Volume 13 , Issue 26

NW Okie's Ancestry Corner

We all know that the Dust Bowl was the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains. The Dust Bowl took only 50 years to accomplish. People blazed their way across a once richly endowed continent with a ruthless, devastating efficiency. The white man coming to the plains talked of "busting" and "breaking" the land. AND . . . that is what they did. The Dust Bowl was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately self-consciously, set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the for all it was worth. The Dust Bowl came into being during the 1930's, as fulvous dirt began to blow all the way from the plains to the East coast and beyond. It was also the age of the Great Depression.

Was there a close link between the Dust Bowl and the Depression? did the same society produced them both for similar reasons? Did both events reveal fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America? One in ecological terms and the other in economic? Was there a reason, opportunity for substantial reform of that culture back then?

As the book (Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains In the 1930, by Donald Worster) below states, "In the spring of 1930 over 3 million men and women were out of work. They had lost their jobs or had been laid off without pay in the aftermath of the stock market crash of the preceding fall. Another 12 million would suffer the same fate in the following two years. Many of the unemployed had no place to live, nor even the means to buy food. They slept in public toilets, under bridges, in shantytowns along the railroad tracks, or on doorsteps, and in the most wretched cases they scavenged from garbage cans."



See you all next Monday, July 4th, America's Independence Day!   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

---