He packs a wealth of original mate- rial into two parts and four hours, including descriptive writing from the most eloquent chroniclers of the Dust Bowl. The grandeur of the trademark Ken Burns style is well suited to this epic tale. For those who stayed, salvation from bankruptcy and starvation came from above-the government’s New Deal programs that put people back to work planting wind- breaks and cover crops to save the soil.
After years of enduring the “black blizzards” and waiting for rain, a great exodus of “Okies” left the Dust Bowl. Then the rain stopped, the wind blew, and millions of tons of topsoil were swept off the plains. By the 1920s, the deep-rooted buffalo grass that had anchored a perfectly balanced prairie ecosystem was being plowed up on an industrial scale. It was a time when “rain follows the plow” was both a real estate sales slogan and a wishful theory of climatol- ogy. Wheat was a cash crop, so land was a commodity for spec- ulators and “suitcase farmers” who grabbed a piece of the action. Owning land was an opportunity for the homesteaders who settled the Southern Plains in the late 19th century. It shows, in powerful detail, how our naive and exploitative treatment of nature created one of the greatest manmade environmental disasters in history-and what it was like to live with the consequences.
But The Dust Bowl, a new Ken Burns documentary, hugely expands our understanding. We’ve seen some Dorothea Lange photographs, heard a Woody Guthrie song, or read The Grapes of Wrath. The Dust Bowl also refers to a period of our national history, and most Americans know something about that. “The Dust Bowl” was first used to describe a place-the section of the Southern Plains, mostly in Oklahoma and Texas, that was nearly blown away during the decade-long drought of the 1930s.