Chapter eight of the book of Hosea sets out the following stark warning:
“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.”
This biblical admonishment is usually interpreted in a metaphorical sense as a warning for those who do evil. In its simplest sense, what goes around, comes around – although, in line with the Old Testament’s characteristically hard edged morality, with devastatingly disproportionate consequences.
In America’s mid-west of the 1930s, the verse had a terrible and terrifying literal significance. The whirlwinds that came to destroy American farms and farmers would also have a wide-ranging and devastating impact far beyond the borders of both the mid-western states and the USA.