The Worst Hard Time: Chapter 19 Summary & Analysis

Don Hartwell started a diary on New Year’s Day, 1936. He and his wife, Verna, had lived through four years of drought. They could not grow a single crop and went further into debt. Black Sunday had nearly destroyed their farm completely. Hartwell’s way of fighting back was to write his history, which would be about “one farmer’s life on the Kansas-Nebraska border during a decade when homesteads became graveyards.” He kept his diary secret—not even showing it to his wife.

Hartwell wrote that most narratives tended to be about “noble pioneers,” but the women and children were the ones who suffered the most. Women, generally, had two children every two years and did as much work as two ordinary men while living in abominable conditions. Their men were, in many instances, drunks or religious fanatics.

Hartwell’s family had arrived in Nebraska in 1880. His mother never adjusted to the state, which she despised, and she loathed Hartwell’s father’s family. His father died in 1934. That year, Nebraska got just fourteen inches of rain, the lowest rainfall since 1864. Hartwell raised livestock on a piece of land that he had claimed near Inavale, not far from Willa Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud. It was several hundred miles northeast of No Man’s Land. The town flourished during the wheat boom and was devastated by the decline in wheat prices and drought. The town bank closed in 1932. Hartwell earned extra money by playing piano at dances or in lodges along the Republican River, and his wife made dresses for people in town. They had no children.

Egan chronicles a selection of Hartwell’s thoughts from the worst years of the storms. They include mundane thoughts about holiday customs, as well as Hartwell’s fears of losing his sense of ambition. He also describes the storms. Hartwell recorded “one of the worst storms” on Independence Day—“wind and dust of gale proportions” in 100-degree weather. He wondered if he would ever plant corn again. He sold his livestock and mowed Russian thistles, wishing that something else would grow. There were also happy moments, such as listening to the World Series on the radio on October 2, and having dinner with his wife on Christmas.

Meanwhile, Roy Emerson Stryker also had the idea of creating a record of the decay of the land for the files of the Farm Security Administration. The purpose was to help Roosevelt get elected to a second term. Documentary records of conditions would help people understand why the president had taken such strong measures. Stryker’s contributions would prove to be invaluable to American history. Stryker hired Arthur Rothstein, a young photographer, to go to Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma in the spring of 1936. Rothstein returned with images that the nation had never before seen.

Outside of Dalhart, Rothstein photographed a lone car running just ahead of a black blizzard cloud. In Boise City, he photographed a drifting prairie. He also captured a father and son running for cover to a “half-buried outbuilding.” Pare Lorentz, an amateur filmmaker, wanted to film a narrative of “how and why the Great Plains had been settled and then brought to ruination.” It would be like a fable. Hollywood was not interested in working with him, but in 1935, after Stryker set up a documentary division, Lorentz found his backer—the United States government.

Studio heads did not want the U.S. government in the film business. Lorentz’s film was going to be a commercial release. Others said that the film would be perceived as propaganda. Lorentz said that he only wanted to tell a story that needed to be told. One part of the government was trying to save the plains, while another arm would show people how they had caused the problem. Lorentz only took a salary of eighteen dollars a day, and paid for some of the production himself.

Lorentz and his crew filmed in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. When he reached Dalhart, he asked if anyone knew an old cowboy, and people gave him Bam White’s name. White was perfect for the part. Lorentz offered to pay him twenty-five dollars—two months’ pay for two hours’ work—to hitch a horse to his plow and pull it through the fields. That image of Bam White, “silhouetted against blowing soil,” became the best-known image in the film, The Plow That Broke the Plains.

The film depicted the Great Plains as an Eden, spoiled by the plow. In New York, the film was shown alongside It Happened One Night. In Dalhart, it opened at the Mission Theater. Bam White took his family, and it was the first time Melt had ever seen a movie. The boy could not believe that he was watching his father onscreen. The film moved Bam to tears. In March 1936, the movie played at the White House and the president, too, saw the “hard, sun-seared, dust-chipped face of Bam White, the wanderer, the Indian half-breed” who became the face of the High Plains in the 1930s.