Great Depression for Kids: Hardship and Hope in 1930s America, with 21 Activities
INTRODUCTION THE MYSTERY of the MIGRANT FAMILY ife as a migrant family in 1936 was harsh The woman in the photo Migrant Mother p xii and the two little girls knew just how tough it was The baby would soon learn For over 40 years no one knew much about the family in the photo It was taken by Dorothea Lange who worked in a program that used photographs to tell the stories of migrant families those who moved frequently from place to place to find temporary farming work Dorothea ran across this mother and her children at a camp in California They lived in a tent Other migrant families lived in the camp They took jobs working in the farm fields The nearby fields of peas had been destroyed by cold weather Most workers were moving on to
the next place where they hoped to find work The Migrant Mother and her children Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints Photographs Division FSA OWI Collection LC DIG fsa 8b29516 The mother in the photo was a widow and her car had broken down She couldn't go anywhere She and her children were eating the frozen peas from the
fields and birds that her older children had caught Before Dorothea captured the photo she promised the woman she would never tell anyone her name In fact Dorothea never asked for it The day after the photo was taken newspapers around the country published it Many Americans were shocked by the image of the woman and her children They were disturbed to hear about condi tions in the camp Long after the Great Depression ended this image of the migrant mother and her children symbolized the hopelessness of the time School textbooks tried to describe the era People who lived through it struggled to explain their feelings But all anyone has to do is look at the face of the mother in the photo graph to understand what it must have been like for many Americans during this dark time The names of the woman and her children remained a mystery But the emotions visible in the mother's face and the shame expressed by her chil dren who hid their faces from the camera were not unknown to many people who lived during the Great Depression While shame and despair were wide spread during those troubling times many people who lived through the Great Depression recall other more positive memories acts of courage pride and generosity shown by countless individuals and agen cies Some of those stories of hardship and hope are told in The Great Depression for
