The Plow That Broke the Plains is a 1936 short documentary film that shows the cultivation of the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada following the Civil War and leading up to the Dust Bowl as a result of exploitation of the Great Plains' natural resources. while the music score was written by composer Virgil Thomson. The film was narrated by the American actor and baritone Thomas Hardie Chalmers.

In 1999, The Plow That Broke the Plains was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Background

The initial inspiration for The Plow That Broke the Plains came from Pare Lorentz's desire to make a film on the New Deal that would provide Americans with a fresh look at their country. Lorentz became particularly interested in the drought and dust storms of the early thirties which inspired him to write a lengthy piece on the Dust Bowl for Newsweek. In 1935, Rexford Tugwell, the head of the Resettlement Administration, initially recruited Pare Lorentz as a film consultant as part of the Resettlement Administration staff, because the agency administrators were interested in creating a film about the Dust Bowl. The Director of Information for the Resettlement Administration John Franklin Carter asked Lorentz if he thought a motion picture could be used to interpret the general objectives of the Resettlement Administration which included: improvement of impoverished farm families, prevention of waste due to improper land use, structured utilization of land resources, recultivation of worn out and submarginal land, and relocation of families. Following Lorentz agreement to focus on land use and misuse and an estimate that the film could be produced with six-thousand dollars, Tugwell put his support behind the production of a film about the Dust Bowl. Additionally, the film was also to align with the goals of the Resettlement Administration and would explain the causes of the Dust Bowl, while also making a strong case for resettling destitute farmers, retiring marginal farmland from production, and restoring the grasslands in the West.

In a review of his own film, Lorentz commented in McCall's Magazine that he had two primary objectives: To show the audience an exciting portion of the country and to portray the events that led to "one of the major catastrophes in American history," the Great Drought and the Dust Bowl.

Lorentz's depiction differed from other portrayals of the Great Plains region. While photographers tended to emphasize the people of the plains as blameless victims, and mural artists emphasized the glorious past of the pioneer, Lorentz wanted to present the environmental tale of the Plains as one of decline and refused to see the dust storms as a natural disaster, instead depicting these events as human-created tragedies.

The Plow That Broke the Plains also had the benefit of promoting New Deal programs and as President Roosevelt indicated to Lorentz himself, softening the public for subsequent New Deal measures related to public works and health. Because the film was also released during an election year, it was bound to also generate political rancor.

Following the scenes showing extensive plowing and harvesting, the film cuts to images of dried land, animal bones, and abandoned farm equipment. The narrator again states that the rain did not come and the sun-baked millions of acres of plowed land, with footage of arid plains. As a result of this desertification, massive dust storms swept across the plains, causing people to take shelter, with homes buried under the dust. The narrator states that "once again they headed West," referring to the settlers losing hope and migrating in search of better opportunities. Within the final sequence, the narrator exclaims "Four hundred million acres the Great Plains seemed inexhaustible yet in 50 years we turned a part of it into a Dust Bowl" and continues to list the factors that led to the Dust Bowl, such as too many cattle and sheep, plowed lands that should have been left untouched, removal of native grasses to hold soil, and farm machines that made it easy for a single person to plow many acres. The narrator continues to explain that the federal government has been working to salvage whatever land is left and restore it through New Deal initiatives including the Soil Conversation Service, Forest Service, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, while the Resettlement Administration worked to resettle the stranded farmers. The viewer is left with one last message from the narrator who warns that conservation is necessary in order to save the rest of the plains and that "another decade of reckless use, and the grasslands will truly be the great American desert." On September 3, Lorentz secured cameramen Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, and Leo Hurwitz, each with experience in documentary film production and influenced by the work of Soviet filmmakers. This resulted in Steiner, Strand, and Hurwitz creating their own script that voiced their own political positions that indicted capitalism, human greed, and a "lousy social system" for the devastation of the Great Plains and its residents.

Controversies

Distribution

Because government regulation forbade commercial theaters from charging admission to see the film, theater owners felt that the government was attempting to use them to distribute propaganda. Following the end of the U.S. Film Service, American film efforts were run solely by Hollywood.

See also

  • Pare Lorentz
  • Virgil Thomson
  • The River (1938)
  • Farm Security Administration
  • Rain follows the plow

References

;Media

  • The Plow that Broke the Plains video at YouTube

;Other

  • The Plow That Broke the Plains essay [https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/plow_broke.pdf] by Dr. Robert J. Snyder at National Film Registry
  • Reaping the Golden Harvest - University of Virginia
  • The Plow that Broke the Plains - University of Virginia
  • The Plow that Broke the Plains review - American Music Preservation
  • The Plow That Broke the Plains essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 , pages 242-243 [https://books.google.com/books?id=deq3xI8OmCkC]
  • U.S. Film Service, Living New Deal