Donald Worster Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains In The 1930s

Max Drucker

October 18, 2017

Donald Worster Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s

Topic: Donald Worster focuses on the events that lead up to the dust bowl, how it happens, what causes it to happen, the factors, and how it causes the push for farmers to move toward mechanization to achieve higher profits. He talks about the new deal created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and how it effects the situation with the dust bowl. It is also talks about the living conditions of people during this time and high demand for these farming jobs. He also does a great job of describing how extreme the dust bowl its self was and how it effected people. He also describes the after effects of this large job loss on the people. He talks about a stretch of time from the 1890s to 1940s

Thesis: America’s creed of maximization in the form of business farming paired with the drought

Was the main cause of the poverty stricken people in the farming industry.

Worster talks about the racism that goes on when people are searching for these super scares farming jobs. We can conclude that with the over production and over farming in the U.S. due to a lack of ecological understanding, the dust bowl was created around the time of the great depression. It can also be concluded that the attempt to repair the farming industry only made it worse and created a world where only large farms would last and small businesses would go under. This book would be a great source to any historians trying to understand the life of the people effected by the dustbowl and how it might have looked to be driving and see this cloud of dust forming and consuming everything making it so you can’t see or