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.