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Let's take a second and zoom in on the Dust Bowl. There was a

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terrible drought and huge dust storms that wreaked havoc on the land, even [Baron field with no crops.]

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giving people a special kind of sickness called dust pneumonia. Was it the most

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depressing part of the Great Depression? Well, it certainly wasn't cheering anybody

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up. But one of the worst of these dust storms, or black blizzards, actually

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managed to carry 12 million pounds of dust from the Great Plains and dump it [Dust cloud moves East across map of USA.]

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on Chicago. The snow in New England was red for goodness' sake. We're pretty sure

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that no matter how jolly Frosty the Snowman is, we wouldn't play with

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him if he was made of red snow. Of course, John Steinbeck drew inspiration from the

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dust apocalypse, or "dustocalypse," and wrote his famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath,

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which told of a farm family fleeing the Dust Bowl in hopes of a better life in

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California. Though this wasn't a story for as many Dust Bowl families as most people [Family from farm leave.]

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believe, there were definitely a ton of people displaced by this widespread

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devastation. It was like living in a giant sandbox that wants to eat you. Dust

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clouds rolled over every day, creeping into the cracks and the houses and

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rippling on the floors. People had to walk around with handkerchiefs and Vaseline

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smeared on their nostrils. And no, Vaseline does not sponsor us; that's actually true. [Man holds handkerchief to nose.]

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But how did the breadbasket of America somehow turn into a heaping bowl of dust?

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Did Americans somehow anger the ancient demon of drought? Did they tell him his

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new haircut was dumb or something? Well, not exactly. The drought wasn't

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actually the only cause of the whole dust debacle. Droughts were actually pretty

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common in the Great Plains and came every 25 years or so. The real trouble was that

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people were abusing the land. The main issue was that during World War I, the [Angry looking man in front of a crop field.]

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demand for wheat had skyrocketed, so farmers tilled every acre of grassland

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they could. What bit of grass that wasn't swept away to make room for wheat

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fields was eaten by cattle and sheep. Why did it matter that all the grass went

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away? Because the grass was the thing that held all the fine topsoil of the

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Great Plains in place. When the drought came and killed all the wheat, suddenly

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there was nothing to keep the soil in the ground,

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and so the dust learned to fly. Eventually, the federal government

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sauntered in and started sweeping up the dust. Starting in 1935, the [Franklin D. Roosevelt holding a broom.]

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government started programs that changed basic farming methods. Crops were

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rotated, strips of trees where planted to stop the wind, and certain areas

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were seeded with just regular old grass. Well, at first, farmers were

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suspicious of these newfangled farming practices, so the government paid farmers

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a dollar an acre to implement all this newfangled technology. Also, somebody [Franklin D. Roosevelt offering farmer money.]

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must have said something like, "Look guys, you had your shot, and look how that

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turned out."

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