Book Review; The Worst Hard Time

Motherly Love eases Oklahoma Dust-bowl Hardship, originally uploaded by chrisjman.

For most, the 1930s dust bowl is little more than a few pages in a textbook. Lots of dust, little rain, and an uncompleted assignment from Mrs. Watts to read the Grapes of Wrath are the familar reference points for this time in American history.

An environmental disaster on a scale previously unknown, the Dust Bowl was the product of unbridled national ambition. An attempt to work the unworkable and make the barren fertile. Ignoring warnings, sod-busters plowed under the grasses of the southern plains and exposed millions of acres of soil to the elements, all in an effort to join the then-rising wheat empire. It was the last of the frontier. The last chance to claim and prove up a homestead in a nation that was slipping its agricultural roots.

The outcome is familiar. The beneficial rains of the 1920s were an aberration. By the 1930s, the rains stopped. The soil dried out and great dust storms bankrupted the wheat empire.

Whereas Steinbeck describes the okies who left the Dust Bowl, Timothy Egan's "The Worst Hard Time" describes the lives of those who stayed.

The book is remarkable. A page turner in the most unlikely of subjects. Tracing the rise and fall of the southern plains, where promoters promised that dust clouds raised by plows would actually increase rain fall, Egan demonstrates the perils of toying with the environment.

Links to excerpt and NPR interview.