Migrant Mother: The Dust Bowl, 1930

Migrant Mother, 1936 Dorothea Lange took a photograph of a single mother with her three children. The mother is a weather beaten women that has three children. Two who are leaning on her shoulder and one who is still an infant on her lap. This photo became the well know photograph called the Great Depression of America. It was created to raise awareness and to provide aid to impoverished farmers. Ms. Thompson, the mother in the photograph, had been living on frozen vegetables from the fields. Her children caught wild birds to help feed themselves. Everything had frozen over and there was no work at all, yet the mother could not move on because she had sold all of the four tires to her car to provide food for her family.

The Dust Bowl, 1930

It was to show how these families were living and to understand what they were going through. The Dust Bowl happened in 1930. It had lasted for eight years making it a decade of sorrow. The Dust Bowl had impacted the areas of the South and soon traveled to the area of the North, but unlike the North, the South had experienced more damage from this dastardly weather. In fact the agricultural devastation helped to lengthen the Depression whose effects were felt worldwide. People were left homeless and hungry. It came in as a yellow brown dust that formed in the South and turned black going toward the North. It was hard to breathe, eat, and walk in this extremely crazy weather. People had to wear dust mask to keep their lungs from collecting the dust. Women had to hang wet sheets over their windows to keep dirt from entering their homes, and farmers watched as their crops died. Poor agricultural practices and years of sustained drought caused the Dust Bowl. Plains grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s deepened, the farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing would grow. The ground cover that held the soil in place was gone. The Plains winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust to the sky’s. The skies could darken for days, and even the most well sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on furniture. In some places the dust would drift like snow, covering