[wind blowing] For people on the plains, the 1930s started with the world spiraling into the Great Depression.

Then came drought and wind, turning a large swath of the region into what would eventually be dubbed the Dust Bowl.

[wind blowing] [music playing] In our second of three episodes on the Dirty 30s, our host Don Rowlison is once again joined by Dr.

Richard Hurt, professor emeritus of Purdue University and author of Dust Bowl, an Agricultural and Social History, Kansas State University professors of history, .

Dr.

Suzanne Orr and Dr.

Andrew Orr.

And we once again visit the historic Waterville Opera House with educator and historic performer Nolan Sump to catch up on his representation of a 1930s Kansas farmer contending with the effects of the Dust Bowl.

When it got dry and the wind kept blowing, you don't have the wheat to hold that soil in the ground.

The soil just started lifting up.

And as it kept going, we'd get these dusters rolling through, small at first, and then it just kept getting bigger and bigger until it got to the point.

We started seeing folks there in Richland and Elkhart wearing dust masks.

We even had to wear those.

Well, we still do.

We have to.

It's out of necessity.

Sometimes this dust would come in like a fog.

Sometimes it'd come in from the north, the south, the west.

One time when I went to Richland to go pay my taxes, stopped in at this dry goods store and this fellow behind the counter, he had the most impressive sight he exclaimed to us, "States under glass."

You'd have that red Oklahoma dust in a jar.

You'd have that gray Colorado dust in a jar, and you'd have the black dust from the Dakotas.

I'd tell you, there's times where I felt like in about a three-day period of time I'd been visited by all three of those states, and I never even had to leave my front porch.

The dust storms really become increasingly severe in 1933.

But the period for 34, 35, and 36 are particularly bad for the southern Great Plains.

These are the hottest years, and they're the driest years.

And then you have this continual prevailing wind.

So wheat really isn't growing at all.

The drought just doesn't seem to break.

And it's year after year where farmers and people in small towns are having to deal with this.

With dendrochronology, which is free-ring dating, they say that there's a drought that happens in the Great Plains or in the High Plains about every 30 years.

When you talk about drought on that, and you say, "Well, we don't hear about it that much," well, a drought is when there's not enough rain and not timely rains.

Crops will grow quite well in the High Plains if the rains happen at the same time.

But if they don't, and you might get five inches in one rain, but it doesn't rain for another three months, it's a drought.

And in some of these areas in the southern Great Plains are very close to desert conditions, nearly 10 inches as a precipitation.

Some areas are getting 12, 14 inches, and that's the wheat isn't going to grow.

And at best, you can only hope for weeds to grow and catch some of that wind and slow some of that soil down.

At the time, too, farming, you would cut a crop down or you'd plant it, harvest it, and then leave it vacant, which they called summer fallow.

You didn't really work, you might have worked in land to keep the weeds out of it, but you didn't work to plant a crop.

Well, they thought that was letting the land rest, but having no ground cover, as they would call it, with crops or stubble on it, it blew more.

This is an area in which the soil is very friable.

So if it's exposed to the wind, it can easily lift and blow.

As things get going, it sort of builds and builds and builds, and it drifts for miles.

Drifts of dust covered fence posts.

You can just see the top of the fence posts.

They blew around houses so you couldn't get out.

It was incredible, the land that moved back and forth.

And it wasn't until later during the Dust Bowl when it became a national deal where there was red dirt, a red dust storm over Washington, D.C.

The red dirt came from the southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma and blew east.

Ships out at sea reported having a layer of dust, you know, take your finger and sweep it across, you know, the rail or something, and it would be dusty.

And then they thought, you know, where's this dust coming from?

Well, okay, there's a crisis in the Great Plains.

That crisis was framed within the worldwide crisis of the Great Depression, spurred by the stock market crash of 1929.

The financial effects of the crash reverberate throughout the economy.

The banks lose a lot of money in the crash.

They have less money available to loan out.

Makes it hard for individuals to borrow money.

It makes it harder for companies to borrow money.

Unemployment is going to increase dramatically with the coming of the Great Depression.

Before in the 1920s, the unemployment rate in the country hovered around 3 to 4 percent.

With the coming of the Great Depression, it's going to go up to 25 percent.

When it comes to particular places, especially places that relied on a single industry, if something happens to that industry, their numbers become much worse.

Toledo, Ohio, 80 percent unemployment.

In places like Chicago, Detroit, 50 percent.

Urban workers become unemployed.

That means there's less money in urban centers to buy things made in rural places.

The Depression spreads to agricultural areas.

It feeds back to the industrial.

Why does Chicago have such high unemployment?

Because they make things that get sold all up and down the Great Plains.

And when the farmers find they're selling at prices that barely, if at all, cover costs, they stop buying.

And it feeds one after another.

The safety valve of global trade just isn't there.

Europe was dependent in the late 1920s on American capital.

But the Depression chokes off that flow of financial capital almost immediately.

And we see it hit hard in Germany, in Austria, in the rest of Eastern Europe.

By 1930, the German economy is in freefall, they stopped being able to buy American goods.

The British enter their darkest period of the Depression, 1931, 1932.

And when Britain collapses, it hits Kansas in a way no one saw coming.

To the 19th century, Britain with the global champion of free trade opened markets to foreign imports and they had started with food.

1931, 1932, the new British coalition government abandons free trade.

They bring in imperial preference, high tariffs against non-British or British imperial food.

It disrupts exports of food from the U.S.

and it hits Kansas and Great Plains farmers hard.

And it deepens the agricultural depression in the United States.

And then there was the dust.

There's a lot of pictures of the 1930s that people had taken as the storms came in.

And they were just black clouds.

When people talk about they couldn't see the hand in front of their face during a dust storm, that was about right.

People would get lost in dust storms.

Some of the older cars, the dust would get into the carburetor and you'd be going down the road and your car would stop.

I mean, it was penetrating everything.

There was a lot of dust pneumonia.

Now my children, they've had a cough for a while.

Fortunately neither of them had gotten dust pneumonia.

And I've had a cough as well.

I guess this was one of my good days for now.

But it's been awful to think about some of these fellers that have had to go to the hospital and knowing they wouldn't make it.

Babies in their cribs, they would take wet sheets or wet blankets and cover the baby up in the crib and hopefully that would keep it a little, would be a filter for the baby in the crib.

So yeah, they were horrible.

When you talk about the commodities, there wasn't anything for the cows to eat so they didn't have enough protein to make milk or enough food and sometimes enough water.

So it affected everybody.

The chickens quit laying eggs.

It wasn't enough to eat.

And so it was tough all the way around.

But the one of mid-April of 35 probably covered the most area of one storm.

April 14, 1935.

Black Sunday.

It's one in which really you have the term "dust bowl" coined.

As I recall, about 85 degrees in Elkhart.

Not a cloud in the sky.

Calm winds with a slight bit of haze on the horizon.

A newspaper reporter, Robert Geiger, who's working for the Washington, D.C.

Evening Star.

And he's in the southern Great Plains area.

I decided to go to church that morning since it was a Palm Sunday.

Beautiful day.

I went with my wife and our children and the minister.

The minister was preaching about Joseph and the Egyptians.

Now they had a seven-year drought and the way he saw it, why?

We just had two more years to go.

And he's filing reports and he's filed three of them about the dust storms and he referred to them twice as this area being a dust belt.

And in one report he called it a dust bowl.

The Soil Conservation Service picked that up and started using it in its reports.

And the public started using this term for this environmental disaster in the southern Great Plains.

It just stuck.

It was getting on towards about three o'clock.

And we saw it, a thin blue line on the horizon.

And it just kept rolling and tumbling over itself and kept getting higher and higher in the sky.

And you couldn't see nothing beyond it.

It was getting darker and darker.

And my wife and the children, they went inside the house and they were shutting all the windows in the place because you don't want your windows open when there's a duster, your wife will never forgive you for that.

People customarily would say, "I remember when we had to put tape over the keyholes on our doors so the dust didn't blow through."

Or "I remember when we would tape the windows so that the dust wouldn't blow in."

And it's hard to visualize that, something that could be that bad.

As I was heading back to the porch, I could see the cloud just almost encircling all of the horizon.

And behind it was this wall of black.

And that's when the lights went out.

I was plunged into an icky black darkness.

I couldn't breathe.

I couldn't see.

I couldn't even see the hand right in front of my face.

But fortunately, I was holding on to the edge of the porch and I was able to get inside.

It's also hard when they would say, "I remember when it became black as night."

And I remember as a kid, thinking "No, Nothing can be as dark as night just because of a dust storm," but we have to take them at their word."

They experienced it.

My wife, Ester, she'd held up a coal oil lamp and had lit it, but it was a fog in there where the dust had just sifted in through all of the different nooks and crannies of our house.

If the dust was as dark as night and you couldn't see the street lamps or headlights on automobiles, who are we to say that it wasn't?

Because they lived through it.

And if they said it was dark, it was dark because of these black blizzards, which were clearly the worst.

Here I was, surrounded by blinding, choking dust, miles in all directions.

You couldn't see, you couldn't breathe.

And then we heard it.

Ducks, geese, birds of all types, just frantically trying to stay ahead of that dust and failing, unfortunately.

At that point, we did the only thing that came to mind.

We dropped to our knees.

I started praying out to Lord.

I holler, "Lord, please make it stop.

I'll do anything.

I'll attend church more often.

I'll stop going to the pool hall.

I'll even vote Democrat again if that help."

And then that's when I came to my senses.

I'd read the good book.

It never said anything about the Lord coming back in a cloud of dust.

All this was was a natural phenomenon of the weather.

And it would end soon, hopefully soon because I do like to breathe after all.

My mother said after a dust storm, they'd start cleaning the house with a scoop shovel to get the dust out.

And then they would get down to brooms and dust pans until they got it.

And they'd get it done.

Another storm would come through.

But it battered everything.

It took the paints off the building.

So with a lot of the pictures from that period, you see these desolate looking drab places because the wind and the dirt blowing had sandblasted everything around.

It's the kind of environmental situation in which it's very difficult to address.

I mean, how do you stop dust blowing over large areas?

And one must say that once the federal government enters this business of soil conservation on a very large scale, it's successful and it's not.

There's a lot of experimentation here and some successes and some failures.

But the soil conservation service said, "Oh, roughly the wind erosion problem was about 97 million acres."

Well, it's kind of hard to understand what 97 million acres is, to visualize it.

But an acre is roughly, not quite, but roughly the size of a football field.

So you've got 97 million football fields of land out there that are exposed or have the potential of blowing.

The soil conservation service, which was created in 1935, really takes an active role in addressing this wind erosion problem.

They would show the farmer, "Look, take your lister plow and just blank lister your field.

And the lister plow is sort of like a double mull board plow.

It's going to turn the furrow each way and it's going to cut very deep."

And the idea was just rough up that field so that when the wind is blowing and the soil is moving, those clods and furrows are going to at least catch some of that ground level and slow it down and hold it in place.

Do that and we'll give you some money to help you afford to do it.

And also in the 1930s or directly thereafter, they started terracing the land.

So now we have what we call contour conservation terraces, meaning that the terraces follow the contour of the land as it goes on a slope.

And so that's the contour and then the conservation is that the water, it's a kind of a check dam to stop the water from rushing down a slope.

And maybe you get a crop, you can harvest the heads, but let everything else stay there and just let it be.

And when the wind blows, the stocks are going to catch some of that soil and hold it in place.

This is an experiment.

Nobody knew, nobody had done anything like this before where you have a government and an institutional effort to help farmers do certain things to make their lives better or have an environmental impact.

When Franklin Roosevelt is elected, he's elected with a mandate to try something.

And his approach is going to be also about managing the economy.

When it comes to business, he creates the National Recovery Administration and he has the counterpart to that for agriculture in the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

And here too, it's about managing the economy and trying to set output, trying to stabilize prices.

And as part of those programs, the government is going to pay farmers to not have land in production.

The government's paying wheat farmers not to raise wheat to increase their income and at the same time cut back production.

That's fine.

The Triple A checks were the difference in whether a farm family stayed on land or not in many cases, but it isn't the required production cutbacks that were of consequence because of the legislation.

The drought was simply killing the wheat crop.

The government is going to destroy livestock, destroy cows, destroy pigs.

To keep the people on the farms and help them out, there were government subsidies that helped out.

They would buy the wheat or the cotton or livestock because one of the subsidies was with nothing to feed the cattle.

The cattle, a big pit was dug and you shot the cattle.

The government paid you so much per head, per animal, to have it destroyed.

And so there are these big pits full of cattle that you couldn't do anything with.

You couldn't ship them.

There was no money to buy them.

There were too many to feed and they were starving, so you killed them.

So you brought in your cattle.

You hopefully got away before they started killing your livelihood.

This dust, it takes away about everything that you have.

If you're not broke, then you lose everything altogether.

For people who are struggling to buy food, the site of crops and livestock being destroyed, to them it doesn't make any sense.

And the program will have the effect of raising prices, but for a lot of consumers, that's not something they wanted.

But here's where the dust bowl was politically useful for the Roosevelt administration.

By explaining that the dust bowl was a result of environmental factors around overproduction, he could frame his plan, which was pay to take land out of production, as a solution to the dust bowl and a long-term necessity.

One of the unintended effects of paying farmers to not produce on land was, well, the land that they were going to take out of production was the most marginal land.

And often that land might be worked by tenant farmers.

And so it was easier to receive the government benefit for not producing than have tenant farmers working this land.

And so those are people who are most likely to be displaced.

Well, there is a considerable migration from the Great Plains in general in the 1930s.

But one thing that I think people don't understand is that Steinbeck got it wrong.

The Okies that he traces across Route 66 into California were not really dust bowl people.

They were cotton tenant farmers that were tractored off the land in eastern Oklahoma.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act provided that farm landowners could get paid for reducing cotton production.

And these large landowners have divided their farms into small tenant farms.

Well, they don't need these people anymore.

So you see this transition across the southern United States.

That image shapes people's memory of the dust bowl.

But at the same time, there are a lot of people who stayed.

Not everyone suddenly vacates the plains.

Most people stay behind and they find ways to make do.

The people that lived then, whose time it was then, it became an indelible scar.

If they lived through it, they never forgot it.

And often their references go back to it.

And I'll give you an example.

And that is my mother, who would have been a teenager in the 1930s at this time.

In the 1950s, when it got dirty and dusty again in the same region one afternoon, our kitchen window faced to the west.

This dust storm would come through like a squall of a thunderstorm.

Just really raced through and everything would blow and the dust would be going down the street and leaves and all that.

And she said, "I hope it's not going to start again."

Then she repeated it, "I hope it's not going to start again."

So this is the kind of thing that had an emotional effect on people.