The BEST Hard Time

Discerning readers will recognize that my title is a reference to Timothy Egan’s classic remembrance of those who stayed home to weather the Dust Bowl horrors, The Worst Hard Time. If you haven’t read it, you should. Otherwise, it is impossible to imagine the series of disasters, both natural and man-made that struck the High Plains country during the Great Depression. We all know John Steinbeck’s story of those who left, Grapes of Wrath, but few have any idea how bad it really was for those who stayed.

To recap: in the late 1920’s, the U.S. Government decided to offer homesteading rights to an area that had not already been settled, known as the High Plains. It was centered in the Oklahoma Panhandle, and included north Texas, Southeast Colorado, and Southwest Kansas. Promised to the Comanche Indians, it was originally home to unimaginably large herds of buffalo, which provided almost everything the Comanche required for survival: food, hides for clothes and teepee coverings, tendons that could be stretched to provide bow strings and much more. According to Egan, the wholesale slaughter of these buffalo was for neither sport nor meat, but part of a plan to eradicate the Comanches (who were legendary horsemen and fighters, to the dismay of white settlers) by eliminating their lifeline. No one knows how many buffalo were actually killed, but estimates are that millions were. They were very nearly driven to extinction.

The first whites to take advantage were ranchers, whose cattle thrived on the short, tough grass that covered the plains. When the homesteaders began arriving, the ranchers were furious, but before long they were first marginalized, then forced away. But the new settlers had a very hard time eking out a living, because the grass was tightly bound to the ground, and plowing it behind a horse was a long, hard process. Before long, however, internal combustion machines were harnessed to tractors, threshers and harvesting machines, and the new farmers found that winter wheat took well to the shallow soil. What followed was a short-term bonanza, with small fortunes made overnight as the price of wheat rose steadily, and regular rain (an anomaly, as it turned out) provided generous yields. Towns were created, with banks and clothing stores, and, of course, houses of ill-repute. The farmers, who had been living in dugouts covered with tarpaper, built sturdy homes. Word spread quickly around the country that fortunes were being made.

Unfortunately, one of the most certain principles of an unregulated marketplace is that when money is being made by some, many more move in to cash in and, inevitably, a surplus is created which floods the market and begins to undermine the price. Greed had justified loans to buy more tractors, mortgages to build larger homes, and as the price of wheat steadily dropped, the only way to make all those payments was to plant more wheat. And the only way to plant more wheat was to plow up more land. What transpired might be described as bursting the “wheat bubble.”

Meanwhile, another kind of bubble was about to burst—the Stock Market had been skyrocketing for more than a decade after World War I, and in October of 1929 it began a free fall that seemed never to end. President Hoover insisted that everything would be just fine in a little while, and his Free Market philosophy was never shaken, no matter how bad things got. And they kept getting worse. Back in the High Plains, as the market for wheat kept falling, the farmers suddenly discovered that the banks they had trusted to hold their savings were broke. Empty. Penniless. They had taken their deposits to the Stock Market, borrowed against them (bought on margin) and had been wiped out.

As if that weren’t enough, the rain stopped, completely. The drought lasted almost a decade. The High Plains had always been windy, but the tough grass had always survived previous droughts. Now it was gone, and the wind began whipping up the loose soil, and now you know why it was called the Dust Bowl. Except, if you didn’t live through, you can’t image how awful it really was. Blackness descended. The dust just kept coming. It covered everything and felt like the harshest sand paper as it struck you, Even on the rare occasion when it rained, it rained mud, often mixed with huge, black hailstones. Not even Dante could have imagined it. The wonder is that anyone stayed. Tough and stubborn. Where else can we go? We have nothing.

Into this gloomy scenario came a razor-thin gleam of sunlight: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President in 1932, and almost immediately began trying to turn the tide. He swept aside Hoover’s beloved “Free Market,” ordering that livestock be killed and crops destroyed in order to create shortages that would lift prices. He put people to work, often rationing the jobs to help as many as possible. Eventually, he cajoled and threatened a recalcitrant Congress to mandate an 8 hour workday and a 40 hour workweek, with a minimum wage and minimal benefits. He provided deposit insurance to convince people to get their money back into the banks. He created Social Security, so that elder Americans could survive without begging.

Now, lest there be any doubt, none of this would have been even vaguely possible without a major financial crisis. And none of it would have happened without FDR’s consummate political skills and determination. Of course, much of his solutions had originally been proposed by the first Progressive Party, early in the 20th Century, but it had been dismissed as idealistic nonsense until there was no other choice.

Which brings me at last to the reason for the title of this essay. Because, as hard as the time was, the result was good times that lasted for half a century until Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan convinced the world that “coddling” the poor made them uppity and lazy, and the high taxes that paid for the Safety Net inhibited the motivation for the rich to invest in business and create jobs. Since 1980, most of the old Safety Net has been shredded and trashed. Unions that provided muscle for workers have been dismantled, “Welfare Reform” and the globalization ushered in by NAFTA (thanks to Bill Clinton!) have kept wages at pre-Reagan levels, and created a groundswell of righteous anger now manifest in the campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Presidential race.