As the twentieth century progressed, depression and dust bowl conditions modified the settlement pattern, initiating significant changes that continue to the present. Rural free mail delivery led to the discontinuance of many of the open-country post offices.
Full Answer
How did the Dust Bowl affect the southern plains?
Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a dry period in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region.
What happened in the Dust Bowl in 1930?
The 1930's Dust Bowl Drought. The Dust Bowl was not only one of the worst droughts in United States history, but is generally thought of as the worst and most prolonged disaster in American history. The effects of the "Dust Bowl" drought devastated the United States central states region known as the Great Plains (or High Plains).
How many people were affected by the Dust Bowl?
Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states—Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma—during the 1930s. It was the largest migration in American history. READ MORE: How the Dust Bowl Made Americans Refugees in Their Own Country. Oklahoma alone lost 440,000 people to migration.
Why is the Dust Bowl important to history?
The Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s plays an important and complicated role in the way Americans talk about the history of poverty and public policy in their country.
How did the Dust Bowl affect human settlement?
In the rural area outside Boise City, Oklahoma, the population dropped 40% with 1,642 small farmers and their families pulling up stakes. The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states; of those, 200,000 moved to California.
What consequence did the Dust Bowl have on migration patterns in the US?
The Dust Bowl led to a massive migration of Midwestern farmers out of the region, many of whom traveled to California in search of jobs. The World Bank predicts climate change could create as many as 143 million "climate migrants" by 2050.
What were 3 problems caused by the dust bowl?
The biggest causes for the dust bowl were poverty that led to poor agricultural techniques, extremely high temperatures, long periods of drought and wind erosion.
What was most affected by the Dust Bowl?
The agricultural land that was worst affected by the Dust Bowl was 16 million acres (6.5 million hectares) of land by the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.
What effects did the Dust Bowl have on the economy?
Banks began failing on a massive scale and since deposits were uninsured, many people lost all of their life's savings. In 1931 a total of 28,285 business failed at a rate of 133 per 10,000 businesses. By 1932, US industrial output fell 54% and there was 25-30% unemployment [15].
How did farming change after the Dust Bowl?
Some of the new methods he introduced included crop rotation, strip farming, contour plowing, terracing, planting cover crops and leaving fallow fields (land that is plowed but not planted). Because of resistance, farmers were actually paid a dollar an acre by the government to practice one of the new farming methods.
What areas were affected by the Dust Bowl?
This boy is on a farm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, during the Dust Bowl. Arthur Rothstein, 1936 (image courtesy of the Library of Congress). Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Kansas were all a part of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
What are 5 facts about the Dust Bowl?
Life for the Average Family During the Great DepressionDust storms crackled with powerful static electricity. ... The swirling dust proved deadly. ... The federal government paid farmers to plow under fields and butcher livestock. ... Most farm families did not flee the Dust Bowl. ... Few “Okies” were actually from Oklahoma.
Who benefited from the Dust Bowl?
The shift particularly benefited Dust Bowl farmers, and nearly all participated. AAA payments became the major source of farm income by 1937. One of President Roosevelt's personal favorites among the New Deal programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).
What migrations occurred during the Dust Bowl?
In the early 1930s, thousands of Dust Bowl refugees — mainly from Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico — packed up their families and migrated west, hoping to find work.
Why did the Dust Bowl lead to increased migration?
Years of severe drought had ravaged millions of acres of farmland. Many migrants were enticed by flyers advertising jobs picking crops, according to the Library of Congress.
What impact did the Dust Bowl have on migration and small farmers in the 1930s?
The Dust Bowl intensified the crushing economic impacts of the Great Depression and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of work and better living conditions.
Where did people migrate because of the Dust Bowl?
The press called them Dust Bowl refugees, although actually few came from the area devastated by dust storms. Instead they came from a broad area encompassing four southern plains states: Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. More than half a million left the region in the 1930s, mostly heading for California.
What was the Dust Bowl?
The term Dust Bowl was coined in 1935 when an AP reporter, Robert Geiger, used it to describe the drought-affected south central United States in the aftermath of horrific dust storms. Although it technically refers to the western third of Kansas, southeastern Colorado, the Oklahoma Panhandle, the northern two-thirds of the Texas Panhandle, and northeastern New Mexico, the Dust Bowl has come to symbolize the hardships of the entire nation during the 1930 s.
Who coined the term "Dust Bowl"?
The term "Dust Bowl" was coined when an AP reporter, Robert Geiger, used it to describe the drought-affected south central United States in the aftermath of horrific dust storms.
How did the 1930s affect agriculture?
In the 1930s, drought covered virtually the entire Plains for almost a decade (Warrick, 1980). The drought’s direct effect is most often remembered as agricultural. Many crops were damaged by deficient rainfall, high temperatures, and high winds, as well as insect infestations and dust storms that accompanied these conditions. The resulting agricultural depression contributed to the Great Depression’s bank closures, business losses, increased unemployment, and other physical and emotional hardships. Although records focus on other problems, the lack of precipitation would also have affected wildlife and plant life, and would have created water shortages for domestic needs.
How did the Plains drought affect the economy?
For example, millions of people migrated from the drought areas, often heading west, in search of work. These newcomers were often in direct competition for jobs with longer-established residents, which created conflict between the groups. In addition, because of poverty and high unemployment, migrants added to local relief efforts, sometimes overburdening relief and health agencies.
How many droughts were there in the 1930s?
Although the 1930s drought is often referred to as if it were one episode, there were at least 4 distinct drought events: 1930–31, 1934, 1936, and 1939–40 (Riebsame et al., 1991). These events occurred in such rapid succession that affected regions were not able to recover adequately before another drought began.
What were the problems of the Great Plains before the 1930s?
A number of poor land management practices in the Great Plains region increased the vulnerability of the area before the 1930s drought. Some of the land use patterns and methods of cultivation in the region can be traced back to the settlement of the Great Plains nearly 100 years earlier. At that time, little was known of the region’s climate. Several expeditions had explored the region, but they were not studying the region for its agricultural potential, and, furthermore, their findings went into government reports that were not readily available to the general public (Fite, 1966).
Why was the survival of a majority of the families and enterprises undoubtedly rested solely with their perseverance and?
As important as these programs may have been, the survival of a majority of the families and enterprises undoubtedly rested solely with their perseverance and integrity. Whether they stayed or moved into the drought regions or migrated to other areas in hopes of a better life, families encountered new hardships and obstacles that would require ingenuity, resilience, and humility.
Why did farmers not get credit in the Dust Bowl?
A second explanation is a lack of availability of credit, caused by the high rate of failure of banks in the Plains states. Because banks failed in the Dust Bowl region at a higher rate than elsewhere, farmers could not get the credit they needed to obtain capital to shift crop production. In addition, profit margins in either animals or hay were still minimal, and farmers had little incentive in the beginning to change their crops.
How did the Dust Bowl affect Kansas?
Developed in 1937 to speed up the process and increase returns from pasture, the "hay method" was originally supposed to occur in Kansas naturally over 25–40 years. After much data analysis, the causal mechanism for the droughts can be linked to ocean temperature anomalies. Specifically, Atlantic Ocean sea surface temperatures appear to have had an indirect effect on the general atmospheric circulation, while Pacific sea surface temperatures seem to have had the most direct influence.
How much dust did the Dust Bowl remove?
Beginning on May 9, 1934, a strong, two-day dust storm removed massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil in one of the worst such storms of the Dust Bowl. The dust clouds blew all the way to Chicago, where they deposited 12 million pounds of dust (~ 5500 tonnes).
How much did the Dust Bowl cost in 1936?
The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families, who were unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, to abandon their farms, and losses reached $25 million per day by 1936 (equivalent to $470,000,000 in 2020).
What was the Dust Bowl?
The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s ; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the phenomenon. The drought came in three waves: 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years.
What caused the Great Plains to become dry?
After fairly favorable climatic conditions in the 1920s with good rainfall and relatively moderate winters, which permitted increased settlement and cultivation in the Great Plains, the region entered an unusually dry era in the summer of 1930. During the next decade, the northern plains suffered four of their seven driest calendar years since 1895, Kansas four of its twelve driest, and the entire region south to West Texas lacked any period of above-normal rainfall until record rains hit in 1941. When severe drought struck the Great Plains region in the 1930s, it resulted in erosion and loss of topsoil because of farming practices at the time. The drought dried the topsoil and over time it became friable, reduced to a powdery consistency in some places. Without the indigenous grasses in place, the high winds that occur on the plains picked up the topsoil and created the massive dust storms that marked the Dust Bowl period. The persistent dry weather caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The fine soil of the Great Plains was easily eroded and carried east by strong continental winds.
What was the impact of the 1940s on agriculture?
By 1940, counties that had experienced the most significant levels of erosion had a greater decline in agricultural land values. The per-acre value of farmland declined by 28% in high-erosion counties and 17% in medium-erosion counties, relative to land value changes in low-erosion counties. : 3 Even over the long-term, the agricultural value of the land often failed to recover to pre-Dust Bowl levels. In highly eroded areas, less than 25% of the original agricultural losses were recovered. The economy adjusted predominantly through large relative population declines in more-eroded counties, both during the 1930s and through the 1950s. : 1500
What were the shelterbelts in the Dust Bowl?
The wind erosion was gradually halted with federal aid. Windbreaks known as shelterbelts—swaths of trees that protect soil and crops from wind—were planted, and much of the grassland was restored. By the early 1940s the area had largely recovered. Dust Bowl: windbreaks.
Where is the Dust Bowl?
Dust Bowl, section of the Great Plains of the United States that extended over southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and northeastern New Mexico. Abandoned farmstead in the Dust Bowl region of Oklahoma, showing the effects of wind erosion, 1937.
What is the Dust Bowl poster?
Dust Bowl: USDA poster. A U.S. Department of Agriculture poster from the Dust Bowl era urging farmers on the Great Plains to plant windbreaks (also known as shelterbelts) to halt erosion. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now.
What was the song that characterized the Dust Bowl?
Their plight was characterized in songs such as “Dust Bowl Refugee” and “Do Re Mi” by folksinger Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoman who had joined the parade of those headed west in search of work. That experience was perhaps most famously depicted in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath(1939).
How many people fled the Plains?
…whole area into a vast Dust Bowl and destroyed crops and livestock in unprecedented amounts. As a result, some 2.5 million people fled the Plains states, many bound for California, where the promise of sunshine and a better life often collided with the reality of scarce, poorly paid work as…
How many trees were planted in the 1935 shelterbelt?
A swath of three-year-old trees forming a windbreak (also known as a shelterbelt), part of a 1935 federal project that saw the planting of some 200 million trees in a 100-mile wide (160-km), 1,000-mile (1,600-km) long barricade meant to halt the wind erosion that had decimated a section of the Great Plains known as the Dust Bowl.
Who was the woman who left the Dust Bowl?
Dorothea Lange —Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-USF34-T01-016453-E) Thousands of families were forced to leave the Dust Bowl at the height of the Great Depression in the early and mid-1930s.
What was the impact of the Dust Bowl on the US?
Dust transmits influenza virus and measles and combined with the economic depression, the Dust Bowl period brought a significant increase in the number of measles cases, respiratory disorders and increased infant and overall mortality in the plains.
Why was the Dust Bowl so bad?
The prolonged drought was made much worse by a fundamental misunderstanding of high plains environment, and the utilization of methods which called for a thin layer of dust to be purposefully exposed on the surface for large parts of the summer. Dust transmits influenza virus and measles and combined with the economic depression, the Dust Bowl period brought a significant increase in the number of measles cases, respiratory disorders and increased infant and overall mortality in the plains.
What was the worst drought in the United States?
Updated May 28, 2019. The Dust Bowl was not only one of the worst droughts in United States history, but is generally thought of as the worst and most prolonged disaster in American history. The effects of the "Dust Bowl" drought devastated the United States central states region known as the Great Plains (or High Plains).
Why were wheat prices so high in the 1910s?
In the late 1910s, prices for wheat, the main Dust Bowl crop, were quite high due to demands for feeding people during World War I. Farmers used emerging tractor technologies to work the land and although tractors lowered labor costs and allowed the farmers to work larger acreages of land, the higher capital costs required for tractors resulted in mortgages on farms. The Federal government became involved in farm credit during the 1910s, making mortgages easier to obtain.
Why was the Great Plains considered unsuitable for pioneer settlement and agriculture?
Known as the "Great American Desert" to early European and American explorers, the Great Plains was first thought to be unsuitable for pioneer settlement and agriculture thanks to the lack of surface water.
Why did crop prices drop in the 1920s?
But in the 1920s, crop prices dropped as production increased, and reached minimum levels after the crash of the economy in 1929. Low crop prices were paired with poor harvests due to the drought but exacerbated by infestations of rabbits and grasshoppers.
When did farmers start using the Campbell method?
Farmers began using the Campbell method to conduct large scale farming in the 1910s and 1920s, while the climate was somewhat wetter. When the drought hit in the late 20s, though, the farmers didn't have enough experience to have learned what the best tillage practices and equipment would be best for the steppe lands.
What were the changes in the settlement pattern?
As the twentieth century progressed, depression and dust bowl conditions modified the settlement pattern, initiating significant changes that continue to the present. Rural free mail delivery led to the discontinuance of many of the open-country post offices. Farm consolidation led to the abandonment of many section-line roads, and operations that were originally farms became ranches. Removal of much of the rural population led to the consolidation of rural schools and churches. The advent of larger railroad steam engines, and then of diesel engines, decreased the need for water-tower villages–only the grain elevator survives in many diminished places. Additionally, improved highways and the use of trucks doomed many of the branch railroads and the villages they served.
How did the pioneers divide the grasslands of North America?
The pioneer settlement process divided the grasslands of North America into a vast checkerboard where squares were separated by section lines, which became roads, field divisions, county lines, and even state lines. The artificially imposed matrix of the U.S. Public Land Survey System, originating with the Ordinance of 1785, obliterated the natural landscapes known to the Native Americans. Six-mile-square townships were divided into thirty-six one-mile-square sections of 640 acres. European-style strassendorf villages or earlier New England–style village commons were virtually unknown, since the Homestead Law of 1862 required that homesteaders live on the land they claimed.
How many acres were homesteaders in the nineteenth century?
In most areas, homesteaders in the nineteenth century located on dispersed farms of a quarter-section (160 acres). There were occasional interspersed rural schools, churches, and post offices. Initial building construction often utilized native sod, since lumber was not available.
What are the Plains people?
The original Plains peoples, the Native Americans, remain an important and rapidly growing component of the region's population, especially on the Northern Plains and in Oklahoma. On the reservations, residential villages of Native American s are interspersed with farms, often occupied by European Americans, which were homesteaded as "surplus" lands or purchased as allotments in the decades following the Dawes Act of 1887. On some reservations, for example the Devils Lake Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, more than three-quarters of the land is owned by non-Natives.
What are the settlement patterns of the Great Plains?
The settlement patterns of the Great Plains reflect the sum total of the effects of these ongoing processes. Native Americans, who only 150 years ago were the region's sole inhabitants, have been relegated to relatively small areas. Throughout the region a pattern of large-scale farms is interspersed with abundant artifacts ...
What ethnicity did the Oklahoma land rush reflect?
In Oklahoma, the land rush produced an ethnic pattern that reflected Native American, Confederate refugee, and European origin s. On the Texas Plains the pattern was initially dominated by people of southern U.S. and Mexican origin: in the Texas Panhandle in 1880, for example, about two-thirds of the population had origins in ...
What is the dominant pattern of settlement in the Great Plains?
The dominant settlement patterns of the Great Plains of the United States reflect both an initial 1800s pioneer landscape and subsequent changes: the evolution of the region's landscape is a continuing process. The pioneer settlement process divided the grasslands of North America into a vast checkerboard where squares were separated by section ...
How did the Dust Bowl affect poverty?
If the poverty associated with the Dust Bowl migration was transitory, the impact on public policy and on popular understandings of poverty was more lasting. This high-profile episode with its sympathetic white victims and its powerful storytellers helped reshape the terrain of poverty-related policymaking in various ways, especially around the issues of interstate migration and farm labor. Poor people crossing state lines would have a clear set of rights in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl migration, and the plight of farm workers would be more visible even as the Joads left the fields to families with darker skins and different accents.
What was the significance of the Dust Bowl migration?
The Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s plays an important and complicated role in the way Americans talk about the history of poverty and public policy in their country.
What was the significance of race in the Dust Bowl?
Race has always been central to the story of the Dust Bowl migration. Paul Taylor knew in 1935 when he wrote his first article about the "drought refugees" that their white skins and Anglo-Saxon names could win attention and sympathy that would not so readily attach to the Mexican and Asian farm workers who normally struggled in the valleys of California. Steinbeck too used the paradox, emphasizing in a dozen ways that Americans of their pedigree were not supposed to experience what the Joads experienced.
What is the Dust Bowl saga about?
The continuing fascination with the Dust Bowl saga also has something to do with the way race and poverty have interacted over the generations since the 1930s. Here is one of the last great stories depicting white Americans as victims of severe poverty and social prejudice.
Why is race important in the Dust Bowl?
The continuing fascination with this subject over the decades has had as much to do with racial politics as with the events themselves. As poverty became more and more racialized, and as struggles over social welfare programs increasingly contentious, the Dust Bowl migration took on new meanings and new functions. By the 1970s an aging generation of former migrants and their upwardly mobile offspring where ready to memorialize the experiences of the 1930s and another set of storytellers were ready to help. A new round of journalism, novels, history books, TV documentaries, and country music songs has been the result, much of it fed by a late 20 th century need for stories of poverty, hardship, and eventual triumph where the victims are white. These latter-day Dust Bowl accounts have sometimes promoted conservative agendas, as in the collection of songs that Merle Haggard produced in the late 1960s and 1970s celebrating the struggles of his parents and implying that the poverty of their generation was more noble than the poverty of contemporary America. Unwilling to acknowledge kinship with the Mexican-Americans who replaced them in the fields or admit the importance of government assistance in Dust Bowl survival strategies, some former migrants constructed self histories that added to racial distances. But others among the new storytellers see the meanings differently. In keeping alive the Dust Bowl migration saga, they remind America that poverty has had many faces, that disparaging the victims is senseless and cruel, and that the poor and helpless of one era will hopefully escape that fate in the next.
Why is the Dust Bowl important?
The Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s plays an important and complicated role in the way Americans talk about the history of poverty and public policy in their country . For almost seventy years the story of white families from Oklahoma and neighboring states making their way to California in the midst of the Great Depression has been kept alive by journalists and filmmakers, college teachers and museum curators, songwriters and novelists, and of course historians. Although it was but one episode out of many struggles with poverty during the 1930s, the Dust Bowl migration became something of synecdoche, the single most common image that later generations would use to memorialize the hardships of that decade. The continuing fascination with the Dust Bowl saga also has something to do with the way race and poverty have interacted over the generations since the 1930s. Here is one of the last great stories depicting white Americans as victims of severe poverty and social prejudice. It is a story that many Americans have needed to tell, for many different reasons.
How many people were indicted for the Dust Bowl?
In 1939 the district attorneys of several of the counties most affected by the Dust Bowl influx began using the law in a very public manner. More than two dozen people were indicted, tried, and convicted. Their crime: helping their relatives move to California from Oklahoma and nearby states.
Overview
The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the phenomenon. The drought came in three waves: 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains e…
Geographic characteristics and early history
With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline t…
Drought and dust storms
After fairly favorable climatic conditions in the 1920s with good rainfall and relatively moderate winters, which permitted increased settlement and cultivation in the Great Plains, the region entered an unusually dry era in the summer of 1930. During the next decade, the northern plains suffered four of their seven driest calendar years since 1895, Kansas four of its twelve driest, a…
Human displacement
This catastrophe intensified the economic impact of the Great Depression in the region.
In 1935, many families were forced to leave their farms and travel to other areas seeking work because of the drought (which at that time had already lasted four years). The abandonment of homesteads and financial ruin resulting from cat…
Government response
The greatly expanded participation of government in land management and soil conservation was an important outcome from the disaster. Different groups took many different approaches to responding to the disaster. To identify areas that needed attention, groups such as the Soil Conservation Service generated detailed soil maps and took photos of the land from the sky. To create shelterbelts to reduce soil erosion, groups such as the United States Forestry Service's Pr…
Long-term economic impact
In many regions, more than 75% of the topsoil was blown away by the end of the 1930s. Land degradation varied widely. Aside from the short-term economic consequences caused by erosion, there were severe long-term economic consequences caused by the Dust Bowl.
By 1940, counties that had experienced the most significant levels of erosion had a greater decline in agricultural land values. The per-acre value of farmland declined by 28% in high-erosio…
Influence on the arts and culture
The crisis was documented by photographers, musicians, and authors, many hired during the Great Depression by the federal government. For instance, the Farm Security Administration hired numerous photographers to document the crisis. Artists such as Dorothea Lange were aided by having salaried work during the Depression. She captured what have become classic images of the dust st…
Changes in agriculture and population on the Plains
Agricultural land and revenue boomed during World War I, but fell during the Great Depression and the 1930s. The agricultural land that was worst affected by the Dust Bowl was 16 million acres (6.5 million hectares) of land by the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. These twenty counties that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service identified as the worst wind-eroded region were home to the majority of the Great Plains migrants during the Dust Bowl.