The Dust Bowl

During the Great Depression, a decade of droughts and severe dust storms caused an ecological phenomenon called the Dust Bowl in the United States. Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado were gripped by mass rural impoverishment. The situation became more fraught as the period coincided with the introduction of mechanized farming pushing thousands into penury. The only way out for the thousands affected by the crisis was to pack up all their belongings and move to the West Coast where the horticultural farms of California became something akin to the Promised Land.

To respond to the crisis, the Farm Security Administration got set up and one of their landmark decisions was to document the crisis through their photography division. This project soon became a landmark event in the history of documentary photography and some of the most iconic photographs of the period come into being.

The documentary maker Ken Burns has a curated set of photographs of this period which can be accessed here. Do check them out (preferably on a desktop or laptop) and dwell a bit on each of them.

While I had a vague notion of this period, it was Aimee de Jongh’s graphic novel – ‘Days of Sand’ that showed me visually the horrific impact of this period. Almost all the iconic photographs of the period appear in her fictional story of a photographer commissioned to capture the lives of the people in the Dust Bowl.

While flipping through the comic and reading up about the period, I got to know that Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’ was also written by relying on the documented evidence of the period. After abandoning the book many years ago due to its inaccessible language style, I decided to soldier on this time. Through one family’s struggle to pack all their belongings into a truck and drive through hostile, inhospitable terrain – only to find themselves no better off – Steinbeck, with gut wrenching effect, lays bare what market forces and a collapse of agricultural systems can do to the poor. (The last paragraph of the book will probably be something that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.)

In free market economics, there’s a term called Creative Destruction. In simple words, each time a technological innovation gets introduced, many jobs will get affected. This process of ‘creative destruction’ is what has always driven societies across eons and is how they’ve navigated the ebbs and flows of change. While economics can theorize, only literature can paint the visceral pain of these changes.