Word: drought
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Sirs: I am getting distinctly fatigued with all the furor, perpetrated by the well-meaning uninformed and the less altruistic, dues-collecting labor agitators, about the sad plight of the ill-fed, downtrodden sharecropper [TIME, June 29]. Aside from exceptional and infrequent disastrous years of severe drought, floods and the like (and this merely goes to prove the rule), a farmer cannot be starved to death on the ground. Having been reared on a plantation, I know that the majority of tenants absolutely will not raise a garden on the plot always provided free of charge unless the landlord...
After an abnormally dry spring throughout all the 24 leading agricultural States, with week after week of drying wind and blazing sun, everyone was talking of 1934, the year of the Great Drought. In both 1930 and 1934, reported the U. S. Weather Bureau, "the situation was not nearly so critical at the end of June. . . . Pasture lands, hay, oats, spring wheat and truck crops have been hardest hit. Very little pasture is now available between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains. . . . Livestock shipments are becoming heavy because there is no pasture or water...
Secretary of Agriculture Wallace predicted that the drought would be worse than that of 1934 unless rain came before July 20. "I would say," said he, starting West on a tour of inspection, "that the situation today looks as bad as it did in 1934, when Congress voted us $500,000,000 to meet the emergency...
...western North and South Dakota, east ern Montana and Wyoming, it looked as if there would be no crops at all. And the drought was getting steadily worse in Oklahoma, western Arkansas, northern Tennessee, southern Kentucky. The Government, declared the President, was ready to pour out unlimited amounts of WPA, AAA, Resettlement Administration and Surplus Commodities Corporation money to relieve stricken farmers...
Swinging through the Northwest, WPAdministrator Harry Hopkins declared the drought in some areas to be "much worse" than in 1934. WPAdministrators in the five worst-hit States - Minnesota, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas - were ordered to begin Relief jobs for up to 50,000 destitute farmers at once...