The Worst Hard Time: Chapter 21 Summary & Analysis

Hugh Bennett returned to Washington, DC believing that the Great Plains could be restored. Congress approved a plan “to reverse the flow of water under the Continental Divide,” a kind of “hydraulic savior.” Others thought the solution was to drill into the Ogallala Aquifer. Meanwhile, four million acres of farmland were empty, with no takers, not even among the Resettlement agency whose responsibility it was to buy back land.

Hugh Bennett proposed saving the land through contour plowing, crop rotation, and soil conservation districts. The crisis had already cost tax payers five hundred million dollars in 1933 for remedial land projects, grants, loans, and relief. Before spending any more money, Roosevelt wanted to know if the plains could be saved, and how. Also, had homesteading been a mistake? The report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee was delivered to the president on August 27, 1936, and said that the climate had not changed, but that the plains were in the first years of “a hundred-year cycle of change.” There was also simply not enough rainfall to raise crops. The problem of the Great Plains was not the product of a single act of nature, it declared, but of “a single year or even a series of exceptionally bad years” caused by mistaken public policies, particularly a misguided homesteading policy.

The report also described how the disaster occurred. A chart showed how quickly the grass was overturned. Ten million acres were plowed in 1879. Still, Bennett and his team did not blame the settlers, since the nesters lacked the knowledge to be aware of their mistakes. Instead, they were misled by the Federal homestead policy. There would be no easy solution to the problem of 80 percent of the Great Plains being in a state of erosion.

Roosevelt was worried, but during one of his radio broadcast “fireside chats,” he tried to encourage people to hold on. He remained extremely popular. Meanwhile, things in Europe were tense, and Hitler’s power was growing. In the next election, the Republicans ran the Kansan Governor Alf Landon, who said that Roosevelt had no idea how to fix the plains and “was taking the country in a radical direction.” Most Americans disagreed, and Roosevelt was re-elected in a landslide. Later, Landon himself would say that the New Deal saved American society.

Bennett’s agency was ready to start planting the first new sections of sod, but he was worried about its survival in a land prone to drought. They planted a mixture of weeds, grass from Africa, blue grama, bluestem, buffalo grass, and other flora. It might take fifty years before a large swath of turf was rooted in place. Roosevelt still wanted to build his trees from North Dakota’s Canadian border to an area just south of Amarillo, Texas, and the Forest Service was saying that it could be done. Trees could not stop dust, but “they could provide shelter from black blizzards.”

A tree-planting crew was sent to Oklahoma, just east of No Man’s Land. The tree planters were CCC crews. The goal was to plant 180,000 acres per year, mostly on private land. The owner would then care for the trees, and farming would continue between the strips. Roosevelt ignored Bennett and others who said that one could not alter “the basic nature of the Great Plains.” He would have his trees, “from the top of the plains to the bottom.”