Month: January 2020

The “Dust Bowl” is a term used both to describe the drought and dust storms of the 1930’s, and the Great Plains area in which it occurred. While the drought itself was an unavoidable natural disaster, its effects were greatly exacerbated by human activities, namely irresponsible agricultural practices.

    This is clear in the Dust Bowl’s conditions. After all, as awful as a decade-long series of droughts and high winds might be, it doesn’t account for the “black blizzards,” as they were called, storms that picked up Great Plains topsoil and carried it as far as New York. Dust storms, it’s true, were and are a thing, but never to this magnitude. That’s because, among other things, there’s just not enough loose topsoil to throw around. It’s estimated that as many as three million tons of topsoil blew off of the Great Plains during the infamous “Black Sunday” storm, and that was only one occurence.

    So why was there so much topsoil? That’s where human error and farming practices come into play. You see, one of the benefits of the native grasses that grew in the Plains is that they had deep roots that held the soil in place. But when settlers came and cultivated the land, they dug up those grasses in favor of other crops, like wheat. Increased demand for those other crops during World War I encouraged farmers to plow more land that had once been grassland, so that they could plant more, and when the prices for the crops they now had surpluses of dropped again, they plowed even more so that they could plant enough to make a profit. As a result, when the droughts hit and the crops died, there were no native grasses to stop the soil from blowing away.

    At some point, all of the best farmland was in use, and when the farmers kept on cultivating land, they had to move to poorer growing space. Unfortunately, “farming submarginal lands often had negative results, such as soil erosion and nutrient leaching.” (National Drought Mitigation Center) Other practices, such as using the new one-way disc plow, which increased the risk of blowing soil, and the abandonment of soil conservation measures in the interest of saving time and money, also greatly contributed to the environmental damage done prior to the droughts of the Dust Bowl. This damage, in turn, provided the means — that is to say, the dry, nutrient-depleted, loose dirt in abundance — for the catastrophic effects of what would otherwise have been little more than a severe dry spell.

    The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, bringing an official end to the conflict between Germany and the Allies. Unfortunately, by forcing Germany to shoulder most, if not all, of the blame for the war, the War Guilt Clause (Article 231) placed a heavy burden upon the German people.  The Treaty of Versailles had the opportunity to be a new beginning for all involved parties, regardless of where they stood during the war, and instead was used as the means by which the Allied Powers exacted revenge on Germany. This compulsion to act out of anger and selfishness, not compassion and mutual beneficialism, became a direct cause of another conflict only twenty years down the road.

The treaty was supposed to be a step towards a lasting peace, at least according to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. His plans “called for an immediate end to the war, the establishment of an international peacekeeping organization, international disarmament, open diplomacy, the explicit disavowal of war, and independence for formerly colonial territories.” (Khan Academy) This, though I cannot speak to how well or for how long it would have worked, would have been, at the very least, an attempt to pick themselves up, put the past behind them, and work together for a better future.

Britain and France did not approve of this approach. There were multiple reasons for this, but the foremost was that they were angry. Where America had been fighting “Over There” (song composed by George M. Cohan in 1917) and for less than a year, the French and British had been fighting close to home, if not in their own territory, for four years. They had lost men, supplies, buildings, and land, and they wanted Germany to pay for it. Germany was forced to give up its territories, drastically downsize its military, and, quite literally, pay the expenses. The total bill of reparations came out to a whopping $60 billion dollars, what would be over $760 billion today. A decade later this sum would be reduced to something slightly more reasonable, $30 billion dollars, but the damage was already done.

With reparations to pay and not nearly enough money to pay them with, the German government, then changed to the Weimar Republic, started printing deutschmarks (their currency at the time). Unfortunately, this had a reverse effect as the nation went into a state of hyperinflation and the value of the deutschmark plummeted, bringing the Weimar economy with it. To quote the History.com article on the Weimar Republic, “An underground bartering economy was established to help people meet their basic needs.” That alone should indicate how bad things were.

Regardless of Germany’s past actions, this should have been the point where the international community stepped in and did something to help. There is no excuse for willfully neglecting the welfare of an entire civilian population, yet the Allies did so for a whole generation. Even when they did act — which, admittedly, they did — their focus was on the reparations and resuming the payments, not on the suffering of the German people.

Between their loss in the war, their economic collapse, and the seeming indifference of their neighbors to their suffering, it should not be surprising that in their anger and desperation the German people turned to extremism, looking for new leadership and a semblance of hope. As Sarah Pruitt wrote, “Due to lasting resentment of the Versailles Treaty, the National Socialist (Nazi) Party and other radical right-wing parties were able to gain support… by promising to overturn its harsh provisions and make Germany into a major European power once again.”

As I hope I have made clear, the Treaty of Versailles, by its focus on revenge rather than rationality, was a direct cause of both Hitler’s rise to power and the Second World War, and while the treaty itself was necessary, many of its contents, particularly Article 231, the War Guilt Clause, were inevitably detrimental to not only Germany, but the whole of the international community.