Program Information

On an overcast afternoon in the spring of 1935, Hugh Hammond, a rumpled bureaucrat, was testifying before Congress. Suddenly the sky turned the color of copper.

A Moment in Time is a brief, exciting and compelling journey into the past. Created to excite and enlighten the public about the past, its relevance to the present and its impact on the future, A Moment In Time is a captivating historical narrative that is currently broadcast worldwide.

Transcript

Lead: On an overcast afternoon in the spring of 1935, Hugh Hammond, a rumpled bureaucrat, was testifying before Congress. Suddenly the sky turned the color of copper.

Intro: A Moment In Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: During the Great Depression of the 1930s, several midwestern agricultural states were known as the Dust Bowl. Over-farming and a run of drought-plagued weather had so depleted and dried the soil under the grasses of the Great Plains that it became like powder. Windstorms swept it up and drifts, sometimes ten feet deep, covered the roads. At times, in towns all over Kansas, Texas, Wyoming and the Dakotas, dust was so thick you could only see three hundred yards at midday. The bones of starved cattle lay bleached in the pale sunlight that was able to penetrate the gloom. With four million acres out of production by the mid-1930s and another sixty million under threat, the nation's land was in serious peril.

Hugh Bennett thought he could solve the problem through an aggressive program of soil conservation. As the senators listened, the sky darkened and assumed a sickening reddish hue. His testimony coincided that afternoon with the arrival in Washington of another giant windstorm heavy with midwestern grit. That was enough. Congress established the Soil Conservation Service and appointed Bennett its first director.

Hugh Hammond Bennett, at fifty-four, had spent most of his working years as a soil scientist warning of the steady depletion of agricultural land. Over the next generation under his leadership, farmers built drainage ditches and terraces, grew cover crops, rotated their fields, planted windbreaks, and found that with a little care they could substantially increase production. Bennett served as head of the agency until he retired at 71. At his death in 1960 midwestern newspapers commented that Hugh Bennett's memorial was carved in the earth itself.

The producer of A Moment In Time is Steve Clark. At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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