Camp at Robstown, Texas. Arthur Rothstein, 1942. The orderly, clean aspect of the FSA camps belied the chaos and dislocation experienced by Dust Bowl migrants.
all photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington
architecture + migration wpa migrant camps by joseph heathcott
DUSTBOWL DESIGNS Federal migrant camps of the Great Depression
modernity mitigation control climate change communality
In 1937, the FSA launched a government camp project to provide shelter and services to migrant workers in 15 states, mostly in the West, but also in farm and fishing communities in the Northeast and the South. For many migrants, shelter per se was not the foremost challenge – many families took refuge in their vehicles or in makeshift squatter camps. The main problem was that a lack of stable housing forced them to spend large portions of their income on fuel in order to keep moving. Thus, the FSA not only supplied shelter, but sited camps strategically to maximise transportation efficiencies. Government trucks transported workers to agricultural jobs near the camps, enabling migrants to spend less on fuel and to retain a larger share of their earnings for essentials.
In 1932, the topsoil of the American plains took to the wind and scattered eastward across the country. Decades of sodbusting, mono-cropping and deep furrow plantation had so exhausted the fragile soil structure, that it began to dry out in1931; by 1934 the United States was in the worst drought in its history. Fierce winds carried tremendous plumes of dust over millions of square miles. A billion tons of earth moved on, devastating farms, wrecking communities and setting in motion a great westward migration of families seeking other work. In response to this ecological catastrophe, the Roosevelt administration reorganised the rural relief effort.The Farm Security Administration (FSA)was to coordinate a range of housing, credit, health and education programs for farm families, migrants and itinerant workers. As part of an expansive New Deal state, the ultimate goal of the FSA was to democratise land ownership by eradicating rural tenancy. The immediate challenge, however, was to organise temporary shelter for millions of people in motion – the displaced and the dispossessed.
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Muskogee, Oklahoma. Russell Lee, 1939. Millions of dislocated people on the roads heading west to California alarmed the Roosevelt administration, leading to FSA migrant camps whose communal nature unfolded in tension with the rugged individualism of migrants, embodied in the family car. Arkansas. Ben Shahn, 1935. The unemployed squatted on marginal land across the country from the very beginning of the Depression, their makeshift houses in stark contrast to the ratonalised shelter of the FSA camps.
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