American Dust Bowl Fire - Episode 48

In today's episode, Kara is going to ask you if you have ever had "buyer's remorse" and if you have ever had a business venture fail due to factors outside your control. 

Most of us have either experienced one or the other and many of us have experienced both. In the "American Dust Bowl Fire," Kara is taking you back to a time in American history where a handshake was more binding than any contract and many Americans lived in a vastly different country. After the stock market crash of 1929, many Americans had to reinvent themselves in a time that became known as the Great Depression. It could be argued that even though the Great Depression took a toll on millions of American families, this time period shaped a generation that would change the world. 

Among those families whose lives were disrupted the most were those living in the mid west and those living in Panhandle took it even harder when one of the worst droughts in American history coincided with the worst economic downturn the nation had ever experienced up to this point. 

To add salt to the wound, this drought that ruined thousands of cash crops in what would be known as "no man's land" was for the most part preventable! It is this realization that Kara takes us back to the 1800s where a fledgling ambitious nation offered whatever it could to prospective families to move out west at all costs. In doing so, these families tilled the ground and destroyed the delicate ecosystem that made the ground suitable for all live stock. These actions from the 1800s came to a head in the early 1930s which resulted in a dumpster fire of unequaled scope. 

For more details, notes, pics, and especially more of Kara's artwork, check out The Day's Dumpster Fire website! Feel free to peruse our catalog of nearly 50 episodes and binge listen till your ears fall off. If you have ideas for future episodes or just have questions for your hosts, send them an email at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. When Kara and Ed aren't researching the next great dumpster fire, they will happily respond to members of this awesome community of human beings who not just celebrate success, but failures as well. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hey everybody, it's Kara.

SPEAKER_05 0:01

And this is Ed.

SPEAKER_03 0:02

And this is your day's dumpster fire.

SPEAKER_05 0:04

Where we don't celebrate humanity's successes, but its most fantastic failures. A little faster this time.

SPEAKER_03 0:28

Yeah. It'd be fun to put like some 30 30s music in there.

SPEAKER_05 0:34

You know, I I I've been contemplating doing that. Uh the only issue is that I found out like today with um like Spotify, I guess there was like this really weird glitch where if Spotify hears other types of music in your podcast, it automatically tags it as like a radio broadcast and then just deletes it.

SPEAKER_03 1:03

Interesting.

SPEAKER_05 1:04

Yeah, it's it's a really, really weird glitch. I was listening to uh a podcast all about well, podcasting, and uh it's a thrilling, but yeah, I guess it's a very recent thing that Spotify is trying to work on because whenever you have music in a podcast, you have to have it licensed, and you have to have that digital license in the actual recording itself, otherwise it's uh automatically spawns like a copyright violation and and all that stuff. And uh YouTube got around it by like, hey, if you're stealing somebody else's work instead of doing a cease and desist, whatever money you make using that person's work will go to that person. So they just take it from you and give it to them. Got it. But seeing how we don't make a whole bunch of money off of this, like then well, I don't want I don't want to risk like getting it all like convoluted, like all messed up in some weird algorithm somewhere.

SPEAKER_03 2:06

So no, that's fair, but maybe like before every episode, I'll say, by the way, listen to this song. That'll work fine, I guess.

SPEAKER_05 2:17

Yeah, I just need to sit down and learn how like digital rights management works and stuff like that. Because like our our intro music and all that stuff, that's all copyright free. Uh, usually whenever I do a uh uh like the outro music, again, that's all copyright free. The artist just requests, like, hey, just you know, plug us in your show notes or something like that, and that seems to work out just fine. But we've got a uh we've got a a very dusty, dusty episode.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Sure do. I'm excited for it.

SPEAKER_05 2:54

I'm it much like the Vietnam War episode, I'm really curious to see how you how how you approach this and and how you take it and and all that kind of stuff, because it's like it's a drought. What's the big deal?

SPEAKER_03 3:10

Right, like it's it's a lot of dust.

SPEAKER_05 3:12

Yeah. Depression.

SPEAKER_03 3:15

People died. That's fine. Um I will start this off. I have three questions, and I don't want to choose the three, so I'm just gonna ask all three.

SPEAKER_05 3:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 3:27

Have you ever had buyer's remorse?

SPEAKER_05 3:29

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:31

Have you ever purchased land or a home and it didn't really turn out the way you wanted it to?

SPEAKER_05 3:37

Uh shockingly, no. Thankfully, no. Because I waited. I waited until I was way older to buy a home, so I didn't have to worry about like buying getting into a 30-year mortgage and then finding out a year later like the house is full of asbestos, and there's like gallons of DDT in the garage and crap like that, lead in the walls.

SPEAKER_03 4:00

I'm I know there's gotta be someone somewhere who has had that happen to them. In fact, one of my best friends has had that happen to her.

SPEAKER_05 4:08

Oh, yeah, like just watch uh like HGTV. Used to have that show on their uh Homes on Homes, where people would buy these like older homes, and then they would start noticing, like, man, why is it super drafty, or why are the walls always wet? Why, you know, why is it super hot in this room? And then like they call in this contractor, and then he just like rips into the house and he's like, You've got a million things wrong here. And I remember there was one episode where it was so bad that they actually had to condemn the house, and they built the they built the property owners a new home as a result. Sick. Yeah. So thankfully I've never been there, but I I've I've definitely had buyers remorse, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_03 4:56

And the last one ever had a failed business venture?

SPEAKER_05 5:01

Uh yeah. Okay. Nothing nothing too major. It was a computer business that I had in high school. Okay. Where I'd build like custom PCs for people, but I didn't have the the ability to order like 7,000 Pentium 2s. Because it was like me and my friend, and that was it. So I so it wasn't one of those business ventures where it like cost me everything. It was like, oh, well, now I know.

SPEAKER_03 5:31

Nice. All right. Well, we'll we'll keep those questions in mind as we go. Um, this one's gonna be a little bit different in that it's not just one person's dumpster fire, it's just a really big dumpster fire.

SPEAKER_05 5:46

Um it's like an all-encompassing, it's like an umbrella dumpster fire where it's just like everybody is gonna be affected by this to some degree.

SPEAKER_03 5:55

Yes. Okay, even there's a point where it's affected from let's say Texas to New York.

SPEAKER_05 6:03

Oh.

SPEAKER_03 6:04

It's a big in.

SPEAKER_05 6:06

Oh, is that all?

SPEAKER_03 6:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 6:09

It's like it's like it's it just includes most of the Louisiana purchase and then the Northeast.

SPEAKER_03 6:18

Yeah, exactly. Uh with a little bit of Great Depression thrown in. So if you really want to, countrywide. But uh today we're gonna talk about the Dust Bowl. And I was watching a movie about some dust storm or whatever, and it reminded me of the dust bowl, and I was looking it up, and I read that it is a an ecological disaster caused by people. I don't think I ever made that connection that it's it's a man-made disaster.

SPEAKER_05 6:47

I see, I've always grown up just synonymizing the Great Depression with the Dust Bowl. Yeah, like they were kind of like you could use the terms interchangeably, but judging by your tone of voice, that's not the case. Like you have one without the other.

SPEAKER_03 7:09

Yes, and I will say that they do come hand in hand in terms of one was affected by the other, and vice versa. So they do correlate and talk to each other. Okay, but I I'd also say that they're also different events that affect each other.

SPEAKER_05 7:31

Yeah, because I mean, obviously, I don't know much about it now, but it seems like you can have the Dust Bowl, and then if you don't have that, you can still have the Great Depression. And if you don't have the Great Depression, you can still have the Dust Bowl, but the two work together to just really really wrecked wrecked things. Yeah, that that's that's what I'm gathering here. It's just like the it was literally a perfect storm.

SPEAKER_03 8:00

Literally, yes. I learned so much going through this, I'm really excited to share it. Uh, so let's start off with our setting. Where are we? We're in the Great Plains. For those of you who don't know, I am going to put up a map because it's easier to see it than to just hear about it. But the Great Plains make up about a third of the land in the U.S. And it covers or it's part of 10 different states, along with parts of Canada. Those states are Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. And the plains could be described as an endless sea of buffalo grass and wind. It sounds boring.

SPEAKER_05 8:42

I've been there.

SPEAKER_03 8:43

The pictures look nice. I've never been there before.

SPEAKER_05 8:46

Yeah, I've uh I've I've been there for a wedding, and it is yeah, it's just a a sea of grass.

SPEAKER_03 8:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 8:55

As far as the eye can see. Well, now it's all cornfields, but yeah, it's just nothing but well. I mean, I I guess it's the reason why when you look at like Game of Thrones, they you know the Khaleesi, she's the queen of the grass sea. Like lots of grass, lots of grass, yeah. And probably a lot of bison that used to eat that grass until the late 1800s.

SPEAKER_03 9:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 9:21

That's a different story.

SPEAKER_03 9:24

We'll touch on it actually. But um, buffalo grass, I know it sounds boring, but it's actually really important, especially for that area. Buffalo grass is the native grass and it retains a lot of its moisture, not just in the leaves, but in its roots. So the moisture goes down into the soil and it makes it more fertile during the wet season. So during the wet season, the ground is super moist and it's super fertile, and the grass is gorgeous, and you could plant wheat all day. But on the flip side, the dry seasons and droughts are very, very dry.

SPEAKER_05 10:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

So the grass isn't getting as much moisture and it's not going to seep into the ground and in the dirt, it's gonna stay in the plant, which means your dirt's not going to be very fertile. So just keep that in mind. I'm not about this, but just keep it in mind.

SPEAKER_05 10:18

And if the and if the dirt or the soil isn't very moist, then that's gonna it's gonna kill off a lot of the bacteria that other plants need to grow. And okay, I I can already start to see we're adding trash to the dumpster now. We're just wait, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna light this candle here in a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 10:39

Oh yeah. Yep. I'm just gonna keep adding on trash.

SPEAKER_05 10:43

So wait, there's more.

SPEAKER_03 10:44

There's more, always. So just for a reference, the plains average less than 20% of rain each year, which is not ideal if you're trying to farm westward expansion and the long-held belief in Manifest Destiny are driving early American settlers westward from the east. Um, for those of you who don't know, Manifest Destiny is like the belief that it is God's intent and will for the American people to settle west of the colonies and expand their lands and all of that stuff.

SPEAKER_05 11:15

Um and kick out Europe.

SPEAKER_03 11:17

And also kick out Europe. So with Manifest Destiny at its peak, I would say, in the late eight in the late 1700s, early 1800s, um, we have Americans starting to come across the plains. And one primary source that we have says something along the lines of almost wholly unfit for cultivation and uninhabitable depending on agriculture. Or in other words, if you're going to live here and you're going to farm, you're not going to live here. It's just not possible. And they're saying this.

SPEAKER_05 11:54

That's so that's that's just so weird. I always thought like that was the whole point of that whole part of America was that it was the breadbasket. Like anything could grow.

SPEAKER_03 12:04

They didn't believe that way back when.

SPEAKER_05 12:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 12:08

And yes, there were Native American tribes who lived on the plains, but they were actually fully nomadic people. They didn't try to settle long enough to farm land. They primarily hunted bison and they would eat the native plants there and then move on. So they they never actually like farmed anything there.

SPEAKER_04 12:25

Interesting.

SPEAKER_03 12:25

And by the time the early mid-1800s came around, the Native Americans were forced onto reservations, and Americans attempted to settle on the Great Plains, and they began to hunt the bison there as opposed to the Native Americans. But of course, they overdid it. And eventually there were no more bison to hunt in the area. As a solution to this problem, ranchers began to bring cattle instead of the bison, and they called it the Great Beef Bonanza, which is fun. It's really catchy. I like it.

SPEAKER_05 12:56

That seems like a really good barbecue restaurant.

SPEAKER_03 12:58

Right? It does. And it's it's it's a historical uh thing that you could use.

SPEAKER_05 13:03

Like there's like right next door to like salty bits of pig. Like or uh assemble it yourself, Peppa the Pig.

SPEAKER_03 13:15

It's great. I love it. The great beef bonanza. Here we are.

SPEAKER_04 13:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:19

Uh honestly, it's not a terrible solution. Like I can see where they were trying to go with it, but because of the weather and the flip-flops between the dry seasons and the wet seasons, it really complicated the matter. And by 1880, a terrible winter tore through the area and it essentially killed a huge amount of livestock and ending any hopes of said beef bonanza, which is unfortunate, but I guess that's what happens.

SPEAKER_05 13:46

So it went from the the beef bonanza to like the beef bust.

SPEAKER_03 13:51

Yeah, the frozen beef bust. It's upsetting. Anyway, at the same time where we have our ranchers trying to figure out how to raise cattle, the Homestead Act of 1862 was passed. The first Homestead Act was passed during the Civil War in 1862, and it states that any adult citizen who has not taken up arms against the U.S. government could claim 160 acres of government-owned land. If they cultivate and take the land, it would be transferred to that citizen after five years. So essentially, the government's like, look, we're gonna give you this land for dirt cheap, and you're gonna cultivate it and make it profitable, and then we'll give it to you, essentially, after I think it's five years.

SPEAKER_05 14:38

And didn't all they have to do is just go out there with like literally like stakes, and just like pound these stakes into the ground, and that was like their 160 acres.

SPEAKER_03 14:48

Essentially, yeah. It was really cheap, like dirt cheap.

SPEAKER_05 14:53

Oh, yeah. Um, it wasn't cheap enough for they didn't even have to pay for that up front, right? All they had to do was just till the land and then they'd take a cut of that and give it to the government, and that's how they bought it.

SPEAKER_03 15:06

Yeah, I think it was that plus like a small fee because there were people who went to these areas that primarily were city dwelling people. Okay, who had more money than others. So it wasn't like a farmer going to this area for more farmland, it was mostly people living in the cities or in nearby surrounding areas that wanted a new new life for themselves.

SPEAKER_05 15:32

And uh those city slickers coming out with all the money, that's gonna bring up a whole nother can of worms in like the 1880s, 1890s.

SPEAKER_03 15:40

Like, yeah, we're gonna get there here very soon. So this Homestead Act drew a large amount of people, like a large amount of people. Like I said, most of them were people from the cities or people nearby. Sometimes we have families spending their life savings on this opportunity. So we have a lot of people giving up everything they have to get this land out west here. Um, and another element that some people don't think about are the farmers who are Native Americans forced to live in reservations in Oklahoma, so in the panhandle, as well as African American freedmen, especially after the Civil War, who were affected by this lovely upcoming dumpster fire. One could argue that they could have it worse due to the discrimination at the time and the limitations that white farmers didn't face. So I did just want to note that that we do have a population of African Americans and Native Americans who are also settling after the Civil War, especially during this time period.

SPEAKER_05 16:41

Yeah, then may God have mercy on your soul if they find oil later on, if they find oil or find gold or find other mineral that that could be exploited, then they well, and they pack you up and shove you someplace else. And right?

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 16:56

But again, that's another dumpster fire.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

It's a different dumpster fire, but it's related.

SPEAKER_05 17:02

It's like an alleyway of dumpsters that are all on fire, and you just pick one.

SPEAKER_03 17:07

It's true. You're not wrong. Um, they did experience a drought in the 1890s, which kind of halted things for a little bit. And a lot of people tried to stick around as best they could for that time. I believe it lasted from like 1890 something up to about 1907. So there's like a 10-year period, 20-year period where it was pretty rough. But people did stick around because they believed if they farmed that land, the rain was gonna come. Whoa.

SPEAKER_05 17:38

So that would explain why, like in the 1890s, there was the first like true great resret recession in American history. Because there was also the issue of like, hey, uh, we we're based off of a gold standard. Why can't we just add silver to it? And then that way more people can have money. And there is that that's when I think JP Morgan like wrote a check and balanced a budget for like 47 million dollars or something crazy. The 1890s was a wild, yeah, wild time.

SPEAKER_03 18:10

Yeah, the 1890s is nuts, and right now we're just in the the wild west, we're not even talking about you know, cities and industrialization or any of that, which is a whole different ballgame, but in the same country, it's wild. So back in the Great Plains, 1907 is where we have our big wet season and it starts. It begins it begins in 1907, and in 1909, the government expanded the amount of land given to homesteaders, and homesteaders are people who act upon the Homestead Act, that's their nickname. Um, it went from 160 acres given to them to 320 acres given to them for about the same price. Wow. You can tell that the government's like, we really need to get rid of this land, we have to move west as fast as possible.

SPEAKER_05 18:51

How big is 320 acres?

SPEAKER_03 18:54

It's pretty humongo.

SPEAKER_05 18:56

Like, I'm trying to think how big is 20 acres. Um, how many football fields? Okay, so so 100 acres is about 25 football fields. So 320 acres would be about 80 to 85 football fields. Sick. That's a sizable chunk of land, that's a lot of land, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:31

So we have that going on, and we are always going to have people be people in, and we have our real estate modules and moguls and our railroad companies who are starting to buy land for really cheap using the Homestead Act. And then what they would do is they would divide it all up and sell it to farmers and homesteaders who are moving west. So they would buy as much land as they can, kind of like what's happening in the the housing market right now. They buy as much land as They possibly can, and then sell it for a little bit more to just regular people or farmers who are trying to make a new life for themselves. So we have that added to the mixer.

SPEAKER_05 20:10

They were uh piecemealing it out, basically.

SPEAKER_03 20:14

And they would hire or send out salesmen, and most of these salesmen were not um government hires. I think they were primarily private salesmen with some government hires involved. I could be wrong in that. That's um I'm going off my memory.

SPEAKER_05 20:35

Either way, they're probably a little unscrupulous.

SPEAKER_03 20:37

Well, these these sales pitches, man, they're wild. All right, are you ready? Salesmen would claim that you put wheat in the ground and without need for labor, like watering it, it would grow. I saw one ad that called it the Garden of the West, which please look at the picture of the Great Plains. The Garden of the West. They claimed that the rains would be affected by how much farmers cultivated the land. So, like the more land that was plowed, the more rain that would fall.

SPEAKER_05 21:10

Oh, so so your interaction with the land will somehow make the rains come.

SPEAKER_03 21:17

Correct.

SPEAKER_05 21:18

Got it.

SPEAKER_03 21:19

So if you plow more, the more rain's going to fall, and then that's going to help your plants grow.

SPEAKER_05 21:24

Got it.

SPEAKER_03 21:25

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_05 21:26

I I can see how that's a little misleading.

SPEAKER_03 21:34

But people believed them. That's the thing. Salesmen claims that the plains had the most fertile land in the country and for dirt cheap. Get rich quick. You're gonna do really great out here. You're gonna plant so much wheat, and you're gonna be able to build a house for your whole family. Everybody's gonna have their own room. It's gonna be great. But then if you look at pictures, please, please, for the love of everything, look up a picture of the Great Plains in like 1910. And you will laugh at this comment.

SPEAKER_05 22:07

Okay. Uh images of the Great Plains. Um, we said 1910.

SPEAKER_03 22:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 22:22

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:23

Yeah, the gardens of the West, right?

SPEAKER_05 22:26

It's just stunning. I mean, there's obviously there, there are some homesteads that did pretty okay.

SPEAKER_03 22:34

No, yeah. And we will talk about the the good times, but it comes crashing real hard.

SPEAKER_05 22:41

Well, then there's a picture of this dude just sitting in like this big giant hole in the ground surrounded by grass, and just like this is all mine. But then again, if you're coming from small some small, like cramped apartment in New York, having that much land is like, especially when you market it in terms of like, you know, America was kind of founded that on the premise that voters could only be landowners, and then now suddenly you're a landowner and you're like, hey, look at me.

SPEAKER_03 23:13

That's yeah. Well, that's the thing. Like, if you look at these advertisements and stuff and you compare it to the land, a lot of these people didn't have any image or knowledge of what these areas looked like. They're going solely based off of the Homestead Act, and they're going solely based off of the advertisements they're seeing in their local newspapers.

SPEAKER_05 23:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:35

So that's it. Like they're selling their entire livelihood based off of those two things. So you can imagine if you get there and you see this and you're like, well, let's make the best of it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 23:46

You know, like can't even find a tree to get the wood to like. It's like it's basically flat land in Minecraft.

SPEAKER_02 23:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 23:55

That that's what that's what you have to work with, except minus the big giant green blobs that bounce all over the place.

SPEAKER_03 24:01

Right.

SPEAKER_05 24:02

But everything else is just like flatland Minecraft.

SPEAKER_03 24:06

But yeah, same principle. Railroad companies bought up a lot of land and then sold it to cheap for cheap, like I said before. But they also sold it to railroad workers, which I thought was interesting. Some sections of public land were advertised as free land. So if people came fast enough that they would just get free land, that's how desperate they were.

SPEAKER_05 24:24

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 24:25

And people, the big crop at this time in the early 1900s was wheat. And the reason for that, I believe, is because it's cheap to buy the seeds for it, it's fairly easy to plant, and it's fairly easy to what's the word, harvest.

SPEAKER_04 24:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:48

So everybody's growing wheat. By the time the UIS became involved in World War I in 1917, the wheat was in huge demand for both the general public and the military. So now we have an even higher demand of wheat. And World War I kind of pushed that even further. After World War I, wheat was still in high demand by the general public. So this is where we're starting to get that breadbasket reputation. After the wet, or I'm sorry, the wet season was still in full swing even after the first world war. So farmers were cranking out wheat left and right while making a huge profit after the war was over. Throughout the 1920s, people of all different backgrounds are flocking to these areas around the Oklahoma panhandle, especially. And in North Texas, South Oklahoma, I put up a fun map so you can see it later. But yeah, so you have like they call it no man's land here. And essentially, no man's land is North Texas, Oklahoma panhandle, that little tiny area right there. That's going to be a very important spot later. So just know everybody's going there. Making farming even easier in the 20s over the use of tractors, making the work of farming faster and easier. Anybody can do it, right? Now that we have motorized tools, anybody can be a farmer. No training needed. All you gotta do is plow up the land, right?

SPEAKER_05 26:13

And I don't I don't want to like throw the company any shade, but it's kind of like the Squarespace of farming.

SPEAKER_03 26:21

Kinda.

SPEAKER_05 26:22

You don't need to know coding, you don't need to know this, you don't need to know web development. Like it's all here for you.

SPEAKER_03 26:29

Yep, just turn it on to make it.

SPEAKER_05 26:32

The difference is that I think Squarespace works, whereas like this is this is uh You're told that you don't have to do anything only to find out that you have to do everything.

SPEAKER_03 26:44

Right. So just to picture it right now, you have a bunch of people who have never farmed in their lives before just plowing up all of this native buffalo grass. And when I say plowing it up, I mean it's what they're doing is they're digging a hole and churning up dirts over and over and over and over and over and over and over again to where there's no grass left, it's just dirt.

SPEAKER_05 27:07

I feel like they're just butchering the land. They are like if you have like a multi-generation farmer out there, they're looking at it like, what are you doing? That that's not how you do this. And yeah. Meanwhile, you guys some dude out there with a thick Brooklyn accent.

SPEAKER_03 27:28

Right? Like you have people from Ireland, Mexico, Italy, other places where in the cities life was a lot more difficult without a lot of opportunity to own land. The Homestead Act provided something to where now everybody's moving west and they're farming for a price that they can afford because the seeds are cheap right now. And they had a promise that was made to them by these salesmen and the government that they would make so much money growing and selling wheat that, yeah, people are flocking over here. I don't blame them, to be honest. Can you imagine? If you think about the way life is in New York City in the early 1900s, or like the Chicago meat packing, for those of you who have read the jungle. Can you imagine having the opportunity to escape that, to have your own land outside? Sounds nice, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_05 28:22

Well, and we're also coming out of the cusp of like American romanticism.

SPEAKER_04 28:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 28:28

And like Henry David Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman and Dickinson, and like, you know, when we are looking at like the literature from the mid-1800s all the way up into the 1900s, it was heavily romanticized as like leave the city and you can become your own person. You're not a slave to anybody.

SPEAKER_03 28:51

Yeah.

unknown 28:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:52

And by the 20s, it was just a free-for-all, it feels like.

SPEAKER_04 28:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:56

Another group utilizing the Homestead Act were called suitcase farmers. These guys are fun. These guys would buy a plot of land using the Homestead Act. They would hire local farmers who had a tractor or farming equipment to cultivate and plant seeds for them. And then they would go back to the city while they wait until spring, and then they'd come back for the harvest, and then they would sell everything. Yeah. These guys are great.

SPEAKER_05 29:24

Boy, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_03 29:27

I know. So between the years I'd say like 1914 and into the late 20s, we have a huge boom of just plowing. They call it the Great Plow. That's what Ken Burns called it in his documentary. The Great Plow. I like it. Essentially, 5.2 million acres were plowed between these years. In the 1910s and 20s, we have 5.2 million acres. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_05 29:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:00

So picture how much dirt and exposed soil is 5.2 million acres.

SPEAKER_05 30:10

That's that's like what all of Oklahoma, like the size.

SPEAKER_03 30:16

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 30:18

I mean, so yeah, keep that in your head. So that's like an entire large state's worth of landmass that has now been completely tilled and butchered.

SPEAKER_03 30:30

And with no buffalo grass.

SPEAKER_05 30:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:35

There's a particularly large boom of uh plowing between 25 and 29.

SPEAKER_05 30:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 30:41

I think that's when it hit went ahead.

SPEAKER_05 30:44

Well, that's also too when they machinery was at its highest. Like now you had hit and miss engines, you had internal combustion engines, you had a lot of technology that was tilling these fields at unbelievable rates.

SPEAKER_03 31:00

Yep.

SPEAKER_05 31:00

Until 29 to feel like this is gonna blow up.

SPEAKER_03 31:05

It's gonna explode here very soon.

SPEAKER_05 31:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 31:07

We're getting there. So the wet season continued throughout the 20s. There, like I said before, there was a drought in the 1890s, but people truly believed in their heart of hearts that their plowing of the land was changing the climate. They thought that the droughts and the fickle weather were a thing of the past. They didn't have to worry about them all anymore. All they had to do was keep plowing soil and getting rid of the native grass and replacing it all with wheat, at least the new guys. There were some people in the area, especially no man's land in Oklahoma, who knew the land a lot better than these homesteaders did. And they remembered those droughts in the 1890s, and they they had a feeling that something was going to hit sooner or later. They were preparing themselves. All right. 1929. Part three, depression.

SPEAKER_05 32:00

Just a normal October 29th, 1929. Nothing major going on. Just another million stock market.

SPEAKER_03 32:07

Yeah. The stock market crashed in Wall Street. Causing the general public to sell whatever shares they could until even the banks ran out of money to pay them back with. Uh, this caused the worst financial depression in American history that has not only impacted the US, but all around the world. So we're we're talking 29 just after World War I. I'm not going to go into full-on detail, but part of the origin of this global thing is it's linked to World War I and the global economy, and all of the European countries were borrowing money from the US because the US still had money to give. And then when the stock market crashed and the US did not have money to give, everybody else kind of went.

SPEAKER_05 32:50

So to put it to put it in perspective, when I was real little, like when I was like six, seven years old, I knew this guy, uh, one of my grandfather's neighbors, and uh he would he hit the stock market in the height of the 20s, and I mean he made millions. Like we're talking 1920s made millions back then, factor in the inflation now, and it's it's hundreds of millions of dollars. And he said he remembers that October 29th, the bell rang at 8 o'clock in the morning, and by the time it rang at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, he had lost seven million dollars. That's rough, and he was penniless, he lost everything, and so then he became a steel worker, and I mean, is isn't that just wild to think that in one day you go from being very successful financially set to like losing everything? It's almost like losing your home in a tornado or a hurricane, like it's gone. Yeah, this to put this to put the depression into perspective. That that I think would be a good episode.

SPEAKER_03 34:10

Oh, yeah. I've been mulling over doing a great depression episode for a long time now. I would love to tackle that. Well, that's my that's my we house is complicated. So just know the depression hit really hard, and its center point or its starting point was in New York, and it would kind of like spread out from there essentially. Farmers on the plains, meanwhile, on the Great Plains, farmers had the attitude that eh, it's not gonna reach us here, we're fine. People gotta eat still, like we're gonna do great. It's in New York. Um, because they were reading about what was happening, they're reading about the unemployment, and they're reading about things that are happening in these cities, and they're like, we're gonna be okay.

SPEAKER_05 34:57

I mean, the logic isn't faulty. I I don't blame them for that.

SPEAKER_03 35:02

I don't blame them either. Yeah, like they're not dumb, they're just they're trying to live their life, man.

SPEAKER_05 35:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:08

The 1929 harvest was extremely profitable, which kind of proved their theory. But by 1930, the stock market began to reach the wheat farmers. The price of wheat dropped from a dollar per bushel to 70 cents a bushel, so it went down about 30 cents, which I'm not sure what the conversion is today, but um, I'm sure that they would start to feel it after a little bit. Yeah, the federal government asked the farmers on the plains to reduce their production to try and even out the supply. Instead, they did the opposite. The reason for this is the farmers figured that if they weren't going to get as much money for the wheat bushels, then they would simply make up the difference with, well, more wheat.

SPEAKER_05 35:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:52

Yep. Because of this phenomenon, they plowed an additional half million acres in no man's land. That panhandle area, on top of what was plowed during the Great Plow earlier that decade. One historian surmised it as farmers on the Great Plains solved all their problems, especially financial, as always produce more.

unknown 36:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 36:16

Prices are low, make more wheat. Not enough money to go to the market, make more wheat. Produce more wheat meant plowing more land. Prices are high and you're doing well, good for you. Make more.

SPEAKER_05 36:29

Yeah. I mean that that that's just unrequited uh capitalism right there. Like that's just you know that that that's what happens when you put money as the sole incentive to everything, and um, which obviously it serves its place, it serves its purpose, but it can also backfire in a situation like this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 36:53

Just really think about how much grass we're turning into dirt right now.

SPEAKER_05 36:58

Right.

SPEAKER_03 36:59

It's all gonna go airborne. In 1931, the new harvest came in, and it was hugely successful again in terms of crops. A ton of the stuff survived. Like the crops were were awesome, and they made it into bushels to sell and all of that good stuff, like neural. The problem was nobody wanted it. So now we have a supply and demand issue. Yeah, so now we're making too much, nobody needs it. Everybody has it. We're doing great, we don't need more. So by this point, the wheat bushels were selling for 25 cents per bushel. Oh no, that's half of the cost of what it is to grow it. They even dumped it on the streets, the roads, because they didn't have room to store it. So now now they're now we're starting to feel the depression hit them a little bit.

SPEAKER_05 37:48

And Supreme's like, oh no. Cause this was also prohibition. So distillers couldn't even take it.

unknown 37:56

Nope.

SPEAKER_05 37:57

Oh man.

SPEAKER_03 37:58

Nope, they just sat around.

SPEAKER_05 37:59

Oh that's gotta be infuriating if you're a farmer. You're just sitting in silo after silo after silo of just wheat that you can't do anything with. Uh that's a lot of maltomale.

SPEAKER_03 38:13

Right? All right, guys, part four drought and dust. Here you go. The winter of 1931 and 32 into the spring was incredibly dry. Because of the dry winter, meaning not as much rain, not as much snow. Because of the dry winter in the spring, storms became more common. And when I say storms, I mean more like wind storms. Storms that don't have any rain, but it was really windy. And another thing, too, that I wanted to point out that I forgot to mention that's my fault. The Great Plains are naturally just windy all the time.

SPEAKER_04 38:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 38:46

Like there's a constant breeze, or some breezes are stronger than others, or whatever. But wind is very, very common. It's just a part of life. Um, so when the winds kick up a lot, these storms are pretty common where there's not any rain or anything. Um, it's just a lot of wind.

SPEAKER_05 39:03

So the window we were talking before we were recording, like a great visual of what this probably looked like was um in the beginning of Interstellar.

SPEAKER_03 39:13

Yep.

SPEAKER_05 39:14

You know, when they're playing that baseball game, and all of a sudden the air sirens go off, and then there's like this wall of dust coming in. Yep. And I think Christopher Nolan was trying to do a throwback to like 1932.

SPEAKER_03 39:28

Yeah, I mean, that's what I thought of when I saw it most recently. My husband was watching it, and I was like, oh, that looks like what I've been researching for the past two weeks.

SPEAKER_05 39:38

It's almost like Nolan is saying that history will repeat itself. Shocking.

SPEAKER_03 39:43

Right? Or like, oh, filmmakers and artists actually learn their history. What do you know?

SPEAKER_05 39:49

Yeah, they study.

SPEAKER_03 39:50

Oh, it's a shocker. I know because of the dry winter and spring, these storms became a lot more common. So the winds that the air Area is known for, they start to pick up throughout the spring and the summer, and they take the dirt and the dust and the sand with it. And when I say winds, I mean winds that reach 40 to 70 miles an hour. Like these are crazy winds, these are strong winds, these are scary winds. Some of the storms weren't so bad. Just moving the sand around before petering out. Like you know how here in Arizona, you have your fun little dust storms and they kind of peter out. But then there were some really bad ones. Other dust storms made the sky super hazy, the air's hard to breathe. The really bad ones would reduce visibility to the point where you couldn't see further for a hundred yards, if you're lucky. That's a good time. One of these came through on January 1932. Just picture this, all right? 10,000 foot dust storms rolls through Amoryo. 10,000 feet of dust.

SPEAKER_05 40:59

So now I'm thinking of like Mad Max Fury Road. Uh-huh. When they go driving into those, like those that weird dust storm thingy.

SPEAKER_03 41:12

Like it's kind of like that. Just like this this particular one is huge. An estimated 10,000 feet tall wall of dust.

SPEAKER_05 41:22

People driving in to witness me. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 41:26

Just spraying silver on their mouths. This particular storm started in Amarillo, Texas, and uh the dust was so dense that eyewitnesses claimed that it made the daytime look like nighttime. It got so dark. A haboob. Uh-huh. The January storm would be the first really bad storm out of 14 really bad storms in no man's land that year. Meaning there were hazy storms and dust docibles all the time. But 14 of those were really terrible 10,000-foot scary day-to-night dust storms. Um, and I learned this and I thought was really interesting. And we're just talking about 1932. We have not gotten further, just FYI. It gets worse. There's a difference between the dust storms and the sandstorms. I didn't know this, and I thought it was interesting, but it makes a lot of sense now that you really sit down and think about it. The sandstorms weren't scary or dark or ominous, but they did cause a lot more damage to people, livestock, pets, and property. So think about, you know, sand in the playground or beach sand. It's going to cause more damage because it's bigger. Whereas dust is a lot smaller. So dust looks really scary, but in reality, it's the sand that does a lot of damage.

SPEAKER_05 42:46

Yeah, I could see that. Like, I mean, it was you're basically like sandblasting your car, yep, your house, whereas dust doesn't do much like that.

SPEAKER_03 42:55

Correct. Dust does other bad things that we'll talk about much later.

SPEAKER_05 42:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 42:59

Considering the atrocious conditions in 1932, it may go without saying, but the harvest that year in the fall was hot garbage. On top of that, the wheat prices continue to drop.

SPEAKER_05 43:13

Even better.

SPEAKER_03 43:14

Mm-hmm. And despite all of this nonsense in 1932, the farmers continued to plant new batches of seeds in the winter, hoping that next year would be better.

SPEAKER_05 43:23

Yeah, I mean, I mean I can't blame them.

SPEAKER_03 43:26

I have to give them credit for the next year will be better attitude because it really gets them through this whole thing.

SPEAKER_05 43:34

Now, did they try changing it to like say like horn or okra or or did they just like stick to wheat?

SPEAKER_03 43:43

They from what I understand, I'm sure that there was some differences in crops, but they really dug the wheat.

SPEAKER_05 43:51

Okay. Probably because it's a really skinny plant and you can pack it really close together, whereas like corn, you have to like spread out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:02

Yeah. I'm sure there was some diversity, but not a lot. Most of it was just wheat, which is it added to the problem.

SPEAKER_04 44:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:10

Some homesteaders began to lose land, struggling to keep up with mortgage payments if they're still working through the five-year agreement, especially. Offer stop services such as telephones and newspapers to try and save money where they could, because now they're starting to feel the depression. The depression continued to ravage the U.S. and the drought became worse by the time we get to spring of 1933. As far as I could find, there was zero rainfall by March. And as summer came, so did the winds, which brought back more dust and more sandstorms. Remember the 14 really, really bad storms in 32? In 1933, people experienced 38 of them.

SPEAKER_04 44:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:52

In just no man's land. There's a report of a storm in April of 33 that lasts for a whole 24 hours. A 24-hour dust storm? God. Can you imagine cleaning?

SPEAKER_05 45:05

I feel like your car would be like covered. It would almost it's I would say it would be equivalent to a dust version of like a snowstorm.

SPEAKER_03 45:14

Yes. Actually, you can find pictures. It's really interesting.

SPEAKER_05 45:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:18

Yep. It's a good time. In 19 nope, I skipped one. Storms became so commonplace that farmers could identify where they were coming from based off the color of the dust. Oh wow. I thought that was really interesting. They're like, oh, that dust is this color, that's coming from Oklahoma. That dust is this color, that's coming from Texas.

SPEAKER_05 45:36

That's that's wild.

SPEAKER_03 45:38

Right? Isn't that crazy? The 1933 storms with the dust, not the sand, made the outside world look black. Sometimes people couldn't even see their hands in front of their faces, let alone drive anywhere. Dust storms also generate static electricity, which I thought this was really interesting, to the point where people would drive in their cars with chains for the sole purposes of grounding the car in case there was an incoming dust storm. If they didn't, the electronics would short out. Some witnesses even reported seeing charged up barbed wire, which I thought was fascinating. Scary.

SPEAKER_05 46:14

Yeah. Okay, he chained up his grandfather did that.

SPEAKER_03 46:18

Um yeah, a lot of people did that.

SPEAKER_05 46:20

Yeah, they they would drag a chain behind the car just to keep the uh static from getting too high. Because it would cause the engine a misfire.

SPEAKER_03 46:29

Radio would start to short out. Really apocalyptic, really.

SPEAKER_05 46:34

So the cell phones would stop working, and God, oh Wi-Fi was a disaster. Such a pain. Just like man. Bluetooth. Bluetooth, like that was that. Well, I guess people are email when it go through.

SPEAKER_03 46:50

Uh people were getting rid of it anyway. They couldn't afford it anymore.

SPEAKER_05 46:53

How did they survive those trying times?

SPEAKER_03 46:58

It just goes up so hard. ISP costs were people would walk around and the static would make their hair stand up. During really big storms, the static would cause a shock if you touched metal, which is a trip. Between storms, the weather was actually really nice. So, yes, we had these crazy storms happening, and it's terrifying and it's wild. But then when a storm wasn't happening, the weather was really nice.

SPEAKER_02 47:24

Oh.

SPEAKER_03 47:25

In 1933. Like it was sunny out, people were enjoying themselves. But the problem was everything was buried. Houses were buried in sand, cars were buried in sand, fences became absolutely pointless because the dirt and the sand was so high that you could just step over it. Can you imagine trying to raise animals?

SPEAKER_05 47:43

God, that that's could you imagine trying to like shovel all that? Like, where where do you shovel it? At least with snow, you maybe you throw into a pile and eventually it'll melt. Right? If if you if your pile of dust is melting, you've got bigger problems on your hands than just that. Like for real.

SPEAKER_03 48:03

So all of this soil that used to be really moist and good for farming was now really dry, bare, and super hard. Not to mention the piles of sand and dust that keep blowing about.

SPEAKER_05 48:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 48:16

Animals. Animals domesticated and wild began to die of suffocation. Dust and dirt would get stuck in their mouths and their noses, causing it. Coyotes in the area that did survive were shot by farmers. So what happens if you get rid of all the predators? This caused an explosion of rabbits. The rabbits are anything the farmers could muster for themselves. So, like they would eat into fences, they would eat walls, they would eat anything made of wood, they would eat any kind of crop you're actually trying to grow, they would eat through your gardens, they would eat everything. Some families had it so bad they said it was a complete and total invasion.

SPEAKER_05 49:01

So at this time, Australia had emus.

SPEAKER_03 49:06

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_05 49:07

At this time, America had rabbits.

SPEAKER_03 49:11

Correct. Um, I don't suggest looking up pictures if you're sensitive, but um it was uh quite the um rabbit buffet, if you will. Lots of rabbit murders happening, trying to keep the rabbits off the farms and rabbit murders, rabbit murders.

SPEAKER_05 49:28

I I maybe population control or yeah, that's probably a better word. A rabbicide? Uh actually, no, rabbiside. That that that that no, that's a lot of rabbi side.

SPEAKER_03 49:42

That's no, I don't like that.

SPEAKER_05 49:44

Yeah, yeah, we don't know. Pull up the holy hand grenade.

SPEAKER_03 49:48

Yeah, yeah. So rabbits are a problem. Along with, you know, everything else. Can you imagine being a housewife trying to keep your clothes clean, trying to keep your house clean? It was impossible. Even for us today, I am terrible at dusting my house. I can't imagine being one of these poor women trying to do everything they can to have a nice home to live in.

SPEAKER_04 50:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:12

Um, it got it got so bad that you know, like people would put their dishes upside down so dust wouldn't get in them, eat even then. There was one person I saw that in Interstellar. Yep.

SPEAKER_05 50:24

Remember how they would put all their plates upside down, their their cups upside down. And yep.

SPEAKER_03 50:29

Um, I was listening to one interview from a lady who said that she would go to bed in a clean bed and then wake up and she's covered in dust. Oh, I like can you imagine I living that way?

SPEAKER_05 50:41

I lose my mind when my wife eats a cracker in bed.

SPEAKER_03 50:46

Right?

SPEAKER_05 50:46

And I find a crumb, and I'm like, I gotta burn the bed down. Uh I can't sleep in this anymore.

SPEAKER_03 50:53

Yeah. Beds, furniture, food covered in dust. Everything is covered in dust at the end.

SPEAKER_05 50:59

And I wonder if valley fever was a thing back then, too.

SPEAKER_03 51:02

I'm sure it was. And we are going to get into some illness when we get a little bit further here, but yeah, it's a bad deal. So it's not fun.

SPEAKER_05 51:10

Tuberculosis, I imagine, was on the rise.

SPEAKER_03 51:13

I mean, it already was.

SPEAKER_05 51:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:15

In the spring of 1934, after a rare snowfall, there was a day with a little bit of rain. People were so excited. Children played in the rain and in the mud. The farmers had the belief that the drought was finally over. It turned out that after that short span of rainfall in 1934, it would be the driest year to date. Oh, these poor people.

SPEAKER_05 51:38

Uh, this is going swimmingly, but pun attended.

SPEAKER_03 51:41

It's great. That year experienced a nationwide drought that affected 46 out of the 48 states at the time. According to NASA, the 1934 drought was the worst drought of the last millennium and still holds a record today. Wow. Extreme heat and winds caused hot dust storms throughout no man's land. One particular storm on May 9th was estimated to have carried about 350 million tons of dirt and dust from Wyoming and Montana, moving east. The dust created a wall that spanned up to 10,000 feet high. It blew through the Midwestern states all the way up to Chicago. This particular storm brought an estimated 12 million pounds of dust to Chicago. By May 10th, the storm blew through the Detroit East to Buffalo, New York, darkening the skies. And by the 11th, the storm was over the East Coast. New York City had to turn on their streetlights by midday. And due to lack of visibility, the city essentially had to stop its operations until the dust cleared. In DC, President Roosevelt was holding a press conference on May 12th on the topic of relief for the planes in terms of economic relief. And then the dust blew through the White House while he was talking about it, bringing the plight of the planes with it, talk about a message.

SPEAKER_05 52:58

See, this kind of reminds me, and I'm gonna nerd out here a little bit. This kind of reminds me of um uh if you're into astronomy and if you have a telescope, you know, six inches, eight inches diameter, you can look at Mars. And you can because Mars's orbit is pretty similar to that of Earth, so like once it's up in the night sky, it we stick with it for quite a long time. And uh there is these wild dust storms where like you'll see it start at say like the South Pole, and then over the course of days, it will consume the entire planet. Like you can see all of Mars because you see the polar ice caps disappear, and then it's just like this beige marble, and it will be like that for weeks at a time, and it's like a planet-wide dust storm. That that's what's kind of coming to mind here with with all this, is like, oh, it's a it's a planet-wide dust storm that I could see that that just ruined the president's fancy White House.

SPEAKER_03 54:06

I mean, I feel for him though.

SPEAKER_05 54:09

He was trying to help, but yeah, it's it's like it's almost like the environment was like trying to flip him off as well as like everybody else in the Midwest.

SPEAKER_03 54:21

Yeah, but uh we're we're gonna actually go over some of the things that he was trying to do, and I I really respect FDR for it, but oh yeah, because he had the adage like do something.

SPEAKER_05 54:31

If it doesn't work, try something else, but you always gotta be trying something, which I love that that motto.

SPEAKER_03 54:38

Yeah. So early attempts to find a solution. The storm that began on May 10th brought the public attention of the planes, right? So now we're starting to see a lot of people pay attention, especially the people who are in the cities. And to be fair, they're being ravaged by depression, they're all working in factories, life really sucks. But now they're reading about it, they lived through one storm, let alone 38 in a single year or so fair. And it started to bring about a fix-it-can-do attitude across the US from various industries. For example, the Barber Asphany of New Jersey came up with the idea of using their products to cover up the dirt in the plains for$5 an acre. That's very expensive. Another concrete company had a similar idea, but was thoughtful enough to suggest holes if in the concrete for the seeds to make sure the plants could still grow. Most of these were centered around covering up the dirt. And I can, at the time period, I can see where they're going with it. But what they didn't realize is how big the planes were. They had no idea that they would need to cover up a hundred million acres of land. Good intentions.

SPEAKER_05 55:52

That's why you study math, kids. So that you don't agree to something only to find out that, oh, I was supposed to do, you know, like a quarter million acres, now I have a hundred million. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_03 56:09

Right. Well, taxes, here we go. Our intentions were good.

SPEAKER_04 56:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 56:16

Roosevelt and Secretary of Agriculture at the time, his name was Henry Wallace, they came up with the following ideas. Encouraging farmers to plant fewer crops. Tried and failed, but we'll try again. Establish better plowing techniques that would preserve some of the native grasses and soil. Okay, like that one.

SPEAKER_05 56:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 56:34

Roosevelt did spend time traveling to different states throughout the Great Plains while he was president during this time period that were being affected by the Dust Bowl. He was described as being honest in that ideas or changes from his end were still just ideas and they would take time to implement. He stated, I would not try to fool you by saying we know the solution, we don't. But what I can tell you from the bottom of my heart is this if it's possible for us to solve the problem, we're going to do it. Fair.

unknown 57:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 57:02

I can see why people liked him.

SPEAKER_02 57:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 57:04

By the summer of 1934, the government was able to identify the area where most of the Dust Bowl was happening and where it was the worst. That area was Boys City. In Cimarron County, in the panhandle of Oklahoma, right smack dab in the middle of no man's land. This area was hit especially hard due to the constant winds there. Frustratingly, there were sections that still had native buffalo grass, but they were buried by sand. Helpful. Some of those sand piles were 10 feet high and they created huge sand dudes across the area. Property values in the area began to drop and they were dropping really fast. Businesses could no longer stay open. People stayed in their homes for as long as possible because I would too. Some had to leave their homes due to foreclosure, but would stay in town to find like a smaller house or a different place to live, still wanting to hold on to that promise that was sold to them. The resilience of the farmers and the people who lived there as stubborn as some were really needs to be noted. And I really do respect that they stayed hopeful through all of this stuff.

SPEAKER_02 58:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 58:07

In 1934, early 35, a lot of people were still holding on to the idea that the drought would end and that they would get through it and everything would be okay. At the same time, there are a lot of stories where people lost everything. It would affect them so deeply that some people, um, just a trigger warning for a few out there. But some people did like end their own lives, sometimes the lives of others, because they they couldn't see a way out of the situation. And out of just respect for them, I did want to kind of bring that up. And it is a big bad deal for some people while others really tried to make the best of it. It was hard, you know, it's tough.

SPEAKER_05 58:46

I I mean, I I don't know how I would handle it. Because even even to this day, like if I lose my job or whatever, there's resources, a lot of those resources Roosevelt implemented in his time, but there was like there are things that that I can fall back on as a temporary relief while I get back on my feet. Back then, there was nothing. Yeah. If you lost your farm, you're done. That was it. There was no insurance, there was no welfare, there was no social security, uh, certainly no disability, none of that existed. So, like you had nothing to go off of.

SPEAKER_03 59:27

Yeah. Well, speaking of Roosevelt, he did put in the New Deal, which was not only an effort to help the Great Plains, but just the country in general who were who's going through this depression.

SPEAKER_04 59:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 59:42

The New Deal was a series of programs organized by the government to aid the Republic of the US and recover from the Great Depression. And usually when you research the Great the Great when usually when you research the New Deal, it's split into two sections. You have the first section of the New Deal, and that's from the 33 to 35, and then the second section from 35 to 36. I'm not going to go into huge details, just know if you want to look it up, be prepared that you have different sections of the deal to look through. Roosevelt generally summarized his plan with three the three R's is what he called it relief, recovery, reform. Well, all of these acts from the New Deal should be considered important, especially for the country as a whole. For our purposes here, we're just going to focus on the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was signed in 1933. This created the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was designed to bring down the price of agriculture through proper farming practices, livestock adjustments, and tax reform designed to lower prices in agriculture while taking care of farmers who worked in the industry. I know all of that sounds really, really boring, but in reality, it's like some cool science stuff with some beef thrown in, and we got to take care of our farmers. So we can look at it that way. Farmers were beginning to see the benefit of the New Deal by the late night by late 1934, which helped with unemployment. People were able to get food and resources provided by the government to keep them afloat. And we know it doesn't fix the dust problem, but the farmers are being helped, they're being fed, they're able to get some sources, some resources from the government, and that's great. Adding to the difficulty that was farming, especially if you had cattle, you needed to feed the livestock. Farmers began resorting to feeding cattle mashed up yucca or cacti, which is always a good time. Very popular option was breaking down tumbleweed and thistles for cattle to eat. That's a very thorny process, not one that I would want to do.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:46

You had to basically imagine passing that.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:50

Essentially, you'd have to like get all the thorns and spikes off of these plants just to feed to the cattle. Um, a lot of the time it would be the children who would do that stuff. So like the parents would be doing their best to keep the house afloat, and the kids would be de-spiking these spiky plants.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:10

Trying to tame a tumbleweed.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:13

Essentially. A government program was passed, and they had a goal of reducing the amount of cattle spread throughout the country country in an effort to control the prices of beef. They offered$16 a cow, if healthy, for families to turn in personal cattle, and farmers to reduce their herds. This process would increase the amount of beef for the country while reducing the prices. And it was difficult for some ranchers as cattle ranching was their livelihood and they were very, very proud of their work. I understand. But because of the state of the economy and no one could actually afford to pay them privately, they were also struggling. They needed the government money, and as hard as it was, they did sell eventually, most of them sell their stocks. This program proved to be very successful. Uh, it generated 111 million dollars. Oh no, no, I'm sorry. It they spent 111 million dollars, and 8.3 million cows were purchased and processed into food. So essentially, what the government did is they bought a whole bunch of privatized cows from ranchers and farmers and stuff, and then they processed it and turned it into food to make the prices of beef go down. Yeah, that makes sense. And it works, it was actually a really successful program.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:32

It's such a a counterintuitive way of thinking. If you're a farmer, yeah. If you're thinking you're a farmer, like produce more, you make more money. Here it's like I'm gonna make more money by doing less. Less?

SPEAKER_03 1:03:48

Yeah, they really had to sell it. They were like, okay, stop farming for just a month. Hold on, slow down, hold on.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:58

I hope you guys like beef because you're gonna eat well here for a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:03

And I'm just gonna tell you what I named this part because I thought it was funny. Part six, please make the dust stop. Make it stop, please. Generally, people in no man's land felt that the government was truly trying to help them, but they continued to struggle through the effects of the depression and the dust bowl combined. 1935 bought even more dust with stronger storms. Farmers were still trying to plant through the dust bowl as best they could, but these storms made it really, really difficult, as you can imagine. One storm in 35 was reported to have destroyed a quarter of the Oklahoma crop, half of the Kansas crop, and the entire crop of Nebraska. That's a lot of bad crops. These storms became so bad that people who were caught out in the storms were dying, they were suffocating in the dust, they were buried, lost. It was it was really bad to be caught outside in these storms, especially now that we're in 1935 and it's just getting worse and worse and worse. By spring and summer of 35, the long-term effects of the dust began to show themselves in form of illness, especially in children. Symptoms were usually coughing, chest pain, nausea, shortness of breath fever. People call this illness dust pneumonia. The illness spreading throughout the southern plains was primarily caused by small dust particles being breathed in, getting trapped in the lungs. Some reported that they would cough up mud after breathing in so much dust. There were attempts to mitigate the inhalation of dust by the use of masks, but it didn't really stop people from getting sick. It was especially difficult, just like COVID, to keep masks on children. And children's were children are the ones who are most affected by this. And you know, that's just because you know, kids are kids, right? Yeah. Another issue was finding enough masks for people. In no man's land, uh, the Red Cross actually declared a medical emergency in 1935, sending masks and medical officials whenever possible. The final estimation of death deaths from death pneumonia is about 7,000 people, most of them women and children. Remember those suitcase farmers?

SPEAKER_04 1:06:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:10

Yeah, yeah. The guys who would hire people to do the farming for them and then come back to make the money off of them. Conveniently, they just kind of disappeared.

unknown 1:06:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:19

And they abandoned almost four million acres of fields that were plowed and never taken care of. These fields would provide the dust for the dust storms that were going through the area every single time the wind picked up. Oh, geez. By 1935 and 1936, people began to believe that they were being punished by God, believing that he was upset with them for plowing up all of the soil.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:42

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:43

I mean, I can I get it. April 14th, 1935. This is the big one, guys. This is the doozy. April 14th, 1935. Black Sunday is what they call it. A huge black dust storm rolled through the plains of the north from the north. By the time it got to no man's land, it was 200 miles wide, moving at speeds up to 65 miles an hour. That's free away speed. It moved so fast that it caught people off guard. The day began bright and sunny, it was nice. And it ended in a giant black storm of dust. It took a lot of people by surprise. It came in fast, like it came in raging. Imagine you're outside enjoying a picnic during a rare sunny day, and then this things come barreling through like a bat out of hell. A few eyewitnesses compared it to the end of the world. After the storm blew through, people had difficulty going in or out of their homes due to big piles of sand. They just couldn't open the door. Some people said that at sundown, the sky was red because of all of the residue that left, that was left. An article was released by the Associated Press from a reporter who was caught in the middle of Black Sunday in Boy City. The story began with quote, three little words achingly familiar on a western farmer's tongue, rule life today in the dust bowl of the continent if it rains. So I'm just gonna read that again because I felt like I read it wrong. Three little words achingly familiar on a western farmer's tongue. Rule life today in the dust bowl of the continent if it rains. There we go. This was the first time the term dust bowl was used. So fun fact article, 1935, Black Sunday. Black Sunday was considered a monumentous event in the 30s, and throughout 1935, Dust Bowl Dust Bowls, Jesus, dust storms continued to roll through the planes, and the government would continue to work to find ways to fix the environmental disaster. Can you start to see why it's a man-made environmental disaster?

SPEAKER_05 1:08:54

Yeah, I feel like if they were a little bit more responsible, but they also had no way of knowing.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:00

Oh, yeah, that's the thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:01

They're not responsible. Like this still would have happened, but it would have been like a magnitude like two or three versus like uh 9.9.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:13

Correct. It's a fun time. So part seven, what do we do? In the entire year of 1935, it was reported that Boy City, the city that was hit the hardest, received less than 10 inches of rain. An estimated 850 million tons of dust blew through the plains. People felt that it would never end, and it would actually spread east, swallowing up the entire country. People were living under harsh conditions, poverty stricken, covered in dirt. They ate little, they did their best to ration their resources. Families began moving from house to house, moving when they were forced out of their homes for not being able to pay their mortgages or their rents throughout the plains. Uh, this was also around the time where people began making clothes from flour sacks.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:55

Even today, sacks of flour have patterns on them, like little flowers or whatever. This is why.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:02

Interesting.

unknown 1:10:03

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:03

People did still have access to the government support that was being offered in their areas thanks to the New Deal. For some, it wasn't enough. There was also a cultural attitude, especially amongst the men, in which they felt it wasn't proper. They were too proud to take help from the government. I can do this myself. I'm a big macho family man. Um, I make fun of it, but truly it's just the attitude of the time period.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:27

Like well, and I and I think like today, where the gender rules are a little bit more blurred. Yeah. I think anybody would feel pretty bad because it's like, okay, I don't care who's supposed to provide for the family, it's not happening. And you know, I'm I'm like I'm contributing or not contributing to that. So I can see where where they're coming from. Yeah, there's the whole macho man thing, but like I think it's a little bit more deeply rooted. I could see that than that perspective. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:01

Yeah. By the winter of 1935, the amount of farmers who took advantage of the New Deal programs began to grow. Giving into the terrible conditions and giving up their pride, farmers began to come in droves for work. And they would work for various government-provided programs to make enough money to feed their families. It really was a program that helped a lot of people. Um, so it really did help. Up in Washington, DC, not state, policymakers argued how to handle the decibel or if they even should. In 1936, a policy was proposed to encourage plains farmers to move out of the decibel areas. This policy proved to be very controversial. Farmers would be asked to leave lands they worked really hard for, and remember, they left everything to go there. So leaving that area, again, you're leaving everything. You literally have nothing. Where are they gonna go? It would also be a statement of failure that they had failed to succeed on the Great Plains and homestead acts didn't work and all of this. Uh, but would this really be a bad thing to admit that this grand plan of settling in the Great Plains wasn't going to work out? Roosevelt felt that this was a very extreme option. He didn't want that failure to be under him. And I can't help but think about the five presidents involved in Vietnam in this comment, but here we are. Uh, but Roosevelt did have good intentions. He really did. He had hope and truly believed that he could help both the land and the people of the Dust Bowl. So Roosevelt was staunchly, we are not making these farmers move. We are going to help support these farmers where they are. That was Roosevelt's stance on this. And I think that's probably helped him win the coming election in 40.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:41

Four times over.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:45

On a separate front, we have the Soil Conservation Service, which I found very interesting. It's uh it was led by a man named Hugh Hammond Bennett, and the agency was an agency to study better agricultural practices and train farmers to use those practices in an effort to restore the soil of the plains. Bennett hired Howard Fennell, a scientist in agriculture, to assist him in studying those agricultural practices. So essentially they were like, okay, we have this agency, and we know we need to figure out these practices. Like, we know that they're not doing good, but we don't know how to make it better. So we're gonna hire a scientist to help us. Uh and what he came up with was pretty um, it makes sense. And I think a lot of these practices are still in place today. So, what they came up with is capture as much moisture as possible, obviously. Plow along the contour of the land, working with the terrain, not against it, avoiding any runoff of water. While the plains are terribly flat, it did have enough contour slope to cause this or to encourage this. Planting a variety of different crops to diversify the soil. Using a plowing machine or tech called a lister, uh, it made deeper ridges in the soil and it would avoid damage to land that tractors caused. So this particular machine would make the ridges a lot deeper but less wide. So you would still have little gaps of, you know, grass or native soil or whatever to help out. Bennett called the system Operation Dust Bowl. So that's a fun title. I like that. And again, great start. We like it, but it takes a lot of time to fix things, and people are really struggling out here.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:27

By this point, at the end of 1935 and through the late 1930s, it would be a fair question to ask why didn't people leave? I mean, that would that would be a question I would ask. Why didn't you just leave?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:39

And I think it would be a difficult thing to really generalize too, though. Some people couldn't leave because of the economic fallout of the depression. Fair. They can't afford it. Others had the attitude and personality of one who clings on to, you know, if it rains, just hold on, we can make it through. It'll be better next year. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad. I understand both reasons. You know, people be people, and everybody has their own reasons, their own situation. And then some just really loved living on the plains when times were good and they wanted to stake it out. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:12

I mean, it's home.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:14

It's where you built your your future. So I could totally see the hesitancy to to uh not wanting to leave.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:24

I kind of understand all the perspectives. Yeah. Given the situations of people. Families continue to lose their lands, their equipment, their homes. And another huge percentage of the population did just what we were asking. They began to look west, reading a lot about lands of promise, especially in California. Slowly this became a lot more common. As people were losing their farms, they would just pack up and leave and look for somewhere else to go. Over 300,000 people ended up going to California. They went west. A ton of these people moving to the state from all over the country, not just from the plains. So it is important to note that during the 30s, California saw a massive exodus of people coming into their state, not just from the plains, escaping the dust bowl, but from all over the place. California agriculture was expanding rapidly, and by the mid-1930s, there was a high demand for workers. Ads in newspapers would often advertise work for higher wages. So, for example, people growing cotton in California were paid up to 50% more than people who were doing it in the South. California also boasted higher unemployment rates than other states, meaning there's a lot of work to be had. It offered$40 for a family of four, doable. Uh, the amount, it double the amount of planes states were paying. So essentially, California is like, we'll pay you more, we have lots of jobs, and we have a lot of land. I mean, it is enticing. The California pipe population grew up to 20% during this time period. A majority of this population came from other cities, other areas. Some went east, so some other people from the plains went east to places like Arkansas or the Carolinas. The areas in the no man's lands lost an estimated 30 to 45 percent of their population. A majority of the people who stayed were those who were benefiting for the New Deal programs. This mass mass exodus of people moving west is considered one of the largest migrations of people in US history, larger than the Oregon Trail, which I thought was really interesting.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:26

Yeah. That's a that's a big movement of people.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:30

Yeah, that's a huge movement of people. Bigger than the Oregon Trail.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:34

I thought that was cool. Anyway, in many instances, fathers would move to California without their families with the intent to find stability before moving their entire families with them. Once they had found some semblance of stability, families would then travel to meet their husbands and fathers to start a new life. These families, especially the ones from Oklahoma, were known as Oakies. This is where we get John Steinbeck and his idea for Grapes of Wrath. If you've ever heard that, it's a good one. For those on the move, people were packed into their cars full of what they could fit and excitement for a new feature. I'd be excited too. Imagine living in destitution and illness and lots of dirt. You're waking up in dirt beds, and then you're driving towards a new opportunity of finding some new land to farm out of all of this nasty dust. Right? Okay. Now imagine arriving there, either in an area around LA or north near San Francisco, the salty air, the moist soil, the green hills. Oh, after living in the dust bowl, I can only imagine how all of these T people felt. I'm sure they felt great. Unfortunately, though, there was a lot of mistreatment of the people who moved to California from the Dust Bowl. They were looked down upon, they were made fun of, they were taken advantage of. And a lot of not a lot of areas, but in some areas, uh, they had to follow rules that were really similar to Jim Crow laws. Finding work is difficult, even though that they were promised lots of work and jobs and all of these things. Finding work was really difficult, and many people set up living conditions similar to shanty towns or outdoor camping. I have some pictures that it's it's interesting. Yeah. Some rejected farm work, hoping to find a way to work in an entirely different industry. Others stayed in agriculture, but they worked at the mercy of a larger corporate growers and companies that generally did not like this new influx of immigrants. So it was a mixed bag, and it wasn't exactly a promised land of work, but it was nice. So it's like, I don't know, that's kind of hard.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:38

Well, and it's it's a complete identity change that you have to like pull out of your like pull out of your hat. Like, imagine no, like one day you're a school teacher, and then you know, the next day you're now working in a factory assembly line. Right. Like that's just it's it that's assuming that you could even find work like that. That it's and especially if you've been a farmer for like 10, 20 years, and you've had to give all that up now to like bolt-on car tires on a factory assembly line. Yeah, it's rough. That's uh that that's gonna be a uh mental gymnastic yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:20

It's rough.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:21

For the people who remained on the plains, they continue to live as best they could trying to farm and harvest through dust storms and depression, and their drought continued throughout the late 30s. A photographer named Arthur Rosteen was hired by the government to take pictures and document what was going on. They believed that the photographs and images would be a powerful image, um, and it would continue the efforts to aid the people who are struggling throughout the depression. This also happened in cities, but we we should also note that since we're talking about the Dust Bowl, this happened a lot in the plains as well. The photographs are fascinating. They really are. Yeah. And they show a lot of human emotion to the people who were living there. Rothstein claimed that the people of the Dust Bowl and the photos he took there were the most affected or affecting. He was able to take one photo during the dust storm, and that photo became one of the most widespread, impactful photos of that century. Other photographers would follow Rothstein's lead, and pictures of storms were taken frequently, publishing all of it for the public to see in newspapers. Interestingly, film was another form of media that the government used to raise awareness of people living through the Dust Bowl. These would often appear in newsreels that would play before like a show would start in the movies. That was really a common thing back then, is you would have newsreels roll before you'd watch a movie. Roosevelt returned to no man's land to speak with locals and officials. Bennett from the uh conservation service. He went to the plains to test out his uh scientist findings from Operation Dust Bowl and train local farmers on their methods. FDR held firm that he would support the people who remained in the Dust Bowl as best he could. And this was a huge deal to those people. Like he they really took it to heart and they supported him, and like I said, I think that won him the election.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:04

What was that like election number three at that point?

SPEAKER_03 1:22:07

Uh I think this is two because pretty sure. Could be wrong. If I'm wrong, let me know.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:15

Well, because he died in 1944.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:18

Yeah, 44, 45.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:20

And that was his fourth election that he was serving.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:23

Huh. I could be wrong then.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:24

So I think that's his third.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:26

My dates might keep getting funny.

unknown 1:22:28

That's fine.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:28

Anyway, the federal organization was documenting the depression around the country. They sent photographer Dorothea Lange to California. Her job was to photograph conditions of immigrants from the Dust Bowl and the conditions they were living in in California. So she would go to these shantytown tent places and she would take pictures of all of these people. By the time she completed her task, her photos were the photos that urged the government to create a number of government-sponsored camps for Dust Bowl refugees to live in, which I thought was cool. Lange is the photographer who took the famous photo called The Migrant Mother. You'll know it when you see it. Oh yeah. I have it up on my notes. She she took that photo. Uh, these camps filled up really fast and became little mini towns for a lot of the refugees. So it was hard to get into them, but once you did, it was nice. In 1937, in Oklahoma, a group of farmers wrote to the government telling them that they needed more. They needed more support. And honestly, I can't blame them considering they've been dealing with drought and depression since 2093. So we're hitting year seven, eight here. The farmers asked for support in the following. They asked for every landowner was required to leave stubble on harvest fields. I did not look into what that is. My fault. Missed that note. Abandoned fields should be replanted with crops to cover up the dirt. The goal here was to have the crops do what the bus flu grass was doing before it was plowed up. And they wanted to make sure the government was forcing farmers or people living in the dust bowl to keep up with their land to prevent dust from being kicked up. They even wanted the government to call martial law to make sure that this happened. Like they were very serious. And this letter was really surprising.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:01

That's actually a thing that is here in Arizona.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:04

So, like, uh, we'll have housing developments by these uh farms out here out in you know, like the Southeast Valley. And they're like, Well, well, we're not going to develop these quite yet. So then they are charged by the state and by the federal government, like, well, now you have to control the dust.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:26

Right.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:27

And uh because of valley fever and whatnot. So what do they do? They farm it. Yep. They just pay the farmers that were living there originally, like, hey, I know we give you like 20 million dollars for this plot of land, but can you live here for free and farm this and you can keep all the profits off of it? Sure, because that eliminates the dust.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:51

So a lot of these practices we're we're still seeing today, absolutely.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:54

Oh, oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's uh it's huge.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:57

This letter from the farmers, it surprised Washington because traditionally they were people who wanted to be left alone. They didn't want government interference, but they were desperate. And they knew that they needed help and they needed help to control how people were farming. That was the big thing. They wanted to make sure that people were farming correctly. That way we're not getting so much dust kicked up. The Soil Conservation Service saw the letter as their calling card. They set up districts enforcing proper farming practices saying that farmers would not be paid unless they plant and till the land correctly to avoid destroying land and creating dusty conditions. The federal government responded to the letter by purchasing the abandoned land that was left by the suitcase farmers. Kind. Once purchased, they worked to bring the land back to its original state, and it was eventually covered in buffalo grass. They also paid farmers in gas if they were using particular farming tools, and they even paid farmers who were not planting crash crop wheat crash cash crops like wheat. I can word. They were paying them to not plant essentially.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:06

Yeah, the subsidies.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:07

Yep. Farmers liked this a lot because they could keep their land and they'd get paid so they could survive without having to plant so much. So I mean, it's a pretty good deal. The new farming practices were introduced by Fennel and they were very much working. They were proven to work, and farmers across the plains began to adopt them more and more. In 1938, farmers began to see more rain for the first time since early 1930s. People were hopeful that the harvest was pretty good compared to the past years. But with rain, after a long drought, comes a lot of bugs.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:38

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:39

In 1938, that crop was taken over by grasshoppers. States even called the National Guard to help with pest control.

unknown 1:26:47

Oh.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:49

And what happens when you use pesticide? It kills the crops.

unknown 1:26:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:56

It's a big deal all the way up into the 70s and 80s with like silent spring and and whatnot.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:02

Yeah, it's a good time. It kills the crops and the bugs. But as was tradition, the farmers had the that attitude, it'll be better next year. And you know what it was. In 1939, a snowstorm hit no man's land, and by spring, after the snow melted and the reconstruction of the fields and in the plains and all of that good stuff, the soil was the best it had been since the 1920s. Slowly but surely, after the restoration of millions of acres of land and the retraining of farm practices, the drought began to let up and the rainfall became more frequent throughout 39 and the 1940s. So again, I'm going to ask you, have you ever had buyer's remorse?

SPEAKER_05 1:27:39

No.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:41

Have you ever purchased land or a home and it didn't turn out the way you wanted it to?

SPEAKER_05 1:27:48

No, compared to what has happened back then, I'm perfectly content with my financial decisions that I have made up to this point.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:57

Have you ever had a failed business venture?

SPEAKER_05 1:28:01

Yes. Yeah. But also, no, it's uh yeah, the the big one is that buyer's remorse. It's just like yeah, you know, every I I think it's natural for everybody to get it. Like, man, did I really need to go buy that fancy laptop or that expensive cell phone or or whatnot? But but compared to this, man, oh man, this is like it's a lot, yeah. It's just well, and it it it it it is a lot, but I think it also really brought out some really cool aspects of Americana.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:40

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:41

For example, my my grandfather, he was raised in Elgin, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, and during the height of the depression, him and his mom, like every night, because there was no fences, all the houses had no fences, it were they were just houses, and they would on the back patio, they would put like four or five plates of food because they were lucky. My my great-grandfather ran a gas station or he owned it, and regardless of a of a recession, you have to have gas, like that's all there is to it. So like his family stayed employed, gainfully employed, and did all right. But every night they would put out like four or five plates of food, and then like every time it seemed like the following morning, they would go out and check it, and the plates would be neatly stacked, washed, dried, you know, silverware kind of like put back on its plate, and like because that that that was homeless families that were coming through every night trying to get out west, and you know, and then you know, my great-grandmother was just like, Yeah, we've got excess food, we're gonna put it out there for whoever needs it. Yeah, so like this is also the time period in American history where like a handshake, there's like a legally binding contract. Yeah, like you do not go back on a handshake. That is like like break a contract, you all you want on paper, that's fine, but don't don't violate the sanctity of that of that handshake. And then and a lot of it comes from this time period of less fortunate Americans trying to figure out how to make a living with more fortunate Americans, and there wasn't this. Um, I mean, I'm sure it took place, but there wasn't like this hierarchy so much amongst the middle class, it was just like, hey, I know you've lost everything, but here's what we can do to help you out, you know, and then a couple of years later, that family would be like, Hey, I know you've lost everything. Here's how we can help you out, and so on and so on.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:02

Yeah, that class system kind of um went dormant after the stock market crashed.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:09

Yeah, yeah, because I mean because you you go from these millionaires to just everyday people just trying to find work.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:19

Yep.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:20

And uh and and it and it's as much as that sucks, that's also in a way liberating, if that makes sense. It's it's one of those things that's where like, yeah, you've had to go through this rough patch, but at the end of the day, like you're better off for it.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:38

You made it. Yeah, it makes sense.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:40

So yeah, it's uh and I think this is where we start to see like the Norman Rockwell paintings coming out, and just you know, good old-fashioned scenes of America where like you don't have to have the fancy new toys, you don't have the have the uh nice cars or the big mansions and all that stuff. Just having a a roof over your head, comfortable place to sleep, and work the next day, there's really nothing more that you could possibly want, other than obviously like your your spouse and your kids and and whatnot. Well, yeah, there is that. So, yeah, as crappy as the situation is, I think it really did bring out a lot of really interesting traits that would help serve America through like World War II and then you know, all the way up through Korea and Vietnam and then walking on the moon and and all that stuff. I feel like a lot of those seeds that got us through those tough times in the 70s and 80s stemmed back to this time period. I could see that. It's uh yeah, you could you could write a dissertation on it, but that's just my philosophy. So it's one of those things where it's like, hey, yeah, it's a dumpster fire, but it it's almost like um it's almost like alcoholism. Like Dick Van Dyke said that alcoholism is one of those really rare diseases where once you get through it, once you're on the other side of it, you are a better person than you were than before it even started. And I feel like that's kind of how the this whole Dust Bowl thing, whole Great Depression thing is, is like America became a much more empathetic country after the fact than it was before.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:41

I can agree with that.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:42

Boy, you did your homework on that one. It was fun. Yeah, look at all the uh the citations and yeah, I went all out. No, that's uh that was that was solid. Just like the uh just like the Vietnam War one. It's just like, oh, okay. Yeah, I see how you navigated through that.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:05

So I gotta find another complex one now.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:07

Yeah, I know like one thing I'm working on is uh the Panama Canal.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:13

Yeah, that's a good one.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:15

Because that's a two-parter. Not not so much maybe the episodes it could be a two-parter, but the whole incident, uh, you know, the first half of it is the French dealing with it, and then the second half of it is the Americans dealing with it, and you can see the contrast.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:34

Whereas like the French didn't really have regulations, they weren't working on sanitation, they weren't working on any of that. They were just dig a freaking hole. Yeah. Whereas like the Americans come in and they're like, no, no, no, we're gonna spray for mosquitoes, we're gonna build supply towns, we're gonna we're gonna have a systemic way of doing this. And you can, it's one of those cool things where you can see the dumpster fire get lit and then put out and then turned into a garden. Nice. So, and I know that's been on the news lately, but yeah, that that's one. And then I know we've got our uh that very, very, very special guest, our Holocaust survivor. We did actually record an episode with her. I'm in the process of editing that as we speak, so stay tuned to that one. That one is gonna be pretty uh Yeah, it'll be good. Yeah, that that one you it takes away all your complaining rights. Facts. Yeah, you you don't have a bad day after that. Kind of like how I've never had Byron's remorse now. After something like this, right? And then we're we're encroaching on episode 50, which we've got a special special theme for that one.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:52

Yeah, got some things lined up for you guys.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:55

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so so yeah, be sure to check us out on the daysdumpsterfire.com. You'll see a lot of Kara's artwork there, you'll see our show notes there, a lot of pictures, all sorts of stuff. Um uh be sure to what's up for this episode.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:14

I am also going to add a little section. I included some extra research things about people who lived throughout the Dust Bowl. They're like little blurbs of different people. I'll add that to the website too, if anybody's interested. Because I know like this one didn't have a lot of personable uh, you know, Dust Bowl survivors. So I wanted to make sure that there was something in there for my friends who like that type of thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:36:41

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, be sure to check us up on on the Instagrams. We're on there, and um, feel free to shoot us an email. Um, the days dumpster fire at gmail.com. Uh, we are totally open to ideas, uh, suggestions, criticisms if they're not written too harshly. We're open to trash can fires. Like, yeah, be sure to uh uh hit us up. And then naturally, of course, the homework, as always, uh find people. Uh, the number one way that a podcast grows these days is through word of mouth. And don't be afraid to speak up, especially if you're in a setting where you guys could be in a meeting talking about, like, oh wow, hey, yeah, this whole thing fell apart, or this was a disaster, or this or that. Well, this is where you speak up and be like, I actually know of a podcast that could help out with this that may be able to offer some insight into our current situation. And then, of course, if you're a student, uh history student or whatever, uh, look at our catalog. It's actually getting kind of big now. And uh yeah, you may be able to find stuff here that could help you study for a test without having to like reread, you know, 300 pages prior to taking the test. So, so yeah, don't be afraid to go out there and uh use this as a resource. Hit us up, um, ask us questions, give us ideas, go to the Instagrams, uh, go to our website, the daysomstifier.com. And so, yeah, that's all I got. Did you have anything you want to add? Nope, that's it.

unknown 1:38:27

Good.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:28

Awesome. Well, as always, good stuff, and uh yeah, keep it a hot mess. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:46

Everything up here is news. I can't stand it, just must land it, going back for Jesus Every Jesus People got your father. It's come jealous, healthy, jealous, going back for Jesus If you've done my feet and must get your friends. If you don't mind, get your hands. Broken heart, gone against God, go to Jesus.