Timothy Egan relates that it was a son of Kansas, Roy Emerson Stryker, who came up with the idea of creating a record of American decay for the files of the Farm Security Administration, and "...the government photo unit proved to be one of the lasting and most popular contributions of the New Deal..." Americans familiar with their history have the images taken by Walter Evans and Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression as part of their cultural baggage, and Egan expands that to the work of Arthur Rothstein, and others, who were just out of college, and told to stay in the "field", and get to know the people. The images of the immense ecological disaster that was dubbed "the Dust Bowl" are not properly honored with even the word "haunting."
Egan has written a magnificent, heart-breaking history of the "the Dust Bowl" area during the `30's. Much of the specific history was new to me, and thus confirmed Truman's dictum that there is nothing new in the world except the history that you did not know. I had recently re-read Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," which Egan briefly touches upon, pointing out correctly that Tom Joad and his family came from eastern Oklahoma, whereas the true dust bowl encompassed only western Oklahoma. I felt Egan's one map, outlining where the area of the dust bowl was, most illuminating. Both Steinbeck's and Egan's books are damning indictments of so-called "market forces" unleashed without an overall structure of prudent rules set by society, as administered by the government. Egan did however cover the impudent rules that society and the government advocated, which encouraged the settlement and farming of the land west of the 100th meridian which was the root cause of the dust bowl.
Egan tells the story of the worst hard times through the eyes of those who experienced it, via interviews with them, or their children, accompanied by surviving diaries and the newspaper stories of the day. He doesn't say how or why he selected certain people, but I felt that they were a representative sampling, from Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Of the stories that were particularly memorable, I found the ones of the "Volga Germans" who settled in Shattuck, OK. They had been recruited by Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (who was actually German) to settle on the Volga river. They were given incentives to do so, like exemption from conscription. When these were removed, 150 years later, by Czar Alexander II, they left in mass, and settled in the USA. The epicenter of Egan's stories, and no doubt research, seemed to be Dalhart, Texas, in the northwest corner of the panhandle. The author starts his book with the story of Bam White, part Indian, whose horses could not carry his family any further south into Texas, so he had to stop in Delhart. Bam was in the most famous movie made about the dust bowl, and was shunned by much of the population of the area for this role. Another very memorable character from Delhart was the indominable promoter and newspaper editor, John L McCarty. He was a founding member of the "Last Man Club," pledging that they would never leave, a pledge that he broke, when "he got a better deal." I also found the stories of set in the Oklahoma panhandle, which was once called "no man's land" also quite illuminating.
I read a few of the 1-star reviews, found their criticism of little merit. One did not like the endless stories about the dust storms, which I found a strength of the book. Egan explained well the whole trajectory of the area's residents from hope and defiance through resignation and defeat. As Egan says on p 242: "The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine, on harvest day, from victory stands."
Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" was the catalyst for a trip to Garden City, Kansas a year ago, to see the feedlots there. Pollan declares that afterwards it would take "a supreme act of forgetting to ever eat meat again." On the way, I drove through Dalhart, and on the way back, I drove through Boise City, OK (named, as Egan points out, after the French word, "bois," for woods, of which there are none except in the fevered imagination of the real estate promoters.) I stopped in Keys, OK, and photographed the still extant devastation, the abandoned houses, and shuttered businesses. Egan's book will force a return trip, now that he has helped me "see" what I was oblivious too the last time.
On last year's trip it was quite apparent that both the panhandles of OK and TX continue to struggle, yet the area around Garden City, KS seemed relatively prosperous. Sadly, Egan explains some of this in his epilogue: "So cotton growing, siphoning from the Ogallala (underground reservoir) get three billion dollars a year in taxpayer money for fiber that is shipped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing sold back to American chain retail stores like Wal-Mart. The aquifer is declining at a rate of 1.1 million acre-feet a day... In parts of the Texas Panhandle, hydrologists say, the water will be gone by 2010."
Plus ca change...
Egan's book certainly deserves the National Book Award. An excellent, informative read.
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
4.4 | 6,313 ratings
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Last update: 07-10-2024
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