page_title: History of the United States (1918–1945)
section_title: Farm programs
hierarchical_section_title: History of the United States (1918–1945) / Great Depression / Farm programs
caption_attribution_description: العربية: تُظهر الصُورة فلورنسا طومسون مع عدد من أطفالها، وتعرف الصُورة باسم "الأم المُهاجرة" (Migrant Mother)، نظراً لأنَّ فلورنسا قد نزحت مع أطفالها السبعة من نيبومو في كاليفورنيا، أثناء فترة الكساد الكبير، والصورة مُلتقطة في مارس 1936. في فترة الكساد الكبير وظفت هيئة الرقابة المالية عدد من المصورين لتوثيق آثار الكساد على سكان أمريكا،فقامت المصورة دوروثي لانج بالتقاط هذه الصورة، حيثُ أصبحت فلورنسا طومسون وأطفالها رمزاً للصمود في مواجهة الشدائد. English: Portrait shows Florence Thompson with several of her children in a photograph known as "Migrant Mother". The Library of Congress caption reads: "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California." In the 1930s, the FSA employed several photographers to document the effects of the Great Depression on the population of America. Many of the photographs can also be seen as propaganda images to support the U.S. government's policy distributing support to the worst affected, poorer areas of the country. Lange's image of a supposed migrant pea picker, Florence Owens Thompson, and her family has become an icon of resilience in the face of adversity. However, it is not universally accepted that Florence Thompson was a migrant pea picker. In the book Photographing Farmworkers in California (Stanford University Press, 2004), author Richard Steven Street asserts that some scholars believe Lange's description of the print was "either vague or demonstrably inaccurate" and that Thompson was not a farmworker, but a Dust Bowl migrant. Nevertheless, if she was a "Dust Bowl migrant", she would have left a farm as most potential Dust Bowl migrants typically did and then began her life as such. Thus any potential inaccuracy is virtually irrelevant. The child to the viewer's right was Thompson's daughter, Katherine (later Katherine McIntosh), 4 years old (Leonard, Tom, "Woman whose plight defined Great Depression warns tragedy will happen again ", article, The Daily Telegraph, December 4, 2008) Lange took this photograph with a Graflex camera on large format (4"x5") negative film.[1] Español: Madre migrante, foto de Dorothea Lange, muestra a los desposeídos cosechadores de California, centrándose en Florence Owens Thompson, de 32 años, madre de 7 hijos, en Nipomo, California (marzo de 1936). Français&#160;: Portrait de Florence Owens Thompson avec plusieurs de ses enfants connu sous le titre Migrant Mother (Mère migrante), et prise par Dorothea Lange en Californie (États-Unis), en 1936. La légende originale était "Ramasseurs de pois ruinés en Californie. Mère de sept enfants, âgée de 32 ans." Selon des études ultérieures cette femme n'était pas ramasseuse de pois, mais une fermière fuyant le Dust Bowl. Elle fait partie d'une série de photographies commandées par la Farm Security Administration pour convaincre le peuple américain de la nécessité de réformes du New Deal suite à la Grande Dépression de 1929 aux États-Unis Italiano: Foto intitolata Migrant Mother, scattata da Dorothea Lange nel 1936 in California, che inquadra Florence Thompson con alcuni dei suoi sette figli, uno dei simboli della depressione economica statunitense negli anni '30. Português: Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange, Estados Unidos, 1936 עברית: תמונה זו מכונה "אם נודדת" ובה נראית פלורנס אוונס תומפסון (Florence Owens Thompson;‏ 1903–1983), כשעל כתפיה שעונות שתי בנות והיא אוחזת בחיקה תינוקת. בטקסט המתאר את התמונה בספרית הקונגרס נכתב כך: "קוטפי אפונה נואשים בקליפורניה. אם לשבעה ילדים. בת שלושים ושתים." בשנות ה-30 של המאה ה-20 שרות הרווחה של הממשל הפדרלי בארה"ב העסיק כמה צלמים כדי לתעד את השפעת המשבר הגדול על התושבים. רבים מהצילומים מתקופה זו יכולים להיחשב גם כמעין תעמולה של הממשל, שתמך באוכלוסיה שנפגעה ביותר מהמשבר, באזורים העניים ביותר בארה"ב. הצלמת היא דורותי לנג. התמונה הפכה לסמל של יכולת העמידה האנושית נוכח המשבר הקשה. Русский: Семья сборщиков гороха в период кризиса. Фото Доротеи Ланге.
context_page_description: The history of the United States from 1918 through 1945 covers the post-World War I era, the Great Depression, and World War II. After World War I, the U.S. rejected the Treaty of Versailles and did not join the League of Nations.
  In 1920, the manufacture, sale, import and export of alcohol was prohibited by an amendment to the United States Constitution. Possession of liquor, and drinking it, was never illegal. The overall level of ab alcohol consumption did go down, however, state and local governments avoided aggressive enforcement. The federal government was overwhelmed with cases, so that bootlegging and speakeasies flourished in every city, and well-organized criminal gangs exploded in numbers, finances, power, and influence on city politics.
  A few local domestic-terrorist attacks from radicals, like the 1920 Wall Street Bombing and the 1919 United States anarchist bombings sparked the first Red Scare. Culture wars between fundamentalist Christians and modernists became more intense, as demonstrated by prohibition, the KKK, and the highly publicized Scopes Trial.
  The nation enjoyed a period of sustained prosperity, 1921–1929.
context_section_description: The celebrated First Hundred Days of the new administration also produced a federal program to protect American farmers from the uncertainties of the market through subsidies and production controls, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which Congress passed in May 1933. The AAA reflected the desires of leaders of various farm organizations and Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace.
  Relative farm incomes had been falling for decades. The AAA included reworkings of many long-touted programs for agrarian relief, which had been demanded for decades. The most important provision of the AAA was the provision for crop reductions—the "domestic allotment" system, which was intended to raise prices for farm commodities by preventing surpluses from flooding the market and depressing prices further.  The most controversial component of the system was the destruction in summer 1933 of growing crops and newborn livestock that exceeded the allotments.  They had to be destroyed to get the plan working. However, gross farm incomes increased by half in the first three years of the New Deal and the relative position of farmers improved significantly for the first time in twenty years. Urban food prices went up slightly, because the cost of the grains was only a small fraction of what the consumer paid.  Conditions improved for the great majority of commercial farmers by 1936. The income of the farm sector almost doubled from $4.5 billion in 1932 to $8.9 billion in 1941 just before the war. Meanwhile, food prices rose 22% in nine years from an index of 31.5 in 1932, to 38.4 in 1941.
  However, rural America contained many isolated farmers scratching out a subsistence income.  The new deal set up programs such as the  Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration to help them, but was very reluctant to help them buy farms.
caption: The Farm Security Administration used photography to document poverty in rural America. Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, depicts destitute pea pickers in California, centering on a mother of seven children, age thirty-two, in Nipomo, California, March 1936.
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