"This has been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. There is no question about it," said New YorkUniversity economist Mark Gertler in the WSJ.
The nation's unemployment rate rose to an eye-popping 7.2% in December and brought the total jobs lost for the year to the largest number since 1945, the Labor Department said. More alarming than the bare numbers was the trend line: The economy has lost 2.6 million jobs in the last 12 months, but 75% of them vanished in the last four months, with 524,000 jobs lost in December alone.
The Los Angeles Times – January 9, 2009
THE DUST BOWL
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.2001-07.Dust Bowl
the name given to areas of the U.S. prairie states that suffered ecological devastation in the 1930s and then to a lesser extent in the mid-1950s. The problem began during World War I, when the high price of wheat and the needs of Allied troops encouraged farmers to grow more wheat by plowing and seeding areas in prairie states, such as Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, which were formerly used only for grazing. After years of adequate yields, livestock were returned to graze the areas, and their hooves pulverized the unprotected soil. In 1934 strong winds blew the soil into huge clouds called “dusters” or “black blizzards,” and in the succeeding years, from December to May, the dust storms recurred. Crops and pasture lands were ruined by the harsh storms, which also proved a severe health hazard. The uprooting, poverty, and human suffering caused during this period is notably portrayed in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Through later governmental intervention and methods of erosion-prevention farming, the Dust Bowl phenomenon has been virtually eliminated, thus left a historic reference.
Major Themes/Concepts: To be taught between the World Wars…
- Understanding of what the Dust Bowl was, including its occurrence in Nebraska/Oklahoma
- Understanding of why a drought occurs by looking at agricultural practices
- Impact of the Dust Bowl on families in conjunction with the Great Depression happening across the country
Materials/Resources:
*Copied quotations from The American Experience
*Dust Bowl photos (on desks as students enter - a few for each group)
* Dust Bowl PPT
* Word Wall Vocab – pre-printed (on desks as students enter - one or two terms for each group)
* 4 x Poster Paper: WHAT WAS THE DUST BOWL? WHEN WAS THE DUST BOWL? WHO WAS AFFECTED? HOW DID THE USA DEAL? (w/markers)
* Jackdaw Primary Source – Depression (on desks as students enter - one or two sources for each group)
* Loose leaf for foldables
Lesson Objectives: Students will be able to…
1)Describe the effects of the 1930s Dust Bowl that devastated the Midwest United States
2)Understand why a drought occurs, focusing on farming practices
Procedures for Instruction:
To introduce this lesson, tell the students you are wondering whether the classroom needs a good clean up. Give them a chance to look for dust in the room. Do they think there is a potential "dust problem"? How bad could it get? If it were 10 times worse, how would it affect activities in the classroom? What if it were a hundred times worse? Could it ever get that bad? Worse?
Show them slide 2 of the lybian dust storm, Ask them what do they think they are looking at. (Take comments and then point out that it is a giant dust storm – a far cry from the dust bunnies they may have found in the classroom.
Q2 – What is dust? (get from them that it is made up of dry particle carried in the air.)
Q3 – Why do the particles need to be dry? What make things dry?
Ask for the definition of the word DROUGHT from the class group that had the vocab term on their desk. Tape on the WHAT poster
Bring up the Drought Map graphic from Drought:
Explain that the 30’s decade started with dry years in 1930 and 1931 especially in the East. Then, 1934 recorded extremely dry conditions over almost 80 percent of the United States. Extreme drought conditions returned in 1936, 1939 and 1940.
Q4. According to the map, what states were affected? (Show the progression – they will see that all states were affected but just a few were affected every year) They should be able to tell you that these were the plains states – the hub of US agriculture.
Q5. How did drought affect farmers?
With no rain, farmers couldn't grow any crops. No crops meant that the wind blew bare soil high in the air creating dust storms. School was canceled because of dust storms, not snowstorms. Some farmers, in trouble because of the bad economy, were forced to give up and move out of the plains looking for work.
Don’t believe me? Let’s go to a source…a PRIMARY SOURCE
Introduction/Anticipatory Set:
1)Hand out quotes from The American Experience to four volunteer students (one quote each). Have students stand and read them as the class views photos from the dust bowl that teacher projects from the Dust Bowl PPT
2)Explain to students we just heard personal testimony from those who survived a difficult time, particularly in the rural Midwest, during the Great Depression.
3)The instructor should then go back over the slides offering brief narration – make sure you touch upon each of the student vocab words:
- Relief
- Migrant farmers
- Great Depression
- Foreclosure
- Drought
- Deperate
(As you touch on each vocab word – have a student define and post the definition on the word wall)
Class Activity
- Divide the class into small groups. Explain to students that historians learn a great deal from primary sources, records of events from participants and eyewitnesses (interviews, diaries, photographs, official documents and so on). Various archival primary source documents that paint a dramatic picture of the Dust Bowl will be provided (quotations, Jackdaw sources – Depression, Projected Drought Map, Primary Source photos.)
- Distribute a set of documents, with captions, to each group, along with related questions, such as:
- What was the Dust Bowl?
- Where was the Dust Bowl?
- How were people affected by the Dust Bowl?
- What did the people who were affected by the Dust Bowl do?
- What did the United States government do?
What can the students learn about the Dust Bowl — something that happened in the U.S. during the Great Depression of the 1930s — from these documents? Students should form hypotheses to answer the questions. Succeeding lessons in this unit will provide materials with answers to these questions; correct hypotheses can be shared with the class at that time.
Before moving on model the creation of a Concept Foldable
CONCEPT FOLDABLE
Identify any three concepts or events which students should know from a section, a chapter, or reading assignment.
- Place a sheet of loose leaf paper in front of you so the side with holes is at the top. Fold the paper’s edge up to the red line.
- Fold both sides in one and again. Unfold the paper so four sections show.
- Through the top thickness of paper, cut along each of the fold lines to the top fold, forming four tabs. Label each tab: WHAT WAS THE DUST BOWL? WHEN WAS THE DUST BOWL? WHO WAS AFFECTED? HOW DID THE USA DEAL?
- As the lesson progresses, students will record bullets from corresponding poster paper and then write the characteristics of each event under the appropriate tab.
Learning Advice (Suggestions for teaching the lesson):
*As you monitor the students, check for understanding of the questions they are answering. They may just be writing and not comprehending the material. Create an opportunity that allows them to really think about what the landscape looked like on during the Dust Bowl, and what it’d be like if they were attending a school where they were kept overnight due to a dust storm.
Summary/Conclusion:
1)About ten minutes before the end of the lesson, begin a final by reviewing questions and adding student responses to the posters (In Closing…Questions). Check for Understanding as you listen to several students answer the same question. Encourage students to listen to others and add to their answer.
2)Assign homework to complete foldable
3)All students complete closure slip for 5 points added to project
Extension Activities:
-Use songs/song lyrics about the Dust Bowl to provide another description: 2 Woody Guthrie songs attached
Bibliography:
1)The American Experience: Surviving the Dust Bowl;
2)Wessels Living History Farm;
3)Drought:
4)EDSITEMENT-Dust Bowl Days;
5)This editorial cartoon Sure, I'll Try Anything Once!, available on the FDR Cartoon Archive, a link from the EDSITEment resource American Memory, shows not only a farmer accepting relief but also his reluctance to do so.
"I felt I was becoming a slave to the land. But I held on to the thought that this land had to be stopped from blowing. Often I was so full of dust that I drove blind, unable to see even the radiator cap on my tractor or hear the roar of the engines. But I kept driving on and on, by guess and instinct. I was making my last stand in the Dust Bowl."
The storm on Black Sunday was the last major dust storm of the year, and the damage it caused was not calculated for months. Coming on the heels of a stormy season, the April 14 storm hit as many others had, only harder. "The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face," Avis D. Carlson wrote in a NewRepublic article. "People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk. . . . The nightmare is deepest during the storms. But on the occasional bright day and the usual gray day we cannot shake from it. We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real. The poetic uplift of spring fades into a phantom of the storied past. The nightmare is becoming life."
"...With the gales came the dust. Sometimes it was so thick that it completely hid the sun. Visibility ranged from nothing to fifty feet, the former when the eyes were filled with dirt which could not be avoided, even with goggles."
"...At other times a cloud is seen to be approaching from a distance of many miles. Already it has the banked appearance of a cumulus cloud, but it is black instead of white, and it hangs low, seeming to hug the earth. Instead of being slow to change its form, it appears to be rolling on itself from the crest downward. As it sweeps onward, the landscape is progressively blotted out. Birds fly in terror before the storm, and only those that are strong of wing may escape. The smaller birds fly until they are exhausted, then fall to the ground, to share the fate of the thousands of jack rabbits which perish from suffocation."
Black Wind Blowing - Woody Guthrie
Theres a black wind blowing in the cotton field
Honey
Theres a black wind blowing in the cotton field
Baby
Theres a black wind blowing in the cotton field
And O’ how funny it makes me feel,
Baby, sweet thing, darling
There’s a long black cloud a hanging in the sky
Honey
There’s a long black cloud a hanging in the sky
Baby
There’s a long black cloud a hanging in the sky
Weathers gonna break and hells gonna fly
Baby, sweet thing, darling
Cotton’s pretty thin yonder on the hill
Honey
Cotton’s pretty thin yonder on the hill
Baby
Cotton’s pretty thin yonder on the hill
Won’t clear a greenback dollar bill
Baby, sweet thing, darling
Work shade and back to the buzzard wing
Honey
Work shade and back to the buzzard wing
Baby
Work shade and back to the buzzard wing
Clouds are gonna bust and cry down rain
Baby, sweet thing, darling
Dust Bowl Blues
I just blowed in, and I got them dust bowl blues,
I just blowed in, and I got them dust bowl blues,
I just blowed in, and I'll blow back out again.
I guess you've heard about ev'ry kind of blues,
I guess you've heard about ev'ry kind of blues,
But when the dust gets high, you can't even see the sky.
I've seen the dust so black that I couldn't see a thing,
I've seen the dust so black that I couldn't see a thing,
And the wind so cold, boy, it nearly cut your water off.
I seen the wind so high that it blowed my fences down,
I've seen the wind so high that it blowed my fences down,
Buried my tractor six feet underground.
Well, it turned my farm into a pile of sand,
Yes, it turned my farm into a pile of sand,
I had to hit that road with a bottle in my hand.
I spent ten years down in that old dust bowl,
I spent ten years down in that old dust bowl,
When you get that dust pneumony, boy, it's time to go.
I had a gal, and she was young and sweet,
I had a gal, and she was young and sweet,
But a dust storm buried her sixteen hundred feet.
She was a good gal, long, tall and stout,
Yes, she was a good gal, long, tall and stout,
I had to get a steam shovel just to dig my darlin' out.
These dusty blues are the dustiest ones I know,
These dusty blues are the dustiest ones I know,
Buried head over heels in the black old dust,
I had to pack up and go.
An' I just blowed in, an' I'll soon blow out again.