ABSTRACT
“Vast clouds of dust rise and roll across the Great Plains,” wrote Paul Schuster Taylor in that seminal Survey Graphic article for July 1935, his prose enhanced by Dorothea Lange’s photographs. 1 “Exposed by cultivation which killed the protecting grasses, and powdered by protracted drought, the rich topsoil is being stripped from tens of thousands of acres by wind erosion, leaving land and life impoverished.” Powerfully struck by this theme, a young documentary film maker, who had already tried and failed to sell Hollywood on a movie about the Depression, straight-away took new heart and began to plan his own epic statement of the Dust Bowl. To this day Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains is the best remembered, most often shown and cited documentary movie about the American Great Depression. Yet it would have virtually nothing to say about economics or politics, and everything about the natural catastrophes of drought and dust.
