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U.S. History 1877-Present 8.4: The Grapes of Wrath I: The Dust Bowl 84 Views
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Description:
The Dust Bowl... It was just like the Super Bowl, except it had less funding and people from Kansas actually participated.
Transcript
- 00:03
Let's take a second and zoom in on the Dust Bowl. There was a
- 00:07
terrible drought and huge dust storms that wreaked havoc on the land, even [Baron field with no crops.]
- 00:12
giving people a special kind of sickness called dust pneumonia. Was it the most
- 00:16
depressing part of the Great Depression? Well, it certainly wasn't cheering anybody
- 00:20
up. But one of the worst of these dust storms, or black blizzards, actually
Full Transcript
- 00:24
managed to carry 12 million pounds of dust from the Great Plains and dump it [Dust cloud moves East across map of USA.]
- 00:29
on Chicago. The snow in New England was red for goodness' sake. We're pretty sure
- 00:34
that no matter how jolly Frosty the Snowman is, we wouldn't play with
- 00:38
him if he was made of red snow. Of course, John Steinbeck drew inspiration from the
- 00:43
dust apocalypse, or "dustocalypse," and wrote his famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath,
- 00:47
which told of a farm family fleeing the Dust Bowl in hopes of a better life in
- 00:52
California. Though this wasn't a story for as many Dust Bowl families as most people [Family from farm leave.]
- 00:57
believe, there were definitely a ton of people displaced by this widespread
- 01:01
devastation. It was like living in a giant sandbox that wants to eat you. Dust
- 01:06
clouds rolled over every day, creeping into the cracks and the houses and
- 01:10
rippling on the floors. People had to walk around with handkerchiefs and Vaseline
- 01:14
smeared on their nostrils. And no, Vaseline does not sponsor us; that's actually true. [Man holds handkerchief to nose.]
- 01:19
But how did the breadbasket of America somehow turn into a heaping bowl of dust?
- 01:23
Did Americans somehow anger the ancient demon of drought? Did they tell him his
- 01:28
new haircut was dumb or something? Well, not exactly. The drought wasn't
- 01:32
actually the only cause of the whole dust debacle. Droughts were actually pretty
- 01:36
common in the Great Plains and came every 25 years or so. The real trouble was that
- 01:40
people were abusing the land. The main issue was that during World War I, the [Angry looking man in front of a crop field.]
- 01:44
demand for wheat had skyrocketed, so farmers tilled every acre of grassland
- 01:48
they could. What bit of grass that wasn't swept away to make room for wheat
- 01:52
fields was eaten by cattle and sheep. Why did it matter that all the grass went
- 01:57
away? Because the grass was the thing that held all the fine topsoil of the
- 02:02
Great Plains in place. When the drought came and killed all the wheat, suddenly
- 02:06
there was nothing to keep the soil in the ground,
- 02:08
and so the dust learned to fly. Eventually, the federal government
- 02:12
sauntered in and started sweeping up the dust. Starting in 1935, the [Franklin D. Roosevelt holding a broom.]
- 02:16
government started programs that changed basic farming methods. Crops were
- 02:21
rotated, strips of trees where planted to stop the wind, and certain areas
- 02:25
were seeded with just regular old grass. Well, at first, farmers were
- 02:29
suspicious of these newfangled farming practices, so the government paid farmers
- 02:33
a dollar an acre to implement all this newfangled technology. Also, somebody [Franklin D. Roosevelt offering farmer money.]
- 02:38
must have said something like, "Look guys, you had your shot, and look how that
- 02:42
turned out."
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