Kristin Hannah's novel, The Four Winds, published in 2021, is a fine book on the Dust Bowl years in America's Heartland.
I like the book for two reasons. First, Hannah's description of what it was like to live on a Dust Bowl farm is harrowingly accurate. I wasn't born until after the Great Depression, but my mother grew up on a farm in northwestern Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl years. Her description of that time confirms the accuracy of Hannah's narrative.
My grandfather had a small herd of cows but no forage. Finally, he was forced to sell them to the government for a pittance.
To reduce the glut in cattle, government shooters came onto the family farm, gathered up grandfather's cows, and shot them. My mother saw that happen, and she remembers a line of cars filled with scavengers who followed the shooters and harvested the meat.
My mother's family often went to bed hungry. The drought made it impossible to grow a vegetable garden, and their fruit trees died for lack of water.
My grandfather came to Oklahoma from Nebraska in a covered wagon, and he prospered for a few years when the price of wheat was high. He owned three horse-drawn harvesting machines. I remember those old relics rusting away in front of his home.
As a child, I imagined those machines as Christopher Columbus's ships: the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria. And I remember walking through one of my grandfather's pastures. No cows; nothing but sagebrush and sand.
The Great Depression broke my grandfather's spirit. He spent his last days sitting in a rocking chair and masticating Swisher Sweet cigars like chewing tobacco. I don't recall ever having a conversation with him.
I also liked Hannah's book for its description of the reception the Dust Bowl refugees got when they migrated to California. My mother's family stuck it out, but over a quarter of a million Oklahomans migrated to California in the 1930s.
Californians tried to keep them out, and when they got in anyway, California's big landowners hired them to pick fruit, vegetables, and cotton for starvation wages. Whole families worked all day just to buy their daily food.
Any review of Four Winds must include a comparison with John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Both books have a feminist theme. Elsa Martinelli, Hannah's protagonist, goes to California as a single mother with two children. By the novel's end, Elsa becomes radicalized and helps organize a farm workers' strike.
In The Grapes of Wrath, Ma Joad assumes the leadership of her extended family after the menfolk break under the strain of their flight to California. When the going gets really tough, Steinbeck implies, you gotta rely on the women to survive,
Every American should read The Grapes of Wrath and The Four Winds to understand rural Americans' desperate lives during the 1930s. They should also see John Ford's epic movie, The Grapes of Wrath, which won two Academy Awards in 1941.
It is fashionable today to view all Americans living in the Heartland as "white Christian Nationalists" who have prospered by exploiting people of color. Of course, that's not true. Most people in Flyover Country work hard, practice their religion, and lead modest lives.
Moreover, the descendants of the Dust Bowl refugees claim a heritage of suffering, exploitation, and unbearable hardship--as harsh as any American has suffered in the twentieth century--regardless of color. This is my heritage, and I'm proud of it.
