A few nights ago I watched
another of Ken Burns excellent documentaries, The Dust Bowl (I have seen and
enjoyed The Civil War and Jazz, although I must admit I declined to watch the
one about baseball). This painful period of our shared history is familiar to
me even though I haven’t delved too deeply into studying it, but I know enough
to have some strong opinions. I love some of the movies from this period
especially Shirley Temple's and Astaire/Rogers who I never tire of watching. Some
of the best Jazz was born from the creative fervor that the times engendered.
The fashions and the architecture were unsurpassed. But at this time, there
were two Americas. One of wealth and privilege and one of soup kitchens and
shanty towns and out of this economic despair and disparity rose FDR. I think
that Roosevelt was our greatest president and we’ve had some amazing ones. This
quote from a so-called class traitor particularly stands out, “Never before in
all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they
stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their
hatred.” Plus his 2nd or economic
bill of rights still stands as true today as when he wrote it in its intrinsic
fairness and embodies what liberals want for our country and planet. The New
Deal lifted millions out of poverty and its legacy still lasts today although
it is tattered and torn and the Repukes would like nothing better than to wipe
it all away. They keep saying they want to take America back and that’s where
they want to take it back to, the Gilded Age before Roosevelt to child labor
and no regulations, long hours on the clock for pennies, your only right is to
work for what they want to pay you until you die. Think of that recent tragic
fire on a factory floor in India where 110 people were burned to death is to see
what they really aspire to; people are just a casualty or a cost to business,
instead of a partner and an asset. Right now these forces are closer than they
have ever been in 60 years to this goal. The Dust Bowl highlights this, that
everything old really is new again. It seems we learn nothing or maybe its willful
blindness, I don’t know which is worse. But the strong helping hand of FDR is
all over this documentary and if nothing else will show that government can be
and should be a force for good in people’s lives.
The Dust Bowl may have
seemed to be a natural disaster or the wrath of God but it was a manmade
environmental catastrophe. Our hubris knows no bounds and we keep thinking that
we can do what we want, where we want and there will be no consequences. The
tearing up of the Great Plains for the planting of crops that were unsuitable
for the environment was the cause of the dust that blew and blanketed the
country all the way to New York and which consisted of the formerly rich
topsoil decimated by poor farming techniques. These hardy people withstood this
year in and year out. They are what is known as “next year people”, no matter
how bad things got, they always hoped that NEXT YEAR would be better. What I
found most interesting was the amazing stories that those who lived through it
had to tell. Just like in Burn’s documentary on the Civil War and the diaries
and letters of Mary Chestnut, The Dust Bowl also has a strong woman’s voice to
guide us through the events from start to finish, Caroline Henderson. Her
erudite testimony both hopeful and heartbreaking is fascinating. I was especially
struck by the comment that follows, which is concerning how the WPA made such a
difference in the lives most affected by this catastrophe, because of its
prescience.
“If mere dollars were to be
considered, the actually destitute in our section could have undoubtedly been
fed or clothed more cheaply then the works projects that have been carried out.
But in our national economy, manhood must be considered as well as money.
People employed to do some useful work may retain their self-respect to a
degree impossible under cash relief. If we must worry so over the ruinous
effects of made work on people of this type why haven’t we been worrying for
generations over the character of the idlers to whom some accident of birth or
inheritance has given wealth unmeasured, unearned, and unappreciated.”
There were many times in the
watching that I just had to shake my head, we seem to be in such the same
situation now as then, except this time we don’t have Roosevelt to lead us out of the
darkness. President Obama is trying but he is no liberal and is no FDR. I also
was amazed at the photographs that were presented. Roosevelt put together a
project headed by Roy Striker that hired a cadre of talented photographers to
travel the length and breadth of America to document the suffering of her
citizens. Thanks to this we have the immeasurably precious and iconic visual histories
that the cameras of Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Marion
Post-Walcott, John Vashon, and Dorothea Lange captured. These images are
simple but haunting and could probably be recreated today with little
effort. I sit in absolute awe of these artists that take such ugliness and make it beautiful and it hits you viscerally.
The show ended with how new
farming techniques based on ancient practices could renew the land and make it
fertile again. It almost seemed that the land responded to the wise stewardship
by ending the drought and the land once again produced bumper crops.
Unfortunately, as I stated in the beginning, we learned nothing from this. Big
factory farms moved in and for the last 20 years have been farming the land
with the same destructive techniques that caused the Dust Bowl in the first
place because it costs less. The only thing tying the topsoil to the ground is
the water pumped continually out in massive quantities from the Ogallala
aquifer while polluting it at the same time. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/opinion/polluting-the-ogallala-aquifer.html
Once this water is gone, the
Dust Bowl will return guaranteed and with the droughts the region has been
going through it will be sooner rather than later. The Ogallala is also one of
the main things those who oppose the Keystone Pipeline is trying to protect, the
dirty oil would flow right over this irreplaceable resource on its way to Texas
refineries and then on ships to markets all over the world. It is the captains
of industry who decide who lives and who dies because they can; they hold all
the cards and our countries wealth is forever funneled upward. The same barons
seem not to realize that they inhabit the same planet as us. I finish this with
the words from The Grapes of Wrath, the most famous novel from this period and
it is as true now as when the words were first written. We really do seem
doomed to repeat a past we refuse to learn from.
“This is the beginning—from
"I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have
could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate
causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you
cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I",
and cuts you off forever from the "we".”
