Word: drought
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...time he reached Des Moines for his meeting with Alf Landon (see col. 3), President Roosevelt had seen the worst of the Drought. Rolling East next day into the mild Drought belt, he stopped at Hannibal, Mo. to help dedicate a Mark Twain Memorial bridge across the Mississippi. At Springfield, Ill. for Drought talks with Illinois officials, a telephone talk with Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau gave him occasion to declare: "The obligations of the Government-of the United States-are on a sounder basis of credit than ever before in history...
Last week when Franklin Roosevelt's special train rolled into Bismarck, N. Dak. in the course of its travels through the drought area, it also rolled into a story which brought nationwide attention to a smalltown newspaper. Aboard the Presidential Pullmans were placed scores of copies of the Fargo (N. Dak.) Forum, whose front page displayed a strange yarn. Because a corps of the nation's nimblest newshawks were also on the train, Republican editors throughout the land were soon rubbing their hands over a dispatch which, on quick reading, seemed to convict the New Deal...
...Resettlement Administration publicity photograph of parched and cracking soil, a dusty skyline, a steer's skull lying in the foreground. The picture was taken by the RA's able Cameraman Arthur Rothstein and had been widely used by the U. S. Press as a sample of the drought in the Dakotas. Of this "gem among phony pictures," the Fargo Forum declared: "There never was a year that this scene couldn't be produced in North Dakota, even in years when rain- fall levels were far above normal. What we see here is a typical alkali flat, left...
Promptly the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune swung into action on the story, ordered its Washington Bureau to dig in the RA publicity files for confirmation. Next day the Herald Tribune frontpaged an article about three other Rothstein "drought pictures," in at least two of which the same steer's skull had apparently been used for dramatic effect. One print was labeled "Drought Victim," giving the distinct impression that the steer had just been laid low by the weather. Another was located in "the Bad Lands" which no farmer in his right mind would attempt to cultivate...
Retorted the doughty little Fargo Forum: "Especially revealing! . . . Last May we did not have a drought either in Pennington County, in South Dakota or elsewhere in this area...