FSA photographs depict rural families adapting to life far from their Kansas and Oklahoma farms. Planners organised each camp on some variant of an orthogonal grid surrounding a public square, a landscape condition largely alien to the residents’ experience of rural agricultural life in the Midwest and Great Plains. People shared water sources and bathing facilities, recreation spaces and dining halls. In many of the camps, the FSA operated co-operative stores, day care centres, adult education classes, libraries, health clinics and kitchens. Architects invariably sited camp manager offices next to the gates in order to enhance surveillance. And yet, these images of the architecturally uniform and rigourous camps belie the fragility and transience of their condition. With the 1940 elections, the political winds in Congress shifted against bold federal experiments such as the migrant camps. The entry of the United States into World War II in 1941 absorbed millions of migrants into the military and defence production force. In 1943, Congress shifted all migrant relief programs into the more conservative and narrowly conceived War Food Administration in the Labor Department. By the conclusion of the war, the federal camp program was shuttered. In the end, the camps presented highly ambivalent landscapes. They were less communities than collections of strangers, coming and going at intervals, forming rapid but tenuous connections amid dire circumstances. The architecture itself expressed this ambivalence. On the one hand, camp planning and organisation spoke of a tentative optimism in the provision of the public good. On the other, it expressed the aims of government through modular and temporary construction suited to the immediate provision of shelter, but less suited to the broader goal of the New Deal to remake American democracy. The camps had sprung up amid volatile political and economic forces – by the time the government had constructed a sizable network of camps, federal priorities had shifted to the war effort. Migrants disappeared into factories and defence housing springing up in cities; construction materials flowed out of FSA warehouses and into war production. In hindsight, the permanent state of the camps had always been impermanence; they were momentary and ephemeral, much like the dust that drove people westward in the first place. n
Marysville Camp, California. Dorothea Lange, 1935. Some migrant camps, such as Marysville in California and Rupert in Idaho, were built earlier by the Civilian Conservation Corps. State officials appropriated this Marysville tourist camp for use by migrant workers two years in advance of the FSA program. With its giant legacy trees, log gate and frame cottages, the camp was designed with permanence in mind.
Arlington, Virginia. Marjory Collins, 1942. When the United States entered World War II, FSA officials shifted new camp design to the provision of manufactured mobile units.These units were generally more costly to produce, but lasted longer, and had the advantage of high mobility. This camp near Arlington housed migrants who flocked to the Southeast to work in food production, military services and defence industries.
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all photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington
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