Dr. Alvin Turner, of East Central University in Ada, was in Woodward Wednesday afternoon to discuss the Dust Bowl, as part of an Oklahoma Northwest Summer Institute history class.
Turner, who edited “Letters from the Dust Bowl: Caroline Henderson,” told the class that the Dust Bowl still impacts Oklahoma today.
“The Dust Bowl and other events have reinforced in the Eastern mind that the Great Plains area is a throwaway zone,” Turner said.
He pointed to the recent Associated Press article about former President George W. Bush’s Fourth of July plans. The article called Woodward “a town in the middle of nowhere.”
Turner said this mindset has been with leaders back East ever since the Dust Bowl. He said that at one point the government wanted to move the people off their land and place them elsewhere.
Turner also said the government played a role in the Dust Bowl’s occurrence. He said that before 1916 Oklahoma’s agriculture was diverse, but the government provided some incentives for farmers to grow only wheat crops.
Turner said this is similar to what the government is doing today by encouraging people to plant corn for ethanol. One of the major drawbacks of ethanol production is the amount of water the crop needs.
A reason why the Dust Bowl occurred was because of misuse of land.
“A large portion of Western Oklahoma and the Great Plains was plowed that should not have been plowed,” Turner said.
Besides a huge area that was plowed and the exclusive planting of wheat crops, the Great Depression and droughts caused the Dust Bowl to be “one of the three most important environmental disasters in history,” Turner said.
One of the worst aspects of the Dust Bowl, Turner said was its consistency.
“For a period of five years there were 60 or more of these dust storms a year,” he said.
Turner read a letter to the class that was written by Caroline Henderson. In the letter Henderson described that for days windows were not able to be distinguished from walls because of the sky being pitch black.
Turner said that throughout the reading of Henderson’s letters in preparation for compiling the book, her loss of hope was the most tragic part of the Dust Bowl.
He said that his father, who grew up during the same time period, had trouble buying a new house even though the one he had was falling apart. He could not part with something he owned.
Turner also described how the Dust Bowl and Great Depression effected Oklahoma.
“Oklahoma started out poor and we got poorer,” he said.
The price of cotton crops dropped severely in the late-1920s. Turner said that before the Great Depression hit the rest of the country it came to Oklahoma because of the drop in the cotton price.
“One person in every three was out of work from 1929 to 1939 at the height of the Depression,” Turner said. “Another third were working less than full time.”
That means that two out of three people were out of work or only bringing in a partial income during that time. Turner then asked the class what they would do if they were in the same situation? Leaving the area seemed like a good answer.
The epicenter of the Dust Bowl was Texas County Oklahoma Turner said. About a third of the population of Texas County left due to the Dust Bowl. Of course migrant workers were immortalized by John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath.”
“Most of the migrants were as John Steinbeck portrayed them,” Turner said.
He said that the Joad family came from eastern Oklahoma, where the dip in the cotton crop caused farmers to lose their land to banks. This was mainly caused by the Great Depression and not the Dust Bowl, however, Turner said. The Dust Bowl did most of its damage in western Oklahoma.
