There are so many echoes of what happened in the 1930s and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005. For starters, there were ample warnings that a large part of the United States could be rendered uninhabitable if people continued to live as they did - in this case, ripping up all the grass that held the earth in place. In one sense, the prairie grass was like the levees around New Orleans; the grass protected the land against ferocious winds, cycles of drought, and storms. Then after the big dusters hit, you had a massive exodus: more than a quarter million people left their homes and fled. Never before or since had so many Americans been on the move because of a single weather event - until Hurricane Katrina. And finally there was the whole restoration effort: President Franklin Roosevelt thought he could restore the land to grass, plant trees, and maybe bring it back.
The Worst Hard Time is a story of survival, of perseverance, of the most corrosive poverty. Of days when the sky turned ink-black at noon, and times when parents gave up their children because they feared they would starve. Of days with no Social Security, no accurate weather forecasts. Most of the Dust Bowlers didn't even have electricity. They ate things like tumbleweeds - salted and canned - or roadkill, cooked over an open fire. And when they would slaughter a pig, as one woman told me, "We ate everything but the squeal."
There's a part-Apache cowboy family we follow throughout the story. The father loved horses and empty sky and the grasslands. What happened to the land broke his heart. Some days, he'd come home to see his wife in tears, trembling in the corner of their tiny house, muttering, "The dust, I just can't take it anymore."
There's a woman named Hazel Lucas, with southern charm and a big heart. We see her first as a teenage bride, teaching kids in a one-room sodhouse, and then we watch her try to raise a family and keep her dignity through these awful storms.
There's a hero of the New Deal, Big Hugh Bennett, a farm boy from the south who tried to save the grass in the Dust Bowl and convince people that the grasslands could be restored.
There's an extraordinary, pioneering Jewish family, the Herzsteins, who tried to maintain the rituals of daily life even after they lost a beloved uncle to a gunslinger.
There's a town booster and newspaper man, John McCarty, who tried to make a virtue of the dust storms.
And there was a free-spirited kid, one of nine children living in a hole in the ground, whose only goal was to make it to his senior year in high school.
The Dust Bowlers faced incredible peril. Everything the sky could throw at them, it did. In addition to the usual horrors - violent thunderstorms that produced hail the size of baseballs, wildfires that swept over the prairie, tornadoes that could level a town in the blink of an eye - there were these massive, almost otherworldly dust storms. A typical duster was a corrosive mix of sand and high-velocity air that could make cattle go blind and people cough until it hurt. The sky would blacken as these great waves of dust rose up and fell. Sometimes the leading edge of one of these storms was a mile-high. Charles Lindbergh, the greatest aviator of his age, got stuck at the edge of one of these storms and had to make an emergency landing. He said it was the most frightful thing he ever saw as a pilot. And the storms could be lethal. Makeshift hospitals were set up in school gyms for children who fell ill and then died suddenly from something the doctors called "dust pneumonia."
I said earlier that the Dust Bowl is the great untold story of the Greatest Generation. We know a lot about the Dust Bowl refugees, the so-called Okies and Arkies who migrated west to California and into the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s. Much of this we know from John Steinbeck's masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath, and from the government photographers and writers who did a terrific job of recording this migration. But very little is known about the people who did not leave the Dust Bowl. And as it turns out, most people never moved away. Nearly two-thirds of the Dust Bowl inhabitants hunkered down and lived through the Dirty Thirties. How did they get by? There was no food from the land, no jobs during the Depression, no money from the government until much later. This was my starting point.
I'd like to hear your thoughts about my book. I'll drop in when I can to talk with you and discuss your comments.
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Comments: 27
Is there a message that you're trying to convey with your book, or do you see this as more of a stand-alone snapshot of history? What would you like people to take away from your story? It sounds like you might have included some analysis of what the government did, or didn't do, to address poverty and joblessness.
My great-grandparents were migrant workers who traveled from Arkansas to California during that time to pick fruit. Just recently I've been trying to dig into their stories a bit before all my remaining relatives from that time are gone. I grew up hearing how my dad's parents refused to camp for vacations because it was a reminder of their experiences living in the camps near the fields where they worked. (The movie "Bound for Glory" depicts some great scenes of how this life would have been, if you've not see it.)
I'm curious: How do you think President Roosevelt's restoration efforts have relevance today?
Julie: I've often thought about Roosevelt's plan to plant 200 million trees in the arid midsection of the country, and his attempt to restore the grass, and whether it would have -- or did have -- any lasting legacy. You see some of the trees now, most of them dead. And you see some of the restored prairie. But other parts look like a moonscape. I think we can say with some certainty that he was deeply moved and genuinely cared about a part of the country that many others had given up on. If you look at post-Hurricane Katrina, and compare the government response to what FDR tried to do...well, there's really no comparison. FDR tried to put more than a bandaid on this open wound. I'm not sure he succeeded, but then it may have been an impossible task. IN any event, I came away from my research with a renewed fascination and -- yes -- respect, for his efforts. He was a blueblood, who was beloved by people called Okies and considered ignorant by others.
Your narrative approach makes this kind of topic more accessible; are you a fan of historian Studs Terkel? I can't help but ask, thinking of his book of oral history on the Great Depression, "Hard Times."
What are you working on now?
Your book was already on my "to read" list, but after reading this, I'll move it up several notches!
I'm glad to see the John Steinbeck reference -- he is my favorite author and I thought The Grapes of Wrath was such a moving novel.
Congratulations on the National Book Award. That's no small feat! Quite an honor.
And, it's an honor to be able to talk to you here on Gather.
I thought that was a shocking and sad statistic, that the best American novels of the year weren't moving until after being validated by the award.
Do you find that the award has boosted your exposure and sales?
There were a couple of questions about the National Book Award: it does change your life, in ways I wasn't entirely prepared for. People who would sniff at your other works now give them at least a cursory glance. (I'm only half-kidding). The book has sold really well, to my surprise, even making the New York Times bestseller list. Some people say Americans will not read history, that they don't care; my experience has been just the opposite -- that if you tell a good story, now matter how hard the episode, and you bring your characters to life, people will want to read about it. We all have a hunger for a collective national story of some stort. We all want to know what our "narrative" is, as a people. That's why it's been so gratifying to see this largely unknown part of the dust bowl story get a second life. It's also made me appreciate, more than ever, the people who lived through the hardest years of the Great Depression. Our lives are so easy by comparison.
I am reading The Worst Hard Time, now also. Good to see something on this out there. My mother and father talked so much about these hard times and all their experiences just trying to keep going through it all. I'm really curious, you must have really done some research and/or also traveled the area to come up with names like Inavale, NE -- most in NE, don't realize where this is -- but I do as we lived very close to that area. OH, yes, and if you haven't heard Lincoln, NE - the entire city has picked your book in the Lincoln Reads program that is done every year where everyone reads the same book and discusses it. I'm hoping school kids are having to read this also as a great way to read about our history. Wish you could be in Lincoln at one of those discussion groups about the book- would love to hear your experiences in the research in person. Now, I want to read your other books.l Keep up the good work.
I grew up attending church camps with a great baseball player, Tony Egan from SE Colorado ... any relation?
I greatly enjoyed "The Worst Hard Time" and after reading it I have an appreciation for the people who lived through the disaster and your efforts in committing their stories to history.
On page 38 of your book you recount someone's memory of a cattle dip at a rodeo in which the cattle are drowned by cowboys on either side of the dip trough holding the animals head under water. I wonder if that memory as recounted to you was perhaps not completely remembered as it actually occurred. Cattle dips were common then and the cattle had to be fully submerged to get the solution on them to kill the ticks that transmitted babesiosis. However, after their heads were submerged the cattle were immediately released to run out of the treatment vat.
Thanks for telling the story of these amazing people who endured and prevailed through 'The Worst Hard Time'.
I picked up your book while doing an A-Level History topic on the Depression, and found it very engaging and interesting. I am now doing a project on the Dust Bowl, and was hoping you'd be able to answer a question which would really help push my research along; what do you think were the key artistic responses to the Dust Bowl?
Thanks so much, once again congratulations on the brilliant book.