The Dust Bowl

In the 1920s, low crop prices and high machinery costs pushed Plains farmers to plow marginal land, and many abandoned soil conservation practices. Plowing destroyed the native sod that had held the dry soil in place; relatively wet years had masked the danger.

Drought covered almost the entire Plains for nearly a decade, in at least four distinct episodes that came too quickly for the land to recover. With the ground cover gone and few windbreaks, high winds churned the dry topsoil into storms that people called “black blizzards” or “dusters.” The disaster struck farmers already ruined by years of falling prices and foreclosures during the Great Depression.

Dust storms blotted out the sun, choked people and livestock,. Some carried dirt as far east as Washington, D.C., New England, and ships on the Atlantic. The worst came on Sunday, April 14, 1935 — “Black Sunday” — when a towering wall of dust swept across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, turning afternoon into total darkness. The next day an Associated Press reporter, Robert Geiger, who had been caught in the storm near Boise City, Oklahoma, wrote of the “dust bowl,” and the name stuck.

Crops failed across the region, and many families gave up. Hundreds of thousands headed west, especially to California; the migrants, many of them from Oklahoma, were disparagingly called “Okies.” Some states tried to keep them out, and California officials briefly blockaded the border in 1935–1936. Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photograph Migrant Mother, taken at a farmworkers’ camp in Nipomo, California, and John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath made the migrants’ hardship a national story.

Federal drought relief began in 1932, with funds specifically for drought relief released in the fall of 1933. In March 1935 soil scientist Hugh Hammond Bennett, a Roosevelt adviser, testified to Congress on the need for better soil conservation — by one widely told account, as dust from the Plains darkened the sky over Washington — and Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act that year. A 1937 Works Progress Administration bulletin reported that 21 percent of rural Plains families were on federal relief. Near-normal rains returned by 1941, and World War II revived the farm economy.

The 1930s drought remains the nation’s “drought of record.” Its lessons — soil conservation, windbreaks, and government drought planning — reduced the damage when severe drought returned to the Plains in the 1950s.