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Florence Thompson: Migrant Mother |
| © 2007 David C. Hanson, Virginia Western Community College |
[Click on photo for enlargement]
This photograph known as "Migrant Mother" is a familiar image of the Great Depression. The woman behind the icon was named Florence Thompson. Born in Oklahoma in 1903, Florence and her husband, Cleo Owens, moved to California in 1925. So, she was an "Okie" (immortalized by John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath), but she was not displaced from the Dust Bowl by the Depression of the 1930s. By the time of the stock market Crash of '29, she had just given birth to her fifth child Ruby. Her husband died in 1931 when Florence was expecting her sixth child. In 1934 she joined the army of migrant workers in the San Joaquin valley. From Modesto to Salinas to Bakersfield to Fireball, wherever the next harvest was ready, Florence and her children loaded their tent into their Model T Ford and moved on down U.S. Highway 101 through California. "It was very hard and cheap," Florence said. "We just existed. We survived, let's put it that way."
In the early spring of that year, the family was looking for work in the pea fields outside of Nipomo, California. But a late frost had destroyed the crop, and worse, they had car trouble (the timing chain snapped), so they couldn't move on. A man named Jim Hill, with whom Florence had been living for the past year, went into town with her boys to get the car fixed. Florence was comforting her three daughters and a car drove by. In it, photographer Dorothea Lange was returning from her first major trip for the Farm Security Administration, documenting depression conditions in the west. Something drew Lange back to Florence's lean-to tent. She shot six photographs and the last [above] has become famous. Lange felt a spiritual connection. In 1960 she wrote:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.
The photos did not help Florence Thompson, but they did help Lange. This caption was printed with the photo in various newspapers and magazines: "Nipomo, Calif. March 1936. Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged 32, the father is a native Californian. Destitute in a pea pickers camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500 people in this camp were destitute." In truth, she had been widowed since 1931, both Florence and her husband were originally from Oklahoma, she hadn't sold the tent, and the boys were getting the car fixed (still with its tires). Nevertheless, Florence and her sad plight were real. The photo seemed to instantly epitomize the combination of determination and desperation felt by millions of Americans during the Depression years. It quickly became a classic of American social history.
Florence and her family came through the Depression and worked their way into the middle class. She settled around Modesto, California, where her children bought her a suburban tract house, but Florence didn't feel comfortable and moved back into a mobile home. In the late 1970s her identity became known after she wrote a letter that was published in a local newspaper and picked up by the Associated Press. Florence was quoted as saying "I wish she [Lange] hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did." Because Lange took the photos as an employee of the federal government, there were no royalties from it (and there is no copyright). Florence died of cancer in 1983. Her gravestone reads: "Migrant Mother--A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood."