Dust Thou Art
The days before one of the worst black blizzards to barrel across the Plains, an event song writer Woody Guthrie “watched…come up like the Red Sea closin’ in on the Israel children,” lead up to April 14, 1935, Black Sunday, the title and subject of Chicago-based TimeLine Theatre Company’s final production for the 2023-4 season. (https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/guthrie/black-sunday,)
As middle-aged Okie mother Ma is increasingly overcome by a compulsion to sketch the visions she sees in her dreams—menacing swirls of black and gray blotting out sky and land--TimeLine’s 27th theatrical production illuminates the challenges of the Depression-era Oklahoma panhandle through its characters:
Stubborn Pa, unwilling to give up on his land and homestead despite years of drought, locust and wild rabbit infestations.
Daughter Sunny, searching for a way out of the daily grind like thousands of other families who pack up wagons and head west to California.
Mexican laborer Jesús, an itinerant farmworker forced to move from homestead to homestead, harvest to harvest in literally back-breaking labor using the short handle hoe known as el cortito or el brazo del diablo (the devil’s arm) that requires him to stoop over as he thins and weeds crops for more than 12 hours a day. (https://timelinetheatre.com/events/black-sunday/
The 2018 novel Death of a Rainmaker sets a murder and its investigation against the backdrop of a 240-day drought that brings flamboyant Roland Coombs to Jackson, Oklahoma, on August 2, 1935. Roland promises residents he will bring rain to parched fields with “a little old matchstick and a load of TNT.” Instead, Roland is found dead the next afternoon, bludgeoned to death and hidden beneath mounds of dirt and sand left after an hour-long duster pummeled the walls of the city’s Jewel Movie House.
Like Black Sunday, Death of a Rainmaker recalls the devastating, decades-long effects of environmental abuse across the Dust Bowl. It also factors in efforts to address the long-term droughts and their consequences, including the environmental restoration work of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the charlatans who guarantee they will “give the skies a healthy kick in the drawers” to bring down rain.
The Dust Bowl
During the 1930s and early 1940s, waves of drought regularly passed over the Great Plains of the Southwest. Overall, precipitation was 15-20% less than normal almost every year of the decade, and in some years, it was more than 50% less than normal. Some areas had less than 10 inches per year for several years in a row. (https://www.weather.gov/ama/dust_bowl_versus_today) With little surface water or timber to serve as anchors, the Plains was also subject to high winds.
Nevertheless, the area became the target of agricultural development in the late 1800s. The Homestead Act, passed in 1862, gave individuals 160 acres of land to settle and “improve.” The Kirkland Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 encouraged even more settlement, leading to property claims that encompassed 270 million acres or 10% of the continental US. (https://timelinetheatre.com/events/black-sunday/
To transform natural prairies into tillable acres, the new and inexperienced farmers pulled up grasses, in the process exposing and loosening soil by removing the roots that held the soil in place and trapped meager amounts of rainfall. Cattle and sheep on ranches also pulled up the natural grasses and shrubs that held onto soil, and over-farming depleted and dried it out.
Black Blizzards
Dust storms increased in number and intensified as soil conditions worsened. The yearly number of storms nearly tripled in one year, rising from 14 in 1932 to 38 in 1933. A storm on May 11, 1934 sent clouds of dust 2 miles high across the country, traveling over 2000 miles to dust buildings along the East Coast. https://footnote.wordpress.ncsu.edu/2020/07/23/black-blizzards-7-24-2020/
Along with high winds and dust, the Dust Bowl area was infested by insects and overrun by rabbits. A swarm of grasshoppers on July 26, 1931 was so thick it blocked out the sun, leaving mounds of carapaces that had to be removed with scoops and cornstalks that had been eaten to the ground. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/grasshoppers-bring-ruin-to-midwest
Black-tailed rabbits multiplied steadily, reaching a total population of nearly 8 million in 30 Kansas counties in 1935 and devouring not only corn stalks but their roots as well. https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/jackrabbit-drives/12097
Black Sunday
On the morning of April 14, 1935, a cold front from Canada collided with the warm air mass over the Dakotas, dropping the temperature 30 degrees and kicking up winds from 40 to 60 mph. The storm spanned 1000 miles and moved swiftly across the Plains, hitting northwest Oklahoma at 4:00 pm and Amarillo at 7:00 pm, with winds finally dying down at 7:30 pm. People huddled in their homes or cars while the storm lasted, kerchiefs over their faces.
While none of the people in the area died directly during or immediately after the storm, most had long-term effects from inhaling dust—bronchitis, dust pneumonia or “brown plague” and shortness of breath. Wildlife did not fare as well. Birds tried to fly away from the storm but ended up falling from the sky, and jack rabbits suffocated to death.
Dust Busters
A New Deal program aimed at helping reduce the high rate of unemployment during the Great Depression by employing cadres of workers to conserve natural resources. One of its divisions—the Soil Conservation Service—worked directly with Dust Bowl farmers to ameliorate soil erosion and prevent the devastating consequences of the black blizzards.
Meanwhile, conmen roamed the prairies, advertising their own special techniques for making rain and bilking desperate farmers and townspeople in the process.
Civilian Conservation Corps
To help reduce overall unemployment stemming from the stock market crash of 1929 and resulting Great Depression, US President Franklin Roosevelt on April 5, 1933, brought together the departments of War, Interior, Agriculture, and Labor to develop a program that would hire and pay young men to work on environmental conservation. In three months, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) created 1433 camps to accommodate 300,000 men. Two months later, CCC had 2900 camps and 500,000 CCCers. Between the years 1933 and 1942 when the corps was closed, the program employed 3 million men.
CCCers were generally between the ages of 18 and 25 years. They also included veterans of WW I, Native Americans, and craftsmen and skilled foresters as well as African Americans who served for at least six months in a CCC camp that followed military-style operation and rules.
CCC has been credited with replacing 3.5 million trees that were lost because of natural erosion, inappropriate farming practices, fires, and lumbering, accounting for half of all reforestation in the country’s history. (https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/civilian-conservation-corps)
The Soil Conservation Service of the Department of Agriculture was formed in 1938 to oversee the work of 60,000 young men each year in 500 projects across 44 states. The men taught farmers how to conserve soil, worked with individual farmers on their own land, tested and researched techniques to control soil erosion. Among them were gullies to capture rainfall, fencing, trees planted on contours of land, and land terraces that prevented water runoff. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/ccc/salmond/chap7.htm
Rainmakers
Real-life rainmaking conmen were fodder for almost mythical tales. Tex Thornton, known for arming torpedoes of explosives into hard rock to make way for oil wells, had plans for Dalhart, Texas, in 1935. He released balloons armed with nitroglycerine and time clocks set to explode at various altitudes. Winds carried the balloons away, however, with one dropping onto the roof and detonating a barn and another just missing a family driving east in their car. He left town with only the $300 town leaders paid in front money but did claim credit for the light dusting of snow that fell over the town a week a week later. https://www.oilystuff.com/single-post/rainmaker
Charley Hatfield in the late 1800s was a student of meteorological pluvicultre or rainmaking,
convincing towns desperate for rain that he could induce showers by building towers and blasting his own brand of rain-making substances into the air with dynamite and nitroglycerine.
In 1915 he had a special plan for San Diego. He wouldn’t charge for the first 30 or 40 inches of rain he caused to fall, but he expected $500-$1000 for every inch over and above 30 to 50.
His plan worked way too well. After his rainmaking on January 1, rain fell steadily between the 15th and the 20th. It rained again from the 22nd to the 27th, overflowing the reservoir, washing out bridges, toppling phone lines, flooding streets and eventually causing the dam to burst and washing away 20 people.
When San Diego city leaders refused to pay him, Hatfield threatened to sue. He reneged when he realized he would have to compensate the city for damages. Hatfield the Rainmaker, The Worst Hard Time]
Dust Thou Shalt Return?
Regular irrigation and improvements in agriculture and soil management, such as no-till farming, sustain land and vegetation during dry periods, protect exposed areas, and prevent the erosion of topsoil. But many sources of water are drying up. The Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates 30-46% of farmland in the Plains states, could be depleted by as much as 70% within 50 years. In the mid-2000s, water levels were already half of what they were 100 years before. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/dust-bowl-heat-wave-climate-change-twice-as-likely-study-says/
Higher temperatures and protracted heat waves are up to 2.5 times more likely because of climate change. And the rising temperatures trigger a vicious cycle: High temperatures dry out the land. Drier land releases more energy, and the energy converts to heat. Periods of drought therefore fuel more severe heat waves, which lead to drier conditions. https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-the-climate-warms-could-the-u.s.-face-another-dust-bowl
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and a day like Black Sunday, could very well come again.