Washington, Aug. 2.
Mankind has on many' occasions and in many places abused the soil which nourished him, has taken no care of it, treated it as the everlasting source of his wealth, and the soil has had its revenge. There are forgotten cities in the Gobi, buried civilizations in the Sahara, crumbling ruins in Asia Minor, all' of which teach the lesson that land cannot be treated roughly and thoughtlessly as slave but with consideration as a partner, In the United States to-day that lesson has been learned, but has it been learned too late?' Will future, years see the formation of a vast central Sahara, driving the Middle Western farmer back to the overcrowded Atlantic seaboard from which he came, or pushing him on towards the Pacific? In considering the drought problem of the United States, one fluctuates between two extremes. Is one being too imaginative and letting fancy run riot in picturing so great a disaster? Or is one refusing to recognize a possibility merely because it is so strange {hat one does not want to recognize Experts themselves disagree. Mr. J.
Kincher, chief of the division' of the weather bureau which studies climate and its effects on crops, optimistic, This year's warm wea ther, he says, Is the continuation of a cycle which has been in evidence for quarter of a century. Befler weather will probably prevail next year and the United States will enter a cycle of wet years. There reason to believe that the climate is changing permanently or that cutting down forests or ploughing up plains has any influence on climate' and Il, Its influence on the soil is, a different matter. If Mr ier is right, then what was once grass land could, if the soil were properly treated' become grass land once again and could even be farmed if the right methods, such as crop rotation, were adopted, On the other hand, the Natural Resources Committee in a survey re-eased at the height of the drought period was pessimistie:—
The fact 1s that most o€ the territory occupied by the United States not naturally "sulted for, a civilization can flash Into a blaze. of glory and then collapse in' a. few Henerations 'Into "ruin. With fertile sell and selt-renewing forests the splendour of our bankrupt cities wit become a ghastly joke. Arnles and navies. cannot defend a "nation inst' the "scourge of wind and Blunt and to the Point A statement made lost March by Mr, Hugh Bennett, director of the United States Soil' Conservation Service, was blunt and to the point, and permits no easy optimism about the future, "We have impoverished and destroyed our agricultural Jands probably faster than any other nation oF race, civilized or barbaric, in all the history of the world. Unrestrained erosion is rapidly, building a new Public Domain in America, an empire of impoverished and worn-olit land, Ind stripped of its rich surface covering, or gullied beyond the pos: sibility of practical reclamation," Mr.
The devastating droughts of 1930 1934, and 1999 may in the long ru be considered a blessing in disguise, for they have called attention to th existence of a soil conservation problem, The race is now on between Sequence 4.:—Many were disappointed os the rains failed and the sun baked the light sell. There. was fresh and the West, there was more grass further on, new land for the taking and Uiere was a new day coming.
"Sequence '6. War:—Wheat will win the war: plant wheat; plant the fcaltle ranges; wheat for the boys, over there, wheat for the allies, £0r the British, Yor. the French.
'Sequence' 6, "Speculation:—Then we reaped the golden harvest, then Feally ploughed the plains, the world was our market, but speculation led tora crash.
Sequence 7. Drought:—The rains held off and the sun baked the earth. But this time no grass held moisture gainst the wind and. the sun.
1000. The worst drought in the history of the plains.
M031, The rains" held off, the machinery rusted.
1832. No seed to plant, no land to put it in.
1893. And then the Dust Storms:—High winds whipped across once. fertile eres; death and disaster: out—blown out—and. broke: years they fought the sun and wind, watched their homes blow away until Mnally" they" left the plains thousands; nothing to, stay for. nothing to eat, nothing to hope for. Homeless, penniless, and bewildered, looking for a. stopping place, they Joined the great army of the highway.
This picture shows the immensity fof the tragedy, but it leaves the impression that man was not to blame. He was but a poor atom buffeted by fan unkind fate. Nature was. the villain, as in some primitive religion. The farmer was the victim of unkind circumstance, pursued by a relentless fate like a character in a Greek play, but with no hint of the original crime which he must expiate.
Man The Villain But man was the real villain. He wasted his substance in riotous living. He shot the buffalo for the sheer joy of shooting. He tore up the! and, intent only on what he could get from it; treasure was there for the looting, and the future could take care 2f Itself. Ask the Eastern farmer what he thinks of his brother in the Middle West. He will probably call him a soil robber, not a true farmer. He has no pigs, no garden, no chickens; nothing but his cash crop, He does not even try to feed his family from his land. He sells his crop and buys food in cans. He wastes his money on expensive Iuxuries, on radios and ears, instead of on' improvements. He borrows! lavishly and gets into debt, and then eries out for his debt to be' lightened, He has to be paid for doing what any self-respecting farmer would do naturally and instinctively, for plant ing crops which benefit the sell as well as rob it.
But whoever is to blame the situation remains, ominous and menacing. Over 200,000 families are dependent upon relict. At a recent press conference the President said that there were 570,000 farms in the emergency zone, on which 2,718,000 people were living. Recent rains brought relief and prevented the damage from being serious as in 1934, but in many places it came too late to save the crops. Drought, heat, grasshoppers and other pasis, fires, and dust storms have left the farmer in a hope-Tess situation. Seventy-five Thousand farmers have been handed picks and shovels and given work under government supervision on soil. conservation projects and cart tracks. Another 70,000 are being given direct relief and another 50,000 part relief. erosion and conservation, and the prize is the future of thie United States.
The Resettlement Administration, whose job is to move families from drought-stricken areas to more fertile spots, turned cinematograph—proneer at the beginning of the year and released a film called, "The Plough that broke the Plains." The caption headings to the ten sequences of the scenario supply in a dramatic way the background of present farm Stelking Film Sequence 1. Grass:—First there was. grass, 2 treviess wind-swept continent grass, a country of high winds and sun, without rivers, without streams, and' with witte rat 'Sequence 2, Caitle:—Then came the battle, up from the Mo Grande, in from' the rolling prairies, the cattle rolled into the old' buffalo range. An empty," inexhaustible "pasture, an lunfenced, unchartered "range," one thousand' miles Jong. Fortunes" in beef, more cattle; the railroad brought the market closer, and it brought the sheepman and the dist farmer.
Sequence. 3. The Homesteader:—The ploughman followed the herder, and the pioneer found the plains: Lana in the West, land in the last frontier, the first fence and the last of the free range.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.