{ "id": "epvg10bp07", "slug": "the-plow-that-broke-the-plains", "title": "The Plow That Broke the Plains", "updated": "2026-11-01", "topic_path": [ { "id": "culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture" }, { "id": "culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form", "label": "Films by genre, form, and subject", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary", "label": "Documentary and biographical films", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary.documentary-short-works", "label": "Individual documentary short films", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary.documentary-short-works" } ], "geo": [ { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form", "label": "United States · 1800 to 1945: Films by genre, form, and subject", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form", "path": [ { "id": "geo.us", "label": "United States", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800", "label": "United States · 1800 to 1945", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form", "label": "Films by genre, form, and subject", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1800.culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form" } ] } ], "excerpt": "The Plow That Broke the Plains is Pare Lorentz's 1936 Resettlement Administration documentary on the Dust Bowl, scored by Virgil Thomson, costing $19,260, seen by 10 million people in 1937, and controversial for blaming mechanized farming.", "snippet": "The Plow That Broke the Plains is Pare Lorentz's 1936 Resettlement Administration documentary on the Dust Bowl, scored by Virgil Thomson, costing $19,260, seen by 10 million people in 1937, and controversial for blaming mechanized farming.", "node": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary.documentary-short-works", "markdown": "# The Plow That Broke the Plains\n\n*The Plow That Broke the Plains* is a 1936 American documentary film, written and directed by Pare Lorentz and produced by the federal [Resettlement Administration](https://www.edgepedia.org/resettlement-administration), that traces the settlement and agricultural exploitation of the [Great Plains](https://www.edgepedia.org/great-plains) from the 1880s to the [Dust Bowl](https://www.edgepedia.org/dust-bowl) of the 1930s. Released in May 1936 as part of a New Deal campaign to explain the causes of the dust storms and to build support for resettling destitute farmers, retiring marginal farmland, and restoring grasslands, it became one of the most widely viewed films in American history and a foundational work of the American documentary tradition.[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html)\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Release | May 1936, produced by the U.S. Resettlement Administration under Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html) |\n| Director and writer | Pare Lorentz, previously a film critic with no prior filmmaking experience[2](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/plow_broke.pdf) |\n| Principal credits | Cinematography by Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, and Leo Hurwitz; score by Virgil Thomson; narration by Thomas Chalmers[3](https://www.acmi.net.au/works/97131--plow-that-broke-the-plains/) |\n| Cost | Original budget of $6,000; final cost $19,260, with Lorentz paying part of the overage himself[2](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/plow_broke.pdf) |\n| Audience | Seen by 10 million people in 1937 alone, in independent theaters, school auditoriums, and public meeting places[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html) |\n| Central claim | Mechanized agriculture and the great plow-up, not simply greed or drought, had ruined the Plains; the film's closing figures were 40 million acres totally ruined and 200 million acres badly damaged[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html) |\n| Legacy | Considered a seminal American documentary; Lorentz's later films *The River* (1938) and *The Fight for Life* (1940) followed from its success[4](https://www.documentary.org/parelorentz/films) |\n\n## Spoilers\n\n### Plot\n\nThe film opens on the Great Plains of the 1880s, an \"ocean of grass\" where cattle graze on the open range and the land asks nothing of anyone. Then the settlers arrive, and with them the plow. The narration, written by Lorentz and delivered by Chalmers in a slow, biblical cadence, warns the homesteader directly: \"Settler, plough at your peril!\" The prairie sod, which had held the soil against wind and drought for millennia, is cut open, and the film shows the machinery moving in ranks across the land like an army, tractors massed in formation, acre after acre of grass turned under.[10](https://time.com/archive/6755363/cinema-documented-dust/) • [5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains)\n\nThe middle section traces the wheat boom. The Great Plains are flat, treeless, and made for machines, and during World War I the price of wheat soars, so farmers plow ever deeper into the dry western plains where the rain is unreliable and the grass was the only thing holding the soil. When the war ends and prices collapse, the fields are left bare, and the drought of the early 1930s finds topsoil with nothing to anchor it.[11](https://www.c-span.org/program/reel-america/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains/339088) • [12](https://docsteach.org/document/plow-that-broke-the-plains/)\n\n**The film's famous set piece is its dust storm sequence, in which day suddenly becomes night.** A black wall of dirt rolls over the plains, swallowing farms whole; the light changes from noon to dusk to darkness in a matter of shots, and the landscape mutates from moment to moment, familiar fields erased under drifting dunes of topsoil. Virgil Thomson's score darkens and thins with the images, and Lorentz's editing makes the catastrophe feel like a slow-motion fall rather than a weather report. After the storm come the dead tree and the sun-baked desert where the grass began the film, and the farms stand abandoned.[10](https://time.com/archive/6755363/cinema-documented-dust/) • [12](https://docsteach.org/document/plow-that-broke-the-plains/)\n\nThen the exodus. In the summer of 1935 the film counts 30,000 refugees a month leaving the Dust Bowl by automobile, loaded cars crawling west on the roads toward California, families who lost everything to dust. The narration gives the farmers their epitaph in one line that became the emblem of the decade: \"Blown out! Baked out! And broke!\"[10](https://time.com/archive/6755363/cinema-documented-dust/) • [13](https://www.timeout.com/movies/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains)\n\nThe epilogue turns to the government. The Resettlement Administration is shown transplanting 4,500 stranded families to new houses on small farms across ten states, and the closing narration lists the Soil Conservation Service, the Forest Service, the CCC, and the Resettlement Administration cooperating on sixty-five land improvement projects in the plains. The disaster that took twenty minutes to destroy is resolved in a couple of minutes of planned land use, contour plowing, and tree planting, which is exactly the point the film's sponsors wanted made.[10](https://time.com/archive/6755363/cinema-documented-dust/) • [8](https://courses.bowdoin.edu/history-2203-fall-2020-ialexand/primary-source-analysis/)\n\n### Characters\n\nThere is no cast in the conventional sense; the human figures are anonymous farmers, sod-busters, cattle, and migrant families filmed across the plains states. The film has two real voices:\n\n- **The Narrator (Thomas Chalmers)**: an unseen commentator with about 700 words of grave, semi-liturgical prose, cadenced and repetitive rather than statistical, who gives soil conservation the gravity of scripture.[10](https://time.com/archive/6755363/cinema-documented-dust/)\n- **The Music (Virgil Thomson)**: the film's secret engine, built from hymn tunes and folk songs and performed by a substantial orchestra, carrying the emotional weight the restrained narration holds back.\n\n### Interpretations and controversies\n\nThe film was controversial from the start. Great Plains residents and politicians lobbied against it, arguing that Lorentz deemphasized the drought's role, exaggerated agricultural expansion as the cause of the Dust Bowl, and painted an unfair picture of plains farmers as reckless grass-busters. The major Hollywood studios initially refused to screen it, fearing the controversy, though public demand carried it into theaters anyway. Under that pressure the film was withdrawn from distribution in 1939 and not seen again until 1961. Critics then and since have read the ending as one-sided [New Deal](https://www.edgepedia.org/new-deal) propaganda, a clean moral fable in which the plow is the villain, the grassland the innocent victim, and federal intervention the resolution, with little room for the economic pressures that actually put the plow in the ground.[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html) • [14](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/arts/music/25tomm.html) • [8](https://courses.bowdoin.edu/history-2203-fall-2020-ialexand/primary-source-analysis/) • [15](https://www.filmpatrol.com/2025/02/nfr-project-plow-that-broke-plains-1936.html)\n\n## Origin and production\n\nIn 1935 Rexford Tugwell, who led the Resettlement Administration, brought in Pare Lorentz to make a film laying out what had caused the Dust Bowl.[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html) Lorentz, born Leonard MacTaggart Lorentz in Clarksburg, West Virginia, had worked as a film critic for the *New York Evening Journal*, *Vanity Fair*, and the Hearst syndicate, and had published a 1930 book attacking Hollywood censorship, but he had never made a movie.[2](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/plow_broke.pdf) When Tugwell asked what budget he would need, Lorentz guessed $6,000.[2](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/plow_broke.pdf)\n\n**Shooting and editing.** Lorentz hired three photographers who had made documentaries of their own, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, and Leo Hurwitz, and took them on a trek from Montana to Texas, filming dust storms and snowstorms along the way.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains) The crew, lacking a shooting script and divided by politics, went on strike while shooting in Texas; some members wanted the film to be a critique of greed and the social system, which Lorentz resisted, and he fired them.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains) Hollywood studios refused to sell stock footage to a government competitor, so Lorentz, with help from the director [King Vidor](https://www.edgepedia.org/king-vidor), found the material he needed and shot a little more with cinematographer Paul Ivano.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains) With production funds exhausted, he taught himself editing with help from Leo Zochling.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains)\n\nFor the score, Lorentz interviewed twelve potential composers and settled on Virgil Thomson, composer of the opera *Four Saints in Three Acts*, who had never written a film score; the two collaborated closely, with Thomson playing his evolving score on the piano against edited sequences.[2](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/plow_broke.pdf) The former opera singer Thomas Chalmers narrated.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains) The final cost of $19,260 was more than three times the original budget, and Lorentz and his wife, the actress Sally Bates, covered part of the overage.[2](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/plow_broke.pdf)\n\n## Structure and argument\n\nThe film is a roughly half-hour black-and-white work combining live-action scenes, animated images and text, a musical score, and sparse male narration.[6](https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstreams/f4b6adea-bfbe-471b-b509-666ebf4e93b3/download) It opens in the 1880s, when the Plains were an \"ocean of grass\" suited to grazing cattle, then follows the cattlemen, the railroads and land speculators, and the waves of homesteaders with gang plows breaking up the grasslands.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains) • [1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html) It moves to the World War I era of high prices and seemingly unlimited prosperity, showing giant plows lined up side by side plowing under millions of additional acres, then shifts to the 1930s: dust-covered farms, a bleached steer's skull wedged in the dirt, and farmers fleeing dust storms.[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html)\n\nWhere many contemporaries blamed farmers and ranchers for exploiting the West without regard for the environment, Lorentz focused the blame on mechanized agriculture itself. The closing narration, as refugees flee the Plains, states that 40 million acres have been totally ruined and another 200 million acres badly damaged, and ends with the question, \"What is America going to do about it?\"[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html)\n\n## Distribution and reception\n\nThe movie industry complained about competition from a government-produced film, and distributors and exhibitors initially refused to book it.[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html) • [5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains) Lorentz took the film on a promotional tour with a government public-relations team; after a Manhattan theater booked it, advertising it as \"The Picture They Dared Us to Show!\", more than 3,000 theaters around the United States followed.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains) It was seen by 10 million people in 1937 alone.[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html)\n\nMost critics of the 1930s praised the film generously, though a few found it too dreary or depressing.[7](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED310025.pdf) Political reaction split along regional and partisan lines: a [South Dakota](https://www.edgepedia.org/south-dakota) officeholder declared that the film had \"made South Dakota definitely Republican\" by \"picturing the state as a wasteland,\" while a Texas admirer wrote that Lorentz should have shown worse things, including people dying from dust pneumonia and black dusters.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains)\n\n## Criticism and historical debate\n\nBoth at the time and in later debate, the central issue was how Lorentz, together with other New Deal agricultural specialists, judged that a large portion of the Great Plains could not support farming.[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html) Contemporary critics made three main objections: that Lorentz deemphasized the impact of drought and exaggerated the importance of agricultural expansion in explaining the Dust Bowl; that he created a false impression that the entire Great Plains was a Dust Bowl, overlooking the diversity of the regional economy; and that he presented an unfair image of farmers, who his critics argued were conscientious stewards of the land.[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html)\n\nFilm historian Richard Dyer MacCann documented further factual errors: dust dunes and bankrupted farms were not present everywhere in the region as the film implies; there is no place in the grasslands where people live two hundred miles from water; the region has rivers, including the Missouri, the Yellowstone, and the Arkansas; and the 1929 stock-market crash did not cause the decline in farming, which began earlier, or the drought, which began later.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains) Later commentators have also noted that the film minimizes the role of federal land and land-use policies in the disaster while presenting New Deal programs as the remedy.[8](https://courses.bowdoin.edu/history-2203-fall-2020-ialexand/primary-source-analysis/)\n\n## Legacy\n\nThe film is generally regarded as a key American documentary and a seminal work of the form, and it is still shown to explain the economic and ecological disasters of the 1930s.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains) • [1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html) Its success made possible Lorentz's second film, *The River* (1938), and led to the establishment of the United States Film Service in 1939.[4](https://www.documentary.org/parelorentz/films) Its most important impact, according to the [Encyclopedia](https://www.edgepedia.org/encyclopedia) of the Great Plains, was to focus discussion on the future of the Plains and underscore the need for a comprehensive soil conservation program, though it did not settle the question of whether the region, particularly the western Plains, should be farmed at all; the same debate continues during periods of drought and low farm prices.[1](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html) The film's title itself entered the language of the debate: a 1940 South Dakota newspaper headline about a \"Revolutionary 'Plow to Save the Plains'\" for conservation tillage was inspired by skepticism the film had fueled.[9](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1nh3mg8)\n\n## References\n\n1. [The Plow That Broke the Plains, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (Michael W. Schuyler)](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.055.html)\n2. [The Plow That Broke the Plains, by Dr. Robert J. Snyder, Library of Congress National Film Preservation Board](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/plow_broke.pdf)\n3. [Plow that broke the plains, ACMI collection](https://www.acmi.net.au/works/97131--plow-that-broke-the-plains/)\n4. [The Films of Pare Lorentz, International Documentary Association](https://www.documentary.org/parelorentz/films)\n5. [The Plow That Broke the Plains, by David Sterritt, Turner Classic Movies](https://www.tcm.com/articles/252906/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains)\n6. [Broken Ground: Plowing and America's Cultural Landscape, University of Kansas](https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstreams/f4b6adea-bfbe-471b-b509-666ebf4e93b3/download)\n7. [Teaching guide on The Plow That Broke the Plains, ERIC](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED310025.pdf)\n8. [The Plow that Broke the Plains: Government Propaganda?, Bowdoin College](https://courses.bowdoin.edu/history-2203-fall-2020-ialexand/primary-source-analysis/)\n9. [The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region's Environmental Histories, JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1nh3mg8)\n10. [https://time.com/archive/6755363/cinema-documented-dust/](https://time.com/archive/6755363/cinema-documented-dust/)\n11. [https://www.c-span.org/program/reel-america/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains/339088](https://www.c-span.org/program/reel-america/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains/339088)\n12. [https://docsteach.org/document/plow-that-broke-the-plains/](https://docsteach.org/document/plow-that-broke-the-plains/)\n13. [https://www.timeout.com/movies/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains](https://www.timeout.com/movies/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains)\n14. [https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/arts/music/25tomm.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/arts/music/25tomm.html)\n15. [https://www.filmpatrol.com/2025/02/nfr-project-plow-that-broke-plains-1936.html](https://www.filmpatrol.com/2025/02/nfr-project-plow-that-broke-plains-1936.html)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Individual documentary short films*\n\n*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n", "same_as": [], "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains", "markdown_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains.md", "license": { "name": "Edgepedia Community License 1.0", "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license", "summary": "Free with credit, commercial use included. AI training is open to everyone. For other uses, organizations over USD 100M in revenue or 100M monthly users license separately.", "spdx": "LicenseRef-Edgepedia-Community-1.0" }, "credit": "\"The Plow That Broke the Plains\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "credit_md": "\"[The Plow That Broke the Plains](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), [https://www.edgepedia.org/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains). [Edgepedia Community License 1.0](https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license).", "credit_html": "\"The Plow That Broke the Plains\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/the-plow-that-broke-the-plains. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "speakable": "The Plow That Broke the Plains is Pare Lorentz's 1936 Resettlement Administration documentary on the Dust Bowl, scored by Virgil Thomson, costing $19,260, seen by 10 million people in 1937, and controversial for blaming mechanized farming." }