The Dust Bowl Heat Wave on This Day in History

 

This day in history: The Dust Bowl heat wave reached its peak on this day in 1935, sending temperatures to 109 °F (43 °C) in Chicago and 104 °F (40 °C) in Milwaukee.

From Glenn Corey:

In the 1930s, in addition to dealing with the Great Depression that had much of the industrialized world in its grip, Americans, particularly in the Plains States, were also coping with the Great Dust Bowl, considered the greatest single human-caused environmental catastrophe in the country’s history. Though the Depression still looms larger in the American mind, the Dust Bowl was no less traumatic or devastating for those who lived through it, and, like the economic crisis, it transformed American society as thousands of people lost their farms, their way of life, and, in some cases, even their lives.

Because the Dust Bowl is, for most people, a distant event, it might be helpful to get a sense of its massive scale through some facts and figures:

• On a single day, April 14, 1935, known to history as Black Sunday, more dirt was displaced in the air (around 300 million tons) during a massive dust storm than was moved to build the Panama Canal.
• Dirt from as far away as Illinois and Kansas was blown to points east, including New York City and states on the East Coast.
• By 1934, it was estimated that 100 million acres of farmland had lost all or most of its topsoil to the winds.
• During the same April as Black Sunday, 1935, one of FDR's advisors, Hugh Hammond Bennett, was in Washington, DC, on his way to testify before Congress about the need for soil conservation legislation. A dust storm arrived in Washington all the way from the Great Plains. As a dusty gloom spread over the nation's capital and blotted out the sun, Bennett explained, "This, gentlemen, is what I have been talking about." Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act that same year.

In addition to the damage to the land through the erosion of topsoil, the Dust Bowl prompted thousands of farmers to leave their farms and move to the cities or to leave the area entirely and head out West, around ten thousand a month at its peak. So many of those who headed West came from Oklahoma that they became known as Okies. They were immortalized by John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath.

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, wishing to ensure that nothing like the Dust Bowl could ever happen again, put together the Great Plains Drought Area Committee. He charged the committee with determining the exact causes of the Dust Bowl. The first, preliminary report of the committee was filed on August 27, 1936, with an extended memo being released by the end of the year.

In The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, Timothy Egan quotes from the first report: “Mistaken public policies have been largely responsible for the situation, [specifically] a mistaken homesteading policy, the stimulation of wartime demands which led to over cropping and overgrazing, and encouragement of a system of agriculture which could not be both permanent and prosperous.” In short, according to Roosevelt’s committee, three government policies were responsible for the Dust Bowl: The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains, many of whom believed in the myth that “the rain follows the plow.”

Though Roosevelt, who believed that government policies could be a force for good in improving the human lot, didn’t like the findings of his committee, he accepted them. Of course, policymakers did not set out to create the Dust Bowl, but they aren’t entirely off the hook. As Egan points out, three groups of people testified before Congress on the potentially disastrous consequences of policies that would encourage plowing the land in the Plains States: ecologists, American Indians, and farmers. Despite their testimony, legislators went ahead with their policies. These three groups became the Cassandras of the aforementioned policies: like Cassandra in the Greek myth, they told the truth, but no one would listen.

Whether or not legislators have learned them, several lessons emerge from the experience of the Dust Bowl. First, the full consequences of a given policy can take many years, even decades, to play out. This makes it very difficult to pinpoint the ultimate cause of a particular event. Second, multiple policies can combine to create a situation that no single policy would have brought about by itself.

In this case, the Homestead Act of 1862 brought people to the Great Plains, but it wasn’t enough to get people to plow the land. The other acts, which followed the Homestead Act by over forty years, encouraged people to act in a way that disrupted the delicate ecological balance that had been established over the course of millennia. Finally, when policymakers are committed to a certain course of action, they will often proceed regardless of input received from experts.

Glenn Corey

Glenn Corey is a professional copy editor from North Canton, Ohio, and the author of the Kindle book How to Get a $150,000 Liberal Arts Education for Free: 100 Books to Help You Better Understand Yourself, Others, and the World You Live In.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Twenty-Second Amendment to the United States Constitution on This Day in History

 

This day in history: The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on this day in 1951, limiting Presidents to two terms. The Twenty-second Amendment was a reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt's election to an unprecedented four terms as president, but presidential term limits had long been debated in American politics. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 considered the issue extensively (alongside broader questions, such as who would elect the president, and the president's role). Many, including Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, supported lifetime tenure for presidents, while others favored fixed terms. Virginia's George Mason denounced the life-tenure proposal as tantamount to elective monarchy. An early draft of the U.S. Constitution provided that the president was restricted to one seven-year term. Ultimately, the Framers approved four-year terms with no restriction on how many times a person could be elected president.

Early presidents, like Washington, resigned after 2 terms. Numerous academics and public figures have looked at his decision to retire after two terms, and have, according to political scientist Bruce Peabody, "argued he had established a two-term tradition that served as a vital check against any one person, or the presidency as a whole, accumulating too much power".

"It was Benjamin Franklin who summed up the best case for term limits more than two centuries ago: 'In free governments, the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors . . . . For the former to return among the latter does not degrade, but promote them.' In other words, when politicians know they must return to ordinary society and live under the laws passed while they were in government, at least some of them will think more carefully about the long-term effects of the programs they support. Their end-all will not be re-election, because that option will not be available." Source

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The War on Poverty on This Day in History

 

This day in history: On this day in 1964, LBJ (Lyndon B. Johnson) declared a "War on Poverty." 22 trillion dollars have been spent on this "war" and more people are now dependent on Government and less self-sufficient than before. 

Poverty researcher Michael D. Tanner remarked on the War on Poverty and its programmatic legacies:

"Throwing money at the problem has neither reduced poverty nor made the poor self-sufficient. Instead, government programs have torn at the social fabric of the country and been a significant factor in increasing out-of-wedlock births with all of their attendant problems. They have weakened the work ethic and contributed to rising crime rates. Most tragically of all, the pathologies they engender have been passed on from parent to child, from generation to generation."

The WSJ shared the same sentiment:

"The stated goal of the War on Poverty is not just to raise living standards but also to make America’s poor more self-sufficient and to bring them into the mainstream of the economy. In that effort the war has been an abject failure, increasing dependency and largely severing the bottom fifth of earners from the rewards and responsibilities of work…The expanding availability of antipoverty transfers has devastated the work effort of poor and lower-middle income families. By 1975 the lowest-earning fifth of families had 24.8% more families with a prime-work age head and no one working than did their middle-income peers. By 2015 this differential had risen to 37.1%…The War on Poverty has increased dependency and failed in its primary effort to bring poor people into the mainstream of America’s economy and communal life. Government programs replaced deprivation with idleness, stifling human flourishing."

FDR, who I rarely agree with once wisely stated:

 

“The lessons of history, confirmed by evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration to the national fiber. To dole out relief . . . is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

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Jesse Owens (and Hitler) on This Day in History

 

This day in history: Jesse Owens won the 100 metre dash, defeating Ralph Metcalfe, at the Berlin Olympics on this day in 1936. There is a popular myth that Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics. As the story goes, after Owens won one gold medal, Hitler, incensed, stormed out of Olympic Stadium so he wouldn't have to congratulate Owens on his victory. However, this story isn't true. It was fabricated by the media. Fake News it appears is nothing new. The facts are simple. Hitler did not congratulate Owens, but that day he didn't congratulate anybody else either, not even the German winners. As a matter of fact, Hitler didn't congratulate anyone after the first day of the competition. It was reported that the German leader gave the American sprinter a “friendly little Nazi salute,” and Owens said that the two exchanged congratulatory waves. However, it was the conduct of Roosevelt– who never invited Owens to the White House or acknowledged his triumphs–that disappointed the Olympic champion. “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was our president who snubbed me,” he said months after the Games. “The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”

Another popular belief is that the games marked a humiliating moment for the Nazis because a few blacks walked away with a fistful of medals while Hitler had predicted the Teutonic lads would be the big winners, proof of the superman abilities of the white race. In reality, the competition was anything but a German humiliation. It is forgotten that Germany managed to pick up more medals than all the other countries combined. Hitler was pleased with the outcome.

See also: The Jesse Owens They Don't Teach You about in History Class

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The Great Society on This Day in History

 

The Failure of LBJ's Great Society

This Day in History: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the Great Society on this day in 1964. Johnson declared war on poverty, jacked up federal spending on education, and pushed massive new entitlement programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, which promised to deliver high-quality, low-cost health care to the nation's elderly and poor.

"..if we judge the Great Society by its goal, providing the poor with their basic family needs so they can go out into the marketplace and find jobs and join their fellow Americans, it has been, writes Rector, 'a catastrophe.' Scores of millions of Americans are today less able to achieve self-sufficiency through work than were their grandparents. And by providing for all the needs that the father used to provide for his family, the Great Society has helped make fathers superfluous. We have created a system where a teenage girl who becomes pregnant can have all her basic needs met by government. This is a primary cause of the rise in illegitimacy in America from 6 percent of all births in 1963 to 41 percent today, and to 53 percent among Hispanics and 73 percent among African-Americans. And that record illegitimacy rate is directly tied to the drug use rate, the dropout rate, the crime rate and the incarceration rate. If the goal of the Great Society was to turn America’s tax consumers into taxpayers, it has been a total failure. We have now a vast underclass of scores of millions who are dependent upon government for most or all of their basic needs, a class among whom many, if not most, have lost the ability to survive without government money, food and shelter." Source

Even FDR, 30 years prior warned that welfare is “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

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FDR's Gold Confiscation on This Day in History

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This Day in History: US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 on this day in 1933 "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States." With this Executive Order, gold as legal money disappeared in the United States, paving the way for the government to engage in near-unconstrained debasement of the currency. Without EO 6102 Roosevelt would be unable to enact his New Deal spending programs.

"The monetary system of the United States at the time of the Depression could not sustain inflation very long because the country was on a gold standard. If people sensed that the government was printing too many paper dollars, by law they could redeem those dollars from the government’s store of gold. Moreover, gold coins circulated along with silver dollars, half-dollars, quarters, and dimes. If people were exchanging their dollars for gold, then the government’s own gold supply would be diminished. Since the gold standard included requirements that the country’s money supply have at least a 40 percent gold backing, a drain on gold reserves would have forced the government to stop printing so many dollars. Therefore, the plans of the New Dealers ran headlong into the reality of the gold standard and its check on inflation." Source

This is the same revered administration that ordered the mass destruction of crops, as well as animals such as pigs and chickens, at a time of Depression when the country was hungry. "The aim was explicitly to raise the prices of all farm commodities. The preposterous economic 'theory' behind this was that if prices and wages were jacked up, that would increase 'purchasing power,' which was the way to lift the country out of the Depression." Source

Despite all of the above and all of the spending, the New Deal was an abject failure. On May 6, 1939, Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, confirmed this: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work ... After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!” 

Any centralized governmental plan to invigorate an economy has always failed, and these plans are always proposed by elites who are not very bright. Raymond Moley wrote in May 1936 about Roosevelt: "I was impressed as never before by the utter lack of logic of the man, the scantiness of his precise knowledge of things that he was talking about, by the gross inaccuracies in his statements. . . ."

The limitation on gold ownership in the United States was repealed after President Gerald Ford signed a bill legalizing private ownership of gold coins, bars, and certificates by an Act of Congress, codified in Pub.L. 93–373, which went into effect December 31, 1974.

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