American Literature reviews Dust Bowl, USA

American Literature

Marshalling an eclectic range of sources-newspaper accounts, sermons, government documents, political cartoons, folksongs and legends, paintings, and photographs- Brad Lookingbill compellingly demonstrates how Depressionera discursive and artistic responses to an ecological crisis, the North American Dust Bowl, expressed and mediated national convictions and anxieties about "the frontier," as well-as about nature, development, science, and the role of government.

Lookingbill historically situates narratives of the Dustbowl, revealing the ways they have served different groups and institutions in different historical moments. Chapter 1, "Conquest," fascinatingly details1the notion of "conquering" the frontier as it was articulated by nineteenth-century colonists and dispossessed Native Americans, progressive-era idealists, World War I era patriots, and Depression-era conservatives and liberals. The book's genealogical method produces rich understandings of particular texts and of the historical moment in which they do their cultural work. In the second chapter, "Fall," Lookingbill reads narratives in which the crisis is cast as a divine punishment for poor agricultural practice and greed. Plains ministers, journalists, poets, and painters voiced a jeremiad, a prophecy of disaster for a failing civilization. The parched earth and choking dust were materializations of a spiritual famine. The subsequent chapter, "Adjustment, " analyzes how these religiously inflected narratives were mobilized and cleverly revised by critics of New Deal policies that "adjusted" prices and crop production. These critics, among them livestock commissioners and meatpacking representatives, warned farmers, and Americans more broadly, that destroying livestock and crop reduction interfered with natural processes and violated the divine mandate to reap and sow. One Texas reverend argued that agricultural policy should be guided by the biblical story of Joseph who stored surplus crops from bumper years to provide for the lean years ahead. Another minister intoned that " [o]ne of the qualifications for office of all future secretaries of agriculture should be a sworn adherence to the agricultural program of Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel".

Subsequent chapters provide similar pleasure and insight as they turn other discourses to new frequencies of light, illuminating their many facets. Dust Bowl also examines environmentalist narratives about natural equilibrium and attempts to understand environmental crisis through scientific knowledge and manage it by technological intervention. Another chapter discusses nationalist and patriotic narratives about the agrarian "survivor" of a transient, but trying, moment.

I enjoy this book's energetic and vivid prose and admire the coherence of its arguments and the thoroughness of the research. This book will appeal to literary scholars in the way Hayden White's work does. In that tradition, Lookingbill, a historian, suggests the generic romantic and tragic conventions that have been used to tell the story of an ecological crisis wedded to a national foscal crisis, both crises associated with "modernity" for contemporarires.

American Literature