Economic Hardship and Lessons of the Great Depression Theme Analysis

On October 29, 1929, the American stock market crashed. The banks had gone on “speculative binges” with money from people’s savings accounts, believing that “stocks were only going skyward.” Like the prairie farmers who believed that the soil was a resource that would produce endless bounty, stock brokers and speculators were lulled by the economic boom of the 1920s into thinking that money would never run out. In the High Plains, however, the crash was a distant noise. The Panhandle remained prosperous through 1929. In Boise City, there were record harvests, a new railroad had been built, and there was even talk of erecting a skyscraper. Then, a surplus in the market sent prices down. At the beginning of 1930, “wheat sold for one-eighth of the high price from ten years earlier.” Grain was now 40 cents a bushel, which did not cover the cost of harvesting, let alone turn a profit. Most Americans were devastated by the economic collapse, but farmers in the Southern Plains, solely reliant on the purchase of wheat, are shown in The Worst Hard Time to have been uniquely cornered by the crisis.

Though in 1929 there continued to be plenty of productivity in the Plains, no one could afford to buy what the farms produced. At the movie theatres, farmers watched newsreels showing well-dressed businessmen standing in breadlines or selling apples on street corners for a nickel each. The Depression seemed like a distant phenomenon, but these images were signs of how the farmers, too, would come to suffer.

In 1929, the U.S. government estimated that one out of every four Americans worked on a farm that supplied grain for either bread or alcohol. With people in the cities unable to afford bread and a glut in the wheat market, crops did not sell easily—not even for the production of grain alcohol, which was in high demand during Prohibition. Crops that did not sell simply rotted. The sight of decaying bushels of wheat were a sign that the farmers, who had vainly believed that the grasslands would always be a source of profit, were also vulnerable to the financial collapse.

Grain was not the only crop to drop in price. The price of corn fell to three cents a bushel. The average farmer now earned three hundred dollars per year—“an 80 percent drop in income from a decade earlier.” Like the apple vendors in the cities, wheat farmers were selling their product at bottom dollar just to survive. Whereas just several years before farmers were so economically secure that they bought new farm equipment and started building houses above ground, they now found their way of life becoming increasingly unsustainable. Some had their property foreclosed on by their local banks, and in Boise City, the town’s banker, John Johnson, began to auction off the shiny new equipment that farmers had purchased with money from the wheat boom.

While Herbert Hoover had believed in allowing the free market to regulate the agricultural economy, President Franklin Roosevelt insisted on making the government the market—that is, the government would become the farmers’ main buyer of crops (a decision that the Supreme Court would later rule unconstitutional). With the government now shaping “the price and flow of food,” farmers would never again produce more than what was needed in the interest of capitalizing off of a good market, and they would never again suffer from the vagaries of a free market system.

First, the government had to buy the surplus products. Roosevelt arranged for excess “corn, beans, and flour” to be purchased from farmers and distributed among the needy. In regard to livestock, six million pigs were bought and slaughtered to supply relief organizations with meat. The following year, the government asked “cattlemen and wheat growers” to reduce their supply in exchange for money. It was thus not only important to relieve farmers of what they could not sell, but to break them out of the habit of producing more than what was needed by providing an economic incentive.

Next, Roosevelt signed a bill into law which provided farmers with two hundred million dollars in aid to keep their properties out of foreclosure. Whereas local banks and speculators had profited off of farmers’ financial insolvency by holding property auctions, Roosevelt kept to his campaign promise of looking out for the interests of common farmers by supplying them with the funds to help them maintain their way of life.

Though the entire nation learned harsh lessons from the Great Depression—lessons about what could happen when people got too greedy—the farmers suffered from both a loss of funds and a loss of the land. Both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were man-made phenomena, the results of indulgence and human excesses. For the farmers, it offered a particularly poignant lesson on the limitations of free markets. While all farmers hoped to prosper—and many did—it became counterproductive to try to get rich off of the land. Through his depiction of the farmers’ economic hardships during the Depression, Egan diverts from President Roosevelt’s narrative that they were simple, decent people caught in an evil system, instead suggesting that the simple farmer was as vulnerable to greed as any Wall Street broker—and needed to learn similar lessons about moderation in the pursuit of profit.