farm life and the dust bowl
The Depression attacked farms as quickly and as destructively as it did the cities. The problems facing farmers were numerous and complex and could not be fixed with a single solution.
the dust bowl migration
During the 1920s, farms were prospering and there was such an abundance of rainfall that farmers all across the western United States had become careless in their farming techniques and soil preparation. Farmers over-grazed livestock and over-plowed fields to make more money. This damaged the land and destroyed the regenerative properties of the soil. During the 1930s, there was a large drought in the West, causing crops to shrivel, cattle to die, and the topsoil to blow away. This turned the West into one large dust bowl.
The states in the dust bowl region were Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. This region was called the dust bowl because of the large numbers of dust storms that occurred there. However, other states like Arkansas and the Dakotas were also plagued by dust storms.
What is a dust storm? Dust storms are storms that last for several days, driven by high winds. The winds blow dust, creating huge dark, yellowish clouds that, at times, can block out the light of the sun. Sometimes, these dust clouds can get up to 8,000 feet high and be accompanied by thunder and lightning. Two massive and highly destructive dust storms occurred in the 1930s. The first was in May of 1934.
A dust storm lasting three days blew across the West and Southwest, pulling up over 350 million tons of soil and dropping it as far east as New York City, New York and Boston, Massachusetts. It was reported that these cities had to turn on streetlamps in the daytime just to be able to see through the blowing dust. The second storm occurred in March of 1935 in the Dakotas and Nebraska. It destroyed the entire wheat crop for both states and swept away as much dirt as workers dug up when they constructed the Panama Canal.

People living in the dust bowl states packed up everything they owned and migrated west. They pulled wagons filled with their personal goods, like the one shown above, behind their cars or trucks.
Not only were these dust storms economically damaging, they were a danger to the people living in these states. People caught outside in dust storms could suffocate and die from dust inhalation. Because of the havoc these storms wreaked on the land and the people living on it, people were forced to migrate to find work or a new place to farm. Many packed up everything they owned into trucks, cars, and wagons and began to travel further west to California and other Pacific States. Over 2.5 million people fled to California during the Great Depression. The migrants began to gather nicknames based on where they were migrating from such as "Oakies" if they were from Oklahoma and "Arkies" if they were from Arkansas. These people pushed west into Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, and finding no relief in these dust bowl-burdened states, pushed on to California.
Unfortunately, California could not support the huge influx of people that began to pour into the state. California was not a huge farming state, and the small farm towns it did have quickly became overcrowded and overrun with migrants looking for work and land to farm. By 1939, the problem had gotten so bad that the California state government passed a law forbidding entry of any new people into the state. The Supreme Court overturned this law as unconstitutional, and people continued to flood the state.
The federal government in the 1930s tried to alleviate the crisis by taking measures to salvage the land that had been destroyed by the dust storms and poor farming techniques. In 1933, the government created the Soil Erosion Service. This was a commission that taught terracing and contour farming techniques to farmers to help them preserve the soil. In 1936, the government passed the Soil Conservation Act, which tried to reduce farm surpluses and promote soil conservation. The government also planted over 200 million trees in the most ravaged parts of the dust bowl from the Dakotas to Texas. These trees took to the soil and began to grow, providing "shelter belts" along the West and conserving water to help hold down the topsoil. The dust bowl was slowly beginning to replenish itself.
farm tenants
Aside from the growing dust storms and bad soil, there was another class of farmers affected by the Great Depression. These farmers were tenant farmers or sharecroppers. After the Civil War, sharecroppers replaced slaves on many farms. Some sharecroppers were former slaves, while others were poor white farmers. Sharecroppers, or tenant farmers, did not own their land. They were not paid any wages. Someone else owned the land they farmed and the sharecroppers rented it. They paid these landowners with a "share" of the crops and other goods produced on that farm. Most of these farmers could only obtain the seed, food, and clothes the needed each year by pledging their harvest in advance.
When the Great Depression hit these farms, not to mention the dust storms, most sharecroppers had already pledged their crops and other goods in advance. The dying crops and bad soil could not produce enough for the farmers to live off of, so they were unable to pay their share to the landowners. As a result, they were forced to leave the land, burdened with huge debts they had no hope of paying.
The federal government, again, tried to help, by passing the Federal Emergency Relief Act to help tenant farmers. This act gave money, seeds, and equipment to these farmers and tried to relocate them to better land. It helped some, but not all sharecroppers, escape total poverty.

This map shows the states that were considered dust bowl states and the areas affected by dust storms. Notice that many states not considered dust bowl states were still damaged by dust storms. The whole middle of the United States was literally blowing away.
ELECTRIC FARMS
Another major problem that farmers faced during the Great
Depression was lack of electricity. Before the depression hit,
only one in ten farms had electricity. After the depression
and the major dust storms, it became apparent that more
farms needed electricity and quickly! So the federal
government formed the Rural Electrification Administration
to bring electricity to farms in the West. The REA had
the power to loan money to farmers and small towns to help
them build generators and install power lines. This action
was one of the most revolutionary and successful actions
during the Great Depression. By 1941, four out of five
American farms now had electricity.
Dorthea Lange, Photographer of the Great Depression
Dorthea Lange decided to travel the world at age 20, taking pictures and selling her photographs. By the time she settled down in San Francisco, California in 1916, she had gathered a reputation as an innovative, talented documentary photographer.
During the Great Depression, she wanted to expand her talents and began by photographing the homeless men in the cities around the country. One of those photographs, White Angel Breadline, gained the attention of not only her colleagues, but also the federal government. The government hired her to work with the Resettlement Association of the 1930s to bring the conditions of the poor to the attention of the public. She traveled with and photographed hundreds of migrant workers. Her photographs directly contributed to the establishment of better housing camps for migrant workers in California.

Dorothea Lange's most famous photograph is entitled Migrant Mother, taken in Nipomo, California in 1936. Lange was famous for capturing the hardship, anguish, and the humanity of the Great Depression.
keeping spirits up
During the Great Depression, not only was the economy depressed, but also were the people. The morale of American society was down and out. The country and its people needed hope, and the entertainment industry tried hard to keep America's spirits up.
Books, movies, and music were dedicated to bringing up American morale. Most of the books were reality-based books about the state of affairs such as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, that told the story of tenant farmers, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, that fictionalized the story of a dust bowl family's migration west. Both of these novels were extremely popular because they told the truth and gave a voice to the people of the nation who felt like no one was listening.
Movies took a different tack. Some studios projected the image of the ideal life or a hopeful future, such as many of the Shirley Temple movies of the 1930s. Others films were pure escapism, like The Wizard of Oz. People flocked to the movies either to be encouraged by the future or to forget the present.
Also during this time, comics were introduced with superhero characters such as Superman. These comics had characters with extraordinary powers that helped the poor, downtrodden, and innocent.
The music industry also worked hard to raise people's spirits. Many parlor songs of the time were uplifting, with messages of hope for the future with titles such as "When The Shepherd Leads the Sheep Back Home" (1931) and "The Clouds Will Soon Roll By" (1932). Some songs took on a more humorous and whimsical tone to help refocus people's attention away from the bad times, such as "Here It is Monday and I've Still Got A Dollar" (1932).
One of the most popular songs of the era was "Pennies From Heaven":
Other types of entertainment slipped in to help society refocus. In 1930, the first pinball machine hit the scene, and in 1935, Parker Brothers distributed the first version of the board game Monopoly. People took to these distractions, and they helped to pass what was one of the hardest times in American history.