The Plow That Broke the Plains is a 1936 short documentary film that shows the cultivation of the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada following the Civil War and leading up to the Dust Bowl as a result of farmers' exploitation of the Great Plains' natural resources.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. The Resettlement Administration recruited Pare Lorentz to produce The Plow That Broke the Plains to support its campaign of showing the public that the search for profits in the West resulted in the displacement of settlers, misuse of the land, and ultimately resulted in the dust storms that affected the Great Plains regions in the 1930s. The film was one of the most widely publicized attempts by the U.S. federal government to communicate to its citizens through motion pictures. The Plow That Broke the Plains was written and directed by Pare Lorentz while the music score was written by composer Virgil Thomson. The film was narrated by the American actor and baritone Thomas Hardie Chalmers. 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". Background 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. Lorentz became particularly interested in the drought and dust storms of the early thirties which inspired him to write a lengthy piece on the Dust Bowl for Newsweek. In 1935, Rexford Tugwell, the head of the Resettlement Administration, initially recruited Pare Lorentz as a film consultant as part of the Resettlement Administration staff, because the agency administrators were interested in creating a film about the Dust Bowl. 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. The Director of Information for the Resettlement Administration John Franklin Carter asked Lorentz if he thought a motion picture could be used to interpret the general objectives