Florence Owens Thompson (1903-1983)

Migrant Mother, taken by

Dorothea Lange in 1936

One of the most iconic images of the Great Depression is a photo by Dorothea Lange tagged simply "Migrant Mother". The backstory was mentioned by Garrison Keillor in this morning's Writer's Almanac since May 26 is Dorothea Lange's birthday (1895). His narrative is often more interesting than his notes and his telling of this famous photograph is especially good. The Wikipedia link is quite moving.

Her name is Florence Owens Thompson.

Florence Owens Thompson was born Florence Leona Christie on September 1, 1903, in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Both her parents were of Cherokee descent. Her father, Jackson Christie, had abandoned her mother, Mary Jane Cobb, before Florence was born, and her mother remarried Charles Akman in the spring of 1905. The family lived on a small farm in Indian Territory outside of Tahlequah.

Seventeen-year-old Florence married Cleo Owens, a 23-year-old farmer's son from Stone County, Missouri, on February 14, 1921. They soon had their first daughter, Violet, followed by a second daughter, Viola, and a son, Leroy (Troy). The family migrated west with other Owens relatives to Oroville, California, where they worked in the saw mills and on the farms of the Sacramento Valley. By 1931, Florence was pregnant with her sixth child when her husband Cleo died of tuberculosis. Florence then worked in the fields and in restaurants to support her six children. In 1933 Florence had another child, returned to Oklahoma for a time, and then was joined by her parents as they migrated to Shafter, California, north of Bakersfield. There Florence met Jim Hill, with whom she had three more children. During the 1930s the family worked as migrant farm workers following the crops in California and at times into Arizona. Florence later recalled periods when she picked 400–500 pounds (180–230 kg) of cotton from first daylight until after it was too dark to work. She said: "I worked in hospitals. I tended bar. I cooked. I worked in the fields. I done a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids."

(The family settled in Modesto, California, in 1945. Well after World War II, Florence met and married hospital administrator George Thompson. This marriage brought her far greater financial security than she had previously enjoyed.)

On March 6, 1936, after picking beets in the Imperial Valley, Florence and her family were traveling on U.S. Highway 101 towards Watsonville "where they had hoped to find work in the lettuce fields of the Pajaro Valley." On the road, the car's timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-pickers' camp on Nipomo Mesa. They were shocked to find so many people camping there—as many as 2,500 to 3,500. A notice had been sent out for pickers, but the crops had been destroyed by freezing rain, leaving them without work or pay. Years later Florence told an interviewer that when she cooked food for her children that day, other children appeared from the pea pickers' camp asking, "Can I have a bite?"

While Jim Hill, her partner, and two of Florence's sons went into town to get parts to repair the car, Florence and some of the children set up a temporary camp. As Florence waited, photographer Dorothea Lange, working for the Resettlement Administration, drove up and started taking photos of Florence and her family. She took seven images in the course of ten minutes. Lange's field notes for the Resettlement Administration were typically very thorough, but on this particular day she had been rushing to get home after a month on assignment, and the notes she submitted with this batch of negatives do not refer to any of the seven photographs she took of Thompson and her family. It seems that the published newspaper reports about this camp were later distilled into captions for the series, which explains inaccuracies on the file cards in the Library of Congress.

For example, one of the file cards reads:

Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February [sic: March] 1936.

Twenty-three years later, Lange wrote of the encounter with Thompson:

I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.

Troy Owens, one of Thompson's sons, recounted:

There's no way we sold our tires, because we didn't have any to sell. The only ones we had were on the Hudson and we drove off in them. I don't believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn't have.

In many ways, Migrant Mother is not typical of Lange's careful method of interacting with her subject. Exhausted after a long road-trip, she did not speak extensively to the migrant woman, Florence Thompson, and may not have recorded any notes.

According to Thompson, Lange promised the photos would never be published. Lange did send them to the San Francisco News even before sending them to the Resettlement Administration in Washington, D.C. The News ran the pictures almost immediately and reported that 2,500 to 3,500 migrant workers were starving in Nipomo, California. Within days, the pea-picker camp received 20,000 pounds (9,100 kg) of food from the federal government. Thompson and her family had moved on by the time the food arrived and were working near Watsonville, California.

While Thompson's identity was not known for over 40 years after the photos were taken, the images became famous. The image which later became known as Migrant Mother, "achieved near mythical status, symbolizing, if not defining, an entire era in United States history." Roy Stryker called Migrant Mother the "ultimate" photo of the Depression Era: "[Lange] never surpassed it. To me, it was the picture ... . The others were marvelous, but that was special ... . She is immortal." As a whole, the photographs taken for the Resettlement Administration "have been widely heralded as the epitome of documentary photography." Edward Steichen described them as "the most remarkable human documents ever rendered in pictures."

Thompson's identity was discovered in the late 1970s. In 1978, acting on a tip, Modesto Bee reporter Emmett Corrigan located Thompson at her mobile home in Space 24 of the Modesto Mobile Village and recognized her from the 42-year-old photograph. Florence was quoted as saying "I wish she [Lange] hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did." As Lange was funded by the federal government when she took the picture, the image was public domain and Lange was not entitled to royalties. However, the picture did help make Lange a celebrity and earned her "respect from her colleagues."

While the image was being prepared for exhibit in 1938, the negative of the photo was retouched to remove Florence's thumb from the lower-right corner of the image.