1. Objectives: Section 3: Life in the New Deal Era
What were the effects of the Dust Bowl?
How did the New Deal agencies use photography to promote their goals?
How effective was the New Deal in ending the Great Depression?

2. The Dust Bowl:

3. Photo by Dorothea Lange
Kern County, California. Children of young migratory parents. These children originally lived in Texas

4. Photo by Dorothea Lange
This is a picture of destitute pea pickers in California. This woman is the mother of seven children, she has scavenged vegetables from California fields to feed herself and her family
Photo by Dorothea Lange

5. Photo by Dorothea Lange
Tulare County, California. Cheap auto camp housing for citrus workers

6. Photo by Dorothea Lange
Kern County, California. A 17-year old boy working sacking potatoes after a mechanical potato digger went through a large potato ranch. Kern County planted 27,250 acres of potatoes.

7. Photo by Dorothea Lange
Kern County, California. Children living in the camp with their parents. Rent at this camp is $2.75 plus electricity

8. Photo by Dorothea Lange
On Highway 87 in Arizona, south of Chandler, Arizona. A grandmother and the sick baby of a migratory family that is camped in a trailer in an open field

9. Photo by Walker Evans
A migratory family living in a trailer in an open field on Highway 87 in Arizona. No sanitation and no water. After the cotton picking season the family plans to look for work in the WPA.

10. Alabama miners’ houses near Birmingham, Alabama
Photo by Walker Evans
Alabama miners’ houses near Birmingham, Alabama

11. Photo by Irving Rusinow
Abandoned house and field, Haskell County, Kansas.

12. Photo by Mary Bourke-White
A sharecroppers house in Marion Junction, Alabama. The original caption for the photo quotes the sharecropper as saying, “No place to plant me a little garden when the white-boss says to plow the cotton right up to my front door.”

13. Music of the Dustbowl
How does American songwriter Woody Guthrie capture the hardships of the dustbowl?

14. Effects of the Dust Bowl
Section 3: Life in the New Deal Era
Effects of the Dust Bowl
Many farmers lost their land.
Dust Bowl farmers migrated west in search of work harvesting crops.
Migrants to the West Coast faced stiff competition for jobs.
YouTube - The Great Dust Storms - a Ken Burns style video

15. Use of photography to promote New Deal goals
Section 3: Life in the New Deal Era
Use of photography to promote New Deal goals
New Deal workers hoped that photographs of suffering Americans would arouse support for the New Deal relief programs.
Photographs were used in government pamphlets.
Photographs illustrating the work of the government were published in magazines.

16. How might the publication of these pictures encourage political support for the Depression in America? What do these pictures tell us 75 years later?

17. The New Deal’s effectiveness
Section 3: Life in the New Deal Era
The New Deal’s effectiveness
Not completely effective in ending the Great Depression
Saved lives of those facing starvation
Avoided a revolution of desperate people
Provided jobs and improved people’s sense of self-worth
Helped modernize the South
Broke down class barriers
Brought electricity to rural areas
Boosted family incomes so children could stay in school