The Worst Hard Time Part 5

Americans had become a force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than "the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history."

9. New Leader, New Deal A SEARCH FOR SKUNK HIDES SEARCH FOR SKUNK HIDES sent Bam White wandering around the High Plains in the year that Americans threw out their president. On the road, the cowboy found that a lot of his countrymen were living like him, close to the bone, looking twice at another man's garbage, swapping half a day's labor for a meal. He hoisted his bindle and moved from camp to camp, hearing about low-grade opportunities to stay alive. A man could pick citrus in deep Texas for a nickel a bushel, or collect bottles for bootleggers at a dime a bucket load, or cut asparagus in the spring for twelve cents an hour. Cas.h.i.+ng in a skunk hide, at $2.50 apiece, seemed more dignified and less hard on the back of a man in his late fifties. What Bam White saw on the road made him shudder. There was a big "Hooverville" in Oklahoma City, thousands of people living out of orange-crate shacks or inside the mildewed, rusted-out hulks of junk cars. Entire towns were broke, shutting down city services. In the string of communities that had sprouted up along the new rail lines, schoolhouses closed, unable to pay teachers or heat cla.s.srooms. Texhoma, just up the road from Dalhart, disconnected its streetlights. Couldn't afford to bring light to darkness. The land was baked, brown, and blowing, and there wasn't much feed left for cattle, and still in the cafes of Clayton or Boise City was Rudy Vallee singing that life is just a bowl of cherries. Bam returned home to kids sick and coughing in the two-room house that leaked wind. He rubbed a mixture of skunk oil, turpentine, and kerosene on Melt's chest, a family remedy, and Melt said he felt better. But at school, the kids said the boy smelled like road kill. sent Bam White wandering around the High Plains in the year that Americans threw out their president. On the road, the cowboy found that a lot of his countrymen were living like him, close to the bone, looking twice at another man's garbage, swapping half a day's labor for a meal. He hoisted his bindle and moved from camp to camp, hearing about low-grade opportunities to stay alive. A man could pick citrus in deep Texas for a nickel a bushel, or collect bottles for bootleggers at a dime a bucket load, or cut asparagus in the spring for twelve cents an hour. Cas.h.i.+ng in a skunk hide, at $2.50 apiece, seemed more dignified and less hard on the back of a man in his late fifties. What Bam White saw on the road made him shudder. There was a big "Hooverville" in Oklahoma City, thousands of people living out of orange-crate shacks or inside the mildewed, rusted-out hulks of junk cars. Entire towns were broke, shutting down city services. In the string of communities that had sprouted up along the new rail lines, schoolhouses closed, unable to pay teachers or heat cla.s.srooms. Texhoma, just up the road from Dalhart, disconnected its streetlights. Couldn't afford to bring light to darkness. The land was baked, brown, and blowing, and there wasn't much feed left for cattle, and still in the cafes of Clayton or Boise City was Rudy Vallee singing that life is just a bowl of cherries. Bam returned home to kids sick and coughing in the two-room house that leaked wind. He rubbed a mixture of skunk oil, turpentine, and kerosene on Melt's chest, a family remedy, and Melt said he felt better. But at school, the kids said the boy smelled like road kill.

When you're hungry, you listen when a politician talks about food, and in the election of 1932, growling stomachs drove many people to develop a sudden interest in democracy. Alfalfa Bill Murray said if he were president n.o.body would go without bread, b.u.t.ter, bacon, or beans. The man from Toadsuck said the problem was that America had gone soft. Look at those college people at Oklahoma A&M, asking for public money to build a swimming pool. "As far as I am concerned they can go to the creek to swim," he said. Murray thought everyone should get a piece of land, get out of the crowded and unworkable cities, and turn back the clock. With his wrinkled suits and cigar that seemed to be an extension of his mouth, Murray took to the hustings in the 1932 Democratic primary season, planting Four B's clubs. Hoover was sinking fast. Most Americans paid no federal income tax in 1932. But Hoover wanted to tax the untaxed to pay for a sizeable deficit. He scoffed at the pictures of fruit vendors on city streets; they were selling apples at five cents apiece, he said, because it was more profitable than working a regular job. The Republicans had been routed in the 1930 midterm elections, losing seventeen seats in the Senate and control of the House. The presidential election year of 1932 looked to be even worse for Hoover's party. In the capital, a whiff of genuine cla.s.s warfare was in the air. Congress voted to raise taxes across the board on the wealthy to cries of "Soak the rich!" Others pushed for an estate tax, taking nearly half the worth of anything over ten million dollars.

Hoover was an engineer and entrepreneur who was worth four million by the start of the First World War. As president, his past statements haunted him like a bill collector. It was not just his inaugural prediction that the United States was close to eliminating poverty forever, nor his prosperity-around-the-corner forecasts. One statement, defining character by how much money somebody had, followed Hoover everywhere. "If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much," Hoover had said in the giddy days, when America was a c.r.a.pshoot with good odds.

The national unemployment rate remained at 25 percent. It seemed as if the country had been sick forever. The economist John Maynard Keynes was asked if there was ever a worse time. "It was called the Dark Ages," Keynes said. "And it lasted four hundred years."

To Murray, anybody who could stand up straight and string four sentences together had a shot at being president. One wing of the Democratic Party favored the 1928 nominee, Al Smith, but you know about Catholics, Murray said. And then at the other end of the spectrum were the Reds; Murray had shown he would deal with socialists when he sent the National Guard to Henryetta, Oklahoma, to break up a May Day parade last year.

Out of New York came a governor from the moneyed cla.s.s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he drove Murray to fits-being from that hated family. (FDR's cousin, Teddy, had forced Murray to remove a white supremacist plank from the Oklahoma const.i.tution before he would allow it to join the union.) At first, Franklin Roosevelt was dismissed as a man without heft, a dilettante running on one of the nation's great names. Then he took up the cause of the "forgotten man"-the broken farmer on the plains, the apple vendor in the city, the factory hand now hitting the rails. And though he spoke with an accent that sounded funny to anyone outside the mid-Atlantic states, and he seemed a bit jaunty with that cigarette holder, Roosevelt roused people with a blend of hope and outrage. He knew hards.h.i.+p and the kind of emotional panic that comes when your world collapses. He had been felled by double pneumonia in 1918, which nearly killed him, and polio in 1921, which left him partially paralyzed. He had been told time and again in the prime of his young adulthood that he had no future, that he would not walk again, that he might not live much longer.

"If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe, after that anything would seem easy," he said.

Hoover believed the cure for the Depression was to prime the pump at the producer end, helping factories and business owners get up and running again. Goods would roll off the lines, prosperity would follow. Roosevelt said it made no sense to gin up the machines of production if people could not afford to buy what came out the factory door.

"These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized, the indispensable units of economic powers," FDR said on April 7, 1932, in a radio speech that defined the central theme of his campaign. He called for faith "in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid." That forgotten man was likely to be a person with prairie dirt under the fingernails.

"How much do the shallow thinkers realize that approximately one half of our population, fifty or sixty million people, earn their living by farming or in small towns where existence immediately depends on farms? They have today lost their purchasing power. Why? They are receiving less than the cost to them of growing these farm products."

As the campaign wore on, prices fell further. In No Man's Land, a farmer could get only six cents for a dozen eggs, four cents a pound for a hog or chicken.

At the Democratic convention in Chicago, Murray roared one last time, joining the forces trying to stop Roosevelt. But FDR won the nomination on the third ballot. Alfalfa Bill was crushed; he finished with twenty-three delegates, a curious presence, the Four B's clubs gone, unbending even as "Happy Days Are Here Again" started to play and people sang: "Your cares and troubles are gone There'll be no more from now on."

Murray glowered. "Object of many an urban stare was the rustic figure of Governor William Henry (Alfalfa Bill) Murray of Oklahoma sipping gallons of black coffee, chewing soggy cigar b.u.t.ts," wrote Time Time magazine. Oklahoma, Murray insisted, would vote for Roosevelt only "'after frost-and frost our way don't come until after the election.'" magazine. Oklahoma, Murray insisted, would vote for Roosevelt only "'after frost-and frost our way don't come until after the election.'"

In November, Roosevelt carried Oklahoma and every other state but six, mostly in New England. Hoover said the Democrats under Roosevelt had become "the party of the mob." The mob voted. FDR's take in Oklahoma was 73 percent; in Texas it was 88 percent. Alfalfa Bill Murray later said that Franklin Roosevelt-son of Hudson River Valley Protestant aristocracy, cousin to a president, product of Groton and Harvard-was a Jew, who kept his ancestry secret.

In March 1933, the new president was sworn in on a snowy day that seemed to match the winter mood of the country. Hoover, his tank of ideas empty, handed Roosevelt a sh.e.l.l of a country, its confidence shot. "We have done all that we can do," Hoover said on his last day in office. "There is nothing more to be done."

Roosevelt did not waste an hour. The gates of possibility sprang open, and Roosevelt went on a hundred-day dash. For American capitalism, it had been a truly frightening time, full of "dark realities," as Roosevelt said. Money was not circulating, even in the capital. James A. Farley, the postmaster general, said he could not cash a check in Was.h.i.+ngton. The president blamed "unscrupulous money lenders" and "a generation of self-seekers." Some in his government urged him to nationalize the banks. After all, they had robbed a nation of savers, the argument went, disregarding the laws of nature in a binge of speculative excess. Roosevelt immediately called a bank holiday, four days to stabilize a system in which nine thousand banks had failed in three years. And then he took to the airwaves.

"I want to talk for a few minutes about banking."

It was his first radio chat with the country, just days after his inaugural. Roosevelt tried to rea.s.sure people that when the banks reopened, the system would stay afloat. But privately, he told reporters later in what he thought was an off-the-record session, he was afraid that there was not enough money to prevent another run. "On Friday afternoon last we undoubtedly didn't have adequate currency," he said to the informal press gathering. "No question about it: there wasn't enough circulating money to go around." He called Congress into session and signed the Emergency Banking Bill into law-eight hours after it had been introduced. It worked. By the end of Roosevelt's first week in office, deposits exceeded withdrawals. A few months later, more provisions were added to the new law, insuring individual deposits up to ten thousand dollars. He told people they could take their savings out of mattresses and from beneath the floor. The government would back their dollars.

Next up: try to save the farm. Free-market agricultural economics was over, for good. Look what it had done, Roosevelt said: America had produced more food than any country in history, and farmers were being run off the land, penniless, while the cities couldn't feed themselves. The average farmer was earning three hundred dollars a year-an 80 percent drop in income from a decade earlier. From now on, government would try to shape the price and flow of food. To force prices up enough for farmers to make a living, Roosevelt had the government buy surplus corn, beans, and flour, and distribute it to the needy. Over six million pigs were slaughtered, and the meat given to relief organizations. Crops were plowed into the ground-like slitting your wrist, to some farmers. In the South, when horses were first directed to the fields to rip out cotton, they balked. Next year, the government would ask cattlemen and wheat growers to reduce supply in return for cash. Hoover had been leery of meddling with the mechanics of the free market. Under Roosevelt, the government was was the market. The Agricultural Adjustment Act created the framework, and the Civilian Conservation Corps drummed up the foot soldiers. They would try to st.i.tch the land back together. Build dams, bridges. Restore forests. Keep water from running away. Build trails in the mountains, roads on the prairie, lakes and ponds. In May, Roosevelt signed a bill giving two hundred million dollars to help farmers facing foreclosure. Now, before some nester's land could be taken to satisfy a bank loan, there was a place of last resort. the market. The Agricultural Adjustment Act created the framework, and the Civilian Conservation Corps drummed up the foot soldiers. They would try to st.i.tch the land back together. Build dams, bridges. Restore forests. Keep water from running away. Build trails in the mountains, roads on the prairie, lakes and ponds. In May, Roosevelt signed a bill giving two hundred million dollars to help farmers facing foreclosure. Now, before some nester's land could be taken to satisfy a bank loan, there was a place of last resort.

The Volstead Act was amended to permit the sale of 3.2 percent beer, and by December, the rest of federal prohibition was gone. Signs went up in Boise City: "BEER IS HERE!" But some counties in the southern plains kept prohibition. Dalhart was still dry, meaning the whiskey stills would stay in business and prescriptions for spirits would continue at the drugstore.

That son of a Carolina cotton farmer, Big Hugh Bennett, continued to rage against the killing of the land by his countrymen. What was happening in Oklahoma, in particular, appalled him.

"It seems not so long ago since hundreds of homesteaders, at the crack of muskets fired by United States troops, were rus.h.i.+ng into the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma for the purpose of locating free farmsteads," he said. "What has happened in this region since is tragic beyond belief."

Bennett could make these kinds of statements and not seem like a scientific nag or an urban elite, because he had an earthy populism. He milked cows and fed slop to hogs on his own farm. He chopped cordwood for winter fuel. He knew soil, but he also knew every farmer's daughter joke. He could talk cotton in the South, wheat in Kansas, oranges in California. He loved nothing more than digging with his big hands in earth that was the greatest of American endowments. And at the end of the day, he poured himself a few tumblers of bourbon and swapped tall tales.

Most scientists did not take Bennett seriously. Some called him a crank. They blamed the withering of the Great Plains on weather, not on farming methods. Basic soil science was one thing but talking about the fragile web of life and slapping the face of nature-this kind of early ecology had yet to find a wide audience. Sure, Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir had made conservation an American value at the dawn of the new century, but it was usually applied to brawny, scenic wonders: mountains, rivers, megaflora. And in 1933, a game biologist in Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold, had published an essay that said man was part of the big organic whole and should treat his place with special care. But that essay, "The Conservation Ethic," had yet to influence public policy. Raging dirt on a flat, ugly surface was not the focus of a poet's praise or a politician's call for restoration.

But one of the first things Franklin Roosevelt did was summon Bennett to the White House. Bennett said Americans in the nation's midsection had farmed too much, too fast. The land could not take that kind of a.s.sault. The greatest gra.s.sland in the world had been hammered and left without cover. The dusters that were just starting to make national news were not a work of G.o.d. And they would get worse. Well then, the president asked: was it possible to undo what man had done?

Bennett made no promises. He was forceful, he had charisma that Roosevelt liked, and he took to the task-as director of a new agency within the Interior Department set up to stabilize the soil-with relish. He had little money or staff. But Big Hugh was a showman and a scientist who knew his subject. If Roosevelt believed, as he said in his forgotten man speech, that the core problem of the Depression was that farmers and the small towns dependent on them had fallen completely out of the economy, Bennett was his intellectual soul mate as he looked at what caused the Great Plains to break down. He knew in his heart that something profound had occurred, that man had changed nature. The balance would have to be restored from the ground up. Bennett must get people to see the crisis in a different way, to accept some of the blame. It called for a period of shock therapy. By some estimates, more than eighty million acres in the southern plains were stripped of topsoil. A rich cover that had taken several thousand years to develop was disappearing day by day.

Big Hugh was only a few weeks into the job when he started with speeches that attributed the failed farm system to "a pattern of land use that was basically unsound." Millions of years of runoff from the Rocky Mountains had deposited a rich loam over the plains, held in place by gra.s.s. For that land to be restored, Bennett suggested, people should look back to the days before the plow broke the prairie. The answer was there in the land, in what had been obvious to XIT cowhands and Comanche Indians all along: it was the best place in the world for gra.s.s and for animals that ate gra.s.s. But could the native sod ever be put back in place, the balance restored? Or had they killed it forever?

The drought did not take a holiday. Weather forecasts took on a dreary similarity: dry, with dusters. The wind rumbled through and tore off great sheets of prairie soil. As storms darkened the skies, people started to believe they were being punished for something awful. When Roosevelt took a trip to the plains, a farmer in North Dakota held up a hand-painted sign: "YOU GAVE US BEER. NOW GIVE US RAIN."

The president was not optimistic. "Beer was the easy part," he said.

10. Big Blows THE LAND WOULD NOT DIE an easy death. Fields were bare, sc.r.a.ped to hardpan in places, heaving in others. The skies carried soil from state to state. With no appreciable rain for two years, even deep wells were gasping to draw from the natural underground reservoir. One late winter day in 1933, a battalion of heavy clouds ma.s.sed over No Man's Land. At midday, the sun disappeared. Lights were turned on in town in order to see. The clouds dumped layers of dust, one wave after the other, an aerial a.s.sault that covered streets in Boise City, buried brown pockets of gra.s.s, and rolled over big Will Crawford's dugout and the patch of ground where Sadie had tried to establish her garden with a tin-can irrigation system. They had to shovel furiously to avoid being swallowed by the enraged prairie. an easy death. Fields were bare, sc.r.a.ped to hardpan in places, heaving in others. The skies carried soil from state to state. With no appreciable rain for two years, even deep wells were gasping to draw from the natural underground reservoir. One late winter day in 1933, a battalion of heavy clouds ma.s.sed over No Man's Land. At midday, the sun disappeared. Lights were turned on in town in order to see. The clouds dumped layers of dust, one wave after the other, an aerial a.s.sault that covered streets in Boise City, buried brown pockets of gra.s.s, and rolled over big Will Crawford's dugout and the patch of ground where Sadie had tried to establish her garden with a tin-can irrigation system. They had to shovel furiously to avoid being swallowed by the enraged prairie.

Hazel Lucas Shaw watched the dust seep through the thinnest cracks in the walls of their rental house, spread over the china, into the bedroom, onto the sheets. When she woke in the morning, the only clean part of her pillow was the outline of her head. She taped all the windows and around the outer edge of doors, but the dust always found a way in. She learned never to set a dinner plate out until ready to eat, to cook with the pots covered, to leave no standing water out for long or it would turn to mud. She had decided to give up the teaching job that paid worthless scrip and to try and start a family. Her husband, Charles, had at last opened his business, a funeral home in the rental house. Town was supposed to be an easier place to live than a dead homestead to the south. But Boise City faced the same tormenter-the skies that brought no rain, only dirt. Some days Hazel put on her white gloves and sat at the table-a small act of defiance that seemed both silly and brave.

The temperature fell more than seventy degrees in less than twenty-four hours one February day in 1933. It reached fourteen below zero in Boise City and still the dust blew in with the arctic chill. Hazel tried everything to stay warm and keep the house clean. Dust dominated life. Driving from Boise City to Dalhart, a journey ofbarely fifty miles, was like a trip out on the open seas in a small boat. The road was fine in parts, rutted and hard, but a few miles later it disappeared under waves of drifting dust. Unable to see more than a car length ahead, the Shaws followed telephone poles to get from one town to the next.

At the Panhandle A&M weather station, they recorded seventy days of severe dust storms in 1933. Weather forecasting was still a rough skill in that year, a hit and miss game. The basic instruments for measuring air movement, temperature, and all that fell from the sky were little changed over the previous 350 years. The government predicted the weather by rounding up readings from more than two hundred reporting stations across the country and from air balloons, planes, and kite stations. The information was sent by Teletype to Was.h.i.+ngton twice a day. There, a map was drawn up and a forecast went out from the weather bureau for different regions of the nation. It was based on the movement and struggle between high and low barometric pressure-an ancient way of predicting weather. The forecast always originated in the capital, which is one reason why older, more skeptical nesters still referred to weather prediction by its nineteenth-century term-the "probability." A hardy homily such as "Clear moon, frost soon" or "Red sky at night, sheep herder's delight, red sky in the morning, sheep herder take warning" was more trusted, and not just by those who worked the land. During his days as an airmail carrier, Charles Lindbergh said he ignored the official weather bureau forecast; it was useless. Throughout the 1920s, as one technological marvel after the other changed American life, the tools of weather forecasting remained items that would have been familiar to Benjamin Franklin. And there was a dire need for some sense of what tomorrow would bring, especially with the dawn of widespread air travel. When weather turned lethal without notice, it killed people-sometimes in large numbers. For tornadoes, there were no warnings at all. A big twister roared through the Midwest in 1925, killing 957 people. The weather bureau's only great achievement was taking accurate measurements: atmospheric pressure, days without rain, total precipitation, swings in temperature, and wind speed.

March and April 1933 were the worst months of the year-a two-month block of steady wind throwing fine-grained dirt at the High Plains. The cold snap had killed what little wheat had been planted last fall. There was now an expanse of fallow, overturned land nearly half the size of England, no pasture for cattle, and no feed for other animals.

Fred Folkers spent most of his days shoveling dust. The shovel was his rescue tool; he never went anywhere without it. In a long day's blow, the drifts could pile four feet or more against fences clogged with tumbleweeds, which created dunes, which then sent dust off in other directions. He tried to modify the fences so dunes would move along, below the rails. Some mornings, Folkers did not recognize his land as the s.h.i.+fting dunes produced dust mounds with ripples holding the imprint of winds from overnight. Other mornings, his car was completely covered. And after he wiped his car clean, it was h.e.l.l to start it, the dust clogging the carburetor.

He knew now he was probably going to lose the orchard, the last living thing on the Folkers farm. All the pails of water he'd hauled from the tank to the little grove of trees seemed for naught. His living memory patch of the old Missouri home, the peach and cherry trees, plum and apple, the gooseberry, currants, and huckleberry-they could not live through the howling dirt of 1933.

At the end of April, with no green on the land and no rain from overhead, came a duster that lasted twenty hours. For most of the storm, the winds blew at better than forty miles an hour. The dust was strong and abrasive enough to sc.r.a.pe the paint off the Folkers house, to get into the digestive system of cattle.

"Here comes another roller!" was the shout in Boise City, a warning to take cover. People watched the horizon darken with the approach of the duster. There was no escape. They could not stay outside for fear of getting lost or of choking on a blast of gritty air. And while indoors offered protection from the wind, it was no respite from the fine granules.

Lindbergh, the greatest aviator of his day, flew into this corrosive air s.p.a.ce on May 6 while trying to cross the Texas Panhandle. His plane choked, the engine sputtering, and bucked wildly in the turbulent currents. Six years earlier, Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic, flying just barely above the ocean on his way to Paris. Now, he could not cross the flattest part of the United States. He made a forced landing in the part of Texas where a promoter had tried to plant a part of Norway. He was greeted by children as a G.o.d sent down from the heavens, with front-page headlines throughout the southern plains. Lindbergh wanted no part of it. He seemed spooked by the dusters. He slept in his plane, then flew out after a two-day delay.

One day in late May, just as the high wind season started to ebb, the dust disappeared, and out came the blue empty skies that had so enticed nesters in years past. But by midmorning, dark clouds were back. They looked like rain clouds-an answer to everyone's prayers. Bigger, darker, heavier clouds were on top of them-dusters piggybacked on a system that would normally bring only rain. In the early evening, the skies broke, delivering hard brown globs of moisture-rain and hail, which had picked up dust on the way down, falling as mud pellets. The dirty torrent smashed rooftops, buckled car hoods, made cows bawl in agony. More was on the way. A funnel cloud appeared.

"Twister!"

People raced for shelter, praying for deliverance. The tornado touched down in Liberal, Kansas, near the Oklahoma border, in the heart of tornado alley. It lifted roofs from barns, knocked down warehouse walls, pushed houses from their foundations. An old broomcorn factory was completely destroyed. Stores were pulverized into piles of sticks. Windows shattered. Downtown was reduced to a heap of timber and bricks. Four people were killed; nearly eight hundred were left without homes. And then not long after the tornado swept through, destroying the heart of one of the bigger towns on the High Plains, the mud pellets came again, tossed from the sky, a final insult.

In the summer, winds knocked down telephone poles on the Texas Panhandle and shoved aside grain silos holding the wheat that n.o.body wanted. At the end of summer, another twister, this one at the southern edge of No Man's Land, hit the area. This furious funnel was strong enough to carry off the roof of a hotel. For the record, there had never been a drier summer.

The High Plains lay in ruins. From Kansas, through No Man's Land, up into Colorado, over in Union County, New Mexico, and south into the Llano Estacado of Texas, the soil blew up from the ground or rained down from above. There was no color to the land, no crops, in what was the worst growing season anyone had seen. Some farmers had grown spindles of dwarfed wheat and corn, but it was not worth the effort to harvest it. The same Texas Panhandle that had produced six million bushels of wheat just two years ago now gave up just a few truckloads of grain. In one county, 90 percent of the chickens died; the dust had got into their systems, choking them or clogging their digestive tracts. Milk cows went dry. Cattle starved or dropped dead from what veterinarians called "dust fever." A reporter toured Cimarron County and found not one blade of gra.s.s or wheat.

An Oklahoma farmhouse, 1930s People from four states gathered in Guymon, Oklahoma, east of Boise City, to share stories and plead for help. The Red Cross was overwhelmed, with far more people begging for a.s.sistance than the agency could respond to. Some relief was on the way from one of the new agencies of the federal government: it would provide enough money to pay men to shovel dust from the streets of Guymon, Liberal, Texhoma, Shattuck, Dalhart, and Boise City. The wage was one dollar a day, and a man could not work more than three days a week in order to give others a chance.

A distress telegram was sent to Congress from the sodbusters of the High Plains. It was something these nesters never thought they would do-beg. In Dalhart, the editor of the Texan, Texan, John L. McCarty, was against asking for help. It was humiliating, his town with its head down and hand out. He preferred defiance, scoffing at people who complained of the dust-"the softies, the tenderfeet, the cry babies," he called them. Still, people on the dust-sweeper rolls and those who had broken the prairie gra.s.s, only to have it break them, took up a collection and sent out the urgent request, a telegram signed by 1,500 people: John L. McCarty, was against asking for help. It was humiliating, his town with its head down and hand out. He preferred defiance, scoffing at people who complained of the dust-"the softies, the tenderfeet, the cry babies," he called them. Still, people on the dust-sweeper rolls and those who had broken the prairie gra.s.s, only to have it break them, took up a collection and sent out the urgent request, a telegram signed by 1,500 people: WE ARE FIGHTING DESPERATELY TO MAINTAIN OUR HOMES, SCHOOLS, CHURCHES, AND VARIOUS ENTERPRISES TO MEET LOCAL NEEDS. WE DON'T WANT DOLE OR DIRECT RELIEF. WE WANT WORK.

Other farmers were leaving, joining the exodus of tenants from the drought-crushed eastern half of Oklahoma and from Arkansas and Missouri, where cotton farming had crashed. But most people decided to hunker down and see it through. After all, there was a new president. The drought was longer and harsher than anyone could remember, but this had to be the bottom of the pit. The law of averages said so.

One night just before dinner, after clearing the floor, the dining table, the lampshades, and the kitchen counter of their daily dust at her home in Boise City, Hazel Shaw put on her white gloves and smiled. She had an announcement for her husband.

"I'm pregnant."

III.

BLOWUP.

1934-1939.

11. Triage.

THE GOVERNMENT MEN came to the High Plains in the second year of the new president's term with a plan to kill as many farm animals as possible. There was not a buyer in the hemisphere for the wretched-looking cattle stumbling over the prairie, many of them blind, their ribs outlined through the skin, scabby with sores, and their insides all bound up with dust. And n.o.body was going to get much grain out of this anemic, flyaway ground, not with the drought in its third year, and less than five inches of rain so far by mid-1934. Every day presented another bleak task for a farmer who had raised a calf to maturity only to see it break a leg in a blinding dust cloud or choke trying to get a breath. It made silent men cry to see herbivores on what had been the greatest gra.s.sland under the heavens dying cruel deaths from this lifeless, cursed turf. A cow could live only so long chewing salted tumbleweeds and swallowing mud. The job of the government men was to set things right by drying up the market of surplus beef, hogs, and grain. They gathered a crowd of gaunt-faced nesters into the Palace Theater in Boise City. In between takes of Mae West's came to the High Plains in the second year of the new president's term with a plan to kill as many farm animals as possible. There was not a buyer in the hemisphere for the wretched-looking cattle stumbling over the prairie, many of them blind, their ribs outlined through the skin, scabby with sores, and their insides all bound up with dust. And n.o.body was going to get much grain out of this anemic, flyaway ground, not with the drought in its third year, and less than five inches of rain so far by mid-1934. Every day presented another bleak task for a farmer who had raised a calf to maturity only to see it break a leg in a blinding dust cloud or choke trying to get a breath. It made silent men cry to see herbivores on what had been the greatest gra.s.sland under the heavens dying cruel deaths from this lifeless, cursed turf. A cow could live only so long chewing salted tumbleweeds and swallowing mud. The job of the government men was to set things right by drying up the market of surplus beef, hogs, and grain. They gathered a crowd of gaunt-faced nesters into the Palace Theater in Boise City. In between takes of Mae West's I'm No Angel, I'm No Angel, they put an offer on the table: they put an offer on the table: Tell you what: bring those tired animals to us and we'll give you cash dollar, up to sixteen bucks a head. The ones that can still walk, the cows with a pinch of flesh left between their bones and saggy skin, we'll send down to a butchering plant in Amarillo, and the meat will go to hungry people. The others will probably fetch no more than a dollar-the minimum buyout-and we are going to kill them here. Could use a cowboy or two to help us along. That's our deal.

Okay, fine by me, said Fred Folkers. He was down to a few head of cattle, and they were having trouble standing. He had a dairy cow still and milked her, but what came into the pail looked like chocolate milk, and he had to put a dishrag into the bucket to draw out the dust.

And Hazel Lucas's uncle, C.C., agreed it was probably the only way to get a dollar to keep the homestead going. He did not like the idea of shooting your cow in the head and shoving her into a ditch after raising her from infancy. But it was either that or watching her die, gagging like the others, or fevered and blind. It was wrong keeping an animal alive in the No Man's Land of 1934. Lucas's old milking cow was already gone, and he had just a small herd of cattle and two horses left. Some people asked the government men what would replace the cattle after they had been shot. What were they supposed to do now? The year before, the government had bought up more than five million hogs for slaughter, focusing on "piggy sows," or pregnant pigs. The plan was to get farm animals off the land. Period. Shrink the expansion. The government men had set a goal of killing eight million cattle over the next year to bring prices up enough for farmers to get a fair return on their labor. As they worked the new towns of the southern plains, they found the worst stragglers they had seen. Nearly one out of every three cattle bought were judged too sickly to be butchered. The Lucas animals were typical. Uncle C.C.'s cattle were condemned; not a one was healthy enough to get s.h.i.+pped to Amarillo. The government men told Lucas he could do the shooting, or they could let the cowboy they had hired execute the Lucas animals. He chose the cowboy.

On the day the Lucas farm animals were rounded up for killing, the children went down to the cellar, closed the door, and covered their ears. Gunshots rang out, a bullet to the head for each animal, and the children started to cry. Now only a few horses remained to show for C.C.'s time on this Oklahoma dirt. Everything else was gone. One of his daughters tried to scrounge up enough feed to keep the horses alive, but the animals could not hold down tumbleweed like the cattle. One horse chewed on the fence. The dust had piled so high that the fence line was a s.h.i.+fting dune, which made it hard for the horse to stand. Later, the mare was found on her side, nibbling at the edge of a fence, gums bloodied and eyes clogged with dirt. She died shortly thereafter. Hazel Lucas tried to soothe the children, her nieces and nephews. Think about tomorrow. Think about green fields and new life. Think about water. Think about clear skies and spring the way it used to be... Think about tomorrow. Think about green fields and new life. Think about water. Think about clear skies and spring the way it used to be...

Hazel took the children up to the Kohler ranch north of town, by the trickled remains of the Cimarron River. It had become a Sunday drive destination for people in Boise City-a place to see something green. Julius Kohler was one of the first Anglo settlers in No Man's Land; he came to the edge of the territory in 1902, when the gra.s.s was free from the Texas line to Kansas. Using horses, Kohler built eight miles of ca.n.a.ls from the Cimarron River to his ranch. Just a crawl of water made it out of the river now, the worst drought the Kohlers had ever seen. All but one of their springs were dry. By diverting just enough liquid from the Cimarron, they were able to keep a small oasis going while everything else in No Man's Land looked like the surface of Mars. Hazel walked the children over the gra.s.s, had them touch the original prairie. This is what it all used to look like when our family came here, Hazel told the children. New life amid the death-think of that, the story of No Man's Land. Renewal. One of the reasons Hazel was going to bring a baby into this blast furnace of coa.r.s.e air was because she believed the land could look like the little patch at Kohler ranch. Someday. But the Sunday drive back to Boise City would grind up hope, as they pa.s.sed one blowing, sandblasted homestead after the other. The town itself was cloaked in a haze; you could not tell you were close to Boise City until the car rumbled over the railroad tracks into town. Used to be, Boise City looked like toy buildings on a Monopoly board; it was an oasis as well. But now it was dirt-wrapped and camouflaged, without any distinct lines, a half-existence amid the runaway prairie.

People who traveled through predicted it would all soon be gone-houses, towns, even railroad tracks. "The tracks will soon be mere streaks of rust through a howling desert, which separate by 1,500 miles the two inhabitable coastal regions," wrote a reporter for New New Outlook Outlook magazine in May 1934. There was an exodus, small but steady, of people who folded their lives in No Man's Land and headed for some place where the sky was not so enraged. magazine in May 1934. There was an exodus, small but steady, of people who folded their lives in No Man's Land and headed for some place where the sky was not so enraged.

South in Dalhart, the government men bought four thousand cattle for killing. Those animals did not look any better than the cattle of No Man's Land. Some were dying of thirst and starving. Roaming over the tattered remains of the XIT, they looked for water until they dropped, their tongues coated with sand. Bam White took a short-term job, getting two dollars a day shooting cattle, work for a cowboy. The government hired cowboys because they would not go soft when it came time to look a hungry, wet-nosed calf in the eye and shoot her dead. The old XIT hands took the emaciated cattle out to a ditch near town and gunned them down. People in town were welcome to come pick over the carca.s.ses, looking for salvageable meat, before the burial. Sometimes the animals didn't die right away; they lingered in pain and moaned, and their cries were carried by the wind at night, people in town said. It was hard for Bam to explain to the children what they were doing, killing animals that had been brought here for people to make a living. Nothing was right in the world anymore. And these animals were gonna die anyway, might as well get a buck or two for killing them.

Fifty years earlier the government had cleared this land of the finest gra.s.s-eating creature on four legs, had cleared away every bison to make room for cattle. Barely one year after Quanah Parker's Comanche had surrendered and were pushed off the treaty land that had been promised to the Lords of the Prairie for eternity, Charles Goodnight moved his cattle onto the gra.s.s, p.r.o.nouncing it the richest sod on earth. That was yesterday-an eye blink in time. And now the cattle brought to replace the bison were being mowed down because they were starving: they could not stand, could not drink, could not live another day, and even if they could people were unable to make a living off them. The government killings were supposed to restore market balance, not right nature's wrong. It was a sick thing, harder still to comprehend, to cowboys like Bam White. The XIT was so exhausted that barely a blade of gra.s.s was seen in the summer of 1934; a ranch that had been bigger than some Eastern states was a drifting wasteland, and probably all the better that most days the wind blew dust so hard a man could not see far enough to get a sense of how awful it was. That prairie writer, the Kansas newspaperman William Allen White, said he knew what was to blame, and it was time for people in the Great Plains to look inside themselves and acknowledge what they had done. He blamed the wheat farmer who broke ground at a gluttonous pace.

"His good times had ruined him," White wrote.

The Fourth of July was so hot n.o.body wanted to stir. Same as the day before, and the day before that. Winds were down a bit, but dust was in the air. People wore scarves or one of the surgical masks distributed by the Red Cross. It was a rare person who did not have the dust hack-a gut-turning cough. If you smoked, and most people rolled their own cigarettes, it made it all the tougher to get through a night without the lungs trying to shake out prairie topsoil coated with nicotine. Thanks to the government cattle-culling operation, there was a little money coursing through town. John McCarty tried to get people out of their smothered dugouts and houses. There was a baseball game at the Dalhart diamond, fifteen cents a head to watch the cellar-dwelling Texans take on the Clayton nine, composed mostly of cousins of Don Juan Lujan. The rabbit drives were on hold because it was too hot to club animals. And while n.o.body felt like going out into sun-scorched fields and corralling big-eared pests, the campaign against rabbits continued nonetheless. It was us or them, many people felt. The Chamber of Commerce pa.s.sed the hat for money to hire a man who claimed a good knowledge of how to mix a large batch of poison, and he was contracted to find a biological solution to the rabbit problem.

McCarty kept his pledge to stress the good news in his paper.

"Conditions are going to be much brighter and better," McCarty wrote in his column, "and when they are we will hardly realize what has happened."

He tried to dissuade every person who considered leaving Dalhart. Move out of the Texas Panhandle for California? He argued that Dalhart had more sunny days than California, that its people were hardier, its soil better, and that the long drought was in its last gasp.

"The law of averages are working in our favor now," he wrote. "We are overdue for rain, prosperity and lots of good things, and it is coming as sure as two plus two makes four."

It would take a powerful dose of amnesia to block out what had happened on the High Plains, but McCarty gave it his best.

"Aside from wind and sandstorms," he wrote, "there is really no disagreeable weather in the north Panhandle."

Beer was back in Dalhart, after a sixteen-year absence. The Busy Bee Cafe sold cold pints for a nickel a pop. But liquor was still against the law. The Number 126 house, having survived McCarty's stillborn campaign, went about its business of selling s.e.x out of sight in the mustard-colored house, though the girls tried to be a little less conspicuous. For people who did not like baseball, wh.o.r.es, or cold beer for their diversions, the Reverend Joe Hankins held a revival on the Fourth of July, at the First Baptist Church, t.i.tled, "What's Wrong with Card-Playing and Dancing." He swept the dust off the pews and welcomed a hundred young people. Following the sermon, the kids crowded to the front of the church and pledged never to dance and never to play cards.

On May 9, 1934, a flock of whirlwinds started up in the northern prairie, in the Dakotas and eastern Montana, where people had fled the homesteads two decades earlier. The sun at midmorning turned orange and looked swollen. The sky seemed as if it were matted by a window screen. The next day, a ma.s.s of dust-filled clouds marched east, picking up strength as they found the jet stream winds, moving toward the population centers. By the time this black front hit Illinois and Ohio, the formations had merged into what looked to pilots like a solid block of airborne dirt. Planes had to fly fifteen thousand feet to get above it, and when they finally topped out at their ceiling, the pilots described the storm in apocalyptic terms. Carrying three tons of dust for every American alive, the formation moved over the Midwest. It covered Chicago at night, dumping an estimated six thousand tons, the dust slinking down walls as if every home and every office had sprung a leak. By morning, the dust fell like snow over Boston and Scranton, and then New York slipped under partial darkness. Now the storm was measured at 1,800 miles wide, a great rectangle of dust from the Great Plains to the Atlantic, weighing 350 million tons. In Manhattan, the streetlights came on at midday and cars used their headlights to drive. A sunny day, which had dawned cloudless, fell under a haze like that of a partial eclipse. From the observatory at the top of the Empire State Building, people looked into a soup unlike anything ever seen in midtown. They could not see the city below or Central Park just to the north. An off-white film covered the ledge. People coughed, rushed into hospitals and doctors' offices asking for emergency help to clear their eyes. The harbor turned gray, the dust floating on the surface. The gra.s.s of the parks and the tulips rising to break the Depression fog were coated in fine sand. From Governors Island, visibility was so bad a person could not see the boats just beyond the sh.o.r.e. Baseball players said they had trouble tracking fly b.a.l.l.s.

Reporters rushed out to query the experts. "I spent my youth in the south, where such occurrences are more common, but I didn't remember one in which the dust was carried so high," said a New York meteorologist, Dr. James H. Scarr. "I can't say I like this air. It cuts off all my free-breathing."

The pyrheliometer, an odd-looking instrument that resembled something vaguely futuristic with an art deco touch, measured sunlight at 50 percent-that is, only half the ultraviolet rays of a normal sunny spring day made it to the city.

New York was a dirty city in 1934, the air clogged with auto exhaust and the effluents of thousands of small shops, factories, bakeries, and apartments. The air could be so hazardous that people with respiratory problems were advised to move out to the Western desert for life. On a typical day, the dust measured 227 particles per square millimeter-not a good reading for someone with health problems. But on May 11, the dust measured 619 particles per square millimeter. It got inside as well. In the NBC radio studios, air filters were changed hourly. A professor from New York University, Dr. E. E. Free, calculated that on the seventeenth floor of the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue, the thickness of the dust was about forty tons per cubic mile, which meant all of New York City was under the weight of 1,320 tons.

New Yorkers did not like this monstrous visitor from the heartland. They had heard reports about blowing homesteads and had seen a few newsreels, but it was a world away, far beyond the Hudson River. On May 11, the orphaned land of the Great Plains came to the doorstep of the nation's premier city. For five hours, the cloud dumped dirt over New York. Commerce came to a standstill. The captain of a cargo s.h.i.+p, the Deutschland, Deutschland, delayed coming into anchor because he was not sure what had happened. The outline of the Statue of Liberty was barely visible, and it wore a coat of light gray topsoil. The delayed coming into anchor because he was not sure what had happened. The outline of the Statue of Liberty was barely visible, and it wore a coat of light gray topsoil. The Deutschland Deutschland's skipper said it reminded him of the Cape Verde Islands, where the sands of the Sahara blew out to sea.

"HUGE DUST CLOUD,.

BLOWS 1,500 MILES,.

DIMS CITY 5 HOURS".

That was the New York Times New York Times headline the next day. The paper called it "the greatest dust storm in United States history." headline the next day. The paper called it "the greatest dust storm in United States history."

The storm moved out to sea, covering s.h.i.+ps that were more than two hundred miles from sh.o.r.e. Its rear guard also spread south, leaving a taste of prairie soil in the mouths of members of Congress. Dust fell on the National Mall and seeped into the White House, where President Roosevelt was discussing plans for drought relief. Dust in Chicago, Boston, Manhattan, Philadelphia, and Was.h.i.+ngton gave the great cities of America a dose of what the people in the little communities of the High Plains had been living with for nearly two years. People in the cities wondered why the plains folks could not do something to hold their soil down. One man suggested laying asphalt over the prairie. Another idea was to s.h.i.+p junked cars to the southern plains, where they would be used as weights to hold the ground in place.

At least on the Eastern seaboard, the dust came and went like a snowstorm, and then the normal seasonal fluctuations resumed. But in No Man's Land or the Texas Panhandle or Kansas the seasons varied only by temperature or the ferocity of the wind. Dust blew every season. It had become life itself. Even snow brought little change from the choking gray and black. A snowstorm in March dumped twenty-one inches in No Man's Land, but it fell as dark flakes. They called it a "snuster," snow mixed with dust. St. Patrick's Day had beer but no sunlight-a duster hung over the land for sixteen hours. Late in the month, the sun was obscured for six days in a row. In January 1934, there were four dust storms in the southern plains, followed by seven in February, seven in March, fourteen in April-including one that lasted twelve hours-four in May, two in June and July, one in August, six in September, two in October, three in November, and four in December. That year was not even the worst. For most of these storms, daylight was still visible; the sky never went completely black. But visibility was reduced to a quarter mile or less.

The dust blew all over the Great Plains, but the worst and most persistent storms were in parts of five states-southern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, and northeastern New Mexico. The government placed the geographic heart of the dust-lashed land in Cimarron County, in the middle of No Man's Land. In places where the cover of the land had not been completely stripped, the drifts swooshed in, leaving a fresh source of dust.