blame game by Nate Collier (ca. 1931 – 1932)

Many say it all started with the stock market crash of 1929, but there were so many other factor that contributed to the Greatest Depression the world has seen.  Was it the bank, lack of international trade, was it capitalism.  Something was definitely unbalanced, and led to extreme poverty.

Dorothea Lange‘s Migrant Mother depicts destitute pea pickers in California, centering on Florence Owens Thompson, age 32, a mother of seven children, in Nipomo, California, March 1936.

When ever I think about the depression, and even during my research of photographs, the picture above seems to carry the greatest effect on me. This woman is carrying her two small children, and a look of pure sadness and lost that one just can’t fake.  She looks poor, and while doing some research found that she had 7 children traveling and looking for work. That’s a lot of mouths to feed.  I can’t imagine how hard that was.  At least now, there are government supports and aids for some of the poor.

I close these two photographs to show how on the large scale of things, that many things may have been responsible for the Great depression, but at the end of the day, many families suffered for it.  The hardship was real even if the real reason isn’t quite clear.