American Dust Bowl Fire - Episode 48

In today's episode, Kara is going to ask you if you have ever had "buyer's remorse" and if you have ever had a business venture fail due to factors outside your control. 

Most of us have either experienced one or the other and many of us have experienced both. In the "American Dust Bowl Fire," Kara is taking you back to a time in American history where a handshake was more binding than any contract and many Americans lived in a vastly different country. After the stock market crash of 1929, many Americans had to reinvent themselves in a time that became known as the Great Depression. It could be argued that even though the Great Depression took a toll on millions of American families, this time period shaped a generation that would change the world. 

Among those families whose lives were disrupted the most were those living in the mid west and those living in Panhandle took it even harder when one of the worst droughts in American history coincided with the worst economic downturn the nation had ever experienced up to this point. 

To add salt to the wound, this drought that ruined thousands of cash crops in what would be known as "no man's land" was for the most part preventable! It is this realization that Kara takes us back to the 1800s where a fledgling ambitious nation offered whatever it could to prospective families to move out west at all costs. In doing so, these families tilled the ground and destroyed the delicate ecosystem that made the ground suitable for all live stock. These actions from the 1800s came to a head in the early 1930s which resulted in a dumpster fire of unequaled scope. 

For more details, notes, pics, and especially more of Kara's artwork, check out The Day's Dumpster Fire website! Feel free to peruse our catalog of nearly 50 episodes and binge listen till your ears fall off. If you have ideas for future episodes or just have questions for your hosts, send them an email at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. When Kara and Ed aren't researching the next great dumpster fire, they will happily respond to members of this awesome community of human beings who not just celebrate success, but failures as well. 

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Transcript

Kara: 0:00

Hey, everybody. It's Kara. This is Ed. And this is Audi's dumpster fire. Where we don't celebrate humanity's successes. But its most fantastic failures. Well, a little faster this time. Yeah, it'd be fun to put, like, some throw in these throws music in there. You know, I, I, I've been contemplating doing that. Uh, the only issue is that I found out, like, today with, um, like Spotify, I guess there, like this really weird glitch where if Spotify hears other types of music in your podcast, it automatically tags it as like a radio broadcast and then just deletes it. Interesting. Yeah, it's a really, really weird glitch. I was listening to a podcast all about. Wow. Podcasting and it's thrilling. But yeah, I guess it's a very recent thing that Spotify is trying to work on because whenever you have music in a podcast, you have to have a license. Then you have to have that digital license in the actual recording itself. Otherwise it's automatically spawns like a copyright violation and all that stuff. Got it. YouTube got around it by like, Hey, if you're stealing somebody else's work instead of doing it, cease and desist. Whatever money you make using that person's work will go to that person. So they just take it from you and give it to them. Got it. But so we don't make a whole bunch of money off of this. Like then? Well, I don't want I don't want to risk, like, getting in all, like, convoluted, like, all messed up in some weird algorithm somewhere, so. No, that's fair. But maybe like before every episode, I'll say, by the way, listen to this song. That'll work fine, I guess. Yeah. I just need to sit down and learn how digital rights management works and stuff like that, because like our intro music and all that stuff, that's all copyright free. Usually whenever I do a uh, uh, like the outro music again, that's all copyright Free the Artist just requests like, hey, just, you know, plug this in your show notes or something like that. And that seems to work out just fine. But we've got a, we've got a, a, a really dusty, dusty episode. Sure do. I'm excited for it. I'm much like the Vietnam War episode. I'm really curious to see how you how you approach this and how you take it and all that kind of stuff because it's like drought. What's the big deal? Right. It's a lot of dust. Yeah. Correction. People died. Um, I will start this off. I have three questions, and I don't want to choose the three, so I'm just going to ask all three. Okay. Have you ever had buyer's remorse? Oh, yeah. Have you ever purchased land or a home? And it didn't really turn out the way you wanted it to. Uh, shockingly, no. Thankfully, no. Cause I waited. I waited until I was way older to buy a home so I didn't have to worry about, like, buying, getting into a 30 year mortgage and then finding out a year later, like the house is full of asbestos and with gallons of DDT in the garage and crap like that led in the walls. I know there's got to be someone somewhere who has had that happen to them. In fact, one of my best friends has had that happen to her. Oh, yeah. Like, just watch, uh, like HGTV. Yeah. No. On their homes. On homes where people would buy these like older homes and then they would start noticing like, man, why is it super drafty or why are the walls always wet? Why, you know, why is it super hot in this room? And then like they call in this contractor and then he just like, rips into the house and he's like, you've got a million things wrong here. And I remember there was one episode where it was so bad that they actually had to condemn the house and they built that. They built the property owners are new home as a result. Sick. Yeah. So thankfully I've never been there, but I've definitely had buyer's remorse, that's for sure. And the last one ever had a failed business venture. Yeah. Nothing. Nothing too major. It was a computer business that I had in high school. Okay. Where I build like custom pieces for people. But I didn't have the ability to order like 7000 Pentium twos because it was like me and my friend and that was it. So it wasn't one of those business ventures where it like cost me everything. It was like, Oh, well, now I know. Nice. All right. Well, we'll keep those questions in mind as we go. This one's going to be a little bit different in that it's not just one person's dumpster fire. It's just a really big dumpster fire. It's like an all encompassing it's an umbrella. Yeah. Fire where it is like everybody is going to be affected by this to some degree. Yes. Even there's a point where it's affected from, let's say, Texas to New York. Oh. It's a big win. Oh, is that all Yeah. It's like. It's like it's. It's. It's includes most of the Louisiana Purchase and then the north East. Yeah, exactly. With a little bit of Great Depression thrown in. So if you really want to Countrywide. But today we're going to talk about the Dust Bowl and I was watching a movie about some dust storm or whatever, and it reminded me of the Dust Bowl. And I was looking it up and I read that it is a an ecological disaster caused by people. I don't think I ever made that connection that it's it's a man made disaster. I've always grown up just so anonymizing the Great Depression with the Dust Bowl. Like there were kind of like you could use the terms interchangeably, but judging by your tone of voice, that's not the case. Like you have one without the other. Yes. And I will say that they do come hand in hand in terms of one was affected by the other and vice versa. So they do correlate and talk to each other. Okay. But I also say that there are also different events that affect each other. Yeah, because, I mean, obviously I don't know much about it now, but it seems like you can have the Dust Bowl and then if you don't have that, you can still have the Great Depression. And if you don't know the Great Depression, you can still the Dust Bowl. But the two work together to just really. Really wrecked, wrecked things. Yeah, that that's. That's what I'm gathering here. It's just like it was. It was literally a perfect storm. Literally. Yes. I learned so much going through this. I'm really excited to share it. So let's start off with our setting. Where are we? We're in the Great Plains. For those of you who don't know, I am going to put up a map because it's easier to see it than to just hear about it. But the Great Plains make up about a third of the land in the U.S. and it covers or it's part of ten different states, along with parts of Canada. Those states are Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. And the plains could be described as an endless sea of buffalo grass in wind. Sounds boring. I've been there. The pictures look nice. Never been there before. Yeah, I've. I've been there for a wedding and it is it. Yeah, it's just a sea of grass. As far as the eye can see. Well, now it's all cornfields, but yeah, it's just nothing but. Well, I mean, I guess it's a reason why when you look at like, Game of Thrones, they, you know, the Khaleesi is she's the queen of the grassy, like. Lots of grass. Lots of grass. Yeah, and probably a lot of bison that used to eat that grass Correct. until the late 1800s. Yeah. That's a different story. Touch on it, actually. But Okay. buffalo grass. I know it sounds boring, but it's actually really important, especially for that area. Buffalo grass is the native grass and it retains a lot of its moisture, not just in the leaves but in its roots. So the moisture. Goes down into the soil and it makes it more fertile during the wet season. So during the wet season, the ground is super moist and it's super fertile and the grass is gorgeous and you could wheat all day. But on the flip side, the dry seasons and droughts are very, very dry. So the grass isn't getting as much moisture and it's not going to seep into the ground and in the dirt. It's going to stay in the plant, which means your dirt is not going to be very fertile. So just keep that. I'm not You a botanist, know. but just keep it in mind. And if the end if the dirt or the soil isn't very moist and that's going to it's going to kill off a lot of the bacteria that other plants need to grow in. Okay. I can already start to see. We're adding trash to the dumpster now. We're going to. We're going to. We're going to light this candle here in a little bit. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm just going to keep adding on. Trash. So. But wait, there's more. There's more always. So just for a reference, the Plains averaged less than 20% of rain each year, which is not ideal if you're trying to farm Western expansion. And the long held belief in Manifest Destiny are driving early American settlers westward from the east. For those of you who don't know, Manifest Destiny is like the belief that it is God's intent and will for the American people to settle west of the colonies and expand their lands and all of that stuff. And kick out Europe. And also check out Europe. So with Manifest Destiny at its peak, I would say in the late in the late 1700s or early 1800s, we have Americans starting to come across the plains. And one primary source that we have is something along the lines of almost wholly unfit for cultivation and uninhabitable, depending on agriculture. Or in other words, if we're going to live here and you're going to farm, you're not going to live here. It's just not possible. And they're saying this. That's so that's that's just so weird. I always thought, like, that was the whole point of that whole part of America was that it was the breadbasket. Like anything could grow. They didn't believe that way back when. Okay. And yes, there were Native American tribes who lived on the plains, but they were actually fully nomadic people. They didn't try to settle long enough to farm land. They primarily hunted bison and they would eat the native plants there and then move on. So they they never actually, like, farmed anything there. By the time the early 1800s came around, the Native Americans were forced onto reservations and Americans attempted to settle on the Great Plains and they began to hunt the bison there as opposed to the Native Americans. But of course, they overdid it. And eventually there were no more bison to hunt in the area as a solution to this problem. Ranchers began to bring cattle instead of the bison, and they called it the great beef bonanza, which. It's really catchy. I like it. This The was great. like a really good barbecue restaurant. And it's it's it's a historical thing that you could use. It's like right next door to like salty bits of pig, like or assemble it yourself. Pepper the pig. It's great Bonanza. Bonanza. Here we are. Yeah. Honestly, it's not a terrible solution. Like I can see where they were trying to go with it. But because of the weather and the flip flops between the dry seasons and the wet seasons, it really complicated the matter. And by 1880, a terrible winter tore through the area and it killed a huge amount of livestock and ending any hopes of said beef bonanza. Which is unfortunate, but happens. It went from the the beef bonanza to like the beef bust. Yeah. The frozen beef burst. upsetting. Anyway, at the same time, where we have our ranchers trying to figure out how to raise cattle, the Homestead Act of 1862 was passed. The first homestead Act was passed during the Civil War in 1862, and it states that any adult citizen who has not taken up arms against the U.S. government in the Civil War could claim 160 acres of government owned land as a cultivate and take the land. It would be transferred to that citizen after five years. So essentially the government's like, Look, we're going to give you this land for dirt cheap and you're going to cultivate it and make it profitable, and then we'll give it to you essentially after I think it's five years. And then all they have to do is go out there with, like literally, like steaks and there's like pound these steaks into the ground. And that was like the 160 acres. Essentially a. It was really cheap. Like dirt cheap. Oh, yeah. It wasn't cheap enough They for. didn't even have to pay for that up front, Right? All they had to do was just till the land, and then they'd take a cut of that and give it to the government. And that's how they bought it. Yeah, I think it was that plus like a small fee, because there were people who went to these areas that primarily were city dwelling people. Who had more money than others. So it wasn't like a farmer going to this area for more farmland. It was mostly people living in the cities or in nearby surrounding areas that wanted a new life for themselves. And those city slickers coming out with all the money that's going to bring up a whole nother can of worms. And like the 1880s, 1890s, like. Yeah. We're going to get there. He. So this Homestead Act drew a large amount of people. Like a large amount of people. Like I said, most of them were people from the cities or people nearby. Sometimes we have families spending their life savings on this opportunity. So we have a lot of people giving up everything they have to to get this land out west here. And another element that some people don't think about are the farmers who are Native Americans forced to live in reservations in Oklahoma, some in the Panhandle, as well as African-American freedmen, especially after the Civil War, who were affected by this lovely upcoming dumpster fire. One could argue that they could have it worse due to the discrimination at the time and the limitations that white farmers face. So I did just want to note that that we do have a population of African-Americans and Native Americans who are also settling after the Civil War, especially during this time period. Yeah. Then may. May God have mercy on your soul. If they find oil later on. If they find oil or find gold or find a mineral, that that could be exploited, then they will pack up and shove you someplace else. And. Right? Yeah. But again, that's another dumpster fire. dumpster fire, but it's related is. It's took an alleyway of dumpsters that are all on fire. You pick one. True. You're not wrong. They did experience a drought in the 1890s, which kind of halted things for a little bit. people stick around as best they could. time, I believe it lasted from 1890 something to about 1907. So there's like a ten year period, 20 year period where it was pretty rough. But people did stick around because they believed if they farmed that land, the rain was going to come. Oh, so that would explain why, like in the 1890s, there was the first like true Great Recession in American history. There is also the issue of like, hey, we were based off of a gold standard. Why can't we just add silver to it? And then that way more people can have money in there is that. That's when I think J.P. like wrote a check and balance the budget for like$47 million or something crazy. The 1890s was a wild. Yeah. Wild thyme. Yeah, the 1890s is nuts. And right now we're just in the Wild West. We're not even talking about, you know, cities and industrialization or any of that, which is a whole different ballgame. But in the same country it's wild. So back to the Great Plains, 1907 is where we have our big wet season. And it starts it begins. It begins in 1907 and in 1909, the government expanded the amount of land given to homesteaders and homesteaders or people who act upon the Homestead Act. That's their nickname. It went from 160 acres given to them to 320 acres given to them for about the same price. Wow. You can tell that the government's like, we really need to get rid of this land. We have to move as fast as possible. How big is 320 acres? It's pretty humongous. I. I'm trying to think, how big is 20 acres? Um, how many football fields? Okay, so. So 100 acres is about 25 football fields. So 320 acres would be about 80 to 85 football fields. Sick. That's a sizeable chunk of land. It's a lot of land. So we have that going on and we are always going to have people be people in. We have our real estate miles and moguls and our railroad companies who are starting to buy land for really cheap using the Homestead Act. And then what they would do is they would divide it all up and sell it to farmers and homesteaders who are moving west so they would buy as much land as they can. Kind of like what's happening and the housing market right now. They buy as much land as they possibly can and then sell it for a little bit more to just regular people or farmers who are trying to make a new life for themselves. So we have that added to the. They were piecemeal ing it out, basically. And they would hire or send out salesmen. salesmen were not government I think they were primarily private salesmen with some government involved. I could be wrong in that. That's I'm going off my memory. Either way, they're probably a little unscrupulous. Well, these these sales pitches, man, they're wild. All right, Are you ready? Salesmen would claim that you put wheat in the ground and without need for labor, like watering it, it would grow. I saw one ad that called it the garden of the West, which please look at the picture of the Great Plains, Garden of the West. They claimed that the rains would be affected by how much farmers cultivated the land. So, like the more land that was plowed, the more rain that would fall. Make that make sense. The more crops would grow. Oh, so. So your interaction with the land will somehow make the rains come. Correct. Got So it. if you plow more, the more rain's going to fall, and then that's going to help your plants grow. Got it. Uh huh. I could see how that's a little misleading. But people believed them. That's the thing. Salesman claims that the planes had the most fertile land in the country. And for dirt cheap. Get rich quick. You're going to do really great out here. You're going to plant so much wheat and you're going to be able to build a house for your whole family. Everybody is going to have their own room. It's going be great. But then if you look at pictures, please, please, for for the love of everything, look up a picture of the Great Plains in 1910 and you will laugh at this comment. Uh, images of the grey said 1910. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The gardens of the West, Right? Stunning. I mean, there is obviously there are some homesteads that did pretty okay. No. Yeah. We'll talk about the the good times, but it comes crashing real hard. There's a picture of the dude just sitting in like, this big giant hole in the ground, surrounded by grass, and it's like. This is all mine. But then again, if you're coming from small, some small, cramped apartment in New York, having that much land is like, especially when you market it in terms of late, You know, America was kind of founded that on the premise that voters could only be landowners and then now suddenly you're a landowner and you're like, Hey, look at me. Yeah, well, that's the thing. Like, if you look at these advertisements and stuff and you compare it to the land, a lot of these people didn't have any image or. Knowledge of what these areas looked like. They're going solely based off of the Homestead Act and they're going solely based off of the advertisements they're seeing in their local newspapers. So that's it. Like they're selling their entire livelihood based off of those two things. So you can imagine if you get there and you see this and you're like, Well, let's make the best of it, you know? Can't even find a tree to get the wood to like. It's It's is basically flat land in Minecraft. That's what that's what you have to work with. Except minus the big giant green blobs that bounce all over the place. Everything else is just like Flatley, India, Minecraft. Same principle. Railroad companies bought up a lot of land and then sold it to ship for cheap, like I said before, But they also sold it to railroad workers, which I thought was interesting. Some sections of public land were advertised as free land, so if people came fast enough that they would just get free land. That's how desperate they were. Wow. And people. The big, big crop at this time in the early 1900s was wheat. And the reason for that, I believe, is because it's cheap buy the seeds for it. It's fairly easy to plant and it's fairly easy to harvest. So everybody's grown. Wheat. By the time the US became involved in World War One in 1917, the wheat was in huge demand for both the general public and the military. So now we have an even higher demand of wheat. And World War One kind of pushed that even further. After World War One, wheat was still in high demand by the general public. So this is where we're starting to get that breadbasket reputation. After the OR I'm sorry, the wet season was still in full swing even after the First World War. So farmers were cranking out wheat left and right while making a huge profit. After the war was over. Throughout the 1920s, people of all different backgrounds are flocking to these areas around the Oklahoma Panhandle, especially, and in north Texas, south Oklahoma. I put up a phone map so you can see it later. But yeah, so you have like they call it no man's land here and essentially no man's land is north Texas, Oklahoma, Panhandle, that little tiny area right there. That's going to be a very important spot later. So just know everybody's going that way, making farming even easier in the twenties over the use of tractors, making the work of farming faster and easier. Anybody can do it right now that we have motorized tools. Anybody can be a farmer. No training needed. All you got to do is plow up the land, right? Kind of like the, uh. And I know I don't want to, like, throw the company any shade, but it's kind of like the Squarespace of farming. Kind of. You don't need to know coding. You don't need to know this. You don't need to know web development like it's all here for you. Just turn it on. Just turn it on. The difference is that I think Squarespace works, whereas like, this is. This is. You're told that you don't have to do anything, only to find out that you have to do everything. Right. So just to picture it right now, you have a bunch of people who have never farmed in their lives before, just plowing up all of this native buffalo grass. And when I say plowing it up, I mean, it's what they're doing is they're digging a hole and turning up dirt over and over and over and over and over and over and over again to where there's no grass left is just dirt. I feel like they're just butchering the land. They are. Like if you have like a multi-generation farmer out there, they're looking at it like, What are you doing that that's not how you do this? And. Yeah. Meanwhile, you guess some dude out there was a thick Brooklyn accent. Right. Like you have people from Ireland, Mexico, Italy, other places were in the cities. Life was a lot more difficult without a lot of opportunity to own land. The Homestead Act provided something to where now everybody's moving west and they're farming for a price that they can afford because the seeds are cheap right now. And they had a promise that was made to them by these salesmen and the government that they would make so much money growing and selling wheat that, yeah, people are flocking over here. I don't blame them, to be honest. Can you imagine if you think about the way life is in New York City, in the early 1900s or like the Chicago Meatpacking? For those of you who've read The Jungle, can you imagine having the opportunity to escape that, to have your own land outside? Sounds nice, doesn't it? Well, And we're also coming out of the cusp of like American romanticism Yeah. and like Henry David Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman and Dickinson and like, you know, when we are looking at like the literature from the mid 1800s, all the way up into the 1900s, it was heavily romanticizes like leave the city and you can become your own person. You're not a slave to anybody. Yeah. By the twenties. It was just a free for all. It feels like another group utilizing the Homestead Act were called Suitcase Farmers. guys are fun. These guys would buy a plot of land using the Homestead Act. They would hire local farmers who had a tractor or farming equipment to cultivate and plant seeds for them. And then they would go back to the city while they wait until spring. And then they'd come back for the harvest. And then they would sell everything. Yeah. These guys are great. We. That's amazing. I know. So between the years. Mhm. I'd say like 1914 and into the late twenties we have a huge boom of just ploughing. They call it the Great Plow. That's what Ken Burns called it in his documentary The Great Plow. I like it. Essentially 5.2 million acres were plowed between these years in the 19 tens and twenties. We have 5.2 million acres. Cause that's crazy. Yeah. So picture how much dirt and exposed soil is 5.2 million acres. That's it's like what All of Oklahoma. Like the size. Yeah. Yeah. I mean. So, yeah, keep that That's in. so that's like an entire large state's worth of land mass that has now been completely tilled and butchered and. With no buffalo grass. Yeah. There's a particularly large boom of ploughing between 25 and 29. Okay. I think that's when it hit went ahead. Well, that's also, too, when the machinery was at its highest. Now, you had hit and miss engines, you had internal combustion engines, you had a lot of technology that was tilling these fields at unbuilt liveable rates. Until. The good time. 29. Does it feel like this is going to blow up? It's going to explode here very soon. Yeah. We're getting there. So the wet season continued throughout the twenties there. Like I said before, there was a drought in the 1890s, but people truly believed in their heart of hearts that their plowing of the land was changing the climate. They thought that the droughts and the fickle weather were a thing of the past. They didn't have to worry about them all anymore. All they had to do was keep plowing soil and getting rid of the native grasses and replacing it all with we, at least the new guys. There were some people in the area, especially in no man's land in Oklahoma, who knew the land a lot better than these homesteaders and they remembered those droughts in the 1890s and they they had a feeling that something was going to hit sooner or later. They were preparing themselves. All right. 1929. Part three Depression. Just a normal October 29th, 1929. Nothing major going on. Just another. No, nothing. Stock market. Yeah. The stock market crash and Wall Street. Causing the general public to sell whatever shares they could until even the banks ran out of money to pay them back with. This caused the worst financial depression in American history that has not only impacted the U.S., but all around the world. So we're talking 29 just after World War One. I'm not going to go into full on detail, but part of the origin of this global thing is this link to World War One and the global economy. And all of the European countries were borrowing money from the U.S. because the U.S. still had money to give. And then when the stock market crashed and the U.S. did not have money to give, everybody else kind of went. So to So. put it to put it in perspective, when I was real little, like when I was like six, seven years old, I knew this guy. One of my grandfather's neighbors. And, uh, he was he hit the stock market in the height of the twenties, and he made millions like we're talking 19, 20. He's made millions back then. Factor in the inflation now, and it's hundreds of millions of dollars. And he said he remembers that October 29th, the bell rang at

8: 33:23

00 in the morning and by the time it rang at 5:00 in the afternoon, he had lost $7 million. And he was penniless. He lost. Everything. And so then he became a store worker. And I mean, is that just wild to think that in one day you go from being very successful financially set to like losing everything? It's almost like losing your home in a tornado or hurricane, like it's gone. And this is to put this to put the depression into perspective. That I think would be a good episode.

Kara: 34:10

Oh, yeah. I've been mulling over doing a Great Depression episode for a long time now. It would be. I would love to tackle that. Well, that's my that's my wheelhouse is complicated. So just know that the depression hit really hard and its center point, starting point was in New York and it would kind of like spread out from there. Essentially. Farmers on the plains. Meanwhile, on the Great Plains, farmers had the attitude that it's not going to reach us here. We're fine. People got to eat still like we're going to do great. It's in New York. They were reading about what was happening. They're reading about the unemployment and they're reading about things that are happening in these cities. And they're like, We're going to be okay. The 1929. Logic isn't faulty. I don't blame them for I that. don't blame them either. Yeah, like they're not dumb. They're just. life, man. Yeah. The 1929 harvest was extremely profitable, which kind of proved their theory. But by 1930, the stock market began to reach the wheat farmers. The price of wheat dropped from $1 per bushel to $0.70 a bushel, so it went down about $0.30, which I'm not sure what the conversion is today, but I'm sure that they would start to feel it after a little bit. Yeah. The federal government asked the farmers on the plains to reduce their production to try and even up the supply. Instead, they did the opposite. this is the farmers figured that if they weren't going to get as much money for the wheat bushels, then they would simply make up the difference with, well, more wheat. Yeah. phenomenon, they plowed an additional half million acres in no man's land. That Panhandle area on top of what was plowed during the great plow earlier that decade. One historian surmised that as farmers on the Great Plains solved all their problems, especially financial, as always, produce more. Prices are low. Make more. Not enough money to go to the market. Make more wheat. Produce more wheat meant ploughing, more lands. Prices are high and you're doing well. Good for you. Make more. Yeah. I mean, that that that's just unrequited capitalism right there. Like, that's just, you know, that that's what happens when you put money as the sole incentive to everything and, um, which obviously it serves its place, it serves its purpose, but it can also backfire and a situation like this. Just really think about how much grass we're turning into dirt right now. Right. It's all going to go airborne. In 1931, the new Harvest came in and it was hugely successful again in terms of crops. A ton of the stuff survived. Like, the crops were awesome and they made it into bushels to sell and all of that good stuff. Like in our world. Problem was nobody wanted it. now we have a supply and demand issue. Yeah. So now we're making too much. Nobody needs it. Everybody has it. We're doing great. We don't need more. So by this point, the wheat bushels were selling for $0.25 per bushel. Oh, no. That's half of the cost of what it is to grow it. They even dumped it on the streets, the roads, because they didn't have room to store it. Now, now. Now we're starting to feel the depression hit them a little bit. It's I'm surprised getting. like, Oh no, because this was also prohibition, so Distillers couldn't even take it. Oh, man. But just sat around. Oh. Oh, that's got to be infuriating. If you're a farmer, you're just sitting in silo after silo after silo, just wheat that you can't do anything with. That's a lot of model meal. Right. All right, guys. Part four drone dust. Here we go. The winter of 1931 and 32 into the spring was incredibly dry because of the dry winter. Meaning not as much rain and not as much snow. Because of the dry winter in the spring, storms became more common. And when I say storms, I mean more like wind storms. Storms that don't have any rain. But it was really windy. And another thing, too, that I wanted to point out that I forgot to mention, that's my fault. The Great Plains are naturally just windy all the time. Like there's a constant breeze or some breezes are stronger than others or whatever. But wind is very, very common. It's just a part of life. So when the winds kick up a lot, these storms are pretty common where there's not any rain or anything. It's just a lot of wind. So the wind. I think we were talking before we were recording like a great visual of what this probably looks like was the beginning of Interstellar. You know, and they're playing that baseball game and all of a sudden the air sirens go off and then there's like this wall of dust coming in. I think Christopher Nolan was trying to do a throwback to like 1932. Yeah. I mean, that's what I thought of when I saw it. Most recently, Yeah. my husband was watching it and I was like, Oh, that looks like what I've been researching for the past. Yeah. It's almost like Nolan is saying that history will repeat itself. Shocking. Right? Or like, oh, filmmakers and artists actually learn their history. What do you know? Yeah, they study. Shocker. Because of the dry winter and spring, these storms became a lot more common. So the winds that the area is known for, they start to pick up throughout the spring, in the summer, and they take the dirt and the dust and the sand with it. I mean winds that reach 40 to 70 miles an hour. winds. These are strong winds. These are scary winds. bad, just moving the sand around before petering out. Like, you know how you're in Arizona, you have your fun little dust storms and they kind of petered out. But then there are some really bad ones. Other dust storms made the sky super hazy. The air's hard to breathe. The really bad ones were reduced visibility to the point where you couldn't see further for 100 yards. If you're lucky. Good time. One of these came through on January 1932. Picture this right. 10,000 foot dust storms rolls through Amarillo, 10,000 feet of dust. So now, now I'm thinking of, like, Mad Max Fury Road. Uh huh. When they go driving into those like Yep. those that weird dust storm thing you like. It's kind of like that. Just like. This. This particular one is huge. An estimated 10,000 foot tall wall of dust. People driving in to witness me. Yeah, right. Or on their most. This particular storm started in Amarillo, Texas. And the dust was so dense that eyewitness eyewitnesses claimed that it made the daytime look like nighttime. It got so dark. Haboob. would be the first really bad storm out of 14 really bad storms and no man's land that year, and dust devils all the time. But 14 of those were really terrible. 10,000 foot scary day to night. Dust storms. And I learned this and I thought was really interesting. And we're just talking about 1932. We have not gotten FYI, it gets worse. dust storms and the sandstorms. I didn't know this and I thought it was interesting, but it makes a lot of sense now that you really sit down and think about it. The sand storms were scary or dark, ominous, but they did cause a lot more damage to people, livestock, pets and property. So think about, you know, playground or beach sand. It's going to cause more damage because whereas dust is a lot smaller. So dust looks really scary. But in reality, it's the sand that does a lot of damage. Yeah, I could see that. I mean, you're basically, like, sandblasting your car. Your house, whereas dust doesn't do much like that. Correct. Does as other bad things that we'll talk about much later. Yeah. Considering the atrocious conditions in 1932. It may go without saying, but the harvest that year in the fall was hot garbage. On top of that, the wheat prices continued to drop. Even better. Mm hmm. And despite all of this nonsense in 1932, the farmers continued to plant new batches of seeds in the winter, hoping that next year would be better. Yeah. I mean. I mean. can't blame them. I have to give them credit for the next year will be better attitude because it really gets him through this whole thing. Now, did they try changing it to like, say, like corn or okra or did they just, like, stick to wheat? They from what I understand, I'm sure there was some differences in crops, but they really dug the wheat. Okay, probably because it's a really skinny plant and you can pack it really close together. We're like corn. Do you have to, like, It's spread bigger. out? Yeah. Yeah, I'm Yeah. sure there was some some diversity, but not a lot. Most of it was just wheat, which added to the problem. Some homesteaders began to lose land, struggling to keep up with mortgage payments. they're still working through the five year agreement, especially offer stop services such as telephones and newspapers to try and save money where they could because now they're starting to feel the depression. Depression continued to ravage the U.S. and the drought became worse by the time we get to spring of 1933. As far as I could find, there was zero rainfall by March. And as summer came, so did the winds which. Brought back more dust and more sandstorms. Remember the 14 really, really bad storms in 32? In 1933, people experienced 38 of them in just no man's land. There's a report of a storm in April of 33 that lasts for a whole 24 hours. A 24 hour dust storm. I can imagine cleaning. I feel like your car would be, like, covered. It would almost, I would say, would be equivalent to a dust version of like a snowstorm. Yes, actually, there you can find pictures. It's really interesting. Yeah. It's a good time. In 19? Nope, I skipped one. Stars became so commonplace that farmers could identify where they were coming from based off the color of the dust. Oh. I thought that was really interesting. They're like, Oh, but does this color that's coming from Oklahoma that this is this color that's coming from Texas? Two adds that while hold. Right. And they're crazy. The 1933 storms with the dust, not the sand, made the outside world look black. Sometimes people couldn't even see their hands in front of their faces, let alone drive anywhere. Dust storms also generate static electricity, which I thought this was really interesting to the point where people would drive in their cars with chains for the sole purposes of grounding the car in case there was an incoming dust storm. If they didn't, the electronics would sort out. Some witnesses even reported seeing charged barbed wire, which I thought was fascinating. Scary. Okay. He cleaned up his. My grandfather did that. Yeah, a lot of people do that. Yeah. They would drag a chain behind the car. Just to keep the static from getting too high because it'll cause the engine a misfire. Radio would serve to sort out really apocalyptic. Really? The cell phones would stop working and. A wi fi was a disaster. Such a plan? Just like. Oh, No. man. A Bluetooth Bluetooth like that was that. Well, I guess people are. Email when go through. People were getting rid of it anyway. They couldn't afford it anymore. How did they survive those trying times? It's just goes so. Their ISP costs. People would walk around. In the static would make their hair stand up during really big storms. The static would cause a shock if he touched a metal, which is a trip between storms. The weather was actually really nice. So, yes, we had these crazy storms happening and it's terrifying and it's wild. But then when a storm wasn't happening, the weather was really nice. Oh. In 1933, it was sunny out. People are enjoying themselves. But the problem was everything was buried. Houses were buried in sand. Cars are burying sand fences became absolutely pointless because the dirt in the sand was so high that you could just step over it. Can you imagine trying to raise animals? That's Oh. material. Metro shovel, all that. Like, where do you shovel? These were snow. You maybe you throw into a pile and eventually will melt. Right. If you if your pile of dust is melting, you've got bigger problems on your hands than. Just that, like. Real. So all the soil that used to be really moist and good for farming was now really dry, bare and super hard. Not to mention the piles of sand and dust that keep blowing about. Suffolk. Animals. Oh, animals. Domesticated and wild begin to die of suffocation. Dust and dirt would get stuck in their mouths and their noses causing it. Coyotes in the area that did survive were shot by farmers. So what happens if you get rid of all the predators? This caused an explosion of rabbits. anything the farmers could muster for themselves. So, like into fences, they would eat walls, wood. They would eat any kind of crop You're actually trying to grow. They would eat through your gardens. They would eat everything. Some families had it so bad they said it was a complete and total invasion. So at this time Australia had emus. This time America had rabbits. Correct. I don't suggest looking at pictures if you're sensitive, but it was quite the rabbit buffet. If you will. Lots of rabbit murders happening, trying to keep the rabbits off the farms. And Rabbit it's. murders. Rabbit murders. Maybe population control or. Yeah, that's probably a better word. A rabbit side. Oh. Actually no rabbit side that that that that. No, that's a lot. Rabbi Syed That's. No, I don't like that. Yeah. You know. Pull out the Holy Hand grenade. Yeah. So rabbits are a problem. Along with, you know, everything else. Can you imagine being a housewife, clothes clean, house clean? It was impossible. Even for us today. terrible at dusting my house. I can't imagine being one of these poor women trying to do everything they can to have a nice home to live in. got so bad that, you know, like people would put their dishes upside down so dust wouldn't get in them. It even then person. We saw that in Interstellar. Remember how they would pull their plates upside down or their cups upside down and. I was listening to one interview from a lady she would clean bed and then wake up and she's covered in dust. I. Can you imagine? I. Living I. that. I lose my mind when my wife eats a cracker in bed. Right. And I find a crumb and I'm like, I got to burn the bed down. Uh, I can't sleep in this anymore. Yeah. Beds, furniture, food covered in dust. Everything is covered. And I wonder if Valley Fever was a thing back then to. I'm sure it was. And we are going to get into some illness when we get a little bit further here. But yeah, it's a bad deal. It's not fun. Tuberculosis, I imagine, was on the rise. I mean, it already was. In the spring of 1934 after a rare snowfall, there was a day with a little bit of rain. People were so excited. Children played in the rain, in the mud. The farmers had the belief that the drought was finally over. It turned out that after that short span of rainfall in 1934, it would be the driest year to date. These poor people. This is going swimmingly. To. It's great that you're experiencing a nationwide drought that affected 46 out of the 48 states at the time. According to NASA, the 1934 drought was the worst drought of the last millennium and still holds the record today. Extreme heat and winds caused hot dust storms throughout no man's land. One particular storm on May 9th was estimated to have carried about 350 million tons of dirt and dust from Wyoming and Montana moving east. The dust created a wall that spanned up to 10,000 feet high. It blew through the Midwestern states all the way up to Chicago. This particular storm brought an estimated £12 million of dust to Chicago. May 10th, the storm blew through the Detroit East to Buffalo, New York, darkening the skies. And by the 11th, the storm was over the East Coast. New York City had to turn on their streetlights by midday and due to lack of visibility, the city essentially had to stop its operations until the dust cleared. In D.C., President Roosevelt was holding a press conference on May 12th on the topic of relief for the Plains. In terms of economic relief. And then the dust blew through the White House wall, he was talking about it bringing the plight of the plains with it. Talk about a message. See, this kind of reminds me, I'm going to nerd out here a little bit. This kind of reminds me of, um, uh, if you're into astronomy and if you have a telescope, you know, six inches, eight inches diameter. You can look at Mars and you can because Mars is orbit is pretty similar to that of Earth. So like, once it's up in the night sky, we stick with it for quite a long time. And there is this wild dust storms were like, you'll see it start at, say, like the South Pole. And then over the course of days it will consume the entire planet. Like you can see all of Mars because you see the polar ice caps disappear. And then it's just like this beige marble. And it will be like that for weeks at a time. And it's like a planet wide dust storm that that's what's kind of coming to mind here with with all this is like, oh, it's a it's a planet wide dust storm that. could see that. That does ruin the president's fancy White House. I mean, him, though, he was trying to help him Yeah, it's it's almost like it's almost like the environment was like, trying to flip him off as well as, like, everybody else in the Midwest. But we're going to actually go over some of the things that he was trying to do. And I Yeah. really respect FDR for it, but. Oh, yeah. Because he had the adage, like, do something. If it doesn't work, try something else. But you always got to be trying something, which I love that. That motto. Yeah. So early attempts to find a solution to the storm that began on May 10th brought the public attention of the plane's right. So now we're starting to see a lot of people pay attention, especially the people who are in the cities. And to be fair, they're being ravaged by depression and they're all working in factories. Life really sucks, but now they're reading about it. They lived through one storm, let alone 38 in a single year. So fair. And it started to bring about a fix. It can do attitude across the US from various industries. For example, the Barber Asphalt Company of New Jersey came up with the idea of using their products to cover up the dirt in the planes for $5 an acre. That's very expensive. Another concrete company had a similar idea, but was supple enough to suggest holes in the concrete for the seeds to make sure the plants could still grow. Most of these were centered around covering up the dirt. And I can at the time period, I can see where they're going with it. But what they didn't realize is how big the planes were. They had no idea that they would need to cover up 100 million acres of land. Good intentions. That's why you study math kids so that. You don't agree to something only to find out that oh, supposed to do, you know, like a quarter million acres. Now I have 100 million. Oh. Okay, well, Texas, here we. Our intentions were good. Yeah. Roosevelt and Secretary of Agriculture at the time. His name was Henry Wallace. They came up with the following ideas encouraging farmers to plant fewer crops. Tried and failed, but will try again establish better plowing techniques that would preserve some of the native grasses and soil like that one. Roosevelt did spend time traveling to different states throughout the Great Plains while he was president during this time period that were being affected by the Dust Bowl. He was described as being honest in that ideas or changes from his end were still just ideas and they would take time to implement. He stated, I would not try to fool you by saying we know the solution. We don't. But what I can tell you from the bottom of my heart is this If it's possible for us to solve the problem, we're going to do it. There. I can see why people liked him. Yeah. By the summer of 1934, the government was able to identify the area where most of the Dust Bowl was happening and where it was the worst. That area was Boys City. In Cimarron County, in the panhandle of Oklahoma, right smack dab in the middle of no man's land, this area was hit especially hard due to the constant Windsor. Frustratingly, there were sections that still had native buffalo grass, but they were buried by sand. Helpful. Some of those sand piles were ten feet high and they created huge sand dunes across the area. Property values in the area began to drop and they were dropping really fast. Businesses could no longer stay open. People stayed in their homes for as long as possible because I would, too. Some had to leave their homes due to foreclosure, but would stay in town to find like a smaller house or a different place to live. Still wanted to hold on to that promise that was sold to them. The resilience of the farmers and the people who lived there. Stubbornness somewhere really needs to be noted, and I really do respect that. They stayed hopeful through all of this stuff. In 1934, early 35. A lot of people were still holding on to the idea that the drought would end and that they would get through it and everything would be okay. At the same time, there are a lot of stories where people lost everything. It would affect them so deeply that some people just a trigger warning for for a few out there. But some people did. And their own lives, sometimes the lives of others, because they couldn't see a way out of the situation and out of just respect for them. I did want to kind of bring that up. And it is a big bad deal for some people while others really tried to make the best of it. It hard nosed, tough. I mean, I, I don't know how I would handle it, because even even to this day, like, if I lose my job or whatever, there is resources. A lot of those resources rose about. Implemented in his time. But there is like there are things that that I can fall back on as a temporary relief while I get back on my feet. Back then, there was nothing. If you lost your farm. You're done. That was it. There was no insurance. There was no welfare. There was no Social Security, certainly no disability. None of that existed. So like you had nothing to go off of. Yeah, well, speaking of Roosevelt. He did put in the New Deal, which was not only an effort to help the Great Plains, but just the country in general who is going through this depression. The New Deal was a series of programs organized by the government to aid the Republic of the U.S. and recover from the Great Depression. And usually when you research to a great degree, when usually when you research the New Deal, it's split into two sections. You have the first section of the New Deal, and that's from the 33 to 35. And then the second section from 35 to 36. I'm not going to go into huge details. Just know if you want to look it up. Be prepared that you have different sections of the deal to look through. Roosevelt generally summarized his plan with three. The three R's is what he called it relief, recovery reform. Well, all these acts from the New Deal should be considered important, especially for the country as a whole. For our purposes here, we're just going to focus on the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was signed in 1933. This created the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was designed to bring down the price of agriculture through proper farming practices, livestock adjustments and tax reform designed to lower prices in agriculture. Well, taking care of farmers who worked in the industry. I know all of that sounds really, really boring. Reality. It's like some cool science stuff with some beef thrown in and we got to take care of our farmers. So we can look at it that way. Farmers are beginning to see the benefit of the New Deal by the late night, by late 1934, which helped with unemployment. People were able to get food and resources provided by the government to keep them afloat. And. We know it doesn't fix the dust problem, but the farmers are being helped. They're being fed. They're able to get some sources, some resources from the government. And that's great. Adding to the difficulty that was farming, especially if you had cattle, you needed to feed the livestock. Farmers began resorting to feeding, cattle mashed up yucca or cacti, which is always a good time. A very popular option was breaking down tumbleweed and thistles for cattle to eat. Now, that's a very thorny process, not one that I would want to do. You had to basically. Imagine passing that. Oh, essentially you'd have to, like, get all the thorns and spikes off of these plants just to feed the cattle. A lot of the time it would be the children who would do that stuff. So like the parents would be doing their best to keep the house afloat and the kids would be spiking these spiky plants. Trying to tame a tumbleweed. Essentially. A government was passed a gun, got a government program was passed, and they had a goal of reducing the amount of cattle spread throughout the country in an effort to control the prices of beef. They offered $16 a cow if healthy, for families to turn in personal cattle and farmers to reduce their herds. This process would increase the amount of beef for the country while reducing the prices. And it was difficult for some ranchers as cattle ranching was their livelihood and they were very, very proud of their work. I understand. But because of the state of the economy and no one could actually afford to pay them privately, they were also struggling. They needed the government money. And as hard as it was, they did so eventually, most of them sold their stocks. This program proved to be very successful. It generated $111 million. Oh, no, no, I'm sorry. They spent $111 million and 8.3 million cows were purchased and processed into food. So essentially what the government did is they bought a whole bunch of privatized cows from ranchers and farmers and stuff, and then they processed it and turned it into food to make the prices of beef go down. It didn't make sense. And it was. It was actually a really successful program. It's such a counterintuitive way of thinking if you're a farmer. If you're looking at your farmer like produce more, you make more money here. It's like, I'm going to make more money by doing less. Yeah, they really had to sell it. They were like, Okay, stop, stop. Farming for just a month. Well, hold on. Slow down. Hold on. I hope you guys like beef because. Yeah. You're going to eat well here for a little bit. And I'm just going to tell you what I named this part because I thought it was funny. Person X, please make the door stop. Megastar, please. Generally, people in No man's land felt that the government was truly trying to help them, but they continued to struggle through the effects of the depression and the dustbowl combined. 1935, by even more dust with stronger storms. Farmers were still trying to plant through the Dust Bowl as best they could, but these storms made it really, really difficult, as you can imagine. One storm in 35 was reported to have destroyed a quarter of the Oklahoma crop. Half of the Kansas crop and the entire crop of Nebraska. That's a lot of bad crops. These storms became so bad that people who were caught out in the storms were dying. They were suffocating in the dust. They were buried, lost. It was it was really bad to be caught outside in these storms, especially now that we're in 1935. And it's just getting worse and worse and worse by spring and summer of 35. The long term effects of the dust begin to show themselves in form of illness, especially in children. Symptoms were usually coughing, chest pain, nausea, shortness of breath, fever. People called this illness dust, pneumonia. The illness spreading throughout the southern plains was primarily caused by small dust particles being breathed in, getting trapped in the lungs. Some reported that they would cough up mud after breathing in so much dust. to mitigate the inhalation of dust by the use of masks, but it didn't really stop people from getting sick. It was especially difficult, just like COVID to keep masks on. Children and children's children are the ones who are most affected by this. And that's just because, you know, kids are kids, Another issue was finding enough masks for people in no man's land. The Red Cross actually declared a medical emergency in 1935, sending masks and medical officials whenever possible. estimation of deaths, deaths from dust pneumonia, is about 7000 people, most of them women and children. Remember those suitcase bombers? Yeah. The guys who would hire people to do the farming for them and then come back to make them. Conveniently, they just kind of disappeared. And they abandoned almost 4 million acres of fields that were plowed and never taken care of. These fields would provide the dust for the dust storms that were going through the area. Every single time the wind picked up. It's. 1936, people began to believe that they were being punished by God, believing he was upset with them for plowing up all of the soil. Right. I mean, I can. I get it. April 14th, 1935. This is the big one, guys. This is the doozy. April 14th, 1935, Black Sunday is what they call it. huge black dust storm rolled through the plains of the north from the north. By the time it got to no man's land, it was 200 miles wide, moving at speeds up to 65 miles an hour. That's freeway speed. A move so fast that it caught people off guard. The day began bright and sunny. It was nice and it ended in a giant black storm of dust. It took a lot of people by surprise. It came in fast, like it came in raging. Imagine you're outside enjoying a picnic during a rare sunny day and a this things come barreling through like a bat out of hell. A few eyewitnesses compared it to the end of the world after the storm blew through. People had difficulty going in or out of their homes due to big piles of sand. They just couldn't open the door. Some people said that at sundown the sky was red because of all of the residue that left. That was. Yeah. An article was released by the Associated Press from a reporter who was caught in the middle of Black Sunday in Boy City. The story began with, quote, three little words achingly familiar on a western farmer's tongue. Rural life today in the Dust Bowl of the continent. If it rains. So I'm just going to read that because I felt like I read it wrong. Three little words achingly familiar on a Western farmer's tongue. Rural life today in the Dust Bowl of the continent. If it rains, here we go. This was the first time the term dust Bowl was used. So fun fact. Article 1935 Black Sun. Black Sunday was considered a monumental event in the thirties, and throughout 1935, Dust Bowl dust was dust. Storms continued to roll through the plains and the government would continue to work to find ways to fix the environmental disaster. Can you start to see why it's a manmade environmental disaster? Yeah. I feel like if they were a little bit more responsible, but they also had no way of knowing if Yeah, they. that's the thing. They didn't know. Responsible like this still would have happened, but it would have been like a magnitude like two or three versus like a 9.9. Correct. It's a fun time. So part seven, What do we do In the entire year of 1935, it was reported that Boy City, the city that was hit the hardest, received less than ten inches of rain. An estimated 850 million tons of dust blew through the plains. People felt that it would never end and it would actually spread east, swallowing up the entire country. People were living under harsh conditions, poverty stricken, covered in dirt. They ate little. They did their best to ration the resources. Families began moving from house to house, moving when they were forced out of their homes for not being able to pay their mortgages or the rents throughout the plains. This was also around the time where people began making clothes from flour sacks. Okay. Even today, sacks of flour have patterns on them, like little flowers or whatever. This is why. Interesting. still have access to the government support that was being offered in their areas thanks to the New Deal. For some, it wasn't enough. There was also a cultural attitude, especially amongst the men in which they felt it wasn't proper. They're too proud to take help from the government. I can do this myself. I'm a bit much a family man. But truly, it's just the attitude of the time period. Like, And I think like today, where the gender roles are a little bit more blurred. I think anybody would feel because it's like, okay, supposed to provide for the family, it's not happening. And, I'm like, contributing contributing to that. So I can't see where they're coming from. Yeah, there's the whole Macho Man thing. But like, I think it's a little bit more deeply rooted. I can see that. Then that. Respective. Yeah. Right. By the winter of 1935, the amount of farmers who took advantage of the New Deal programs began to grow, giving into the terrible conditions and giving up their pride. Farmers began to come in droves for work, and they would work for various government provided programs to make enough money to feed their families. It really was a program that helped a lot of people, so it really did help. Up in Washington, D.C., not state policymakers argued how to handle the Dust Bowl or if they even should. In 1936, a policy was proposed to encourage Plains farmers to move out of the Dust Bowl areas. This policy appeared to be very controversial. Farmers would be asked to leave lands. They worked really hard for and remember they left everything to go there. So leaving that area again, you're leaving everything. You literally have nothing. Where are they going to go? It would also be a statement of failure that they had failed to succeed on the Great Plains. The Homestead acts didn't work in all of this. But would this really be a bad thing to admit that this grand plan of settling in the Great Plains wasn't going to work out? Roosevelt felt that this was a very extreme option. He didn't want that feeling to be under him. And I can't help but think about the five presidents involved world Vietnam in this comment. But here we are. But Roosevelt did have good intentions. He really did. He had hope and truly believed that he could help both the land and the people of the Dust Bowl. So Roosevelt was staunchly we are not making these farmers move. We are going to help support these farmers where they are. That was Roosevelt's stance on this, and I think that's probably helped him win the coming election for. Four times over. You know. On a separate front, we have the Soil Conservation Service, which I found very interesting. It was led by a man named Hugh Hammond Bennett agency was to study better agricultural practices and trained farmers to use those practices in an effort to restore the soil of the plains. hired Howard Finnell, a scientist in agriculture, to assist him in studying those agricultural practices. So essentially they were like, okay, we have this and we know we need to these practices. We know that they're not doing good, but we don't know how to make it better. So we're going to hire a scientist to help us. And when he came, it was pretty it makes sense. And I think a lot of these practices are still in place today. So what they came up with is capture as much moisture as possible, obviously plow along the contour of the land, working with the terrain, not against it, avoiding any runoff of water while the plains are terribly flat. It did have enough contour slope to cause this or to encourage this, planting a variety of different crops to to diversify the soil using a ploughing machine or tech called a lister. It made deeper ridges in the soil and it would avoid damage to land that tractor caused. So this particular machine would make the ridges a lot deeper but less wide. So you would still have little gaps of. Grass or native soil or whatever to help out. Bennett called the system Operation Dust Bowl. So that's a fun title. I like that. And again, great start. We like it, but it takes a lot of time to fix things. And people are really struggling out here. By this point. At the end of 1935 through the late 1930s, It would be a fair question to ask why didn't people leave? I mean, that that would be a question I would ask. Why didn't you just leave? And I think it would be a difficult thing to really generalize to, though some people couldn't leave because of the economic fallout of the depression there. They can't afford it. Others had the attitude and personality of one who clings on to, you know, if it rains. Just hold on. We can make it through. It'll be better next year. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad. I understand both reasons. You know, people be people and everybody has their own reasons, their own situation. And then some just really loved living on the plains when times were good and they wanted to stick it out. Fair enough. I mean, it's home. Yeah. It's where you built your your future. So I can totally see. Yeah. Hesitancy to not wanting to leave. Kind of understand all the perspectives. Yeah. Given the situations of few families continue to lose their lands, their equipment, their homes, and another huge percentage of the population did just what we are asking. They began to look west. Reading a lot about lines of promise, especially in California. So this became a lot more common as people were losing the farms. They would just pack up and leave and look for somewhere else to go. Over 300,000 people ended up going to California. They went west. A ton of these people moving to the state from all over the country, not just from the plains. So it is important to note that during the thirties, California saw a massive exodus of people coming into their state, not just from the plains, escaping the Dust Bowl, but from all over the place. California agriculture was expanding rapidly, and by the mid 1930s there was a high demand for workers. Ads in newspapers would often advertise work for higher wages. So, for example, people growing cotton in California were paid up to 50% more than people who were doing it in the South. California also boasted higher unemployment rates than other states, meaning there's a lot of work to be had. It offered $40 for a family of four. Doable the amount it double the amount of Plains states were paying. So essentially California was like, we'll pay you more. We have lots of jobs and we have a lot of land. I mean, it isn't that the California plant population grew up to 20% during this time period. A majority of this population came from other cities, other areas somewhat east. So some other people from the plains went east to places like Arkansas or the Carolinas. is in the no man's lands lost an estimated 30 to 45% of their population. majority of the people who stayed were those who are benefiting from the New Deal programs. This massive mass exodus of people moving west is considered one of the largest migrations of people in U.S. history. Larger than the Oregon Trail, which I thought was really interesting. Yeah, that's a that's a big movement of people. Yeah, that's a huge movement of people. Bigger than the Oregon Trail. Yeah. I thought that was cool. Anyway, in many instances, fathers would move to California without their families with the intent to find stability before moving their entire families with them. Once they had found some semblance of stability, families would then travel to meet their husbands and fathers to start a new life. These families, especially the ones from Oklahoma, were known as Okies. This is where we get John's Steinbeck and his idea for Grapes of Wrath. Do you prefer that school for those on the move? People were packed into their cars full of what they could fit, and excitement for a new feature. I'd be excited to imagine living in destitution and illness. Lots of dirt. You're waking up in dirt beds, and then you're driving towards a new opportunity of finding some new land to farm. Out of all of this nasty dust. Right. Okay. Now, imagine arriving there either in an area around L.A. or north near San Francisco. The salty air, the moist soil, the green hills are after living the dustbowl. I can only imagine how all of these people felt. Oh, yeah. mistreatment of the people who moved to California from the Dust Bowl. They were looked down upon. They were made fun of they were taken advantage of and a lot of not in a lot of areas, but in some areas that were really similar to Jim Crow laws. difficult, that lots of work and jobs and all of these things. difficult and many people conditions similar to shantytowns or outdoor camping. I have some pictures of there. It's it's interesting. Yeah. Some rejected farm work, hoping to find a way to work in an entirely different industry. Others stayed in agriculture, but they worked at the mercy of a larger corporate growers and companies that generally did not like this new influx of immigrants. So it's a mixed bag, and it wasn't exactly promised land of work, was nice. You're not dirt anymore. So it's like, I don't know, that's kind of hard. Well, it's it's a complete identity change that you have to, like pull out of your like pull out of your hat. Like, imagine. No, like one day you're a schoolteacher and then, you know, the next day you're now working in a factory assembly line. Like, that's it. That's assuming that you could even find work like that. It's and especially if you've been a farmer for like ten, 20 years and you had to give all that up now to, like, bolt on car tires on a factory assembly line. Yeah, rough. That's, uh, that that's going to be a, uh, mentally. Old gymnastic. Yeah. It's rough Yeah. for the people who remained on the plains. They continue to leave as best they could, trying to farm and harvest through dust storms and depression. And the drought continued throughout the late thirties. A photographer named Arthur Rothstein was hired by the government to take pictures and document what was going on. They believe that the photographs and images would be a powerful image and it would continue the efforts to aid the people who are struggling throughout the Depression. This also happened in cities. But we should also note that since we're talking about the dust Bowl, this this happened a lot in the plains as well. The photographs are fascinating. They really are. And they show a lot of human emotion to the people who are living there. Rothstein claimed that the people of the Dust Bowl in the photos he took there were the most affected or affecting. He was able to take one photo during the storm, and that photo became one of the most widespread, impactful photos of that century. Other photographers would follow Rothstein's lead, and pictures of storms were taken frequently, publishing all of it for the public to see in newspapers. Interestingly, film was another form of media The government used to raise awareness of people living through the Dust Bowl. These would often appear in newsreels that would play before, like a show would start in the movies. That was really common thing back then, as you would have newsreels rule before you'd watch a movie. Roosevelt returned to no man's land to speak with locals and officials. Bennett from the Conservation Service, he went to the plains to test out his scientists findings from Operation Dust Bowl and trained local farmers on their methods. FDR held firm that he would support the people who remain in the Dust Bowl as best he could. And this was a huge deal that those people, they really took it to heart and they supported him. And like I said, I think that won him the election. Was was election number three at that point. I think this is to. Because. Second election. Pretty sure. could be wrong. If I'm wrong, let me know. But. Well, because he died in 1944. Yeah. 44. 45. Now was his fourth election that he was serving. then. So I think that's a third. My dates might keep getting funny. Anyway, the federal organization was documenting the depression around the country. They sent photographer Dorothea Lynch to California. Her job was to photograph conditions of immigrants from the Dust Bowl and the conditions they were living in in California. So she would go to these shanty town tent places and she would take pictures of all of these people. By the time she completed her task, her photos were the photos that urged the government to create a number of government sponsored camps for dustbowl refugees to live in, which I thought was cool. Lane is a photographer who took the famous photo called the Migrant Mother. You'll know it when you see it. I have it up on my notes. She. She took that photo. These camps filled up really fast and became little mini towns for a lot of the refugees. So it was hard to get into them. But once you did, it was nice. In 1937, in Oklahoma, a group of farmers wrote to the government telling them that they needed more, they needed more support. And honestly, I can't blame them considering they've been dealing with drought and depression since 2930. So we're hitting year seven eight here. The farmers asked for support and the following they asked for every landowner was required to leave stubble on harvest fields. I did not look into what that is. My fault is that no abandoned fields should be replanted with crops to cover up the dirt. The goal here was to have the crops do with a bus full of grass was doing before it was plowed up, and they wanted to make sure the government was forcing farmers or people living in the Dust Bowl to keep up with their land to prevent dust from being kicked up. They even wanted the government to call martial law to make sure that this happens. They were very serious and this letter was really surprising. That's actually a thing that is here in Arizona. Okay. So like we'll have housing developments by these farms out here, out in know, like the southeast valley. And they're like, well, we're not going to develop these quite yet. So then they are charged by the state and by the federal government like, well, now you have to control the dust. Right. And because of valley fever and whatnot. So what do they do? They form it. They just pay the farmers that were living there originally like, Hey, I know we give you like $20 million for this plot of land, but can you live here for free and farm this and you can keep all the profits off of it. Sure. Because that eliminates the dust. So a lot of these practices we're still seeing today. Absolutely. Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah, It's, uh. It's huge. This letter from the farmers. It surprised Washington because traditionally they were people who wanted to be left alone. They didn't want government interference, but they were desperate and they knew that they needed help and they needed help to control how people were farming. That was the big thing. They wanted to make sure that people were farming correctly. That way we're not getting so much dust kicked up. The Soil Conservation Service saw the letter as they're calling card. They set up districts enforcing proper farming practices, saying that farmers would not be paid unless they plant until the lands correctly to avoid destroying land and creating dusty conditions. The federal government responded to the letter by purchasing the abandoned land that was left by the suitcase. Farmers. Once purchased, they worked to bring the land back to its original state, and it was eventually covered in buffalo grass. They also paid farmers and gas if they were using particular farming tools and they even paid farmers who were not planting cash crop wheat cash crops like wheat. I can word they were paying them to not plants essentially just don't don't plant anything and we will pay you. Subsidies. lot because they could keep their land paid so they could survive without having to plant so much. So, I mean, it's a pretty good deal. practices were introduced by Finnell and they were very much working. They were proven to work and farmers across the plains began to adopt them more and more. 1938, see more rain for the first time since the early 1930s. the harvest was pretty good compared to the past years, a long drought comes a lot of bugs. No. Yeah. In Oh. 1938, that crop was taken over by grasshoppers. called the National Guard to help with pest control. happens when you use pesticide? Oh, yeah. Yeah, That was a big deal. All the way up into the seventies and eighties with, like, Silent Spring and. And whatnot. It's a good time. It kills the crops and the bugs. But as was tradition, the farmers had the era. That attitude. It'll be better next year. And you know what? It was in 1939, a snowstorm hit no man's land. And by spring, after the snow melted and the reconstruction of the fields and the plains and all that good stuff, the soil was the best it had been since the 1920s. Slowly but surely, after the restoration of millions of acres of land and the retraining of farm practices, the drought began to let up and the rainfall became more frequent throughout 39 in the 1940s. So again, I'm going to ask you, have you ever had buyer's remorse? No. Have you ever. So I've never. Have you ever purchased land or a home? And it didn't turn out the way you wanted it to No. Compared to what has happened back then, I'm perfectly content with my financial decisions that I have made up to this point. It's. Ever had a failed business venture. Yes. But also know it's, uh. Yeah. The big one is that buyer's remorse is just like. Yeah. You know, I think it's natural for everybody to get it. Like, Man, did I really need to go buy that fancy laptop or. Yeah. Rare that expensive cell phone or whatnot. But. But compared to this now, man. It's a lot. Yeah, it's just. Well, it is a lot, but I think it also really brought out some really cool aspects of Americana. Oh, yeah. For example, my my grandfather, he was raised in Elgin, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. And during the height of the Depression, him and his mom like every night because there were no fences. All the houses had no fences. There were just houses. And they would on the back patio, they would put like four or five plates of food because they were lucky. My my great grandfather ran a gas station or he owned it and regardless of the recession, you have to have gas like that's all there is to it. So, like his family stayed employed gainfully employed, and did all right. But every night they would put out like four or five plates of food. And then like every time it seemed like the following morning would go out and check it and the plates would be neatly stacked, washed, dried, know, silverware kind of like put back on its plate. And like because that was homeless families that were coming through every night trying to get out west. And, know, and then, you know, my great grandmother was like, yeah, we've got excess food and we're going to put it out there for whoever needs it. So like, this is also the time period in American history where like a handshake is like a legally binding contract. Yeah. Like you do not go back on a handshake that is like like break your contract. You all you are on paper. That's fine. But don't don't violate the sanctity of that of that handshake. And a lot of it comes from this time period of less fortunate Americans trying to figure out how to make a living with more fortunate Americans. And there wasn't this, um, I mean, I'm sure it took place, but there wasn't like this hierarchy so much amongst the middle class. It was just like, Hey, I know you lost everything. Here's what we can do to help you out, you know? And then a couple of years later, that family would be like, Hey, I know you've lost everything. Here's how we can help you out. And so on and so on. Yeah. That class system kind of went dormant after the stock market crashed. Yeah. Yeah. Because you. Because you go from these millionaires to just everyday people just trying to find work. And and and it's as much as that sucks. That's also, in a way, liberating, if that makes sense. It's it's one of those things where, like, yeah, you've had to go through this rough patch, but at the end of the day, like, you're better off for it. You made it. makes sense. So yeah, it's a a and I think this is where we start to see like the Norman Rockwell paintings coming out and just, you know, good old fashioned scene of America where like, you don't have to have the fancy new toys, you don't have to have the nice cars or the big mansions and all that stuff. Just having a a roof over your head, comfortable place to sleep and work the next day. There's really nothing more that you could possibly want other than obviously like your your spouse and your kids and and whatnot. Well, yeah, there is that. So, yeah, as crappy as this situation is, I think it really did bring out a lot of really interesting traits that would help serve America through like World War Two and then, you know, all the way up through Korea and Vietnam and then walking on the moon and all that stuff. I feel like a lot of those seeds that got us through those tough times in the seventies and eighties stemmed back to this time period. I could see that. It's up you. You could write a dissertation on it, but that's just my philosophy. So it's one of those things where it's like, yes, dumpster fire, but it's almost like, um, it's almost like alcoholism. Like Dick Van Dyke said that alcoholism is one of those really rare diseases where once you get through it, once you're on the other side of it, you are a better person than you were then before it even started. And I feel like that's kind of how the this whole Dust Bowl thing, whole Great Depression thing is, is like America became a much more empathetic country after the fact than it was before. I can agree with that. Boy, you did your homework on that one. It was fun. the citations. Mm hmm. Yeah, I went all out. was solid. Just like the just like the Vietnam War. One was just like, oh, okay. through that. So. And to find another complex one now. Yeah, I know. Like, one thing I'm working on is the Panama Canal. Yeah, that's a good one. Because that's a two parter. Not so much. Maybe the episodes. It could be a two parter. But the whole incident, you know, the first half of it is the French dealing with it. And then the second half of it is the Americans dealing with it. And you can see the contrast. Yeah. Whereas the French didn't really have regulations, they weren't working on sanitation, they weren't working on any of that. They were just. Dig a freakin hole. Whereas, like, the Americans come in and they're like, No, no, no, we're going to spray for mosquitoes. We're going to build supply towns, We're going to we're going to have a systemic way of doing this. And you can it's one of those cool things where you can see the dumpster fire get lit and then put out and then turned into a garden. Nice. And I know that's been on the news lately. But yeah, that one. And then I know we've got our, uh, very, very, very special guests are Holocaust survivor. We did actually record an episode with her. I'm in the process of editing that as we speak, so stay tuned to that one. That one is going to be pretty. Yeah, it'll be good. Yeah, that one. It takes away all your complaining rights. X. You don't have a bad day after that. Kind of like how I've never have buyer's. The rabbi. After. After something like this. Right. And then we're encroaching on episode 50, which we've got a special, special theme for that one. Got some things lined up for you guys. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And so. So, yeah. Be sure to check us out. Um, the day's dumpster fire dot com. You'll see a lot of Kara's artwork there. You'll see our show notes there. Lot of pictures. All sorts of stuff. Be sure to. What's up. For this episode. I am also going to add a little section. I included some extra research things about people who lived throughout the dustbowl. They're like little blurbs of different people. I'll add that to the website too, if anybody's interested, because I do like this one. Didn't have a lot of personable. Dustbowl survivors. So I wanted to make sure that there was something in there for my friends who like that type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. So be sure to check us up on on the Instagrams. We're on there. And, um, feel free to shoot us an email. Um, the days of dumpster fire at gmail.com. We are totally open to ideas, suggestions, criticisms. If they're not written too harshly, we're open to trash campfires. Like, yeah, be sure to hit us up and then naturally of course, the homework as always find people. The number one way that a podcast grows these days is through word of mouth and don't be afraid to speak up, especially if you're in a setting where you guys could be in a meeting talking about like, Oh, wow, hey, yeah, this whole thing fell apart or This was a disaster or this or that. Well, this is where you speak up and be like, I actually know of a podcast that could help out with this that may be able to offer some insight into our current situation. And then, of course, if you're a student, a history student or whatever, uh, look at our catalog. It's actually getting kind of big now. And yeah, you may be able to find stuff here that could help you study for a test without having to, like, reread, you know, 300 pages prior to taking the test. So. yeah, don't be afraid to go out there and, uh, use this as a resource. Hit us up. Um, ask us questions, give us ideas, go to the Instagrams, go to our website to do some Wired.com. And so, yeah, that's all I got. Do you have anything you want to add? Look at it. Good. Awesome. Well, as always, good stuff. And yeah, keep it a hot mess. By.