59 pages • 1 hour read
The Worst Hard Time
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Chapters 19-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “BLOW UP (1934-1939)”
Chapter 19 Summary: “Witnesses”
This chapter focuses on the people who are documenting the devastation of the High Plains during the 1930s and 1940s.
Egan introduces Don Hartwell, a farmer in Inavale, Nebraska, who keeps a diary that is eventually archived in a museum. The diary primarily centers around Hartwell's failure to grow corn. Two subsequent chapters, Chapter 22: “Cornhusker I,” and Chapter 24: “Cornhusker II,” also feature this diary.
Roy Stryker, the head of FDR's photography department, sends a team of photographers to the Dust Bowl to get “the record of decay for the files of the Farm Security Administration,” a new FDR agency created to combat rural poverty (248).Stryker's team comes back with photos of abandoned houses and farms, and one iconic picture of a father and son running for cover in a storm that receives national notoriety.
With FDR's approval, Stryker sets up a documentary division in his photo unit and hires Pare Lorentz, who has never made a film but has a vision for a documentary which will show how people destroyed the land on the High Plains. Lorentz decides to film on location instead of in a studio, to save money, and he chooses Dalhart, Texas for the film’s location. Lorentz asks around Dalhart if there is an old cowboy who still might have an old horse-drawn plow, and someone suggests Bam White. Lorentz pays White twenty-five dollars for two hours work, the highest wage White's ever earned, to simply plow a field with his plow. Lorentz releases the documentary, The Plow That Broke the Plains, in 1936, and Bam White's “hard, sun-seared, dust-chipped face […] [becomes] the visage of the High Plains at its lowest point” (253).
Chapter 20 Summary: “The Saddest Land”
John McCarty, president of the Last Man's Club and Dalhart's biggest morale booster, is livid about The Plow that Broke the Southern Plains. He protests the film, calling it government propaganda. When Hugh Bennett comes to Dalhart, McCarty goes out of his way to show Bennett that the citizens of Dalhart are not as downtrodden as the film suggests.
Bennett has problems trying to get the farmers to work together on his new project, Operation Dust Bowl. Neighbors complain about other people being lazy, drunk, sloppy or too religious to do their fair share of the work. Bennett's greatest challenge, however, is finding a way to hold down the ground long enough so his carefully selected seeds will sprout.
This chapter unveils a lot of statistics that speak to the Dust Bowl's devastation. Some of the more important statistics are: “More than 859 million tons of topsoil had blown off the southern plains in the last year,” and “across the entire Great Plains, nearly a million people had left their farms from 1930 to 1935” (254-55).
Egan tells how FDR does not have as much sympathy for the High Plains farmers in the early years of his administration as he does in later years. FDR’s more hands-off policy is revealed in one of his early fireside chats:“‘You and I know that many farmers in many states are trying to make both ends meet on land not fit for agriculture […] but if they want to do that […] I take it, it's their funeral’” (255).
Egan uses the works of two period writers to drive home the chapter's title, “The Saddest Land.”Caroline Henderson, a college-educated No Man's Land farmer's wife writes, “Letters from the Dust Bowl” published in The Atlantic Monthly. She explains in her letters how the black blizzards have left Dust Bowl residents confused and unable to make plans. Ernie Pyle, an influential writer of the era, tours the Dust Bowl in 1936 and refers to the plains as “‘the saddest land I've ever seen’” (256).
Chapter 21 Summary: “Verdict”
Hugh Bennett delivers the Great Plains Drought Area Committee report to FDR in 1936. The report is supposed to answer the following questions for the president: 1) had the climate changed? (as one Harvard meteorologist consultant had told FDR); 2) should the government have implemented the homestead program; and 3) should the government still pour money into the Great Plains and, if so, what should the money go towards?
First, the report states that the climate has not changed, and the disaster of the Dust Bowl was not due to weather, but human error. The report blames the government for misleading the people when it was the government's place to guide them. The report explains that when the government pushed homestead settlement, it caused over-plowing of the land. This over-plowing, combined with the government's push for even more wheat production to help the World War I effort, caused a wheat surplus, and the wheat surplus is what caused the wheat price decline. Other disturbing news in the report is that when the land was over-plowed (particularly with the new tractor technology), the over-plowing caused the roots of the grass to sever from the ground, forming loose topsoil. Bennett said it was the loose topsoil picked up by the High Plains winds that was causing the unusual strength and power of the new black dusters.
The report's verdict is that restoration of the Dust Bowl land and economy will not be easy. Bennett gives no guarantees on his solution, but he recommends a program to reseed the prairie, and establish local soil conservation groups on the Great Plains. Soil scientists have limited knowledge at this time. They know how to test for soil composition, but nobody in America has ever created an ecosystem on this grand of scale, which is now Bennett's challenge. The government chooses 107,000 acres in Kansas for the first experiment with rebuilding the grassland, planting a mixture of African grass, grama, bluestem, and buffalo grass. However, Bennett's most successful project is “Operation Dust Bowl” in Dalhart, Texas.
The chapter ends describing a bigger idea the president has of solving the agricultural problems of the grasslands: planting a belt of trees throughout the plains (known as his Shelter Belt program) in FDR's effort to break the area's winds and heat and hopefully modify the Great Plains' climate.
Chapters 19-21 Analysis
The theme of lost dreams is foregrounded in these chapters. Hazel Lucas Shaw, daughter of one of the oldest pioneering families, who once held on to hope and willed herself into positive thinking, loses her dream of keeping her family's homestead. She leaves her land to live in a more central location of Oklahoma. John McCarty’s illusion of himself overcoming any environmental crisis is dashed when McCarty arranges musicians to meet visitors from Guymon, Oklahoma, in order to show how the weather will not break Dalhart's toughness and spirit. One of the German Russians, Gustav Borth, experiences the loss of the American dream when he is broken by his child's mortal illness, his hard-worked land now completely devastated. Egan tells how “Gustav think[s] of the Russian steppe often, and it was always better in his mind than this place in America” (260).
Egan consistently portrays the devastation of the Dust Bowl in The Worst Hard Time with paintings, films, writings, statistics and eyewitness accounts. In these chapters, however, the characters are described not as just downtrodden, but completely desperate. His descriptions of desperate people echo facts he weaves into these chapters. One statistic states “across the entire Great Plains, nearly a million people had left their farms from 1930 to 1935” (255). Don Hartwell's July 21st entry is an example of this fact: “I have seen a good many bad years in this country, more, in fact than any other. But I never saw any worse than this one” (247). Caroline Henderson, in “Letters from the Dust Bowl,” tells of a neighbor committing the “‘unpardonable sin’” of dismantling his well to sell the pipes for scrap (207).In Chapter 20, “The Saddest Land,” there is a description of the tough German Russians at their breaking point: “The men cried because they had never seen anything like this and had never before been without a plan of action” (259).
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