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Aeolian Research 2 (2010) 1–4
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Aeolian Research
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aeolia
Donald Worster’s ‘‘Dust Bowl” q
Stanley Wayne Trimble *
Geography, Univ. of California, 1255 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1524, United States
Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
(Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition). Oxford University Press, New
York, 2004.
When I first read this book over 25 years ago, I thought it a
political tract. So it remains with this new edition. Worster starts
out with a quote from Marx about capitalism robbing the soil
and then spends the next 290 pages trying to prove it using selected evidence from the Dust Bowl period. Unfortunately, he
makes more questionable points than can be covered in a brief review. I will confine my comments to the most flagrant issues.
Worster’s basic theme is that the Dust Bowl was created by a
bunch of mostly ignorant, greedy, gullible, unethical (but ‘‘Puritan”) yokels, driven by the American capitalistic ethic of acquisition and also by deviously clever and manipulative ‘‘Madison
Avenue hucksters,” who took up the land and mined it agriculturally for short term profits.
Was the Dust Bowl one of the three worst environmental problems ever as Worster contends? Certainly the Dust Bowl was an extremely severe problem which richly deserves serious academic
inquiry. And despite strong evidence to the contrary considered later in this review, I believe, like Worster, that the Dust Bowl was
mainly induced by modern and often unwise agriculture, all exacerbated by an extreme drought. The strongest evidence for that is
the great recovery and stabilization of the region since the soil conservation movement got underway in the 1930s, a topic unfortunately given short shrift by Worster.
Worster considers a large region in this study (approximately
208 counties) but his approach is to use ‘‘case studies” of two (2)
counties which we, on faith, have to take as representative of the
entire region. That’s a small sample and no study, even when
objective, is any better than the representiveness of samples. Another problem with case studies, especially when not set into context, is that one can introduce all sorts of weighted evidence and
fascinating anecdotes which most readers are in no position to
judge. Case studies with small samples fail most tests of rigor. With
detailed federal and state census reports by every county readily
available for the entire period, why did Worster not give us the
q
Editor’s note: Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl is the best-known scholarly book on
the topic and a seminal work in the field of Environmental History. It was published
in 1979 and I felt that the recent release of the 25th Anniversary Edition warranted
a re-evaluation of this winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for American
History. This essay by Stanley Trimble began as a book review, but grew into a more
substantive commentary.—J.L.
* Tel.: +1 931 363 0457.
E-mail address: [email protected]
1875-9637/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V.
doi:10.1016/j.aeolia.2009.11.002
complete, clinical picture? That same question was pointedly
posed by Cunfer (2002, 2005, 2008) in several rigorous studies
(systematic factual data fairly analyzed) which give a quite different view of the Dust Bowl and its origins. Cunfer maps land use,
precipitation and other data which indicate that the relationship
between agriculture and dust storms does not correlate well in
either space or time, suggesting that human causality may be
dubious.
But Cunfer then gives Worster an unearned reprieve by pointing
out that census reports were not computerized when Worster researched the book nor were historical county boundaries easily
available. The reprieve is unearned because the US Census, geographers, and others have been mapping extensive US land use for
over a century. When I researched historical soil erosion on the
Southern Piedmont in the early 1970s, for example, I spent two
years reconstructing land use, population, ethnicity, tenancy and
other potential causative factors as available for the entire region
and period. Moreover, I had to reconstruct the volatile county
boundary changes over the historical period and these were in
the poorly delineated Headrights (Metes and Bounds) survey region of the eastern US. I found analyzing 130 counties for a period
of over 180 years to be tedious but not impossible. It does not seem
unreasonable to expect Worster to have handled 208 counties in
the much simpler Federal (rectilinear) land survey system for a
much shorter period of only about 60–70 years. That would have
given a sturdy framework on which to hang factual case studies
and even anecdotes.
Without the rigor of a full chronological and spatial analysis, it
is difficult to judge the validity of evidence presented. For example,
Cunfer (2008) questions the use of photos and other materials used
by Worster which were seemingly made as propaganda, both for
soil conservation and for radical causes (see also Ganzel, 1984).
This raises questions about the other evidence presented – how
cherry picked was it? To his credit, Worster did consult the
National Archives (as well as state historical archives) and introduced several types of evidence found there. But how unfortunate
it is that he apparently did not consult the huge file on soil erosion
in arid and semi-arid regions of the US (Record Group 114, Entries
49, 57–75). This analysis, including climatic as well as land use and
tenure data, was done by a group of earth scientists in the late 30s
and early 40s under the direction of the eminent climatologist C.
Warren Thorthwaite, himself from Oklahoma and vitally interested
in the Dust Bowl. This effort was sponsored by the Climate and
Physiographic [Research] Group, under the aegis of USDA, and
has been known since then as the work of the ‘‘Thorthwaite
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S.W. Trimble / Aeolian Research 2 (2010) 1–4
Group”. It seems unlikely that some of this analysis would not
impinge significantly on any study of the Dust Bowl. Yet, the
existence of this file is not even acknowledged in Worster’s book.
There are also other USDA studies as well as a huge photographic
file from the 1930s by the Climate and Physiographic Group which,
sadly, Worster seems to have missed.
Let’s now consider the premise that the Dust Bowl was the unique child of capitalism. As opposed to what? Worster never gives
a clear alternative that would have prevented the Dust Bowl. How
about state socialism? Only 40 years of state socialism (aka communism) destroyed environment in the old Soviet Union and eastern Europe (e.g., Goldman, 1971; Weiner, 1988). It will take
Germans, for example, centuries to repair the environmental depredations of the old German Democratic Republic. Basically, it is
the tragedy of the commons: when ‘‘everybody” owns the environment as in a socialist state, then no one owns it and thus no one is
willing to take responsibility for it. Most damning of socialist planning in the context of the Dust Bowl was that Soviet planners in the
1950s disrupted thousands of human lives and mobilized massive
but scarce resources to extend collective wheat farms into the
steppes of central Asia (the ‘‘Virgin Lands”). Of course, this absurd
project failed with dire environmental results. Note that the Soviet
planners did this with full knowledge of the earlier American debacle. The two factors that prevented a total disaster there were (1)
the inefficiency of socialist agriculture so that relatively little land
was plowed during the period and (2) the absence of a protracted
drought as was experienced in the Dust Bowl. Worster does mention the Virgin Lands project, properly calling it a ‘‘debacle,” but
then he fails to follow the obvious political and economic implications, merely brushing them aside. He also fails to mention that
while pre-Revolutionary Russia had been a massive exporter of
wheat (produced largely by ‘‘capitalist” Kulaks), the Soviets were
forced to rape the virgin lands because like most socialist countries, they were unable to feed themselves. One might assume that
the first role of any economic system is to adequately feed its people but Worster continually criticizes the ‘‘overproduction” of capitalism. Perhaps he should also have considered that it was this
‘‘overproduction” of American farmers (including those of the Dust
Bowl region) that fed the Allies during WWI, arguably saving the
Allied cause.
Another alternative to capitalism might have been organizing
agriculture into private collectives. For this we have the examples
of utopian settlements in the US, all of which, so far as I know,
failed as collectives and have since been privatized. Even the Israeli
Kibbutzim have had to privatize. More to the point, I know of no
evidence in environmental history that suggests that such collectives have an environmental record superior to that of their capitalist neighbors.
Worster never relents in his vendetta against capitalism. It appears to him that almost every aspect of American society was surreptitiously geared to promote its evils—even the US rectilinear
Land Survey which had been ‘‘slapped down by land officials”
(p.143). This is a rather cavalier, or perhaps myopic, appraisal of
a system which goes back to the Romans and was carefully developed by Jefferson and others to replace the old and notoriously
inaccurate and non-reproducible Metes and Bounds system in
the eastern US which has been keeping lawyers employed for three
centuries.
In an even more puzzling vein, Worster suggests that the Dust
Bowl farmers should have emulated indigenous populations. For
example, he admires the low population densities of such populations and their ability to control population growth stating that
they ‘‘carefully kept their numbers down to what the ecological
community could support” (p.77). ‘‘Carefully?” What he does not
consider is just exactly how such primitive societies could ‘‘control” population. The choices are few: warfare, starvation, infanti-
cide, homicide, suicide and migration. And indigenous
populations were not quite as environmentally benign as Worster
seems to imagine.
Worster correctly criticizes some of the farm practices such as
trying to farm too much land and even sociological characteristics
such as the improvidence of some farmers who, for example, did
not even grow food on the farm and were thus forced to raise
even more cash crops in order to buy food. But Worster goes well
beyond this and, in my view, much of his sociological critique is
elitist and sometimes condescendingly mean-spirited and unfair.
For example, he suggests that such farmers had little business
aspiring to own such bourgeois items as stoves and refrigerators
and, in any case, wanted these items mainly because they were
duped by clever advertising. He is also greatly exercised, gratuitously so, about their ‘‘Puritanism.” What did their Puritanism,
assuming it was that, have to do with soil erosion? When it
comes to critiquing social mores and folkways in early 20th
century mid-America, Worster is clearly no Sinclair Lewis. Lewis
worked with a figurative scalpel but Worster uses a sledgehammer.
Worster seems consumed with the idea that ‘‘Madison Avenue
hucksters”, using newspaper and especially radio advertising, cleverly enticed the poor farmers to plow up vast areas in order to buy
more consumer goods. But the chronology simply doesn’t fit. Most
of the agricultural expansion was during WWI and the early 1920s
but commercial radio was not widespread until the 1930s. And in
any case, how many farmers owned radios—or even had electricity? As for newspapers, just how alluring were advertisements in,
say, the Sublette [KS, pop 600] Monitor, and how many farmers
did they reach? It was in fact the late 1930s before people in small
towns and farms on the plains were really affected by modern
advertising. Indeed, a very interesting account of this very phenomenon was described by none other than Bernard DeVoto
(accompanied by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) who in 1940 revisited
the small towns of the West in 1940 and described the efflorescence of modern styles springing up there since the 1920s (DeVoto,
1940).
One of Worster’s major errors is his pivotal contrast between
American and European agriculture, always to the favor of the latter. Of course, he really means northwest Europe, not the south
where most soil washed away three millennia ago from poor land
use and a harsh climate. For at least two reasons this is an invalid
comparison, and an examination of these two reasons reveals why
soil erosion was rampant in the US but not in northwest Europe.
First, European agriculture is economically intense. Land is scarce,
a very expensive capital input which must be preserved and even
improved by high labor, fertilizer, and other costs. By contrast, land
in the US was cheap, or even free, resulting from the deliberate US
government policy to have the land occupied and patented. Thus,
agriculture became extensive (low labor and other inputs) and land
became predictably expendable, a condition which was lamented
in the literature from colonial days onward. Applicable here is
the old saying, ‘‘When bread is free, people will feed it to pigs.” This
extreme distortion of the market (government-subsidized capital
input) vitiates Worster’s basic premise. ‘‘Capitalism” wasn’t the
driving force behind the form of agriculture implicated in the Dust
Bowl. Government incentives were. We may not have a neat
vocabulary for designating a system that was neither capitalist
nor socialist, but that’s no excuse for misrepresenting the more
complex political and economic reality of the time. The distortion
was created by government.
While I lament the lack of a good land ethic in the pre-1930s US,
especially among large Southern landowners (Trimble, 1985),
there simply was little incentive to have such an ethic other than
one’s own personal standards. And an economic system cannot
be based entirely on personal standards.
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S.W. Trimble / Aeolian Research 2 (2010) 1–4
Another point about the intensive-extensive dichotomy is that
extensive agriculture produces relatively cheaper food. The
European system that Worster admires is quite regressive in this
respect. And intensive agriculture is not necessarily environmentally benign or even environmentally better.
The second problem with the US–Europe comparison is that
northwest Europe has a mild and moist climate with a dependable moisture supply and moderately good soils. Even with poor
land use, soil erosion was a minor problem there and accepted
agricultural methods had evolved over centuries to suit this benign environment. In contrast, the US, as the eminent American
geographer Carl Sauer once put it, had a much more ‘‘lusty” climate with extremes of temperature, rainfall and drought which
Americans, mostly from northwest Europe, had never experienced
and thus had no techniques to deal with (Trimble, 1985, in press).
Thus, despite some widespread but primitive efforts to conserve,
soils were washed away in humid areas and were blown away in
semi-arid regions. Worster, apparently not comprehending this
difference, constantly berates these poor American farmers for
not using the correct techniques. But ‘‘correct” agricultural techniques based on scientific experimentation in the 1920s and 30s
were not even developed and available to American farmers until
the 1940s and later (Trimble, 1974, in press; Trimble and Lund,
1982).
While Worster never really gives us an alternative to ‘‘capitalism,” he does frequently suggest that ‘‘government” should have
intervened in some way with more controls. For example, he says:
‘‘These capitalist-minded individuals were still permitted the freedom to live where they chose, to own as much land as they liked, to
plant whatever they wanted, and to pursue gain without much
hindrance” (pp. 153–154).
Personal and economic freedom in the US? Imagine that. Since
we lacked a Politburo, just to whom or what agency in government
would Worster have delegated the responsibility to make such
decisions for these benighted and villainous farmers?
Government did step in but not in the draconian way that Worster seems to envision. Starting early in the 20th century, states
and the federal government cooperated to set up experiment stations to find methods to contend with American climate and soil
conditions as mentioned above. Armed with these new methods
by the mid-late 1930s, government at several levels set out in a
remarkably organized way to pass this information on to farmers.
Worster does mention some of this but doesn’t seem to realize the
full import. He mainly discusses ecologists like Paul Sears and
intellectual bureaucrats like Rexford Tugwell, but the main impetus came from technocrats like H.H. Bennett of the USDA. Worster
complains that farmers would not listen to intellectuals, and I
wonder if he realizes how little time farmers have to listen to anyone. For very good reasons, one being the potential for bankruptcy
or even starvation, they are conservative about changing their
methods. That’s why governmental efforts including technical
and financial assistance and ‘‘demonstration areas” were so effective (Trimble, 1974, in press; Trimble and Lund, 1982). Besides, just
how would a farmer of that place and period ‘‘listen” to intellectuals. One can imagine them picking up the fortnightly issue of The
Nation or The New Republic at the local country store along with
salt, sugar, coffee and ammunition.
With the incredibly bountiful output of present-day American
scientific agriculture on just a fraction of the area formerly cultivated, it now seems impossible to realize that hardly more than
a century ago many American farmers thought fertile and productive prairies to be deserts, that rocks grew from the soil, and that
the plow brought rain, the point being that scientific agricultural
knowledge came late. People and societies must be judged by the
standards of the day and the historian must know what those standards were.
3
Worster berates these poor farmers for planting wheat in semiarid regions. But how could they have known the climatic frontier
for various crops without historical experience and almost no
available environmental data like long-term rainfall records? There
were no extension agents around to guide them. If semiarid regions of the US had been settled by people from central Asia rather
than northwest Europe, different crop choices and planting strategies might have been made. But there still would have been almost
no climate and soils information even for people with the cultural
baggage appropriate to that region. Sadly, all of this seems to elude
Worster.
Worster also faults the farmers for buying tractors, which he
portrays as some sort of devil’s machine. Yes, tractors allowed
farmers to have more land plowed and thus more land susceptible
to wind erosion. Farm machinery is even now sometimes emotionally portrayed as promoting soil erosion. On the other hand, it can
also greatly abet soil conservation. Despite some wishful and sentimental thinking to the contrary, there is nothing better about
plowing with an animal as opposed to using machinery. Indeed,
the opposite is often true. At present in the upper Midwest, a relatively major problem has been soil erosion and stream contamination by Amish farmers using the old methods.
Finally, Worster seems to go to some trouble (pp. 205–206) to
discredit James Malin, a highly respected scholar of the American
plains. Why? It seems that Malin, had ‘‘intense ideological biases,”
which apparently means that Malin did not share Worster’s euphoria for Marx. But what Worster does not tell us is that Malin long
ago documented many severe dust storms in the ‘‘Dust Bowl” region long before the Dust Bowl period. Indeed, some of these were
reported at the time of European settlement in the mid-to-late
1800s, and some were judged to be just as severe as those of the
Dust Bowl of which Worster writes. Cunfer reports all this plus
more, a sadly embarrassing situation for Worster. My own inexpert
view on this is that, while severe earlier dust storms must have existed, Cunfer makes a bit too much of them. Again, I believe that
much of the wind erosion problem was due to agriculture and
drought, more or less as Worster maintains. But my question is
this: why did Worster, who obviously had read Malin, not tell us
about these earlier dust storms and consider them at length?
Was this an inconvenient truth?
From his more rigorous studies of wind erosion on the American plains, Cunfer (2008) concludes that the simplistic capitalists-plow-the - prairie-get-the-dust-storms villainy story such as
told by Worster and others is largely ‘‘twentieth-century mass
marketing.” In an earlier essay largely concerning ‘‘critical studies”
of history, Cronon (1992) is clearly troubled with what he subtly
terms ‘‘infinitely malleable” environmental history. He eloquently
poses the question ‘‘If our choice of narratives reflects only our
power to impose our preferred version of reality on a past that cannot resist us, then what is left of history?” The only logical response
to his rhetorical question is unfortunately ‘‘fiction.”
I find this book long on ideology and short on rigor, good historiography, knowledge of environmental science, and just basic fairness and common sense. It appears to me to be written primarily to
push an ideological agenda. At best, it is impressionistic and highly
subjective. We all agree that the Dust Bowl was a severe American
environmental problem, and such a problem deserves better treatment than it regretfully received in this book.
References
Cronon, W., 1992. A place for stories: nature, history, and narrative. The Journal of
American History 78, 1347–1376.
Cunfer, G., 2002. In: Knowles, A. (Ed.), Causes of the Dust Bowl in Past Time, Past
Place: GIS for History. ESRI Press, Redlands, CA, pp. 93–104.
Cunfer, G., 2005. On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment. Texas A&M,
College Station.
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Cunfer, G., 2008. Scaling the Dust Bowl. In: Knowles, A. (Ed.), Placing History: How
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