The Great Depression - Dust | 4

American History Tellers

Wondery

Society & Culture, Kids & Family, History, Education For Kids

4.7 • 18.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2019

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Great Depression wasn’t the only crisis facing the country when Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933. Following a decade-long drought that had shriveled crops, massive dust storms were pummeling huge swaths of the Midwest, the Great Plains, and the Northwest. Years of poor harvest practices had worsened the crisis, pushing farmers already strained by the financial hit of the Great Depression off their land. Only when a lifelong soil scientist made a dramatic testimony before Congress did the government finally begin to develop a solution.

Many of those unmoored by environmental calamity searched for opportunity elsewhere — particularly in California. But when a controversial Los Angeles police chief sent armed officers to block access to the Golden State, he would launch a constitutional crisis and a showdown with a rural sheriff.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, prime members, you can listen to American History Tellers add free on Amazon Music,
0:05.6	download the app today.
0:07.0	Imagine it's April 14, 1934.
0:15.9	Massive black clouds, royal towards your farm.
0:19.4	When the storm arrives, it's like nothing you or your parents have ever experienced.
0:24.2	Darkness sweeps over the prairie, and suddenly the storm slams into your house with a freight
0:28.8	train's rumble.
0:32.4	When it's finally over, you spit dirt from your mouth.
0:35.9	You open the door, step over an ankle high mound of dust piled against your house, like
0:40.4	a snow drift, and head outside.
0:43.3	Your farm looks like it's been transported to the middle of the Sahara, an enormous
0:47.7	dune buries half the barn.
0:50.3	You remember the cows in the pasture.
0:52.5	You turn toward the field and find one slumped over.
0:55.2	It's hide, cut, and scraped.
0:57.7	The wounds make it appear as if someone took sandpaper to it.
1:01.6	Pause voice startles you as he approaches from behind.
1:04.7	She's dead, must have suffocated.
1:07.4	How do you know?
1:08.7	Just look at all that mud coming out of her mouth.
1:11.0	Looks like she fell in a pit of quicksand.
1:13.0	Anyway, she's dead.
	...

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