59 pages • 1 hour read
Timothy EganThe Worst Hard Time
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Triage”
This chapter explains another provision of the Agricultural Adjustment Act: paying High Plains settlers to slaughter their animals. Through animal slaughter FDR hopes to reduce the food surplus and keep meat prices stable. As the title of this chapter suggests, government men must select which animals are too sick (and those will be left to rot), and which animals are healthy enough to go to the local slaughterhouses. High Plains residents like Bam White get two dollars a day for shooting cattle.
The chapter also discusses the on-going problem with the dust storms. In January of 1934, there are four dust storms in the southern plains, “followed by seven in February, seven in March, fourteen in April [...] four in May, two in June and July, one in August, six in September, two in October, three in November, and four in December” (153).Egan tells how the constant dust storms are becoming too familiar and tiresome for Americans outside of the Dust Bowl to hear and read about anymore. However, this detached attitude changes in May of 1934, when a black duster sweeps across the country. The duster starts in the Dakotas and Montana, moves through Ohio, covers Chicago and by morning falls over Boston and finally arrives in New York City, covering the Statue of Liberty with topsoil.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Long Darkness”
This chapter centers around major events happening in 1934.
Egan opens with the story with Hazel Lucas Shaw having her baby, but losing it to dust pneumonia. A few hours later, her beloved grandmother, Loumiza, dies with a lingering, hacking cough just like Shaw's baby (169). During this same time period, Shaw finds an abandoned baby (that also dies of dust pneumonia) in a coffee-box across the street from her house, on the church steps.
1934 is the driest year to date in the Dust Bowl. The drought is described through the Ehrlich family: “The Ehrlichs had established themselves with a typical homestead–160 acres [...] Nearly all of it was gone, reduced to a barren patch in the dun-colored air around the Texas-Oklahoma border” (164).
Egan shows how families like the Ehrlichs try to survive by living off their land. Ehrlich saves hog fat for candles and lye soap and makes a solution to help preserve the hog, which he injects into the pig with a syringe. Once the pig is treated with the solution, Ehrlich hangs it in the basement. “They ate everything but the squeal,” Egan comments (164). Other people in the Dust Bowl, like some Dalhart residents, eat at a soup kitchen, or wait for the sheriff to hand out road kill.
1934 is also the year FDR offers the wheat farmers contracts to not plant crops the following year. More than twelve hundred wheat farmers in No Man's Land sign up for contracts: “Thus was born a subsidy system that grew into one of the untouchable pillars of the federal budget” (158).
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Struggle for Air”
The dust storms continue. Ike Osteen's family experiences a dust storm that blocks the sun for four days, and they retreat to the dugout for three of those days. Osteen sees electrical currents pulsing on a windmill, and a friend of Osteen's tells how he saw a jackrabbit electrocuted in front of his eyes.
The Red Cross declares the Dust Bowl a medical crisis in 1935 because of the constant dusters. (Beaver County, Oklahoma alone records 300 people diagnosed with dust pneumonia.)Ike Osteen continues riding to school on a mule that stumbles for miles over high sand dunes, and when Osteen arrives, the school is closed due to the weather. He signs up for the senior play, but the play is called off because the Red Cross needs the school gym as one of six emergency hospitals in the area. A classmate of his dies of dust pneumonia.
The Red Cross distributes masks to prevent other children from being infected, but the masks keep getting clogged up with dirt, so the Red Cross has to improvise with special sponges that people could breathe through, which the general store keeps selling out of. Doctors in the Dust Bowl see cases of silicosis (inflammation of the lung's air sacs from the silica in sand, rock, and mineral ore) in patients after just three years, which concerns the doctors because they know this disease usually takes much longer to build up in similar cases, such as with those involving coal miners. Thousands of patients have the same symptoms: coughing jags, body aches (especially chest pains), and shortness of breath. Many die within days of their diagnosis. One doctor's patient dies within just a few hours of his visit.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
Dust Bowl residents are beginning to feel powerless and defiant with all the environmental crises, farm foreclosures, and bank closings that take people's life savings. One example of rebellion is Hazel Lucas Shaw, who “put on her white gloves at the dinner table–a small act of defiance [of the dust] that seemed both silly and brave” (137).Shaw's grandmother, Loumiza, who was one of the original Lucas homesteaders, says she has never seen the land so “mean-edged” (169). Loumiza, a widow, has now lost all her energy because of constant hacking coughing fits. Egan cites a poem by Bonnie Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde, written when Bonnie sensed her death was near. Egan claims that the poem “contributed to their heroic stature among some people in No Man's Land [because] they robbed banks, just as the banks had robbed people” (166). Perhaps the strongest act of defiance Egan reveals is how High Plains residents refuse to follow the Red Cross's advice not to go outside: “Despite the Red Cross warning, people had to go outside. They loved outdoors; the outdoors lived with them. It was one and the same” (175).
Dust Bowl farmers, however, are not resisting government hand-outs as they once did. Egan explains how farmers who once believed government hand-outs were immoral have now changed their minds: “The defiance, evident at the start of the Depression when the county proudly turned down relief, was gone” (168). Dust Bowl residents are shifting from self-reliance to dependence on the government. In these chapters, farmers even go so far as to hold a meeting with 1,500 attendees who sign a distress telegram and send it to FDR asking for jobs: “It was something these nesters never thought they would do–beg” (141). Fred Folkers' reaction to the government's plan to pay the farmers to slaughter their farm animals to reduce the meat surplus is now “Okay, fine by me,” and “Hazel Lucas's uncle, C.C. agreed it was probably the only way to get a dollar to keep the homestead going” (147).
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