This paper evaluates Donald Worster's environmental history Dust Bowl against the historiographical standards set out by Edward Hallett Carr in What is History? Beginning with Carr's three key principles — that historians must interpret facts, that historians themselves must be understood as social beings, and that history involves ongoing causal analysis — the paper examines how well Worster's account of the 1930s southern plains disaster meets those criteria. While Worster brings strong academic credentials and firsthand geographic familiarity to the subject, the paper argues that his passionate environmentalism leads him to impose ideological determinism, attributing blame to capitalism and human agency in ways that distort rather than illuminate historical causation.
In his book What is History?, Edward Hallett Carr (1961) defines history in a way that has perhaps been lost in contemporary practice. Our perspectives on history have been shaped by modern reporting of facts as they relate to events, but, as Carr succinctly points out — quoting, he thinks, one of Pirandello's characters — "a fact is like a sack: it won't stand up till you've put something in it" (p. 9). In other words, historians can give us the facts, but until they lend perspective to those facts, the facts do not stand up; they do not become events worthy of discussion. Based on the facts, a reader can either agree or disagree with the historian's perspective. This is Carr's standard, and it is a good one, because it provides the reader of history with points to consider and stimulates critical thinking. That reader arrives at his or her own conclusions — whether in support of or contrary to the historian's — and it is this process that keeps the analysis and dialogue of the past alive in the present.
This does not mean that we must be a backward-looking society, but rather that we take the lessons learned from the past forward with us. There is no need to reinvent the wheel in concept, because the facts of how the wheel operates do not change. We can, however, improve upon that wheel — make it stronger so that it goes further and lasts longer.
As Carr argues, we know only the historical facts, but the facts alone do not provide insight into how and why those facts should be important to us as a society. Without the explanations of those who lived in the time and place of the events, and of those who were the decision-makers and driving forces behind them, we are left without the relevant context. Unless these individuals recorded their decision-making processes and explained their perceptions of what was occurring, we cannot know their thinking. We have many facts about historical times, dates, and events through surviving documents, but we do not always have the perspectives needed to place the mindset of the people involved in proper context (pp. 17–18). Furthermore, documents analyzed even by people who were present in the lives of key historical figures do not necessarily reflect the understanding of the person who was the driving force behind events (p. 18).
Carr uses the example of Stresemanns Vermächtnis, a book by Bernhardt, secretary to the former Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic. The Foreign Minister died leaving behind 300 boxes of documents related to his service, which Bernhardt then used to write three volumes detailing — from his close perspective — the events, people, places, and times he believed were significant to the Foreign Minister's work (p. 16).
When Hitler came to power, the original books by Bernhardt were destroyed, but the original documents survived and were preserved when the United States and Britain copied them for research and made them available to the public (pp. 17–18). The original book was also translated by a well-known translator, Sutton; however, Sutton translated only about two-thirds of the book, meaning that Sutton — after Bernhardt — decided which events and which of Bernhardt's perspectives on those events would be included or excluded from the translated edition (p. 18).
Carr's point is that the historian inevitably puts his own perspective into play. Certainly neither Bernhardt nor Sutton knew the mind of the Foreign Minister; although Bernhardt had better insight into the Minister's decisions and perspective, Sutton lacked insight into either Bernhardt's editorial process or the Foreign Minister's thinking, yet produced a "condensed" version of Bernhardt's book (p. 18). What we receive from history is therefore often not the perspective of the person directly involved, but the perceptions and interpretations of a historian at one or more removes from the events. Carr's point is not only to demonstrate this, but also to show that many different perspectives could have been brought to bear on the Foreign Minister's life and career — and none of them would have come directly from the Foreign Minister himself. Events might be reported accurately, but the analysis and conclusions drawn from documents about those events would be informed, correctly, by Bernhardt's proximity; not necessarily by the actual thoughts of the Foreign Minister — and certainly not in the case of Sutton's condensed version.
Nonetheless, historical documents and events should be analyzed, and the historian's conclusions, grounded in factual documents, serve to compel readers toward further research. Inevitably, questions will go unanswered in the reader's mind, yet the reader needs the historian's analysis to create a point of comparison, to generate new ideas, and to inspire different perspectives on the events the documents represent.
From this scenario, Carr also argues that we should study not just history but also the historian, because the historian is a social being engaged in a social inquiry. As Carr writes: "The reciprocal process of interaction between the historian and his facts, what I have called the dialogue between present and past, is a dialogue not between abstract and isolated individuals, but between the society of today and the society of yesterday . . . The past is intelligible to us only in the light of the present; and we can fully understand the present only in the light of the past" (p. 69).
Carr's third key point concerns the argument that nothing can be learned from history because history is not science and cannot lead to "future prediction" (p. 86). This argument is further complicated, Carr notes, when we introduce the figure of the historian-moralist (p. 96). Carr holds that it is impossible to derive concrete lessons for the future from history in the manner of scientific laws; rather, history and its analysis constitute an ongoing, living process, always presented through the insight and experiences of the present. The historian, Carr says, is a scientist who is always asking the question "Why?" (p. 112). We look backward, but we should always move forward — and move forward with a perspective that is always bringing the past up to date. This happens when the historian rigorously analyzes causation (pp. 113–143).
History as a process, Carr writes, begins when "men begin to think of the passage of time not in terms of natural processes — the cycle of the seasons, the human life span — but of a series of specific events in which men are consciously involved and which they can consciously influence" (p. 178).
These are the standards by which Carr explains what history is. As we can see, the past lives on as historians continually revisit, analyze, and then posit conclusions for others to consider. What is historically relevant reflects the mindset of the historian in support of conclusions drawn from a study of documents, events, places, times, and people. What is not acceptable is any attempt to eradicate facts so that they can no longer be analyzed. Facts are the building blocks of history; it is the human factor that continues to evolve history in the present. History begins with the facts of the past but evolves through the human condition of each historian who reviews those facts. If we attempt to obliterate the facts, the past will cease to make sense to us as it pertains to the human condition.
If we begin Donald Worster's Dust Bowl by observing Carr's standards, we should first seek to understand Worster as the historian. Worster's brief biography as a lecturer reads:
"Donald Worster is Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Professor of History at [University]. He received a BA in 1963 and an MA in 1964 from [University]. He continued his education at [University], earning an MPhil in 1970 and a PhD in 1971. Dr. Worster's research, lecturing, and teaching fields include the environmental history of North America and the world, the American West, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history. He has held teaching appointments at [University], [University], and [University]. He serves on the boards of several environmental organizations. His publications include An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West (1994); The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (1993); Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977); and A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (2001). He is currently working on a biography of John Muir, to be published by Oxford University Press."1
Worster's credentials reveal him to be well educated in the subject matter he covers in Dust Bowl. He is a scholar whose interest in environmental history — especially as it focuses on those areas of the country where his own life experiences were shaped — would have familiarized him with the geography and environments of Kansas and Oklahoma. Worster's ability to relate firsthand to the environment he describes enhances his credibility; combined with his academic and professional accomplishments, we can be confident that he brings a strong basis of understanding to his subject.
Worster begins his book by introducing the area he knows well — the Dust Bowl of the high plains of America — where, he writes, one of the darkest moments in America's twentieth century descended upon the landscape with all the lack of forethought and environmental ignorance that mankind could muster (p. 4). Only two other environmental events in world history can be compared to the environmental damage done to the landscape: "the deforestation of China's uplands about 3000 B.C." (p. 4) and "the destruction of the Mediterranean vegetation by livestock" (p. 4). These are Worster's conclusions, drawn from research and posited from his own perspective. There are certainly readers who might add to that list the deforestation of the South American rainforest, Chernobyl, and any number of other environmental disasters inflicted by mankind upon the natural world.
Worster goes on to argue that the Dust Bowl disaster cannot be ascribed to illiteracy, overpopulation, or social disorder (p. 4). However, one might note that the Great Depression, within which Worster frames the context of the Dust Bowl, could itself be characterized as a condition of social disorder. As he observes, the Dust Bowl coincided with the Great Depression of the 1930s, when much of America was impoverished and out of work following the stock market crash (p. 5). Worster does not treat these as two separate events but as "part of the same crisis" (p. 5). It should be noted that historians have traditionally treated the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression as distinct events, even though the displacement caused by the Dust Bowl swelled the ranks of the unemployed — Worster estimates three million additional Americans (p. 10) — as residents of affected states migrated elsewhere in search of work to support their families.
Here we might surmise that Worster is expressing a conclusion shaped by a passionate environmental morality — one that imposes the primacy of the environment over the primacy of mankind. On the one hand, Worster contends that the Dust Bowl was not the result of mankind's illiteracy; on the other, the farmers who contributed to the disaster through poor planning and the uncritical adoption of technology during drought were plainly bereft of modern agricultural knowledge — otherwise they would not have ploughed drought-dried fields in a landscape unprotected by trees and other vegetation that might have helped prevent the catastrophe that followed.
Worster begins his book with an indication of the strong personal views that will shape his analysis, quoting R. H. Tawney: "if the historian eschews the word, he may also ignore the fact" (p. 5). He concludes his introduction with a passage that should be read as an explicit statement of the perspective informing his interpretation:
"Worster's capitalism critique and deterministic causation claims"
"Final judgment on Worster as historian by Carr's criteria"
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