rain falling on a happy farmer dust bowl photo

#Rain falling on a happy farmer dust bowl photo drivers

Although they came from many states, not just Oklahoma, these migrants became known as “ Okies,” which was almost always uttered as a term of disparagement.īut the question asked by Americans who had once seen the Great Plains as an earthy Garden of Eden was, “How did this happen?” Was this a disaster created by human folly and greed or just a cyclical natural occurrence an “act of God” as some believed? Many families simply walked away from their farms and headed to the west coast, where they hoped to find work and where their children could breathe. Unable to raise crops and pay their bills, farmers lost their land and migrated in search of work. The economic effects of these storms were devastating, doubly so when coupled with the effects of the Great Depression. Pictured are a father and his two sons at their partly submerged house during a 1936 dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. Crops were being destroyed and, in some cases, the dust was piling up and drifting like snow, burying homes and farm buildings. The most disastrous storm yet struck the Midwest on April 14, 1935, earning that day the name “Black Sunday” and causing a writer for the Associated Press to coin the term “Dust Bowl” to describe the area where these storms originated and did the greatest damage. Quickly, Congress passed legislation to create the Soil Conservation Service, which still exists today as the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Bennett’s group was about to run out of money, and he was asking for new funding as well as a permanent agency to deal with soil conservation.

The storm hit Washington, DC, just as testimony was being given by presidential advisor Hugh Bennett, who headed the Soil Erosion Service, a temporary government agency created to thwart the very conditions that had led to the dust storms. This storm was also the one that spurred legislation allowing a first step to be taken to alleviate the situation and give the dying Great Plains a new lease on life. This was neither the first nor the last of the many dust storms of the 1930s, but it was the one that got the nation’s attention – the one that allowed people in the east from Richmond, Virginia, all the way north to the Canadian border to actually see, taste, and smell the phenomenon, and to suffer the respiratory distress that came along with it. One tanker captain operating many miles off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, reported that his ship was completely covered with a fine blanket of reddish-brown soil. The Boston Globe carried a front-page story reading, “Vast Dust Blanket Over New England.” The storm then blew out to sea, where people on ocean liners hundreds of miles from land saw the monster black clouds of dust billowing up from the west. “Huge Dust Cloud, Blown 1,500 Miles, Dims City 5 Hours” was the banner in the next morning’s New York Times. In its wake, the storm left a massive clean-up effort and bold headlines. In Boston, an airplane owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ventured into the storm and found that it extended over three miles (17,000 feet) into the upper atmosphere.

#Rain falling on a happy farmer dust bowl photo drivers

Cab drivers had to stop to remove dirt from their windshields, and commercial airplanes were grounded because of low visibility and fears that engines choked with dust would fail.

The storm took six hours to pass over Manhattan when it arrived there, and it brought the city to a halt. In some locales, the dust was so deep on the roads that snowplows were brought out to clear them. The storm quickly moved into the cities to the east like Toledo, Cleveland, and Buffalo and then to the Eastern Seaboard. The particles from this storm were not the relatively insignificant kind that normally accumulate around the average house, but rather a total of 300 million tons of topsoil, parched to dust by drought and blown out of the Great Plains by a strong storm system that originated on the west coast. On an enormous dust storm, 1,500 miles long and 600 miles wide, was moving eastward across the Great Plains, eventually depositing 12 million pounds of dust on Chicago – four pounds for each person in the city.

Use this narrative with the Photographs: The Dust Bowl and Rural Poverty, 1936-1937 Primary Source to have students analyze the impact of poverty during the Great Depression.