2024-07-19 08:11:23
Heat, drought-ravaged fields, terrifying sandstorms. Hundreds of thousands of desperate people are leaving their homes and making their way to somewhere to live. That might seem like a catastrophic vision of the future. But it’s not. It took place in the USA in the thirties, during the economic crisis. Writer John Steinbeck described it in The Grapes of Wrath. Photographer Dorothea Lange also captured the difficult time just as masterfully.
At first it seemed like a great idea, backed by the US government. Populate and fertilize the prairies in the area from Texas to Nebraska. After the First World War, the price of grain was very high and for many people it seemed like a clear path to a nice life on prosperous farms. But this dream soon turned into a nightmare.
The new farmers managed to transform the original grassy landscape into a field. But then came the great economic crisis. “Wheat prices plummeted. Desperate farmers struggled to make ends meet, so in an effort to grow more, they turned even more tracts of grassy prairie into fields,” writes History.com. Soon after came a great drought and terrible dust storms. It was after the harvest, farm animals were dying. Due to crop failures, farm owners had no livelihood and began to lose their properties in foreclosures.
A dust storm in one of Dorothea Lange’s pictures. | Photo: Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection
Farms were destroyed by black blizzards
The great drought began in 1930, dust storms, called black blizzards, were added a year later. “Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, the wind began to blow it away. Soil erosion led to massive dust storms and economic devastation,” writes History.com. “The following series of dry years deepened the ecological disaster,” he adds.
“A cloud of dust covered the sky sometimes for several days. In many places the dust drifted like snow and the inhabitants had to shovel it away. The dust penetrated even through cracks in well-sealed houses and left a coating on food, skin and furniture. People suffered from pneumonia, felt chest pain and difficulty breathing. It is unclear how many people died from the condition. Estimates range from hundreds to several thousand,” according to History.com.
Migration wave: desperate families fled farms
A period of drought lasted until 1939. Vast areas of previously cultivated land became unusable for agriculture, and others rapidly lost topsoil. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers began to leave their homes in order to survive at all. Many of them went to California. The American government also had to deal with the massive wave of migration and help for impoverished families.
In the 1930s, roughly 2.5 million people are reported to have left the affected states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It was one of the largest migrations in American history.
But even those who managed to get to their dream California did not have an easy time. There they faced discrimination, they were given menial work, they were poorly paid. Many of them lived in shacks and tents along irrigation ditches.
Poverty, typhus, smallpox, malaria
The peak of migration was brought by the years 1936 and 1937. “With the increasing number of people living in desperate conditions, serious diseases such as typhoid, smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria and pneumonia began to spread among them. People died not only from them, but also from hunger,” he states in his on the website of the State of California Capitol Museum (State of California Capitol Museum). In 1937, therefore, the US Farm Security Administration (FSA) built ten federal camps that provided relatively decent housing, but could not help all who needed it.
Wandering Mother (alternate, less famous shot) | Photo: Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection
A writer, photographer and singer captured the testimony of people’s suffering
The time of suffering and migration was reflected in the works of many artists. The most famous are the writer John Steinbeck, who captured the fate of impoverished farmers in the novel The Grapes of Wrath, the songwriter Woody Guthrie and the photographer Dorothea Lange.
Her iconic images, documenting the situation at the time, were created while she was working for the federal Farm Security Administration. In particular, the portrait entitled Wandering Mother has become as famous a work in photography as Steinbeck’s novel in literature.
“I saw her and approached the hungry and desperate mother as if drawn by a magnetic force. I don’t really remember how I explained my presence and the presence of my camera to her, but I remember that she didn’t ask me anything. She told me that she 32 years and that they survive on vegetables from the frozen fields and thanks to the birds that the children caught. She just sold the tires from her car to buy food,” Lange recalled later on meeting the heroine of her film. Her name did not come to light until much later: it was Florence Owens Thompson, who was then ashamed all her life for becoming the heroine of a famous photograph depicting misery and poverty.
Dívka z chatrče | Foto: Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection
Dorothea Lange’s images are part of a collection created by the federal Farm Security Administration. It is now maintained by the US Library of Congress. The images selected for the photo gallery belong to the so-called public domain and, according to the Library of Congress, there are no known facts that would prevent their publication.