And then the dispossessed were drawn west—from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless—restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do—to lift, to push, to pick, to cut—anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.¹

On October 29, 1929,—Black Tuesday—was marked by a sharp drop in the stock market.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was especially hard hit with high trading volume, falling 12%, one of the larges on-day drops in stock market history.  A panic sell-off effectively ended the Roaring Twenties and launched the global economy into the Great Depression.²

For the United States, the next 15 years would see the great dust storms of the drought-stricken plains region, massive unemployment during a depression that was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, and a global war that also involved most of the world’s countries.

Dust, drought, depression, and war—a new project

Over the life of this blog, I have posted many, many times on the great depression and the dust bowl, usually just sharing images, sometimes going into more depth.  This new “project” will take a different approach.  There will still be relevant photos or images—I can’t see doing a post without at least one image—but there will also be content associated with the period from the crash of the stock market to the end of World War II, usually including one or more of the themes dust, drought, depression, and war.

Each blog post will be an exploration of something from the almost 16 years between the crash of the stock market and the end of World War 2—no limits, no specific focus.

I want to vary the focus up so that I’m not always concentrating in one area. In the first few posts, I found myself falling into that trap with three posts related to the drought in 1930.  To add some randomness to the posts, I used a random date generator to select one year’s worth of dates between Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, and September 2, 1945, the end of the Second World War.  Those dates were then sorted in a spreadsheet using a random order function.

From that list of dates, I plan to pick the top date and do an image search on that date.  If I find an image that’s related to one or more of the themes, then the post will be related to that image.  If there isn’t an image that’s relevant, then I’ll do a regular Google search and/or a New York Times article search.

I may also stumble across a topic to blog on separate from the list of dates.

Posts already prepared—both published and scheduled—are listed at Dust, drought, depression, and war – the posts. The randomly selected and randomly ordered blog post prompt dates for future posts are also included.  Some significant dates may later be inserted or substituted.

1. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York, NY: Viking Press, 1939.
2. Halton, Clay. “Black Tuesday.” Investopedia. Investopedia, May 19, 2021. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blacktuesday.asp.

Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 5

In the 1934 mayoral election in New Orleans, Senator Huey P. Long¹, the Democratic political leader of Louisiana convinced John Klorer, Sr., a respected engineer and father of the editor of Long’s American Progress newspaper, to oppose the incumbent mayor, T. Semmes Walmsley.

In the final days of the campaign, Long supporters were caught removing names of Old Regular supporters from the voter rolls, so the registration books were seized by the civil sheriff and placed in the Orleans Parish Prison for safekeeping. Long’s ally Governor Oscar K. Allen ordered the Louisiana National Guard to mobilize for New Orleans to defend the registrar’s office, while Walmsley threatened to deputize ten thousand “special police.” With potential armed clashes between the National Guard and Walmsley’s police looming, a last-minute agreement to submit to an arbitration committee averted a crisis.²

The following article appeared in the New York Times on September 8, 1934.³  The image above is a composite from public domain photos.

Protest Calling of Troops.

Long Broadcasts Warning.

Mayor Points to Own Power.

Martial Law Predicted.

1. “Huey Long.” Wikipedia.  last edit August 13, 2021. Accessed August 15, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long.
2. “1934 New Orleans Mayoral Election.” Wikipedia. last edited June 25, 2020.Accessed August 15, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_New_Orleans_mayoral_election.
3. Daniell, F. Raymond. “2,000 Troops Move into New ORLEANS; Long IS ‘Dictator’; but His Faction Loses Two Important Court Rulings COVERING PRIMARY.” The New York Times. September 8, 1934. https://www.nytimes.com/1934/09/08/archives/2000-troops-move-into-new-orleans-long-is-dictator-but-his-faction.html.

Royalty-free images by Mike¹ — No. 149 of over 1200 images

Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, near La Junta, Colorado, September 5, 2018

I’ve shared a number of photos over the years about Bent’s Old Fort in Colorado and, in November 2011, wrote a fairly lengthy post² on it and created a 4-minute video. We had visited the site earlier that year, in September, and, again, seven years later in the fall of 2018.

In 1831 or 1832 Charles Bent and St. Vrain formed a partnership, which in time became Bent, St. Vrain, and Co., and entered the Santa Fe trade. In the late 1820s or early 1830s, William Bent, who had apparently been trading independently, erected a large adobe fort on the north bank of the Arkansas River, 12 miles west of the mouth of the Purgatoire. At first named Fort William, it was also known as Bent’s Fort and finally as Bent’s Old Fort after it was partially destroyed and a new fort was built elsewhere. Elaborately constructed, it was eventually a massive adobe structure of quadrangular shape having 24 rooms lining the walls, supported by poles. Two 30-foot cylindrical bastions, equipped with cannon, flanked the southwest and northeast corners. The walls were 15 feet high and 2 feet thick and extended 4 feet above the building roofs to serve as a banquette and were pierced with loopholes. On the south side was a cattle yard, enclosed by a high wall. A self-sufficient institution, the fort was operated by about 60 persons of many nationalities and vocations, including blacksmiths, trappers and traders, carpenters, mechanics, wheelwrights, gunsmiths, cooks, cattle herders, hunters, clerks, teamsters, and laborers.³

Post Endnotes

1. I am sharing some of my public domain images in periodic blog posts.
2. Goad, Mike. “Bent’s Old Fort.” Exit78, November 8, 2011. https://exit78.com/bents-old-fort/.
3. ibid

Series Notes:

• This image is also shared as public domain on Pixabay,  Flickr, and Pinterest.
• Images are being shared in the sequence they were accepted by Pixabay, a royalty-free image-sharing site.
• Only images specifically identified as such are public domain or creative commons on our pages.
• All other images are copyright protected by me, creative commons, or used under the provisions of fair use.

Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 4

The Dust Bowl, caused by severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods that limit wind erosion of the land, damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies beginning in 1934 and displaced about 3.5 million people in the U.S., the largest short period migration in American history. A quarter-million Canadians migrated from the plains.¹

Before that, and little remembered, was the drought of 1930-1931.

In 1930, dry conditions touched 30 states from the Appalachians to the Rockies, but the brunt of the drought was felt in the lower Mississippi and Ohio valleys.  Arkansas was perhaps hardest hit, the epicenter of the disaster.  Wells and streams ran dry, crops failed, and by mid-summer, thousands of farm families in the region faced starvation for themselves and their livestock.²

The drought enveloped eight southern states.  Of these, it struck southeast Arkansas the worst, striking a region long plagued with poverty and economic instability and where cotton was still king.³  There, unethical practices, racism, and violence kept tenant farmers, day workers, and sharecroppers always suffering and scrambling, always in debt, and always at the mercy of the landowner and the storekeeper.⁴

The 1929 stock market crash brought ruin to the rich and poor. Bank closings shut off financing and crop prices plummeted as did the need for raw materials.⁴ The drought just added hunger, illness, and near starvation to the suffering.

Unlike previous droughts that were severe, but short in duration, that of 1930 gradually intensified and lasted for almost a year. With temperatures that reached 113 degrees in some counties, Arkansas lost from 30 to 50 percent of its crops. The parched earth and the famine that followed in its wake came as a final link in a sequential chain of disasters. Like other southern cotton-producing regions, the delta had experienced during the 1920s fluctuating cotton prices, under-production and over-production, indebtedness and foreclosures, an increase in tenantry, and the almost total collapse of the rural banking structure. Natural calamities like the boll weevil invasion and the 1927 Mississippi River flood compounded the region’s serious social and economic ills, for the counties affected most severely by the drought had also experienced the flood. Delta planters and croppers never had an opportunity to recover from one disaster before the depression and drought brought further distress.⁵

Relief for those affected by the drought was slow and inefficient.  President Hoover and other officials were reluctant to provide direct aid, fearing that farmers would end up “on the dole,” reluctant to go back to their work.  What aid did arrive was administered locally, usually by representatives of large property owners and employers, a practice that would continue through the New Deal.⁶

In Arkansas, “The drought relief experience revealed the limitations of local voluntaryism. The individual relief committees consisted of the social and economic leaders of each community — a planter, banker, merchant, and county judge. Rather than administering relief judiciously, the delta committees used discrimination and intimidation to ensure that the labor force remained under their control.”⁷

On January 3, 1931, angry farmers descended on England, Arkansas demanding food for their hungry, suffering families.  Little did they know the drastic changes their future would hold.

The drought ended, but, over the next decade and a half, agricultural production in the south, through mechanization, changed profoundly, convulsing the entire region. Sharecropping and tenant farming shrank rapidly to insignificance through wholesale evictions.  Millions of people across the region were displaced to cities or other parts of the country.  Mules, symbols and versatile laborers of the soil, became rare. “The southern landscape was depopulated and enclosed; agriculture at last became capital-intensive.”⁸

1. “Dust Bowl.” Wikipedia. last revision July 8, 2021. Accessed August 9, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl.
2. Howard, Spencer. “Herbert Hoover and the 1930 Drought.” National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives and Records Administration, September 16, 2020. https://hoover.blogs.archives.gov/2020/09/16/herbert-hoover-and-the-1930-drought/.
3. “The Failure of Relief During the Arkansas Drought of 1930-1931.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly. Vol. 39, No. 4 (Winter, 1980), pp. 301-313 (13 pages). Accessed August 9, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/40024133
4. Sonnichsen, C. L. “The Sharecropper Novel in the Southwest.” Agricultural History 43, no. 2 (1969): 249-58. Accessed August 9, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4617663.
5. “Tenant Farming in Arkansas.” Southern Tenant Farmers Museum. Accessed August 9, 2021. https://stfm.astate.edu/tenant-farming-history/.
6. “The Failure of Relief…”
7. Kirby, Jack Temple. “The Transformation of Southern Plantations c. 1920-1960.” Agricultural History 57, no. 3 (July 1983): 257–76. Accessed August 9, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3742453
8. “The Failure of Relief…”
9. Kirby

Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 3

E Barracks, Marine Barracks, Quantico, Va¹

General Butler Sends 700 Marines on Leave As Drought Depletes Quantico Water Supply²

WASHINGTON, July 31 (1930).—Seven hundred marines left Quantico, Va., today on special liberty granted them by the commanding officer, Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, in an effort to conserve the water supply of the marine base.

Following an inspection of the base and the troops stationed there yesterday by Secretary Adams, the officers and men were gathered in the post gymnasium, where Mr. Adams addressed them and praised their appearance. At the conclusion of Mr. Adams’s remarks General Butler told the men that he would allow all who could be spared to leave camp until Tuesday morning to aid in the conserving of the water supply of the reservation, which has been seriously depleted by the drought in the eastern part of Virginia.

The special liberty did not apply to the Nineteenth Reserve Regiment, now in training at Quantico. This regiment, which consists of 800 officers and men from New York City and vicinity, will leave camp Saturday, and their absence, according to marine officers, will greatly relieve the situation.

A tank barge, with a capacity of 54,000 gallons, was loaded at Indian Head, Maryland, today, and is expected to reach Quantico this afternoon. Two other barges are on their way from Elizabeth City, N. C., and Deep Creek, Va. With their arrival the Quantico authorities believe the supply of water will be adequate.

An order rationing water is now in effect at Quantico. Enlisted men are bathing at a beach established for the purpose on the shores of the Potomac south of the main reservation. The post laundry has curtailed its output.

The Quantico base and the town of the same name, which is entirely surrounded by the military reservation, get their water supply from a series of large tanks fed by streams in the hills back of the base. Five wells recently were connected with the pumps to increase the normal supply.

The construction of the new 2,000,000-gallon concrete tank is now under way, and when this is completed, three months from now, engineers report, there will be no further danger of a water shortage.

1. “E Barracks, Marine Barracks, Quantico, Va.” Flickr, uploaded August 12, 2021. https://www.flickr.com/photos/exit78/51374097791/.
2. “General Butler Sends 700 Marines on Leave as Drought Depletes Quantico Water Supply.” The New York Times. The New York Times, August 1, 1930. Accessed August 12, 2021.  https://www.nytimes.com/1930/08/01/archives/general-butler-sends-700-marines-on-leave-as-drought-depletes.html.

 Lindell caricature: 

Surprise, surprise… and Biden is still president.

The next date Mr. Lindell is offering for Mr. Trump’s apparent return to office is now 30 September.

The Symposium – Some Headlines

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell fled the stage at his cyber symposium at the same time news broke that Dominion’s billion-dollar defamation lawsuit against him would proceed… Insider

MyPillow CEO’s Cyber Symposium Goes Down in Flames After His ‘Cyber Guy’ Admits It’s a Sham – The effort to prove election fraud in the U.S. was one goofy disaster after another… Gizmodo

Mike Lindell said his cyber symposium would prove voter fraud. One cyber expert said it was just full of ‘random garbage that wastes our time.’… Insider

MyPillow’s Mike Lindell Holds Conference To Show Election Fraud Proof Only To Provide Nothing – In the midst of Lindell’s bizarre, three-day conspiracy conference, a federal judge declined his request for a Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against him be thrown out. … NowThis

Critics mock believers in former President Donald Trump’s ‘reinstatement day’ – MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell predicted 13 August would mark Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office … Independent

Mike Lindell’s unfortunate week gets quite a bit worse – A federal judge delivered some bad news to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell this week. But the results of his “cyber symposium” made matters worse. … MSNBC

Some experts say it’s possible a new polio epidemic could happen in the United States as more parents opt out of immunizing their children.

Iron lungs crowd a polio ward in Boston during 1955 epidemic (AP)

By the 1950s, polio had become one of the most serious communicable diseases among children in the United States. In 1952 alone, nearly 60,000 children were infected with the virus; thousands were paralyzed, and more than 3,000 died.¹

Poliomyelitis – commonly shortened to polio – is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus.  It only occurs naturally in humans. In about 0.5% of cases, it affects the central nervous system with muscle weakness resulting in a flaccid paralysis. The weakness most often involves the legs, but may less commonly involve the muscles of the head, neck, and diaphragm.  In those with muscle weakness, about 2 to 5% of children and 15 to 30% of adults die.  Up to 70% of children infected are asymptomatic, about 25% have minor symptoms such as a fever and sore throat and up to 5% have headache, neck stiffness, and pains in the arms and legs.²

Through vaccinations, the numbers of paralytic cases in the U.S. dropped from more than 21,000 in 1952 to 2,525 reported in 1960 and only 61 in 1965. World-wide, the incidence of poliomyelitis declined significantly with widespread use of the poliovirus vaccine. Polio paralyzed an estimated 350,000 individuals per year in the 1980s in more than 125 countries. In 1994, the Western Hemisphere was certified to be free of indigenous wild poliovirus.  By 2019, only 125 cases caused by wild poliovirus were reported globally.  Unfortunately, a vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) – a  strain of the weakened poliovirus that was initially included in oral polio vaccine – caused outbreaks in 20 countries in Africa and Asia, and paralyzed 369 children.³

1. Beaubien, Jason. “Wiping out Polio: How The U.S. Snuffed out a Killer.” NPR. October 15, 2012. Accessed August 13, 2021. https://www.npr.org/…. wiping-out-polio-how-the-u-s-snuffed-out-a-killer.
2. “Polio.” Wikipedia. last edit August 7, 2021. Accessed August 12, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio.
3. Estivariz, Concepcion F, Ruth Link-Gelles, and Tom Shimabukuro. “Pinkbook: Poliomyelitis.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, updated last November 16, 2020. Accessed August 12, 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/polio.html.

Royalty-free images by Mike¹ — No. 148 of over 1200 images

Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota, August 22, 2007 (Pentax K10D)

Accomplishment of Lincoln

President Calvin Coolidge at the dedication of Mt. Rushmore, August 10, 1927²

After our Country had been established, enlarged from sea to sea, and dedicated to popular Government, the next great task was to demonstrate the permanency of our Union and to extend the principle of freedom to all inhabitants of our land.

The master of this supreme accomplishment was Abraham Lincoln. Above all other national figures, he holds the love of his fellow countrymen. The work which Washington and Jefferson began, he extended to its logical conclusions.

Mount Rushmore³

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is centered on a colossal sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore (Lakota Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, or Six Grandfathers) in the Black Hills near Keystone, South Dakota. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum created the sculpture’s design and oversaw the project’s execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son, Lincoln Borglum. The sculpture features the 60-foot (18 m) heads of Presidents George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), as recommended by Borglum. The four presidents were chosen to represent the nation’s birth, growth, development and preservation, respectively. The memorial park covers 1,278 acres (2.00 sq mi; 5.17 km2)[7] and the actual mountain has an elevation of 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level.

The sculptor and tribal representatives settled on Mount Rushmore, which also has the advantage of facing southeast for maximum sun exposure.

Mount Rushmore was conceived with the intention of creating a site to lure tourists, representing “not only the wild grandeur of its local geography but also the triumph of modern civilization over that geography through its anthropomorphic representation.

In 1933, the National Park Service took Mount Rushmore under its jurisdiction.

Borglum died from an embolism in March 1941. His son, Lincoln Borglum, continued the project. Originally, it was planned that the figures would be carved from head to waist, but insufficient funding forced the carving to end.

(Read much, much more at Wikipedia)

Post Endnotes

1. I am sharing some of my public domain images in periodic blog posts.
2. “Coolidge Dedicates Mountain Memorial to Four Presidents; He Lauds the Achievements of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt.” The New York Times, August 11, 1927. Accessed August 11, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/1927/08/11/archives/coolidge-dedicates-mountain-memorial-to-four-presidents-he-lauds.html.
3. “Mount Rushmore.” Wikipedia. last edit August 11, 2021 (as a result of an error spotted while composing this post). Accessed August 11, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rushmore.

Series Notes:

• This image is also shared as public domain on Pixabay,  Flickr, and Pinterest.
• Images are being shared in the sequence they were accepted by Pixabay, a royalty-free image-sharing site.
• Only images specifically identified as such are public domain or creative commons on our pages.
• All other images are copyright protected by me, creative commons, or used under the provisions of fair use.

I created this little video almost ten years ago.¹

Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site features a reconstructed 1840s adobe fur trading post on the mountain branch of the Santa Fe Trail where traders, trappers, travelers, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes came together in peaceful terms for trade. Today, living historians recreate the sights, sounds, and smells of the past with guided tours, demonstrations and special events.²

1. Goad, Micahel. “Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site.” YouTube.  November 6, 2011. Accessed August 11, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuInwYA_OQs.
2. “Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site.” National Park Service. U.S. Department of the Interior. Accessed August 12, 2021. https://www.nps.gov/beol/index.htm.