NO MAN'S LAND
Those of the Dust Bowl era depended on themselves and neighbors — values that are forgotten today
BY DOUG FRENCH

Boom, bust and dust: That was the story of what my Midwestern parents always referred to as the “dirty thirties,” or the Dust Bowl. While today Al Gore has been nominated for both an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize for his junk science movie, real American heroes braved the worst that nature could throw at them in the 1930s. 

The Great American Dust Bowl steeled the resolve of a generation of Midwesterners. The hard-earned lessons they learned have been passed on to their baby-boomer prodigy to the great value of this country. Unlike the New Orleans floods, there was no FEMA to house the victims in trailer cities — only days on end of coating the nostrils with Vaseline to filter the dust. Those who survived learned thrift, perseverance and patience. They depended on themselves and their neighbors. Sadly, those values today are but dust in the wind. 

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath famously told the story of those who fled the Dust Bowl. Now, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Timothy Egan tells the individual stories of a handful of those families that stayed and endured America’s worst environmental catastrophe in his masterful book, The Worst Hard Time. 

Anyone who has made the drive through western Kansas, eastern Colorado and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas knows the eerie blankness of the land. Miles can be driven without seeing a tree. The occasional town encountered seems to be in a time warp. 

This land was made for buffalo grazing and little else, with its 20-inch annual rainfall. But with the buffalo and Indian long gone by the turn of the century, immigrant families flocked to No Man’s Land to homestead their share of the American dream. In 1914, 53,000 families staked their claims in the Great Plains, living in sod huts, often infested with centipedes and snakes. The government even provided free train rides to pilgrims who wished to settle on the harsh land. 

The First World War then set off a series of events that would lead to disaster. The dry-land farmers had enjoyed prosperity, working the land and growing wheat with the benefit of new machinery that made them wondrously productive. Then the Turkish navy kept Russian wheat from making its way to Europe and the federal government told farmers to produce more wheat to win the war. And produce they did; from 1917 to 1919, the number of acres put into wheat production increased 70 percent. And why not: the government guaranteed a price of $2 per bushel. 

But when the war ended, the price collapsed and there was no one to buy the mountains of grain left rotting in the sun. The debts incurred to buy equipment and property still had to be paid, so farmers continued to plow up the grassland in hopes that the price of wheat would rebound. By 1931, 33 million acres in the Great Plains had been plowed. But farmers could only sell the wheat for half what it cost to produce the golden grain, if they could find buyers at all. And then the winds came. 

The black blizzards began in earnest in 1932 and would continue through the end of the decade. These storms would carry enough static electricity that people would avoid shaking hands because the shock would flatten a person. With no rain and temperatures exceeding more than 110 degrees for days on end, more and more bugs appeared. Grasshoppers swarmed over fields; centipedes by the bucketful infested houses, along with Black Widow spiders and Tarantulas. Rabbits multiplied while the people choked from the dust. 

Egan’s story of despair reaches a crescendo with the chapter chronicling Black Sunday — April 14, 1935, a day that started out unusually calm and clear, but would turn into a nightmare that no horror movie could match. The author has accounts of this duster to end all dusters from cities all over the Great Plains — from Bismark, North Dakota to Amarillo, Texas. 

When the storm passed through Kansas, it was 200 miles wide with winds like a tornado. Daytime turned to night as the wall of dust blocked the sun. 

Only a few families continue to farm in No Man’s Land these days, and much of the High Plains hasn’t recovered. The three-year drought during the 1950s brought more dusters; and dry spells in the 1970s and from 2000 to 2003 caused the soil to drift, but thankfully Black Sunday has never been repeated. Today’s Americans aren’t hardy enough to survive it.

Doug French, associate editor of Liberty Watch: The Magazine, is an executive vice president of a Nevada bank. He is the 2005 recipient of the Murray N. Rothbard Award from the Center for Libertarian Studies.