Capitalism Causing Chaos

A detailed Summary of Capitalism Causing Chaos

Donald Worster wrote about the causes of both the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression in his appropriately titled book, The Dust Bowl. In his book, Worster explains how the two disastrous events were actually connected by one major cause - - capitalism.

As immigrants poured into American society in the early 1900s, the cities became more inhabitable, forcing many to move further inland. The relocation was not just to help supply the new immigrants with places to live, but with places to work as well. Worster explains this by stating that "What brought them to the region was a social system, a set of values, and an economic order. There is no word that so fully sums up those elements as "capitalism" " (5). Due to the cities on the coast harboring almost all of the industrial commerce circulating within the United States, it became vital that those that moved inland produce the majority of the agricultural commerce.

Once in the Southern Plains of America, those involved in the growing businesses of agriculture began looking at the land as a commodity to be bought or sold and like the stock market, would eventually be manipulated. "Like American agriculturists elsewhere, he [plainsman] increasingly began to view farming

was no great difference. In each situation diehard optimists were sure that it could not happen, then were equally sure that it would not last long and in each there were people who failed to survive. Whether they lost their jobs in Depression cutbacks following the crash or their farms to blowing dirt, the effect could be the same: as shattered moral, an eroded sense of worth, a loss of the future . . . Linking the two disasters was a shared cause - a common economic culture, in factories and on farms, based on unregulated private capitalist seeking its own unlimited increase. (44)

and ranching as businesses, objects of which were not simply to make a living, but to make money"(6). The agricultural commerce of the Southern Plains developed just as the factories of the industrial commerce did across the nation; quickly, hastily and without regulation. "Plains operators . . . ignored all environmental limits in this enterprise, just as wall street ignored sharp practices and a top heavy economy" (7). The fields were being plowed heavily, without rest. This practice exhausted the land and drained it of all its nutrients and unfortunately this was done without haste. The mentality of the plainsmen was ideally that the more crops they produced, the more money they would earn. The lack of regulation in commercial farming left the plainsmen starving for more profit, depriving th

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Approximate Word count = 937
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History