Summer 1936. The Dust Bowl has just entered its fifth year. Over the previous forty months, the federal government has pumped $500,000,000 and launched hundreds of different programs to combat the worst environmental disaster in American history. Nothing worked. Agricultural experts predicted crop losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the year. The nation’s foremost ecologist was warning that the middle third of the continent could become an American Sahara. Roosevelt was worried that the Dust Bowl might become an existential threat to the entire American political economy.
Franklin Roosevelt tasked Rexford Tugwell, an original member of his Brains Trust, to solve the problem. It didn’t go well.
In recent years, historians of conservatism have pushed back the origin story of the modern right into the 1930s. The emergence of the right-wing, this school of thought argues, was a direct response the growing power and reach of a federal government that threatened the hegemony of local power structures. That’s certainly what happened in the Dust Bowl.
In this talk, historian Jeff Roche, drawing from his forthcoming book The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right, will recast three well-known New Deal Dust Bowl Projects (The Plow that Broke the Plains, the Ropesville Community, and the Great Plains Drought Committee’s The Future of the Great Plains, within this larger story of the creation of modern conservativism and demonstrate how conflicts over policy, the past, and the present helped to create the most right-wing region in the nation.
About Jeff Roche: Jeff Roche is the author and editor of four books that examine the relationships between politics and place, culture and history. They include Restructured Resistance: The Sibley Commission and the Politics of Desegregation in Georgia (1996, 2010), The Conservative Sixties with David Farber (2001), and The Political Culture of the New West (2008). His most recent book is The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right which comes out on October 7th. He is currently at work on a cultural biography of cereal magnate and anti-labor zealot C.W. Post. He received his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico and his BA and MA from Georgia State University. Since 2001, he has taught at the College of Wooster in Ohio. He is also the founder and director of the Monday Night Mile, a non-profit organization that raises money for children’s hospitals.
