[1]The Plow That Broke the Plains was the first film created by the US government for commercial release and distribution through the Resettlement Administration as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal program.

In 1999, The Plow That Broke the Plains was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

[6][7] The initial inspiration for The Plow That Broke the Plains came from Pare Lorentz's desire to make a film on the New Deal that would provide Americans with a fresh look at their country.

[8] While the Resettlement Administration sponsored extensive photographic surveys of rural poverty conditions, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Henry Wallace and Tugwell became interested in using motion pictures as a medium which would bridge gaps in communication between the government and the public.

[2] In a review of his own film, Lorentz commented in McCall's Magazine that he had two primary objectives: To show the audience an exciting portion of the country and to portray the events that led to "one of the major catastrophes in American history," the Great Drought and the Dust Bowl.

[8] Therefore, Lorentz envisioned the film as a "lyric educational exercise, both practical and aesthetic, incorporating the history of the Great Plains from the first cattle drives to the punishing drought then entering its 6th year.

Within the final sequence, the narrator exclaims "Four hundred million acres the Great Plains seemed inexhaustible yet in 50 years we turned a part of it into a Dust Bowl" and continues to list the factors that led to the Dust Bowl, such as too many cattle and sheep, plowed lands that should have been left untouched, removal of native grasses to hold soil, and farm machines that made it easy for a single person to plow many acres.

The viewer is left with one last message from the narrator who warns that conservation is necessary in order to save the rest of the plains and that "another decade of reckless use, and the grasslands will truly be the great American desert.

[13] On September 3, Lorentz secured cameramen Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, and Leo Hurwitz, each with experience in documentary film production and influenced by the work of Soviet filmmakers.

[14] This resulted in Steiner, Strand, and Hurwitz creating their own script that voiced their own political positions that indicted capitalism, human greed, and a "lousy social system" for the devastation of the Great Plains and its residents.

[8][9][4] Following the Dust Storm sequences in Texas, Lorentz fired the crew and headed to California where Resettlement Administration photographer Dorothea Lange helped him capture scenes of migrants searching for work.

[1] In order to engage the audience, Lorentz had to condense the history of the Great Plains into a simplified "ecological drama" that would elicit a strong emotional response.

[8] Lorentz wrote the script following filming, with narration in a free verse that utilized a Walt Whitman-like repetition of words and phrases to create a mood of judgement.

[13] After viewing the rough cut of the film, Thomson composed a score that was divided into six movements: Prelude, Pastorale (Grass), Cattle, Blues (Speculation), Drought, and Devastation.

[14] The soundtrack was a patchwork of dances, hymns, neo-medieval counterpoint, and chorale-like passages with wide-spaced harmonies, with interludes of familiar folk tunes like "Streets of Laredo" and "Git Along, Little Dogies".

[13] During the war sequence, Thomson accompanied the scene of the phalanx of tractors coming over a hill like a battalion of tanks on a battlefield with American troops marching to the song, "Mademoiselle from Armentieres.

Because Lorentz had so little money left in his budget, on the day that the score was recorded he forced the session to stop at midnight because he could not afford to pay the New York Philharmonic members overtime.

[3] Although some film reviewers did not agree that The Plow That Broke the Plains was a pinnacle of artistic achievement, praise was almost unanimous and Lorentz became one of America's foremost directors.

[2] According to Robert L. Snyder's book about Lorentz, the filmmaker's favorite comment about the movie was something he heard an audience member say in the row ahead of him: "They never should have plowed them plains.

While newsreels, journalists, and Great Plains politicians blamed the disasters on weather, Lorentz rejected this and instead pointed toward mechanized agriculture and human action as being the main culprits.

[2][10] Contemporary critics questioned Lorentz's understanding of the history of the Great Plains by pointing out how he emphasized agricultural expansion as the origin of the Dust Bowl and not the long droughts.

[8] Because the scenes of the movie focused on the severely damaged counties in Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, Dakotans felt the film did not represent the whole plains region.

[8] As a response to the film, South Dakotans created an illustrated pamphlet titled "The True Story of The Plow that Broke the Plains" which the Rural Credit Department distributed.

Attorney and Republican state chairman Harlan Bushfield complained that The Plow That Broke the Plains the film "in one savage blow ruthlessly destroyed all the South Dakotans have built up in a generation.

One particular resident from Pennington County rebutted Bushfield's critique stating that he viewed everything through political eyeglasses and that "his eyesight is affected so much he can't tell a desert anymore when he sees one".

In Congress Mundt stated that the film was a "malicious and slanderous attempt to misrepresent the homeland of millions of thrifty people living west of the Mississippi River.

"[8] Due to efforts from politicians like Mundt, the United States Film Service withdrew The Plow That Broke the Plains from US circulation on April 18, 1939, under the pretense that it would be revised to show the improved agricultural conditions.

At a conference on Canadian-American relations at Queen's University at Kingston in Ontario, The Plow That Broke the Plains screened as part of a program of films that highlighted problems of adapting to the North American Environment.