by Simon Schama
This is not what the delegates had come to Los Angeles to hear. Powell’s unanticipated pessimism seemed at odds not just with their own temper of invincible achievement but with his own past record of enthusiasm about damming the rivers and creating on-stream reservoirs from which fields and homes could be supplied. The patriarch’s comments were interrupted by booing and vocal outbursts of angry dissent. Though taken aback by Powell’s attack on premature boosterism, Smythe himself had too much respect for the old major to pick a public quarrel. But Smythe’s impassioned faith in a transformational irrigation of the West remained fierce. This would be America’s true answer to the panic, anger, and defeatism that had gripped the country in that year of economic collapse. Messianic in his nationalist optimism, Smythe told readers of his book The Conquest of Arid America that it was “for all optimistic Americans…for homeseekers who under the leadership of the paternal Nation are to grapple with the desert, translate its gray barrenness into green fields and gardens, banish its silence with the laughter of children. This is the breed of men who make the Republic possible, who keep the lamp of faith burning through the night of corrupt commercialism.” It was about “what is being done by the partnership of God and mankind in finishing one important corner of the world.” The outlook in the 1890s might seem bleak for such grand projects, but the armies of the marching unemployed, the fear and gloom surrounding America’s cities, were all the more reason to forge ahead, for “when Uncle Sam puts his hand to a task we know it will be done. Not even the hysteria of hard times can frighten him away from the work. When he waves his hand at the desert and says ‘Let there be water!’ we know that the stream will obey his command. We know more than that—know when the water will come, how much land will be reclaimed, how many homes will be built. We can even calculate with precision how many towns will spring up and where they will be.”
Powell died in 1902, and in that same year, Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the National Reclamation Act, which owed perhaps more to Smythe’s irrepressible optimism than to the major’s emphasis on local conservation. For as was often the case with Roosevelt, the act brought the federal government deep into one of the most critical sectors of the economy. Though TR had to back off from the excited sponsor of the bill, Senator Francis Newlands, who claimed that with a stroke the government had “nationalized water,” a new agency would now use tax revenues to undertake a sweeping range of hydraulic projects all over the West. Most of them would involve the creation of dams and reservoirs from which a systemic supply of irrigation could be provided to farmers in areas—like Southern California’s parched Imperial Valley—that would otherwise never have been able to grow cereals and fruit. The Bureau of Reclamation would then provide the water and be repaid from the profits of the improved and productive farms, though at heavily subsidized rates. In the sense that they had hoped that irrigation was too precious to leave to the usual forces of the market, and that some sort of public intervention would be needed just to get the immense work of damming and creating reservoirs and canals done successfully, both Powell and Smythe might have felt satisfied that they had turned the United States in a new direction. For a generation at least it was no shame to be working for the government, just as in Montgomery Meigs’s day, working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was thought an honorable vocation.
Talented engineers in the years before and after World War I flocked to the reclamation agency, full of exactly the kind of can-do energy that Smythe had hoped would rekindle the spirit both of scientific ingenuity and public service in the United States. More than 600 dams were constructed in the first thirty years of the agency’s existence, culminating in the spectacular achievements of Grand Coulee and Hoover, the last of which brought work to thousands of unemployed and created an entire city around the construction site. Millions of acres were brought under cultivation. Peaches, grapefruit, wheat, and alfalfa all prospered. And in that sense Smythe’s vision had been realized, and Americans were now eating fruit and vegetables from places that had no natural business to be growing them.
Eventually deep fossil-bed aquifers—unknown to Powell—would be tapped for water, and almost nothing seemed to be beyond the powers of the church of irrigation. But then you look at the “bath rings” around the rock walls of Lake Mead that measure the bald fact of the reservoir being at barely 60 percent of capacity, and Powell doesn’t seem so much off the mark after all. Something has to be done, and both Powell and Smythe would have agreed that the best you can say for a desperate situation is that it makes citizens reconsider what the government, which acts in their name and with their money, should, or should not, do.
38. Ghost house
We were bowling along the backroads of east Colorado looking for locations like a hound tracks game, side to side, sniffing for scat: “There”; “No there”; “How about there?” These days it takes a long while to get out of the Denver “boomburbs” that string themselves along the freeway, the beautiful lavender mountains always on the western horizon, running parallel to the road. That’s where the tourists go, heading for the ski resorts of the Rockies, or in summer country hikes to the snow-capped Continental Divide. Pike’s Peak will put you a good 12,000 feet up, and you feel, because you are, on top of the world.
I’d been there myself more than once and even got on a horse; at least I think it was a horse, so swayback was the poor creature with the burden of unnumbered urban cowboys that her belly almost touched the dirt. We were professors in the saddle; on parole from a hard morning’s workout with business executives Needing to Know about Locke and Hobbes, and why not? Up into the Maroon Bells we went with our trusty steeds, when the ancient but courteous nag had a sudden notion that she was, for one last afternoon, the frisking filly she must once have been and took off from the trail of PhDs, galloping like she never wanted to hear another word about John Maynard Keynes ever again. Off she went over hill and down dale, and mountain meadows, taking me with her. Reins? What reins? I hung on, mostly to her old generous black mane, and after a bit the “for dear life” part of the sentence fell away. Eventually—five minutes later—the horse felt she had put enough distance between her and the philosophy rodeo, and Peggy (Pegasus to you) and I were Alone at last in Colorado. We both whinnied happily. Take me where you will, o winged one, I thought and possibly said (it had been a long morning), and obligingly she cantered a bit more through a glade of quaking aspen and out onto a bluff that looked down steeply to the valley below. I applied the brakes as best as old John Wayne movies had taught. Amazingly, “Whoa” seemed to work. Then without warning another rider appeared, perhaps thirty feet away on a little rise in the field, darkly silhouetted against the late afternoon Rocky Mountain light. To my amazement he then did that thing, leaning back in the saddle, taking the cowboy hat off, and waving it in salutation in the air. “HIYA,” came the shout. This was it. The West and I were One. “HOWDY,” I yelled back, getting into the spirit of the thing. There was a pause. Then came the fatal blow as deadly as if he’d beaten me to the draw. “That point you were making about Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty this morning…Really insight-ful!” It was over. I had been gunned down by the political theory of contract. I slumped in the saddle. Peggy and I headed dejectedly back to the trail where the riders were chatting animatedly about Ingmar Bergman. “Where have you been?” one of them kindly inquired. “Oh just off west a bit,” I said, accepting my place in the scheme of things. “What is it tonight, Schubert or Bartók?” Peggy snorted and emitted the richly foul aroma only horses can. I knew how she felt.
But we were filming a different Colorado, beyond the endless line of lumberyards and fixtures-and-fittings depots that go along with suburban sprawl. As you drive east about a hundred miles, the mountains become no more than a sawtooth edge to the far horizon, and out before and around you, 360 degrees, is nothing but an ocean of dark dirt, the Great Plains extending hundreds of miles through Kansas and south into the Oklahoma Panhandle, once the Cherokee
Outlet, the land that the Runners of 1893 had galloped to buy. Not much goes on any longer around here—there are more abandoned farms than working ones—but the fields are plowed and will bear some wheat later in the season. Occasionally the skeletal sails of a small pump mill, still there hunting water long after the farmers have gone, clatter and moan. The silence gets broken only by the rumble of a distant truck that you smell before you see it; the unforgettably bad whiff of crated poultry coming from the vehicle as it rattles by, leaving a trail of atmospheric nastiness in the sweet spring air behind it.
Despite their name the plains aren’t dead flat. Every so often the ground swells and rises; nothing more than a gentle wave but enough for the road to divert itself with a curve or two. Around one of those bends near a village called Hereford we came, and there, on the brow of one of those risers, was what once had been a farmhouse. From a distance the basics looked more or less intact, freeze-dried by the prairie winter: the pitched roof to let the snow slide away; the dark overlapping shingles along the side; the scatter of smaller wooden huts out back: a hog pen; a henhouse. But when you stepped through the balls of scratchy tumbleweed that had come to rest against the broken fence, you could see the place was held together by nothing more than the debris of its own ruin; the splintered wreck of a life that was hanging on in the middle of nowhere, so its reproach would endure against the Colorado sky like someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t stop crying.
Well, there was a lot to cry about. The dust storms of the 1930s that swept over the plains came like a biblical plague and in their gray-brown mountains of pulverized aerial dirt, took with them every hope of a share in American plenty the farmers in west Oklahoma, Kansas, the Texas Panhandle, and east Colorado ever had. Digging out after one of the dusters had gone through must have been like the aftermath of a nuclear attack, the bodies of cattle, blinded and choked, lying around in dunes of blowing dust. The flying grime settled in layers everywhere inside your house, and no matter how much you scrubbed it down, back it would come, turning the linen gray, covering the oilcloth on your table just as soon as you’d wiped it down, lodging in your children’s ears till they hurt. At night you had to get up and down a glass of foul-tasting water just to make sure you didn’t choke asleep what with all the dirt coming in as you slept.
The farm people of the western plains had seen a lot of trouble but never anything like this. One minute the sky overhead was clear blue; that washed-out, thin blue of the prairies; the next a monstrous wall of darkness made its appearance on the horizon, sometimes 30,000 feet high, gathering force from the wind. Often enough there would be no sound as it moved relentlessly toward your town or your house; only sometimes, from deep within the citadel of flying filth, there would be a low rumble of thunder and a shrouded bolt of lightning. There was nowhere you could get to quick enough; no good bundling the children in the old Model T as you might all be entombed by the wall of dust. All you could do was get everyone inside as the darkness rolled over you, blotting out the light, the suffocating blanket of dust hissing through every crack and cavity, falling with the quietness of snow on your grandma’s chair, your kitchen sink, your marriage bed. Outside your animals were dying and your fields were buried. Your life on the High Plains was over.
How had it happened? How had the “bowl” that its excited booster Thomas Hart Benton had insisted was not the Great American Desert, but a true dish of impending fruitfulness, turned into the Dust Bowl? The first generation of sodbusters had had a hard time making a go of it; the promised irrigation never really came, and no one knew about deep subterranean aquifers, much less had the means to get at them. Many had gone to the wall along with the early irrigation companies. Back came the Texas cattlemen, who this time managed not to overstock the shortgrass range. But then “dry farming”—deep plowing, mulching the soil with its own dust, then keeping some of the fields fallow through summer to retain moisture—seemed to offer whole new possibilities of making do with less water. Freshly ripped and broken sod, it turned out, was receptive to wheat, a crop no one had thought possible in the “semi-arid” western plains. What was more, international market conditions were perfect, with Europe’s domestic production disrupted by World War I and postwar havoc. Demand rose steeply. The farmers who had hung on through the hard times of the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century found themselves in the unfamiliar position of cashing in from soaring cereal prices.
But if they were to profit properly from the opportunity, they needed help from heavy machinery and big capital. The old plowing days were a thing of the past. Now what was needed were tractors and the big disk plows that moved through the packed shortgrass sod, shallow and fast, tearing out the roots and leaving a fine dirt, the loose topsoil making sowing that much easier. At the other end of the process, a new generation of combine harvesters, especially the McCormicks, could get through a field in a fraction of the time needed in the old farming days. Scenting a killing, in came the banks offering the credit needed to rent or—in partnership with neighboring farms—buy the machines. Mortgages could be arranged now that the wheat boom had appreciated the price of their land, or advances given against future crops. The good times were so close. It was all so possible. But why should the rubes get all the action? So thought main chancers watching the price of wheat go up faster than the price of land. They had the wherewithal to buy huge tracts of land, plow and harvest on an industrial scale, the scale the agribusiness deserved. Never mind Jefferson’s old dream of the husbandman-democrat and his hundred acres. This was the twentieth century.
Enter outsiders. They didn’t get any more outside than Hickman Price, who in 1931 ditched his $50,000 salary from Fox Film Corps. in Hollywood to buy up 25,000 acres of Texas Panhandle prime. Everything was on a scale no one else could quite match: the half million bushels of wheat; the twenty-five combines painted a shiny silver, with jumbo lettering spelling out the name of the great man; the hundred trucks that took the wheat to the elevators at Kress; the motorcycle-riding harvest patrol roaring around the fields to check all was as it should be and reporting back to Price HQ if it wasn’t; the 250 mobile maintenance units, carrying their sleeping gear with them, who could be deployed day and night if any of the combines and tractors broke down.
Some were even bigger. James Jelinek of Greeley County, Kansas, had 28,000 acres producing 620,000 bushels a year, a mere fourteen combines, and twenty tractors. But he also had his very own grain elevator. And then there was the prodigious Simon Fishman, who had come from Lithuania in the 1880s, aged twelve, had reckoned there were too many little Fishmans running around the Lower East Side, and moved on all the way to the High Plains, where he traveled around as Jews did, selling a bit of this and a bit of that. But there was a cult of the Land among Jews from the Pale around that time that produced a whole number who wanted to try their luck on the High Plains rather than Palestine: Benny Goldberg in North Dakota, or Samuel Kahn of Holt County, Nebraska, who mixed up wheat with livestock and other crops enough for him to be hailed far and wide as Kahn the Onion King. Encouraged, Simon Fishman turned farmer in Nebraska and did well enough to be elected mayor of Sydney in that state before moving on to Tribune, Kansas, where he established a wheat empire that shipped a million bushels a year from both his own and his neighbors’ farms.
And, as generally happens, the wheat barons paid the price of their own success: overproduction, steeply falling prices; many of them going broke, starting with Hickman Price, who after only a few years of megaproduction was forced into bankruptcy by a hardware store to which he was in hock for 600 lousy bucks that somehow still couldn’t get paid. But it was the small owners who got into deep trouble, mortgaged to the banks for their equipment against a harvest and their land that was now worth a fraction of its value in the boom years of the 1920s. Many were foreclosed, reduced to laboring.
And then, starting in 1931, there was nothing much to labor at. Droughts of the kind that no one could remember in their lifetime hit
the High Plains. Such moisture as had been held beneath the broken sod was a distant memory. Wheat blackened and died. The shortgrass prairie turned into an ashland of burned-out prospects stretching as far as the Oklahoma horizon. And then, starting in 1933, it got worse. Winds started to blow, and there was now no vegetation to break their force, or to stop them sucking up the brown-black powder that was all that was left of the topsoil. The black blizzards were born.
The worst of all arrived on 14 April 1935 when an estimated 300,000 tons of flying dirt darkened skies all the way from eastern Colorado to Washington D.C., where Franklin Roosevelt’s soil conservation specialist Hugh Bennett was about to testify before a congressional committee on restoring the integrity of the shortgrass prairie before nothing was left of it. On Friday the 19th, Bennett made his appearance announcing, as the sky over Washington turned dirty copper, that they were about to witness what had killed a whole age of farming. As the storm dirtied the windows of the Capitol, Bennett, nature helping his case, announced, “This, gentlemen, is what I’m talking about. There goes Oklahoma.”
A week later the Soil Conservation Act was passed, funding an army of 20,000 in the plains who would attempt a restoration of the land; plant trees as windbreaks (a futile exercise in the semi-arid zone) and offer relief to the multitudes of destitute and homeless. To the Cherokee Strip, that just forty or so years before had seen the rush of horsemen to stake their claim to breadbasket prosperity, now came the chroniclers of America’s agrarian agony: film-makers like Pare Lorentz, whose The Plow That Broke the Plains is still a documentary of tragic beauty; photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, whose images of heroically lined begrimed faces, mothers and children standing before broken-down frame houses half buried in dune-dirt, can never leave anyone who has seen them; writers like John Steinbeck and Archibald MacLeish, who grasped that what had gone was more than just a moment in America’s farm history, but rather a simple ideal that had been born with the republic itself, and with Jefferson’s dream of a democratic republic of citizens of the soil.
