There may have been, Burns says, “more folly in the real estate boom,” since the homesteaders in the 20s and 30s weren’t buying homes to flip them, and “all of a sudden, everybody was being told, ‘it won’t cost you anything.'” The plains farmers, by contrast, were pursuing an older American dream, that of working with the long-range goal in mind. “One’s instantaneous,” Burns says, “and the other is if you work hard, you will be rewarded.”
Ken Burns, during the Sunday session devoted to his new documentary film, “The Dust Bowl,” at the 2012 Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour.
Ken Burns calls the Dust Bowl, the calamitous drought that parched the plains during the Great Depression, “the greatest man-made ecological disaster in American history.”
After watching Burns’ latest documentary film, “The Dust Bowl,” the two-part, four-hour film, coming to PBS Nov. 18-19, it’s impossible to argue the point.
Today, Day 2 of the 2012 Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour, was highlighted by a fascinating session devoted to the film. Burns was joined onstage by Dayton Duncan, who wrote the excellent script for the documentary, and has a companion volume coming out in the fall; author/journalist Timothy Egan, who is interviewed in the film and wrote his own history of the era, “The Worst Hard Time”; and the elegant and eloquent Dust Bowl survivor, Cal Crabill, who’s in his late 80s.
Clips of the documentary gave a taste of the film’s power: survivors of the Dust Bowl, now elderly, recalled what it was like being engulfed in dust storms so massive they looked like moving mountain ranges as they blew in across the barren land. Not for nothing were the storms called “black blizzards,” and photographs from the era illustrate why — during daytime, the incoming dust clouds turned the skies a terrifying black.
[…]
