Chapter 9 | Section 1
Migrant Mother
Photographer Dorothea Lange documented the devastating effects of the Great Depression on Americans for the Farm Security Administration. Her photographs ranged in subject from the living conditions of agricultural workers in the American West and South to bread lines in cities. Lange’s best-known work is Migrant Mother (1936), an iconic symbol of the Great Depression in the United States. The Farm Security Administration hired photographers like Lange to document the displacement of people during the 1930s. The photograph known as Migrant Mother is actually the last in a series of six images created by Lange. Have you seen this image before? Why do you think this photo has become such an iconic image of the Great Depression?
The photograph known as Migrant Mother served as an iconic symbol of the Great Depression in the United States. Oklahoman Florence Owens Thompson, photographed in March 1936 by Dorothea Lange of the Farm Security Administration, represents the larger outmigration of people leaving Oklahoma and seeking work in California during the 1930s.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
To understand the importance of this photo, it is helpful to learn its back story. What led Lange to take this photo and what do we know about the people she photographed? Initially Lange drove past the pea pickers camp in Nipomo in central California, but something inspired her to turn around. She parked her car and entered the camp. Immediately she saw a woman and her children. The woman, Florence Owens Thompson, told Lange that she was thirty-two years old and that she and her children had resorted to eating frozen vegetables from nearby fields and birds that the children had caught to keep from starving. The pea crop was frozen and there was no work. Thompson had just sold the tires on her car to buy food.
Florence Thompson had left Oklahoma in the mid-1920s with her husband. They moved to California looking for mill and farm work. Her husband died in the early 1930s, leaving her with six children to support. Thompson continued to do farm work in California to support her family. She began a new relationship and had another child. Even though Thompson did farm work for a living, she was not actually one of the pea-picking migrant workers in Nipomo, contrary to what Lange believed her to be. When Lange encountered Thompson and her children, Thompson had been on her way to find work picking lettuce when her car broke down, forcing her to pull over into the migrant workers’ camp area.
Although Thompson had left Oklahoma for California ten years earlier, her story represents the larger outmigration of people leaving Oklahoma for potential work opportunities in the American West, particularly California. During the late 1930s, hundreds of thousands of people left Oklahoma traveling west on Route 66 and other highways. Many tenant farmers or sharecroppers from rural areas moved to cities and lived in tent camps. Pushed off the land, tenant farmers packed up their belongings and headed west, seeking jobs in California, reminiscent of the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in literature. And it has been difficult to escape the Okie stereotype that Steinbeck’s book has left in its wake. Historian Angie Debo challenged many of the inaccuracies found in the book and questioned Steinbeck’s nine days of research in Oklahoma and the region. In later decades, governors Dewey Bartlett, George Nigh and others would work hard to dispel the state’s negative Okie image and reclaim “Oklahoma!” as the state song and as a source of pride.
This postcard depicts the famous Route 66 highway and its route through Oklahoma. First established in 1926, Route 66 connected Chicago to Los Angeles, with more than four hundred miles of road stretching across much of Oklahoma. Today there are many historical markers and landmarks along this route, including the Round Barn in Arcadia and the Route 66 Museum in Clinton.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath is based on the lives of thousands of Oklahomans who were driven from their homes by poverty, drought, and dust storms during the Great Depression. In the 1930s and 1940s, the population of 62 of 77 counties in Oklahoma decreased. This image from 1939 shows a family in Muskogee in their fully packed car as they prepared to head to California to find work. Steinbeck called such a journey west on Route 66 “the road of flight.”
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Great Depression
Like the COVID-19 pandemic that started in late 2019, the Great Depression was a cataclysmic world event. Many thought the whole global financial system could collapse. The ordeal altered the lives of nearly all those who lived through it in ways they never forgot.
During the 1930s, the United States joined the rest of the world in this international crisis. The US stock market crashed on October 29, 1929. The world economy then began to unravel. Oklahoma was producing almost 25 percent of the US supply of oil. By the early 1930s, most manufacturers in the United States cut back on production. In addition, auto sales dropped. Oil companies, however, did not reduce production, and the market dropped. Oil prices dropped to ten cents a barrel. In Tulsa, oil companies laid off half of their production workers, two-fifths of their pipeline hands, and nearly a third of their refining employees.
In agriculture, commodity prices started dropping in the 1920s and continued to plunge into the 1930s. Cotton, for example, plummeted to five cents a pound. As we have seen, most farmers in Oklahoma were tenant farmers, meaning they did not own their own land. They had to pay their rent and expenses with shares of their crops. Wheat farmers in Oklahoma were more likely to own their land. Agricultural experts had advised farmers to kill off the native grasses, plow up anything their tractors could reach, plant as much wheat as possible, and then leave their fields lying open, beneath thin layers of dust. But this method led to devastating results, as we will discover in more detail later in this chapter.
Wheat and other farm commodities started to collapse in the early 1930s. The price of wheat dropped. And yet farmers tried to produce more wheat by plowing up more land. The 1931 harvest was a bumper crop, an exceptionally good harvest, but there was no market for the wheat. Prices dropped by 25 cents a bushel, or about half of what it cost farmers to grow the wheat. By the early 1930s, farmers in northwestern Oklahoma faced the economic realities of the Great Depression. Total farm prices dropped by more than 50 percent. Farmers could not pay off their bank loans, leading to foreclosures and bankruptcy sales. And things became often worse for tenant farmers in the state, who could no longer pay the rent they owed for the land they farmed. They were already poor when the Great Depression started, and things got even worse for them as the 1930s continued. The poorest tenant farmers did not have the means to try to relocate to California or other states. Some moved to Oklahoma City or Tulsa to find work and began living in makeshift homeless camps along the rivers bordering these cities, where they at least had access to water.
A group of children are pictured here at a migrant camp located in Oklahoma City near Mays Avenue. During the Great Depression era, many families experiencing homelessness congregated in migrant camps in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. A large number of these families were previously tenant farmers.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
While farmers struggled to sell their crops, at least some still had one thing going for them: food to eat. Oklahomans in large cities faced high levels of unemployment, and thousands of them were going hungry by the early 1930s. Tulsa began issuing scrip, or stamped vouchers, to unemployed people so they could get food in one of the city’s soup kitchens. Homelessness became a growing problem in Oklahoma, and people struggled to find work and food.
For women of color in particular, and all women in general, the Great Depression hit fast and hard. In 1929, 40 percent of African American women and girls were in the workforce. By 1931, more than 25 percent of these women had lost their jobs. As the depression intensified, 50 percent of Black women lost their jobs, while about 30 percent of white women lost their jobs. And so women “made do” and took whatever jobs they could get. All the while women’s wages were about half the wages of men. Also, some laws barred married women from certain jobs, and many state and local governments, including school districts, refused to employ married women. Why was there such a double standard for women? During the 1930s the common public opinion was that all available jobs should go to men rather than married women, with the idea that men should financially support their family. In reality the number of married women workers actually increased during the 1930s, as all family members had to contribute what they could to make ends meet.
Breadlines such as this one at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Oklahoma City became increasingly common during the Great Depression, as many people did not have the means to support themselves.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
According to the 1930 census, Oklahoma’s population was almost 2.4 million, an increase of 300,000 from 1920. One in three people in Oklahoma lived in urban areas. By the mid-to-late 1930s landless farmers and out-of-work oil field workers headed west to California looking for work. From 1930 to 1950, 62 of 77 counties in Oklahoma experienced a population decline. The population of Oklahoma did not recover from the outmigration until the early 1960s.
Oklahoma experienced significant population changes during the Great Depression. Rural counties suffered the greatest decrease in populations as Oklahomans struggled to find work and care for their families.
Courtesy of Brad Watkins, PhD.
The New Deal
Americans elected Franklin D. Roosevelt (or FDR, as many called him) as president in 1933. Roosevelt had promised the country a “New Deal,” which would address the serious problems of unemployment, homelessness, and hunger in the United States. He had a plan, and his first 100 days produced a flurry of legislation and executive orders meant to create jobs, relieve suffering, and stimulate the economy in a variety of ways.
Roosevelt began working on these problems as soon as he was elected. The day after his inauguration, he declared a bank holiday, closing all banks until they could reopen following federal inspection and support. This helped restore some trust in the banking system. Previously, many ordinary people worried their own banks would collapse and their own money would disappear. This worry caused a series of “runs” on banks, when large groups of depositors would withdraw their money from local banks. In response to the banking crisis, Roosevelt’s administration created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which proved a significant outcome of the New Deal. The FDIC insured individual accounts so people would no longer lose their money if a bank failed. The FDIC remains in place today, insuring individual accounts up to $250,000.
New Deal in Oklahoma
In Oklahoma, the New Deal made an impact in a variety of ways. New government programs addressed the problems in rural areas so badly affected by the financial collapse. One of the most important programs, which operated in other states as well, was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Young men ages 18–25 joined the CCC and worked on conservation projects such as trails, picnic areas, and buildings for public use. In return for their labor, the government paid the men monthly wages, plus room and board. As a result, the program helped ease the unemployment crisis.
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal program, provided jobs for many young men such as this group at Camp Haskell in Binger. The CCC developed state parks in Oklahoma, including Roman Nose, Quartz Mountain, Robbers Cave, and Beavers Bend.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
The first seven state parks in Oklahoma—Beavers Bend, Boiling Springs, Lake Murray, Osage Hills, Quartz Mountain, Robbers Cave, and Roman Nose—all started as CCC projects. A CCC camp in Tulsa created Mohawk Park, and two camps in Oklahoma City improved the zoo and built Will Rogers Park. In Oklahoma, CCC participants received training as carpenters, masons, and woodworkers. They were required to send $25 of their $30 monthly wages home to help support their families. Most camps were separated by race, but Tulsa had one of the few mixed-race camps, although Blacks and whites still slept in separate quarters. Five camps, including one at Fort Sill and one at Fort Reno, were established for Black participants. In 1934 Oklahoma had 5,000 CCC participants in 26 camps throughout the state. Today we can appreciate the contributions of the CCC in Oklahoma every time we visit a state park.
Federal programs helped farmers, especially larger farmers, survive the Great Depression. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) limited crop production by paying farmers subsidies, or cash payments, for leaving portions of their land fallow, or unplanted. The idea was that by offering farmers money to produce less, the supply of farm produce would shrink, and prices would increase. An effort to regulate livestock, however, resulted in a public relations fiasco when cattle, sheep, and hogs were slaughtered, and the meat went unused at a time when many people were hungry and meat was a luxury. Another weakness of the program was that smaller family farms, especially sharecroppers, received little financial assistance. In fact some landowners evicted their sharecroppers, leaving these families with nowhere to go but the migrant camps on the outskirts of cities.
Second New Deal
The first two years of the New Deal’s government programs restored some public confidence and prevented the collapse of the financial system. They did not, however, do much to reduce unemployment or get industry back up and running again. So President Roosevelt launched the Second New Deal in 1935 as a way to help more people and to enact long-term reform. For example, the Social Security Act, one of the most significant legacies of the New Deal, provided retirement benefits financed by payroll taxes. It also provided monthly payments to widows and children who qualified for unemployment assistance through state-based programs. Another New Deal measure was the National Labor Relations Act, which protected collective bargaining, or the right of labor unions to negotiate with employers over wages, benefits, and the working conditions of union members. A third important outcome of the New Deal was the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). Established in 1935, the REA extended electrical power to rural areas. Thanks to this program, by 1950 two-thirds of Oklahoma farmers had electricity. Finally, the largest New Deal program, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), employed approximately 90,000 Oklahomans on WPA projects ranging from roads, sidewalks (which all over Oklahoma bear a WPA stamp), and bridges, to theater, visual arts, and history projects.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program, allotted funds for developing roads, bridges, schools, and courthouses. WPA projects in Guthrie included the Jelsma Stadium and the thirty-foot-high native sandstone wall, called “The Rock,” on the north side of the stadium.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.