The Plow That Broke the Plains

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.

Pare Lorentz was unknown until he made documentaries during the Great Depression on the devastation of the Dust Bowl in the Southern Plains. This film featured an actual farmer whose son is in one of the Dust Bowl documentaries as well. The documentary is short but focuses on the history of the Dust Bowl and the plow that destroyed the land in the plains. I am disappointed that it is short nor does it interview any of the dust bowl survivors. The Dust Bowl is an important part of understanding why it happened and how the plains were destroyed to learn to respect the land and the soil. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's program hired artists like film directors and photographers to explain the disaster to the rest of the country and the world in order to support to help the Southern Plains where wheat ruled supreme until the black blizzard where billions of tons of sand and dirt blew across the country, causing death and destruction, and where John Steinbeck's novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," has a family who migrated west in search of a better life.

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!

Note the written prologue states that the film will show what "we" (European settlers) "did" with a half-million square miles of high plains once the swath was "cleared" of Indians and buffalo. Now, the visuals start with waving seas of native grassland, and since the narrative follows an historical timeline, this is a depiction of the land before European settlers arrived. The land may have been harsh and dry—"treeless, windblown, and without rivers or streams"—but it did support rich fields of native grass. In contrast, the visuals end with a stark depiction of the 1930's dustbowl— great clouds of topsoil swept up from a land stripped bare by drought and plowing away of the native grass cover. The images are bleak, searing, and unforgettable.

I call attention to this because a literal reading of the prologue matched against these opening and closing shots is hardly a tale of triumph. The plow that broke the plains really did break them, it appears-- at least to this point in 1936. Hopefully, an improved agronomy has prevented these latter scenes from repeating.

Nonetheless, the documentary itself represents a triumph of artistic imagery (Lorenz) and musical score (Thompson)— and a tribute to its New Deal sponsors. From the first lone rider to the great cattle herds to the mighty plows to soaring WWI demand and finally to the dustbowl and its refugees, the story is elegantly related. I agree that the narration too often goes over the top, but the basic idea works. And I really like that last shot of the lone tree skeleton with its tiny bird's nest looking hopefully to the future. All in all, the 25 minutes adds up to a powerful work of documentary art.

(In passing—I think there are two ways of construing the rather puzzling shots of British WWI tanks plowing forward. In context, the tank armies are juxtaposed with armies of tractors plowing over the plains. Thus, we might view each army as subduing a resistant foe, in the latter case, a difficult land. Or, possibly, the tractors can be taken as a mechanized army of harvesters supplying foodstuffs for a mechanized army of tanks. And even though the two construals may be taken as odes to the power of mechanization, I detect a dark undercurrent to the film as a whole that hardly coincides with the usual tales of "the winning of the West".)

The music for "The Plow that Brioke the Plains" was written by Virgil Thompson, who later became a classical music critic (and a very articulate and provocative one) for the New York Herold Tribune in the middle of the 20th Century. The score incorporated popular melodies, cowboy songs (including one that mega-composer Aaron Copland would also use), and what-have-you in a pastiche that somehow works, at least for the film. It's fairly obvious (to anyone who has spent a lot of time listening to American classical music of that time) that Thompson influenced others even as he was influenced by them. It's a peculiarly American style, with a lilt all its own and a humor that can creep up on you.

The rest of the film, unfortunately, hasn't aged all that well. It's a bit like finding, in a musty old library, a promising monograph on the history of a city or a region written by someone in town who thought he had a gift for such things, only to find adolescent, unsupportable, and insufferable platitudes and a dearth of much-needed facts. And zero -- count 'em, zero! -- specific stories that could have warmed up the narrative, even a little bit. Yuck.