Legacies of Dust

Set in the southeastern corner of Colorado, Douglas Sheflin's history of the Dust Bowl is a careful reconstruction of how US policymakers, bureaucrats, and farmers responded to ecological and economic crises during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Despite the breadth of scholarship covering the Dust Bowl, Sheflin maintains that we have yet to fully appreciate its long-term impact on systems of land use, agriculture, and federal policy in the region. To correct for this shortcoming, Sheflin extends the chronology beyond the 1930s and into the 1950s and ’60s. In so doing, Sheflin shows how World War II and its aftermath firmly secured structural changes that had been set in motion during the so-called Dirty Thirties and continue to inform US agricultural policy today.Organized chronologically, The Legacies of Dust explores why farming on the Great Plains was so challenging, addressing three key themes in particular: land, water, and labor. Sheflin traces these themes through microstudies of two counties in Colorado, which remains a relatively under-studied area of the Dust Bowl. Although it's not clear how the Colorado focus might change or shape our understandings of this history, this two-county approach reveals how distinct material conditions determined divergent responses to crisis. In Baca County, water scarcity and soil erosion were especially intense, leading farmers to embrace the soil conservation policies that were championed by federal officials and New Dealers. In contrast, farmers in the neighboring Prowers County had better access to the Arkansas River and generally favored policies to maintain their water supply with dams and reservoirs.Sheflin is attentive to these differences but also sheds light on common patterns, including the Dust Bowl's profound impact on the social organization of labor, property, and federal power. In both counties, dust storms and debt squeezed out farm tenants and small operators. Landowners who weathered these storms tended to expand and diversify their farms, and in the process, they grew increasingly dependent on migrant laborers. This workforce arrived in no small part because the federal government stepped in to stabilize agricultural production in the late 1930s and especially during the war. Thus, with significant logistical, technical, and financial help from the federal government, Colorado farmers reorganized production to grow “food for freedom,” to quote propaganda from the Office of War Information (203). Farmers would continue to embrace this kind of support after the war's end, as they faced recurrent issues of water and labor scarcity. The response to crisis and war during the 1930s and ’40s thus forged a lasting relationship between a newly consolidated agricultural sector and the federal government. Although it has taken different forms over time, this relationship remains intact today.Running through this story are the complicated dynamics between federal, state, and local forces—the subject that most interests Sheflin. These shifting and often tense relationships were evident in the history of soil conservation efforts, to take one example. Federal agents had long been concerned with soil erosion, but it wasn't until the 1930s that erosion's calamitous effects finally compelled officials to take decisive action. Even then, it was no simple task to convince farmers to reduce their acreage or to adopt different farming techniques. The formation of soil conservation districts helped to resolve these tensions over federal power and local autonomy, while encouraging farmers to prevent erosion and repair damage. Although the policy was crafted at the national level and drew on federal money and expertise, it was passed by the state legislature and encouraged farmers to exercise power locally within self-organized districts. Establishing their own governing boards, farmers could, for example, discourage one another from breaking new sod and even seek damages from those who broke district rules. These soil conservation districts ultimately helped federal agents overcome a thorny political challenge: making changes on privately held property without appearing to encroach on local property rights themselves.On these questions of policy formation and the intricacies of local implementation, Sheflin's research is rich. His ability to reconstruct how agricultural and conservation policies actually worked is impressive. Partly because the story is focused so intensely on these policies, the experiences of individual tenants and workers play a lesser role. Although labor and labor scarcity are central themes of the book, the characters who most come to life are federal agents of the New Deal, whose environmental and economic thought drive the narrative forward. We learn less, for example, about the interned Japanese farm laborers who helped to sustain agricultural production during the war and whose lives were deeply affected by decisions at the level of policy. Nevertheless, Sheflin successfully tracks how structures of political economy changed over time, and in this regard he makes a valuable contribution.Bearing in mind its careful attention to these questions of long-term structural change, it is worth noting that this book does not explore the connections between colonialism and ecological degradation on the Plains. To be sure, Sheflin gestures toward the colonial context of this agricultural history, referencing land dispossession in the nineteenth century and Native farm workers in the twentieth; he also describes the formation of the Comanche National Grasslands, an expanse of submarginal land that federal agents removed from production and that happened to be named after the Indigenous polity that occupied parts of Colorado for centuries, until the late 1800s. In these brief gestures, the Legacies of Dust points to possible directions for future research. What would this history look like, for example, if we understood colonialism less as a discrete event and more as an ongoing structure, which intersected with capitalism to shape the organization of land, labor, and power? By encouraging us to think about long-term historical processes, Sheflin opens new questions not only about the Dust Bowl itself but also about systems of power and resource consumption, including the ongoing history of colonialism on the Plains. For environmental historians and those interested in the political economy of agriculture in the twentieth century, this is a worthwhile book

Agriculture · Archaeology · Economics · Geography · Political science · Scarcity · Scholarship · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Law