decreased to from eight to fourteen, the situation became acute.

It might be worth noting that the average rainfall in Lubbock, Texas, the town profiled in Abramsky's "Dust Bowl Blues" this week, enjoyed a grand total of 11.43 inches of precipitation in 2012, according to the National Weather Service. In 2011, it had less than 6 inches. In 1937, it had 22.25 inches. Duncan continued:

"Dusters" began to boil up and shut out the sun, and everywhere the question was asked, "What shall we do?" It was a question that remained unanswered for many months while gas engines refused to run and locomotives crawled through a springless, viewless land-a land where people live with windows weather-stripped tightly with adhesive tape to exclude the penetrating silt; where wet sheets were hung above beds and about the walls to save the lives of the old, the ill, and the new-born...where a weird purplish sun guided the funeral procession of those who had died of dust pneumonia.

* * *

Abramsky reports that not only is the present drought crisis in the Southwest, to some extent, a human-caused phenomenon, it continues to be exacerbated by a broken American political system.

Congress has an opportunity to address this crisis through the farm bill, which is currently the topic of robust debate in Washington. On July 11, with help from the powerful agribusiness lobby, the House passed legislation giving large farms the ability to buy "shallow loss insurance," which would guarantee up to 90 percent of their income-thus providing a perverse incentive for agribusiness to try to cultivate land manifestly unsuited to the crops in question.

Two years ago, as it became apparent that this would be an especially contentious episode in the perpetual drama that is the farm bill's quinquennial renewal, the ecology writer and activist Daniel Imhoff wrote in The Nation about the prickly questions embedded in the debate-and, like Abramsky, connected the dots between agricultural legislation, drought and climate change:

Generous crop insurance programs and increasing global demand for animal feed and biofuels have triggered an aggressive expansion of farming and ranching activities into marginally productive areas. Water tables are plummeting and aquifers are being depleted. Soil erosion is on the rise. Agriculture contributes to greenhouse gases, loss of biodiversity, chemical runoff in waterways, compromised animal welfare and food contamination. Farm bill conservation programs could be the only thing that stands between us and another Dust Bowl, collapsed watershed or imperiled species.

Sure enough, the farm bill passed by the House earlier this month-in addition to stripping out the food-stamps program, thereby sundering the traditional farm-bill coalition in two-disconnected conservation compliance from crop insurance payouts, essentially declawing the bill's already insufficient environmental-protection provisions. If the new Dust Bowl gets any worse, we may have to start looking for the next William Gropper.

Ad Policy

The current drought in the Southwest bears echoes of the 1930s, when Nation writers and illustrators evoked what it was like to have "nice hot dust in your nose, eyes, and throat."

When the wind blows, you get a blow of nice hot dust in your nose, eyes, and throat. The landscape is simple-sky and sand for miles. At night you can get some sleep with a wet cloth over your face, or if you're prepared with a mask you can manage to get by until you get used to it. In Elkhart, Kansas, I saw a farmer plowing. No sooner did he pass with the plow than the dust blew over and covered up the earth as if nothing had happened. I asked him if he got any crops, and he said, "No." "Then why plow?" And he said, "Been doin' it fer years; it's a habit now," and went on with his plowing.

Popular

"swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe →

More than once on the road I've seen families packing their belongings in old Fords and leaving the old homestead. Many of them, I've been told, are migrating to California-not because they want to, but because they have been evicted.

* * *

The Dust Bowler, seeking means of combating these terrible conditions, went first into causes and found that he was having to fight more than super-temperatures, water shortage, and constant wind-whipped dust. He was having to fight the mistakes of his predecessors.

The high plains have never had abundant rainfall. But when the annual precipitation of from fourteen to twenty inches decreased to from eight to fourteen, the situation became acute.

"Dusters" began to boil up and shut out the sun, and everywhere the question was asked, "What shall we do?" It was a question that remained unanswered for many months while gas engines refused to run and locomotives crawled through a springless, viewless land-a land where people live with windows weather-stripped tightly with adhesive tape to exclude the penetrating silt; where wet sheets were hung above beds and about the walls to save the lives of the old, the ill, and the new-born...where a weird purplish sun guided the funeral procession of those who had died of dust pneumonia.

* * *

Congress has an opportunity to address this crisis through the farm bill, which is currently the topic of robust debate in Washington. On July 11, with help from the powerful agribusiness lobby, the House passed legislation giving large farms the ability to buy "shallow loss insurance," which would guarantee up to 90 percent of their income-thus providing a perverse incentive for agribusiness to try to cultivate land manifestly unsuited to the crops in question.

Generous crop insurance programs and increasing global demand for animal feed and biofuels have triggered an aggressive expansion of farming and ranching activities into marginally productive areas. Water tables are plummeting and aquifers are being depleted. Soil erosion is on the rise. Agriculture contributes to greenhouse gases, loss of biodiversity, chemical runoff in waterways, compromised animal welfare and food contamination. Farm bill conservation programs could be the only thing that stands between us and another Dust Bowl, collapsed watershed or imperiled species.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This Week in 'Nation' History: How Not to Make a Dust Bowl Worse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The current drought in the Southwest bears echoes of the 1930s, when Nation writers and illustrators evoked what it was like to have "nice hot dust in your nose, eyes, and throat."

# data[].attributes.body
It is a black and white picture of a car driving towards the camera with a large dust storm behind it. The way the storm is following the car makes it seem like it is chasing it adding a feeling like the storm is coming.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Fleeing a dust storm". Farmer Arthur Coble and sons walking in the face of a dust storm, Cimmaron County, Oklahoma. Arthur Rothstein, photographer, April, 1936. (Library of Congress)

# data[].attributes.body
This somber poem, speaking of the terrible affect humans have had on the environment. The poem describes the way the writer misses the rain.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read the latest issue of POETRY magazine-the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world-or browse the magazine archive.

# data[].attributes.body
in this painting the muted colors and heavy brushstrokes bring an overwhelming sense desolation and suffocation. everything is swallowed by sand symbolizing both the physical and emotional toll of the environmental disaster.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The epic stories of hardship and survival during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl have inspired numerous artists and authors to think critically about the era and the experiences of those who lived at that time. These theme-related lessons provide a framework for closely reading and comparing a range of images and texts about the Dust Bowl, including works of art (a lithograph and documentary photographs), historical fiction, informational texts, maps, and timelines. The instructional activities allow students to critically analyze and interpret these images and texts in terms of the choices made by the artists and authors, their historic and cultural contexts, and the differences and connections among modes of communication.
Authors
Amy Andrews, Chicago Public Schools
Jennifer Chisholm, Evanston/Skokie District 65 Schools
Judy Koon, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
Sarah Mack, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
Corinne Rose, Manager of Education, Museum of Contemporary Photography

Grade Levels: 5-8
Related Art Studies
The lessons related to this theme are listed below in a suggested sequence, but you may choose to teach just one lesson or any combination of them.

Time Needed: 3 class periods, 40 - 50 minutes each

Summary: Students closely read and compare the lithograph Dust by Mervin Jules and "Blankets of Black," a poem from Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, in order to understand the effects of dust storms on people and places during the Dust Bowl years.
Works of Art Essential Questions

How do artists and authors help us to understand what it was like to endure hard times?

How do artists and authors express ideas, tell stories, and capture history through the different techniques of their media?

How does close reading help you understand the structure and meaning of an image or a text?

What tools and techniques do authors and artists use to establish setting, mood, and tone?

Enduring Understandings

Artists and authors sometimes use themes and symbols to communicate how an event affected people's lives and our history.

Key details reveal the content and tone of a text.

Understanding a text's structures and themes helps the reader/viewer understand the key ideas of an image or a text.

Time Needed: 1 class period, 40 - 50 minutes

Summary: Students will deepen their understanding of Dorothea Lange's 1936 Migrant Mother and the tradition of documentary photography by conducting a close reading of this image and other related photographs, reading an informational text about Dorothea Lange, and listening to an interview with the subject of the photograph.
Works of Art Essential Questions Enduring Understandings
Time Needed: 2 class periods, 40 - 50 minutes each

Summary: Students do a close reading of two photographs from the Dust Bowl period and of the poem "Freak Show" from Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse to understand how some individuals faced the challenges of the Dust Bowl and to discuss how the point of view of a writer or an artist may differ from that of the subject.
Works of Art Essential Questions Enduring Understandings

Understanding a text's structure and themes helps the reader make meaning of the text.

Key details reveal the content and tone of a text.

A person who is the subject of a photograph or another work of art may have a different point of view than the artist who created the work.

Time Needed: 2 -3 class periods, 40 - 50 minutes each

Summary: Students synthesize their learning through a RAFT writing assignment in which they write a text in the voice of a character who has experienced the Dust Bowl.
Works of Art Essential Questions Enduring Understandings Common Core State Standards Over Four Lessons Anchor Standards in Reading: http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/CCRA/R/ Anchor Standards in Writing: Anchor Standards in Speaking and Listening: http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/CCRA/SL/ Anchor Standards in Language: http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/CCRA/L/ http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/CCRA/W/

CCSS-ELA Reading Anchor Standard 1: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.1

CCSS-ELA Reading Anchor Standard 2: ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.2

CCSS-ELA Reading Anchor Standard 6: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.6

CCSS-ELA Reading Anchor Standard 7: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.7

CCSS-ELA Reading Anchor Standard 9: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.9

CCSS-ELA Speaking and Listening Anchor Standard 2: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.SL.2

CCSS-ELA Language Anchor Standard 6: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.L.6

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The epic stories of hardship and survival during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl have inspired numerous artists and authors to think critically about the era and the experiences of those who lived at that time.

# data[].attributes.body
Thus infographic depicts the Dustbowl's affect on different regions. One area where major damage was suffered was in the Dakota region where 100000 acres of damage occurred.

# data[].attributes.body
A brief description of the dustbowl's causes and effects. This video Shows images of the destruction.

# data[].attributes.body
The farm that is seemingly located in the desert is about to be hit by a large dust storm. This dust storm is dark and ominous giving a feeling of destruction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the late 1990s, I was casting about for a new career track. "Why don't you write a book about the Dust Bowl," said my aunt, Ardith Rieke, who had grown up in the 1930s on a farm in northeastern Colorado.

"Aunt Ardith," I protested, "at least eight books have been written about the Dust Bowl. What's left to say?"

Plenty, as it turns out. In 2006, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Timothy Egan came out with "The Worst Hard Time." In it he assembled facts into a novel-like read, later winning the National Book Award. At Tattered Cover's LoDo store, he told me one of his best and previously untapped sources was the historical society in Springfield, located in Colorado's southeast corner, in the core area of distress.

Tonight, PBS will begin broadcasting "The Dust Bowl," a two-part documentary (the second part airs Monday) by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan. They have also co-authored a new book - "The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History" (Chronicle Books, October 2012) - that is heavy on photographs but rich in elegant, accessible prose.

The Dust Bowl still matters today. Those dark, dirty and desperate times were not just something that crept into comments at my family's dinner table, a regional subtext to the broader story of the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl stands as a story alone. It was the worst human-caused ecological disaster in U.S. history and arguably among the worst in the world. The lessons should be applied to problems today, like the unsustainable mining of the Ogallala and other aquifers and, more daunting yet, the challenges of global warming.

Victims, not villains, populate the Dust Bowl story. As Duncan pointed out when he spoke recently at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Lubbock, Texas, it was primarily a consequence of many people trying to better themselves and their families. And for awhile, their gamble in this region that the explorer Stephen Long and other had described as desert paid off. The thatch of buffalo grass, when upended, delivered bountiful crops of wheat when blessed with good or even moderate precipitation.

During World War I, farmers were called upon to produce more and more. Wheat will win the war, they were told. Plowing was patriotic and profitable and, with the aid of the new technology called tractors, prodigious. Wheat production in Colorado, mostly on dryland, unirrigated farms, tripled between 1913 and 1919, according to James F. Wickens in "Colorado in the Great Depression." Population boomed. Prowers County, where Lamar is located, grew 1,400 percent between 1900 and 1930. Other counties in the dryland country of Colorado were close behind.

When demand drooped and prices flagged, the new dryland farmers plowed yet more to compensate for reduced revenue. Compounding the problem were the so-called suitcase farmers, from Denver and elsewhere, absentee landowners who plowed massive swathes of prairie sod. In these ways, millions and millions of acres of soil were rendered naked.

Drought then came, lasting most of the 1930s. After receiving 331 inches of moisture in the 1920s, southeast Colorado got only 126 inches the next decade. Heat was scorching, at places hotter than in 2012. Wind and dust have always been a part of prairie life, but what happened next convinced the religious of a Biblical apocalypse.

Historian Ed Quillen, the late Denver Post columnist, used to joke that one good word is worth a thousand pictures, but the photos in Duncan's book make for a compelling counterargument. Billowing clouds of dust approach houses, towns and sometimes people like a giant carpet being unfurled. A photo taken on April 14, 1935, in Dodge City, Kan., at 3 p.m., looks like the darkest of mid-winter nights. Just a car and store lights poke from the black.

Drifted soil blocked trains. Steamboat Springs has its three-wire winters, when settled snow tops barbed-wire fences. For the Dust Bowl region, the '30s were a three-wire decade. At times, dust even blanketed Boston, Savannah, Ga., and New York City. On an otherwise clear, sparking day in 1934, Central Park could not be seen from the Empire State Building.

Shortly after graduating from Colorado College, Dorothy Christenson Williamson landed a job as a social worker in Prowers County during the Dust Bowl. Now 99 and living in Denver, she offers riveting personal experience in both the film and book. "There's nowhere you can run," she says. "You can try to get out of it, but it's as if it follows you, follows you, follows you. You can't escape."

Then she struggles for just the right word. "That dust was something that at least in our country we had never encountered before. And I think it carried with it a feeling of - I don't know the word exactly - of almost being ... evil."

Scores of people died directly. Some were caught in the storms and found later, suffocated. Others died more slowly of pneumonia. Children were given masks to take to school, should a dust storm blow in. Blinded cattle died excruciating deaths, mud caking their lungs. Some farmers tried to make light of their misery. One joke was about cleaning kettles by exposing them to the keyholes in doors.

Even along the base of the Rocky Mountains, dust was a menace. "Just before the storm hit, the air would become deathly still," wrote Donald Nielsen some 60 years later, recalling his childhood on a farm near Cheraw, 10 miles north of La Junta. "Then a breeze would pick up and seconds later the wind would strike with gale force, and the farmstead would be enveloped in thick, choking dust. Sometimes the storms would last for two or three days. The folks would hang damp bed sheets over the west and north windows to trap some of the dust that came in around the panes."

Later, after returning from World War II, Nielsen studied agronomy at Colorado A&M (now Colorado State University). Through his career with the Soil Conservation Service, a federal agency formed in response to the Dust Bowl, he shared the lessons learned with other farmers and applied them to his own farm at Cheraw.

Today, Donald Nielsen's son, John, works to help forestall another ecological catastrophe, global warming. The energy program director for Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates, he sees a parallel with the Dust Bowl. "Human activities can have profound impacts on natural systems, and devastating social and economic impacts as well," says John Nielsen.

The Dust Bowl did not end farming, but it forced farmers to change. "It was a matter of rethinking farming," says Nielsen. "And we need to rethink how we produce energy." Renewable energy must be at the core, not the fringes, he says, supported when necessary by the cleanest, most efficient fossil fuel technologies.

There are differences, too. In the 1920s, few people foresaw the consequences of the massive plowing up of prairie turf. Today, the science supporting the theory of global warming is cohesive and clear about the broad outcomes unless we make changes in how we produce and consume fossil fuels. "Because we know more, we have greater responsibility," says John Nielsen.

Human suffering during the Dust Bowl is hard to image today. Nearly 50 percent of families in Baca County were on relief. Many dryland farmers left the Great Plains. If the Nielsens survived well enough on their irrigated farm, the highway through the Arkansas Valley was filled with weary, dryland refugees. There were plenty of Joads, and they weren't all Okies.

Federal action salved the worst of the wounds. Direct aid and then jobs were offered. More controversially, the federal government bought dryland farms to create the Comanche, Pawnee and other grasslands now managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Farmers were encouraged to plant belts of trees, to deflect the winds. Then, rainfall returned.

Tree rings show that drought is never far away on the Great Plains. Black clouds returned in the mid-1950s, but this time rain was absent only two years. Still, with every spike in commodity prices, plowing resumes, begging the question of whether we really do learn from the past.

Overpumping of the Ogallala constitutes the most immediate threat. The interrelated aquifers underlying the High Plains from South Dakota to Texas are in places dropping a foot a year. In some places, such as around Lubbock, Texas, there are worries the aquifer may become too depleted in 20 to 25 years to be useful for irrigation. Only in the Nebraska Sandhills is it rising. Some look to science, to plant genetics, for new varieties of cotton that require less water, while others hope for perennial grains, with deeper roots than our wheat and corn and less need to bare the soil to erosion. Others continue to argue that the real solution lies in return of the region to its native state, a Buffalo Commons.

Global warming is a more challenging pickle. Dust clouds gathered soon after the great plowup of the prairie, and even Washington, D.C., got coated. Of the cause, there was little doubt. With accumulating greenhouse gas emissions, the fossil fuels that are at the very core of modern prosperity around the world, and no small stew of alphabet federal agencies can solve it. Furthermore, most of the damage lies in the future. In our own way, we're in the midst of a great plowup of our own. This time it's the sky, not the soil.
Contact longtime Colorado journalist Allen Best at http://mountaintownnews.net or at allen.best@comcast.net. By the numbers: 6
Deaths and 100 serious illnesses due to dust pneumonia in Baca County in March 1935
138
Dirt storms recorded in 1937
2.5 million
People had left the Plains states by 1940, with 200,000 of them migrating to California. It was the largest migration in American history within a short period of time.
Sources: "The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History" by R. Douglas Hurt; "Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in the 1930s" by Donald Worster
Originally Published:

# data[].attributes.body
This painting depicts several dead animals, predominantly cows being eaten by snakes and bugs. I believe the cows represent more than just the struggling food supply, but the region as a whole, getting consumed by the dust.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The dust storms that ravaged the Southern Great Plains of the United States during the 1930s created an environmental catastrophe that would affect the lives of thousands. Artists from around the country both during and after the storms traveled to the region to capture the devastation, making the Dust Bowl a significant chapter of 20th-century American art.

American Art During The Wheat Boom

As wheat farming became more and more widespread throughout the Southern Plains during the 1920s, modest small-scale wheat farming as shown in Jones' painting was replaced by large-scale operations.

Advancements in farming machinery, like improvements of the plow and tractor, contributed to more wheat being planted across the region than ever before. Farmers were planting more crops and making more money than they ever could have envisioned. With no environmental government oversight or regulation, they had no reason to stop planting.

As this wheat was planted across the region, the natural grasses that held the soil down were gradually torn out. The constant plowing of the soils also created topsoil that was of chalky consistency. With no natural vegetation to provide resistance to heavy winds and hold the chalky topsoil down, dust storms began to become more frequent throughout the region.

The wheat frenzy of the 1910s and '20s created startling amounts of wealth for many Plains wheat farmers, but it also laid the groundwork for a catastrophe that would rob the region's population of its livelihood for nearly a decade.

The Dust Storms

Mike Sevick's painting captures the horror of an incoming storm in the Dust Bowl. When the storms first began to spread across the region during the early 1930s, many thought they were apocalyptic, divine punishment from God. Anyone caught outside would be blinded and hit by the piercing waves of wind and dust.

Prominent folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was in the region during the storms, sums up the feeling of people experiencing the first dust storms in "The Great Dust Storm:"

From Oklahoma City to the Arizona line

Dakota and Nebraska to the lazy Rio Grande

It fell across our city like a curtain of black rolled down

We thought it was our judgment, we thought it was our doom

Drought In The Plains

James E. Allen was a prominent figure in the Social Realist American Art movement during the Great Depression era. Allen captures the plight of the Plains farmer in Prayer for Rain .

The lack of rainfall only made the increasingly more common dust storms throughout the decade worse, as the already depleted topsoil's consistency was made even drier and dustier. Rain became a daily prayer for those living on the plains, though the region would not see anything close to above-average annual rainfall until 1941.

The Devastation Of The Region

Mervin Jules was an American artist who sought to capture the plights of people across the country during the Great Depression. Jules' painting captures an abandoned plains farm, an all-too-common scene in the region during the 1930s.

Jules was known especially for his use of ironic satire and social commentary throughout his art. The tractor in the foreground of the painting shows the irony of the mechanization of wheat farming in the plains. Something that was supposed to bring so much wealth to its owners now laid covered in dust with no fields left to plow. The plains environment was pushed past its limits, and now had nothing left to give the people who depended on it.

The Dust Bowl Household

As the storms became more intense and frequent, dust became an inescapable part of living in a Dust Bowl household. Dust would find its way through every doorway, window, and crevice. Silverware, dishes, and tables would be covered, with many waking up after a storm to their pillow being the only thing in their house not caked with dust.

The dust became more than a continual routine of seeking shelter from incoming storms, it became an inescapable part of daily life.

Leaving The Dust Bowl

Unfortunately for these migrants, the rest of the country also found itself in the hardship of the Great Depression, and there was very little employment available. There was widespread discrimination and prejudice against the influx of Dust Bowlers, with many of them spending the rest of the decade in migrant camps with horrid conditions.

Those Who Stayed

In Clyfford Still captures the agony of those who stayed in the Plains. Throughout the 1930s communities began to unravel as people left in hope for a better future elsewhere. The combination of storms, the lack of crop yields, and the absence of economic opportunity created a hopeless, destitute situation for those living in the plains. Those that stayed felt their livelihoods were constantly being destroyed and withered down by all sides of the deteriorating conditions of the region.

While some communities became increasingly isolated, many communities became even more tight-knit. The bond between many of the Dust Bowlers who stayed in the region became stronger as community members increasingly relied on each other to survive and remain level-headed amongst all the hardship of the decade.

The New Deal

Alexandre Hogue is widely considered the quintessential American artist of the Dust Bowl. In Drouth Survivors Hogue sought to capture the devastation of the drought in the plains. This painting caused controversy throughout the American art community, as some people of the region were offended by this grim depiction of the plains.

Instead of only looking for short-term solutions to the Dust Bowl, President Roosevelt sought to fundamentally change the practices of the region. His administration not only lessened the severity of dust storms and provided aid to poverty-stricken communities; it created a breadth of research that would be used to prevent potential future Dust Bowls.

Great Plains Optimism

This painting by Hogue captures the unraveling of the American homestead. The man-made fences that once represented the American conquering of the untouched Great Plains wilderness, now appear withered away by the superior forces of nature. Both human footsteps and vehicle tracks are seen in the foreground, signifying an exodus from the farm.

While Hogue depicts a gloomy, apocalyptic scene, the sun shining on top of the clouds of dust perhaps symbolizes the hope the people of the plains clung to. It represents the optimism and positivity the plains people were able to find within themselves during a time when there was none to be found around them. Hogue's foreground of desolation and destruction is outshined by the background of a brighter future, a better life when the storms and drought would finally leave the plains.

The Dust Bowl And Its Legacy In American Art

The artists who captured the Dust Bowl region both during the 1930s and afterward captured a chapter of American history that is too often lost underneath the Great Depression and other events of the period. Instead of vilifying the people and farming practices of the region, the artists instead focused on showing the scope of the devastation that those living in the Dust Bowl faced in their everyday lives.

This American art made people realize the reality of what was happening in the plains. They helped shift the rhetoric of the Dust Bowl from blame to empathy, not just by showing devastated landscapes, but also by showing the extraordinary strength of the people who were somehow surviving amongst all the devastation.

The dust storms of the 1930s were not only the greatest American environmental catastrophe of the 20 th century, but they were also a testament to the extraordinary strength and resilience of ordinary American people. While the Dust Bowl catastrophe should undoubtedly be used as a warning against using the environment as a limitless resource in the pursuit of profit, the prolific work of the Dust Bowl artists also helps ensure that both the strength and suffering of those who lived in the region won't be lost to history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The dust storms that ravaged the Southern Great Plains of the United States during the 1930s created an environmental catastrophe that would affect the lives of thousands. Artists from around the country both during and after the storms traveled to the region to capture the devastation, making the Dust Bowl a significant chapter of 20th-century American art.

# data[].attributes.body
This political cartoon depicts the struggle many farm owners has with food and livestock. When at one time livestock was a form of investment at this point it was just an expense.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Political cartoon, "The Nation's Champion Recovery Producer"

# data[].attributes.body
This poem highlights the struggles of a farmer during the great depression. The farmer's view on what is to come shows the terrible expirience that he went through the dust bowl.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dust Bowl - Dust Bowl Poem by John F. McCullagh

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read Dust Bowl poem by John F. McCullagh written. Dust Bowl poem is from John F. McCullagh poems. Dust Bowl poem summary, analysis and comments.