THE

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THE DIRTY THIRTIESFROM WHEAT BOOM TO DUST BOWL

• Florida International University students
  Michelle Narganes and Brian Villar present
  artifacts from The Wolfsonian-FIU library and a
  series of photographic images from the Library of
  Congress documenting the greatest man-made
  ecological disaster of the twentieth century.

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It Began with a Prosperous Farming Industry

• Beginning in the late nineteenth century,
  farming families began to settle the Great
  Plains, plowing under the native grasses and
  planting wheat.

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In the early twentieth century, with the
encouragement of the Homestead Act and the
low-cost of land, many more farming folk were
attracted to this relatively barren and
unforgiving region.
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The demand for wheat during the First World War
brought in handsome returns. Wheat prices fell
precipitously after the war, however, forcing
farmers to compensate by planting even more wheat
in the ecologically-sensitive region.
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Great Plains farmers were so desperate to
increase income that they over plowed,
overplanted, and overgrazed the land on the Great
Plains.
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Decades of poor agricultural techniques combined
with natural cycles of drought to cause the
environmental disaster of the dust bowl in the
1930s. 
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During the so-called dirty thirties, numerous
violent dust storms rolled across the Great
Plains. The largest dust storm hit the Midwest on
Black Sunday, April 14, 1935.  
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Living conditions in the region not only became
difficult and actually life-threatening. Simple
day-to-day chores were made impossible due to the
frequent storms and near-constant dust particles
suspended in the air. Young children and the
elderly often died from the newly-coined
respiratory illness, dust pneumonia.
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Drought, dust storms, and desertification forced
nearly 2.5 million people from the Great Plains
area, the largest migration in US history in such
a short period of time.
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As soon as Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in
1933, he began to enact policies designed to aid
those affected by the dusters. Within his first
100 days as president he brought programs such as
the Civilian Conservation Corp (C.C.C.) into
being, charged with spearheading efforts in
reforestation, combating soil erosion, and
protecting the nations natural resources.
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Right C.C.C. Advertisement Below C.C.C. Sleeve
Badge
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C.C.C. Troop
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The C.C.C. planted over 3 billion trees around
the nation to hold the soil in place and to serve
as a wind-break, particularly in the dust bowl
states.
Civilian Conservation Corp enrollees at work
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One government official, Hugh Hammond Bennett,
stressed the importance of soil conservation to
Congress at the height of the crisis. His efforts
led to the establishment of the Soil Conservation
Service, which is still active today as the
National Resource Conservation Service.
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THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN THE C.C.C.
(CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS) Florida
International University student Robert Gueits
investigates the idealize images and actual
experiences of African American youths serving in
the C.C.C. Camps located in the Southern states
were segregated and under the command of white
officers. But even in some of the desegregated
camps in the North and West, both institutional
and social discrimination were an inescapable
part of camp life. The following photographs
were produced to document the C.C.C. experience
and are made available from the Library of
Congress.
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This propaganda poster depicts a smiling (but
otherwise faceless) C.C.C. enrollee with an axe
in his hand. The image emphasizes the outdoor
work opportunities for unemployed youths that
would take them out of the cities and put them to
work in healthful wilderness environs.
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This is a photograph of an African American
C.C.C. enrollee. He is shouldering an axe as he
works in the outdoors.
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This photograph captures a group of African
American boys doing hard manual labor in a
healthful wilderness environment.
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Another publicity photograph shows African
American youths hard at work cutting lumber in a
C.C.C. camp.
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Just like their white counterparts, the
photographs imply, African Americans did all
sorts of work in the outdoorsplanting trees,
cutting timber, and roadwork. Here three Black
C.C.C. recruits are photographed as they repair
rail fences along the roadway.
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This photograph shows African Americans in a
C.C.C. machine shop learning a trade skillin
this casewelding.
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Photographs were taken to document the fact that
African Americans learned useful trades in the
typical C.C.C. camp.
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Although African American youths did enjoy new
job opportunities in the C.C.C., not all of their
experiences were uplifting. Many Black enrollees
in non-segregated camps were assigned mess hall
duties such as washing dishes, pealing potatoes,
and throwing out the garbage. It was assumed that
relegating black youths to such duties would
minimize racial tensions and prevent hostile
encounters.
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ARTISTS ON THE LEFT Florida International
University students Al Pena and Nicole Saltzmann
examine the artwork of Socialist Lynd Kendall
Ward (1905-1985), Giacomo Patri (1898-1978), and
Communist Hugo Gellert (1892-1985). All three
artists used their work to criticize the
Capitalist system and call for transformative
societal changes far beyond the New Deal
programs put forward by the Roosevelt
administration.
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A committed Socialist, Lynd Ward saw the Great
Depression as proof that the Capitalist system
was economically moribund as well as morally
bankrupt. Ward used his artistic talent as an
engraver to create numerous block books or
graphic stories without words. His powerful black
white images were intended to bridge linguistic
and cultural barriers and to reach out to the
semi-literate working classes of the world.
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BUILDINGS Lynd Wards buildings have an
overbearing and brooding quality to them. Like
giant silent sentinels, they tower over those
trapped within their high walls. Factories
resemble prisons and the persons in the images
appear lost within the labyrinth-like spaces
created by the high angular walls.
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URBAN ALIENATION There is an implicit irony in
the skyscrapers that figure in Lynd Wards block
prints although constructed by working men,
this new cityscape is dominated by Capitalist
robber barons and working class families can
find no place within.
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CAPITALISTS According to Lynd Ward, the
capitalist was driven by an insatiable appetite
for money and power. In his artwork they act as
wicked tempters of the innocent or as ruthless
exploiters of the working class. They are evil
and greed personified and are unflatteringly
pictured as bloated and gluttonous social
parasites sporting top hats.
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A DYING BROOD Other of Lynd Wards images of
businessmen deliberately link them to images of
death and dying. While one gaunt figure in top
hat resembles the Grim Reaper himself, other
businessmen are likened to the moribund
Capitalist system itself and are depicted as old,
balding men on their deathbed.
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STRIKES To emphasize the common plight of the
working classes, Lynd Ward often depicted
striking workers in tightly packed spaces, though
union organizers and demonstration speakers might
be singled out to invest them with the status of
visionaries or martyrs. Banners and picket signs
also figure prominently in his prints. These
might be engulfed by dark clouds to indicate the
dark struggles of the masses or highlighted by
beams of heavenly light.
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THE POLICE Lynd Wards work often called
attention to the fact that the police were often
used to attack demonstrators and to break up
strikes during the Great Depression. Wards
policemen have an automaton-like quality to them.
Their faces betray little or no emotion at all as
they mercilessly beat peaceful protestors and
working person with their nightsticks.
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VIGILANTE MEN Ward believed that deputized
strike-breakers and corporate vigilante men had
no interest in right or wrong. He depicted them
as mobster-like in dress and appearancewell-armed
thugs who used their muscle and weapons to
disrupt picket lines and to intimidate, attack,
or even kill union organizers and demonstrators.
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COMMUNISM AND ART Hungarian-born Hugo Gellert
(1892-1985) was not at all reticent about
employing his art in the service of ideology in
his adopted homeland. A committed member of the
Communist Party of the United States of America,
Gellert proudly integrated party heroes, themes,
and symbols into all of his lithographic images.
For Gellert, there could be no separation between
art and politicsthe struggle of the proletariat
against the evil forces of Capitalism were
all-consuming.
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TOOLS In the lithographic prints of Hugo Gellert,
working class tools became powerful devices,
graceful in their symmetry and imbued with
symbolic meaning. Paired with a person, a
specific tool labeled the person as miner,
mechanic, or farmer. By themselves, or in
conjunction with other tools, they also became
symbolic manifestations of the virtues of labor.
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THE CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN Hats and clothing, like
tools, help to define Hugo Gellerts cast of
characters either as evil Capitalist monopolists
or honest working-class folk. Simple caps or
helmets, work boots, and tight-fitting coveralls
that almost appear to be a second skin emphasize
the musculature credentials of the laboring
classes.
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POWERFUL IMAGES OF POWERFUL BODIES Artist-activist
Hugo Gellert endowed all of his laborers with
hulking, muscular bodies. In contrast to obese,
old, and sickly Capitalist types, or their
scrawny under-nourished victims, the common
laborers in his artwork possess bodies that would
be the envy of present-day bodybuilders.
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BRAWN IS BEAUTIFUL For Hugo Gellert, the brawny
bodies of his workers were not merely the product
of physical work and manual labor their bulging
musculature and calloused hands clenched into
fists symbolized the as yet unrealized power and
strength of the working class.
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