SAN LUIS VALLEY — In March 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president and took office during the Great Depression, a period of unprecedented hardship. At the time, a staggering 15.5 million Americans were unemployed, resulting in an alarming unemployment rate of 25 percent. The banking system had collapsed, and prices and productivity had plummeted to one-third of their pre-depression levels.  

The stock market crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression, which was exacerbated by the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the failure of European banks in 1931. To this day, the United States Senate considers the passage of Smoot-Hawley "among the most catastrophic acts in congressional history." 

The actual number of people unemployed was much higher than the official statistics, as farmers were not included in those numbers. Despite the devastating impact of the Depression, the agricultural communities in the San Luis Valley showed remarkable resilience in the face of economic challenges, and natural disasters. Commodity prices crashed, and many farm families lost their land and homes. Farmers in the San Luis Valley were not spared hardship; the price of a hundredweight of potatoes fell from $4 in 1920 to thirty-five cents by 1932. 

Under his visionary “New Deal for the American People,” Roosevelt launched a series of groundbreaking programs to combat the Depression. In 1935, he established the Resettlement Administration, which paved the way for new rural and communities and aimed to restore millions of acres of decimated farmland. The agency was later renamed the Farm Security Administration in 1937.  

The original mission was to relocate entire farm communities to areas in which it was hoped farming could be more profitable and productive. However, resettlement was controversial and expensive, and its results were ambiguous.  

Other Roosevelt programs continue to leave a lasting impact in Colorado. The Works Project Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) worked tirelessly to construct the Red Rocks Amphitheater, while the CCC was active at the Colorado National Monument and Rocky Mountain National Park. These projects, born out of the New Deal, have become enduring symbols of public service and community development in Colorado. 

To document the FSA's impactful work, a team of photographers was hired to travel the country and capture everyday life. While he was a student at Columbia University in New York, a student Arthur Rothstein met economics professor Roy Stryker (a Colorado native), who later established the photographic section of the FSA and hired him. 

The FSA also enlisted the services of Dorthea Lange, one of the most renowned photographers of the Depression era. Under Stryker's direction, the photographers embarked on an unprecedented documentary effort and created over 200,000 images. 

In 1939, with the unemployment rate at a high rate of 17%, Rothstein came to the San Luis Valley and captured the lives of what he termed Spanish-American farmers and others. 

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck was published the same year Rothstein was in the Valley. Steinbeck, a former reporter for the San Francisco News had covered migrant agricultural camps in California, which inspired Steinbeck's book. 

While Rothstein was in Colorado, he spent time in Costilla County, where he photographed many agricultural workers.  

The Library of Congress has many of Rothstein's historic photos, which can be viewed at www. loc.gov. The Denver Public Library Digital Collections is another great source of historic photos at www.digital.denverlibrary.org. The photos used in this article are from the Library of Congress.