The Worst Hard Time (38 page)

Four million acres of farmland were empty, abandoned, with no takers, not even Resettlement—whose mission was to buy back land.
From the start, Bennett thought the answer was getting people to treat the prairie soil on its own terms, a great plowup in reverse. Conserve what farmland could be saved through new methods of contour plowing, crop rotation, and soil conservation districts. For other lands, the ground could be seeded, and in time the southern plains would have its grasslands back. Perhaps. Bennett, whose graduate degree was in chemistry, was not given to policy speculation. He was a man of science: look at the facts, draw the right conclusions. But he was in new territory. They all were. There were no historic models.

Roosevelt had asked for an honest verdict: why had the Great Plains blown away? What made this land die? The crisis of the transient prairie had already cost Depression-strapped taxpayers an enormous sum—five hundred million dollars since 1933—on remedial land projects, grants, loans, and relief. Before spending any more money, the president wanted to know if the plains could be saved, and if so, how. Roosevelt had also asked whether the arid flatlands should have been settled. Had it been a colossal mistake to allow homesteading on the land? Was the Jeffersonian small farmer, small town, agri-citizen model a horrible fit for the grasslands? Had this environmental catastrophe—the worst in American history—been aided by government?

The report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee was delivered to the president on August 27, 1936. It was labeled "personal and confidential," signed first by Bennett, and then seven agency heads. An extended memo,
The Future of the Great Plains,
was due at the end of the year. But this shorter report showed where the committee was going. The conclusions were stark.

The climate had not changed. This refuted a theory Roosevelt had been mulling for some time: that the plains were in the first years of a hundred-year cycle of change. The plains had suffered a severe drought—no argument there—but dry times were part of prairie life, dating back eons. An accompanying map showed the president what was obvious to any student of American geography: the nation's midsection west of the ninety-eighth meridian, from the Canadian border to Mexico, received only twenty inches of yearly rainfall or less. This was simply not enough rain to raise crops, no matter how
much "dust-mulching" or other dry farming gimmicks were promoted, and it was why banks for so long had refused to lend money in this arid zone. During the drought, the dry states had received anywhere from five to twelve inches annually.

"There is no reason to believe that the primary factors of climate, temperature, precipitation and winds in the Great Plains region have undergone any fundamental change," the report stated. "The problem of the Great Plains is not the product of a single act of nature, of a single year or even a series of exceptionally bad years."

What, then, was the cause?

"Mistaken public policies have been largely responsible for the situation," the report proclaimed. Specifically, "a mistaken homesteading policy, the stimulation of war time demands which led to over cropping and over grazing, and encouragement of a system of agriculture which could not be both permanent and prosperous."

For Roosevelt, who believed in human initiative aided by government goodwill as a guiding force, these words were hard to take. His most trusted aide on the land and a host of experts were telling him that
people
—not weather or bad luck—had caused the problem. What's more, in an additional blow to Roosevelt's humanitarian impulses, the experts said a big part of what ailed the prairie could not be fixed by man.

"The basic cause of the present Great Plains situation is an attempt to impose upon the region a system of agriculture to which the Plains are not adapted," the report stated. "The Great Plains has climatic attributes which cannot be altered by any act of man, although they may be slowly changed, for better or worse, by natural weather cycles which we cannot yet predict."

The report moved on to how the disaster had unfolded—a chronology of collapse. One chart showed how quickly the grass was overturned. In 1879, ten million acres were plowed. Fifty years later, the total was one hundred million acres. Grass was needed to hold the soil in place; it was nature's way of adapting to the basic conditions of the plains, the high wind and low rainfall. Buffalo grass, in particular, short and drought-resistant, was nature's refinement over centuries. The turf was intact for thousands of years, and then in two manic periods of exploitation—the cattle boom, followed by the wheat bubble—it was ripped apart.

"Thus there was not only a progressive breaking up of the native sod but a thinning out of the grass cover on lands not yet plowed."

But having placed the blame for the flyaway plains on the farming equivalent of a gold rush, Bennett and his colleagues did not then fault the individuals who brought the plow that broke the land.

"The settlers lacked both the knowledge and incentive necessary to avoid these mistakes. They were misled by those who should have been their natural guides. The Federal homestead policy, which kept land allotments low and required that a portion of each should be plowed, is now seen to have caused immeasurable harm. The Homestead Act of 1862, limiting an individual holding to 160 acres, was on the western plains almost an obligatory act of poverty."

This was the most damning indictment: the sacred Homestead Act,
almost an obligatory act of poverty!

Technology and speculation came in for their share of blame. Wartime demand drove up prices, stimulating record production. The prices could not hold, leaving farmers to plow more ground as the only way to break even. And these bountiful years happened "at the beginning of a wet period which has apparently been terminated." Had farmers tried to settle the arid plains forty years earlier when it was more typically dry, they never would have broken ground.

"The dust storms of 1934 and 1935 have been visible evidence to nearly every American living east of the Rocky Mountains that something is seriously wrong. The extent of the erosion on the Great Plains has not yet been accurately measured. It is safe to say that 80 percent of it is now in some stage of erosion."

Roosevelt liked action plans, programs that could be carried out quickly, grandly mobilizing big forces toward a common goal.

"We are definitely in the era of building," he said in a speech, "the building of great public projects for the benefit of the public and with the definite objective of building human happiness."

But the report said there was no easy solution.

"This is a situation that will not by any possibility cure itself. A series of wet years might postpone the destructive process, yet in the
end, by raising false hopes and by encouraging renewal of mistaken agricultural practices, might accelerate it."

And why should a city person care about this wreckage of lives and land?

"The situation is so serious that the Nation, for its own sake, cannot afford to allow the farmer to fail," the report concluded. "We endanger our democracy if we allow the Great Plains, or any other section of the country, to become an economic desert."

It was enough to keep Roosevelt up nights. Failed homestead acts. Settlers misled. A speculative frenzy. And now the retreat: ten thousand people a month leaving the Great Plains, the greatest single exodus in American history. He took to the airwaves, sounding pained and conflicted. In a radio chat on September 6, 1936, too early in the calendar to claim to be from his "fireside," he tried to inspire people to hold on.

"No cracked earth, no blistering sun, no burning wind, no grasshoppers are a permanent match for the indomitable American farmers and stockmen and their wives and children, who have carried us through desperate days, and inspire us with their self-reliance, their tenacity, and their courage."

It was an election year, and Roosevelt was extremely popular. Europe was tense, with Hitler consolidating power and fortifying his military in Germany, and the Spanish Civil War a staging ground for the larger battle to come. Consumed by its domestic crisis, the United States declared neutrality in the affairs of Europe. The Republicans ran a Kansan, Governor Alf Landon, the only GOP governor west of the Mississippi. Landon said Roosevelt had no idea how to fix the Great Plains and was taking the country in a radical direction. Most Americans felt otherwise: the election was a rout. Roosevelt carried every state but Maine and Vermont, winning the Electoral College by the largest margin ever, 523 to 8, and the popular vote by more than ten million, with 60 percent of the electorate. Late in his life, Landon was asked about the New Deal and its lasting effect on the country. He said it "saved our society."

The High Plains, like the rest of the country, had given its heart to
Roosevelt. People wrote to him as if he were an uncle, the one who always had an answer.

"Please do something to help us save our country, where one time we were all so happy," a plainswoman, Mary Gallagher, wrote.

FDR went back to Bennett and others at work on the larger report of the future of the dusted land. What was next? They had more of the same coming: the past had been a failure, nature was abused, the dust storms were the consequence, don't count on rain to save it.

"Nature has established a balance in the Great Plains," an early draft of the second report concluded. "The white man has disturbed this balance; he must restore it, or devise a new one of his own." Here was an echo of Aldo Leopold's groundbreaking conservation essay of 1933; they even quoted him, citing the interdependence of people and other species, earth and technology.

Bennett's agency was ready to start planting the first sections of new sod on the stripped land. But many questions remained: how could grass ever get started during a marathon of drought? What species would survive? How long would it take for the sod to build up, resilient as in the past? Were there enough nutrients in the soil for grass to take hold? Soil science was basic; agronomists could tell the makeup of soil, its composition, but no one had ever dreamed of recreating an entire ecosystem. The new grass would have to live or die on the nutrient-poor land, after it was settled with basic erosion therapy. The nesters had removed a perennial plant, a perfect fit for flat, wind-scraped land, and replaced it with a weak annual. The government bought 107,000 acres in a dead corner of Kansas that drained into the Cimarron River, just over the state line from No Man's Land, and designated it as the first patch in the rebuilding of the great American grassland. They planted a mixture: weeds to hold the ground down, grass from Africa, blue grama, bluestem, buffalo grass, and other flora. It would take time: ten, twenty, maybe fifty years before a big new swath of turf was in place again.

Roosevelt still wanted something dramatic, something quicker—a Grand Coulee Dam for the soil. His "Big Idea" of planting trees down the middle of America had taken on a life of its own after the Forest Service came back with a positive report. The president had
been mocked since he first talked up his vision, a belt of trees a hundred miles wide, stretching from the North Dakota border with Canada to just south of Amarillo, Texas. Trees could not stop the dust. But they could provide shelter from black blizzards, enough so people could get a crop in. He hoped the project could accomplish three things:

Break up the wind.
Check erosion.
Employ thousands of people.

Some also said the trees would produce more rain, though this promise was never written into the enabling law. And in pushing for government-subsidized tree-planting on the flatlands, Roosevelt was harkening back to an earlier American law, the Timber Culture Act, which allowed people to claim a significantly larger homestead if they agreed to plant and maintain trees on a portion of the land.

A tree-planting crew was dispatched to Oklahoma, east of No Man's Land. Roosevelt's Big Idea was underway.

"This will be the largest project ever undertaken in the country to modify climate and agricultural conditions," said F. A. Silcox, chief of the Forest Service. He apparently had not read the warnings of the Great Plains report, the cautions against trying to remake the climate. The tree planters were CCC crews, young men hungry for work; an eleven-man team could plant six thousand trees a day. Nesters stared at these earnest New Dealers dropping saplings in the ruined soil, planting trees like crops in rows running north and south, filling the tanks of big gas-hauling trucks with water to give the trees a start. Damn fools, the nesters said. Nobody plants a tree on the prairie facing north and south. After a time, the crews shifted and planted rows running east and west, a more effective wind barrier.

Trees would bring people together, make it easier to live, some of the experts said—social change through hardwood. "We are going to improve living conditions," said Charles Scott, who was in charge of the shelterbelt program in Kansas. "We want to make conditions livable. We want to develop a rural sociability, a rural happiness, a rural contentment which we think such plantings will bring about."

The goal was to plant 180,000 acres a year, mostly on private land, which the owner would then take responsibility for. The trees were planted in strips up to a mile apart, up to a hundred strips within the width of the shelterbelt. Farming would take place between the strips. One government scientist who had been sent to the Gobi Desert to study what could grow on sterile soil came back with several species; another returned from the Sahara with suggestions. Adjustments were made based on advice from nesters. Into the ground went cottonwoods, honey locusts, hackberries, ash, walnuts, ponderosa pines, and Chinese elms. The trees held through that first winter, and by late spring of 1937, as the dusters started up with the ferocious seasonal winds, Roosevelt sent the crews out again. The president ignored the warnings of Hugh Bennett and others who said man could not alter the basic nature of the Great Plains. Bennett could have his fledgling new grassland and soil conservation districts, but Roosevelt bulled ahead with the idea that had most captivated him from the start. He dispatched his army to half a dozen states, to the most broken counties, the most barren farms, the driest land, with a simple command: plant trees, two hundred million of them, from the top of the plains to the bottom.