It’s the stuff of primal nightmares: 10,000-foot-high blizzards of searing hot dirt, moving 60 mph and turning the sky black. “It’s as if it follows you, and follows you, and follows you,” says one survivor, a child at the time with the fear still in her eyes.
Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl, airing in two two-hour episodes Sunday and Monday nights on KERA-TV (Channel 13), brings that nightmare back to life. Working with writer Dayton Duncan, Burns digs deep into the causes of what historians call the worst man-made disaster in American history, an unholy alliance of overconfidence and horrible timing. Just as important, he invites survivors, many of them knee-high at the time, to bear witness and describe the indescribable.
Timothy Egan, author of the National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time and the star talking head here, describes the Dust Bowl as “a classic American bubble:” A lucrative wheat market drives a farming bonanza. Grasslands are aggressively plowed over. Overzealous farming practices ensue, a double-whammy of drought and economic collapse takes hold, and instead of pulling back when the wheat market collapses, the farmers double down out of desperation. Then come the unwelcome winds of change.
Burns specializes in two different kinds of documentary series. One is the massive, wide-angle take on a national phenomenon or event, laden with historical commentary — The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz. Then there’s the shorter, more intimate project that benefits from survivors and eyewitnesses, more a tapestry of feature stories with historical overtones than an encyclopedia. Prohibition in 2011 fits that profile. So does The Dust Bowl.
Granted, martinis and flappers are sexier than agricultural catastrophe, but the tragedy that beset the farmers of the 1930s, especially those in the Dust Bowl epicenter of the Oklahoma panhandle, packs its own kind of power. A mixture of almost biblical awe and stubborn survival defines the drama, along with a strong hint of caution: Mother Nature takes precedence over quick profit.
The phrase “global warming” is uttered nowhere in The Dust Bowl, but the suggestions are clear. “The Dust Bowl can most emphatically happen again,” says historian Donald Worster near the end of Monday night’s episode. Or perhaps something worse.
Worster and Egan lead the historical charge, but The Dust Bowl really belongs to those who lived to tell. Robert Forester describes his family’s epic journey from Goodwell, Okla., to the Oakland hills in Northern California. His father had hoped to bequeath 640 acres each to Robert and his four brothers. In the end they were grateful to survive. Kansas native Floyd Coen says he still can’t drink out of a clean glass from the cupboard without dusting it off first.
Countless lives were claimed by dust pneumonia, which is exactly what it sounds like. A mixture of kerosene and sugar made for cough syrup. Other kinds of losses occurred daily. There’s something heartbreaking about seeing an old-timer weep at the memory of witnessing his family’s livestock liquidated en masse as an economic measure.
Those who were there are emphatic about one thing: Between government assistance and farming expertise, the Roosevelt administration helped immensely. Some express shame at having needed such help, but the alternatives were clear. “We would have starved to death” without the Works Progress Administration, says Pauline Hodges of Beaver County, Okla. Roosevelt toured the affected areas in person, but he already had some direct if minor experience beforehand. During one of the worst dust storms, in May 1934, the dirt blew so far from the plains it drifted into the White House as the president gave a speech on the drought’s impact.
The Dust Bowl images that linger longest in the memory give some idea of the period’s daily terror. Worster describes one major storm as “a boiling wall of dirt.” It’s hard to imagine but important to remember.
Follow Chris Vognar on Twitter at @chrisvognar.
The Dust Bowl
7 tonight and Monday, PBS (Channel 13).
2 hrs. each night.