The Worst Hard Time

by Timothy Egan

  Many farmers refused to surrender. The National Farmers Holiday Association urged its members to "stay at home—buy nothing and sell nothing," as a way to force Hoover to set a minimum price for grain. But people were already buying and selling nothing, farmers and city folk alike. It was as if all of American capitalism were held by ice in a deep winter freeze. "I feel the capitalistic system is doomed," said the head of one farmers' group.

  By 1932, nearly a third of all farmers on the plains faced foreclosure for back taxes or debt; nationwide, one in twenty were losing their land. And since more Americans still worked on a farm than any other place, it meant every state was swimming in the same drowning pool. Farmers charged a courtroom in Le Mars, Iowa, demanding that a judge not sign any more foreclosure notices. He was dragged from the courthouse and taken to the empty county fairgrounds. There, a rope was strung around his neck and tied to a tree. The judge's life was spared by cooler heads. The farmers were rounded up by the Iowa National Guard and detained behind a makeshift, barbed-wire outdoor prison.

  "Unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the countryside in less than twelve months," Edward O'Neal of the American Farm Bureau told Congress at the beginning of 1932. It wasn't just wheat that had sunk below the cost of producing it; milk, cattle, and hogs were all in the same depressed situation. Farmers continued to block and spill milk on the streets. If the American farmer went down, they warned in angry protests, they would take the rest of the country with them.

  "The greatest emergency that ever faced this country in time of peace is confronting it now," said Congressman Wilburn Cartwright of Oklahoma.

  In No Man's Land, the Folkers family learned to use their wheat for something in every meal. They ground it for harsh breakfast cereal, sifted it to make flour for bread, blended it in a porridge with rabbit meat at dinner. Fred Folkers's life's work had become worthless, and the despair drove him to his jars of corn whiskey. He could not control the weather. And he could no longer plow any additional land; every bushel of wheat harvested led him deeper into poverty. His homestead was a quicksand of debt. The new house he had built by hand, the Model-T, the new kerosene cook stove, the piano that he and Katherine had purchased for their daughter Faye—he might lose it all. He would need two years, maybe three, of prices back up in the high range, a dollar or more a bushel, just to pay his debts, just to get even. Katherine was homesick and wanted to go back to Missouri again. She cried at night, dreaming of green valleys and land with trees. But Folkers said it wasn't any better in the Midwest. They had to hold on and hope that next year would be better. During the boom years, Folkers had been wise enough to put some money away. But now his savings were gone, wiped out in the banking collapse. He withdrew into a paralysis, blank-faced, skulking around the homestead and talking to his fruit orchard, the one thing that still gave him hope. At night, he sat in a chair, his fingers tapping away, going over the figures in his head. Faye never saw her father so broken.

  Outside, the wind blew with a callous edge. It would come in hard from the southwest, and then shift, pick up in intensity, and barrel in from the north. The wind was always there in No Man's Land, even when it was just lying low, between breaths. It seemed different now, in the early stages of a dry spell, hotter and harsher, as if it sucked the life out of anything it touched. The spring of 1932 was too dry to plant and with no ground cover, some of Folkers's land began to peel away. It takes a wind of thirty miles an hour to move dirt; at forty or fifty, it's a dust storm. Folkers tried to keep his orchard alive through the spring and summer of that first dry year. In the evenings, he hauled water by milk pail from the tank to the orchard. But the heat bore down on the trees, pests swarmed on the leaves, and what little fruit came after the bud quickly browned and shriveled like raisins. One thing that did grow was the Russian thistle, as Doc Dawson found on his land just to the south in Dalhart. The tumbleweeds blew against Folkers's barbed-wire fences, forming a barrier that trapped blowing dust. The children hauled the tumbleweeds away from the fence and stacked them in the cow lot for winter feed. We might need it, he said. Feeding tumbleweeds to cattle—it was a frontier in American agriculture, but not the one prophesied by the government.

  Folkers complained about stomachache. Deep in his gut, something cried for relief, like an ulcer, growing sharper as the winter wore on. He did not think much of doctors, and it was always trouble to find one. Like most prairie nesters, the Folkers had their own remedies. When a tooth hurt, they sucked on a clove. When the heat of summer became unbearable, they drank sassafras tea to thin the blood. For a severe cold or cough, there was a chest plaster of turpentine and kerosene. And so now when Fred Folkers's gut started to whine, he drank more corn whiskey. Katherine begged him to see a doctor. There was somebody new in town, a woman doc who had just shown up in Boise City. When Folkers went to see her, she diagnosed him with stomach cancer. Cancer? That meant death, surely. No, the doc assured Folkers. She had developed a cure for cancer, salve and bandage, the special ointment drawing out the disease. Folkers would have to spend several weeks in the woman's small hospital, while she applied fresh salve every day. But how? He was broke. Sell something, she suggested. Folkers had some cattle, a few dairy cows, and he could give up the Model-T. But he needed both of them to stay alive. If he sold his cattle and his car, he would have only the fallow ground. At home was one small stash, the money he never put in a bank. He gave it to the cancer doctor in Boise City and agreed to her treatment. After a few weeks, he returned home with a scar on his stomach where the salve had been applied. It worked, Folkers told his family. He was cured. But not long after he finished his treatment, the cancer doctor left town, never to be seen again, and Folkers's gut burst. Turned out, he never had cancer; it was appendicitis. A doctor in Texhoma saved his life.

  Folkers's neighbor, the fat man Will Crawford, who had met his wife, Sadie, after finding a note in his bib overalls, had taken another mortgage out on his half-section as a way to stay alive at the start of the Depression. The money dwindled; their old car up and died. Will was ashamed to look at other people now, hiding in his hole, and neighbors said it was because he could not be the "real man" that Sadie had been seeking when she left her note in his overalls. They did not go to church and seldom went to town. Will looked like he had stopped caring about life, his clothes tattered, his hair mashed, his eyes hollow. Sadie was in rags as well. She planted a garden, using a row of tin cans lined end to end, the openings cut out and half-buried as a primitive irrigation system. To keep the wind from knocking down her plants, she put up a fence of sticks and canvas. From this little patch of ground next to their dugout, Will and Sadie grew enough to stay alive: cabbage and potatoes, onions and corn. But as a winter without rain dragged on, the blue northers wore them down and left them hungry, shivering in their dugout.

  Cash was scarce in Boise City. It was a hard-shelled, stiff little town that clung to a sense of destiny despite all evidence to the contrary. A visitor from Denver, getting off the train, said rusted cans scattered over the dusty plain would be an improvement. People swapped a hen—live and clucking—for a year's subscription to the Boise City News. They bartered a bushel of wheat for an oven stove wick. They brought in fifteen dozen eggs and got back a pair of overalls. They traded turnips for two cans of Franco-American spaghetti. Or they took the quarter they had been staring at for five days and went down to the little café run by Mrs. Skaggs, where two bits could buy a hamburger, a piece of pie, and a glass of milk. The Palace Theater closed, cutting off the one source of reliable fantasy, and then reopened after considerable pleadings, with ten-cent picture shows. The joy had gone out of living. Subsistence was a trial. But even though people were hurting, the town refused to slouch or cower. Boise City did not need help from anybody. The town was too proud to take anyone's charity. Pain was submerged until it screamed to the surface, as with one local businessman who had lost his life savings. He shot his wife first, then put the gun to
his head and blew his own brains out.

  The Cimarron County sheriff, Hi Barrick, was a former doughboy who had come back from the Great War intending to get rich like everyone else in the wheat bonanza, but he never got a big enough crop. One day then farmer Barrick saw the sheriff drunk on duty, and he reported it. Hell, then why don't you run for sheriff? He did. Sheriff Barrick moved to Boise City and took up residence in the courthouse, next to the jail. Barrick chased a regular cast of bootleggers around No Man's Land, brought them in for jail time, released them after a few days, then chased them again. Both sides of the law laughed about it. It was a game that kept everybody in business. Sheriff Barrick knew his moonshiners better than he knew some members of his family. And busting up a still was a good way to spread a commodity around town. Stills required a lot of sugar. After a bust, Barrick would bring the sugar into town and give it away in front of the courthouse. There was always a line, waiting on the sheriff. It was better than taking someone's property at the weekly foreclosure auction held by John Johnson's bank. The banker had caught on to the conspiracy of low bidding among farmers—the ten-cent sales, with people offering no more than a dime for a tractor or car—and he brought in his own bidders. But then a hangman's noose appeared outside the auction site. The implication was clear to anybody thinking of picking up a neighbor's homestead in a bankruptcy sale.

  The new governor of Oklahoma gave people hope, but he also tried to get them to hate. William Henry David Murray had been elected in 1930 after scandal drove the last two governors from office, both of them impeached. With a campaign slogan that railed against what he called "The Three C's—Corporations, Carpetbaggers, and Coons," Murray won by a huge margin, 301,921 votes to 208,575. He was known as "Alfalfa Bill" for his ceaseless advocacy of agriculture as the cornerstone of society. Alfalfa Bill said anything could grow in Oklahoma. His daddy, David, had made wine not long after grabbing a piece of dirt in the 1889 Sooner land rush; his Murray Mosel was so well-known that President Teddy Roosevelt had declared it "the bulliest wine of the land." Alfalfa Bill was himself a bully, but these times needed such a man, he said. Born in Toadsuck, Texas, in 1869, Murray ran away from home at the age of twelve, worked on a series of farms, and then got involved in populist politics. He bought a newspaper, educated himself so well he passed the bar, and made a name as president of the Oklahoma statehood convention in 1906. Oklahoma, he said at the time, could be a great state only if blacks were separated from whites and kept in the proper jobs—in the fields or factories. Next door, in Texas, lawmakers had institutionalized that sentiment forty years earlier with Reconstruction laws that said blacks could work only as field hands. Blacks were inferior to whites in all ways, Murray said, and must be fenced from society like quarantined hogs. At the start of the twentieth century, many people felt otherwise, but Alfalfa Bill tried to set his view into the proposed constitution. At the same time, he welcomed even black support, if done properly.

  "I appreciate the old darkie who comes to me talking softly in that humble spirit which should characterize their actions and dealings with the white man," he said to wide applause at the constitutional convention. Murray hated Jews as well. Blacks had some virtues, but Jews had none, in his view. Nor did he like the handful of Italians who had come to the High Plains. The "low grade races" of southern Europe, he said, were a threat to civilization. Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state only after President Theodore Roosevelt forced Murray to remove the segregationist planks of the constitution. Murray was furious; he never let go of his grudge against the Roosevelt family.

  At the start of the Depression, Alfalfa Bill was a mustachioed, haunt-eyed, big-eared man of sixty who could talk for hours without interruption, fueled by caffeine and nicotine. He drank two pots of black coffee a day and was never without a cigar—his method of ingesting "the great civilizer," as he called tobacco. Storming around Oklahoma in 1931, he said he could not make the sun less oppressive, but he promised to use muscle to fix the broken land. His muscle was the National Guard. As governor, Murray ruled by martial law, calling out the guard twenty-seven times in his first two years in office. When oil prices fell to a new low in 1931, the governor sent his troops to the oil fields to force a shutdown of three thousand wells as a way to drive up prices. When Texas backed a toll bridge across the Red River on the border with Oklahoma, Murray sent the guard to the bridge, nearly provoking a shooting war between the two states. In the midst of the standoff he showed up with an antique revolver, waving it in the faces of Texas Rangers. And when blacks tried to hold an Emancipation Day parade in a park in Oklahoma City, the governor imposed martial law on the city and ordered his guard troops to shut them down. Blacks were supposed to be invisible in his state, quietly working the land or manning a factory station. All told, the governor issued thirty-four declarations of martial law during his four years in office.

  The land dried up in the spring of 1932. Month after month, going into the height of the growing season, there was no rain. The sky was white and hot, and it took until well after midnight for the heat to dissipate. Alfalfa Bill urged people to fight nature with force. The unemployment rate in his state was 29 percent. To show them what could be done, he plowed up the grass on the grounds of the capitol and let people plant vegetable gardens. And to demonstrate how water could be taken from the ground, Murray went on a building binge, trying to create lakes and ponds in places that had neither. The ground could be mined at the deepest levels for water, using new and powerful centrifugal pumps, to create the garden state of Oklahoma. They could grab onto that underground lake, the Ogallala Aquifer, like the Sooners had grabbed the old Cherokee lands, and so what if the water was nearly seven hundred feet deep and had taken at least a hundred centuries to build up—it was there to be grubstaked.

  In Boise City, Alfalfa Bill's plans sounded like a tonic. God knows they needed water. It wasn't trickling out of the distant Rockies. The Cimarron, once a roaring river, was now a tear trail. And it wasn't coming from overhead. It rained barely ten inches in all of 1932. The sun glared down at nesters in No Man's Land, every dawn a new punishment. It was time for man to stand up to the puckered face of the elements.

  "Human progress has now reached the stage where it can master these mighty forces of nature," wrote the Boise City News, in support of a proposed dam in No Man's Land.

  In the spring of 1932, Alfalfa Bill decided to run for president. He would follow the model that got him elected governor. In running for the statehouse, he had campaigned on the Three C's. Now he ran on a platform of promising people the "Four B's: Bread, Butter, Bacon, and Beans." That a governor could run for the highest office of the land with a campaign that offered people calories said something about 1932.

  By late winter, the suitcase farmers who had flooded into the southern plains during the biggest wheat-growing boom in the nation's history had completely disappeared. They had scalped the sod in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, had followed the new rail lines into day-old towns in Nebraska, southwestern Kansas, and Baca County, Colorado. For a few years, they hit the crop just as anticipated, but if they hit a crop in the early 1930s, it was worthless. When they walked away, they left behind torn-up land, abandoned like a played-out strip mine. Other people, some with homesteads or mortgages, started to leave as well, just disappearing, not even locking the door behind them. But most drylanders had no plans to go anywhere. They saw the newsreels in the Mission Theater in Dalhart and the Palace in Boise City, showing those breadlines in the big cities, the apple vendors on every street corner, the millions crying for relief. At least here, in a cashless economy, people could squeeze a dozen eggs every day from a house of hens, or get a pail of milk from an old cow, or spread water from the windmill onto the ground to grow vegetables, or fatten up a pig, then smoke a winter's supply of bacon. They also thought, in the first year of the epic drought, that things had to change because they always did. Wet years followed dry years. You hung on, as Hazel Lucas Shaw did, even though s
he worked for nothing at the one-room schoolhouse. They hung on because this was still the only place they could call theirs. Going to the city, or to California, was a journey to the unknown.

  Subsistence farming may have kept people alive, but it did nothing for the land, which was going fallow section by section. At the end of 1931, the Agriculture College of Oklahoma did a survey of all the land that had been torn up in their state during the wheat bonanza. They were astonished by what they found: of sixteen million acres in cultivation in the state, thirteen million were seriously eroded. And this was before the drought had calcified most of the ground. The erosion was due to a pair of perennial weather conditions on the plains: wind and brief, powerful rain or hailstorms. But it was a third element—something new to the prairie ecosystem—that was really to blame, the college agriculture experts reported: neglect. Farmers had taken their machines to the fields and produced the biggest wheat crops in history, transforming the great grasslands into a vast medium for turning out a global commodity. And then they ditched it.

  "The area seems doomed to become in dreary reality the Great American Desert shown on early maps," wrote Lawrence Svobida, a Kansas wheat farmer who kept a journal of his slow decline. Svobida had started to see the wheat game as an elaborate fraud if not a tragic mistake. He had come to the plains in 1929, a young man whose motto was "Never defeated." He pronounced his first crop "breathtaking." He never made money afterward. When the land started to blow, he was not even sure if he would live to tell his cautionary tale. The sky, choked with topsoil, frightened him. And the heat—nobody alive had ever seen the sky like this, day after day, the white bowl overhead.