Just over eighty-three years ago, on April 14, 1935, residents of the Great Plains woke up to clear skies. As they headed to church on that Palm Sunday, they enjoyed fresh air and a respite from the complications that the storms known as “dusters” had brought to their streets, businesses, and homes repeatedly during the previous months. The pristine air that morning meant that no one needed to wear goggles or facial masks, something that had become commonplace thanks to the winds that often picked up and coated the plains with the exhausted tawny dirt created by fifty years of aggressive farming, cattle and sheep ranching, and what the residents themselves embraced as a way of “breaking the land” to extract every bit of profit it could produce. Compounded by an extended period of extreme high temperatures and drought, the human activities had begun reducing a once thriving region into a bowl of dust. And despite how the day had started, the conditions for one of the most terrifying events in American history were beginning to gather.
The clear morning soon began to deteriorate as hundred-mile-per-hour winds began sweeping across the northern plains. Stirred up by confluence of a stationary high-pressure system and a cold front diving down from Alaska, temperatures plunged and residents began to brace themselves for the effects of yet another duster blowing through. The menace of the dust storms was all too familiar to Americans throughout the plains during the decade they dubbed the “dirty thirties,” the darkening skies presaging the spread of dust across their streets and fields. The dust even invaded their homes, requiring frequent sweeping and sanitation. Visibility at the height of the storms could be limited to a single foot, and the dust accumulated in the eyes and lungs, spawning a host of health problems, such as “Dust Pneumonia,” that resisted most remedies.
None of the dusters, however, carried the potency of the massive storm that spread across the region that Palm Sunday, which came to be known more popularly as “Black Sunday.” Skies turned the color of coal from South Dakota to Nebraska. Gales kicked up pound upon pound of sand over an area once covered in productive topsoil. As it swept through Kansas heading for Oklahoma and Texas, the monster storm grew to almost two hundred miles in width. Ultimately, it swelled to over a thousand miles wide and dumped over 300,000 tons of dirt across 100 million acres of land.
Black Sunday completed the destruction of the region that became known as the Great Dust Bowl. It destroyed wildlife, cattle, and lives, and rendered agriculture impossible. Hundreds of thousands of residents fled the plains in its aftermath. Many of these “exodusters” flocked to California, where they were dubbed “Okies” and “Arkies” and prompted the creation of “bum blockades” along the Golden State’s borders. Patrolmen required the refugees to prove that they had at least $50.00 in monetary resources. If admitted to California they could latch on as migrant workers and find basic shelter in large temporary camps, where they lived in challenging conditions. Life was even harder for the residents who stayed behind.
In response to emergence of the Dust Bowl, the United States Government stepped up its efforts to mitigate the devastation on the plains. Already in the midst of a relief and recovery effort to deal with another man made disaster, the Great Depression, New Deal agencies like the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Resettlement Administration looked for ways to combat homelessness, while the Soil Conservation Corps tried to restore the land. A new Prairie States Forestry Project, along with the Works Progress Administration and private farmers, planted over 220 million trees in an effort to block the dusty winds. The United States Department of Agriculture educated Dust Bowl farmers on more responsible farming techniques. Franklin Roosevelt created a “Great Plains Committee” to develop long-term solutions to the problem. All these efforts helped. In fact, they effectively prevented new dust storms from destroying farms. But they could not stimulate the reconstruction of the plains.
Black Sunday also sparked a creative response. Novelist John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which was published in 1939 on the anniversary of the Black Sunday storm and which quickly became one of the iconic works of American literature as readers followed the heartbreaking saga of the Joad family and their fellow refugees along the American highways. Photographers like Dorothea Lange and Seema Weatherwax chronicled the hardships faced by the Okies and Arkies in their broken down jalopies and in the refugee camps.
In Pampa, Texas, that Palm Sunday, a budding Okie songwriter named Woody Guthrie huddled with his family against the blinding storm. With no prospects around the panhandle, the storm prompted him to hobo out to California. In California, at the behest of a new, leftist friend named Ed Robbin he set out to bear witness to the life of his compatriots in the new FSA refugee camps. Although Guthrie probably didn’t read Steinbeck’s book, he saw the movie it inspired and wrote one of the most important works in the American songbook, “The Dust Bowl Ballads,” in which he vividly chronicled the plight of the migrants. His “Do Re Me” deftly lampoons the impact of the “bum blockades” on migrants warning them not to come to California if they “don’t have the do re mi.” His masterful “Tom Joad,” according to Guthrie family lore, prompted Steinbeck to write him a letter saying “you little bastard. How could you say in one song what it took me an entire novel to write?”
The impact of Black Sunday still captivates the American imagination today. Students continue to read The Grapes of Wrath. Environmental Studies is one of the most rapidly growing academic fields. Musician-activists like Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello use topical songs written in the folk tradition of Woody Guthrie to encourage change. This April, the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, will open a new virtual reality exhibit that will allow visitors to experience what it was like to be inside a dust storm.
Black Sunday and the rise of the Great Dust Bowl mark one of the most significant man-made environmental disasters in history. Like the broader economic conflagration of the Great Depression they played out against, the root causes were the excesses of capitalism–a determined effort, without regard for the possible repercussions, to “bust” or “break” the land in order to extract every ounce of wealth, and an inclination to cull every possible profit out of industry and investment. This lethal combination, both inhabiting the same chronological space, exposed the havoc that unbridled development can wreak on the environment and on the economy.