Koppes – American Disasters

April 30, 2014December 16, 2020

A Treeless Windswept Continent of Grass and No Rivers

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After the opening credits of Lorentz The Plow That Broke the Plains, the first words of narration describe a land of desolation with no natural water sources. An area fit for only the lone cattle rancher, at least until the “The Train brought Plowmen”. In Koppes review of the Worster text Dust Bowl, he highlights how Worster describes the wrestling of land away from the cattle ranchers as farmers began to populate the Great Plains. Both the Koppes review and the Lorentz documentary do a good job highlighting the transformation of the Great Plains from a windy grasslands to a desolate dust bowl.

Briefly before World War I, Lorentz described farming in the Great Plains as “Plowing at one’s own peril”, but his tone quickly heightens with enthusiasm as wheat and grain prices began to soar. “Wheat Will Win The War,” filled the headlines of American Newspapers and the incorporation of Tractors and other gas powered machinery only increased the rate of wheat production. As Molly described in her post, “The plowmen waged war on the lands, as enemies waged war on the allies,” it makes sense that the wheat boom took off in the fashion that it did. Lorentz does a good job in foreshadowing the farming conditions subject to the loose and dry soil of the plains. Periodically throughout the documentary Lorentz can be heard repeating, “High Winds and Sun, High Winds and Sun,” describing the unchanging conditions of the plains because no matter how little farming the land is subject too, there will always be high wind and blistering sun.

Koppes review of the Worster text highlights many of the highs and lows of Great Plains living in the early 20th Century. “The bison and Indians sometimes broke the grass cover, but it was quickly revegetated,” grass is the glue that holds the earth together in the dry and arid conditions of the Great Plains. As for the surge of farmers, Koppes highlights the Worster term “Sodbusters” because they did just that, breaking up the sod and unrooting acres upon acres of grass. Vegetation in the Great Plains can be subjected to subsistent farming, but can’t in an uncontrolled and unregulated farming culture driven by New Deal agricultural reform. As described by Koppes, Dust Bowl, is a passionate book written by a native of the Great Plains. Koppes does a good job providing us with an overview of the Worster text that helps us understand why wheat production became a major surplus in the American economy and how the Great Plains became 400,000,000 acres of dusty vacant land.

Overall the Lorentz documentary provides vivid video footage from the height of the Wheat Farming boom to the dust storms stirred up by the high winds common to the Great Plains. The Koppes text provides a good review for the Worster text, which can be used to understand why and how farmers overused the Great Plains. The Great Plains farming and tales of the Dust Bowl tie up the gilded age and are a prime example of why regulation/monitoring of particular ventures, in this case plain’s farming, are byproducts of Gilded Age disasters.

April 30, 2014December 16, 2020

The Dust Bowl: Interpreting it as Disaster

The dust bowl is a very interesting historical event to study, with many factors that led to it happening, both natural and manmade. I think Koppes does an adequate job of comparing Worster and Bonnifield, yet he does an incomplete analysis of each source individually. He argues the Worster is more coherent, while Bonnifield’s argument needs polishing.

Like Marston, I was frustrated by not knowing about the two sources Koppes is reviewing. I think that I would have been less frustrated if he approached the two sources differently, as I do not expect everyone who reads his article to have read the two sources that he reviews. He says that Bonnefield’s argument is too incoherent without going in depth as to explain why it is incoherent. With Worster, he presents the book as having a more polished argument. He then concludes his analysis of the book by stating one of its main arguments, an implication of an alternative to capitalism. He then goes on talking about his qualms with the book, yet he does not explain how the book could have argued his points better. Instead, he points out one argument of the book that he liked. He leaves the reader putting an immense amount of trust in his assessment of both sources without really explaining too much why he feels the way that he feels about both of the sources. I feel as though he was too ambitious with the word count that he used, and he should have either narrowed what he was arguing or written more.

April 30, 2014December 16, 2020

The Plow the Broke the Plains: The Dust Bowl as an End to Agrarian Romanticism in the U.S.

Pare Lorentz’s 1936 documentary, The Plow that Broke the Plains, claims to be “the story of lands, not of people.” The first scene of the documentary displays a map of the Great Plains Area and the nine states that comprise it. Next, Lorentz features numerous sprawling shots of the Plains, and the cattle that graze there. After the exposition however, Lorenz focuses more on human activities on the Plains. His true focus demonstrates that Lorentz, whose stated purpose was to tell the story of the lands, would have done better to amend the wording of his focus to “the story of how people overused the lands.”

Lorentz indicates a bias about early human activity by Romanticizing the lone cattle rancher. He films the rancher seated on a white horse from below, indicating a motivation to make the rancher seem larger and more dominant than he might otherwise appear. One of the shots of the rancher looking after his cattle actually looked very similar to the Romantic painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich. Lorenz makes it clear that he has no qualms with ranchers using the Plains.

Lorentz later accompanies footage of a fence with the statement, “the first fence—progress came to the plains.” He describes man’s increased activities on the Plains as progress, but quickly follows this statement with the phrase, “The rains failed them,” when referring to early plowmen. With progress, Lorenz points out, came more problems.

At around 13 minutes, Lorentz juxtaposes scenes of tractors coming from the right with enemy tanks coming in from the left, suggesting through powerful imagery that the people of the time believed that, “Wheat will win the war.” Plowmen waged war on the lands, just as enemies waged war on the allies.

The land, Lorentz suggests, got its revenge. After the war and the golden harvest, “the sun and winds wrote the most tragic chapter in American agriculture.” As Koppes points out in his evaluation, early accounts of the Dust Bowl ignore factors like economics and policy. Lorentz gives nature a great deal of agency here, and by ending with this line, suggests that ecological factors caused the Dust Bowl.

I agree with Price and Jean that Koppes used his book review “as a platform to voice his own argument.” Because he presents his bias early on and fails to support his claims with enough evidence, I cannot agree with his final evaluation of the texts without conducting further research. However, I enjoyed reading the review as helpful in filling in a number of gaps that The Plow the Broke the Plains left in its narrative.