The Worst Hard Time

Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time details the lives of the people who stayed where they were during the Dust Bowl years. Among other resources, Egan interviewed several people still living in the area who survived the 1930s in the High Plains. Melt White's father was an old cowboy had the family settle in Dalhart, after their wagon team lost too many horses to go further south. Jeanne Clark's mother was a Broadway dancer who moved to the Plains for her lungs. Hazel Lucas' was a child when her family moved there, but even after she married and saw city life, she wanted to go back and set up back in the open expanses. He also found a rescued diary of a man living in Inavale, Nebraska, trying to keep his farm going during the bad years. Through these people he's able to learn about their neighbors, the physical, financial, and psychological hardships, and why people held on.

The book starts before the bad years, at the point when the land was supposed to be for various Native American tribes to live on. That didn't last once ranchers decided that if the land could support buffalo, it could support cattle, and things followed the typical pattern of white people exterminating Native Americans, or driving them away, and killing all the buffalo. Except cattle don't excel at surviving in the High Plains like bison do. Soon, the ranches are being chopped up and sold to homesteaders, who've been told this land will grow plenty, and they can be owners of their own piece, which was pretty appealing.

Egan talks about how the government setting a fixed (highly profitable) price on wheat during World War I drove the farmers to plant even more more wheat, turning over more soil, tearing up more native grasses. As prices stayed high through the 1920s, people began buying more land, frequently on credit, betting the next year would be better than the last and they'd be fine. Which works until they produce so much wheat there's no buyer for it. Massive piles of grain sitting at railway depots, wasting. The economy fails, the price drops to the below the break-even point, which makes people nervous. Going on more credit, they buy more land, hoping for an even bigger haul that will bail them out. But people still won't (or can't) buy, and the Plains enter a drought period, and people stop being able to afford to plant. Now there's nothing holding down the soil, a bad thing in a place where the wind blows strongly most of the time.

The majority of the book deals with what happened after the dusters became a common occurrence. People trying to survive it, while trying to understand why it was happening, and what they could do about it, all the way up to FDR. The first tentative steps to correct the problem. The book effectively captures how the mood of the people turns. Even through 1932, they have hope. They're holding on, even though it hardly rained, though the bank had invested (and lost) all their money and closed up without an accounting, even though dust gets everywhere. They still believed in tomorrow. All it would take was a few good rains, the ground would soften up, wheat would grow, and people were starving in the cities, so surely there would be buyers. But the "drouth" continues, the dust continues, and the mood sours. Even so, people hold out, trying to not only sustain their livestock on salted tumbleweeds, but eat the Russian thistle themselves. Some of them can't afford to leave, or heard it's bad allover, but others are determined to stick it out.

Even then, you have people trying to keep hopes up. Joe McCarty ran the newspaper in Dalhart, and he chose to focus on the positive. This included comparing his readers to Spartans, because they were tough, and could handle whatever nature threw at them, and choosing to focus on the positive side of the dust storms, namely that they were really big, impressive, and one couldn't see their like anywhere else*. What's strange, he seemed genuine in this; he believed if Dalhart could ride out the tough times, it would rebound and become some great city out in the Plains. He even formed a Last Man Club, of people swearing to stick it out until the end.

Of course, it's not all ludicrous headlines, or big barbecues celebrating cowboy days. There were jackrabbit roundups, people clubbing thousands of long-ears to death, considering them part of the problem. The threats towards banks that foreclosed on homes, and racism, naturally. A white man riding the rails into town was told to get back on the train and ride out. A black man who got off the train was immediately arrested for vagrancy. Maybe the food and living conditions were better in jail, though I doubt it. To be fair, the racism was in effect well before the hard times, but it probably didn't improve in the bad years. People abandoned their children, or lost their sanity from the wind that was always howling outside. Teachers (such as Hazel Lucas) being paid in scrip that was not honored by grocery stores, so essentially not being paid at all for years on end, and dust pneumonia, which was as pleasant as it sounds.

Reading the book, certain things seemed relevant today. I work near a little town out in the boonies (though it's the Ozarks, rather than the High Plains), and I see houses being put up for sale all the time. Can they not make payments? Is there not enough economic opportunity, or do they just want a change of scenery? The idea of people borrowing too much from banks, then needing miraculously productive circumstances to get out of debt seems familiar. The sense people never learn.

FDR wanted some big project people could see as a sign they government was trying to fix the problem, and restoring the grasslands was too slow, too small. So he ordered trees planted as shelterbelts for hundreds of miles, sending people across the globe to find tree species that could survive the conditions. All told, over 200 million trees were planted, and most are gone. Some couldn't survive it out there, but Egan writes that when the rains came back in the 1940s, and the price of wheat rose, many farmers tore the trees up so they could, survey says, PLANT MORE WHEAT! Which is the same stupid approach that got them into the mess in the first place. It was a wet cycle, it won't last, and then they'll have exposed soil being blown 200 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean again!

Anyway, depressing examples of human arrogance in the face of past experience aside, it's an excellent book. I'm not sure whether Egan's descriptions, or even those of the people who lived through the times, really capture how harsh it was, but they describe it well enough that my imagination did the rest. I could see myself baking in the sun, being afraid to touch anything during a storm because of the massive static buildup (during that time, people took to dragging a chain behind their car to ground it, so it wouldn't short out in the middle of a storm), being afraid to breathe. I wasn't always sure what year things were happening in, as I felt Egan might follow a particular thread for a few years, before going back to the year he originally was discussing. The upshot is, it gives a sense of every day being like the last. It was horrible yesterday, horrible today, it'll be horrible tomorrow. What day it is exactly, doesn't matter in such circumstances.

* He also tended to blame Dalhart's dust storms on other states, and tell his readers how all the people in other states were wusses, who surely didn't have it half as bad as Dalhartians, but complained so much. It was around that point I wanted to go back in time and punch McCarty in the throat.