Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother And The Great Depression

The Great Depression in the United States began on October 29, 1929. The American stock market–which had been roaring steadily upward for almost a decade–crashed, plunging the country into its most severe economic downturn yet. President Herbert Hoover believed that it wasn’t the federal government’s job to try and resolve. The Depression grew worse and by 1932 at least one-quarter of the American workforce was unemployed.

President Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, he acted swiftly to try and stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief to those who were suffering. Roosevelt instituted a series of experimental projects and programs, known collectively as the New Deal, that aimed to restore some measure of dignity and prosperity

Dorothea Lange was a photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced the countries feeling toward the suffering of the Great Depression. Dorothea Lange 's work brought the plight of the poor and forgotten – particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers – to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her images became icons of the era. Lange 's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother." In Lange’s travels she came across a migrant camp that Florence Thompson and her family stopped at looking for day work. Thompson sat on the side of the road with five of her children. The family’s car had broken down while they were on their way to pick lettuce, her husband had taken the two oldest boys with him to have the radiator fixed in town. It just happened that they left Thompson and the other children next to a migrant camp that housed at least 2,500 workers. Lange convinced a reluctant Florence Thompson to sit for six pictures, including the Migrant Mother. She left after only asking Thompson’s age and how many children she had in her family. Lange returned home, she told the editor of a San Francisco newspaper about conditions at the camp and provided him with two of her photos. The