The Dust Bowl

What have we learned from the Dust Bowl?

Robert Boots McCoy talks about dust storms.

Ken Burns, Dayton Duncan, Julie Dunfey and Susan Shumaker talk about making The Dust Bowl, and how they discovered the incredible people to interview.

Dale Coen reads a poem he thinks his mother wrote.

The stock market crashed on what came to be called Black Tuesday. In response to the lower wheat prices more wheat was planted.

Sanora Babb, an author, poet, editor and journalist, joins the Farm Security Administration to help refugees.

In the summer of 1936, Roosevelt takes a whistle-stop tour across the Midwest and Northern Plains to see the crisis himself. He inspires enthusiastic, but weary, audiences. At the same time, Hugh Bennett, head of the Soil Conservation Service, begins instituting his program of agricultural reform and offering incentives to those farmers who will adopt the new farming methods.

Calvin Crabill talks about how his father drove a tractor at night to try to get ahead.

Raymond Huff, Superindendent of Schools of Union County hired the entire town to build the new high school in Clayton, NM. He used the WPA to save the County.

Sanora Babb, a journalist from No Man's Land, returns to her childhood home and is struck by the leveling of social distinction between her old neighbors.

Tex Pace left the panhandle for CA and convinced his family to follow him. He lived and worked in Visalia, CA in a new work camp. He met his wife Dorothy at a camp talent show and got married at the local movie theater.