The Worst Hard Time: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

Images from the Associated Press ran in every newspaper, as people tried to explain what they had witnessed. The drought was now in its fourth year. Though dry periods were a part of life on the Great Plains, the ground was naked in 1935. That was not normal. Hugh Bennett wanted a permanent reform to address “an environmental disaster bigger than anything in American history.” Within the Roosevelt administration, there were conflicting views. A Harvard geologist warned the president that the climate itself had changed, “the start of a cycle that would take a hundred years or more and leave the southern plains ‘a desert waste.’” The Agriculture Department thought that it was just a severe drought—not a sign of a shift in climate. The area that had once been called the Great American Desert might come to fit the description.

Roosevelt called for “young, uniformed CCC workers” to save America’s heartland by planting the vast row of trees that he had proposed. Harold Ickes continued to push for reverse homesteading. Hugh Bennett wanted to form farming districts where everyone would follow a set of conservation rules, “rotating crops, fallowing land, abandoning tear-up-the-earth methods of plowing.” Bennett also worked with Congress to create “a permanent, well-funded agency to heal the land.” He believed, too, that the most important goal was to change human behavior.

Some politicians thought that other parts of the country needed more help. Twenty-five million people lived without regular income, and the unemployment rate for black people was 50 percent. Throughout the South, and in some Northern towns and cities, signs read, “No jobs for niggers until every white man has a job.” Roosevelt created an executive order in May 1935, opening public works up to all races. Per capita income had fallen, and between 1930 and 1935 there were 750,000 bankruptcies and foreclosures on farms. Some people thought that the people of the Southern Plains should not get such attention, because they were perceived as stupid. H.L. Mencken referred to them as “inferior men.”

Bennett found out that the huge storm was moving east, picking up dirt in other states. While he was meeting with senators on an early afternoon in mid-April, soil from the Southern Plains—the weather bureau said it came from No Man’s Land—fell on Washington, DC. Bennett said that this was what he had been talking about. Within that day, Congress gave Bennett the money he needed and a permanent agency to restore and sustain the soil. One hundred and fifty CCC camps were redirected from the Forest Service to the newly formed Soil Conservation Service, and twenty thousand workers were sent to the Southern Plains.

Roosevelt had two ideas about what to do. First, he created the Resettlement Administration, which could give loans, about seven hundred dollars per family, to fund them to go elsewhere. He also signed Executive Order 7028 for the federal government to buy back what it had given away to homesteaders. Some people resented the “push to depopulate the plains.”

John McCarty was furious with Roosevelt’s offer. In response, he formed the Last Man Club, designating himself as president. No matter what, he and other like-minded nesters said, they would not leave the land. The first signatory was a former XIT trail boss. “Uncle” Dick Coon was the second man to sign his name next to McCarty’s on a declaration the editor had drawn up. Another was Texas governor James V. Allred. Doc Dawson was the fourth.

Dalhart citizens also still believed that they could blast rain from the clouds, and enlisted Tex Thornton to do so. Tex exploded dynamite for several days, to no avail. On the fourth day, he rested. Then, the temperature dropped and there were reports of snow in Clayton. A tenth of an inch also fell in Dalhart. People thanked Tex, though it had also snowed in places in which no explosives had been sent into the clouds.

There was no optimism in Boise City, though they also saw snow flurries. Black Sunday had stripped the town bare. Hazel was nearly broken by depression, and felt claustrophobic. Livestock had died from starvation or from suffocating on dust—their bellies were full of dirt. More than a thousand people left Cimarron County by the end of the year, but some people, such as the Lowerys, vowed to hold on. Some of Hazel’s friends who had joined the exodus reported that things were no better in California, where many had sought shelter. People from the Southern Plains were roundly described as “Okies” and faced discrimination. Only 16,000 of the 221,000 who moved to California came from the Dust Bowl. Hazel and Charles were now ready to leave—there was no point in continuing their mortuary business when people could not pay. There were no options and no future, it seemed.