PBS America last night started an engaging and informative documentary series – The Dust Bowl. Made by the fêted US director Ken Burns, it tells the story of the storm-ravaged Oklahoma plains in the Great Depression.
These are horrors, both human and environmental, that were told powerfully by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. But Burns’s slow and careful narrative went further back, to the Twenties, and Government-sponsored factory farming of the southern plains. The “Great Plow-Up” saw over five million acres of scrubby grassland turned over to grow wheat, at that time a most lucrative crop.
But the grassland was there for a reason. Historian Timothy Egan recalled an old-timer called Bam White, “half Apache, half Anglo”, who had taken a piece of sod, freshly flipped by a plough, and declared: “Wrong side up. It’s wrong side up.”
Sure enough, when the winds came, the ploughed soil just blew away. It created enormous dust storms that blistered young girls’ legs and literally suffocated many of the cows. Dorothy Kleffman – one of the few people still alive to have been there – recalled sitting indoors, in her family’s kitchen during dust storms. She had still needed a wet tea towel over her head, made out of a flour sack, to catch the dirt.
It’s not often that a four-hour documentary – let alone a historical one – turns out to be as gripping as this. But as Burns’s series continues through the Thirties every night this week, this “worst man-made ecological disaster in American history” is required viewing.