Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas

by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Fontell Littrell's grandmother was a devout Latter-Day Saint. But when Fontell's father turned to bootlegging and poker to support an extended family of ten during the dirty thirties, her grandmother took it in stride. The Lord works in mysterious ways, his miracles to perform, she rationalized.

The Litrells' story and those of thousands of others who rode out the dust bowl in southwest Kansas are the focus of Pamela Riney-Kehrberg's study of survival in a drought-ridden decade. Unlike other historians, who have dwelt on those who fled hardship, Riney-Kehrberg concentrates on the majority--three-quarters of the population--who endured.

Examining the social impact of drought and depression, she illustrates how both farm and town families dealt with the deprivation by finding odd jobs, working in government programs, or depending on federal and private assistance. Years of tribulation, she shows, affected standards of living, family relationships, city and county finances, land ownership, farm prices and production, population shifts, and politics (traditionally staunchly Republican, southwest Kansas twice voted for Roosevelt). Looking also at the environmental impact, Riney-Kehrberg presents both the negative and positive sides of farming practices and governmental intervention.

Most Kansans persevered for nearly ten years, Riney-Kehrberg emphasizes, and how they adapted indelibly altered their outlook and plans for the future More than fifty years later, the devastating dust storms continue to affect agricultural practices and policy and the population of southwest Kansas.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

264 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1994

Reviews

[Jessica]

Riney-Kehrberg draws our attention to the Dust Bowl years not to have us focus exclusively on the challenges of the era, but to think about how Kansas agriculture was deeply connected to the broader treatment of farmers and gov’t intervention in the 1930s. In her survey of 16 counties across southwestern Texas in the Dust Bowl years, she draws our attention to how the crisis was read as both a moment for federal and state reformation of farming practices, but also as a moment in which farmers and rural residents ingeniously worked through the era. Her priority is to focus on the people who endured through the years, and what factors allowed them to endure and how that shaped their relationship to the land. In particular Riney-Kehrberg notes the essential funds women brought to their homes through this era by way of lucrative side businesses and some degree of employment outside the home, both on their own terms and through relief businesses. This may explain why, in her questionnaires distributed to survivors of the era from these counties, there is an inherent fondness in their remembrances of those years. Even as federal relief efforts threatened to act as a reforming force on these counties, their push back and assertion of self-sustenance counters the prevailing “Okie” narrative of desperation that Gregory, Steinbeck and others emphasized. An interesting blend of methodology and historical treatment of a crucial era in rural history.