4/15/2024 0 Comments Dust bowl fireside chats![]() This activity focuses on “reading” the Lange photographs as illumination of “word” scenes of migrants and migrants’ experiences you will encounter in Steinbeck’s novel. The following assignments suggest ways to “interpret” Lange’s “Migrant Mother” photograph(s) as part of the frame of reference from which Steinbeck built The Grapes of Wrath. Lange’s most celebrated photographic subject out of her large collection is of a “Migrant Mother”– heart-rending images (six in all) of a gaunt young mother holding her baby. Premier among the established photographers in the project was Dorothea Lange, whose work has become synonymous with historical perspectives of the hardships, poverty, despair, coping and resiliency of Americans caught in the convergence of the 1930s disasters– particularly of migrants en route to California and living in squatters’ camps while searching for employment. Roosevelt’s New Deal rural and farm reclaim initiatives, the Roosevelt Administration commissioned the Historical Division of the Farm Security Administration to undertake the challenging project of interviewing and photographing people and scenes throughout a wide span of the nation as a way of documenting evidence of the impact of the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, and new farm technology on American farmers, rural life, and the American landscape. Several of these photographs, preserved in the Prints and Photograph Division of The Library of Congress (and available on the Web), are the centerpiece of the following suggested student activities. Stryker’s corps generated a remarkable bank of over 200,000 first-hand photographs based on themes Stryker encouraged them to photograph of every-day American life – working, going to church, on-the road migrant scenes cooking, sewing tending the children, etc., generating a memorable record of rural life and displaced Americans coping with being caught in the throes of the natural and man-made disasters of the 1930s. Stryker recruited a corps of notably recognized photographers, among them much acclaimed Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Walker Evans. ![]() He was given the charge to shape a project that would particularly impress upon the American consciousness the desperate plight of rural workers and their families - sharecroppers, tenant farmers, struggling landowner farmers, the new wave of migrants - and through that exposure, promote recognition that New Deal program interventions dedicated to land reclaim, new farming techniques and farm-related arrangements could help mitigate the poverty and suffering of America’s farmers, rural small-town populations and migrants. Richard Stryker, a bureaucrat in the Farm Security Division, was chosen to head the program. The Roosevelt Administration commissioned the Historical Division of the Farm Security Administration to undertake the challenging project of interviewing, photographing, and documenting rural scenes, farm individuals and families throughout a wide span of the nation, garnering evidence of the ravages of the Great Depression, the scars of the Dust Bowl and the impact of new farm technology on rural small town life, American farmers and farmland, and areas of the American landscape in general. ![]() In 1935, he added another that not only had far-reaching impact in that decade, but also still resonates in American social and political history. In the first three years of his tenure, Roosevelt and his administration established several “marketing” plans for New Deal initiatives. ![]() He recognized, however, that to broaden and sustain his programs, he had to do more. Roosevelt, after taking office in 1932, had quickly secured a first level of acceptance for his New Deal Programs, built largely at the beginning through his charismatic personality and the appealing personal outreach of his Fireside Chats. ![]()
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