Dark Days of the Great Depression

A Review of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time

Timothy Egan is a national enterprise reporter for the New York Times. He authored six books and received the Pulitzer Prize. In 2006 he won the Washington State Book Award in History/Biography and a 2006 National Book Award for his book The Worst Hard Time, a non-fiction account of those who lived through the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl.

BY STEFANO GANDDINI

On April 14, 1935, “the mother of all dusters” swept across the Great Plains, removing 300,000 tons of topsoil—twice as much dirt as was dug out to create the Panama Canal.1 While Black Sunday was the worst dust storm that took place during the Dust Bowl era, it was only one of many disastrous storms that plagued that Great Plains for nearly a decade. Timothy Egan’s Worst Hard Time is a nonfiction account of those who survived the severe storms of the 1930s, a time “when the simplest thing in life—taking a breath—was a threat.”2 Many have heard the story told by John Steinbeck in his Grapes of Wrath, about the Okies who fled the Great Plains; however, few have heard the story that Egan tells—the story of the people who never left. As Egan narrates the stories of a half-dozen families who stayed in the Dust Bowl, he depicts the bitter life of those who struggled through the nation’s worst economic and environmental disaster.

In the first part of the book, “Promise: The Great Plowup, 1901-1930,” Egan recounts the first three decades of the twentieth century as a backdrop to the Dust Bowl era and introduces several families who moved to the Great Plains during this time to start anew. In the winter of 1926, the Whites moved from Las Animas, Colorado, to Littlefield, Texas. When the Whites crossed into Texas and into the XIT ranch—the biggest ranch in the world under fence—only 450,000 aces were unplowed of the original three-million-acre XIT. Like the rest of the Panhandle, its frontier was in the first three decades of the twentieth century. However, Egan explains how cities like Boise City, Oklahoma, were founded on fraud; brochures were all fiction, a “hyperbole in service of Western settlement.”3 These cities took shape, nonetheless, and by 1910, almost 200 million acres nationwide had been planted by homesteaders, more than half in the Great Plains. The Lucas family arrived in No Man’s Land in 1914, the peak year for homesteads in the twentieth century. The federal government offered free train rides to settlers in No Man’s Land, and in 1916, Congress passed the Federal Farm Loan Act, which offered forty-year loans at six percent interest. During this time, the price of wheat multiplied; no group of people took a more dramatic leap in prosperity than wheat farmers. Between 1924 and 1929, the acreage plowed in the Texas Panhandle that was plowed under for wheat increased by 300 percent. Thus, as the last cowboys began giving up on grass, the cattle era came to an end. By 1925, much of the earlier homestead land was already worn out—“of the roughly two hundred million acres homesteaded on the Great Plains between 1880 and 1925, nearly half was considered marginal for farming.”4 In 1923, the government called it “the last frontier of agriculture,” and between 1925 and 1930 another 5.2 million acres went under the plow.5 By summer of 1929, the United States had a food surplus, which caused prices of wheat to plummet and farmers to tear up more grass. On October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed. By 1930, wheat sold for one-eighth of the high price from ten years earlier. However, while wages fell and jobs disappeared, productivity continued to surge. Unable to pay off loans, farmers were in debt and had stopped paying taxes; foreclosures became a regular event. Although the world economy was a mess, President Hoover rejected government intervention. Despite the bad omens, walking off this land was out of the question for the majority of the families who had settled in the Great Plains.

In the second part, “Betrayal, 1931-1933,” Egan describes the beginning of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era. In one month alone, November 1930, 256 banks failed. By the end of 1930, 1350 banks had failed. The following year, 2294 banks failed. The biggest failure of all came at the end of 1931, when the Bank of the United States in New York collapsed. At this time, 12 million people were unemployed—25 percent of the workforce. The year 1931 also witnessed a record of 250 million bushels of excess wheat nationwide. The market held at nearly 50 percent below the amount it cost farmers to grow the grain. Still, as farmers begged for relief, Hoover refused to interfere with the market. Throughout all of 1932, it rained barely 10 inches. On January 21, a cloud 10,000 feet high appeared just outside Amarillo, Texas, and dumped its load on Dalhart. With half a dozen black blizzards counted on the Oklahoma Panhandle in the late winter of 1932, some parents kept their children home because “school was too dangerous.”6 Hugh Hammond Bennett blamed Americans for being “the greatest destroyers of land of any race of any people.”7 He blamed the government for “encouraging an exploitive farming binge,” which “was not just a crime against nature... but would ultimately starve the nation.”8 Although most scientists didn’t take Bennett seriously, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was quick to summon Bennett to the White House after winning the presidency in the election of 1932. Roosevelt, in his “hundred-day dash,” also passed the Emergency Banking Bill and the Agriculture Adjustment Act, created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and allowed the government to buy surplus crops and distribute it to the needy.9

In the third section, “Blowup, 1934-1939,” Egan describes the darkest days of the Dust Bowl and the action taken to reverse the damage. In 1934, the government planned to kill as many farm animals as possible to “set things right” by eliminating surplus beef, hogs, and grain.10 While people like Fred Folkers and C.C. Lucas agreed to sell cows for a dollar, others like Bam White took short-term jobs getting two dollars a day shooting cattle. On May 9, 1934, a storm was measured at 1,800 miles wide and 350 million tons heavy. While the dust blew all over the Great Plains, the worst and most persistent storms took place in southern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, and northeastern New Mexico. On April 7, 1924, Hazel Lucas gave birth to Ruth Nell. Despite the doctor’s advice to move out of the Great Plains for the baby’s health, Hazel and husband Charles decided to stay. That year, 1934, was the driest year to date. Later that year, the government implemented a subsidy system in order to bring farm prices up by reducing supply. While Bennett put the CCC to work on his early demonstration projects, Harold Ickes believed it was better to give people incentive to leave the Great Plains. One day Hazel found an abandoned baby sitting on church steps; unable to bear the burden of sustaining another life, people abandoned their children, and never before had the birthrate been so low. In addition to “dust pneumonia,” there was also “a new type of mental illness—the person driven mad by dust.”11 Two days before Ruth Nell’s first birthday, Hazel and Charles finally decided to flee, as the doctor had recommended, but it was too late—Ruth Nell would die of dust pneumonia a day before her first birthday. On Palm Sunday of April 14, 1935, the air was clear, there was no wind, and the sun was bright; “some dared to entertain a thought on this morning: perhaps the worst was over.”12 However, within two hours’ time, temperatures plunged more than 30 degrees, and Palm Sunday turned into Black Sunday, “a fury that has never been duplicated.”13 The storm needed only a Sunday afternoon to tear up twice as much dirt as was dug out of the Panama Canal during seven years of construction.

In response to the continued destruction of the land, Bennett passed through Congress the Soil Conservation Act—the first time any nation had created such a unit—in order to heal the land. At the same time, Roosevelt also created the Resettlement Administration to give loans for people to start anew, and signed the Executive Order 7028 which granted federal authorities the power to buy back much of what it had given away in homesteads. Hoping to keep people from leaving Dalhart, John McCarty created the Last Man Club, open to anyone who agreed to stay put. In the summer of 1935, Roosevelt launched the Second Hundred Days, signing the Social Security Act, starting the Works Progress Administration, and backing the National Labor Relations Act. Unfortunately, just as the farm economy was beginning to improve, the Supreme Court declared Roosevelt’s control of the farm economy unconstitutional. However, not only the government was responding to the Great American Dust Bowl. While Don Hartwell started in a diary to scribble descriptions of daily life in the Great Plains, Roy Emerson Stryker came up with the idea of creating a record of American decay. Another documentarian, Pare Lorentz, filmed a narrative of how and why the Great Plains had been settled and then brought to ruination. In August of 1936, Bennett began “Operation Dust Bowl.” On August 27, 1936, the report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee was delivered to the president. The report claimed that “the people—not weather or bad luck—had caused the problem.”14 In response, Roosevelt came up with his “Big Idea” of planting trees down the middle of America to break up wind, check erosion, and employ thousands of people. In 1937, however, there were more dust storms on the High Plains than in any other year—134. Also in 1937, John McCarty, founder of the Last Man Club, left the Dust Bowl; “the betrayal lingered through the last years of the dust storms.”15 But one man, Bam White, never gave up on the High Plains and stayed longer than McCarty himself. White died in February of 1938 and was buried near the old XIT. Meanwhile, Hartwell was failing to make bank payments. He and his wife were forced to move to Denver to find work, and after 26 years of marriage they finally separated when there was no work or room for Hartwell in Denver; “the dust, the drought, the fractured farm had broken the last thing they had: their bond.”16 Soon afterward, the bank took the land that the Hartwell’s had owned since 1909. On July 11, 1938, Roosevelt visited the southern plains to deliver a speech and assure those who had stayed that he had never given up on them. Roosevelt had always believed in the power of restoration, and he was starting to believe that the Dust Bowl could have been prevented.

Egan argues that the Dust Bowl era was not a natural disaster, but rather it was a direct result of man’s ignorant and careless misuse of the land. However, he emphasizes that it was not solely the fault of the people, throughout attacking the federal homestead policy as “arrogance on a grand scale.”17 The Homestead Act of 1862, as boldly declared in the Great Plains Drought Area Committee report, “was on the western plains almost an obligatory act of poverty.”18 Holding the government responsible for setting the stage of the Dust Bowl, Egan’s view of the Great American Dust Bowl is influenced by Neo-Conservative historiography, which is deeply suspicious of federal power. Egan adds that “technology and speculation came in for their share of blame. War time demand drove up prices, stimulating record production.”19 Thus, encouraged settlement by the federal government combined with overproduction doomed the Great Plains from the beginning. Falling wheat prices during the Great Depression caused farmers to tear up more land, and when rains stopped and winds kicked in, soil lifted and dust storms began. Wheat farmers’ prosperity was inevitably short-lived, and their blindness ultimately cost the nation a devastating environmental disaster. Still, Egan portrays those individual farmers and families who clung to their farms as valiant Americans committed to their homes.

According to Elizabeth Royte and Elizabeth Corcoran, Egan’s book is a thrilling account of the Dust Bowl era, “a classic tragedy,” but certainly not flawless.20 Noting that Egan is “a national correspondent on environmental issues for the New York Times,” Corcoran says that “Egan rolls out his story with linguistic flourishes that echo his belief that the land around us is as alive as any furry creature.”21 Similarly, Royte criticizes Egan for “[tripping] himself up with redundant outrage and with iterations of superlatives” as he “slips from inventive, wonder-filled descriptions of the landscape to pure bluster ... and cowboy talk.”22 Corcoran also finds fault in Egan’s “tidy, cinematic ending,” which “leaves the fate of the Panhandle vague.”23 Still, even though “it is not a complete history,” Corcoran asserts that “Egan has admirably captured a part of our American experience that should not be forgotten.”24 Likewise, Royte feels that “You can’t blame [Egan] for feeling angry. The High Plains have never fully recovered.”25 Corcoran and Royte both respect and appreciate Egan’s storytelling, but they also recognize the partiality in Egan’s story which sympathizes with the land and antagonizes the government “for setting the Dust Bowl’s stage.”26

The Worst Hard Time is a dramatic, exciting account of those who struggled through the Dust Bowl era. However, while Egan’s narration of multiple families provides a more complete understanding of the suffering experienced by those on the Great Plains during the 1930s, it also hinders focus on a single family. Jumping from one family to another, he makes difficult the differentiation between families. Nonetheless, by weaving together the stories of these families, Egan successfully recreates the Dust Bowl era. In addition, Eagan provides interesting historical facts that allow readers to grasp the extent and severity of dust storms. For example, in 1935 “starting on the first day of March, there was a duster every day for thirty straight days, according to the weather bureau.”27 Thus, Egan’s book is not only engaging, but also educational.

According to Egan, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s marked a watershed in American political, economic, and cultural history. While Eagan blames the federal government outright for a mistaken homestead policy, he explains how the Great Depression also affected the Dust Bowl, for the worse, by causing wheat prices to plummet, and consequently causing farmers to tear up even more land. Finally, Egan comments on the strength of those Americans who stayed on their farms even during the darkest days of the Dust Bowl, hoping that the next season would be better. Egan believes that the Dust Bowl shows Americans the importance of taking care of the earth, because what happened in the Great Plains was “not a weather disaster at all; it was a human failure” that could have been prevented.28

The Dust Bowl undoubtedly changed many customs and ideas. Most importantly, however, it changed American’s view of their relationship with the land; when the Dust Bowl ended, “farmers...treated the land with greater respect.”29 The horrible Dust Bowl era, as told by Egan, taught many lessons still worth learning. The 1930s have, at least temporarily, opened Americans’ eyes to the destructive consequences of man’s ignorance and hubris.

Egan’s The Worst Hard Time tells of “how the greatest grassland in the world was turned inside out.”30 Egan masterfully depicts vivid stories of families who stayed behind to struggle through the Great American Dust Bowl, the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster. Yet, Egan asserts that the Dust Bowl was ultimately nothing more than a human failure.

Endnotes

Student Bio

Stefano Ganddini was born on April 3, 1993, in Mission Viejo. He enjoys playing soccer, listening to music, and longboarding with his friends. His plans for the future include graduating from UCLA, opening a business, and traveling the world.