The geography behind Migrant Mother

How did these two people meet and, in a few minutes, make history? Here's the video.

How this video happened

I wanted to understand a photograph I've seen all my life.

In all honesty, despite being intoxicated by my last video on...uh....gas stations, I wanted to do something slightly more meaningful for this one (tonal whiplash be damned). I thought about covering the photography behind the picture, but I discovered that Nerdwriter had not only made a video about that, but a pretty darn good one.

However, by then I'd done enough research to believe the geography and history provided another useful lens. By the end of this video, I felt like I'd barely scratched the surface.

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Here's a link to the reaction video (for some paid tiers).

Why Migrant Mother was mad

In 1978, the AP published this report — and it earned this headline in the Palo Alto Times:

Florence Thompson's identity as "Migrant Mother" wasn't even discovered until the late 1970s, when a reporter found her in a Modesto Mobile Home park. There, she said she was mad that she hadn't seen a penny from the ubiquitous photograph, which had been government — and public — property for about 40 years.

In the video above, I tried to strip away a bit of the iconography and reveal the life of the person, but the truth is that any biographical effort will fall short when it spends so long lingering on the light and shadow in high resolution digital scans. Though this video claims, in the conclusion, to serve as a corrective to the "Migrant Mother" mythology, it's also just one more piece of content in a long erasure of Florence Thompson from the "Migrant Mother" image.

Her D.O.B. (September 1, 1903) and key stats (3 marriages, 10 children) don't capture the vertiginous details of her life, which feels like 3 or 4 lives to this cosseted child of modernity. Like Lange, she grew up without a father. She had 5 children by 1931 and was pregnant with a sixth child when her first husband died (she didn't actually get that last name Thompson until the 1950s). Traveling from state to state, and up and down California, everybody worked and worked hard.

She described a typical workday to Bill Ganzel:

I was 28 years old, and I had five kids and one on the way. You couldn’t get no work and what you could, it was very hard and cheap. I’d leave home before daylight and come home after dark — grapes, ‘taters, peas, whatever I was doing. Barely made enough each day to buy groceries that night. I picked cotton in Firebaugh, when that girl there was about two years old, I picked cotton in Firebaugh for 50 cents a hundred.

Then "Migrant Mother" happened — and little changed.

Her children discovered the photograph printed in the newspapers they were delivering, but because it was a photo made by a government employee, no one really profited directly from it. The captions that accompanied the photo — Lange's highly praised journalistic companion to her pictures — were seemingly random. One said Thompson had sold a tent (she hadn't), one said she was a pea farmer (she wasn't), and one claimed she'd sold her car's tires for food (she hadn't done that, either).

Having read a bit about Dorothea Lange, I don't think the takeaway should be to dunk on the photographer herself. After all, she didn't see any direct payment from "Migrant Mother" or her other famous photographs (though she did, of course, become a legend). It also wasn't Lange's fault, in my opinion, that out of thousands of photographs, the one that "popped" the most happened to have a slim description.

That is the reason, however, that Florence Thompson was found "fighting mad" when she was finally discovered as the "Migrant Mother." She wanted to get paid! i have no idea how people would have thought of this in previous decades, but today it seems eminently reasonable. We have 15-seconds-of-fame celebrities who can monetize via everything from bar visits to Superbowl ads. Thompson, who supported her family, didn't even get a copy of the photograph. All she got was a late in life appeal, from her children, for help with medical care. They raised around $35,000, but Thompson died shortly after that in 1983.

Of course, depicting her as "fighting mad" is yet another erasure of whoever this person was. Her children said they wished she were remembered as a fun, quick to laugh person, not as a solemn symbol. How you feel about this photograph and its impact on Thompson, and the world, may depend on how you feel about people becoming symbols against their will.

Is it glorifying or exploitative? Maybe you'll land where I did: it's a little of both.

Sources for the video

• I had to pick a lane when it came to books, so I went with Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. As I was editing my research notes down to a script (since this video's more of a storytelling exercise than a comprehensive history), I realized just how beguiled I'd been by this book's details and oddities. Gordon does a great job of giving you a sense of things at large and Lange's life. I have the page where I stopped bookmarked so I can finish up after this video publishes.

• Photographs come from the Library of Congress (with some excerpts from the Oakland Museum's Archive that couldn't be found elsewhere). But thank goodness for Photogrammar, which I found late in the process. This search engine organizes all archival government photos by year, county, keyword, photographer — it's a Godsend. I recommend you browse it. Some of the data it draws from is spotty (I tried to confirm important photos/locations through secondary means), but it's very fun to explore your local area using the map tool.

• This article, in addition to Gordon's book, ended up being a good resource for Thompson's biography. This Moma article gave me some starting points.

• I got so lucky stumbling onto Paul S. Taylor's paper. Not only did it have a nice biographical tie in, but it actually had a lot of great info and the maps I excerpted.

• Here's the issue of Survey Graphic that featured Migrant Mother and one of (a few) inaccurate captions.

• I used this site of maps for some data - very useful (and I got permission to reuse the data in the video).

Other stuff

Thanks for riding along for a more somber, but hopefully not too sanctimonious, video.

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