1935 Following droughts worsening year on year, dust storms had begun to plague the American south-west from 1932, increasing in size and frequency all the time. The really big one came on ‘Black Sunday’, 14 April 1935. The storm struck Dodge City, Kansas, then moved across the high plains of Texas and New Mexico. People lost their way within feet of where they were trying to go. Livestock and wildlife became blinded and ran around in circles, finally dying from dust ingestion.
Black Sunday gave the Dust Bowl its name. The next day Robert Geiger, an Associated Press reporter travelling through the stricken area, sent a dispatch back to the Washington Evening Star referring to ‘life in the dust bowl of the continent’.
Soon the phrase was humming across the AP wires to papers all across the country. Within weeks, even a sober professor of agricultural economics was writing of ‘vast clouds of dust ris[ing] and roll[ing] across the Great Plains, obscuring the lives of people, blighting homes, hampering traffic, drifting eastwards to New York and westwards to California’.1
Inspired by this account, Pare Lorentz got to work on his documentary film for F.D. Roosevelt’s New Deal government, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), powerfully picturing the dust smothering the farmsteads of Oklahoma, and the farmers heading west to escape it. The film argued that careless ploughing had loosened the topsoil, allowing drought and wind to do the rest.
When it came to still pictures, it was the government photographer Dorothea Lange who caught the mood, with her shots of families marooned by the sides of roads in broken-down cars, and above all in her portrait of the ‘Migrant Mother’, sheltering from the rain in a lean-to, her children cowering in around her.
And the literary spin-off? John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), of course, the story of the Joads, forced to flee Oklahoma for California, then coming apart as one after another member of the family dies, deserts or lights out ahead of the cops.
In truth, the so-called Okies had been heading west since shortly after the turn of the century – more of them between 1910 and 1930 than during the whole of the Depression. Hard times on south-western farms owed more to collapsing markets for wheat, corn and cotton after the First World War than to drought and dust.
In any case, the legendary dust storms fell far short of the vast range suggested in The Plow That Broke the Plains, afflicting mainly Kansas and Colorado, brushing past Texas and Oklahoma only at the panhandles where the two states meet.
For all that, though the Depression struck mainly at the factories and businesses of America, it’s the stories and pictures of the Okies and the Dust Bowl that came to represent the experience as a whole. In 1998 the Post Office issued a 32¢ stamp with ‘Migrant Mother’ on it. ‘America survives the depression’, it said.
1 Paul Schuster Taylor and Dorothea Lange, ‘Again the Covered Wagon’, Survey Graphic, Vol. 24, No. 7 (July 1935), p. 348.