This and many other facts that were brought forth make THE DUST BOWL by Ken Burns a film that should intrigue anyone working on American genealogy. The film has a multitude of black and white images of the people, the farmsteads, and the black clouds of dust that devastated farming and caused many to die of dust fever, a lung disease, including many children, and left many with life-long lung ailments. This wasn't a little dust. This was a chronic barrage of massive clouds that even left the equivalent of sand dunes of dusk and is a testimonial to ecological disaster that was man made but also man resolved after much suffering. The film also has testimonials by some of the children who experienced migration who are now past mid-life.
Among the facts covered that are compelling to me and other American researchers are the following:
The clouds of dust were so fast and dark that some people thought the Biblical end of the world was upon them. The dust blackened the skies and chocked them and gave them dust pneumonia. The dust caused static electricity that made using phones impossible. The Buffalo grass that they had replaced with wheat is what nature and time had evolved as the perfect ground cover for a sometimes wet and sometimes parched area of the country there near Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle. Eventually 40,000 farmers signed up to learn a new technique called contour farming which over several years time did resolve the issue, but through the 1930's 80% of the Great Plain soil was eroded. As a result of the Dust, COUNTIES LOST 30-40% of their population in the 1930's. Schools closed. (See the changes by looking at the 1930 and then 1940 census.*) But 75% of the population hung in there maybe because they had families in the local cemeteries.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took a train ride, covering a couple thousand miles, in order to see for himself and talk to the farmers. Now that we know that Roosevelt hid his crippled body, when we see film of him standing, with an aid next to him, arm provided support, and then raising his arm to wave, we know what an actor he was. He saw that millions of acres were abandoned and that the children were underweight.
Many Dust Bowl families were too proud to accept what public relief there was. HERE THEN COMES THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS... Young men made $30 a month and had to send $25 of it to their families. Some people were critical, feeling that they were being paid to stand around, but others saw that over time these young men learned skills and used their hard physical labor to improve the country. (I can tell you that there is a park nearby where I live where the walls and steps that CCC's members built are still in use and in great shape.) And here then comes THE WORKS PROJECT ADMINISTRATION.
THE WPA BECAME THE BIGGEST EMPLOYER IN THE NATIONS with 8 million people employed and saving themselves from starvation.
By 1937 other ecological disasters were happening. The 1937 OHIO RIVER FLOOD that effected the city of Pittsburgh with houses floating away
THE DUST BOWL a film by Ken Burns is a production of Florentine Films and WETA Television C 2012 The Dust Bowl Film Project, LLC
Review C 2014 Ancestry Worship Genealogy
WOODY GUTHRIE WAS MOVED TO LOS ANGELES BECAUSE OF THE DUST BOWL and is probably the most famous DUST BOWL migrant.
