Donald Worster And The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl was a very pro-founding topic in American history. It was a period of severe dust storms that occurred in the American Great Plains during the years 1930-1936. Donald Worster wrote a scholarly book, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, that reflects on the drastic effects of the event. Worster also offers his reasoning as to why the Dust Bowl happened. He claims, “The dust bowl was the darkest moment in the 20th century life of the southern plains... it was also an event of national, even planetary significance.” This claim is important because the Dust Bowl was truly significant to the development of this era, it was not just a natural disaster, it also affected the natural environment and economy of the United States.

His main argument was the Dust Bowl had contributed to the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl happened because farmers over-used the terrestrial land that had never been farmed on before, and the methods that they used led to the erosion of the soil. His work is supported by Egan as follows, “The farmers were not using “crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops and other techniques which could have prevented fast and irrevocable soil erosion.” The soil turn out to be parched and unusable because of these improper farming techniques, and the drought that accompanied this turned the soil to dust. Historian Timothy Eagen states, “by 1935, more than eight hundred-fifty million tons of topsoil had blown off the southern plains - nearly eight tons of dirt for every resident of the United States. More than one hundred million acres, an area about the size of Pennsylvania, lie in ruin.” The devastating effects did not stop at an agricultural level, but they also affected the social and economic lives of the residents. These cataclysmic events occurred because the cycle of over farming, low price, and drought collided at once. Worster shows us how these events are tied together, causing a cycle of destruction to the farmland, economy and of course human

A Farmers’ Holiday Association was structured by a man named Milo Reno. This association attempted to drive up the prices of their crops by not taking their goods to be sold, and attempted to prevent trucks carrying food to make it to market. Milo Reno stated, “If you continue to confiscate our property and demand that we feed your stomachs and clothes your bodies we will refuse to function...” this was the start of the farmers revolt that led into and continuing through the 1930s. The life of the American farmer got even worse when the dust storms started to