Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930’s by Donald Worster

Abstract

Reviews 59 : The Southern Plains in the 1930's. By Donald ''\Torster. (New Oxford University Press, 1979. 277 pages, $14.95.) Worster brings to the writing of this book a dual set of credentials: a native son who spent twenty some years on the Plains and an historian whose previous work, Nature's Economy: The Roots of (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977) reflects his interest in with land. Credentials notwithstanding, the author is as he says; that "the argument of this book ... will not be acceptable plainsmen." Though it bears some resemblance on a thematic level s Tableland: The Dust Bowl Story (1947) in which Vance ascribes the creation of the Dust Bowl to a land ignorance coupled a willingness to gamble with nature on the part of Plains farmers, thesis cuts a wider swath. Worster regards the Dust Bowl as an event - a cultural climax like the Great Depression of which it was a part - whose causes "were deeply c;lntrenched in the American economic ethos" (63). According to the author, capitalism and the way in which a capitalist society tends to view i~ land was the root of the problem. The burgeoning technology, tractors,· combines, one-way plows, which had made possible the great Plow Up of the Twenties, in combination with the drought of the Thirties, were the •.•..• immediate causes of the Dust Bowl. But it was the economic philosophy of· ?llr national culture, not simply a regional stroke of bad luck that was the Jundamental cause. "The attitude of capitalism ... toward the earth was· Imperial and commercial; none of its ruling values taught environmental ..humility, reverence, or restraint. This was the cultural impetus that drove • Americans into the grassland and determined the way they would use it" (~7). High plains farmers had long been called "sodbusters," but in the Dirty Thirties Americans became aware of the larger implications of the term. Worster is probably correct when he says that many plainsmen will not accept his major premise. He is saying things that Americans increasingly know but still do not like to hear. We must face up to limits; we must moderate our demands; we can no longer afford to weave drunkenly into ~he future. The frontier is gone. The Dust Bowl provided us with a lesson rom which we have not learned enough. ~hose who prefer a rosier and more traditional view of Southern Plains agnculture (and America in general, perhaps) might wish to turn to another ~Udy p~blished in 1979. Paul Bonnifield's The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and epreSSlon (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979) is based ~n the fond belief that the people actually living on the land knew best how o USe that land, and that the disaster of the Dust Bowl was a temporary ~tback in "the continual process of adapting men and culture ... on the Creat Plains" (201). Mr. Bonnifield, who works for a coal company in olorado, does not speculate as to what might happen if (when) the 60 Western American Literature Ogallala aquifer underlying much of the region is pumped dry in the of irrigation agriculture. Though ultimately Mr. Worster's Dust Bowl is a cautionary tale, also a well-written, powerfully argued piece of historical literature, ~V'lIUI'M';'? with maps, photographs, and statistics. At a time when a climatic shift imminent, when already more than half a billion people live in arid semiarid lands, this is a significant book not only for those interested in history of the Great Plains but for the many more who should be in their future. JACK HAFER, Richmond, A Pictorial Life of Jack London. By Russ Kingman. (New York: 1979.288 pages, $14.95.) Until now, no pictorial life of Jack London has existed. In his pictorial biography, Russ Kingman shows us the "real" London as the caught him - boxing, writing, sailing, playing, reading, riding, loving, striking a variety of poses. While the pictures capture London's immense vitality and charm, also suggest that London was rarely, if ever, taken off guard, and may have had the art of making himself seem more spontaneous than he was. A very private man existed, one suspects, behind the ever...