what happened to the victims of the dust bowl
By Paul M. Sparrow, Director, FDR Library.
The Skin Lorentz Film Center at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum has produced a new animated video on FDR and the Dust Bowl. This video was created by FDR's great-granddaughter Perrin Ireland. We hope teachers volition apply information technology to aid their students meliorate understand this important period in American History.
The Dust Bowl was a man-made environmental disaster. Information technology unfolded on the nation'due south Peachy Plains, where decades of intensive farming and inattention to soil conservation had left the vast region ecologically vulnerable. A long drought in the early and mid-1930s triggered disaster. The winds that sweep across the plains began conveying off its dry, depleted topsoil in enormous "dust storms." Dramatic and frightening, these storms turned 24-hour interval into nighttime every bit they destroyed farms.
Once fertile farmlands became barren and dusty wastelands where nix would grow. In the hardest hit area—covering parts of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and the Texas Panhandle—hundreds of thousands of people abased the state.
When Franklin Roosevelt became President in 1933, he faced many challenges only saving America'southward farms was one of his most important and difficult tasks. His actions could exist considered a blueprint for how a authorities should answer to an environmental disaster—combining scientific research, customs engagement, business incentives, and proven ecology policies including soil and h2o conservation programs.
FDR'southward New Deal attacked the crisis on the Great Plains on a number of fronts. The Subcontract Security Administration provided emergency relief, promoted soil conservation, resettled farmers on more than productive land, and aided migrant subcontract workers who had been forced off their land. The Soil Conservation Service helped farmers enrich their soil and stalk erosion. The Taylor Grazing Human activity regulated grazing on overused public ranges. Roosevelt'due south Shelterbelt Project, created past executive society, fought wind erosion by marshalling farmers, Civilian Conservation Corps boys, and Works Progress Administration workers in an enormous effort to plant over 200 million trees in a belt running from Bismarck, Due north Dakota, to Amarillo, Texas. This immense windbreak moderated the Dust Bowl's destructive winds. The Shelterbelt Project remains 1 of the great environmental success stories of our fourth dimension.
In his fireside chat of September 6, 1936, FDR said this nearly the drought:
I saw drought devastation in nine states.
I talked with families who had lost their wheat crop, lost their corn crop, lost their livestock, lost the water in their well, lost their garden and come through to the terminate of the summer without i dollar of cash resources, facing a winter without feed or food—facing a planting flavour without seed to put in the ground.
I shall never forget the fields of wheat so blasted past heat that they cannot be harvested. I shall never forget field after field of corn stunted, earless and stripped of leaves, for what the sun left the grasshoppers took. I saw dark-brown pastures which would not keep a cow on fifty acres.
In the drought area people are not afraid to use new methods to meet changes in Nature, and to right mistakes of the past. If overgrazing has injured range lands, they are willing to reduce the grazing. If sure wheat lands should be returned to pasture they are willing to cooperate. If copse should be planted equally windbreaks or to stop erosion they volition work with the states. If terracing or summer fallowing or ingather rotation is chosen for, they volition behave them out. They stand ready to fit, and not to fight, the ways of Nature.
To fully understand the devastation of this drought you need only look at photographs from April 14, 1935, a date which came to be known equally "Black Dominicus." It is considered the worst dust storm of the era, and is estimated to have blown away 300 million tons of fertile top soil. Oklahoma was striking the hardest but its forcefulness was felt in many states and the clay and grit savage to the footing equally far away as New York City.
Legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie was living in Texas at the time and experienced the storm first mitt. He wrote a song virtually the storm seeming like the cease of the world. That vocal is yet well known today, "So Long Its Been Good To Know You." Only its lighthearted reputation hides the truth of its morbid lyrics:
The sweethearts they sat in the dark and they sparked
They hugged and they kissed in that dusty erstwhile dark
They sighed and they cried and they hugged and they kissed
Only instead of marriage they talked similar this: honey
So long, it's been good to know ya…
The terrible drought did not let up until 1939, when steady rain finally quenched the thirst of the dry and dusty plains. Every bit America transformed into the "Armory of Democracy" at the starting time of World War II, unemployment rates roughshod and agronomical prices rose. Farmers restored their farms and the new scientifically proven techniques of soil conservation were widely adopted.
President Roosevelt'southward efforts to help rural Americans pay their mortgages and so they wouldn't lose their farms, plant trees to suspension the vehement winds, teach them new techniques to preserve their soil and conserve their water were all part of his vision for a fair and just America. One where the authorities helped people who needed help the near. While FDR is often credited with bringing the United States out of the Great Depression and leading the Allies to victory in World State of war 2, his role as a great environmental champion is sometimes overlooked.
Follow FDR Library Manager Paul Sparrow on Twitter: @PaulMSparrow1
Source: https://fdr.blogs.archives.gov/2018/06/20/fdr-and-the-dust-bowl/
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