Rediscovering Family History Through Library of Congress Images*

Rothstein, Arthur, photographer. Untitled photo, possibly related to: Migrant high school students arriving home from school. Tulare migrant camp. Visalia, California. United States Tulare County Visalia California, 1940. Mar. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017774714/

Introductory

I am always curious about the personal connection between artists and their work. Why is a particular medium, topic, or theme interesting? What inspires one to pursue a particular body of work? Since 2019, I have traveled throughout New Mexico and other states photographing many sites built during the Great Depression. The construction of these sites was funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) under the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. I authored an article on New Mexico WPA sites that appeared in El Palacio Magazine and two pages on this website cover a small sample of my images of New Mexico and USA WPA sites. This project was also part of Review Santa Fe in 2023. I also presented images of WPA sites at the National New Deal Preservation Association Conference in Santa Fe in 2024. But the question remains. Below are images of two WPA sites shot as part of this on-going project. But why are these sites and other sites interesting enough to prompt numerous trips and images of these sites? For me, the answer is straightforward but it has many facets some of which I highlight in this short essay.

Left: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge, Outer Bridge Drive (Link Bridge), Chicago, Illinois, June 14, 2023
Right: Jefferson Memorial, Washington, DC, November 30, 2022

Family First

My paternal grandparents and other family migrated to Visalia, California from Jessieville, Arkansas, a small town just north of Hot Springs in 1939. They moved into the Visalia Migrant Labor Camp shortly after their arrival. The Visalia camp was north of the Arvin “Weedpatch” Camp in Bakersfield that served as one of the settings of the John Steinbeck novel (and John Ford film) The Grapes of Wrath. My uncle Jack Russell Blackmon (the youngest of my father’s four brothers) related my grandmother’s experience at the camp in one the many Blackmon family reunion books he put together back in the 1980s and 1990s.

After Mother and Dad moved to California about 1939, Mother organized and worked with a larger number of the migrants who had left the Dust Bowl states, helping the farm women develop and improve their skills in cooking, sewing, canning, personal hygiene, and care of families. Her volunteer efforts were brought to the attention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who called mother to cite her for her efforts.

As is well known, the Roosevelt Administration dispatched a group of photographers to document the Great Depression throughout the country. They photographed many of the migrant labor camps in California. Farm Service Administration (FSA) photographers Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Arthur Rothstein photographed the Visalia Migrant Labor Camp (Linnell) at different times. Lee and Rothstein photographed members of my family. The image below-left shows my paternal grandparents (Mamie Edna and Robert Franklin Blackmon) at an event in the Linnell Camp Community Center. The middle image by Arthur Rothstein is of my grandmother in one of the homes at the camp. The bottom-right image of them was taken in the early-1960s shortly before the death of my grandmother. My grandfather passed in 1975.

My grandparents were accompanied by their sons Durward Oliver (D.O.) and Stanley, and D.O.’s spouse Arizona (“Zona”) and their son Russell. My father (Hugh Howard Edwards, born Basil Calvert Blackmon) left Hot Springs for Los Angeles in the late-1930s and did not live in the camp. I have not found any photographs of either Stanley, Zona, or Russell in the Library of Congress/FSA collection. Nevertheless, the dearth of family pictures from my father’s side of the family makes these images special and I am grateful they exist. The image below shows D.O. (fourth from left) and other staff at the camp store.

Lee, Russell, photographer. Tulare County, California. Farm Security Administration farm workers’s camp. Staff of the cooperative store. Tulare County United States California, 1942. Feb. Photograph.https://www.loc.gov/item/2017817224/

New Deal Public Policy

My academic and professional experience as an economist is another basis for my interest in the Great Depression and New Deal. The WPA was part of a much broader set of policy measures put into place during this period. The first migrant camps that emerged in California were makeshift, had no running water or electricity or sanitation, and were occupied by squatters. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother image was taken in one of these earlier camps in Nipomo which is actually outside of the Central Valley closer to the coast of California just north of Santa Maria. The FSA and Resettlement Administration transformed many of these camps into a set of thirteen migrant labor camps in California beginning in 1935.

R.H. Hansen, Rural Slums, Resettlement Administration Poster,
Resettlement Administration, poster by R. H. Jansen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Resettlement_Administration_Poster_Jansen.jpg

By most measures, the effect that WPA had on overall economic activity during that period was small. The University of Kentucky Research Guides Works Progress Administration: The Works Progress Administration reports that WPA expenditures were $11 billion from 1936 through 1943. This averages just under $1.4 billion per year and that translates to little over 1 percent of US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1940. Regardless, the program provided skills training and jobs for nearly 8 million people. While small, these expenditures made nearly 90 years ago still benefit society, as evidenced by the many WPA sites still in use.

We can look at the people in the Arthur Rothstein image below for a different take on the benefits of these camps. We see clean faces and clothes and expressions of curiosity and hope in children and adults alike. Such sentiments might not have been possible just a few years before. How did this experience change their lives? How can one put a dollar value on that?

Rothstein, Arthur, photographer. Audience watching play in recreation hall. Tulare migrant camp. Visalia, California. United States Tulare County Visalia California, 1940. Mar. Photograph.  https://www.loc.gov/item/2017774799/

Resistance to the Camps

Despite these benefits, the existence of the camps was not accepted universally. The book Documenting America , 1935-1943 (Carl Fleischhauer, Beverly W. Brannan, Lawrence W. Levine, and Alan Trachtenberg, University of California Press, 1988) includes a discussion of resistance to the camps by California growers and businesses (page 189).

California’s growers and a significant portion of the state’s business establishment viewed with suspicion any activity on behalf of migrant workers, including the creation of migrant camps. The growers would benefit from an oversupply of homeless, dependent workers. There had been strikes in California since the start of the Depression, and the growers feared unionization and continued labor unrest. They were accused of rigging pay scales and of inhibiting efforts to aid the migrants. During March 1940, the same month Rothstein visited Visalia, the New York Times carried a story about California’s Associated Farmers organization. The article quotes the organization’s leaders as expressing pride in being “red baiters” and working against subversive organizations. In John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath the migrant Joad family had found succor – and had had their political consciousness raised. – in a government farm labor camp. Within a few months of the novel’s publication Steinbeck’s life was threatened.

The Grapes of Wrath was even banned from libraries and schools in Kern County (which includes Bakersfield) in 1939, but the ban was short-lived, ending in 1941.

What Might Have Been?

A source of personal frustration is my not knowing about this when growing up. After all, we visited my grandparents at their Visalia home many times and paid visits to my uncle and his family at their home in Fresno. Evidently, my own sense of curiosity was not keen enough to ask why we even had relatives in the Central Valley. Moreover, having majored in economics at California State University, Northridge, a term paper on New Deal migrants in California based on interviews with family members might have stood a step above the usual undergraduate term paper fodder and might have even generated some interest outside of the Economics Department (especially in view of CSUN interest in the Farmworker Movement in California during the 1960s). On the other hand, I am not so sure how enthusiastic my family would have been to revisit a period in their lives that they might have been reluctant to remember, especially to a young college student who never pined for a roof over his head let alone a meal.

Culture and Cultural Landscapes

There are many references to the New Deal and the WPA in film and literature beyond the Steinbeck masterpiece. The early part of his Of Mice and Men includes dialogue between George and Lennie about their “work” cards (presumably WPA cards). Steinbeck later laments in Travels with Charley the lack of sufficient room to hold his collection of forty-eight WPA Guides to the States in Rocinante, the flatbed truck he drove across the country with Charley. According to Steinbeck,

If there had been room in Rocinante I would have packed the W.P.A. Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them. I have all of them, and some are very rare. If I remember correctly, North Dakota printed only eight hundred copies and South Dakota about five hundred. The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it.

Echoing some of my comments above, the narrator in the 2003 film Seabiscuit discusses the impact that the many New Deal programs had on people devastated by the Great Depression.

It had dozens of names: NRA, WPA, the CCC. But it really came down to just one thing. For the first time in a long time, someone cared. For the first time in a long time, you were no longer alone. In the end, it wasn’t the dams, or the roads, or the bridges, or the parks, or the tunnels or the thousands of other public projects that were built in those years. It was more invisible than that. Men who were broken only a year before suddenly felt restored. Men who had been shattered suddenly found their voice.

The Great Migration

The Great Depression is sandwiched inside a longer period known as the Great Migration. This started in the 1920s and covers many different migrations across different parts of the country. Perhaps most notable was the migration of American blacks from the south to the north and midwest driven largely by segregation, the sharecropping system, the continual threat of violence, and the effects of agricultural disasters (e.g., boll weevil infestation and flooding). My family migrated to seek the greater economic opportunities in the west. This period of many migrations extended well into the postwar demographic shift to the west and southwest that continues to this day. It also includes immigration to the United States from abroad.

Architectural Genres

State and local governments made decisions on the sourcing and use of materials and the architectural design of many WPA projects. This accounts for much of the variation in architectural styles in Works Progress Administration buildings despite the rather short timeframe of WPA-funded construction. To cite a few examples, the WPA Woman’s Club in Carazzozo, New Mexico is Pueblo Revivalist, the WPA Post Office in Burbank, California is Mission Revivalist, and the WPA post office in Visalia, California is Art Deco. The wonderful Post Office in Milton, Pennsylvania mixes Art Deco with Moderne. The WPA funded the construction of many Art Deco buildings (e.g., the iconic City Hall in Kansas City, Missouri), but many of the Art Deco buildings in Los Angeles predate WPA. Many other civic buildings funded by the Works Progress Administration were not Art Deco. The many Classic Modern buildings funded by the Public Works Administration (PWA – larger projects) on the Pennsylvania State University campus as well as the vast majority of Post Offices scattered throughout the country suggests a fairly wide stylistic umbrella encompassing WPA and PWA buildings. Debates about taxonomy can be interminable, so let me suggest that labels like WPA, New Deal, or Depression Era might refer more to a time period than to any specific architectural genre. The gallery below some of the variation in WPA post offices.

Left: Brian K. Edwards, Post Office, Milton, Pennsylvania, June 12, 2023
Center: Brian K. Edwards, Post Office, Portales, New Mexico, July 19, 2020
Right: Brian K. Edwards, Post Office, Burbank, California, July 13, 2023

Postscript

The beginning of World War II saw improved economic conditions allowing many to leave the camps. Members of my family stayed in the camp until 1942. My grandparents lived the rest of their lives in Visalia. Uncles D.O. and Stanley moved to Fresno. D.O. owned and operated Blackmon’s Antique and Coin and wrote often about the history of the Blackmon family. His research included a fascinating account of the family’s experience at the New Llano Colony in Vernon Parish, Louisiana from 1917 to 1919. Uncle Jack cited above was born in that colony. Jack later attended Law School at Southern Methodist University and became a Judge and served as Mayor of Corpus Christi, Texas. Stanley served as a radio operator in a tank during World War II and was involved in the Normandy Northern France Invasion, Rhineland Ardennes Central Europe campaign. After the war he worked for the United States Postal Service.

I visited the Linnell Camp (now the Linnell Farm Labor Center) in August of 2024. The camp now provides housing for farm workers in the Central Valley. The remodeled Community Center is still there and is now a school for children. The image below-right is a camp employee showing an aerial view of the camp taken back in the 1950s.

Left: Visalia, California. Community building at the Farm Security Administration Tulare camp for migratory workers. Tulare County United States California Visalia, 1938. ?. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017765319/.
Middle: Community Building, Linnell Farm Labor Center, Visalia, California, 2024
Right: Roberto, Linnell Farm Labor Center, Visalia, California, 2024

• Note: The Library of Congress/FSA images seen in this blog post have been downloaded directly from the Library of Congress (see link accompanying each image). There are no known restrictions on the use of these images. https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html