Customer Reviews

Children of the Depression

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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.

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.