Farm Security Administration: Roy Stryker's Shot Lists and Tugwell's Plan

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The best-known images of the Great Depression came from the photography unit of the Farm Security Administration, and the episode traces the agency behind them. Deflation doubled the real burden of farm debt as crop prices fell, and the Dust Bowl drove tenant farmers and sharecroppers west. In 1935 Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Resettlement Administration under Rexford Tugwell, who aimed to move about 650,000 people off 100 million acres of exhausted land, but opposition from large landowners who relied on cheap tenant labor limited him to a few thousand, plus 95 California camps serving about 75,000 migrants. Tugwell resigned in 1936, and the 1937 Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act folded the agency into the FSA, which shifted to low-interest loans.

The FSA lent $778 million to about 950,000 tenant farmers under rural rehabilitation, with agents advising on cooking and child rearing, and it ran 34 subsistence homestead communities where residents could not buy their farms. In the Mississippi Delta it evicted existing sharecroppers for chosen clients and complied with local segregation. To win urban support, Roy Stryker hired 15 photographers between 1935 and 1944, including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks and Arthur Rothstein, and gave them shot lists linking people to the ruined land. In 1942 the FSA worked under the War Relocation Authority, assessing Japanese American farms and transferring leases, mostly to white operators. Congress dissolved it in 1946, replacing it with the Farmers Home Administration.

• Stryker billed the project as introducing America to Americans.
• The unit produced about 250,000 images, and about 164,000 negatives survive at the Library of Congress.
• Richard Wright drew on the archive for his 1941 book 12 Million Black Voices.
• Local Californians opposed the relief camps out of fear that migrants would settle permanently.
• The photography unit was absorbed by the Office of War Information and disbanded in 1943 after funding cuts.