Category: Depression-Era Theories

• The Dust Bowl as God’s Wrath for FDR

  This theory framed the Dust Bowl not primarily as a climate-and-soil catastrophe but as divine punishment falling on the United States during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. Among conservative religious and anti-New Deal circles, drought, dust storms, federal crop controls, and agricultural slaughter programs were woven into a moral narrative: the land itself was testifying against national sin, political arrogance, and Roosevelt’s reforms. The theory did not always accuse the administration of causing the weather directly; often it argued that the disasters were heaven’s judgment on the era Roosevelt represented.