THE DUST BOWL (2012) B-

Ken Burns put together a series of 2 films . . . of two hours each describing the dust storms that arose in the Midwestern United States during the late 1920's and well into the 1930's. 

Many of us have seen famous pictures of the devastation and hardship visited on the people who lived in that region. Essentially this series expanded the description of the devastation. It showed governmental agricultural and relief action taken by the Roosevelt Administration. It also showed the massive migration of the "Okies" (short for Oklahoma) from the areas of east Texas and Oklahoma to California, to gain a better life . . . when everything looked so hopeless. 

In many cases these migrants became very poor migrant farmers living from hand to mouth in shacks. The "Grapes Of Wrath" movie based on the book by John Steinbeck was about this catastrophic event. Unfortunately, the series lacked a coherent (in-depth) technical description for the creation of the dust storms, nor did if fully describe the action the federal and state governments undertook to solve the problem and make sure that it didn't return in the future. Many of us don't realize that farm subsidies started during that period of continue until today.

GRAPES OF WRATH (1940) A

A classic movie based of the Pulitzer Prize Winning Book by John Steinbeck about the dirt-poor migrants from the Dust Bowl, in Oklahoma, in the mid thirties. 

GRAPES OF WRATH was directed by Oscar-winning John Ford and starred a young Henry Fonda as ( mister every man) Tom Joad, who opens the movie by returning to his Oklahoma home after serving jail time for manslaughter. He sees that dust storms, crop failures, and new agricultural methods have financially decimated the once prosperous Oklahoma. His sharecropper family takes the harrowing trip to "the promised land" in California and finds ugly living conditions dominated by farmers who use these people ("Okies") as slaves to pick the crops.

Very socially relevant in its time, showing the the more prosperous people of United States how the agricultural industry really treats to poor and downtrodden. A key element of the movie is the universal truth that government must have a hand in some capitalist ventures where people can easily be abused if they are not organized into a union. It is still a present day message for many Americans and foreign workers overseas to fully understand. 

In the 1950's I saw a repeat of the same theme (in a different state , with different people) on a TV program called "See It Now ", produced on CBS by Edward R Murrow and Fred Friendly. Today much of the work in the fields are done by machines, but we are still living with the the problem of adequate living conditions for immigrant farmers in the United States. It is also sad that we buy cheap goods in the US burdened by the abused laborers in foreign countries.