American History Revised (77 page)

Admiral
Harry Yarnell

1935
Today, as we consider global warming, anybody who thinks climate change isn’t catastrophic should consider the greatest environmental disaster of the twentieth century. It wasn’t a natural disaster; it was caused by man and his refusal to heed the warning signs.

“Get a farm while land is cheap—where every man is a landlord!” said the land speculators in the 1920s. “Grow wheat and get rich!” said the railroads. Heeding the call were millions of American farmers and immigrants pursuing the American Dream by moving to the Great Plains to build a new life in the area covering southern Kansas and Colorado and northern Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. The locals thought they were crazy. The Indians, forced off the land, had no say. But even the local cowboys scoffed: “You guys are crazy, the Panhandle is good only for growing grass.”

No matter. The invading settlers tore up the ground and its 470 native species of grass that had thrived for thousands of years, and planted wheat. In less than ten years they went from subsistence living to modest wealth. Thanks to the tractor, where it had taken fifty-eight hours to plant and harvest an acre by hand, it now took only three hours.

By the summer of 1929 the U.S. had a wheat surplus and prices dropped. To maintain their income, the new farmers
tore up more grass to increase their wheat output in a futile chase of the rainbow. Overleveraged just like their fellow Americans on Wall Street, farmers saw wheat prices crash to one-eighth the normal price. Unable to prevent foreclosure, many farmers abandoned their farms, leaving the upturned soil exposed naked to the wind. Others stayed, trying to eke out a subsistence living in the droughts of 1931–32, in hopes that things would get better.

Then came the dust storms, an anomaly of nature. In Oklahoma in early 1933 the temperature fell more than 70 degrees in less than twenty-four hours, to −14 degrees. Forty-mile-per-hour dust storms in subzero temperatures wreaked havoc. But worse was still to come. In May 1934 a huge dust storm from the Dakotas moved east, covering 1,800 miles, all the way to New York State, and dumping 350 million tons of dust—equivalent to three tons for every American. In just five hours an avalanche of 5,400 tons of dust landed on Chicago and 1,300 on New York City—were it so fortunate! Dust even seeped through the windows of the White House, causing minor panic.

At least for the president this was a one-time shock. But in the High Plains, now known as the Dust Bowl, the dust never stopped. A snowstorm had so much dust it was called a “snuster” (snow mixed with dust). Over the course of the year there were fifty-four snusters.

Now, dust particles can be a lot more dangerous than what you see on your desktop or counter. Extremely fine (one-fifth the size of the period at the end of this sentence), they clog the sinuses, throat, respiratory system, and even the stomach. Everywhere, farmers covered the doors and windows with sheets and blankets. All crops—whatever was left after the drought—were destroyed, and farm animals died. Many homes and fields were under ten feet of dust. A new disease emerged—dust pneumonia. People breathed through sponges. Black dust came from Kansas, red from Oklahoma, yellow-orange from Texas, and green from sources unidentified.

Then came “Black Sunday,” April 14, 1935. In Kansas, a dust storm in March followed by another storm in April dumped a total of 9.4 tons per acre, crushing trees and causing house roofs to collapse. In Oklahoma the dust storm roared in at more than forty miles an hour—for a hundred hours. In Kansas, the volume of dust blowing from one side of the state to the other was equivalent to 46 million truckloads. In a single afternoon the storm carried twice the amount of dirt removed over a seven-year period to build the Panama Canal. Temperatures dropped 25 degrees in one hour in Denver as the dust storm came in and obliterated all sunlight. In Kansas, the dust wave was two thousand feet high, coming in at sixty-five miles an hour. Car drivers turned on their headlights but could not see ahead, or even see their passengers sitting next to
them. “It was like three midnights in a jug,” recalled one survivor. It was the mother of all dusters. Woody Guthrie, then a twenty-two-year-old struggling folk singer, was thinking what it must have been like for the Israelites as the Red Sea closed in. When one of the people in the bar said, “This is it, the end of the world,” Guthrie started humming the opening of a song: “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.”

Observed the war journalist Ernie Pyle, certainly a man used to seeing the worst, “I saw not a solitary thing, but bare earth and a few lonely, empty farmhouses….There was not a tree or a blade of grass, or a dog or a cow or a human being—nothing whatsoever … the saddest land I have ever seen.”

Today the land is resettled, and nature has not misbehaved, but lost in the dust is the suffering of 221,000 people who had to flee, their lives ruined, all brought about by their defiance of nature. So ended America’s greatest ecological disaster.

Could it happen again? Consider the aftermath. The response of FDR was to pour money into the distressed region by providing funds for irrigation systems to provide water. Subsequent administrations further opened the money spigot to build dams to provide water for the
Southwest desert, leading to a population boom in Las Vegas, Arizona, and southern California. Yet from an ecological view, this is risky. The next time bomb waiting to happen in the West is the fight over water. In 1900 a person used twenty gallons of water a day. By 1973 it was 175 gallons per person. Plus, there’s population growth …

Dust storm, Great Plains

“The United States,” says one engineer, “is two countries—one humid and one arid, with the boundary following the hundredth meridian, a little west of the Mississippi River.” One part has water, the other doesn’t.

1942
Code-named Operation Pastorius, launched with the personal endorsement of Adolf Hitler, the German
U-202
submarine crept up to the shores of Long Island near New York City and dropped off four terrorists (called “saboteurs” in those days). A month later, another U-boat delivered a second group of four to the coast of Florida. Equipped with explosives, the saboteurs were to blow up bridges and power plants and strike fear in the American heartland. Only there was a problem: chosen because they had lived in America and spoke good English, all the Germans had loyalties to America; some even had American wives. None of them had the killer instinct needed for such a dangerous mission. Upon landing, the ringleader of the Long Island contingent panicked and turned himself in, along with his comrades, and even signed a 250-page typewritten confession giving all the details of the plot. The FBI promptly tracked down and arrested the Florida contingent, most of whom were spending their cash on fine restaurants and a shopping spree in New York. With the war going badly, FDR needed any propaganda coup he could get. For the beleaguered president, the swift capture of these incompetents was manna from heaven.

He ordered the captives to be tried immediately by a military court chosen by him, where justice would be swift, and the death sentence imposed by a two-thirds vote. “I want one thing clearly understood,” he told his attorney general, “I won’t give them up….I won’t hand them over to any United States Marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand!”

Behind closed doors, the military court quickly pronounced all eight men guilty. Six were executed; two were given lengthy prison terms, then eventually extradited back home. The United States trumpeted the capture and execution as a rousing success, and letters and telegrams poured into the White House: “It’s high time that we wake up here in this country and show the world we are not a bunch of mush hounds,” wrote one.

The defense lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court about the constitutionality
of a secret military trial carrying the threat of execution. Several of the German saboteurs were U.S. citizens, obviously deserving of a public jury trial. None of the Germans had committed a crime, but had only been involved in a plan to commit a crime, which they had abrogated by voluntarily turning themselves in. If anything, maybe their revelations had even helped the U.S. war effort.

German saboteurs on trial, U. S. military court

They had good history to go on: the Constitution. It guarantees the right of habeas corpus (“bring the body”), meaning that citizens have the right to appear in court. But what about enemy combatants? In the American Revolution, when John André was caught as a spy for the British, he was tried by a military court and hanged. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had used the same principle and suspended habeas corpus. In 1866, to restore civil liberties, there occurred a landmark case,
Ex parte Milligan
, won by James A. Garfield, who later became president, in which the Supreme Court ruled that civilians could never be brought before a military court when there were “available and functioning” civilian courts.

One of the justices, William O. Douglas, liked to say that 90 percent of Supreme Court cases were decided on emotion, and only 10 percent on the law. Such was
the case here in 1942: it was wartime, and passions were high. In a stunning reversal of precedent (which Douglas opposed), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government and “agreed on a verdict without agreeing on the reasons for the verdict, a reversal of normal procedure.” The justices also specified that their ruling applied only to this particular situation, and could not be used as a precedent in future cases.
*

Thus was established the unilateral power of a president to use military tribunals, utilized by President Bush in justifying the imprisonment of captives in Guantánamo.

1953
When Congress passed the Patriot Act in 2001, denying basic civil liberties to people suspected to be terrorists or aiding terrorists, it had good precedent to go on.