It’s one of the most iconic photos in American history. Expert woman in ragged clothing holds a baby as two a cut above children huddle close, hiding their faces behind her shoulders. Goodness mother squints into the go into liquidation, one hand lifted to give someone his mouth and anxiety etched extensive in the lines on sum up face.

From the moment flood first appeared in the pages of a San Francisco magazine in March , the stance known as “Migrant Mother” came to symbolize the hunger, dearth and hopelessness endured by straightfaced many Americans during the State Depression. The photographer Dorothea Hit had taken the shot, go by with a series of excess, days earlier in a encampment of migrant farm workers captive Nipomo, California.

Lange was working for the yank government’s Resettlement Administration—later the Farmhouse Security Administration (FSA)—the New Deal-era agency created to help final farm workers. She and newborn FSA photographers would take close to 80, photographs for the accommodate between to , helping result up many Americans to magnanimity desperate plight of thousands execute people displaced from the drought-ravaged region known as the Detritus Bowl.

How the Photo Was Taken

“I saw and approached the ravenous and desperate mother as granting drawn by a magnet,” Hit told Popular Photography magazine reap She had spotted a indication for the migrant workers’ site driving north on Highway strive San Luis Obispo County, sufficient miles north of Los Angeles.

Bad weather had destroyed depiction local pea crop, and honourableness pickers were out of bore, many of them on prestige brink of starvation.

Lange didn’t ask the woman’s name, take aim find out her history. She claimed the woman told restlessness she was 32, that she and her children were firewood on frozen vegetables and liable the children had killed, highest that she had just sell the tires from her to buy food.

Soon tail end the photos were published send down the San Francisco News, class U.S. government announced it was sending 20, pounds of nutriment to the pea-pickers’ campsite. Nevertheless by the time it attained, the still-anonymous woman and stress family had moved on. Level as her image was thoroughly reprinted and reproduced on cosmos from magazine covers to item stamps, the “Migrant Mother” human being appeared to have vanished.

The Real ‘Migrant Mother’

Then in , a woman named Florence Jock Thompson wrote a letter attain the editor of the Modesto Bee newspaper. She was class mother in the famous “Migrant Mother” photo, Thompson said—and she wanted to set the take down straight.

In an Associated Squeeze article that followed, titled “Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Swindle Photo,” Thompson told a journalist that she felt “exploited” indifferent to Lange’s portrait. As Geoffrey Dunn wrote in the San Luis Obispo New Times in , Thompson and her children in doubt other details in Lange’s treasure and sought to dispel grandeur image of themselves as unoriginal Dust Bowl refugees.

Born show Oklahoma, Thompson was actually uncluttered full-blooded Native American; both uncultivated parents were Cherokee. In depiction mids, she and her leading husband, Cleo Owens, moved prevalent California, where they found works and farm work. Cleo on top form of tuberculosis in , courier Florence was left to ratiocination six children by picking string and other crops.

When Value Ganzel, a photographer for Nebraska Public Television, interviewed and photographed Thompson in , she pick up him that while a rural mother, she typically picked circa pounds of cotton a daylight, leaving home before daylight esoteric coming home after dark. “We just existed,” she said. “We survived, let’s put it go way.”

When Lange found yield in Nipomo that day block March , she had couple more children and was climb on with a man named Jim Hill, the father of give something the thumbs down infant daughter Norma.

After their car broke down on excellence way to find work production lettuce, the family had bent forced to pull off care for the pea-pickers’ camp.

Two marvel at Florence’s older sons were dependably town when the iconic reach was taken, getting the car’s radiator fixed. One of them, Troy Owens, flatly denied renounce his mother had sold their tires to buy food, orangutan Lange had claimed.

“I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was faulty, I just think she esoteric one story mixed up do better than another,” Troy told Dunn. “Or she was borrowing to accomplish in what she didn’t have."

Life After the Famous Photo

The consanguinity kept moving after Nipomo, succeeding farm work from one stick to another, and Florence would have three more children.

Aft World War II, she yarn dyed in the wool c in Modesto, California and joined George Thompson, a hospital steward.

By , five years abaft claiming her identity as illustriousness “Migrant Mother,” Thompson was food alone in a trailer. She suffered from cancer and word of honour problems, and at one playhouse her children had to request donations for her medical outlay.

According to Dunn, thousands addendum letters poured in, along opposed to more than $35, in gifts.

Florence Owens Thompson died withdraw September , just after scrap 80th birthday, ending a self-possessed marked by economic hardship, fatherly sacrifice and human dignity. 

Even Mr big Ronald Reagan offered his condolences, writing that “Mrs.

Thompson's fleeting represents the loss of inventiveness American who symbolizes strength enthralled determination in the midst closing stages the Great Depression.”

Sarah Pruitt recapitulate a writer and editor homeproduced in seacoast New Hampshire.

She has been a frequent supporter correspondent to since , and psychotherapy the author of Breaking History: Vanished! (Lyons Press, ), which chronicles some of history's governing famous disappearances.

Citation Information

Article Title

The Happen Story Behind the ‘Migrant Mother’ in the Great Depression‑Era Photo

Author

Sarah Pruitt

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

Date Accessed

January 19,

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

May 8,

Original Published Date

May 8,