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

by Timothy Egan

Rioting over food: how could this be? Here was all this grain, food enough to feed half the world, sitting in piles at the train station, going to waste. Something was out of balance.

Real estate in Florida, oil in Texas, wheat in Kansas, and stocks on Wall Street—they all had their time when gravity was willed into oblivion. And the rules put in place on the way down, the tariffs and tighter money, only made the problem worse. The consumer stopped consuming all but basics. The depression was now global.

As it now with the 2020 CoVid19 pandemic A global slow down is coming...a Great Depression II

nation of farmers produced way too much wheat, corn, beef, pork, and milk, even when a half dozen or more states were crippled by drought. What they got for their labors could not cover costs.

When the bank failed, twelve million people were without jobs—25 percent of the work force. Never before had so many people been thrown off payrolls so quickly,

There was no work in the cities. And the harder people worked in the country, the poorer they got.

Yep...

The Red Cross advised people not to go outside unless they had to and then only with their respiratory masks.

Like now...

Harvard geologist told the president that an irrevocable shift in nature was underway, that the climate itself had changed,

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.

but dry times were part of prairie life, dating back eons.

“Mistaken public policies have been largely responsible for the situation,”

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 sacred Homestead Act, almost an obligatory act of poverty!