The Day America Choked on Its Own Greed - April 14, 1935

On April 14, 1935, a wall of black dust 600 feet high and 800 miles wide swallowed the American Great Plains in what became known as Black Sunday the single worst storm of the Dust Bowl era. Most people know the broad strokes. What they don't know is who built it, why more than seventy percent of Dust Bowl farmers never fled, and how one scientist turned the moment of maximum disaster into the legislation he'd been trying to pass for years. This episode holds those contradictions together and asks whether we've learned a thing.