Pare Lorentz\u2019s 1936 documentary, The Plow that Broke the Plains<\/i>, claims to be \u201cthe story of lands, not of people.\u201d\u00a0 The first scene of the documentary displays a map of the Great Plains Area and the nine states that comprise it.\u00a0 Next, Lorentz features numerous sprawling shots of the Plains, and the cattle that graze there. \u00a0After the exposition however, Lorenz focuses more on human activities on the Plains.\u00a0 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 \u201cthe story of how people overused the lands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lorentz indicates a bias about early human activity by Romanticizing the lone cattle rancher.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/i> by Caspar David Friedrich. \u00a0Lorenz makes it clear that he has no qualms with ranchers using the Plains.<\/p>\n

Lorentz later accompanies footage of a fence with the statement, \u201cthe first fence\u2014progress came to the plains.\u201d\u00a0 He describes man\u2019s increased activities on the Plains as progress, but quickly follows this statement with the phrase, \u201cThe rains failed them,\u201d when referring to early plowmen.\u00a0 With progress, Lorenz points out, came more problems.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWheat will win the war.\u201d\u00a0 Plowmen waged war on the lands, just as enemies waged war on the allies.<\/p>\n

The land, Lorentz suggests, got its revenge.\u00a0 After the war and the golden harvest, \u201cthe sun and winds wrote the most tragic chapter in American agriculture.\u201d\u00a0 As Koppes points out in his evaluation, early accounts of the Dust Bowl ignore factors like economics and policy.\u00a0 Lorentz gives nature a great deal of agency here, and by ending with this line, suggests that ecological factors caused the Dust Bowl.<\/p>\n

I agree with Price<\/a> and Jean<\/a> that Koppes used his book review \u201cas a platform to voice his own argument.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 However, I enjoyed reading the review as helpful in filling in a number of gaps that The Plow the Broke the Plains<\/i> left in its narrative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pare Lorentz\u2019s 1936 documentary, The Plow that Broke the Plains, claims to be \u201cthe story of lands, not of people.\u201d\u00a0 The first scene of the documentary displays a map of the Great Plains Area and the nine states that comprise it.\u00a0 Next, Lorentz features numerous sprawling shots of the Plains, and the cattle that graze … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Plow the Broke the Plains: The Dust Bowl as an End to Agrarian Romanticism in the U.S.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,123,230,244,255],"class_list":["post-706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-agrarian-romanticism","tag-dust-bowl","tag-intertextuality","tag-koppes","tag-lorentz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":827,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions\/827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}