Living in the dust bowl

This is a book that reveals what thing were like for people who, unlike Steinbeck's Okies, stayed and struggled in the Dust Bowl. Terrific research and writing.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 340 pp. $28 hardback.

This is the best book about the American West that I have read in years. Egan discusses in detail the causes and effects that led to and resulted from reckless denuding of the soil in eastern Colorado and western Nebraska and Kansas and the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles—the Homestead Act, called in a government report, “almost an obligatory act of poverty”; real estate developers’ desire to settle empty land and promises that “rain follows the plow”; the wheat and cotton booms during World War I; the falling prices that led to increased production. The result was the loss of 480 tons of soil per acre in the dust bowl area, the loss of perhaps a third of the population, and the impoverishment of the rest. He includes starkly dramatic and depressing photographs of the landscape and buildings, but also, and more important, he tells the stories of a half-dozen or so families, drawing upon interviews with survivors who were children in the 1930s and upon written testimonies and oral histories by their parents.

The result is more like a nineteenth century novel—Vanity Fair, for example—than usual popular history. Like Thackeray’s book, this is a story without a hero—or with so many heroes that none dominates the narrative. One of them is Hugh Bennett, who founded the soil conservation program after he managed to get Congressional funding by filibustering a committee for several hours until the anticipated dust storm darkened the windows of the hearing room in Washington. Another is FDR, who didn’t always understand the possible effects of his programs but was at least willing to act and remained a hero to my father’s generation and even to Alf Landon, who admitted years after Roosevelt crushed him in the presidential election of 1936 that he “saved our society.”

Egan admires others because, like some of Faulkner’s characters, “they endured.” Bam White, the highlit figure with the eponymous implement in Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains and was reviled by Dalhart, TX, boosters for his participation, was in fact a cowboy at heart, hated the destruction of the grasslands, and left his son a love for the land that carries into his nineties. Hazel Lucas Shaw taught in Boise City, OK, receiving only scrip that finally the bank would not accept, lost a baby and a grandmother to dust pneumonia on the same day, and reflected years later that she missed life in No Man’s Land. Uncle Dick Coon, famous in Dalhart for the hundred dollar bill he kept in his pocket as an ace in the hole and for his support of the local soup kitchen, gave the bill to a drifting cowboy and died broke in Houston. Doc Dawson, his friend and operator of the soup kitchen, hung on until he died.

If there are no villains, the cast has a good many dishonest or deluded characters. The founders of Boise City flat lied about the land and infrastructure and go down in history as the only people to go to jail for lying about Western real estate. Alfalfa Bill Murray comes across as a virulent, ignorant racist. John McCarty, editor of the Dalhart newspaper, later head of the Chamber of Commerce, and founder of the Last Man Club of those who swore to “grab a root and growl,” was a prairie Pangloss who extolled the magnificence of the dust storms that buried his town and filled stomachs of cattle and people with dirt and who was the first of the Last Men to leave.

Egan moves artfully from statistics to harshly realistic descriptions of town under siege to sagas of people struggling through drifts of dust to reach a wife in childbirth or to bury the dead or to seek shelter from killer storms. He concludes his story with FDR’s 1938 visit to Amarillo, center of the reclamation effort, jutting out his chin and offering hope in a rare rainstorm. “Then,” Egan writes,

it was back to the train, a quick ride to get out of the rain, and away, never to return to the High Plains, away to a world war, fought by some of the same young men straining to hold the flag on the wet streets of Amarillo, away to a day when the Dust Bowl would be forgotten, the flat land left to the winds, the towns shriveled and lost, the last survivors bent and broken, telling stories of a time when the sky showered the land down on them, not knowing if people believed them but not giving a damn if they did.

Then, in the Epilogue, he denies us the comfort of superior hindsight, pointing to the folly of subsidized agribusiness, the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer—in the Panhandle, perhaps by 2010; the bulldozing of the shelter belt of trees; the persistent decline in population. But he does conclude, like Thackeray, with the lives of those who lived through the Dust Bowl, and them he celebrates.

St. Francis's Cleaning Bills

I can't get anyone to publish this, and one contest judge thought it bad taste to attack the Catholic Church in a short piece. Sancta simplicitas! (Latin for blessed idiot, too stupid to be morally culpable.)

St. Francis’s Cleaning Bills

Browsing in the gift shop of the Center for the Arts in Tubac, Arizona, I saw a small statue of St. Francis of Assisi with birds perched on his shoulders and wrists. This was not surprising, since Tubac lies between two missions served by the Franciscans after the Jesuits were thrown out in the eighteenth century for being pains in the ass. And of course, as a cradle Catholic born in 1934, I have been familiar with the iconography for nearly seven decades.

Suddenly I wondered, aloud, if his birds had ever acted like normal birds. My companion, raised as a Southern Baptist, now a member of some less exacting heretical sect, and in any case bemused by most signs of Popery, was shocked. “I can’t take you anywhere,” she said reproachfully. But the woman behind the counter snorted in surprise and what sounded like delight.

Looking back, what strikes me as odd is not the fact that I raised the question but that it took almost seventy years for it to occur to me. Anyone raised Catholic in my generation could probably come up with a number of reasons for that, all of which reveal a good deal about Catholic education and practices up at least until the mid-1960s and, in some enclaves, beyond. For example, a near-contemporary who went to a Catholic girls’ boarding school said, speaking for the nuns who taught her, “Of course the birds wouldn’t do that to St. Francis! God wouldn’t allow it!” Made sense to me: His eye is on the sparrow, and presumably on the other species as well.

Of course, neither my friend nor I nor any of our contemporaries would have put such a question to the nuns, or to each other, because it would never have occurred to us that anything connected with a saint or even with the clergy could have had anything to do with bodily functions. Sure, in saints lives people got eaten by lions and torn on wheels and fried on griddles and a whole lot of other things that would make Stephen King retch, but the pace of the narrative was as swift and painless as a Roadrunner cartoon; the distinction between bad guys and good made Gene Autry westerns seem by comparison as complex as The Brothers Karamazov; and the resolutions glossed over any possible internal conflicts or questionings. No time for zits, wet dreams, flatulence, or any of the minor grossness that makes adolescence seem purgatorial.

Even worse than the brief saints’ lives were the pious stories printed in Manna, I think it was called—anyway it was the magazine given to us in fourth or fifth grade—about supposedly real people. In the only one I can remember, a very pious boy drinks holy water in order to better himself spiritually and dies—though not, unfortunately, as a result—in an odor of sanctity. If this was supposed to move us to emulate him, it failed. No one we knew, even the good kids, would be that much of a dork, a term we didn’t have, though we understood the concept intuitively.

As this story illustrated, in the 1940s and 1950s almost everyone we encountered who was officially connected with the lower rungs of Church hierarchy seemed to assume that profane, everyday experience had nothing whatever to do with the sacred world. Actually, the sacred was pretty much overlaid by a wide and heavy stratum of piety, and piety precluded not only questions about St. Francis but about the stories in Manna and everything else having to do with religion and religious people. This attitude was fostered implicitly by the visual and narrative art we saw and more or less explicitly by priests and especially by nuns.

The pictures and statues available in Catholic churches and schools in my youth would have had to struggle to rise to the level of kitsch. The term is all the more apt because the style was heavily influenced by nineteenth-century German sculptors and painters, though the Italians, debasing the style of Tuscan Renaissance painters, also contributed, and in the mid-1950s I heard a rumor that distribution of pious art was controlled by the Mafia before the organization discovered that pornography was more profitable.

Pious religious art was pastel, genteel, unthreatening, unremarkable. Even depictions of Christ’s passion and death in the Stations of the Cross was sanitized, the graphic reality of the Gospels undercut by the style.

Fortunately, ecclesiastical pseudo-art was easy to ignore because it was, literally and otherwise, put on pedestals above the common gaze. The statue I saw in Tubac was by comparison to the art I saw in my youth—and in a recent newspaper story about a Catholic school--worthy of Malliol or Moore.

Music was another matter. Some people apparently can shut out tunes they find banal or offensive; others, like me, are doomed to listen to anything remotely rhythmic and melodic. Anyway, school children in my parish, regardless of desire or talent, were expected to sing in the choir. It was possible to sing, with aesthetic as well as religious fervor, Benediction hymns like “Tantum Ergo,” “O Salutaris Hostia,” and “Holy God We Praise Thy Name.” But most hymns in English, like “Daily, Daily Sing to Mary,” strained credulity as well as the larynx.

And it wasn’t only statues and other forms of art that were pedestalized, raised above the common view of experience. Members of the clergy were regarded as special, above criticism, reproach, or, as recent events in the Church have shown, criminal investigation. When I was in high school, a youngish assistant priest came into the men’s room and complained that lay people didn’t think that priests went to the bathroom. But his colleagues and predecessors had done a great deal to foster that illusion.

Nuns were a bit lower on the scale of ethereality, partly because some of them were likely to go upside our heads when annoyed, but even had we high school boys known anything at all about menstruation, it would never have never occurred to us that nuns menstruated because we never thought of them as women. (On the other hand, PMS would have explained the behavior of some nuns we encountered.)

Nor, as the reaction to the priest in the men’s room shows, did many of us think of them as real people. They seemed removed from ordinary concerns, sorrows as well as joys, untouchable and out of touch. I can think of perhaps a dozen members of the clergy whom I found really attractive as human beings, and in all cases I did so because they were intelligent and well-educated and sensible and aware of human as well as pious values.

Jacques Maritain held that piety is no substitute for technique, and it took me a long time to discover art that confronted the complexities of human experience. When I did, the pious art and legends formed a useful backdrop. At the very least, they prepared me to enjoy the fake hagiographies in Norman Douglas’s novel South Wind. One tells the story of an impossibly precocious ascetic virgin; the other of Saint Dodekanus (etymologically speaking, a name derived from twelve inglorious parts of the human anatomy), clearly based on an earth-deity of an island with twelve noxious mineral springs, in which the saint is led into the woods by a figure who may be a man (later a woman) “or only an angel.”

And when I finally read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory—almost condemned by the Vatican before common sense prevailed--I empathized with the young boy restive at his mother’s reading of a pious legend who responds to the real pain and martyrdom of the whiskey priest. Years before, I had read Morris L. West’s The Devil’s Advocate—probably a selection from my mother’s membership in the Book-of-the-Month Club—in which the central, absent figure being considered for beatification had problems and passions and conflicts that I was beginning to be able to recognize. Years later, Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine showed me how someone technically a non-believer, in fact a Communist, could respond to others’ need for the world of the spirit.

Still later, I was able to experience the remoteness and mystery of Byzantine art, the sense of real and compelling temptation portrayed in Cranach’s diptych of Eve seductively offering the apple to Adam, the vision of the unknown artist whose Crucifixion hangs in the museum of ecclesiastical art in Esztergom, Hungary, or the practical sense of Flemish and Dutch painters who made the job of prophet seem like a really tough hustle, unlike the Tuscans who painted aged holy men with foreheads as smooth as those of praying virgins.

Obviously, not everyone feels this way, and in fact can’t imagine their saints looking any other way than pastel and dehumanized. This exasperates real artists like Sister Giotto, who found money to restore and redecorate the church in San Ysidro, New Mexico, and who painted santo-like murals above the altar only to discover that many parishioners preferred the nineteenth-century blond Madonna and her plaster companions to the style of their Hispanic heritage.

Other styles and rituals came into the Church after the Second Vatican Council—not always or, in my experience, often for the better. Sometimes, like the concept of “disposable art” advanced in the early 1970s by a religious education director who liked to have kids blow up balloons to demonstrate the action of the Holy Spirit, it was often for the worse. So, it seemed to me, were borrowings from popular music like “Kumbaya” or from Protestant hymnals, especially songs proclaiming to God that He is great. Come on! He’s omniscient! He knows that. Why insult his intelligence? And of course, when we started singing Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” I figured that it was all over. But perhaps the religious education director was right to reject my suggestion that, to welcome the newly imported bishop, we sing “I’ve Never Been to Heaven, But I’ve Been to Oklahoma,” though that might have reminded the bishop that he was coming into a real context among real people. Still, in the ceremony celebrating the religious education director’s departure for a new job, I did manage to slip in a passage from Bread and Wine extolling the virtues of the communist disguised as a priest. He and the congregation loved it—perhaps because, as the Virginian says in Owen Wister’s novel, it was about something.

It was also heartening to see that children even younger than mine are able to let practical good sense override piety. In the 1970s, I attended a children’s Mass where a hippy-dippy priest was giving a dialogue homily on the theme of freedom. Imagine a bird in a cage, he said to the children in the front pew. What do you have to do for the bird? “Feed him,” one child said. What else? “Give him water.” “Good,” said the priest. “And then what does the bird do?” The answer, based on experience rather than sentiment, convulsed the whole congregation. The last I heard of the priest, he was selling antiques in Colorado.

Unfortunately, some members of the clergy seem immune to even stronger doses of reality. For example, the former bishop of the Phoenix diocese plea bargained his way out of charges of obstruction of justice for concealing evidence that priests under his care had molested young men and in some cases young women. In this he was clearly following the practice of many bishops, if not stated Church policy, as many other cases have shown, based on a clerical culture that put loyalty to the institution above concern for the laity supposedly in their charge. I’m reminded less of the injunction to “Feed my sheep” than of the joke about Montana, where the men are men and the sheep are terrified Even after the Phoenix bishop signed the plea bargain, he denied doing anything wrong until the district attorney threatened to abrogate the deal. The bargain itself should have meant instant disgrace and dismissal, but the Vatican refused to accept his resignation.

It did allow him to retire when, two weeks later, the car he was driving struck and killed a pedestrian. The bishop did not stop. Told by a trusted aide that the police wanted to talk to him, he not only did not call them but refused to answer the door when they came to interview him and asked his secretary how he could get his windshield repaired. In fact, testimony in his trial indicates that he acted as he had done in the molestation cases: hoped it would just go away. It turns out that some eighteen months earlier he damaged another car in a parking lot, got out to look at the damage, and drove away without notifying the owner of the other car. Although he never admitted responsibility, the incident didn’t quite go away, for his insurance company paid for the damage. In his trial on the charge of leaving the scene of the fatal accident, his defense attorneys contended, unsuccessfully, that he thought that he might have hit a dog or been hit by a rock. One can’t know what was in his mind, but from the outside his actions portray a man who never had to confront a serious moral issue—at least one that involved him directly. Certainly not much evidence of heroic virtue in him or in his fellow bishops who allowed priests to run over at least 11,000 lives—and those only of the victims who were willing to bring lawsuits. Nor, come to that, much evidence of manhood.

Running away from or refusing to acknowledge the consequences of one’s actions doesn’t sound much like St. Francis, even in the account wavering between piety and dryness from an early edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia that I found on-line. He was often dirty and ragged, hungry and ill, not always from choice. Perhaps, however much he loved the birds and even sentimentalized them, he knew something about the ways they lived and acted. Another question bubbles up from early training: if they did leave souvenirs on his habit, would their feces be accorded the status of relics of the second order (that is, anything not bearing the saint’s DNA)? And would he have brushed them off in annoyance, or would he, in the phrase notorious in my youth, have offered it up and worn the stains in honorable acceptance of the nature of birds? I like to think so. And I’m pretty sure that he would have stopped to see if he had hit a dog.

Where your country went

This is an older book (1998) but still an excellent comment on what's happened to the American West.

Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West. By Hal K. Rothman. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. 434 pages. $34.95.

Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma

In this carefully researched and somewhat repetitious study, Rothman puts a new twist on the mantra of “Field of Dreams,” “If you build it, they will come.” In his view, access is at least as important as the destination, and he would regard as inevitable a process in which control of the baseball field would be taken over by outsiders, some “neo-natives,” some corporate suits; the rest of the farm would be overrun by condos and upscale chain stores; and the farmer and his family would be reduced to selling tickets and hotdogs and sweeping the stands for minimum wage without benefits—if they were not supplanted by illegal immigrants.

At least that is what has happened in every case Rothman presents. He traces the rise of “industrial tourism”—Edward Abbey’s term, which Rothman defines as “the packaging and marketing of experience as commodity within the boundaries of the accepted level of convenience to the public” (13)—in sites reached through modes of transportation ranging from the Grand Canyon through Santa Fe to archeological sites and dude ranches (railroads), national parks (automobiles), ski resorts (autos and planes), and Las Vegas, which he sees as inaugurating or at least fixing the terms of what he calls postmodern tourism, in which authentic may be distinguished from but is not valued more highly than the inauthentic.

Of course, in most of the sites he discusses, “authentic” is a meaningless term, for in all except the Grand Canyon (though it was scripted in its own way), those who developed the sites—cf. Santa Fe, “the city different”-- fostered in their customers “a range of delusionary pretension” (321). The exception is Las Vegas, without pretension to spiritual or intellectual values or even “manufactured individualism” (344), which has prospered precisely because it is bogus—so genuinely bogus that other gambling resorts have to imitate it. Rothman is far more severe on eco-tourism, which, he says, is in fact indistinguishable from other forms despite the fact that “someone defined it for [greenish tourists] in a manner that affirmed their beliefs” even though their effect on physical and social environments (340) was no different from that of the crassest skier in Aspen.

Readers used to literary criticism, even the most tangled, will find Rothman’s book heavy going. For one thing, he repeats even minor points (e.g., Las Vegas casino workers make middle-class wages in blue-collar jobs) so often that the book could be ten or twenty percent shorter, resulting in a great saving in paper and the reader’s patience. For another, the process of change from wild beauty to condoization is depressingly similar in all cases except that of Las Vegas so that the reader wants to page ahead to the climax.

But Rothman’s point is that there isn’t any climax, and though he mentions a number of names and outlines various take-over processes, he has little sense of drama. This, he says, is the New West, and the few writers he cites are reduced to laments or grumbles. Of course, writers since Wister have argued that the real West is over, but he and thousands of others kept writing about it.

But anyone who writes about the West that Rothman portrays isn’t going to be able to write about the brave nester who stands up against the cattle baron or the bank (even though, as in Shane, cattle made a lot more sense than subsistence farming) because he has no weapons and there is no altruistic gunfighter. Any story that comes out of Rothman’s findings will be more southern than western---masters in the big house, the hands in the field, and the only underground railway leading not to Canada and freedom but to cities where older community values, dead at the point of origin, cannot be sustained.