Books delve into Dust Bowl days of 1930s—June 6, 2008
The fact that we’ve been saturated with rain lately and keep looking at our feet to see if they are webbed makes it difficult to conjure up weeks, months and years without rain. But such were the dust bowl days of the 1930’s. Chautauqua with its “Bright Dreams, Hard Times: America in the Thirties” theme is coming to Hastings July 2–6. To learn more about the trials and tribulations of the thirties, check out some of these books.
Caroline Henderson and her husband, Will, began homesteading in the Oklahoma Panhandle in 1907. Between 1931 and 1937 she had a number of articles published in the Atlantic Monthly that drew national attention to the plight of the farmers in the dust bowl. Her “Letters from the Dust Bowl” present a vivid picture of life on a farm in Oklahoma’s panhandle in the 1930’s. One can almost feel the dust seeping into everything.
Documents from historical journals of Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana and individual reminiscences were compiled by historians John Wunder, Frances Kaye and Vernon Carstensen in “Americans View Their Dust Bowl Experience.” The pages relate the suffering and resilience, loss and hope, defeat and defiance of these amazing people who refused to give up. Details about the farm strikes and movements of the thirties can also be found here.
In addition to the drought and devastation of the Great Plains during the thirties, the rest of the country was suffering from the stock market crash of 1929, massive unemployment and widespread poverty. The photographs in “Hard Times: The 30s” tell the story of the heroes and hooligans of the era.
One doesn’t often associate “riding the rails” with teenagers, but during the Great Depression over 250,000 teenage hoboes were roaming America. The stories of why they left home and how they survived are found in “Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression” by Errol Lincoln Uys.
What about the people who didn’t stay, but moved on to what they hoped were greener fields? The “Okies.” In the thirties many farmers from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Missouri packed up and headed for California where they had heard pickers were needed to work in the fields and orchards of the San Joaquin Valley. Unfortunately when they arrived they discovered there were few jobs available. Many ended up at relief camps, one of which Steinbeck portrayed as “Weedpatch Camp” in “Grapes of Wrath.” In “Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp” Jerry Stanley relates how the children, together with the superintendent Leo Hart, built their own school, a school that not only taught the 3 R’s, but practical skills like masonry, mechanics and agriculture. It, and the children, not only survived, but thrived.