4/4/2024 0 Comments Fireside chats dust bowl![]() ![]() Nearly a million people left the Great Plains-the largest displacement America had ever seen.įDR clung to the belief that there was a way for man to fix what man had broken. Most lost.įrom 1930 to 1935 there were 750,000 bankruptcies or foreclosures on farms. ![]() He brings to life those who wrestled the dry landscape-hard scrabble farmers, railroad barons, real estate speculators, and politicians. Through painstaking research, including interviews with some of those who survived the Dust Bowl years, Egan paints a vivid portrait of America’s greatest environmental disaster.Įgan traces the roots of the Dust Bowl from wresting the High Plains from Native Americans to the “plow up” that tore the land apart. This must-read book is both a breathtaking historical narrative and a cautionary tale. New York Times columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Egan earned the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Times. People lost their way as the wall of darkness rolled in stores and schools were boarded up cattle lay dead in the dust. On Black Sunday, Apa cloud two hundred miles wide carrying more than 300,000 tons of topsoil blackened the skies over the Great Plains. The FSA Photo Unit later became part of the US Office of War Information (OWI), employed to promote national unity as America mobilized for war. This put a human face on the economic abstractions of the Great Depression and helped justify the need for the New Deal’s far-reaching initiatives. Stryker provided the best of these images to newspapers, magazines and book publishers free of charge. The Photo Unit produced more than 175,000 photographs during the 1930s and early 40s. These photographs often appeared in government reports and publications describing such New Deal initiatives as reducing child labor, improving international relations and boosting domestic tourism. At times, Stryker’s photographers were loaned-out for assignments with other agencies, including the Interior Department and the US Public Health Service. By 1936, more than 40,000 farmers throughout the region had adopted the new methods, accounting for more than 5.5 million acres of contour-listed conservation.Ĭhildren of sharecropper, North Carolina, 1935.Ĭourtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.Ī secondary, but crucial role of the FSA’s photographers was to provide images in support of other New Deal programs. The success of the projects combined with new federal loan programs incentivized farmers to adopt the new practices, which boosted the local economy and popularized conservation practices. Initially manned by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, these rehabilitation projects restored grasslands in areas not suitable for farming and introduced new methods of moisture retention, such as terracing, crop rotations and contour plowing. Things began to turn around in 1934 with the emergence of the New Deal, when the USDA’s Soil Conservation Service chose Dalhart, the county seat, for one of the nation’s first erosion-control demonstration projects-the first to focus solely on wind erosion. ![]() Photo by Dorothea Lange, Resettlement Administration, 1938. ![]()
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