The Dust Bowl

Donald Worster believed the Dust Bowl was “the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth”(Worster, 4). He investigated this phenomenon, which took place in the “dirty thirties”, and came to the conclusion that capitalism was to blame. The inhabitants of the Great Plains responded quite differently than the government after the disaster finally subsided. Both the reaction to the Dust Bowl and the events leading up to it are good representations how greedy the American culture was at the time.

When the Great Plains were first taken over by Americans in the early twentieth century, people saw opportunity. This land consisted of miles and miles of fields, and farmers knew they could prosper. Worster believed “what brought them to this region was a social system, a set of values, an economic order. There is no word that so fully sums up those elements as ‘capitalism’”(Worster, 5). The families who moved into the area were not to blame for the eventual disaster because, as Worster states, “the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to” (Worster, 4). Families migrated into Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and the surrounding areas and did what they do best. They farmed. Capitalist ideals made them believe it was acceptable to consider nature as capital (Worster, 6). While Americans in other part of the country were doing business selling clothing or cars or groceries, the people occupying the plains turned their farms into businesses in order to make more than enough money needed to simply survive. They farmed and farmed until the land was exploited beyond its means.

It only took 50 years for the once prospering farmland to turn into a layer of dust (Worster, 4). While the rest of the country was feeling the effects of the stock market crash, farmers in the rural area were still managing. “Then the droughts began, and they...