Primary Sources

Exercise 1: Creation of the ra/fsa

• Executive Order 7027, Establishing the Resettlement Administration
• Excerpt from Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 90–94
• Excerpt from US Government Manual on history and activities of Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration

Exercise 2: Conditions of migrant farmer workers

Documents

• Excerpts from Paul Taylor’s report to California Emergency Relief Administration (1935)
• Report, E.L. Baker Camp, Madera, Calif. (1936)
• Report, Davis Auto Camp, Brentwood, Calif. (1936)

Images

• Pea Picker's Home, Nipomo, Calif. (1936)
• Migrant pea pickers camp, Calif. (1936)
• Privy in cotton camp, Calif. (1936)
• Squatter camp, Calif. (1936)
• Children of migratory Mexican field workers, Coachella Valley, Calif. (1937)
• Irrigation ditch, Calipatria, Calif. (1937)

Exercise 3

• George Nickel to Harry Drobish, March 30, 1935
• Harry Drobish to George Nickel, April 4, 1935
• Excerpt from Paul Taylor to Harry Drobish, April 1935
• C. B. Baldwin to R. M. Evans, April 11, 1938, summarizing policy of fsa camps

Exercise 4

Documents

• Map of California, proposed camp locations
• Proposed layout of Thornton camp
• Report, “Amateur Night at Indio Camp”
• Jonathan Garst letter and clipping to Paul Appleby, Assistant to Secretary of Agriculture, Sept. 10, 1937

Images

• fsa migratory labor camp, Imperial Valley, Calif. (1939)
• Portable laundry unit, Merrill, Oregon (1939)
• Library, Arvin, Calif. (1938)
• Meeting of mothers’ club, Arvin, Calif. (1938)
• Halloween party, Shafter, Calif. (1938)
• Meeting of camp council, Farmersville, Calif. (1939)

Exercise 5

Images

• “Mexican Mother in California” (1935)
• “Young Negro wife, Texas” (1938)
• “Nego on the Aldridge Plantation, Mississippi” (1937)
• “Texas tenant farmer to migrant pea picker in California” (1937)
• “Imperial Valley, California. Old Mexican laborer” (1935)
• “Evicted Arkansas sharecropper” (1936)
• “Migrant agricultural worker’s family” (1936)
• “In a carrot puller’ camp near Holtville, Imperial Valley, California” (1939)
• “Mother of family camped near a creek bed” (1935)

Documents

• Growing tobacco caption (1939)

From the article

• Figure 1. “Destitute pea pickers in California” (1936)
• Figure 2. “Filipinos Cutting Lettuce” (1935)
• Figure 3. “Child of impoverished Negro tenant family” (1936)
• Figure 4. “Waiting for the semimonthly relief checks” (1937)
• Figure 5. “Missouri family of five” (1937)
• Figure 6. “Double log cabin of Negro share tenants” (1939)
• Figures 7–8. “Plantation owner. Mississippi Delta” (1936)
• Figure 9. “Cotton worker in Sunday clothes” (1937)
• Figure 10. “Member of the Delta cooperative farm” (1937)
• Figure 11. “Dairy Coop Officials” (1935)