The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

by Timothy Egan

the grassland than in the fall, when it would be exposed for months, subject to the winds of late winter and early spring—the blow season. To leave that much land naked was a gamble, and many farmers knew it.

They had removed the native prairie grass, a web of perennial species evolved over twenty thousand years or more, so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land—thirty-three million acres stripped bare in the southern plains.

a summer when the rains left and did not come back for nearly eight years.

“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized,” Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was “sinister,” a symptom of “our stupendous ignorance.”

Americans had become a force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than “the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history.”

has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much,” Hoover

Hoover believed the cure for the Depression was to prime the pump at the producer end, helping factories and business owners get up and running again. Goods would roll off the lines, prosperity would follow. Roosevelt said it made no sense to gin up the machines of production if people could not afford to buy what came out the factory door.

The government killings were supposed to restore market balance, not right nature’s wrong. It was a sick thing, harder still to comprehend, to cowboys like Bam White.

time for people in the Great Plains to look inside themselves and acknowledge what they had done.

Thus was born a subsidy system that grew into one of the untouchable pillars of the federal budget.

inch of topsoil can blow away in an hour, but it takes a thousand years to restore it? Think about that equation.

Though he was still reticent about encouraging a massive exodus, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7028, granting federal authorities the power to buy back much of what it had given away in homesteads over the previous seventy-three years. The executive order was a stunning reversal of everything the government had done with the public domain since the founding of the republic.

This was simply not enough rain to raise crops, no matter how much “dust-mulching” or other dry farming gimmicks were promoted, and it was why banks for so long had refused to lend money in this arid zone.

Grass was needed to hold the soil in place; it was nature’s way of adapting to the basic conditions of the plains, the high wind and low rainfall. Buffalo grass, in particular, short and drought-resistant, was nature’s refinement over centuries.

They were misled by those who should have been their natural guides. The Federal homestead policy, which kept land allotments low and required that a portion of each should be plowed, is now seen to have caused immeasurable harm. The Homestead Act of 1862, limiting an individual holding to 160 acres, was on the western plains almost an obligatory act of poverty.”