American collective memory of the Great Depression has been shaped by the photographs taken under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Appearing initially in governmental reports, the popular press, and in widely attended World’s Fair exhibitions during the Depression and its aftermath, FSA photographs appeared decades later in museum exhibitions, textbooks, and documentary films, becoming a common way Americans visualized the 1930s. Many individual photographs, like Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, have become iconic images of this era. Yet creating this visual record for posterity was not the project’s primary objective. In 1935 when the Resettlement Administration (RA, the precursor to the FSA) sent its first photographers out to document impoverished Americans primarily in rural settings, its goal was to demonstrate the need for federal support of struggling Americans. With its specific political objectives—namely showing both the need for New Deal programs and their positive impact on those hit hard by the economic downturn—the photographs aimed to elicit empathy for the plight of small-town Americans, farmers, migrants, displaced laborers, sharecroppers and tenant farmers. And its photographers captured many pictures of quiltmakers.
But why did the photographers choose to snap these shots of quilts and quiltmakers? While only a sliver of the large number of FSA photos, the quilt pictures share many qualities and communicated specific messages about how to lift one’s family out of poverty. These photos drew on nostalgic myths of the colonial era by using quilts as symbols of making do and self-sufficiency; they humanized the subjects living in dire conditions by showing them interacting with quilts in ways that created warm domestic spaces; they depicted the cooperative nature of quiltmaking and the mythologized quilting bee to promote the FSA’s communally minded agenda; and they showed the skill of quiltmaking as one that represented the positive impact of New Deal programs on individuals and communities. Quiltmaking, symbolic of the sorts of domesticity that may have been lost with a transformation from an informal, rural structure to the highly formal planning promoted by the FSA, softened the blow of this form of modernism that accompanied New Deal programs