The Dust Bowl’s Inconvenient Truths: Seattle’s Egan Wins National Book Award November 16, 2006
“Seattle author Timothy Egan has won the National Book Award for nonfiction for his harrowing account of America’s Dust Bowl catastrophe, “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.”
The Worst Hard Time is an expertly rendered blend of history and first rate journalistic coverage of the lives of those who stayed through the Dust Bowl years. John Steinbeck’s fictional Grapes of Wrath immortalized the suffering and redemptive beauty of the “Okies” who fled the environmental disaster on the Great Plains. Egan’s book chronicles the lives of those who stayed behind, endured the disaster, and survived. Like Steinbeck, Egan uses the wrenching and often inspirational stories of individual people to weave a larger narrative of failed public policy, failed market economics, and failed environmental policies.
Before the prolonged drought of the mid 30’s, the Great Plains was the scene of an agricultural and market boom that created a crop based equivalent of strip mining. Grain speculators showed up by the hundreds to take advantage of high crop prices, cheap land, and advances in farm mechanization. Known as “suitcase farmers”, these speculators bought up land, hired out labor, reaped their profits, and left town. Those farmers who stayed behind invested heavily in land and in equipment, and at first enjoyed previously unimaginably high standards of living. Newspapers sprang up: restaurants featured dishes for more prosperous palates, and for the first time Plains dwellers could attend operas and go to museums. When farm prices fell as a result of overproduction, farmers at first tried to maintain their prosperity by bringing more acres under cultivation. As one of the Great Plains’ cyclical droughts took hold, the race to cultivate became a desperate and self-defeating struggle for survival- one that ended in sand dunes in Kansas and Texas, and dust storms so intense that they twice blackened the skies in Washington D.C.
This toxic brew of free market ideology , unsupportable debt, and climate variation was made much worse by the public policy of the period. The national and state governments of the day took the view that the market was the best regulator of human affairs, and regulatory bodies were naive in regarding the land as an inexhaustible resource, not subject to rapid change as a result of human intervention. Policy minded scientists like Hugh Bennett , at first regarded as hopelessly Quioxtic , lobbied hard at what we would now call the grassroots level , as well as in the smoke filled corridors of power, to get people to realize that denuding the Great Plains of native grasses was the source of the problem, and only a massive replanting would halt the soil degradation. Bennett finally made his case to Congress by using delaying tactics until a massive Dust Storm brought premature twilight to the Congressional Committee room itself. As the skies darkened in D.C. , political attitudes became more enlightened. Such paucity of political and ecological imagination becomes the stuff of high drama in Egan’s retelling.
Sitting Bull predicted the crisis of the Plains years before the Dust Bowl, but no one listened. Today, the Plains are only partially recovered from what was arguably both the greatest climatological disaster in American history, and at the same time a uniquely American form of catastrophe. For the Dust Bowl did not come about purely through a variation in weather, but through uniquely American dispensations of free market politics, opportunistic speculation, and debt-driven growth that ultimately exhausted the habitat and the infrastructures supporting an energy and input draining way of farming. To write good history, historians must be careful not to confuse the voices of the past with those of the present, nor judge the actions and intentions of past peoples by present standards. Yet historians themselves live in an age, a time , a place-in the midst of a particular present. It is our present- one of climate change, global warming, and growing ecological consciousness- that informs Egan’s choice of subject. Through this book, we hear the voices of the Dust Bowl survivors as clearly as echoes borne by the wind, whispers in the quieted rooms of grief, urgently spoken warnings and admonitions.. We recognize these recently gone people for who they are- our nearest, most valuable neighbors.
