Courage in the face of hardship - PHOTO

Utah was among the states hardest hit by the Great Depression, which had left many of its rural and urban residents destitute and starving.Between 1936 and 1940, the Farm Security Administration - a New Deal program designed to help counteract the devastating effects of the Great Depression - sent out photographer Dorothea Lange and others to Utah to document the lives of farmers who had received loans from the federal government.The stark black-and-white images tell the story of Utah's slow, very gradual emergence from the grips of a severe economic depression just a few short years after the unemployment rate in the state peaked at 35.8 per cent, and where more than a third of the population relied on the government basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter.Pictures taken by Lange and her colleagues show a different side of Utah: smiling farmers using new equipment like an alfalfa duster or a tomato-planting machine, which they were able to purchase with a loan from the Farm Security Administration.In many of the photos taken in places like Sanpete County, Cache County, Box Elder County and Escalante, industrious rural residents are depicted showing off their fat sows and prize-winning sire bulls, joyfully working on the land, or posing outside their new homes  - all thanks to financial aid from the Roosevelt administration. One such success story was that of Joseph Iverson, who was able to save his farm in Box Elder County thanks to a debt adjustment program and a loan from the FSA.Another beneficiary of New Deal assistance was Marion E. Cox, depicted in her large home garden in Cache County, which she was able to build after her husband received financial assistance from the government.But a few of the images, which were transferred to the Library of Congress in 1944, paint a bleaker portrait of a place still in the throes of a brutal economic downturn.One particularly chilling photo snapped by Lange in 1936 shows an unnamed mother and daughter trudging through the dirty snow of a small Utah coal mining town in little more than threadbare summer dresses to shield them from the cold.(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az