The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl Farms and Families in Transition

Abandoned tenant house seen across tractored fields. Hall County, Texas. Many tenants who have filled the land on the family-farm basis are made landless, forced by the machine into the towns, or reduced to day labor on the farms. Large numbers who have gone to the towns have fallen on relief, or even have sought refuge in distant parts. Not only is their security gone, but the opportunity even to rise to ownership is diminished, for profitable operation of mechanized farms requires more land and more capital equipment per farm.

In 1934 and again in 1936 drought conditions in the Great Plains became so severe that it was necessary for the federal government to take steps to rescue dying cattle, relieve destitute families and safeguard human lives. From the report of the Great Plains Committee, 1936.

Auto camp north of Calipatria, California. Approximately eighty families from the Dust Bowl are camped here. They pay fifty cents a week. The only available work now is agricultural labor.

In Farm Security Administration (FSA) migratory labor camp. Family of mother, father and eleven children, originally from near Mangrum, Oklahoma, where he had been tenant farmer. Came to California in 1936 after the drought. Since then has been traveling from crop to crop in California, following the harvest.

Six of the eleven children attend school wherever the family stops long enough. Five older children work along with the father and mother. February 23, two of the family have been lucky and "got a place" (a day's work) in the peas on the Sinclair ranch. Father had earned about one dollar and seventy-three cents for ten-hour day. Oldest daughter had earned one dollar and twenty-five cents. From these earnings had to provide their transportation to the fields twenty miles away.

Mother wants to return to Oklahoma, father unwilling. She says, "I want to go back to where we can live happy, live decent, and grow what we eat." He says, "We can't go the way I am now. We've got nothing in the world to farm with. I made my mistake when I came out here."

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. Dorothea Lange (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

American River camp, Sacramento. Home of Tennessee family, now migratory workers. Seven in family, came to California July 1935, following relatives who had come in Father was a coal miner in Tennessee. Reason for coming to California. "Our neighbors were coming. We only got one or two days work a week (relief.) Thought we could make it better here." Since arrival family has worked in walnuts, tomatoes, peaches, and the mother has worked in a fruit cannery.

Laundry facilities for migratory workers in Farm Security Administration (FSA) camp at Westley, California.

Champion hop picker in squatter camp before the season opens. Earned five dollars a day in the 1938 season. Age twenty three, been on the road seven years. Married. "I think I did pretty well, only have one baby. Want to get out of this living like a dog." Washington, Yakima Valley.

Migrant agricultural labor family. Tenant farmer with six children, refugees from Texas, near Wasco, California. "People just can't make it back there with drought, hailstorms, windstorms, dust storms, insects. They'll all be here in another year or two. People exist here and they can't do that there. You can make it here if you sleep late and eat little, but it's pretty tough--there's so many people".

Grandmother of twenty-two children, from a farm in Oklahoma; eighty years old. Now living in camp on the outskirts of Bakersfield, California. "If you lose your pluck you lose the most there is in you - all you've got to live with".

In Memphis, Tennessee hundreds of colored laborers congregated near the bridge every morning at daylight in hopes of work chopping cotton on a plantation. They are hauled to and from work on trucks. Reduced cotton acreage has made employment scarce for this class of seasonal labor in all towns. "You can't live the commonest way on six bits a day. Not alone nor no way. A man like me can't get no foothold. It's a mighty tough old go. The people here in the morning are hungry, raggedy, but they don't make no hungry march".

Carrot pullers from Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas and Mexico. Coachella Valley, California. "We come from all states and we can't make a dollar a day in the field no ways. Working in the field from seven in the morning till twelve noon we earn an average of thirty-five cents".

The commodities on the counter represent two weeks allotment for four people. Photograph made in Farm Security Administration (FSA) distributing station for emergency grants of food and clothing to destitute agricultural workers. Bakersfield, California.

Migrant family in Kern County. This family was sent back at the state line by the Los Angeles police. Refused entrance into California, and it was only after they had gone back to Arkansas to borrow fifty dollars cash to show at the border that they were permitted to enter.

Family of four to be returned to Oklahoma by the Relief Administration. "They won't go until they get so hungry that there's nothing else for them to do. They won't go--not twenty- five percent will go" said a transient case worker in Imperial County. This family was hungry. They lost a two-year-old baby as the result of exposure during the winter. Holtville, California.

Howard Street in San Francisco, known as "Skid Row," the district of the unemployed.