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Worksheetsdust bowl
Total questions: 8
Worksheet time: 24mins
I'm a dust bowl refugee
Just a dust bowl refugee
From that dust bowl to the peach bowl
Now that peach fuzz is a-killin' me
'Cross the mountains to the sea
Come the wife and kids and me
It's a hot old dusty highway
For a dust bowl refuge
Woody Guthrie
Question: According to song lyrics, what obstacles did "dust bowl refugees" face? (check all that apply)
A hot old dusty highway
Swarms of wasps
Crossing mountains
Racism
Dry weather turned into severe droughts. Land which had once grown tall grass was now barren. Planting the same crop for so many years had robbed the soil of its nutrients
What is a drought?
An extended period of flooding
An extended period of no rain
A huge blizzard
The name of my cat
Franklin D. Roosevelt became President of the United States in 1933. He immediately went to work trying to help the farmers of the Great Plains. He poured government money into plans to help farmers save their farms. He set up the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act and Farm Credit Act to provide financing for farmers about to lose their land. This was a difficult time for everyone. The entire country was trying to recover from the Great Depression, a financial depression that left the country's economy in peril.
According to the passage, Franklin Roosevelt did all of the following to help farmers except...
Set up the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act
Set up the Credit Act
Used government to help farmers
Purchased more modern farm equipment
Many of the people of the plains left their land and headed west in search of a better life. American author John Steinbeck wrote of one such family, the Joads, in his novel, The Grapes of Wrath. The people of the Dust Bowl were not always welcome in the West. In 1936, the chief of police in Los Angeles, California, ordered over one hundred of his men to patrol the borders between California and Oregon and Nevada. It was their job to keep unwanted plains farmers out of California.
- Jane Runyon
What was the name of the novel written about the Joad family who tried to escape the Dust Bowl?
(a)
Which of the following are Great Plains states? There can be more than one answer.
Texas
Oklahoma
Kansas
Idaho
Years of severe drought had ravaged millions of acres of farmland. Many migrants were enticed by flyers advertising jobs picking crops, according to the Library of Congress. And even though they were American-born, the Dust Bowl migrants still were viewed as intruders by many in California, who saw them as competing with longtime residents for work, which was hard to come by during the Great Depression. Others considered them parasites who would depend on government relief.
- Patrick J. Kiger
According to this excerpt...
All the migrants who came California were greeted with open arms.
The migrants came to California looking for jobs picking crops.
California had many opportunities for migrants to find work.
Most of the migrants came from Oklahoma.
The Golden State was anything but welcoming to the “tired and poor” masses heading this way from Dust Bowl-ravaged states. For a few months in 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department launched a foreign excursion of sorts -- a “Bum Blockade” on the state’s borders. The LAPD deployed 136 officers to 16 major points of entry on the Arizona, Nevada and Oregon lines, with orders to turn back migrants with “no visible means of support.”
The main idea of the article is...
California is the "Golden State"
Migrants from Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon were all bums.
Migrants had no visible means of support
The LAPD tried to prevent migrants from entering California in 1936
The most visible evidence of how dry the 1930s became was the dust storm. Tons of topsoil were blown off barren fields and carried in storm clouds for hundreds of miles. Technically, the driest region of the Plains – southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas – became known as the Dust Bowl, and many dust storms started there. But the entire region, and eventually the entire country, was affected.The Dust Bowl got its name after Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. More and more dust storms had been blowing up in the years leading up to that day. In 1932, 14 dust storms were recorded on the Plains. In 1933, there were 38 storms. By 1934, it was estimated that 100 million acres of farmland had lost all or most of the topsoil to the winds. By April 1935, there had been weeks of dust storms, but the cloud that appeared on the horizon that Sunday was the worst. Winds were clocked at 60 mph. Then it hit.
"The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face," Avis D. Carlson wrote in a New Republic article. "People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk... We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real."
The day after Black Sunday, an Associated Press reporter used the term "Dust Bowl" for the first time. "Three little words achingly familiar on the Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent – if it rains." The term stuck and was used by radio reporters and writers, in private letters and public speeches.
In the central and northern plains, dust was everywhere.
According to the reading, what happened on April 14, 1935?
(a)
