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