The notable African-American intellectual, James Baldwin, wrote frequently during the middle of the twentieth century about the social processes by which the "new" immigrants gradually became American. In his estimation, the new immigrants were seduced by the allure of white supremacy as they increasingly loss contact with land and with community. Regimented into the disciplines of industrial work, and having loss previous forms of independence and intimate relationships with land and soil, the new immigrants found white supremacy as the ideal method to gain back the illusion of control in their lives. As Baldwin sees it, white supremacy itself became a confining "factory" for the new immigrants without them even knowing it.
I point to Baldwin's work because it offers us an interesting angle for understanding the social transformations that helped lead to the Dust Bowl in the Southern Plains. Notably, many observers have pointed to this late-nineteenth-century development of American laborers and farmers gradually losing their sense of independence and connections to the land as they were incorporated into industrial and wage-labor sectors. Karita had noted the "suitcase farmers"--who came to the Great Plains to exploit the land but not make a home there-- in her previous post and I want to expand on it here.
Did the farmers of the Southern Plains lose a connection with the land? If they did, as Baldwin suggests about the new immigrants, what did the farmers embrace in order to gain some measure of control over their lives? In the drive to overproduce in excess and overuse the land, did farmers lose a sense of having something more than just capital invested in the landscape? What happens when we, as human beings, only see the land as potential capital?
