nterprise that not even Roosevelt's "New Deal" could remedy.The "dirty thirties," as many called it, was a time when the earth ran amok in southern plains for the better part of a decade. This great American tragedy, which was more devastating environmentally as well as economically than anything in America's past or present, painstakingly tested the spirit of the southern plainsmen. The proud folks of the south refused at first to accept government help, optimistically believing that better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but from the new machine-controlled agriculture. As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller The Grapes of Wrath, "it was not nature that broke the people-they could handle the drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on land investments and buying tractors to pursue it, that had broken these people, smashing their identity as natural beings wedded to the land."(pg. 58) The machines, one-crop specialization, non-resident farming, and soil abuse were tangible threats to the American agriculture, but it was the capitalistic economic values behind these land exploitations that drove the plainsmen from their land and created the Dust Bowl. Eventually, after years of drought and dust storms, the plains people had to accept some form of aid or fall to the lowest ranks of poverty in the land, and possibly perish. The government set up agency after agency to try and give federal aid to the plains farmers. Groups such as the Farm Credit Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Land Utilization Project, and the Agricultural Adjustment program, among others, were formed to give the plainsmen some sort of relief from the hardships of the Dust Bowl. In Cimarron county, Oklahoma 306 households were drawing government relief in June 1934: 60 of them were paid entirely in commodities, the rest mostly in cash (pg. 131). Roosevelt and the government cont...
