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Section II (National Study): USA 1919-1941
Quick questions on The Dust Bowl and Depression society: HSC Modern History USA
10short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is urban unemployment?Show answer
The Depression's urban impact was severe. Unemployment rose from around 3 per cent in 1929 to around 25 per cent in 1933, around 13 million workers. Underemployment (short hours, low pay) added millions more. Industrial production fell around 46 per cent.
What is the Bonus Army?Show answer
The Adjusted Compensation Act (1924) had granted First World War veterans a bonus payable in 1945. As the Depression deepened, veterans pressed for early payment.
What is the Dust Bowl?Show answer
The Dust Bowl was the convergence of a severe drought (1931 to 1939) and decades of over-ploughing of the Great Plains. The First World War wheat boom had drawn farmers onto marginal land in the southern Plains; tractors and the disc plough broke the native grasses that had held the soil.
What is the Okie migration?Show answer
Around 2.5 million people left the Great Plains during the 1930s. Around 200,000 of these "Okies" (the term applied loosely to migrants from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri) reached California by 1940.
What is the documentary record?Show answer
Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration (1935, under Rexford Tugwell, reorganised in 1937 as the Farm Security Administration under Will Alexander) created the most ambitious federal photographic project in American history. Roy Stryker directed the historical section; around 175,000 photographs were taken between 1935 and 1944.
What is the cultural climate?Show answer
Radio and cinema brought the Depression into every home. Cinema attendance reached 95 million a week in 1929 and held above 60 million through the worst of the slump.
What is policy legacy?Show answer
The Soil Conservation Act (27 April 1935) established the Soil Conservation Service under Hugh Bennett. By 1942 around 30,000 farms were enrolled in conservation programs. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted around 220 million trees along a 100-mile-wide shelterbelt from Texas to North Dakota.
What is historiography?Show answer
Donald Worster (Dust Bowl, 1979) is the standard environmental history.
What is treating the Dust Bowl as a purely natural disaster?Show answer
Decades of over-ploughing and the Plough That Broke the Plains (the 1936 FSA film by Pare Lorentz) are part of the story.
What is treating the FSA photographs as neutral records?Show answer
Stryker briefed photographers; the archive was edited by political need.