Great Plains Quarterly

For everyone studying the Dust Bowl, the first order of business should be to realize how odd it is that we keep returning to this topic. With so many issues waiting to be explored at the intersection of agricultural and environmental history, scholars should have a good reason to look at one and the same event again and again. Do they have one? Elbow room is tight in the field, and every new book needs to squeeze in. The competition includes a book that won a Bancroft Prize (Donald Worster's Dust Bowl in 1980) and the winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction (Timothy Egan for The Worst Hard Time). Scholars also need to cope with the combined cultural thrust of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Dorothea Lange's photographs, and the music of Woody Guthrie. Is this a case akin to the wall full of graffiti that magically attracts artists (and those who see themselves as such) for yet another layer of paint? Or should we think in terms of the broken records of the shellac days that kept skipping back? The latter metaphor might lose readers below age fifty, though.

Of course, the Dust Bowl had dramatic pictures. It is safe to assume that the plight of the Southern Plains would have received different coverage, if any, in the absence of spectacular photographs. The Dust Bowl offered the perfect images for the United States of the Depression years: in the words of David Danbom, Caucasians could watch "someone white with whom they could identify and who was worse off than they were."¹ Dramatic photographs no longer stand out in an age awash with visuals, but something else has emerged that draws [End Page 161] writers to the issue. The Dust Bowl has shown itself to be a powerful and remarkably versatile template. If you have a cause that needs a little boost, just link it to the Dust Bowl.

Needless to say, there is nothing illegitimate on principle about writing history in light of the concerns of one's time. In fact, some people say that this is why we engage with history. Residents of the Great Plains might object that templates are often imported from some- where else and have shallow roots in the land; narratives of the Dust Bowl are also about the cultural occupation of a peripheral region. It may provide a quantum of solace that marginalization is a common experience in rural areas worldwide. In industrialized societies, farmers are hopelessly outnumbered and cannot compete with the monetary and cultural capital that resides in the big cities. In any case, the present reviewer is not in a position to speak for the region. He has never lived in the Great Plains—a month at Iowa State University was the closest approximation—and if you write about the Dust Bowl in the urban wilderness of the English Midlands, it takes a particularly strenuous intellectual effort to understand that a few days without rain might be a problem. However, there is also an intellectual argument for a word of caution. Invoking the drama and the extent of human misery can turn into a surrogate for theoretical and empirical sophistication. Disputing an argument based on the Dust Bowl feels like leaving people dying in the dirt: no matter whether you have a reason, everyone will talk about your heart of stone. It is the environmentalist equivalent of the argumentum ad Hitlerem. Nobody will challenge you if you have the Dust Bowl on your side.

We can see the approach at...