On this date in 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater
in Washington DC.
On this date in 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg.
Black Sunday was a particularly serious dust storm, or black blizzard,
that took place during the Dust Bowl era on this day in 1935.
The storm began in mid afternoon. A long drought during
the first half of the 1930s, combined with a lack of knowledge
of conservation techniques, caused excessive topsoil erosion
on farmlands in the Midwest. Disastrous dust storms like these
forced many farmers to leave their homes to start a new life
elsewhere, especially California. The storm itself was created
by a combination of dry topsoil and high (60 mph) winds.
The Black Sunday storm was the worst dust storm in the Great Plains during the
1930s. It is estimated to have removed 300,000 tons of topsoil from the area
known afterwards as the Dust Bowl. The storm of black dust resulted from prolonged
drought and overplowing in the Great Plains, which destroyed the sod and left topsoil
exposed.
On this day four years later (1939),Viking Press published The
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
At the time of publication, Steinbeck's novel "was a phenomenon
on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned
by citizens, it was debated on national radio hook-ups; but above
all, it was read." Steinbeck scholar John Timmerman sums up the
book's impact: "The Grapes of Wrath may well be the most thoroughly
discussed novel - in criticism, reviews, and college classrooms - of
twentieth century American literature." Part of its impact stemmed
from its passionate depiction of the plight of the poor, and in fact,
many of Steinbeck's contemporaries attacked his social and political
views. Bryan Cordyack writes, "Steinbeck was attacked as a propagandist
and a socialist from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.
The most fervent of these attacks came from the Associated Farmers
of California; they were displeased with the book's depiction of California
farmers' attitudes and conduct toward the migrants. They denounced the
book as a 'pack of lies' and labeled it 'communist propaganda'. However,
although Steinbeck was accused of exaggeration of the camp conditions
to make a political point, in fact he had done the opposite, underplaying
the conditions that he well knew were worse than the novel describes
because he felt exact description would have gotten in the way of his story.
Born This Day:
Loretta Lynn
Shorty Rogers
Gene Ammons
Actress, stripper, gun moll, author, painter,
convicted felon and John Waters starlet
Liz Renay
Julie Christie
Executed This Day:
American murderers Dick Hickock (l) and Perry Smith , who
murdered four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas
in 1959, a crime made famous by Truman Capote in his 1966 non-
fiction novel In Cold Blood.
