The report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee was delivered to the president on August 27, 1936. It was labeled “personal and confidential,” signed first by Bennett, and then seven agency heads. An extended memo, The Future of the Great Plains, was due at the end of the year. But this shorter report showed where the committee was going. The conclusions were stark. The climate had not changed. This refuted a theory Roosevelt had been mulling for some time: that the plains were in the first years of a hundred-year cycle of change.
