59 pages • 1 hour read
The Worst Hard Time
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “BETRAYAL, 1931-1933”
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Darkening”
The beginning of this chapter showcases more facts about the economic and environmental devastation of the Dust Bowl. High Plains' residents are now fighting back. The National Farmers Holiday Association tells its members to buy or sell nothing in an effort to force President Hoover to fix a minimum price on wheat. Edward O'Neal represents the American Farm Bureau and tells Congress in 1932, “Unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the countryside in less than twelve months” (104). The Folkers are learning “to use their wheat for something in every meal” (105). People barter with neighbors and feed tumbleweed to their cattle. The Boise City wheat farmers band together at foreclosures and bid only ten cents for a tractor. A hangman's noose appears outside the bank's auction site.
The chapter ends in January of 1932 with the citing of a “black blizzard,” another thick, ten-thousand-foot-high cloud that appears in Amarillo, TX, and then moves north along the Dust Bowl (113). This second black cloud (which the weather bureau is still not able to identify or explain) leaves the streets of Dalhart, Texas full of black dust, covers the furniture inside of Dick Coon's De Soto Hotel lobby, the dining room table of “Doc” Dawson, and the pool table at Dalhart's local bar.
Chapter 8 Summary: “In a Dry Land”
This chapter gives the dates of the four major droughts on the High Plains during the 1930s: 1930-1931, 1934, 1936, and 1939-1940. Because of the high temperatures, insects are breeding and hatching in larger numbers. “Doc” Dawson's wife in Dalhart, Texas finds a huge tarantula in her bathtub, and a little boy in Kansas dies from a spider bite. Hordes of rabbits are destroying field crops and taking over town streets, so communities organize weekly rabbit drives to kill them.
In the late winter of 1932 there are six black blizzards on the Oklahoma panhandle alone. The weather bureau still has no technical name for the black blizzards, but meteorologists are beginning to classify them by visibility (with no visibility past a quarter of a mile classified as the worst).After a duster hits a school and the children become sick, High Plains' settlers consider the black blizzards a serious threat. With the insects, rabbits, drought, record temperature highs, and now these black blizzards, many High Plains residents wonder if they are living through biblical plague.
Meanwhile, the United States' greatest agriculturalist of the era, Hugh Bennett, is giving speeches across the country and making comments like “Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people” (125). Bennett announces that Americans' treatment of the land has been ignorant and sinister. He exposes his former employer, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as liars when they write bulletins that claim the soil is the one natural resource that cannot be exhausted. Bennett debunks their message, saying, “I didn't know so much costly information could be put into a single, brief sentence” (125).
Chapter 9 Summary: “New Leader, New Deal”
This chapter centers around Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 presidential election win and his early actions to help the residents of the Dust Bowl.
FDR wins the Plains states by a landslide through his philosophy that once he restores the purchasing power of the farming communities, then businesses should operate successfully. (President Hoover believed the opposite: that only when the businesses were restored, would the farming communities recover).
Roosevelt confesses in one of his early press conferences that there is not enough money circulating. He calls Congress into session and signs the Emergency Banking Bill into law. The bill allows the United States Federal Reserve to issue additional currency into banks that are monitored and found solvent. FDR has a fireside chat with Americans, asking them not to continue withdrawing their deposits from the bank. By the end of Roosevelt's first year in office, deposits exceed withdrawals.
The new administration buys surplus food and distributes it to the needy. As part of the New Deal, Congress and FDR pass the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which builds dams and bridges, restores forests, and controls water run-offs with the new Civilian Conservation Corps labor source. The AAA includes a landmark provision to give subsidies to farmers not to plant crops, thus preventing a food surplus, which the government hopes will keep the crop prices from fluctuating. FDR summons Hugh Bennett to the White House to become the director of one of his new agencies in the Interior Department, and the president gives Bennet instructions to stabilize the soil.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
The theme of betrayal continues in these chapters. Fred Folkers goes to a new doctor in Boise City for a stomach ache that none of his home remedies can cure. Folkers is diagnosed with stomach cancer, but the doctor assures him she can cure the cancer using bandages and a salve. The doctor suggests he sell something since he is broke. Folkers gives the doctor his last money only to have his gut burst open from appendicitis; by this time, the doctor has left town. This, combined with his “life's work [that] had become worthless [...] drove him to his jars of corn whiskey” (105).
Egan presents some of the reasons Dust Bowl residents do not leave the region during this era. As he said in his 2011 interview, many of the homesteaders had found out the diaspora to California was not working for Okies. Hazel Lucas Shaw's inner thoughts echo this fact: she “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” (111).
Egan details the growing strength of the black dusters, and the High Plains farm economy collapsing. However, he begins to show that people are awakening to some possible reasons for the land problems in the Dust Bowl, and Egan hints at solutions. The Agriculture College of Oklahoma conducts a survey of the wheat bonanza land in their state and discovers thirteen million acres are “seriously eroded,” chiefly from neglect (111). Bill Baker, the Boisy City agriculturalist, discovers a child mummy and the college archaeologists identify the mummy from the Basket Maker period more than two thousand years ago. Baker argues that the cornhusks and pumpkin seeds found stuffed in the mummy are evidence that High Plains land has been cultivated successfully in the past. Baker puts the mummy on display at the court house in Boisy City. Hugh Bennett, a U.S. Government agriculturalist, tours the High Plains and agrees with Baker that the problem is not the land. Bennett brings up the point, “How could it be that people had farmed the same ground for centuries in other countries and not lost the soil, while Americans had been on the land barely a generation and had stripped it of its life-giving [sic] layers?” (125).
Egan reminds readers of the philosophy of the cowboys and ranchers (and now the agriculturalists) versus the philosophy of the farmers and government: “the fragile web of life and slapping the face of nature–this kind of early ecology had yet to find a wide audience” (134). The last four pages of Chapter 9, “New Leader, New Deal,” show new hope for the High Plains residents as FDR wins the 1932 presidential election, and the president takes swift actions to solve the problems in the Dust Bowl.
Unlock all 59 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Timothy Egan
