22-2 Hardship and Suffering during the Great Depression
EQ: What was so important about environmental damage during the 1930s?
Subquestions:
a. How did the land change before and during the 1930s? Did anyone farm profitably?
b. Did the government fall short of its responsibility to manage change? Or was that responsibility not clear at the time?
c. What steps could've been taken to avert disaster?
d. What were the most extreme dimensions of the crisis--in terms of degree or duration?
Subquestion A:
ReplyDeleteBefore and during the 1930s, farmland in North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma went dry and cracked because they were over worked because of the great demand during WWI. So when the wind started to pick up in the early 1930s, there were no trees or grass to hold the soil, which was blown for hundreds of miles. According to Danzer 652, "One wind storm in 1934 picked up millions of tons of dust from the plains and carried it to the East Coast cities." Ann Marie Low - who lived in North Dakota during this time - experienced this, "Many days this spring the air is just full of dirt coming, literally, for hundreds of miles." (Danzer 650).
This Dust Bowl resulted in many farmers abandoning their farms and moving because of the unprofitable land. "By the end of the 1930s, the population of California had grown by more than a million." (Danzer 652).
The stock market crash is one if not the most severe piecs of the depression. This is because when a company needs money they tend to sell stock. Now if a company needs stock and nobody trusts the stock market to make them money then no company will make money which drives the prices up. And if paychecks can not keep up with prices then noone is going to make any money creating a rising poverty rate.
ReplyDeleteZach Krin
The environmental damage resulted in land that was no longer fit for farming. Farmers were then unable to grow enough crops for a profit, which was hard to get to begin with, and unable to grow food for their own families. When farmers didn't receive enough profit, they were unable to pay off their debts. "Between 1929 and 1932, about 400,000 farms were lost through foreclosure..." (Danzer 651)
ReplyDeletehttp://history1900s.about.com/library/photos/blygd11.htm
I would like to start off my post by posing a connection that may or may not be true, but it is that the environmental damage from the 1920s drove the use of fertilizers and genetically modified seeds. During the dust bowl millions of tons of dust were transplanted by strong winds, carrying some dust 500 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean (Danzer 652). This section on the dust bowl reminded me of An Omnivore's Dilemma in which Michael Pollan interviewed George Naylor about the history of the corn that he was growing. George says that he is able to grow more than 200 bushels of corn per acre, while the average yield in 1920 was 20 bushels of corn per acre. George said that he had heard stories about his father raising a new hybrid corn (which almost all farmers use today), “How they talked him [his father] into raising an acre of two of the new hybrid, and by god when the old corn fell over, the hybrid stood straight up.” (An Omnivore’s Dilemma) This made me think, what made this new hybrid corn necessary, especially since it came onto the market in the late 1930s (An Omnivore’s Dilemma). And then I realized that the land had been stripped of its nutrients during the 1920s, creating the dust bowl in the 1930s, and requiring the use of genetically modified plants in order to allow the farmer to continue growing crops on this infertile land. This increase in the use of hybrid corn also correlates to the use of fertilizer. The world use of fertilizer started to rise around 1926 and continued to rise at the same rate until the mid-sixties, when its usage increased dramatically. (http://www.eolss.net/ebooks/Sample %20Chapters/C08/E3-18-04-03.pdf) This fertilizer would have been supplying the nutrients that the land had been stripped of in the 1920s. The importance of the environmental damage during the 1930s was that it created the need for hybrid crops and fertilizers to grow corn in larger numbers on this increasingly infertile land.
ReplyDeleteSources:
The Americans
An Omnivore’s Dilemma
http://www.eolss.net/ebooks/Sample%20Chapters/C08/E3-18-04-03.pdf