Dust to dust.

• Author: Sachs, Aaron
• Position: Essay

Americans have forgotten all about the great agricultural mistake of the early 20th century, which allowed billions of tons of irreplaceable topsoil to blow away.

At about five in the afternoon, on Sunday, April 14, 1935, Ed Phillips slammed on the brakes of his Model A Ford. Driving east toward his home in the Oklahoma panhandle, he had suddenly noticed a 1,000-foot wall of black dust bearing down on him from the north. By the time the Phillips family had tumbled out of their car, the swirling dirt had surrounded them. They barely made it to a nearby shack, where they spent the next four hours coughing in the dark with 10 other shelter-seekers--whose faces they couldn't see.

The next morning, Robert Geiger, an Associated Press reporter writing for the Washington Evening Star, gave the Dust Bowl its name. Historians have used Geiger's term ever since to conjure up the economic and ecological disaster that occurred on the Great Plains during the Great Depression, and, ever since, they have referred to April 14, 1935 as Black Sunday.

Of course, most history books leave out Black Sunday in their eagerness to analyze Black Thursday--that grim day in October, 1929, when the stock market crashed and the roar of the twenties died away. And those historians who do remember the "black blizzards" of the Dust Bowl tend to write them off as minor natural disasters that just happened to hit in the midst of the Depression. Yet thousands of people in Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas died from "dust pneumonia" and heat in the 1930s, and thousands more abandoned failing farms to journey westward, only to get caught up in an even more oppressive economic situation--that of the migrant agricultural laborer, the picker of The Grapes of Wrath.

By 1936, farm losses had reached $25 million a day, and by 1938 about 10 billion tons of topsoil from the heart of the world's breadbasket had blown away on the prairie winds. In Haskell County, Kansas, the average annual wheat harvest from 1932 to 1937 was only seven percent (250,000 bushels) of what it had been in 1931 (3.5 million bushels). While Black Thursday barely touched most American farmers, the drought that came with Black Sunday literally turned their day into night.

The lasting significance of the Dust Bowl, however, lies not so much in the economic devastation that it wrought as in the misguided practices that permitted it to happen. To say that the Dust Bowl was a natural disaster is to miss the most important part of the story. Black Sunday shared with Black Thursday not only common impacts, but also a deep-rooted common cause: the American mythology of the profit motive, of constant progress and economic growth, of inexhaustible resources. "The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses," proclaimed the U.S. Bureau of Soils in 1909--as if to excuse in advance the wave of "sodbusting" that, over the following 20 years, would turn the shortgrass prairie into an interlocking grid of cash-cropped commercial farms. Ironically...