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OK-Sen: Inhofe’s Politics Spit on Oklahoman History |
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When US Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) was born in late 1934, the debilitating drought that helped cause the Dust Bowl was in full effect in his childhood home of Oklahoma. Nature may have caused the drought, but human behavior made its impact worse:
World War I increased agricultural prices, which encouraged farmers to drastically increase cultivation. In the Llano Estacado, farmland area doubled between 1900 and 1920, and land under cultivation more than tripled between 1925 and 1930. Finally, farmers used agricultural practices which encouraged erosion; for example, cotton farmers left fields bare over winter months, when winds in the High Plains are highest, and burned their wheat stubble, which deprived the soil of organic matter and increased exposure to erosion.
Stricken by poverty, thousands of Oklahomans - “Okies,” as outsiders called them - fled their land. The drought lasted almost a decade, until 1941, when Jim Inhofe was almost seven years old.
While the drought raged, New Deal-era programs helped Oklahomans and other Great Plains residents get back on their feet.
During the 1930s, many measures were undertaken to relieve the direct impacts of droughts and to reduce the region’s vulnerability to the dry conditions. Many of these measures were initiated by the federal government, a relatively new practice. Before the 1930s drought, federal aid had generally been withheld in emergency situations in favor of individual and self-reliant approaches. This began to change with the development of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and the 1933 inauguration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The depression helped “soften deep-rooted, hard-line attitudes of free enterprise, individualism, and the passive role of the governmentâ€Â, thus paving the way for Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, which in turn provided a framework for drought relief programs for the Great Plains (Warrick, 1980).
Warrick et al. (1975) describe these drought relief programs, which are credited with saving many livelihoods throughout the drought periods. The programs had a variety of goals, all of which were aimed at the reduction of drought impacts and vulnerability:
- Providing emergency supplies, cash, and livestock feed and transport to maintain the basic functioning of livelihoods and farms/ranches.
- Establishing health care facilities and supplies to meet emergency medical needs.
- Establishing government-based markets for farm goods, higher tariffs, and loan funds for farm market maintenance and business rehabilitation.
- Providing the supplies, technology, and technical advice necessary to research, implement, and promote appropriate land management strategies.
All this meant that Oklahoma became solid Democratic territory. After going for Republican presidents twice in the 1920s, Oklahoma helped bring Franklin Roosevelt to power four times - and remained Democratic until 1952.
And all this means, as well, that Jim Inhofe grew up in a state that had learned two lessons: the impact human actions can have on a fragile environment, and the value of government programs in helping ordinary Americans in times of trouble.
It’s too bad Inhofe didn’t take those lessons to heart himself.
Instead, his political career is distinguished by the opposite beliefs: Inhofe is a notorious global warming denier and a harsh critic of government programs that help people. Though he frequently touts his “values,” Inhofe voted, to cite just a few examples, against giving health insurance to children and veterans. Inhofe, a close supporter of Bush, shares the president’s cynicism about government - as well as Bush’s willingness to deceive people with high-minded rhetoric about “personal liberty” and “fiscal responsibility” while feeding the interests of his anticompetitive corporate buddies. In this way Inhofe, like Bush, ties himself to the failures of the cronyist Republican presidents of the 1920s, especially Hoover…and to the same set of policies that ultimately helped cause the Great Depression, one factor in Oklahoma’s suffering during the Dust Bowl period.
As environmental and economic problems loom on the horizon for this election year, much as they did in 1934, I encourage Oklahomans to take a look at an honest man who can both learn from the past and help lead Oklahoma into the future, an honest man who recognizes the dangers of climate change as well as the ability of the government to make a positive difference in Americans’ lives. That man is Andrew Rice, and I support him in his race to become US Senator from the great state of Oklahoma.
