Rain Follows the Plow
It was the belief that God would bring rain when the settlers moved into the arid Great Plains. As David Wishart explains in his article, “As they crossed the 100th meridian and the twenty-inch rainfall line, settlers persuaded themselves that they were the agents of increased precipitation.” (Wishart) So, the settlers felt they had not only a right to plow the dry land, but also a duty to follow their destiny.
The individual beliefs of the time were enough to encourage settlers to travel West. However, the government further facilitated and incentivized the moving in the late 19th century into the early 20th century.
Three key acts encouraged people to move west, encouraging untrained farming techniques. They were as follows:
- In 1862 – The Homestead Act provided settlers with 160 acres (“The War and Westward Movement”)
- In 1904 – the Kinkaid act allowed homesteaders to claim 640 acres of land in certain parts of western Nebraska (“Kinkaid Act”)
- In 1909 – To enable dry-land farming (conserving moisture w/ less water dependent crops) “the Enlarged Homestead Act of February 19, 1909, increased the maximum permissible homestead to 320 acres of non-irrigable land in parts of Colorado, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Arizona, and Wyoming. The law responded to the dry-land farming movement that grew soon after the turn of the century.” (Bradsher 35)
These governmental acts compounded with the increased demand and increased wheat prices surrounding WWI, and compounded with the aforementioned manifest destiny, were the perfect storm to precede the 1931 drought. According to the National Drought Mitigation Center, “Of all the droughts that have occurred in the United States, the drought events of the 1930s are widely considered to be the “drought of record” for the nation. The 1930s drought is often referred to as if it were one episode, but it was actually several distinct events occurring in such rapid succession that affected regions were not able to recover adequately before another drought began.” (NDMC)
“The widespread prosperity of the 1920s ended abruptly with the stock market crash in October 1929 and the great economic depression that followed.” (Great Depression) The effects of the disastrous U.S. economy were global. In 1932, one in four workers was unemployed. Thousands of Americans were left homeless with little food and little hope. Political distrust was prominent across the country. However, many Americans were more focused on their individual and familial wellbeing than on protesting. With the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, citizens moved past much of the distrust that had been associated with the Hoover administration, placing their hope in the government. The Great Depression was the context for the Dust Bowl.
The Dust Bowl was a spectacle disaster, through the abrupt living qualities forced upon citizens in the early 1930s, as crops quickly failed to grow. The stock market followed the farming failure, and people were left jobless and homeless across the country. “Farmers [continued] to abandon soil conservation practices.” (NDMC) This had been happening since the early 1920s, as the inexperienced farmers, with the entitlement of their manifest destiny did not consider the conservation practices necessary. And, with the drought came the dust. The lack of conservation practices illustrated the effects of this slow disaster, the thoughtlessness of the inexperienced farmers. For a decade, people in the Dust Bowl regions lived through the frequent dust storms, which could suffocate a victim left outside. People in the most affected areas, such as south-western Kansas, often attempted to flee west to California, where they were ostracized by their fellow citizens. They were hopeless and helpless, left at the mercy of the horrific storm that they had grown.
Not All “Okies” Were White
(Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration)
There were immense differential effects created by the Dust Bowl. Of any group during the 30s and 40s, the African American population was hit the hardest by the effects of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. As opposed to the 1/4 Americans who were left jobless, 1/2 African Americans were unemployed in 1932. There was a surge in lynchings and overall divisiveness in 1932 on, with a total of 28 lynchings in 1933. The election of President Roosevelt began to spark optimism and hope among the African American population. Roosevelt frequently invited African American visitors to the White House.
Roosevelt’s New Deal was a combination of public programs, financial reformation, and policy regulation. Due to the specific political agenda, Roosevelt was unable to meet all the requests of groups such as the NAACP. Roosevelt continued to improve the African American inclusivity during the onset of World War II, when he created policy, in response to the protest of A. Philip Randolph, that allowed any citizen (regardless of background, appearance, or identity) to serve in the military.
Ultimately, although the minority group was hit harder than any during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, their struggle helped create political and social change that paved the way for future integration.