NESA Practice (NESA)-style practice: Explain the social impact of the Great Depression on the United States.

A 15-mark "explain" needs three or four developed strands. **Thesis.** The Depression's social impact was uneven but transformative. It was hardest on African Americans, agricultural labour, and the urban unemployed; it produced internal migrations on a scale not seen since the Civil War; and it generated a national documentary record (Lange, Evans, Steinbeck, the FSA) that itself shaped policy. **Mass unemployment.** Unemployment rose from around 3 per cent (1929) to 25 per cent (1933), around 13 million workers. African American unemployment in northern cities reached around 50 per cent. The St Louis Hooverville on the Mississippi flats had around 8,000 residents at peak. Around 1,000 home foreclosures a day were recorded by 1932. Total household income fell around 40 per cent from 1929 to 1933. **The Bonus Army.** Around 17,000 First World War veterans and their families camped in Washington from May to July 1932 demanding early payment of their 1924 service bonus. They were cleared by force on 28 July 1932 under General Douglas MacArthur, with the cooperation of Majors Eisenhower and Patton. **The Dust Bowl.** A decade of severe drought (1931 to 1939) combined with decades of over-ploughing produced massive dust storms across western Kansas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, the Texas Panhandle, and eastern Colorado. "Black Sunday" (14 April 1935) was the worst single storm; a wall of dust travelled from Boise City, Oklahoma, to Amarillo, Texas. Around 100 million acres of topsoil were degraded. **Internal migration.** Around 2.5 million people left the Plains during the 1930s. Around 200,000 of these "Okies" went to California, where they lived in roadside camps and FSA-operated camps. The 1934 Tulare County strike, the 1934 San Francisco general strike, and the 1935 cotton pickers' strike all reflected the desperation of migrant labour.

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NSWModern HistorySyllabus dot point

How did the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl reshape American society?

The social impact of the Depression, including the Dust Bowl, internal migration, the unemployed, and the documentary record

A focused answer to the HSC Modern History dot point on the social impact of the Depression. Industrial unemployment, Hoovervilles, the Bonus Army, the Dust Bowl, the Okie migration to California, the documentary record of Lange, Steinbeck, and the FSA, and the cultural production of the era.

Generated by Claude Opus 4.89 min answerUpdated 2026-06-28

Reviewed by: AI editorial process; not yet individually human-reviewed

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What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to give an integrated account of the social impact of the Depression on American society. Strong answers integrate the urban unemployment crisis, the Hoovervilles and the Bonus Army, the Dust Bowl as both ecological and social catastrophe, the Okie migration, the documentary record produced by the Farm Security Administration and major writers, and the cultural and political legacy.

In plain English

Imagine a quarter of all adults losing their jobs at once, with no unemployment benefits to fall back on. That was America by 1933. Families that could not pay the rent ended up living in shacks of scrap timber and tin on the edge of town, and people nicknamed these slums "Hoovervilles" after the president they blamed.

At the same time, out on the Great Plains - Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas - a slow-motion environmental disaster was unfolding. For years farmers had ploughed up the tough native grass to grow wheat for quick money. Think of the grass as the stitching that held a giant carpet of soil in place: rip out the stitching, and the first dry, windy spell sends the whole thing into the air. When a long drought hit, the bare topsoil simply blew away in black storms that could turn day into night. Hundreds of thousands of ruined farm families - "Okies" - packed everything onto the car and drove west to California looking for work, like climate refugees in their own country. Photographers and writers like Dorothea Lange and John Steinbeck recorded their faces and their journey, which is why we can still picture the Depression so vividly today.

The answer

Urban unemployment

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. The construction industry collapsed; new dwellings fell from 937,000 (1925) to 93,000 (1933).

The pain was distributed unequally:

African American unemployment in northern cities reached around 50 per cent. The 1930s saw the formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (founded 1925 by A. Philip Randolph), the principal Black union, and the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaigns in Northern cities.
Mexican American workers were targeted by the Repatriation drives (1929 to 1936) that returned around 1 million people to Mexico.
Married women were forced out of federal jobs by Section 213 of the 1932 Economy Act.

Foreclosures averaged around 1,000 a day in 1932. Around 250,000 American families lost their homes. Hoovervilles (shantytowns of unemployed Americans, named after the President) sprang up on the edges of every major city: Central Park (New York), Riverside Park (Manhattan), Forest Hills (St Louis), Hooverville on the Hooverville Flats in Seattle.

The Bonus Army

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.

In May 1932 around 17,000 veterans and their families gathered in Washington as the Bonus Expeditionary Force, led by Sergeant Walter W. Waters. They camped on the Anacostia Flats and in vacant federal buildings. The House passed the Patman Bonus Bill (15 June 1932) for early payment; the Senate rejected it (17 June 1932) by 62 to 18.

Most veterans went home; around 2,000 stayed. On 28 July 1932 Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to clear the encampments. MacArthur, with his aide Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and tank commander Major George Patton, exceeded orders by crossing the Anacostia River and burning the main camp. Press photographs of regular soldiers attacking First World War veterans destroyed Hoover's re-election.

A second Bonus march in May 1933 was met by Roosevelt with coffee, accommodation, and the offer of CCC enrolment.

The Dust Bowl

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.

The drought began in late 1930 and reached the southern Plains by 1932. Major dust storms began in 1933. The worst affected counties were in the Oklahoma Panhandle (Cimarron, Texas, Beaver), the Texas Panhandle, western Kansas, and eastern Colorado. The geographer Hugh Bennett (head of the Soil Conservation Service) testified before Congress in March 1935 during a dust storm that drifted to Washington; the testimony helped secure passage of the Soil Conservation Act.

Black Sunday (14 April 1935) was the worst single storm. A wall of dust 200 miles wide and around 6,000 feet high travelled from Pampa, Texas, to Boise City, Oklahoma. The blackout lasted around 90 minutes. The Associated Press reporter Robert Geiger's dispatch that day coined the term "Dust Bowl".

Around 100 million acres of topsoil were degraded. Visibility was reduced to a few feet in major storms. Cattle and sheep died of dust pneumonia; children developed silicosis-like lung disease. The annual frequency of major storms in the southern Plains rose from 14 (1932) to 38 (1933) to 22 (1934) to 40 (1935) before falling.

The Okie migration

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.

Migrants arrived in California on US Route 66 and faced wage rates of 75 cents to 1 dollar a day in seasonal agricultural work. They lived in roadside camps known as "Little Oklahomas". California's Indigent Act of 1933 (the "Anti-Okie Law") attempted to ban poor migrants; it was struck down by the Supreme Court in Edwards v. California (1941).

The Farm Security Administration built around 95 federal camps to house migrants, modelled on the Arvin Camp opened in 1936 in Kern County (the model for John Steinbeck's "Weedpatch" in "The Grapes of Wrath"). The camps offered showers, sanitation, and self-government.

Major labour conflicts of the era included the Tulare County strike (1934), the San Francisco general strike (May to July 1934, four dead on "Bloody Thursday" 5 July), and the 18,000-worker cotton pickers' strike (October 1933) in the San Joaquin Valley.

The documentary record

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.

Dorothea Lange photographed migrant labour. "Migrant Mother" (March 1936), of Florence Owens Thompson with three of her seven children in a Nipomo pea-pickers' camp, became the iconic image of the Depression. Lange and her husband, the agricultural economist Paul Taylor, produced "An American Exodus" (1939).

Walker Evans photographed Alabama tenant farmers for "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (with James Agee, 1941) and produced the architectural studies that defined the FSA aesthetic.

Arthur Rothstein ("Fleeing a Dust Storm", April 1936) and Russell Lee photographed the Plains. Gordon Parks was the first Black FSA photographer.

John Steinbeck wrote his San Francisco News series on the migrant camps in 1936 (collected as "The Harvest Gypsies"). "Of Mice and Men" (1937) and "The Grapes of Wrath" (April 1939) brought the migrants to a mass readership. "The Grapes of Wrath" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and was filmed by John Ford in the same year. It was banned in Kern County, California, and burned in St Louis.

The WPA Federal Writers' Project under Henry Alsberg employed around 6,600 writers between 1935 and 1939, producing state guidebooks and the slave narratives collection of around 2,300 oral histories of formerly enslaved Americans.

The WPA Federal Theater Project under Hallie Flanagan produced the Living Newspaper series and works including Orson Welles's all-Black "Macbeth" (1936). It was defunded by Congress in 1939.

The Federal Music Project, the Federal Art Project (Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were on relief), and the Federal Writers' Project together provided employment for around 40,000 artists.

The cultural climate

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.

Pop culture turned to escape (musicals, screwball comedies) and to social realism. Frank Capra's films ("Mr Smith Goes to Washington" 1939) modelled an idealised democracy. Warner Brothers' gangster films ("The Public Enemy" 1931, "Scarface" 1932) and prison films ("I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" 1932) carried the darker mood. Disney's "Snow White" (1937), the first feature-length animated film, was the box-office success of the decade.

In music, the swing era (1935 onwards, beginning with Benny Goodman's Palomar Ballroom engagement in August 1935) gave the country an upbeat soundtrack. Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) gave it a folk one.

Studs Terkel's "Hard Times" (1970) is the major oral history of the era.

Policy legacy

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.

The FSA built migrant camps, resettled around 200,000 families, and made around 1 billion dollars in loans to small farmers.

The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act (22 July 1937) provided 10 million dollars a year in low-interest loans to tenant farmers to buy land.

Historiography

Donald Worster (Dust Bowl, 1979) is the standard environmental history.

Timothy Egan (The Worst Hard Time, 2006) is the standard recent narrative.

James Gregory (American Exodus, 1989) is the standard study of the Okies in California.

Robert McElvaine (The Great Depression, 1984; Down and Out in the Great Depression, 1983, a documentary collection) is the standard American social history.

David Kennedy (Freedom from Fear, 1999) is the Pulitzer-winning synthesis.

Cara Finnegan (Picturing Poverty, 2003) is a major recent study of the FSA photographs.

How to read a source on this topic

Sources on Depression society are usually FSA photographs (Lange, Evans, Rothstein), extracts from Steinbeck or oral testimony, or charts of unemployment and migration. Three reading habits.

First, treat the FSA photographs as constructed, not neutral. Roy Stryker briefed the photographers on what to capture and "killed" negatives that did not fit; "Migrant Mother" is one frame of six, chosen for its power. The image is evidence of how the New Deal wished to present poverty, as much as of poverty itself.

Second, separate the ecological from the human. A source on the Dust Bowl may stress the storms (a natural frame) or the ruined families (a human frame); a strong answer reads which the source foregrounds and supplies the other.

Third, weigh perspective. A migrant's oral testimony, a California grower's complaint about "Okies", and a federal report on the camps describe the same migration from incompatible standpoints; corroborate across them.

Model exam responses

A. Source response (5 marks). Source: Dorothea Lange's photograph "Migrant Mother" (1936), of a worn migrant woman and her children in a Californian pea-pickers' camp. Assess its usefulness for a historian studying the social impact of the Depression.

Lange's photograph is a Farm Security Administration image from March 1936, taken at Nipomo by a government-employed photographer working under Roy Stryker to build public support for federal relief. That origin makes it highly useful as evidence of the migrant crisis it records - the displacement of agricultural families, the poverty of the roadside camps, the human reality behind the statistic of around 200,000 Okies in California. It is also evidence of how the New Deal state chose to represent poverty: dignified, maternal, deserving of help. But its usefulness is bounded by that same purpose. The image was one of six frames, selected and lightly edited for emotional impact, so it documents an argument as much as a fact; it tells us little about the structural causes - the over-ploughing, the drought, the evictions - that produced the migration. Read critically, it is strong evidence for the human face of the Depression and for federal documentary practice, and weaker on causation.

Marker's note: a top response states origin and purpose (FSA, Stryker, 1936), separates what the source is useful FOR (the human impact and the New Deal's self-presentation) from what it conceals (causes, the editing), anchors this in specific own knowledge, and ends in a judgement rather than describing the picture.

B. Essay paragraph (from a 25-mark response on whether the Dust Bowl was man-made or natural).

The strongest evidence that the Dust Bowl was man-made lies in the contrast between the land before and after it was ploughed. The southern Plains had endured recurring droughts for centuries while its deep-rooted native grasses held the soil; what was new in the 1930s was that the First World War wheat boom and the mechanised disc plough had stripped that grass for a cash crop. So when the drought of 1931 to 1939 came, around 100 million acres of loosened topsoil simply blew away, peaking on Black Sunday, 14 April 1935. Contemporaries grasped the human cause: the geographer Hugh Bennett built the Soil Conservation Service (1935) around changing farming methods, and Pare Lorentz's federal film "The Plough That Broke the Plains" (1936) made the argument in pictures. As Donald Worster argues in Dust Bowl (1979), the catastrophe was the predictable price of treating a fragile grassland as a factory for wheat - the drought was the trigger, but human land-use built the bomb.

Marker's note: the paragraph argues a single proposition (man-made causation), supports it with dated specifics (the wheat boom, Black Sunday, the 1935 Act), and uses a named historian (Worster) as argument rather than decoration. Sustained argument plus historiography is what lifts a paragraph into Band 6.

Command words and weaving historiography

Read the verb first. "Outline" and "Explain" want developed, dated points, not a story; "Account for" and "Assess the reasons" want CAUSES weighed and ranked; "To what extent / Evaluate" want a JUDGEMENT defending a thesis; "Assess the usefulness/reliability" of a source wants ORIGIN, MOTIVE and PERSPECTIVE, then a verdict. For source questions, run O-M-P-U: Origin, Motive, Perspective, then Usefulness/limitation - and with FSA photographs always ask whether you are reading the New Deal's chosen image or the underlying reality. Weave historians as a clash, not a list: pit the systemic man-made thesis (Worster - capitalist over-exploitation of the grassland) against the human narrative (Egan - the drought and the families who endured it), then say which carries more weight and why. One historian used in genuine tension beats five name-dropped.

In one sentence

The Great Depression reshaped American society through mass urban unemployment (25 per cent in 1933, 13 million workers), the foreclosure of around 250,000 homes and the Hoovervilles, the Bonus Army assault on 28 July 1932, and the ecological and human catastrophe of the Dust Bowl (Black Sunday 14 April 1935, 100 million acres degraded, 2.5 million Plains migrants, 200,000 Okies in California), recorded in the work of Dorothea Lange ("Migrant Mother" March 1936), Walker Evans, John Steinbeck ("The Grapes of Wrath", April 1939), and the Farm Security Administration archive, with policy responses through the Soil Conservation Service of April 1935 and the FSA migrant camps.

Examples in context

Example 1. Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (March 1936). Lange's Farm Security Administration photograph of Florence Owens Thompson at Nipomo, California, became the canonical image. The FSA-OWI documentary project employed Walker Evans, Russell Lee, and Arthur Rothstein. The James Agee-Walker Evans book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) extended the genre.

Example 2. The Dust Bowl and the Okie migration. From 1934 to 1939, around 200,000 "Okies" moved to California from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Carey McWilliams's Factories in the Field (1939) documented the conditions. Donald Worster (Dust Bowl, 1979) integrates the ecological and social dimensions. The Soil Conservation Service (April 1935) addressed the structural causes.

Try this

Q1. Source A is Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936). Using Source A and your own knowledge, explain the impact of the Depression on rural America. [5 marks]

What the marker wants. Identify FSA-OWI documentary project; cite Dust Bowl; link to the Okie migration.

Q2. Evaluate the extent to which the Depression transformed American society. [25 marks]

What the marker wants. Weigh demographic, economic, and cultural change; use Worster, Steinbeck/McWilliams, Lange/Evans context.

Q3. Compare the views of Donald Worster and John Steinbeck on the Dust Bowl. [10 marks]

What the marker wants. Worster (ecological-economic system failure) versus Steinbeck (human and family social trauma); judgement.

Exam-style practice questions

Practice questions written in the style of NESA exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.

Practice (NESA)15 marksExplain the social impact of the Great Depression on the United States.

Show worked answer →

A 15-mark "explain" needs three or four developed strands.

Thesis: The Depression's social impact was uneven but transformative. It was hardest on African Americans, agricultural labour, and the urban unemployed; it produced internal migrations on a scale not seen since the Civil War; and it generated a national documentary record (Lange, Evans, Steinbeck, the FSA) that itself shaped policy.
Mass unemployment: Unemployment rose from around 3 per cent (1929) to 25 per cent (1933), around 13 million workers. African American unemployment in northern cities reached around 50 per cent. The St Louis Hooverville on the Mississippi flats had around 8,000 residents at peak. Around 1,000 home foreclosures a day were recorded by 1932. Total household income fell around 40 per cent from 1929 to 1933.
The Bonus Army: Around 17,000 First World War veterans and their families camped in Washington from May to July 1932 demanding early payment of their 1924 service bonus. They were cleared by force on 28 July 1932 under General Douglas MacArthur, with the cooperation of Majors Eisenhower and Patton.
The Dust Bowl: A decade of severe drought (1931 to 1939) combined with decades of over-ploughing produced massive dust storms across western Kansas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, the Texas Panhandle, and eastern Colorado. "Black Sunday" (14 April 1935) was the worst single storm; a wall of dust travelled from Boise City, Oklahoma, to Amarillo, Texas. Around 100 million acres of topsoil were degraded.
Internal migration: Around 2.5 million people left the Plains during the 1930s. Around 200,000 of these "Okies" went to California, where they lived in roadside camps and FSA-operated camps. The 1934 Tulare County strike, the 1934 San Francisco general strike, and the 1935 cotton pickers' strike all reflected the desperation of migrant labour.

Practice questions

Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.

foundation3 marksOutline the main causes of the Dust Bowl.

Show worked solution →

A 3-mark "outline" wants three distinct, correctly dated causes, each in a sentence.

Over-ploughing: The First World War wheat boom drew farmers onto marginal land in the southern Plains; tractors and the disc plough broke the native grasses that had held the soil in place.
Severe drought: A decade of drought (1931 to 1939) reached the southern Plains by 1932 and left the loosened topsoil exposed.
Wind erosion and dust storms: With no root systems to anchor it, the topsoil blew away in massive storms from 1933, peaking on Black Sunday (14 April 1935).
Marking criteria: 1 mark each for three distinct causes, correctly dated; do not present the Dust Bowl as a purely natural disaster - the human cause (over-ploughing) is essential.

foundation4 marksExplain the social impact of mass unemployment on American cities during the Depression.

Show worked solution →

A 4-mark "explain" needs developed points with specific evidence, not just a list.

Scale: Unemployment reached around 25 per cent (around 13 million workers) by 1933; underemployment added millions more, and industrial production fell around 46 per cent.
Unequal burden: The pain fell hardest on the vulnerable: African American unemployment in northern cities reached around 50 per cent, and the Mexican Repatriation drives (1929 to 1936) returned around 1 million people to Mexico.
Homelessness: Foreclosures averaged around 1,000 a day in 1932; around 250,000 families lost their homes, and Hoovervilles sprang up on the edges of every major city.
Effect: The crisis discredited the Republican philosophy of voluntary relief and prepared the ground for the New Deal.
Marking criteria: 1 mark for the scale (with a statistic), 1 mark for the unequal burden, 1 mark for homelessness/Hoovervilles, 1 mark for a developed link to consequences.

core5 marksSource A (paraphrased, owned): A 1936 Farm Security Administration photograph by Dorothea Lange shows a careworn migrant mother, her face lined with worry, sheltering two children in a roadside pea-pickers' camp in California. The image was widely reproduced and became the public face of the Depression. Using Source A and your own knowledge, explain the impact of the Depression on rural and migrant America. [5 marks]

Show worked solution →

A 5-mark "explain ... using the source" wants the source decoded, then linked to own knowledge.

Decode the source: Lange's "Migrant Mother" (March 1936), of Florence Owens Thompson at Nipomo, is an FSA photograph: a federally commissioned image designed to humanise the migrant crisis and build support for relief. It captures the displacement of agricultural families, not just urban workers.
What it represents (own knowledge): The Dust Bowl (drought from 1931, over-ploughing, Black Sunday 14 April 1935) degraded around 100 million acres and helped push around 2.5 million people off the Plains; around 200,000 "Okies" reached California, where they earned 75 cents to 1 dollar a day and lived in roadside "Little Oklahomas" and FSA camps.
The documentary response: The FSA under Roy Stryker took around 175,000 photographs (1935 to 1944); Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) carried the same story to a mass readership, shaping public sympathy and policy.
Marking criteria: 1 mark for identifying the source as an FSA documentary image; 1-2 marks for the Dust Bowl and Okie migration with evidence; 1 mark for the documentary record (Lange, FSA, Steinbeck); 1 mark for linking the source to the broader rural impact.

core5 marksSource B (paraphrased, owned): A later environmental historian argues that the Dust Bowl was not a natural disaster visited upon innocent farmers but the predictable result of a market-driven assault on a fragile grassland ecosystem - the price of treating the Plains as a factory for wheat. Using Source B and your own knowledge, assess the usefulness of this interpretation for understanding the Dust Bowl. [5 marks]

Show worked solution →

A 5-mark "assess the usefulness" question rewards origin/perspective plus own knowledge, ending in a judgement.

Perspective: Source B reflects Donald Worster's environmental-history thesis (Dust Bowl, 1979): the disaster was man-made, caused by capitalist over-exploitation of marginal land. It is useful because it corrects the popular myth of a purely natural calamity.
Corroboration from own knowledge: The record supports it: the First World War wheat boom drew farmers onto marginal southern-Plains land, tractors and the disc plough destroyed the native grasses, and only then did the 1931 to 1939 drought turn loosened soil into dust storms degrading around 100 million acres. Hugh Bennett's Soil Conservation Service (1935) explicitly targeted the farming methods, confirming a structural cause.
Limitation: By stressing the system it can understate the genuine human suffering and the role of an exceptional drought; Steinbeck and the FSA record foreground the family trauma that Worster's systemic frame can flatten.
Judgement: Highly useful for explaining causation and puncturing the "act of God" myth, but it should be read alongside the human and climatic dimensions that the documentary record preserves.
Marking criteria: 1 mark for identifying the environmental-history perspective (Worster); 1-2 marks for own knowledge corroborating the man-made causes; 1 mark for a limitation; 1 mark for a judgement on usefulness.

core6 marksAccount for the migration of around 200,000 'Okies' to California during the 1930s.

Show worked solution →

A 6-mark "account for" wants ranked, dated causes - not a narrative.

Push factors (the decisive ones): The Dust Bowl degraded around 100 million acres of southern-Plains topsoil; drought (1931 to 1939) and dust storms (peaking on Black Sunday, 14 April 1935) destroyed crops. Simultaneously, mechanisation and New Deal acreage-reduction payments (the AAA, 1933) let landowners evict tenant farmers and sharecroppers, who lost both land and livelihood.
Pull factors: California advertised for agricultural labour, and handbills promised work in the fields and orchards. US Route 66 offered a direct road west. The state's reputation as a land of plenty drew the desperate.
Why California specifically: Of around 2.5 million Plains migrants, only around 200,000 reached California - most went to nearer rural states. California's irrigated agriculture needed seasonal hands, even at 75 cents to 1 dollar a day.
Judgement: The push of ecological and economic collapse outweighed the pull: migrants left because the Plains could no longer support them, and California's advertised demand merely directed where a fraction of them went.
Marking criteria: 1-2 marks for push factors (Dust Bowl plus eviction/mechanisation); 1-2 marks for pull factors; 1 mark for the proportion reaching California; 1 mark for a ranked judgement.

exam25 marksTo what extent was the Dust Bowl a man-made rather than a natural disaster?

Show worked solution →

This is an extended-response/essay. Markers reward a sustained, evidence-based argument that addresses "to what extent" directly and weaves in historiography - not a narrative.

Band-6 PLAN

Thesis. The Dust Bowl was overwhelmingly a man-made disaster: drought was the trigger, but decades of market-driven over-ploughing created the conditions that turned a recurring climatic event into an ecological catastrophe. Nature loaded the gun; human land-use pulled the trigger.
Argument 1 - The human cause (the decisive factor). The First World War wheat boom drew farmers onto marginal southern-Plains land; tractors and the disc plough broke the deep-rooted native grasses that had anchored the soil for millennia. Evidence: Hugh Bennett's Soil Conservation Service (1935) targeted farming methods, not the weather; around 100 million acres were degraded precisely where the sod had been broken.
Argument 2 - The natural trigger (necessary but not sufficient). The drought of 1931 to 1939 was genuinely severe, and the Plains had always been semi-arid. Without the drought there would have been no dust storms. But droughts had come before without producing a Dust Bowl - the difference in the 1930s was the exposed, ploughed soil.
Argument 3 - The economic system behind both. The disaster was structural: a capitalist agriculture that treated the grassland as a wheat factory, ignored conservation, and rewarded short-term yield over long-term stewardship. The same system evicted tenant farmers via mechanisation and AAA payments.
Historiography. Donald Worster (Dust Bowl, 1979) frames it as the predictable result of capitalist over-exploitation - a man-made systemic failure. Timothy Egan (The Worst Hard Time, 2006) narrates the human cost while accepting the man-made causation. The contemporary FSA film "The Plough That Broke the Plains" (Pare Lorentz, 1936) already made the man-made case as government propaganda.
Judgement. Weigh the natural trigger (Egan's severe drought) against the human cause (Worster's broken sod): the drought was the occasion, but the catastrophe was made by human land-use. Overwhelmingly man-made.

MODEL PARAGRAPH (Argument 1)

The clearest evidence that the Dust Bowl was man-made lies in where, and why, the soil blew. The southern Plains had been semi-arid grassland for millennia, held together by deep-rooted native grasses that survived recurring droughts; what changed in the 1920s was that the wheat boom of the First World War drew farmers onto this marginal land, where tractors and the disc plough tore up the sod for a cash crop. When the drought of 1931 to 1939 arrived, there was nothing left to anchor the loosened topsoil, and around 100 million acres simply blew away in storms that peaked on Black Sunday, 14 April 1935. That the cause was human, not divine, was understood at the time: the geographer Hugh Bennett built the Soil Conservation Service (1935) around changing farming methods, not around praying for rain, and Pare Lorentz's federal film "The Plough That Broke the Plains" (1936) made the argument explicit. As Donald Worster argues in Dust Bowl (1979), the catastrophe was the predictable price of treating a fragile ecosystem as a factory for wheat.

Marker's note. A band-6 response keeps "to what extent" in view throughout - ranking the human cause against the natural trigger rather than just describing the storms - anchors every claim in dated evidence (the wheat boom, Black Sunday, the 1935 Soil Conservation Act), and sets historians in genuine relation (Worster's systemic man-made thesis alongside Egan's human narrative) before reaching a graded judgement. Narrating the storms without arguing causation caps the response in the middle bands.