Children of the Depression [Hardcover]

Kathleen Thompson (Editor), Hilary Mac Austin (Editor)

Book Description

During the Depression, Roy Emerson Stryker, head of the Farm Security Administration Historical Section, hired some of the best photographers in the United States—including Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Walcott, John Delano, John Vachon, and Arthur Rothstein—to record the state of the country during its direst days. While Stryker made many demands on his photographers, he also gave them a great deal of freedom. Asking for sociology, he received great art. It is that combination which makes the FSA collection so special.

A goal of the FSA photographers was to inspire the country to care about the people the New Deal programs were trying to help. With regard to children, they were masterful. The photographs show us the young of every ethnicity living in conditions we associate today with Third World countries. Behind virtually every shot taken of a child by these remarkable chroniclers is the dream of a world in which childhood is a time of play, happiness, and safety. The reality, shown in the photographs assembled in Children of the Depression, reveals the betrayal of that dream. But the pictures also are a testament to resilience and hope.

Editors Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin have chosen images that represent different regions and ethnic backgrounds. Some pictures may challenge preconceptions about the Depression era; others will give concrete meaning to the facts and figures that we know about deprivation and hardship. Thompson and Austin use a few of the very familiar FSA photographs, in addition to many pictures that have seldom or never been published.

More than 100 black-and-white images are arranged by category, each chapter depicting a specific element of the daily lives of children. Although the photographs are the defining feature of the book, compelling quotes transcribed by social workers of the era are interspersed throughout.

Children of the Depression will appeal to lovers of great photography. It will also serve as graphic representation for the generations that followed of the conditions that formed the values and aspirations of many of their parents and grandparents.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"These photographs constitute a social history to break your heart." -- Gary Wills, author of

"This is a very important collection of images that will expand the visual discourse in photographic history." -- Deborah Willis-Kennedy, author of

"[CHILDREN OF THE DEPRESSION] shows children both in situations unique to the 1930s and in those that are universal..." -- Robert McElvaine, author of

About the Author

Kathleen Thompson is co-author with Darlene Clark Hine of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America and co-editor with Hilary Mac Austin of The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present. She also co-authored, with Andra Medea, the feminist classic Against Rape (1974). With Diane Epstein, she co-authored Feeding on Dreams, an expose of the diet industry, published in 1994.

Thompson was a major contributor to Black Women in America and is editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia of Black Women. She has worked for the past twenty years in education and publishing and is the author of more than one hundred books for juveniles, including Portrait of America, a 53 volume set of books to accompany Turner Broadcasting's television series of that name. She was also co-founder and, for a number of years, president of a Chicago educational development house, Sense and Nonsense, Inc.

She has received numerous awards for her work, including Best Books for Youth from the ALA in 1974 and the Gold Camera Award from the U.S. Industrial Film Festival, but the one she treasures most is the ban on Against Rape by the apartheid government of South Africa.

Hilary Mac Austin is co-editor with Kathleen Thompson of The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present. She was the photo researcher for A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America by Kathleen Thompson and Darlene Clark Hine (1996); the American Jewish Desk Reference (2000); and Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1998).

Austin has been a writer and photo researcher for ten years, working with the Philip Lief Group; Sense and Nonsense, Inc.; Visual Education Corporation; SRA (Science Research Associates); Bantam/Doubleday/Dell; Carlson Publishing; and others. Her favorite project of the last few years was acting as technical director for a production of Hamlet in Rwanda under the auspices of the International War Crimes Tribunal.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press; First Edition edition (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253340314
• ISBN-13: 978-0253340313
• Product Dimensions: 11.7 x 10.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #529,954 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Growing up in hard times, June 7, 2003

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Children of the Depression (Hardcover)

There always seems a new way of looking at the Farm Security Administration photos of the Depression. I've already got Plain Pictures of Plain Doctoring: Vernacular Expression in New Deal Medicine and Photography - 80 photographs from the Farm Security Administration (Mit ... Humanistic & Social Dimensions of Medicine) and An American Journey: Images of Railroading During the Depression and this excellent book is the first to show dozens of great photos of children (and teenagers).

The author's explain in the intro that at the peak of the Depression about a quarter of the workforce were unemployed and because no child labor laws had been passed this huge number included some children, especially in agriculture. Most of the photos in this book show children in a rural setting, where it was expected that they would help their parents increase the family income.

Sixteen of the FSA photographers work is included and the author's have searched for photos that are seldom or have never been published before and this is one reason I liked the book. Another is the large format landscape size. All the images have a short caption, date, photographer's name and Library of Congress negative file number. There are a couple of slightly annoying production points: the lack of page numbers, even though there is a contents page with a page number for each of the seven chapters and the ten pages of introduction are numbered but with roman numerals, who uses these nowadays.

Fortunately not all the photos show hard times and despair, one chapter, called 'Playing', shows kids having fun, another, 'Living' has a 1940 Marion Post Wolcott shot of five laughing teenagers folding newspapers on a front lawn in Natchitoches, Louisiana. As you would expect though most of the rest of these sensitively taken photos do show children just having to make do in those extraordinary years.

If you collect books of FSA output or just want to see some great descriptive photos of the past 'Children of the Depression' is well worth owning. Another book on the same subject (and written for the younger market) is Children of the Great Depression (Golden Kite Awards (Awards)) which uses FSA photos to go with the text.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars CSPAN PRESENTATION SEEMS TO BE CONFLICTED/LAST DITCH/EVEN POLITICIZED, March 14, 2009

By 

litgirl (Washington state) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Children of the Depression (Hardcover)

While I was seriously captivated by the photographs in the editor's presentation of this book today on CSPAN 3, I am torn about purchasing this book.
The editor was, in her comments, again and again, more concerned about trying to show how clearly distressed & poverty-stricken children were NOT really "victims" attitudinally--that children were able to grow up fast because they were laborers, etc. Children who were in rags, smoking, showing signs of starvation and living in filth were okay, somehow, because they looked like they could still smile or might implode and fight somebody or anybody off at any time. There was a real sickness to the projections placed on those children of the past and not a lot of true historical knowledge in some key areas by at least one of the speakers.

Schizoid/Bipolar Logic, Lack of acknowledgement of the wrongness of children having to have been put in these increasingly stressful situations, etc.

The amazingly revealing pictures continued to be completely at odds with the most vocal speaker's lack of perspective which led me to conclude, with a great deal of disappointment and disgust, that she either had no grip on her subject OR had some ulterior current political agenda(s). The speaker in her own words did not understand how the huge loss of family farms in the rural south in the 1920's PRIOR to the actual Depression was related to the actual financial crisis OF the Depression itself--even though the sudden drop in demand from post-World War I Europe led to this downturn, turned thousands out of their farms and homes, and built-up to the Depression itself. This is just one example of many that stunned me personally. I wanted to hurl a copy of Steinbeck at the TV screen as I had 2 to spare--as well as some good basic copies of US History Surveys and general solid research on the History of the Depression.

A child working in the cranberry bogs of the Northeast during the Depression was supposedly "unaffected" by the Depression because she came from a family of migrant workers. Even supposing, which is unlikely, the child's family had done nothing else for the previous 30 years, there would have been more of a struggle to survive as a migrant worker during the Depression. There were many more shots of children, toddlers, infants, and teens struggling and yet again and again there was a wavery pendulum of token-acknowledgment and then personal, even handed-down memories from family member, reversal of the actual plight of kids back in the day. Everything was somehow okay if one survived it all, essentially, which was the final tone--and on a personal note, I found this disturbing, as the viewpoint and goal for our own society was being formed in this government-broadcasted "educational" history presentation. If the commentary were meant to set some kind of bar for our own children and families now?...well...that would be dangerous.

At the presentation's close there was more of an apology from the less vocal of the 3 presenters that acknowledged the very short amount of time spent in preparation of this book. It was clear that this was put out for the interest of the moment, regarding the financial crisis the global and national market is now experiencing in the US. My recommendation would be to buy this only if you feel you must have the pictures, OR to find a photographical or educational sourcebook on the depression from an author and historian who did the work PRIOR to the trend.