I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or camera to her, but I do remember she asked no questions. I did not ask her name or history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two.

Dorothea Lange on "Migrant Mother"
Quoted in Richard Lacayo and George Russell, Eyewitness: 150 Years of Photojournalism
(New York: Time, 1995), page 101.

On October 11, 1965, photographer Dorothea Lange died in San Francisco at the age of seventy. Lange is best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography.

Lange began her career in New York, later migrating to San Francisco where she opened a portrait studio in 1918. With the onset of the Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her searing studies of homelessness immediately captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the FSA. From 1935 to 1940, Lange's work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten, particularly displaced farm families and migrant workers, to public attention. Distributed free of charge to newspapers across the country, her poignant images quickly became icons of the era.

Drought Refugees,
Calipatria, California, February 1937.
FSA/OWI Photographs, 1935-1945

Toward Los Angeles, California,
March 1937.
FSA/OWI Photographs, 1935-1945

Dorothea Lange,
California, February 1936.
FSA/OWI Photographs, 1935-1945

In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese-Americans to armed camps in the American West. Selections from this controversial series, can be viewed through the Dorothea Lange section of Women Come to the Front—an online exhibition highlighting the work of women journalists, photographers, and broadcasters who documented World War II at home and abroad.

Learn more about Dorothea Lange and the Farm Security Administration:

• See more of Lange's FSA photographs, search on Lange the black-and-white section of FSA/OWI Photographs, 1935-1945. Four of Lange's images are among the fifteen most frequently requested photographs from the FSA/OWI Collection.
• Listen to the words and songs of migrant workers at FSA work camps in central California. Visit Voices from the Dust Bowl, 1940-1941.
• Search the Today in History Archive on the term photographer to see features on famous shutterbugs such as Lange's FSA colleagues Walker Evans and Gordon Parks, and the civil war photographer Mathew Brady.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt,
1933.
Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 11, 1884. Orphaned by the time she was ten, the young niece of President Theodore Roosevelt was raised by her grandmother. After attending finishing school in England, she returned to America and began visiting needy children in poor neighborhoods initiating lifelong work on behalf of the underprivileged.

In 1905, Roosevelt married distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt. Over the next ten years she had six children one of whom died in infancy. Although her duties as mother and wife took most of her time, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to volunteer for good causes. While her husband served in Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I, she worked with the Red Cross and visited wounded troops in the Naval Hospital. Upon returning to New York City in 1920, Mrs. Roosevelt involved herself for the first time in the women's rights movement.

In 1921, Franklin Roosevelt contracted poliomyelitis (polio) and was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. In order to maintain her husband's political career and to further her own ambitions, Eleanor Roosevelt significantly increased her political involvement. She participated in the League of Women Voters, joined the Women's Trade Union League, and worked for the Women's Division of the New York State Democratic Committee. In addition, she help found a non-profit furniture factory in Hyde Park, New York. During this period she began to act as her husband's "eyes and ears" traveling to places and talking to people her husband now found difficult to reach.

When Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to serve as a liaison between the President and the people. Beginning in 1936, her daily syndicated newspaper column provided a constant means of communication with the American public.

At times, the first lady surpassed the president in her commitment to the disadvantaged. She championed anti-lynching laws, for example, but President Roosevelt did not share her enthusiasm. He believed acceding to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's demands for federal anti-lynching laws would endanger congressional support for his New Deal programs. In March 1936, Eleanor wrote a "personal and confidential" letter to NAACP Executive Secretary Walter Francis White expressing dismay that the atrocity of lynching would not be addressed by the Congress or the president:

Eleanor Roosevelt to Walter White,
March 19, 1936.
Words and Deeds in American History

Before I received your letter today I had been in to the President, talking to him about your letter…I told him that it seemed rather terrible that one could get nothing done…and asked him if there were any possibility of getting even one step taken and he said the difficulty is that it is unconstitutional apparently for the Federal Government to step in in the lynching situation…I will talk to him again about the Van Nuys resolution and will try to talk also to Senator Byrnes and get his point of view. I am deeply troubled about the whole situation as it seems to be a terrible thing to stand by and let it continue.

After Franklin Roosevelt's death in 1945, President Harry Truman appointed the former first lady as a delegate to the United Nations. She chaired the Human Rights Commission during drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948.

In 1953, Mrs. Roosevelt resigned her position, but maintained involvement with the United Nations and other humanitarian causes. The former first lady spent most of her later years at Val-Kill Cottage, her home in Hyde Park, New York. Eleanor Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962 in New York City.

Learn more about the Roosevelt family and experience of other first ladies:

• Visit the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site to learn more about her life and the modest house she preferred to her husband's grand Hyde Park estate.
• Search the collection Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present on the names of first ladies to find additional images of these prominent Americans.
• Test your knowledge of turn-of-the-century first ladies in Who's that Lady?, an activity from the Learning Page.
• Search the Today in History Archive on Roosevelt for more about Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. See features on first ladies Abigail Adams, Helen Taft, Florence Harding, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.