228 ChaPter^4
miles of land protected, 1,528,500 acres of drought area land plowed using
improved techniques, 271,760 acres of land terraced, 5,707,000 trees planted,
and 1,682,000 shrubs planted.
However, FDR constantly made clear that Dust Bowl relief was only a
benefit for landowners. When meeting with the governor of Iowa, for exam-
ple, Roosevelt gave a stern warning. “A governor—I will not say which one,
quite far from here—worked hard the other day to try to get me to say that
we would relieve his state from the obligation of taking care of the unemploy-
ables,” said Roosevelt. “I said, ‘No locality, no county, can put any unemploy-
ables onto federal relief.’ So we have to make that very clear to all our local
people. We are working together taking care of the employables [sic]. They
still have got to take care of the maimed, the halt and the blind. This is out
of their own funds.” As with most New Deal programs, Roosevelt made clear
that disaster relief helped only a certain portion of the population. While he
listed blind and maimed halt as disqualified for federal disaster relief, he could
have also listed singles and the non-landholding. With this class-bias, the
federal government left out many drought sufferers—and Roosevelt admitted
that. His disaster relief initiative was more like a back-to-work program for
upright citizens, rather than nondiscriminatory aid for anyone and everyone.
FDR further explained his conservative views, “And you take the next step it
would mean in the case of trees that the Federal government would go and
put the trees on the individual farm without contribution by the individual—
it would mean in the case of terracing, the Federal Government to come in
and terrace the individual farmer’s land free of charge. It is an awfully dan-
gerous precedent to start.”
The Roosevelt administration did indeed expand relief in a way like never
before in history. It did this not just through buying cattle and providing loans,
but also through the erection of dams, roads, reservoirs, schools, sewage dis-
posal systems, bridges, airports, and parks through the WPA as programs to
end both the depression and suffering from the drought. But Roosevelt con-
sistently stressed that aid—be it through loans or jobs—was to be provided to
only a certain part of the American population and jobs were to be provided
to upright citizens as a temporary means toward rural rehabilitation. “Certainly
neither the President, nor the Congress, nor Harry Hopkins, has ever regard-
ed the WPA... as offering a solution to unemployment,” explained a White
House official to the American people over America’s Town Meeting of the Air,