The Plow That Broke the Plains

The first major documentary produced by the U.S. government, made by Pare Lorentz for the Resettlement Administration to explain the Dust Bowl. It traces how homesteaders broke the Great Plains' grass for wheat, how wartime demand and mechanized plowing stripped the land bare, and how drought turned the topsoil into black blizzards that buried farms. Virgil Thomson's score, built from American folk tunes, set a template for documentary music. Congress promptly killed the agency's film program, but the film proved government could make real cinema. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain.