Customer Reviews

Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s

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As most persons are aware, these are times of climatic change, with the West becoming warmer and drier. These changes are episodic, but mankind's response to them is not so predictable. Professor Worster's excellent coverage of the Dust Bowl, one of the greatest agricultural and ecological calamities in history, shows that, with a little foresight and honest recognition of the limitations of technology, much of the harm caused by shifting climate can be prevented. In that respect, it is a hopeful text.

Professor Worster, however, views history from a Marxist standpoint, a trait that colors some of his conclusions. While I agree with him that land is frequently viewed by the shortsighted as a commodity to be used and discarded, I feel that the lessons of the Dust Bowl have resulted in safer, drought-resistant patterns of crop farming. However, as Worster adroitly points out, the shifting in agricultural practices in the Southern plains is accompanied by a wasteful use of available underground water, raising a peril of the Dust Bowl's return. So have we really learned anything? Time will tell, and not very long from now.

So far as Professor Worster addresses the socio-economic causes of the reckless destruction of the short-grass prairie ecosystem for quick profit, his discussion is masterful His organization of topics and chronology is excellent, and the reader will not soon forget the horror of living with the dust. The photos of dust storms and their effect are almost nightmarish.

Regardless of one's irritation at the myopia of those who try to farm mrginal land, his is a sympathetic portrait as well, waxing almost lyrical in his discussions of the effects of crop failures on the local populace. The book is copiously reserched and peopled with personal anecdotes of those who lived through the "Dirty Thirties". This narrative includes not only the local citizenry, but contains numerous passages about governmental attempts to allay the crisis.

I recommend this book very highly. I think anyone who likes history, who is concerned about the effects of climatic change, or both, ought to read this book very carefully. It should be an essential part of anyone's library.

Looking at the cover, this book seems as if it's going to be something really academic--and it is scholarly and knowledgeable--but it's never academic in the bad sense, in the boring sense.

I read this right after reading Timothy Egan's "The Worst Hard Time," and found this book's descriptions of the devastation caused by the 1930s Dust Bowl to be much more vivid and gripping, this book's facts to be much quirkier and more interesting, and this book's scope to feel much broader and more widely felt. With "The Worst Hard Time," I got the idea that the whole thing really only affected a handful of counties, which I knew was wrong, but with this book there was no denying just how epic the whole ordeal was.

I loved this book (despite its author's amusing tendency to quote Marx) and consider it to be perhaps the very best book I've read about the Dust Bowl--and I've read a few of them. You should read it, for sure.

Our family has farmed in the panhandle of Oklahoma for almost 100 years. We still farm there, and in Texhoma (North Texas) both in the center of the dust bowl. My mother grew up there and was always telling us how severe it was and we (as her children) didn't really believe that it could be as bad as she said. However, since that time, we have reviewed the book, and seen a video of actual motion pictures of that period, - in the very area that was the subject of the book. Everything we have seen, and heard from all of our relatives who lived there at this time appear to be in total agreement with the book.

We still farm there and it seems that the cyclical weathern pattern could be developing for a reoccurance of the same pattern, especially since the water table used for irrigation (so important in that part of the U.S., is decreasing yearly. Randy Miller

In the midst of the Great Depression in the 1930's, the Great Plains states faced the additional hardship of one of the worst environmental disasters commonly known as the Dust Bowl. Traditionally grassland, the area was not well-suited to the kind of extensive farming that preceeded those years. And once the natural grass which held the soil together was gone and the regular cycle of drought hit, there was nothing to stop the wind from blowing it across the land or into huge dust storms that raged for weeks on end. History usually focuses only on the social and economic effects of the Dust Bowl, but Worster adds the environment into the mix and seeks to find the root cause of this man-made disaster. He opens with a quote from Karl Marx, and although he dismisses that in his newly added Afterword as mere bravado, it seems apparent throughout his writting that he's a Marxist in his beliefs. He places the blame on American culture and Capitalism - not on the people, but the culture that encourages and drives them to create bigger farms and use machinery that more effectively tills the land. He argues that inherent to American culture is this behavior of exploiting the land for profit and only through government intervention and control can we avoid this kind of disaster in the future.

I can agree that the greed of Capitalism is laid bare in this disaster and that the land is probably not suitable to the kind of exessive use that happens there. But I'm not convinced that his Socialist suggestions (which unfortunately are not offered in a very concise or summarized way) are the answer. He seems to dismiss and ignore the inherent problems in Socialism and it's failure to provide for the people under it's rule. Capitalism may not be perfect, but it taps into mankind's natural desire to better one's position through individual efforts, while Socialism in theory recognizes the brotherhood of mankind but fails to provide for even the basic needs of the people (even the author recognizes it is this Capitalist economy that provides food for most of the world). And his suggestions for population control or that the people in that area should go back to bare subsistence farming seems far-fetched. But at least the author is exploring new ideas (or probably just regurgitating old ones from the 60's and 70's), and for that I give him credit.

But while I found many aspects of the book interesting and insightful, overall it's pretty dry reading (pun intended). The statistics become a bit boring and make the book feel excessively academic. The lectures against the evils of American culture were tiresome, and I felt he had a very condescending attitude when discussing the people affected. And I would have enjoyed a better discussion on the natural ecology of the land and it's native plants and animals, which I think would have been more inspiring. But on a personal aside, the one thing that made me realize how boring the book was becoming for me was when I kept losing my place (I'd forget to put the bookmark back where I left off). But when I picked it up again I would read for several pages before I realized that wasn't actually where I left off before. It was like it didn't matter where I read - it all kinda flowed together.

In the book "Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930's," Worster examines the reasons for and the ideological background behind the Dust Bowl of the 1930's. The author focuses his discussion around the devastation of the Southern Plains, as he presents his argument about the impact of American culture on both the ecological destruction of the land and the desolation of the people who depended on the land for their livelihood. The body of the work focuses on the multifaceted and sometimes diametrically opposed economic and ethical/ecological interests of the country during the Dust Bowl, which Worster brings into an examination of the pervasive capitalist mentality of early 20th century American culture. The author believes the root of Americans' misuse and destruction of the Southern Plains serves as just another example of irresponsibility in the means to obtain the end desire of capitalistic pursuits.

Donald Worster argues that a close link existed between the Dust Bowl and the capitalist mentality of American society during the early 20th century, as American zeal for wealth and expansion wrought devastating affects on both the land and its people.

In his treatise of the Dust Bowl, Worster focuses on the mindset of American culture both before and during the 1930's. Worster believes that before the Dust Bowl and the years immediately preceding it, the area of the Southern Plains enjoyed relative ecological stability as neither the Indians, nor the primary white farmers following them viewed their environment and land as expendable resources or commodities. However, as the Jeffersonian ideals of agrarian harmony with nature gave way to the destructive and selfish capitalist ideology, the Southern Plains became the victim of economic ambition. Subsistence farming no longer existed in the Southern Plains at the time of the Dust Bowl. Rather, Worster describes an area dominated by massive amounts of machinery, fewer farm laborers, and a construct known as the factory farm based on city assembly lines, business principles, and exploitative ends. As the ill-effects of factory farming came together with a period of significant drought, the resulting dust storms generated not only a environmentally destructive force, but also became a symbol of the filth and disparity of the capitalistic pursuits of American society, a symbol that would leave Americans searching for both a solution and a way to prevent such an incident from occurring again.

Worster describes the delicate ecological reality of the Southern Plains in great detail as he presents the scientific basis necessary to further support his claim of unhindered misuse of the lands by American commercial farming. The author presents the Southern Plains as an untainted grassland community, which remained largely in tact due before the period of great settlement and farming in the area. Worster shows that the commercial farming techniques during the early 20th century stripped the land of not only its productiveness, but also its ability to achieve an organic equilibrium in nature. Due to both governmental and personal economic motivations, American farmers felt compelled to plow, plant, and exploit every free tract across the Southern Plains, a trend only intensified by the importance placed on the American farmer during the period immediately following the onset on the Great Depression. Due to the impeding pressures of capitalism, the plowing of the majority of the land and focusing on planting and increasing production of only a select few cash crops resulted in a great loss in biodiversity in the ecosystem of the Southern Plains. This ecological imbalance would reap widespread devastation in the manifestation of not only the dust storms of the period, but also in the displacement of many who depended upon the land for their livelihood.

In the midst of the Dust Bowl, Worster presents the popularly held and supported proposals for solutions to the problem facing the Southern Plains. Worster provides examples such as the formation of the National Land Use Planning Committee and the conservatism of Roosevelt's New Deal to show the government's efforts to offset the devastation of the Dust Bowl and preventing the recurrence of another such disaster in the future. The author shows that, though the ideas of such prevention and regulation constituted seemingly positive ventures, these strategies proved relatively ineffective in drastically changing farming practice or preventing another such event to occur in the future. Worster presents historical information that exemplifies the attitudes associated with the expansionary, free enterprise oriented, capitalistic American culture, which actively participated in the destruction and exploitation of nature to satiate its ever-growing greed.

In Dust Bowl, Worster presents a well-developed and clear argument for his advocacy of American culture's inseparable tie to capitalism and its affect in the ecological devastation of the Southern Plains. The book not only contains a great deal of specific information, but also artfully ties the Dust Bowl into many underlying themes present in early 20th century America. The book supplements one's understanding of the time periods both before and after the Great Depression and provides insight into the affects of the nation's fallen economy on rural America.

Read this after reading the novel, The Happy Immortals, and doing a search on Amazon on the Dust Bowl to learn more about how it affected the Oklahoma Panhandle.

This is a great account that reveals the background behind what happened.

Accurate? Who knows.

Interesting? You bet!

Scary that it could happen again? Definitely!

In Dust Bowl, Donald Worster masterfully transports the reader to a time when the land seemed to rise up in protest against those who would try to dominate it. The author points out in the introduction that the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression took place at the same time, and that both events "revealed fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other in economic." Worster successfully weaves a revealing tapestry in his monograph that supports his argument, by presenting capitalistic values and motives as the human element involved in the Great Depression's "Dust Bowl Days." The natural environment caused the winds to blow and the rains to stop, but the farmers of the Great Plains, in an attempt to reap a profit from the land, destroyed the prairie grasses by plowing them under. This left the nutrient-rich topsoil in an exposed position, where intense drying heat and voracious winds could forcefully thrust the sandy granules of soil into the atmosphere.

Dust Bowl is divided into five parts, and the author has a personal interest in the subject and the location of this ecological disaster. The author dedicates this book to his parents, who actually experienced the trauma of leaving the plains for California during the Great Depression. Although the author was born in California, he spent his childhood living on the Great Plains and considers himself "a native son." The first part of the book provides insight into what a dust storm was like, and how this severe wind erosion effected the land, the people, and the nation in general. Part two gives the reader a sense of place, by explaining the chronological physical history of the Great Plains from prehistoric times to the mechanized wheat farming of the early twentieth century. In part three, Worster concentrates his study toward Cimarron County in the Oklahoma panhandle during the "dirty thirties," by describing people's experiences, government programs, and quotes from historical documents. Moving north to Haskell County, Kansas, Worster scrutinizes this region by interpreting economic, political, social, and agricultural trends evidenced by historical data. The final chapters of the book relate the history of the agricultural conservation movement in the United States, describe the delicate balance between all living things in an ecosystem, and illustrate why the "filthy fifties" took place and how other agricultural disasters may appear in the future.

While some may disagree with Worster's attack on capitalistic values and label his perspective as politically biased, one cannot refute the hard, cold, documented evidence of how economics dominated agriculture and caused the catastrophic disaster of the Dust Bowl. Without considering a history of drought in the area, the farmer used the tractor and plow to cut deep into the soil in order to turn the Great Plains into a giant "wheat factory." The standard of living in the United States was rising quickly, but in order for people to acquire such luxuries as indoor plumbing, they needed currency. With the hope of obtaining more material possessions during the 1920s, bankers bought stocks on margin, and farmers plowed up more and more natural grasses. The wheat fields were considered an investment, and large corporations started to buy enormous expanses of land. The profit margin involved with mechanized farming allowed one person to alter more land area than had ever been possible in the past. This gave people a feeling of complete sovereignty over nature or "human autonomy." As Worster advises, "The attitude of capitalism-industrial and pre-industrial-toward the earth was imperial and commercial; none of its ruling values taught environmental humility, reverence, or restraint" (97).

In order to survive, a society must be able to adapt. Worster's Dust Bowl is an enlightening study, which not only informs the reader of past exploitation, but also challenges the reader with current socio-economic environmental responsibility. After reading the book, one wonders-Can the capitalistic system and a healthy worldwide environment survive the twenty-first century together?

Marilyn Glaser, Student
Great Basin College

As a musician who tours at least 200 days out of every year and spends time in the studio when I'm not on the road, I find that if I don't keep a number of interesting books with me on the road, my brain completely turns to mush.

One of the books I read recently was The Happy Immortals, a great novel set partially in the Dust Bowl years.

I'd traveled through and flown over the Oklahoma Panhandle many times, but didn't know a lot about the area or what this land had gone through.

Anyway, the interest from that novel led to a search for historical books about the Dust Bowl, including this one.

The Dust Bowl is powerful in its impact as it reveals a amazing depth of research and clarity.

Kudos to the author for a job well done!

BTW, two more excellent historical books on the dust bowl areThe Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl and Letters from the Dust Bowl.

I'll admit that I didn't know a lot about the Dust Bowl before reading the historical romance novel, The Happy Immortals, that was set back then and also in 1949. Since falling in love with that book, I've become a voracious reader of anything I can get my hands on relating to the Dust Bowl, the Panhandle, etc.

Dust Bowl, Donald Wooster's powerful book, unleashes a ton of emotions. Be prepared for some vivid images.

What happened during the 1930s during the "dusters" is a very important part of our country's history, and the more we understand about the bittersweet blend of hope, despair, and courage that came from the experiences of those years--all is vital to discovering what led to the 1940s and beyond.

I'm only commenting here because I have read and enjoyed this book and am not at all grasping some of the comments about it on these pages.

First, for a book of American environmental history, it is hardly "dry." The writing is powerful and engaging. But it's a history book. Worster takes us into some of the analysis of why he blames those he blames for the problem, and yes that means talking about some pretty mundane documents and proceedings. I think he does a truly great job of keeping it interesting.

Then there is the "Marxism" issue. Some commenters above suggest that he somehow urges a Soviet-style reform. That is just plain idiotic and wrong. His "Marxism" is simply a choice to examine the ways capitalism -- the desire to encourage and promote markets -- effected and promoted the dust bowl conditions. That's about as far as it goes. There is no homage paid to Lenin in these pages. No call for "Socialist controls." It's just history.