Drought, Dust, Depression, and War No. 12
by J. Russell Smith1,
September 19342
The United States is suffering from drought as never before. There are three different aspects of this catastrophe.
One is the absence of rain in places where the record of the past gave us reason to expect rain sufficient for agriculture.
The second element of loss and misery results from our widespread establishment of extensive agriculture in places where the evidence and the record did not give reason to expect the farmer to make an enduring success.
The third factor, new to most minds, has shocked millions —the destruction of lands by wind erosion.
The second and third of the three troubles may properly be said to result from a national land policy that traditionally has been but little above the level of economic idiocy.
I like to do as I please, especially with the property I own. I like to buy land and cut down the trees. I want to be free to dig ditches, and if I want to drain my lake and grow a crop in the rich accumulation in its bottom—why, it’s nobody’s business but my own—so I feel.
My father was like that, and his father, and all my ancestors, clear back to that little sailing ship that brought them across the Atlantic. In fact, we came to America because we were that kind of people. So were most other Americans. We all want freedom.
The government of the United States, made by that kind of people for that kind of people, has let us do very much as we pleased. Not only has our government let us, it has helped us to do as we pleased, especially with land. Our land policy has been: give it to the people; hurry up and give it to the people. They know what to do with it. Any and all know what to do with land—any land—all land.
In the sixties, seventies and eighties the government was giving away good land in quarter sections. When the good land was taken, the government gave away the poorer land in half sections, and then the yet poorer land in whole sections. If no one took it, the land remained government land; anyone might use it, and all could abuse it. Unrestricted pasturage was too often its fate. The ruin of the grass let gullies begin their destructive work.
We have, in effect, grabbed this continent almost without restrictions. We have done with it as we pleased, and now the consequences of this grab-and-kill land policy are beginning to show up.
We are now reading of drought. I shall not rehearse details. They have been on the front page of nearly every newspaper for weeks. Is drought an “Act of God,” as the marine insurance policy says—something beyond man’s control and also something wholly unexpected? So far as what we call drought is the result of the absence of the usual amount of rain, it may be called, if you choose, an act of God—or of nature. If nature regularly kept a non-agricultural grassland in a certain region, it is not an act of God if we go there to begin farming and fail for want of rain.
But nature has changed her rain technique somewhat in certain areas, for the present at least.
See the full article (pdf)
- “J. Russell Smith.” Wikipedia, last edit, June 19, 2021. Accessed August 26, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Russell_Smith.
- Smith, J. Russell. “The Drought—Act of God and Freedom.” Survey Graphic 23, no. 9, September 1934.
