Everyone has probably heard stories about the Dust Bowl, the devastating drought of the 1930s.
Yet documentary filmmaker Ken Burns views the Dust Bowl as a mostly forgotten chapter of American history.
“For most people, the Dust Bowl can be summed up with some very superficial conventional wisdom — as bad storms and The Grapes of Wrath,” he said. “The story is a lot more complex than that.”
Burns aims to set the record straight with The Dust Bowl, his four-hour documentary set for Sunday and Monday on PBS.
With his team, the filmmaker conducted poignant interviews with dozens of people — in their 80s and 90s — who lived to tell about enduring the worst man-made environmental disaster in American history.
Their suffering was magnified because it coincided with the economic blow of the Great Depression.
Still, viewers won’t fully appreciate the scope of the Dust Bowl until footage taken by an amateur filmmaker of the day is shown.A monster dust storm hundreds of feet high — in grainy black and white — approaches and envelops a small town, snuffing out the sun at noon.
Seeing is believing.
“This was a 10-year apocalypse filled with hundreds of storms, some of which moved more dirt in one day than it took the entire excavation of the Panama Canal to move,” Burns said. “For the people who lived through it, it was suffering overlaid on suffering.”
The Dust Bowl resulted from extreme drought conditions but also stemmed from a man-made catastrophe.
Before the arrival of settlers in the late 19th century, the Southern plains of the United States were predominantly grasslands. At the start of the 1900s, however, offers of cheap land attracted farmers. And during World War I, amid a relatively wet period, a lucrative wheat market thrived.
Advances in gasoline-powered farm machinery sped and eased production. During the 1920s, millions of acres of grassland across the plains were converted into wheat fields at an unprecedented rate.
Then, in 1930, wheat prices collapsed. In response, farmers harvested even more wheat to make up for their losses, leaving fields exposed and vulnerable to a drought, which hit in 1932.
Once the winds began picking up dust from the open fields, they grew into dust storms that became more frequent and ferocious each year. Crops were destroyed, cattle died, and children eventually developed fatal cases of “dust pneumonia.”
Thousands of Americans were forced to move to more livable locations — an exodus unlike anything that the country had seen.
Otherwise, Burns said, the film serves as a testament to the American spirit.
“This is also a story of heroic perseverance in the face of biblical plagues. In the end, in the area once known as No Man’s Land, because no one thought it would ever be suitable for human habitation, three-fourths of the people actually hung on.”
The documentary — provocative and enlightening — seems well-timed.
The film arrives just as the oral history of the Dust Bowl is close to being lost. Beyond a single on-camera interview with a Dust Bowl survivor who was an adult in the 1930s, The Dust Bowl features only stories from people who were children or teenagers at the time. The pool of survivors is fast dwindling.
In addition, the film addresses a timely issue, suggesting that we’re on a path to creating another great calamity in the same area.
“One of the things that mitigated the Dust Bowl was not just the return of wetter weather and smarter soil-conservation and contour-farming techniques,” Burns said, “but it was also our technological ability to poke a million straws into the vast Ogallala Aquifer, which was filled with glacial melt.
“But this is not a sustainable water supply. It’s not a reservoir that refills with snowmelt and rainwater. This is a case of us mining for water.
“The Pollyannas among us say there are 50 years of water left. The Cassandras among us say there are only 20 years left. Whoever is right, we’re going to run out (of water).”