What Caused The Dust Storm

At the end of World War 1, the United States has a hard time making the switch to a peace time economy and the country slips into a recession. The prices of crops have dropped so low farmers are having a hard time making ends meet. And then the stock market crashes and the depression hits. To add to the problems the farmers are having trying to make enough money to survive, in 1931 a drought hits in the southern and plains states. The farmers had bought tractors to plow up more and more land in order to have a large enough crop to survive. Without rain there is no crop, and nothing to hold the soil in place. Now they are dealing with erosion on top of everything else. Around 1932, dust storms started completely blowing the soil away. Those dust storms became to be known as “Black Blizzards”. The worst dust storm occurred on May 11, 1934. It was so bad, the dust was carried all the way to the east coast. It caused views of the Statue of Liberty and the United States Capital to be blocked and even dumped dust on the decks of ships over 300 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean. By the end of 1934, there are more than 35 million acres of what used to be farmland that

He sent photographers out all over to get these pictures for him. One of those photographers was Dorothea Lange. Dorothea Lange took what is probably the best known picture from this time, “Migrant Mother”. She was travelling around to different camps and came upon a camp of pea pickers near Nipomo, California. She almost kept going but decided to turn back. In this camp Dorothea saw Florence Thompson with her seven children. Dorothea Lange took a series of pictures of Mrs. Thompson and her children, some close up some further away. Migrant mother became the most well-known of those