The Plow That Broke the Plains

The reviewer above doesn't know much about what happened in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. By all means watch this film and listen very closely. You can almost hear the chainsaws in the Amazon from here...

This film is a priceless collection of imagery that documents what happened to that region of the country. A region that has never fully recovered from the damage humans did to it.

It is a stark look at what degenerated into a self inflicted hell, which was by no means entirely the fault of the farmers. They simply didn't know what they were doing until it was too late. As usual, the one man who stood up and tried to point out what had occurred was decried as a crank.

Thank goodness Roosevelt commissioned this film or we would have precious few moving images of the desolation that resulted.

(Also recommend: The Worst Hard Time. The untold story of those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan.)

Some of the old time westerns often featured the late 19th century struggles between the cattlemen, who fought for the open range for cattle grazing, and the families of homesteaders / farmers who wanted to break ground and fence-off their respective properties. It was easy to observe early on that, in the movies, the homesteaders were the "good guys." History tells us rather differently, at least in one respect: Clearing the prairie of its great grasses was highly ecologically damaging and far worse than sporadic overgrazing.

This factual documentary was produced to explain the reasons for the dust bowl that occurred in the Great Plains in the 1930s USA. The affected area was vast: 625,000 square miles (400 million acres) that included ten states from Montana to Texas. By 1880 the settlers had cleared the prairie of the Indians and the buffalo. What did the settlers do with the land? Well, there was grazing and farming, and all seemed fine until the first drought. But the rains did return, and as long as there was enough water, agricultural ignorance was put on the back burner. And when the USA went to war against Germany in 1917, there was great demand for grains, especially wheat, and prices soared. Farmers were encouraged to break more sod, seed, and grow even more wheat, which was needed for the allied war effort. Even after the war there was speculation, and more and more settlers were encouraged to purchase more and more "cheap" land, which was placed under cultivation. By 1923, much of the old, hardy grasslands became wheat lands. Times were good; after all it was the new "Jazz Age." Then the lands, without many rivers or streams, experienced a worse drought than that of the 1890s. There were no longer the long, natural grasses to hold the moisture against the wind. Being hardy and with deep root systems, the natural grasses were naturally resistant to many kinds of weather conditions, especially drought. They stood their ground. On the other hand, wheat, with shallower root systems, requires occasional rainfall in the course of a season. When the amount of rainfall began to drop precipitately in the 1930s, the weaker rooting systems of the wheat plant gave way. There was nothing left to protect the dry topsoil, which was blown into large black clouds, the "dust bowl." Then there was the great departure: homesteaders abandoned their lands and animals for western places in order to start over. This film shows that government intervention was meant to encourage methods of erosion-prevention farming. Overall the film is a very good visual record of a difficult time in the Midwest. The music is dramatic, the narrative limited, and the photography excellent!

This film is a companion film to The River, also directed by Pare Lorentz. It is beautifully filmed and has a wonderful score. The topic is soil erosion and the resulting dust bowl conditions during the U.S. depression. This film would be a marvelous choice to show young students who are studying the environment or who are studying U.S. history. It is available from several sources. My video came from Kino Video and also contained The River, a film on a resettlement camp and a film on rural electrification. All were excellent. There is another film Lorentz was involved with called The City. I have seen stills from the movie but have not been able to find a source for it.

Not quite ten years past the first full length talkie, this movie commentary could easily be imagined as written with intertitles. As another nod to the silent tradition, the music conveys much of the story, partly out of habit and partly to avoid they criticisms from the film industry had mounted against the film while still in production that the movie was simply a propaganda piece financed by the Roosevelt administration. The filmed images were necessary to educate people around the nation, be they politicians who railed against yet another alphabet organization to conserve the plains, or to the common people who saw the haunted "Okies" with sand blasted cars and faces coming to their states as unwelcome. For this reason, the film deserves to be preserved and viewed.

If you are having trouble finding the film, go to Wikipedia and click on "The Internet Archives" hypertext to see the movie online. If you want to get to the heartbreaking stories behind this enormous catastrophe, do read "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan, as recommended by another commentator. You will even get the background story to the mustachioed plowman and his family.

Viewers who insist on judging past attitudes by today's standards will hate or dismiss this film (see several examples.) Whether it was a propaganda piece or an educational one when it was made, it is now one of the most immediate visual records we have of the dust bowl and the migration that resulted from it, a monumental achievement which can never be duplicated, and one which influenced both American music and documentary film-making in an essential way. For many years it was shown in U.S. Schools, which is where I first saw it about 55 years ago, in the early 1950s with their emphasis on bread-basket America and the promise of farming technology. With a proper introduction by teachers, even the jingoistic narration could be made useful. As a record of where our country has been, it's an invaluable, irreplaceable document.