American History: The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl is a time in American History that affected the United States, and it’s citizens, in 3 ways: economically, politically, and life for the US citizens. There were several ways that these three aspects were affected by this monumental phenomenon. The ways these three were affected is difficult to discuss, but we’re gonna do it anyway. So sit back and relax, it’s gonna take a while. Now, first we should probably talk about what the Dust Bowl was, and what caused it.
The Dust Bowl is an area in the Great Plains that had poor agricultural farming practices. It affected every state, but none as much as the states that were in that region. The figures of the amount of dust storms that happened in just a window of about 4 years is very
Several hospital patients had suffered from what was being called “dust pneumonia.” Dust would go in your mouth and down your throat, and the dust, when moistened by your lungs, turned to mud. When the dust was completely turned into mud inside your lungs, your lungs wouldn’t function properly, and sometimes the mud, would make your lungs stop functioning at all, depending on the amount. The dust storms would hit so suddenly that farmers would get lost in their fields, and some were just yards away from shelter. Over 350,000 people had migrated from Oklahoma alone. These people were called “Okies.” They loaded their belongings, and left on the famous Route 66 to California. Every day for the following month was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. On May 10, the wind came back from the west, but instead of a cloud, it was more like a fog. It reached over 900 miles wide, and over 1,500 miles long. American politics wasn’t affected much by the Dust Bowl, but it was still
The per-acre farmland value decreased by 28% in high-erosion counties, and 17% in medium-erosion counties, relative to that of the low-erosion counties. Even over the long-term, the agricultural value of the land often failed to recover to pre-Dust Bowl levels. In highly eroded areas, less than 25% of the original agricultural losses were recovered. The economy adjusted predominantly through large relative population declines in more-eroded counties, both during the 1930s and through the 1950s. The economic effects persisted, in part, because of farmers' failure to switch to more appropriate crops for highly eroded areas. Because the amount of topsoil had been reduced, it would have been more productive to shift from crops and wheat to animals and hay. During the Depression and through at least the 1950s, there was limited relative adjustment of farmland away from activities that became less productive in more-eroded counties. Some of the failure to shift to more productive agricultural products may be related to ignorance about the benefits of changing land use. A second explanation is a lack of availability of credit, caused by the high rate of failure of banks in the Plains states. Because banks failed in the Dust Bowl region at a higher rate than elsewhere, farmers could not get the credit they needed to buy capital to shift crop