The Worst Hard Time

The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan (The Immortal Irishman), 2006.

Unreasonably short one-sentence description of the book: The Dust Bowl told from the perspective of a couple of small towns in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.

This is one of my favorite history books, mainly because I knew so little about The Dust Bowl before I read it, and also because Egan covers the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon illustrated by the stories of human perseverance and tragedy.

History is the search for causality in past events.  In that regard, the Dust Bowl is a rich vein to mine, as the events that led to it are, to borrow an ironic metaphor, the perfect storm.  Consider this:

• The Great Plains was previously referred to on maps as the Great American Desert. Those familiar with the area knew that with its oppressive weather and limited rainfall, it wasn't good for much more than grazing land, and even then, ranchers struggled to survive periods of drought.  The land was covered with native buffalo grass.
• In the 1870's, Russian emigrants introduced turkey red wheat, a hearty variety better suited for the plains climate.
• Part of General Phillip Sheridan's plan to defeat the Indians of the Great Plains in the 1870's was to kill all the buffalo. Once the buffalo were dead and the Indians on reservations, the government owned land that it didn't know what to do with.
• In 1882 the Texas Legislature sold 3 million acres to a syndicate from Chicago with British investors for $1.23 per acre, to raise money to build a new statehouse.
• The syndicate sought to recoup their investment by marketing the land as good for "dry farming."  They advertised in Europe, the American South and in port cities.
• Land speculators purported the theory that plowing the ground induced rainfall.  The Sante Fe Railroad issued a map that showed the rain line (where it rained 20 inches or more annually) moving west with civilization about 18 miles a year.
• In 1908, the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company sold 3000 town lots in Boise City, in the Oklahoma Panhandle, for $45 each, using brochures that showed tree-lined streets, an artesian well in the center of home, and "houses any banker would be proud to call home." Unfortunately, the town of Boise City did not yet exist.
• In 1909 Congress amended the homestead act for the western half of the Great Plains, which doubled the amount of land a person could own through improvements to 320 acres.  It was a desperate act that was heavily promoted by railroad companies and prairie state senators to encourage settlement in an area that had never been kind to settlers.
• The Great War in Europe (WWI) increased the demand for wheat, with prices rising from $.80 a bushel in 1920 to $1.60 in 1915, after which the government guaranteed the price of $2.00 per bushel.  This moved wheat from a family farm staple to a commodity export product. Farmers in the Great Plains were getting rich, and many of the struggling settlers became farmers.
• The invention and availability of tractors had a dramatic effect on farming and wheat production, in particular.  In the 1830's, it took 58 hours of work to plant and harvest a single acre. By 1930, it was only three hours.
  
• Tractors were also a stimulus for mortgages, which banks had previously avoided in the area.  But efficient technology along with a few good rain years made mortgages plentiful. Farmers mortgaged everything they had to buy more land to plow up and produce more wheat.
• As the railroad expanded westward it become substantially cheaper to transport wheat to meet the market demands.
• The 1920's featured years of high rainfall.  Many people naively assumed it would last forever, or at least acted that way.  They got while the getting was good.
• In 1917 about 45 million acres of wheat were harvested in America. By 1919, it was over 75 million acres. And the expansion continued even in the decade after the war.
• By the late 1920's there was a worldwide wheat surplus and prices started dropping, down to $1.00 a bushel in 1928.  To make up for the lost pricing revenue, farmers planted more wheat. 
• In October 1929 the stock market crashed.  While only about 10% of Americans owned any stock, the ripple effect on businesses, banks and unemployment were felt deeply in the Great Plains.  
• By 1930, the price of wheat dropped to $.24 a bushel, well below the cost to produce it and bring it to market.  Some farmers held on and plowed even more ground.  But many others simply left their farms.
• On September 14, 1930, the first black duster hit, rolling through towns like a mound of black crud, and carrying enough static electricity to short out cars.  It was a fascinating phenomenon, but people didn't think much more about it.
• 1931 brought the beginning of a drought that would last for eight years in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.  It was also a record year for wheat harvests, with 250 million bushels, an unprecedented agricultural feat in world history.  It sold for below cost.
• Without the buffalo grass and blue gram, which had held the soil for centuries, and with millions of acres of unplanted wheatfields, winds would pick up the dust, creating great dark walls, some of which extended more than 20,000 feet in the sky and moved, sometimes, for hundreds of miles.
• On May 9, 1934, whirlwinds which began in the Dakotas and Montana, carried dust all the way to the New York and Boston, over 350 million tons, and dropping an estimated 6000 tons on Chicago.
• The 1934 Yearbook for Agriculture stated that 100 million acres of farmland had now lost all its topsoil.

Other snippets:

• In the late 19th century, doctors often prescribed a change in geography to treat respiratory ailments, such as what brought Doc Holliday to Dodge City, Kansas. "Every good-sized town in the arid belt had a sanatorium offering various amenities."
  
• In 1872-73, seven million pounds of buffalo tongues were shipped out of Dodge City.  One estimate was that 25 million buffalo had been killed.
• Car owners in the Dust Bowl dragged chains from their cars, which served as a ground to protect it against the static electricity of the dusters.  Men avoided shaking hands with each other because the static electricity was so great it would knock a man to the ground.
• During one storm in 1935 the wind was clocked at 40 mph or higher for 100 straight hours.
• In 1930, 1350 banks failed, followed by 2294 in 1931. At the end of 1931, the Bank of the United States in New York, which had $200 million in deposits, collapsed.  Twenty-five percent of the workforce was without jobs or prospects.
• Many people blamed the Jews, and "Jewish banking" for the collapse. One Christian religious leader would "out" Hollywood celebrities as Jews on his radio show, which was listened to by over a million people.
• The 1930's was the first decade in U.S. history when the number of young children declined.
• People had various theories for how to induce rain.  One was to kill snakes and hang them in the sun.  In Southwest Kansas, dead snakes were hung for miles on barbed wire fences. Another "scientific" theory was aerial bombing, dating back to Plutarch's observation that rain followed battles.  One proponent of this theory was C.W. Post, of Post cereal fame, who owned land in West Texas.  He tried attaching dynamite to 150 kites, and also using a Howitzer, to no avail.
• At it's peak, the Dust Bowl covered 100 million acres. More than a quarter million people fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930's.  It remains the greatest man-made ecological disaster in the nation's history.

"And then the dispossessed were drawn west--from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." 

Grapes of Wrath, 1939, John Steinbeck.

In 2017 I'm rereading 50 books I've read in recent years.  This is 4/50.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed our Minds

The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis (Liars Poker, The Blind Side, The Big Short, Moneyball), 2016.

Unreasonably short one-sentence description of the book: Two brilliant Israeli psychologists form an extraordinary friendship that leads to ground-breaking scholarship on how people make decisions.

Michael Lewis is adept at explaining complex phenomena (baseball sabermetrics, the sub-prime mortgage collapse) in the context of a fascinating story. And while I enjoyed this book, it doesn't have nearly the same page-turner appeal of his other books. Nevertheless, the story of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman needed to be told.

A few snippets and insights below.  Note, a great companion read is Kahneman's best-selling Thinking Fast and Slow, which explains in detail many of the theories he and Tversky worked on, and their application to decision-making.

• "No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story." (Daniel Kahneman)
• "When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret."
• After the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, Israel invited Jews from around the world to emigrate to Israel. Over the next five years, 730,000 immigrants, from many different countries and speaking many different languages, arrived in Israel.  Many of these immigrants had suffered terrible atrocities in World War II. However: "No one was encouraged to speak about what he'd experienced in war ... Part of the job of being an Israeli Jew was to at least pretend to forget the unforgettable."
• A favorite Kahneman principle: "When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of."  In other words, don't try to disprove it; rather, try to understand it.
• Amos Tversky's reply to Nobel laureate (physics) Murray Gell-Mann: "You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are."
• On a related note, Tversky's colleagues at the University of Michigan developed this simple intelligence test: The sooner you figure out that Amos is smarter than you, the smarter you are.
• Tversky taught himself to be an optimist, because when you're a pessimist and bad things happen to you, you experience them twice--once in anticipation and once when it happens.
• Kahneman and Tversky conducted countless experiments to uncover errors in logic and judgment that appear systemic to human nature.  These experiments were often done with their university students, but also younger students or even prison inmates.
• Some of the fallacies, misconceptions, biases, heuristics and decision-making errors that the pair researched include: The Law of Small Numbers, The Gambler's Fallacy, Framing Heuristic, Anchoring, Availability Bias and Loss Aversion.
• One of the fascinating examples of how biases can negatively impact decision-making is research on expert analysis.  For example, radiologists were able to detail the principles of how to read an x-ray to diagnose cancer.  From these principles, the researchers created an algorithm to perform the diagnoses without the input of an actual radiologist.  Even though the radiologists had provided the principles, the algorithm was a consistently better predictor of cancer than even the best of the live doctors.  This same principle has been demonstrated in other fields as well, including many medical fields.  (Think about that the next time a doctor gives her opinion.)

For 2017, I am revisiting 50 books I've enjoyed over the past few years and sharing a few interesting facts and findings I discovered in them.

The Power of Habit

The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, 2012.

Unreasonably short one-sentence description of the book: Habits can be changed if we understand how to do it, and changing certain "keystone habits" will make it easier for us to change others.

Random snippets:

• A 2006 Duke University study found that more than 40 percent of our actions are habit, not conscious decisions.
• "Habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.  Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit."
• "Chunking" is the brain converting a sequence of actions into an automatic routine. This process is key to forming habits.
• The brain can't tell the difference between good and bad habits.  Habits never disappear, so both good and bad ones are always just a trigger away.
• In the 1920's, ad man Claude Hopkins stimulated the habit of teeth brushing for Americans with Pepsodent ads that featured a trigger (film on teeth) and a reward (attractive smile).  Before the ads, less than 7% of Americans owned toothpaste.  Ten years after the ads, 65% of Americans brushed their teeth regularly.
• For a new habit to last, the body has to expect and to crave the rewards--e.g. an endorphins surge or a sense of accomplishment.  For Pepsodent, people craved the cool, tingly feel of the citric acid and other chemicals which originally were added to improve the taste.  Today's toothpastes still contain additives, now expressly designed to provide that cool tingle after brushing, which our bodies crave.
• To change a habit you need to keep the old cue and reward, but change the routine.
• A study of alcoholics found that those who believed in something were much more likely to conquer the habit.  Belief in God often generated other beliefs about change.
• Small wins can be the key to creating keystone habits.
• A West Point study found that factor most correlated to success was "grit," defined as "the tendency to work strenuously toward challenge, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress."
  
• Willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.  Self-discipline is more important than IQ, and can be created as a habit.  "Willpower isn't just a skill.  It's a muscle."
• Organizations have habits, too, and their actions are often guided more by institutional habits than by reasoned, independent decision-making.
• Pathological gamblers get a rush not only from winning, but also from near misses.  Non-pathological gamblers recognize near misses like any other loss.  As a result, gaming machines are designed to give a high rate of near wins.
• William James said that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating the belief in the possibility of change.

For 2017, I am revisiting 50 books I've enjoyed over the past few years and sharing a few interesting facts and findings I discovered in them.

Father, Mother and Best Friend

This time every year always invokes memories for me.   January 7th was my father's birthday, January 8th my mother's and January 9th my best friend Randy Cooke's.  All are gone.

Dad was born 98 years ago, in 1918, which still amazes me.  It was the year that World War I ended--a war that involved 70 million combatants and took over 16 million civilian and military lives.  It was also the year of the most deadly flu pandemic in history.  Casualty estimates vary wildly, ranging from 20 million to as high as 100 million.  In the U.S., the average age dropped ten years.  It was also the year of the Cloquet-Moose Lake Fire, near Mahtowa, where Dad was born, which killed 452 people and destroyed 38 towns and villages.

Sorry for the tangent. The second oldest of 13 children, Dad spent much of his youth working on the family farm.  A graduate of Barnum High School, he got his B.S. from the University of Minnesota, a Master's of Social Work from USC, and served in the Army in World War II as a medic in New Guinea.  He was humble, hard-working and honest as the day is long.  He loved to visit relatives, take saunas, garden, cook and play cards, especially bridge and solitaire.  He spent most of his career as a social worker in the St. Louis County Welfare Department. Looking back, I wish we would have talked more, but that wasn't the Finnish way.

Mom was born 10 years and a day after Dad, in Kettle River, Minnesota, also to Finnish farmers.  She fell in love with the violin at an early age and moved to Duluth to live with a violin teacher during high school.  Music would be an important part of her life, as she spent her years teaching high school orchestras and playing in a string quartet and the Duluth Symphony Orchestra.  She was an inveterate learner, but would jump from one interest to another, flitting like a dilettante from cross-stitch to refinishing furniture to learning Chinese and joining Toastmistress.  She was perpectually engaged in something new, but always had time to talk to me, or play chess or Stratego with me (which I always won) or Scrabble and Milles Borne (where we were more evenly matched).

But the thing I remember most is her generosity of spirit.  She served tirelessly in church, and tended to the needs of those no one else would find time for.  It struck me that these wounded spirits were weird, and I wanted nothing to do with them.  Mom could somehow overlook their faults, and refused to judge them, or at least to let any judgment influence her willingness to serve.

Mom and Dad married late in life, he a life-long 45-year-old bachelor and she a divorcee, both steeped in the Finnish culture and recent converts to the LDS church. Unable to have children of their own, and given their advanced age, they adopted me as an 11-year-old hellion.  Being adopted was an unusual blessing for someone of my age "in the system."  It changed the trajectory of my life and for that I will always be humbly and profoundly grateful.

And then there's my best friend growing up--Randy Cooke.  He died of cancer in 2008, but I still think about him and our many adventures, and sometimes he appears in a dream, usually outdoors, and always speaking softly and walking with long strides.

January 7-9, 2017.  Thanks for the memories.

Isaac's Storm

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, Erik Larson (The Worst Hard Time; Devil and the White City --both highly recommended).

Unreasonably short one-sentence description of the book: The story of the hurricane that decimated Galveston, Texas in 1900, centered on Isaac Cline, the resident meteorologist stationed there.

Random snippets:

• The city was not evacuated, despite sufficient evidence that a deadly storm was approaching. Many of the more than 6000 lost lives could have been saved were it not for politics, egos and a tragic unwillingness to admit the possibility of errors in judgment.
• Prior to the flood, Galveston was a bustling city of great promise, with over 500 saloons.  "The city exhibited a rare harmony of spirit. Blacks, whites, Jews and immigrants lived and worked side by side with an astonishing degree of mutual tolerance. Through the Negro Longshoremen's Association, Galveston's black population controlled wharf labor and enjoyed a standard of living higher than almost anywhere else in the country."
• During this period, meteorology was an emerging science and the National Weather Bureau was trying to establish credibility with a skeptical public.
• Generally, people believed that no storm could be greater than the worst of the past--a common human fallacy. Cline, a respected meteorologist, labeled those that suggested Galveston could be ravaged by a hurricane as suffering from "absurd delusions." "It would be impossible for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city."
• Related fact: A tsunami is a small hump of water travelling at great speeds--up to 500 mph--which explodes when it hits shores.
• So many Galveston citizens were washed away in the sea that many people would not eat fish, shrimp or crabs for several years.  Those corpses that remained were stacked and burned, the stench of the pyres carrying miles out to sea.
• The Galveston Flood exhibit was one of the most popular at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where a machine launched an artificial tidal wave over a model of the city.
• In 1910 a seawall was constructed, rising 17 feet above the beach and behind a wall of 27-foot granite boulders, which was referred to as "one of the greatest engineering works of modern times."  In addition, the entire city was elevated; using manual screw jacks to raise 2000 buildings, which were supported by 11 million pounds of fill.
• Galveston's Relief Committee was a new form of government, with a strong mayor overseeing commissioners for various functions.  This was hailed as a new dawn, supplanting Tammany style city organizations.

For 2017, I am revisiting 50 books I've enjoyed in the past few years and sharing a few interesting  facts and findings I discovered in them.