Donald Worster and the Dust Bowl

December 17, 2014

Mrs. Fogelson's English
Ashlin Bradford
Hour 5

The time of the great depression was very challenging for people all around the world.
Donald Worster lived through the dust bowl. This period of time was during the great depression
and fed the increase of poverty. Donald devoted his time to study the dust bowl and visit places

where poverty was strongest. He analyzed the struggles of the people during their times of
hardship and later wrote a book about the disastrous effects of the dust bowl. Donald Worster
was able to study the effects of soil erosion on the society, study the effects of the dust bowl
economically, and write his findings in his book that correlates to the well known book, The
Grapes of Wrath.
The dust bowl greatly impacted society. It affected society by destroying the areas people
lived in and causing people to relocate. The dust bowl took place in the 1930s and lasted for
more than ten years. It completely transformed the living conditions of the people living in the
areas of the United States and Canada. It created soil erosion, which is what happens when soil is
destroyed faster that it can be formed, greatly affecting the topsoil.There were farmers who had
a lot of trouble adapting to these (soil conservation) new ideas. It was not something they were
used to. (PBS Donald Worster) With the dust bowl and soil erosion, it was hard for people to
stay in the states they lived in. Most people had trouble surviving, but most of all keeping their
good judgement. With the hard times that people were going through, people resulted to doing
things such as stealing to endure to the end. This put their integrity and their trust into a test of
obedience. The dust bowl greatly affected ecology, agriculture, drought conditions, and the
success of farming collapsed.Topsoil that had taken a thousand years per inch to build suddenly
blew away in only minutes. ( PBS surviving the dust bowl). The people had tried so hard
throughout their life to become successful and to get the best they could out of their land.
Tractors came to change production, but all that the farmers had worked for was lost. There was
disasters and hunger due to the effects of dust storms and a lack of a food source.
Donald Worster was able to study the dust bowl when he was older and when his family
had made it to California. His parents had experienced some trials during the dustbowl, and

shared with their son of their hardships. Donalds interest grew about the great depression and he
started visiting and studying places that were associated with the dust bowl. The people had
many struggles and trials during the dustbowl. The people during the great depression
experienced different trials throughout their lives. The older people, however, were able to
persevere through the depression and increase their chances of survival. But the young
generation that were growing up in this time period felt hopeless through this time. My
grandparents had been farming outside near Hutchinson, Kansas. They had lots of stories
about hard times. They stuck it out. (PBS) People had been going through hard times through
the beginning. They had tried to live their life in a way to learn from their mistakes and help
others stay strong until the end. There was no way to stop to the tractors from dominating the
land and the dust storms from ruining the crops. There was nothing in the plains society to
check the progress of commercial farming, nothing to prevent from taking the risks it was willing
to take for profit. That is how and why the Dust Bowl came about...In the main it propped up
an agricultural economy that had proved itself to be socially and ecologically corrosive." (163).
( environmental education) With so much damage done to the area, people constantly had to
shelter themselves from the winds and the effects caused from arousing mother nature. Many
people had become sick from an excessive amount of dirt intake in their bodies. People
constantly had to battle the storms and to try to stay alive throughout that time.
Donald Worster really wanted to capture the events that had happened during this period
of time. Soon after the great depression, he published a book which contained all of his findings
during that time. The book, Grapes of Wrath, directly relates to the great depression and the dust
bowl presented in Worsters book. In the Grapes of Wrath, it depicts a family going through the
great depression and the things they experienced were similar to what Worster discovered and

wrote about in his book. It was not nature that hurt the people. 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.(Worster) The Grapes of Wrath
teaches that even though there are changes, people can still adapt. Through the familys trials
they were able to overcome so much and were viewed different as their characters developed.
Worster writes about the real trials and problems that happened during the 1930s. Is the
agriculture that America offers to the world: producing an incredible bounty in good seasons,
using staggering qualities of machines and fossil fuels to do so, exuding confidence in man's
technological mastery over the earth, running along the thin edge of disaster." (Worster 234). He
was able to demonstrate peoples lives and struggles so people today could learn from him and
use his ideas to create new and improved solutions to many past problems. Through the problems
in literature, people can learn so many lessons as to what they should be doing with their lives
and what society needs to change to be successful.
The great depression was very hard on the people. With Donald Worster's passion to learn
about the trials in this society and to study the dust bowl, he has lead to further discoveries of
people and trials during the dust bowl. When the soil erosion began happening, people became
desperate to survive, which caused them to lose their integrity and to steal from others. The
Grapes of Wrath shows ideals and occurrences that happened often throughout Donald Worster's
book. When people are forced to cope with all kinds of hard conditions, some are able to
persevere while it is very hard for others to adapt. This is the direct reason and inspiration for
Donald to study the dust bowl. Donald Worster was able to study the effects of soil erosion on
the society, study the effects of the dust bowl economically, and write his findings in his book
that correlates to the well known book, The Grapes of Wrath.

Works Cited
"American Experience: TV's Most-watched History Series." PBS. PBS, 2013. Web. 07 Dec.
2014.
"American Experience: TV's Most-watched History Series." PBS. PBS, 1996-2013. Web. 08
Dec. 2014.

"Environmental Education." : A Summary of the Dust Bow.(The Southern Plains). Blogger, 13

July 2011. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.