Post by PeterW on Aug 19, 2009 18:17:32 GMT -5
Last night I watched a two-hour long documentary by the BBC about the High Plains area of the US and the dust storms of the 1930s, part of American history about which I know very little.
Yes, of course I'd heard about the Dust Bowl, seen pictures by Dorothea Lang and others and listened to songs by Woody Guthrie. But in those two hours I saw things in a new light.
All the documentaries I'd seen about the US Depression of the 1930s were about life in the cities, the "Buddy can you spare a dime" theme. Never about the southern part of the mid-west.
The documentary included cine film shot at the time showing the whole horizon black with massively high dust clouds driven by gale force winds, and interviews in the 1940s with "dust storm survivors", farmers and store keepers, older than their years. Stubborn wonderful people who refused to give up and stuck it out through eight long years of grinding hardship and poverty.
The drought, the dust, the heat and then the insects. They'd seen their crops wither and their cattle die. Some believed at the time it was a Biblical prophesy.
Film of children who had inhaled the dust for several years and were coughing their lungs up with silicosis were heart rending.
There was also footage of destitute families who had given up, or had their farms reposessed by the bank and migrated west to California only to find that in the Depression they were little if at all better off materially and lived in shanty towns, exploited by corporate owned Californian farms.
It's years since I read Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath", but after seeing that programme I want to read it again - in a new light.
PeterW
Yes, of course I'd heard about the Dust Bowl, seen pictures by Dorothea Lang and others and listened to songs by Woody Guthrie. But in those two hours I saw things in a new light.
All the documentaries I'd seen about the US Depression of the 1930s were about life in the cities, the "Buddy can you spare a dime" theme. Never about the southern part of the mid-west.
The documentary included cine film shot at the time showing the whole horizon black with massively high dust clouds driven by gale force winds, and interviews in the 1940s with "dust storm survivors", farmers and store keepers, older than their years. Stubborn wonderful people who refused to give up and stuck it out through eight long years of grinding hardship and poverty.
The drought, the dust, the heat and then the insects. They'd seen their crops wither and their cattle die. Some believed at the time it was a Biblical prophesy.
Film of children who had inhaled the dust for several years and were coughing their lungs up with silicosis were heart rending.
There was also footage of destitute families who had given up, or had their farms reposessed by the bank and migrated west to California only to find that in the Depression they were little if at all better off materially and lived in shanty towns, exploited by corporate owned Californian farms.
It's years since I read Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath", but after seeing that programme I want to read it again - in a new light.
PeterW
