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18 CHAPTER THREE Transition: The Thirties, War, and New Leadership Why the KBI was envisioned in the first place is as important as how it was envisioned. To understand why, one must understand the Kansas of the 1930s and the conditions that led to the creation of a new agency within the Kansas criminal justice system. The KBI was born in the narrow corridor of time between the Great Depression and World War II, two of the most challenging crises to ever confront America and Kansas. Today it is difficult for Kansans to fully appreciate the poverty, unemployment, economic conditions, social circumstances, and crime that faced Kansans and their fellow Americans in the decade following the stock market crash of October 1929. There is no doubt that the Great Depression and its effects on Kansas played a major role in the establishment of the KBI. Within months of “Black Tuesday,” October 29, 1929, the day of the stock market crash, prices collapsed amid panic selling, and thousands of investors were financially ruined. Businesses quickly went bankrupt and almost 13 million people became unemployed, a rate of nearly 25 percent of the civilian labor force. That year, 235,000 were unemployed in Kansas. One hundred banks closed in the state in 1930 and 1931. Forty-two more closed in 1933. By 1940, there would be half as many Kansas banks as there had been in 1920.1 Given its vulnerable agriculture-based economy, Kansas would be spared none of the dire economic consequences of the Great Depression. The accompanying drought, which started in the plains states in 1933 and intensified in 1934, joined with higher-than-usual summer temperatures, belowaverage precipitation, never-ending wind, and an onslaught of cutworms, jackrabbits, and grasshoppers to create the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Mother Nature was severely punishing Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. One of the best descriptions of Kansas in the “Dirty Thirties” comes from David M. Kennedy, writing of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression in his book Freedom from Fear: “The wind lifted the surface powder into the skies, creating towering eight-thousand-foot waves known as ‘black blizzards ’. . . . One dust storm so darkened Great Bend, Kansas, that a resident Transition 19 claimed, ‘Lady Godiva could ride through the streets without even the horse seeing her.’ The Kansas newspaperman William Allen White likened it to the ashes that had buried Pompeii.”2 In July 1934, after many days of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees in Kansas, the mercury reached 112 in Independence. The years 1934 and 1935 saw frequent dust storms, which almost eliminated the Kansas wheat crop in both years. “Black blizzards” were especially prevalent in 1935. Wet towels and sheets were routinely placed over doors and windows of homes across western Kansas in unsuccessful attempts to keep out blowing dust and dirt. Sunday, April 14, 1935, was referred to as “Black Sunday” for many years for the intensity of the dust storms that struck Kansas and the Great Plains that day. The fifth year of the drought, 1936, was just as bad as those preceding it. Wichita’s hottest recorded day ever was 114 degrees on August 12, 1936. The average temperature in Kansas for the month of July 1936 was an incredible 103.6 degrees. There were fifty days of 100-degree or higher temperatures. Thermometers in Fredonia reached 121 degrees on July 24, 1936. All before air conditioning. The heat of the summer of 1937 was so oppressive that Kansas Amish Church leaders, to reduce the suffering of their farm horses, gave unprecedented permission for their farmers to use tractors. Few Amish, of course, could afford such modern technology, nor could many other Kansans. In his second inaugural address, on January 20, 1937, President Roosevelt lamented, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Many Kansans could be counted in that suffering one-third. Not all “Okies” streaming west out of the plains en route to California were from Oklahoma. The population of Kansas decreased almost 100,000 between 1930 and 1940.3 The state had 9,715 fewer farms in 1940 than it did in 1930. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s best-selling novel of 1939, and the subsequent movie adaptation of 1940, could have as easily depicted a Kansas farm family as one from Oklahoma. That generation also had to face the threats of polio (the March of Dimes campaign to combat polio was organized in 1938), tuberculosis, and...

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