Discussion Points

THE DUST BOWL is a historical account of an often overlooked moment in American history: the worst man-made ecological disaster in our history, overlaid by the hardships of the Great Depression. It is also a morality tale, a parable, though based on fact, about our relationship to the land that sustains us—a lesson we ignore at our peril.

THE DUST BOWL takes place on the southern Plains, one of the last areas to experience a land boom in the early 20th century, when the frenzy for wheat prompted thousands of farmers, with the full encouragement of the government, to turn over tens of millions of acres of buffalo grass, a plant species that had evolved over thousands of years to withstand the region’s regular droughts, high winds, and weather extremes.

THE DUST BOWL is a four hour film, split into two episodes.

  • The first episode, entitled “The Great Plow Up,” is devoted to introducing the characters, describing the almost unbelievable pace and scope of the rush to turn the grasslands of the southern Plains into wheat fields, and then following the early years of the drought. It shows how the storms killed crops and livestock and literally rearranged the landscape. And the episode ends with the worst storm of them all, on April 14, 1935—Black Sunday—a searing experience for everyone caught in it, including a young songwriter from Pampa, Texas, named Woody Guthrie.
  • The second episode, entitled, “Reaping the Whirlwind,” shows how Black Sunday, bad as it was, was only halfway through the decade-long crisis. The storms continued. But the film also concentrates on how the Great Depression was affecting the people; what government programs were instituted—from the WPA to the CCC—to help; what Franklin Roosevelt’s administration did, following Howard Finnell’s advice, to try to keep the southern Plains from becoming a North American Sahara desert; why some residents finally decided they had to give up and move somewhere else; and most of all, how some of them managed to hold on. The film also deals at length with the aftermath of the Dust Bowl and what lessons were—and weren’t—learned from it.

More than any other of Ken Burns’s films, THE DUST BOWL is an intimate oral history, based on the vivid testimony of more than two dozen people who lived through it—what will probably be the last recorded testimony of the generation that lived through the Dust Bowl. They have incredible, moving stories to tell.

Supplementing the testimony of the survivors are the commentaries of four historians, including Donald Worster, the nation’s pre-eminent environmental historian, and Timothy Egan, who wrote the award-winning The Worst Hard Time. For visual material, there are seldom-seen archival moving pictures, as well as an array of compelling photographs—some from the famous photographers who worked for the FSA (Farm Security Administration) like Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange; but also a lot from small historical societies and people’s family albums—many of them never published before.