The Great Depression A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words Slide 2
Photograph of a Dust Storm During the Great Depression Dust Storms:
In 1934 and 1936 drought and dust storms ravaged the great American
plains and added to the New Deal's relief burden. (Rosenberg) Slide
3 Migrant Workers Farms in the mid-western states were destroyed by
drought. This land became known as the dust bowl. Families were
forced to sell their homes for very little. In these desperate
times, many families traveled west in hopes of better land or to
the city in hopes of factory work. Migrant families moved from
place to place, living in tents, and taking any jobs that were
available. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of
Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas,
Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families,
tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless
and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred
thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the
mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to
find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut -
anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got
no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most
of all for land. (Rosenberg) Slide 4 The Dust Bowl (Rosenberg)
Slide 5 Farm Foreclosure Sales Slide 6 Searching for a Job Slide 7
The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of
a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made in February or
March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's
trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what
was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this
account of the experience: I saw and approached the hungry and
desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I
explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she
asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and
closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her
history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said
that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding
fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the
tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent
with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my
pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of
equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960). (Nelson)
Migrant Mother Slide 8 A Photograph of Christmas Dinner During The
Great Depression (Roseberg) Slide 9 The Big Cities (google images)
Slide 10 Unemployed men vying for jobs at the American Legion
Employment Bureau in Los Angeles during the Great Depression.
(Nelson) Vying for Jobs Slide 11 The trading floor of the New York
Stock Exchange just after the crash of 1929. On Black Tuesday,
October twenty-ninth, the market collapsed. In a single day,
sixteen million shares were traded--a record--and thirty billion
dollars vanished into thin air. Westinghouse lost two thirds of its
September value. DuPont dropped seventy points. The "Era of Get
Rich Quick" was over. Jack Dempsey, America's first millionaire
athlete, lost $3 million. Cynical New York hotel clerks asked
incoming guests, "You want a room for sleeping or jumping?"
(Nelson) The Stock Market Crash Slide 12 (Pearl) Slide 13 Farm
Security Administration: Everywhere the unemployed stood in the
streets, unable to find jobs and wondering how they could feed
their families. (Circa 1935) Depression:Unemployed: Typical picture
capturing the number of people who were unemployed and looking for
a job. (Circa 1935) The Unemployed (Nelson) Slide 14 Depression:
Unemployed: The Unemployed Union: marchers south on Broadway:
Camden New Jersey typical scene reflecting large population of
unemployed in desperate need of work and looking for jobs. (Circa
1935) Unemployed Union March (Nelson) Slide 15 Depression:
Breadlines: long line of people waiting to be fed: New York City:
in the absence of substantial government relief programs during
1932, free food was distributed with private funds in some urban
centers to large numbers of the unemployed. (Circa February 1932)
Waiting in Breadlines (Rosenberg) Slide 16 Segregation (Nelson)
Slide 17 Slide 18 Most of the images we have of the tragedy of the
Depression portray strong, determined, dignified, hopeful Americans
-- fighters, survivors, the salt of the earth. The photographs of
Margaret Bourke- White are not so cheerful. Reinforced by the text
of Eskine Caldwell, her images are often bleak, grim, despairing.
"Unlike other documentary photographers, Bourke-White did not
approach her subjects with the assumption that they were noble, and
though her people were victims of circumstance, she did not
celebrate their ways of coping with their plights. Instead, she
pitied the cultural forms they took" (Peeler 104). Even images of
smiling children have a pitying, patronizing undertone. These are
children who only go to school part-time, who will never know
better than to want to be just like their daddies. They are the
sharecropper's children. They too would become "slaves of
sharecropping." ). Photographs by Margaret Bourke-White: White
Folks and Black Folks (Bourke-White) Slide 19 White Folk
(Bourke-White) Slide 20 Slide 21 Slide 22 Black Folk (Bourke-White)
Slide 23 Slide 24 Slide 25 Slide 26 Slide 27 Works Cited Nelson,
Cary. "Modern American Poetry." A Photo Essay on The Great
Depression. 01 Dec. 2004. Bourke-White, Margaret. Photographing the
Representative American. 01 Dec. 2004. "Pearl Harbor: 1929 The
Great Depression." Scholastic Teachers. 2004. Scholastic. 01 Dec.
2004. Rosenberg, Jennifer. 20 th Century History: Photographs of
the Great Depression." 20 th Century History. 2004. About, Inc. 01
Dec. 2004.
