Plowing up the Plains

The idealism that was a hallmark of 19th century Victorianism came to an abrupt end with the beginning of World War I.  In 1917 a businessman named Herbert Hoover was appointed head of the U.S. Food Administration, which was charged with stabilitizing U.S. food prices during the war.  As head of the administration Hoover created the first ever federally-controlled price limits on produce, effectively turning food into a commodity.  Up until this time Russia was the largest supplier of European wheat, but because of the war front, their farmers could not sell their produce.  Hoover wanted the U.S. to take over this market, and by artificially fixing a high price for wheat, U.S. farmers began planting lots of it.  Millions of acres in the central United States, espeically the plains of newly-settled Oklahoma, were plowed under for wheat.  This entire region, which had once been a dry grassland, was plowed up to make room for more wheat.  Wheat became so profitable that it led to the rise of "suitcase farmers," wealthy businessmen from the East Coast who would buy up land in Oklahoma and pay someone else to farm the land for them.  They bought up huge tracts of land, radically transforming the landscape of the Great Plains.  Hoover, meanwhile, won an humanitarian award for sending money to the starving Russian farmers that his economic policies put out of business.

Eventually, even in the U.S., the prosperity grown on wheat came to an end.  In 1929 the stock market crashed and the price of all commodities plummeted.  Farmers in the Great Plains continued to produce wheat, even when the price dropped below the cost of planting.  Since the price of wheat dropped, they just plowed up more land to plant more wheat, increasing the economic damage that was to come.  There was so much wheat that much of the stores rotted before they could be transported, and much of it was burned.  While unemployed workers and broke businessmen in the cities were starving, farmers in the Great Plains were burning their excess wheat crops because there were no trains to take them to market.

Without a source of income most farmers turned to subsistence farming, keeping their families alive with what they could produce in their own gardens at home.  That, however, changed when the Dust Bowl began.