Word: drought
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last week the idea had become so widespread among hard-hit farmers that God was afflicting them with the drought for a purpose that Secretary of Agriculture Wallace was moved to speak out: "Yes, the drought is serious. But there is one angle which has a touch of the grotesque. That is the attempt to persuade farmers that the Lord is punishing them for reducing acreage...
...outdated optimism. The potato crop in upper New York State, in New Jersey, on Long Island was suffering severely. Massachusetts had to close all its forests to the public because of the fire hazard. On the Pacific Coast the fruit crop had already suffered considerably. In April and May drought had been a local disaster. In July it was a national catastrophe...
...Punishment? The Press carried practically no reports of drought conditions in the Dakotas because the Dakotas no longer had any crops to lose. Yet one of the most talked of articles of the day concerned this new U. S. Sahara and appeared last fortnight in the Saturday Evening Post. Not sensational, it was a piece of excellent reporting by Morris Markey. He began: ''This is written from a small town in South Dakota. ... It has not rained in this town for eleven months. . . . In every direction the fields go off to the horizon, brown and full of dust...
...last week over 40,000 cattle were unloaded in Chicago's stock yards. Half of them belonged to the Federal Government-emaciated beasts shipped from drought-stricken farms where neither food nor water was left for them (see above). As they were driven down the chutes from the cars some wobbled weakly. They were shot and their skinny carcasses dragged away for conversion into tallow and fertilizer...
...Government, trying to save the cattle of drought-stricken farmers, the partial loss of the great Chicago stock yards as a shipping point was serious. For the packing houses it was less serious. Even in ordinary times the packers buy some hogs direct from concentration points in the cattle country. Shipments of "direct" cattle, private and Government owned, continued and soon began to increase. Chicago's commission men, who normally receive the bulk of the cattle and over half the hogs on consignment at the stock yards, virtually shut up shop. Their own livestock handlers would have struck...