Burns does not compete in the free market. He relies on a state broadcaster to show his documentaries. While the stories of the people who lived through the Dust Bowl were interesting, there was a lot of BS New Deal Big Government nonsense in Part II.
Funny how we don’t learn from our mistakes.
A drive down California’s Interstate 5 shows the tragic results of withholding water from growers because of possible negative impact on the Snail Darter fish, which resides in our irrigation (!) canal system.
We have our own “dust bowl”, and right now. Who needs PBS to see it?
Burns is a big Obama partisan who manages to tie racism into every documentary. It will be a stretch to bring in to the Dust Bowl.
A quick bet: the documentary will repeatedly dwell on race issues alternating with blaming wealthy white business owners.
Every Ken Burns production is used as a fabian socialist race baiting exercise. It is sad because the potential is there to communicate American exceptionalism not only to Americans, but to the world.
He re-writes history.
I don’t watch PBS.
I don’t care for the man’s politics, but in this case he does a decent job of telling the story if you read through the political bias. I have an interest in 20th century history so I found this to be a useful documentary. In the end, you will see that the whole story revolves around nature doing what it does. There are fairly long periods of drought interspersed with wet periods. During the wet years the type of agriculture practiced in the early 20th century (and later) on the Plains can be sustained, as it is today by tapping the subsurface aquifer. When the wet period ends, nature does what it does, the land dries out, if there is nothing to hold it (grasslands) then it blows away.
Yep. I totally expect the state run network to include lots of pro-government propaganda in any “documentary”
Burns did get in some publicity for the FDR myth. Burns touts the the great government Ag scientists promoting better methods of soil tillage and planting barrier trees. True these mthods were helpful, but let’s face it, FDR raised marginal tax rates to 90%, continued tariffs, and increased bureaucrat rules which proloinged the depression and reduced agricultural demand and prices. The Dust bowl ended because it rained and farmers started tapping the Ogalala reservoir.
I was a child born out of the Dust Bowl. Grew up in the town that Steinbeck wrote about. Lots of my family lived in the labor camp he wrote about. Went to the school that the children of the dust bowl helped build.
Now it is illegal Mexican territory. Very sad.