The Worst Hard Time
by Timothy Egan
Summary
The Worst Hard Time is the story of the Dust Bowl told by the people who stayed, and it restored to American memory a catastrophe the Joads had carried off in the wrong direction. The great migration of Steinbeck's Okies, Timothy Egan points out, was the minority; most families in the southern plains could not leave or would not, and his book lives with them through the dirty thirties in the hardest hit country of all, the No Man's Land where Oklahoma's panhandle meets Texas, Kansas, and Colorado. Egan builds the disaster from its boom: the last homestead frontier, the wheat bonanza of the 1920s when tractors tore up the buffalo grass that had held the ground for ten thousand years, the suitcase farmers who plowed and left, and then the rains' withdrawal and the land's revenge, the black blizzards that rolled like mountain ranges, buried fences and cattle, shorted out cars with static, and filled children's lungs with the dust pneumonia that killed them. The stories he follows, drawn from survivors' interviews, diaries, and the records of towns like Dalhart and Boise City, are almost unbearably intimate, weddings danced in dust masks, babies buried in shared coffins, and through them runs the national response, Franklin Roosevelt's men on the ground and Hugh Bennett, the soil evangelist who convinced Congress that the plains themselves were a federal emergency and founded soil conservation while a duster darkened the Washington sky. The book won the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and it stands as the definitive popular history of the worst manmade ecological disaster in American history.
Historical Context & Significance
Egan, a New York Times reporter who had covered the rural West for years, published the book in 2006, when the last Dust Bowl survivors were in their eighties and nineties and could still testify; the oral histories he gathered are now irreplaceable. The 2006 National Book Award recognized both the rescue of the stories and the warning inside them, and the book found a second urgency as drought, aquifer depletion, and climate change returned its questions to the same counties. It became a standard text wherever environmental history is taught, and its argument, that the disaster was made by policy and market as much as weather, has shaped every retelling since, including the documentary treatments that drew directly on his survivors.