#gpsbooks

The Dust Bowl

Welcome back to my riveting overview of the 1934 newsreel book Eyes on the World, Edited by M. Lincoln Schuster. For my new friends this wonderful experience is brought to you courtesy of my grandfather’s vast personal library of interesting antique books and my strange determination to make history posts a regular thing on here. Anyway with that said, let’s dive into the magnificent disaster that is The Dust Bowl. 

When I was in school we talked a bit about this but it was mostly lumped in with the Great Depression discussion. Something I didn’t discover until I was an adult and started doing my own studies was this was actually a man made disaster. Essentially large swaths of the natural prairie were developed into farmland as a result of the great American expansion into the west. So by the time the 30′s rolled around a lot of that land had basically been stripped bare and the unfettered high wind just rushed across the land ripping off what remained off the good topsoil. This was obviously a major disaster for the farmers who had spent a couple generations at that point building things up only to have to abandon everything when nothing would grow. Most fled to the coasts with the hope that maybe they could find some subsistence in the cities and coastal towns. Sadly, as often is the case in American History, these migrants were subject to heavy discrimination by local populations displeased with their influx into the already unstable job market of that time. 

Sources | Further Reading 

Moving on from the subject of fascism because the book focuses pretty heavily on that in the first chapter. No need to over-saturate the subject and extend my tendency toward gloom. So on to chapter two of Eyes on the World it’s the Great Depression and The New Deal!  

Yeah I think I just like being depressed maybe? This subject I actually know quite a bit about off the top of my head as my Pops used to talk to me a lot about his early life before he passed on a few years back. I’m not going to get into his whole life story or anything, honestly I don’t remember it super clearly as most of these conversations happened before I left home over a decade ago. The one thing he noted though that always stuck with me was that his family wasn’t really impacted too much by the depression as they were extremely poor before that and life continued on the same vein. “If you were hungry before, you’d be hungry then.” 

The Business Plot

A lot has been made in American history about the Special Committee on Un-American Activities and their efforts to suppress Communism in the US. What isn’t well known is one of the earliest, The McCormack-Dickstein Committee, did investigate a fairly significant Fascist plot to over-through FDR’s government in 1934. Frankly I had not heard of this at all until earlier this week and many at the time thought it was a hoax. HOWEVER the committee itself admitted that there was more weight to it than they originally expected but the luckily conspirators didn’t get very far. Probably because the man they wanted to lead the whole thing, Marine General Smedley Butler, really wanted nothing to do with it. 

So much better reading on this subject found via these links: 

“Smedley Butler & the “Business Plot,” - A 2 Part Essay compiled and edited by Anthony Comegna. Includes transcript of Butler’s testimony and the official report from the The McCormack-Dickstein Committee.

A couple of the “Hunger and Revolt.” Political cartoons by Jacob Burck.

“Battle of Toledo” May 1934

One of the most important labor events in American history, the Auto-lite strike, came to a head on May 23rd when a deputy was seen beating an elderly man during a series of arrests. The purpose of these five arrests had simply been to see if they could break up the crowd by taking their leadership out of the equation. At this point the movement had been going on for some time, having started officially three months earlier with a recognition strike in February, and the industrialists involved were more eager to have it resolved. 

It’s really no surprise though that the nearly ten thousand strikers that were present on that day in May were none too pleased with the authorities and chaos quickly ensued. After a night of back and forth between the police and the picketers the National Guard was called in to put an end to the violence. This of course only resulted in further carnage as the young soldiers proceeded to try and mow down the strikers with machine guns. Eventually everything did settle down as more fruitful talks began between the parties involved but the atmosphere was still largely toxic until June 9th when negotiations were finalized. In the end two people died and over 200 were injured but the strikers were met half way, they received a 5% raise with a guaranteed minimum wage of $0.35/hour ($6.40 in current US). There was some lingering bitterness for a time and some of the companies tried to get out of rehiring these troublesome strikers but in an effort to avoid any further breakdown in industry the government ordered them to allow the men back to work. 

Honestly I had heard of this event maybe once before in a class many years ago but hadn’t done my own reading on it. There’s really a lot more to this that I didn’t mention so it’s worth a look if this summary sparked your interest. 

Further Reading and Sources:

The Taledo Auto-lite Strike, 1935, Jeremy Brecher 

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