Old WPA photo's

[dmccarty]

George,

Well said.

Let the photos document what they document. The picture of the girl with I suppose the grandpa could have been taken today except for their clothing and the car in the background.

The photos of the kids with the dresses made from feed/flour sacks is really good. I have read over and over of families making clothes from sacks. Always thought of it as a bad thing. Not so sure after seeing the photos. I think the material used in the sacks was used as a marketing tool. Those dresses look pretty good to me and they are not at all what I thought they would look like.

People make fun of people who live in trailers. Single wides are a big step up from the tar paper shacks that I remember people living in not so long ago. Can't really tell in some of the photos which is better, the house in the photo or the tar paper shack.

I remember hunting and camping in the Applachians in KY in the 70s. It was not uncommon to see a tar paper shack with a Caddy or other nice car parked out front. It just stuck out. One could take a photo out back showing poverty. But would the photo be telling the truth? They made a choice of a nice car over a nice house.

The train photo is just danged good.

Later,
Dan

 

[N80]

I also think something that gets messed up in some people's thinking is that poverty is necessarily a bad thing. Of course malnutrition, insufficient shelter, etc is bad no matter how you slice it. But often times not having 'nice' cloths, or 'nice' cars, or fancy homes is seen as poverty. And that may be a form of poverty, but hardly the kind of poverty that indicates some sort of social injustice.

It also saddens me to think that we now equate poverty with saddness and consider it to be demeaning. The premise of that notion is that happiness is derived from 'things' and if you don't have things you can't be happy and you can't be good or noble or respectable. So sometimes photos of poverty can alert us to problems that need to be fixed, at other times they can suggest that lack of stuff means lack of happiness and respect. My mother grew up poor, like no shoes poor. Times were tough and there were sad times, but she has never felt that her childhood was bad because of lack of things. Again, I'm not trying to diminish the negative impact of true poverty, but at the same time I do not believe that lack of possessions is equivalent to lack of purpose, happiness, respect or human dignity.

And some of what you see in these WPA photos CONFIRMS that. If you look at a lot of these people you see what hardship has done to them but they still appear defiant, strong and steady. This does not mean they aren't sad, or worried or hungry, but it does mean that you can see that they are not broken. That's the beauty I see in many of these photos.

 

[turbo36]

Dan, of course its bias. Any art can be interpreted in any way and can be used to support any ideology or propaganda. I did not read anything on that web site, so I don't know what it said.....and don't much care.

.

How can you offer an opinion if you didn't read it???? Isn't that just prejudicial thinking?

 

[N80]

The only opinion I rendered on that particular website was qualified with an "if". And the only point in that qualified opinion was that to cast the woes of the depression as solely regional would be a mistake, which is self evident really, regardless of what was in the text. But yes, to render an unqualified opinion on text you had not read would indeed be predjudicial.

 

[Ridgewalker]

The photos of the kids with the dresses made from feed/flour sacks is really good. I have read over and over of families making clothes from sacks.

My Mom talks about going to the feed store and getting to pick out a 50 lb bag of flour so she could get the pattern she wanted for her new dress.

I have an old glass piggy bank that came in a feed sack...anyone ever see one of those? They used to be common in this area.

 

[Bird]

I have read over and over of families making clothes from sacks. Always thought of it as a bad thing.

My Mom talks about going to the feed store and getting to pick out a 50 lb bag of flour so she could get the pattern she wanted for her new dress.

So one of you read about it and the other had a mother who told of it. I lived it. I was 15 years old the first time I bought a shirt in a store. Prior to that time, I had been given white "dress" shirts occasionally to wear to church, but all my other shirts were made by my mother. She also made her own clothes and those of my two younger sisters and two younger brothers. And yes, we bought chicken feed, cow feed for the milk cow, and hog feed. So whichever kid was due a new shirt or dress went with dad to the feed store to pick out the color or pattern he/she wanted.

Of course we weren't as "poor" as some folks. We actually had store bought underwear and socks. And boys got 3 new pair of blue jeans to start school each year. How many of you have used a light bulb as a "darning" bulb to darn socks? You didn't throw away socks just because they had a hole in them; you fixed the hole.

White flour and sugar sacks were either made into pillow cases, or hemmed for "cup towels" to dry the dishes, or were sewn together to make the bottom, or back, side of quilts.

I was almost grown before I learned that flour and sugar could be bought in smaller containers than 25 pound sacks.

 

[dmccarty]

So one of you read about it and the other had a mother who told of it. I lived it.

Was the material of decent quality? How did it feel? From the photos it looks like any material one would buy to make clothes.

The only feed sacks I ever saw were pretty rough material. I had visions of kids running around in something a step above burlap.

The photo about the dance was interesting in that the wall looks like its covered in butcher paper. I can't tell if the paper is "lumpy" because the paper has slump or if the wall is stuffed with some kind of insulation. The farm I worked on had an old house built in the early 1900's which had newspaper has wall paper.

Later,
Dan

 

[N80]

I've seen old sharecropper shacks 'wall papered' with news paper.

 

[Bird]

Dan, burlap was a word I never heard when I was a kid. We called'em "tow sacks". And yes, they were used for stuff that wasn't small or fine enough to escape through the weave. But I think anything smaller than whole kernal corn had to be bagged in something with a tighter weave.

And yes, I think the material in the feed sacks was the same cotton material you'd buy in the dry goods store. So it didn't feel any different than store bought clothes.

As you know, most products back then were packaged differently than they are now. You didn't have all that "packaging" to dispose of. The packaging was either returnable to be reused (soda bottles, milk bottles, and such) or, as was made to be used in some other way, as the sacks for feed, flour, and sugar were.

 

[czechsonofagun]

Thank you, guys, this is probably the most interesting thread here.

And George, I understand what you mean and I am with you. As the saying goes, small problems are problems fixable with money.

It reminds me kind of my growing up - with understanding, that if I go to college, I will do interesting work, but I will never be well paid. See in our twisted socialistic world there were rich groups - like communists in high posts, miners and steel workers (exemplary blue collars, the proletariat to show) and those who could make money on the side (waiters, gas station operators, greengrocers, cab drivers...)

OK, I got carried away