The Dust Bowl

So what would you do if you woke up one day and all you saw in front of you was a whole bunch of dust. It hurt to look at it. It hurt to touch it, and all you were doing was being smothered by it. Well, this is known as the dust ball, or it can also be known as the dirty 30s. It lasted around a good 8 years, and when it came, it was a thick 200 mile wad yellow brown haze. It wrote in from the south and carried on up to the north. When you think about it, it's harder and scarier than it even looks. You could barely breathe, eat or take a walk with that meal some other by dust that's around it. Children had a word dust mass, too and from the places they went, and the modest of the household would hang wet sheets over the window to try and keep the dirt out. Farmers lost the majority of their crops, and families that stayed in their homes during this decade had to survive on cornbread, beans, and milk. During the 1930s, the dust bowl lasted a good decade, and the majority of the impact hit the southern plains. And with this drop from the wind blown dust, it helped lint in the depression his effects were all over the world. So when Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office and created the new deal, he believed it was the federal government's duty to help the American people get through the terrible dust bowl. He also helped create the drought relief service in this offered relief checks, the buying of livestock and food handouts. Hugh Hammond Bennett was the father of soil conservation, and he attended a congressional hearing in May of 1934 regarding the dust bowl. As soon as Bennett got his ideas across to the semi interested congressman, before they could even blink, the dust bowl had reached Washington, D.C.. This was a basic taste of what the plain farmers had to go through. So the 74th Congress passed the soil conservation act on April 27th, 1935. John Steinbeck, a famous author who wrote the groups of wrath in 1939, talked about dust blowing in from Kansas, Texas, New Mexico in Arkansas. There were carloads and homeless and hungry and 20,000 to a 100,000 some people. The dust power is also considered to be one of the worst ecological disasters caused by humans in history. One of the main causes of the dust bowl was poor agricultural practices in years of sustained drought. During years when there was enough rainfall, the land would produce plenty of crops. But later in the 1930s, when the drought continued on, nothing seemed to grow on these lands anymore. Then when the plane winds whipped across the field, big clouds of dust flow to the skies. There will be dark for days in homes that were almost sealed completely, would still have a thick layer of dust on their furniture. Also, the average 1930s dust storm carried more dirt than it would take to build two Panama canals. That's a lot of dirt. In 1932 the national weather bureau reported up to 14 dust storms, and in the next year 38, and then in 1934 there was a total of a 110 black blizzards. In the spring of 1935 the wind blew for a total of 27 days without even stopping. People and animals begin to die of suffocation and dust pneumonia or also known as the brown leg. A total of 7000 men, women in small children die from dust and onion and some others die from malnutrition. In the late 1930s a total of 2.5 million people had moved out of the dust bowl states in towards the Pacific states. They say that during the short time period is not to be one of the largest mass migrations within the U.S.. Many farmers could no longer work on the land they fall and because of that they can no longer pay their mortgages. This left an estimated amount of 500,000 people homeless. In the year of 1944, just 30 years earlier, the war in Europe and the return of the wet weather cycle helped bring prosperity back to the southern plains. This helped the farmers that stayed and it allowed wheat prices to increase. The next 5 years of the 1940s were devoted to wheat expansion by 3 million acres. And those that had moved made their way back with our suitcases in hand. And as a writer named Timothy Egan said, the dust bowl was a classic tale human beings pushing too hard against nature and nature pushing right back. Thank you.