Out of the Dust

This historical context discussion addresses the connection between the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression and points out the impact of both as seen in the novel.

The term “Great Depression” refers to a long-term period of nationwide economic hardship that lasted a decade. One marker of the beginning of the Great Depression is what history nicknamed “Black Tuesday,” October 29, 1929. Although the stock market began to decline after reaching high points in the summer and experienced a less consequential slide on October 24, the market crash on the 29th caused investors to lose billions. The ripple effects snowballed: Banks failed as people panicked and withdrew all their money. Then banks closed, causing customers to lose money the banks still held (bank insurers like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the National Credit Union Administration did not exist yet). People became unable or afraid to spend any money, so supply swelled, causing factories to slow production, which led them to lay off workers. Unemployment rose to elevated levels and increased tariffs on imported goods to the US caused other nations to hike tariffs on US exports. Consequently, world trade fell drastically as well, affecting many countries adversely worldwide.

A perfect storm of circumstances contributed to the sustained ecological event to which we now refer as the 1930s Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl did not simply “start” one day. As Miss Freeland, Billie Jo’s teacher, says, “There are a thousand steps to take / before you get there” (84). The destructive combination of a lack of soil-preservation techniques and a series of lengthy droughts led to devastation for farmers and their families, more strain on the economies of the towns in which they lived, and additional economic challenges nationwide. The droughts and dust impacted a wide swath of the western US. States with severely affected regions included Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Kansas.

The droughts and severe dust conditions contributed to the overall length and hardship of the Great Depression for farming families. As Billie Jo observes in the novel, the price of wheat per bushel when farmers tried to sell it at market in June 1934 was “seventy-three cents a bushel. / Not bad” (48). But as she details in the rest of that poem, “Harvest,” due to the dry conditions, farmers bring in only a fraction of sellable wheat per acre than they typically could. Additionally, that price of 73 cents is drastically reduced from its average in the 1920s of over a dollar per bushel—which was already drastically reduced from its wartime high of over two dollars per bushel. As Miss Freeland suggests in “The Path to Our Sorrow,” the effects then mounted: “And the price of wheat kept dropping / so we had to grow more bushels / to make the same among to money we made before, / to pay for all that equipment, all that land, and the more sod we plowed up, the drier things got […]” (84).

Soil preservation techniques, varying crops, and other agricultural changes plus alleviation of drought conditions eventually helped the Dust Bowl states to recover, but the process was time-consuming and costly. Some scholars believe the soil erosion experienced by some regions in the 1930s left a lasting if not permanent impact on the land. In the US, the economy improved gradually over the course of the decade; historians generally consider 1939 the end of the Great Depression, though many families and businesses continued to recover into the 1940s.