The Dust Bowl and American Inequality | The Cameron Journal

The dust bowl is near to my heart and my family. The farm that my Grandma and her siblings grew up on Yuma county Colorado was not blown away but they suffered the drought and the resulting dust storms. Watching Ken Burns’ documentary is an eye opening look into the period. I finally had a chance to watch the documentary and the causes and realities of the Dust Bowl were shattering.

Causes of the Dust Bowl

The causes of the Dust Bowl were a combination of several events crashing together all at once. First, the Depression lowered the price of wheat until the cash crop was virtually worthless. Rather than selling the wheat for $1 or even $2 a bushel (in 1930 dollars), the price sank to 10 cents at one point in the darkest days of the depression. Second, the region hardest hit by the dust bowl, which was in the area where the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas meet, is an arid desert that experiences a drought every 20 years. The whole area, which stretches from the arid desert of northern Texas to Kansas and Colorado’s plains, is an arid desert where rain isn’t common, to begin with, and a drought means that months can pass without a single drop of rain falling from the sky. The third was the industrialization of agriculture. Tractors had become cheap, which meant that a single farmer could use his machines to plow up thousands of acres. The documentary describes the great plow up beginning in the late 1910s and extending well into the early part of the depression. Modern farming methods like crop rotation, pivot irrigation, fertilizer, and land management were non-existent.

Due to the loose topsoils, when the drought arrived the ground dried out and any wind soon kicked up dust. This resulted in dust storms that would cover whole houses burying the families inside. For those that survived a dust storm, the clean-up effort was daunting. They would have to shovel dust to get out the door and shovel it away from their homes. Inside was no protection, interiors were covered in dust and dirty defying the best efforts of the most assiduous housewife. Pictures of the massive dust storms are dramatic. They were so thick that they would blot out the sun and cause night in the middle…