The Worst Hard Time
The Worst Hard Time
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Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, rape, child death, and racism.
Confronting the Unprecedented
Egan repeatedly stresses the unprecedented nature of the economic and (especially) environmental crises of the 1930s. The financial crisis and Dust Bowl reduced experts and laypeople alike to a state of uncertainty, improvising as they try to respond to circumstances unlike any they’d previously encountered.
For those living in the affected region, the dual crises verged on unimaginable until they happened. Egan explains that farmers initially believed they would escape the worst consequences of the stock market crash because they generally lacked investments. However, the financial crisis was so severe (and markets had become so interconnected) that the bottom fell out of wheat prices, forcing local communities to experiment with novel solutions, such as issuing promissory notes instead of payment. The environmental catastrophe was, if anything, even harder to fathom; the droughts, swarms of insects, and black dusters invited supernatural explanations, like comparisons to biblical plagues. To survive, residents were sometimes reduced to scavenging for tumbleweeds and yucca.
Egan further underscores the extremity of the situation by portraying the surplus of authority figures as not knowing what to do. When the black dusters hit, the weather bureau is described as being “as confused as the callers” (202). It didn’t know how to even detect a tornado approaching, much less a black duster. Scientists studying the phenomena struggled to define and classify the new phenomenon. Similarly, the scientific community was stumped by the new “dust pneumonia” associated with the dusters. Doctors didn’t know if the illness was similar or different from other known respiratory diseases. Egan describes the Red Cross as being “overwhelmed” as it sought to handle the victims of the Dust Bowl. The doctors who once told people like Jeanne Clark’s mother and “Doc” Dawson to go west for clearer and better air, were now confused; the crisis had overturned everything they thought they understood about the environment and its relationship to human health.
This uncertainty extended all the way to the top. Egan describes FDR as staying up at night, pondering “Failed homestead acts. Settlers misled. A speculative frenzy. And now […] ten thousand people a month leaving the Great Plains” (269). Egan portrays FDR as thinking, “What was next?” (270), and turning to Hugh Bennett, his top agriculturalist, for answers. However, even Bennett, who had lifelong experience with soil, admitted that he was unsure of what to do. Bennett began his plan of sowing carefully tested and selected seeds, contour plowing, and beginning local soil conservation districts but gave no guarantees. That even those most capable and desirous of helping struggled to formulate a response further highlights the unprecedented nature of the disaster.
The Limits of Hard Work and Self-Sufficiency
Another theme that emerges in the Worst Hard Time is how the tough, determined, independent-minded people of the Plains nonetheless found themselves unable to handle the crisis. Though initially disdainful of government aid, many impacted by the Dust Bowl were ultimately forced to accept it, while others simply left the land they had invested so much in. Through their stories, Egan challenges the viability of American individualism.
One such story is of George Ehrlich, a German Russian who immigrated to Shattuck, Oklahoma. In Russia, his people were not just victims of the czar but also of a Tartar tribe that raped their women and sold their children into slavery in Asia. Ehrlich survived a near-death experience on his journey to America. Once there, Ehrlich struggled to learn English in the fields and fend off local xenophobia. He experienced the death of his son due to a dust storm, but he didn’t give up. However, after years of trying to live off the land, his family ended up starving, and Ehrlich had no other choice but to accept government money. The journal of Lawrence Svobida records another farmer’s failure. Svobida had come to the plains in 1929, a young man whose motto was “[n]ever defeated” (112). Similarly, Svobida raised one successful crop and then never made any more money. Dick Coon of Dalhart, Texas, not only survived poverty but escaped from the Galveston flood. He raised himself up from rags to riches, determined to overcome. Coon invested in a hotel, movie theater, and other buildings and at one point practically owned the entire town of Dalhart, Texas. However, just like many others, Coon ended up penniless.
The independent-minded cowboys were not immune, either. The James brothers, members of an established pioneer Texas family that owned the largest ranch on the Texas panhandle, were forced into bankruptcy from the cattle surplus and subsequent cattle-price decline. The brothers tried to make money by drilling for oil. They drove the drills deeper and deeper, using bigger and bigger drill bits, but they still couldn’t strike oil. Finally, the James brothers not only had to sell off large portions of their ranch, but Andy James ended up writing a letter to FDR asking for financial help.
John McCarty thought Andy James’s letter was humiliating, even though his own newspaper business was going downhill. McCarty, a self-described Spartan, conducted a pep rally after the worst dust storm on record (Black Sunday, 1935) hit the town. McCarty believed that “No matter how hard the dust blew, no matter how deeply people were buried in sand, they would not retreat. They would hunker in their dust bunker” (229). Yet, in the end McCarty, also left Dalhart. His story rounds out Egan’s exploration of the individualist American ethos by showing the fate of those who would not budge on seeking help: displacement by the realities of the landscape itself. Values of hard work and self-sufficiency ultimately proved insufficient in tackling a crisis as severe and complex as the Dust Bowl.
The Failures and Lies of the American Government
Even as Egan exposes the futility of efforts to resolve the crisis without government intervention, he delineates the ways in which government policy contributed to the problem. In Egan’s portrayal, ordinary Americans pay the price for these policies, which range from misguided to outright deceptive.
Indeed, Egan depicts the campaign to settle the Dust Bowl region as predatory from the start. There are many paragraphs in chapters throughout the work that emphasize how the government lured or pushed Americans to homestead in barren lands. Egan states that “the federal government was so anxious to settle No Man’s Land that they offered free train rides to pilgrims looking to prove up a dry land […] The slogan was ‘Health, Wealth, and Opportunity’” (36). Egan also shows how the government partnered with the Capitol Syndicate in order to push sales of the XIT Ranch promotors that made outlandish claims, such as “through the miracle of dry farming a fellow could turn this land to gold” (24). While few could have predicted how disastrous these policies would ultimately prove, the overall picture is one in which the government prioritized agricultural production (and, more broadly, economic growth) over the well-being of ordinary Americans. Moreover, the desire to open the land to large-scale agriculture led to the Red River War of 1874-1875, during which the US government forced the Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho off the High Plains and onto government reservations. Coupled with the government’s manipulation of would-be settlers’ aspirations, this genocidal campaign frames US policy in the Dust Bowl as corrupt from the start.
A similar pattern of greed and deception characterized the years leading up to the Depression and Dust Bowl, as well as the government’s immediate response to it. The government not only falsely advertised substandard land but also gave incentives for maximum plowing and wheat production. When the farmers did exactly what the government requested, they experienced a wheat price crash. Herbert Hoover pushed wheat production by guaranteeing the price of wheat at $2 a bushel in an effort to help the World War I effort, but later, when the price of wheat crashed, Hoover refused to buy the wheat, even to feed hungry families. In describing such broken promises, Egan suggests that the US government turned its back on the very people it had encouraged to settle the region, leaving them to bear the consequences of its miscalculations and lies.
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