what caused farmers to lose their farms in the 1930s
The Dust Bowl was the proper noun 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 grit swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed beyond the unabridged region. The Dust Bowl intensified the crushing economical impacts of the Neat Low and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of piece of work and meliorate living conditions.
What Caused the Dust Bowl?
The Dust Basin was caused by several economic and agricultural factors, including federal land policies, changes in regional weather, farm economic science and other cultural factors. Later on the Civil War, a serial of federal land acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Cracking Plains.
The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public country, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Bully Plains.
Many of these late nineteenth and early on twentieth century settlers lived by the superstition "pelting follows the plough." Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agronomics would permanently bear upon the climate of the semi-arid Great Plains region, making it more than conducive to farming.
This false belief was linked to Manifest Destiny—an attitude that Americans had a sacred duty to aggrandize west. A series of moisture years during the catamenia created further misunderstanding of the region'due south ecology and led to the intensive cultivation of increasingly marginal lands that couldn't be reached by irrigation.
Rising wheat prices in the 1910s and 1920s and increased demand for wheat from Europe during World War I encouraged farmers to turn upwardly millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat, corn and other row crops. But as the U.s.a. entered the Great Low, wheat prices plummeted. Farmers tore up fifty-fifty more grassland in an attempt to harvest a bumper crop and suspension even.
Crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, exposing the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to agree the soil in identify, it began to blow abroad. Eroding soil led to massive dust storms and economical devastation—especially in the Southern Plains.
When Was The Dust Bowl?
The Dust Basin, also known as "the Muddied Thirties," started in 1930 and lasted for about a decade, merely its long-term economic impacts on the region lingered much longer.
Astringent drought hitting the Midwest and Southern Great Plains in 1930. Massive grit storms began in 1931. A serial of drought years followed, further exacerbating the environmental disaster.
By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had been rendered useless for farming, while another 125 million acres—an area roughly three-quarters the size of Texas—was speedily losing its topsoil.
Regular rainfall returned to the region by the end of 1939, bringing the Dust Bowl years to a close. The economical effects, yet, persisted. Population declines in the worst-hit counties—where the agronomical value of the country failed to recover—connected well into the 1950s.
'Black Blizzards' Strike America
During the Dust Bowl menses, severe dust storms, often called "black blizzards" swept the Great Plains. Some of these carried Nifty Plains topsoil as far east every bit Washington, D.C. and New York City, and coated ships in the Atlantic Ocean with dust.
Billowing clouds of dust would darken the sky, sometimes for days at a fourth dimension. In many places, the grit drifted like snow and residents had to clear information technology with shovels. Dust worked its way through the cracks of fifty-fifty well-sealed homes, leaving a coating on food, skin and piece of furniture.
Some people developed "dust pneumonia" and experienced breast pain and difficulty animate. It's unclear exactly how many people may have died from the status. Estimates range from hundreds to several g people.
Whorl to Keep
On May 11, 1934, a massive grit tempest two miles loftier traveled ii,000 miles to the East Declension, blotting out monuments such equally the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. Capitol.
The worst grit tempest occurred on April 14, 1935. News reports called the issue Black Sunday. A wall of blowing sand and dust started in the Oklahoma Panhandle and spread e. As many equally three million tons of topsoil are estimated to have diddled off the Nifty Plains during Black Sunday.
An Associated Press news written report coined the term "Dust Bowl" after the Black Sun dust storm.
New Deal Programs
President Franklin D. Roosevelt established a number of measures to help convalesce the plight of poor and displaced farmers. He too addressed the environmental degradation that had led to the Grit Bowl in the first place.
Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Projection in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Nifty Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now chosen the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) implemented new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion.
READ MORE: Did New Deal Program Help Finish the Slap-up Low?
Okie Migration
Roughly ii.five million people left the Dust Bowl states—Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma—during the 1930s. It was 1 of the largest migrations in American history.
Oklahoma lonely lost 440,000 people to migration. Many of them, poverty-stricken, traveled west looking for piece of work. From 1935 to 1940, roughly 250,000 Oklahoma migrants moved to California. A 3rd settled in the state'southward agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley.
These Dust Bowl refugees were called "Okies." Okies faced discrimination, menial labor and pitiable wages upon reaching California. Many of them lived in shantytowns and tents along irrigation ditches. "Okie" soon became a term of disdain used to refer to any poor Dust Bowl migrant, regardless of their land of origin.
READ More than: How the Dust Basin Made Americans Refugees in Their Own Country
Grit Bowl in Arts and Culture
The Dust Bowl captured the imagination of the nation's artists, musicians and writers.
John Steinbeck memorialized the plight of the Okies in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. Lensman Dorothea Lange documented rural poverty with a series of photographs for FDR'southward Farm Securities Administration. Creative person Alexander Hogue painted Dust Basin landscapes.
Folk musician Woody Guthrie's semi-autobiographical commencement album Dust Basin Ballads in 1940, told stories of economic hardship faced by Okies in California. Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, left his abode state with thousands of others looking for work during the Dust Bowl.
SOURCES
FDR and the New Deal Response to an Environmental Catastrophe. Roosevelt Institute.
About The Dust Bowl. English Department; University of Illinois.
Dust Bowl Migration. Academy of California at Davis.
The Great Okie Migration. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Okie Migrations. Oklahoma Historical Society.
What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation. Population and Environment.
The Dust Basin. Library of Congress.
Grit Bowl Ballads: Woody Guthrie. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
The Dust Basin. Ken Burns; PBS.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl
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