"Dust Bowl" endangers crops and leads to "Okie" migration (1 gen 1930 anni – 1 gen 1939 anni)

Descrizione:

dust bowl:
An area including the semiarid states of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arkansas, and Kansas that experienced a severe drought and large dust storms from 1930 to 1939.

Attention to natural resources was a consistent theme of the New Deal, and the shaping of the natural landscape among its most visible legacies. Roosevelt and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes saw themselves as conservationists in the tradition of the president’s cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. Decades before the emergence of environmentalism, FDR practiced what he called the “gospel of conservation.” The president primarily cared about making the land — and other natural resources — better serve human needs. National policy stressed scientific land management and maintaining ecological balance. Under Roosevelt, the federal government responded to environmental crises and reshaped the use of natural resources, especially water, in the United States.


Plains farmers faced both economic and environmental catastrophe during the depression. Between 1930 and 1939, a severe drought afflicted the semiarid parts of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arkansas, and Kansas. Farmers in this “ dust bowl” had stripped much of the native vegetation in favor of wheat and other crops. This upset the region’s ecology and led to wind erosion of drought-parched topsoil (Map 22.4). When the winds came, huge clouds of thick dust rolled over the land, turning the day into night. This ecological disaster prompted a mass exodus. At least 350,000 “Okies” (so called whether or not they were from Oklahoma) loaded their belongings into cars and trucks and headed west to California migrant camps. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Dorothea Lange’s haunting photography immortalized the struggle of these climate refugees.

A U.S. Weather Bureau scientist called the drought of the 1930s “the worst in the climatological history of the country.” Conditions were especially severe in the southern plains, where farming on marginal land threatened the environment even before the drought struck. As farm families migrated west on U.S. Route 66, the federal government began a series of massive building projects that provided flood control, irrigation, electric power, and transportation facilities to residents of the states of the far West.

Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange is one of the most famous documentary photographs of the 1930s. On assignment for the Resettlement Administration, Lange spent only ten minutes in a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California. There she captured this image (though not the name) of the woman whose despair and resignation she so powerfully recorded. In the 1970s the woman was identified as Florence Thompson, a native Cherokee from Oklahoma, who disagreed with Lange’s recollections of the circumstances of the taking of the photograph.

Roosevelt and Ickes believed that poor land practices made for poor people. Under their direction, government agencies tackled the dust bowl’s human causes. Agents from the newly created Soil Conservation Service, for instance, taught farmers to prevent soil erosion by tilling hillsides along the contours of the land. They also encouraged (and sometimes paid) farmers to plant soil-preserving grasses instead of commercial crops. In one of the most widely publicized programs, the U.S. Forest Service planted 220 million trees in a wide “shelterbelt” that ran from Abilene, Texas, to the Canadian border, preventing soil erosion and serving as a windbreak. A variety of government agencies, from the CCC to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, lent their expertise to encouraging sound farming practices in the plains.

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