A 1940 Thanksgiving

This post is a video of scenes from the Crouch Family’s Thanksgiving dinner in 1940, in Ledyard, Connecticut. All photos are by Jack Delano who took them as part of President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” photo program (1935-1945). The program hired scores of accomplished, professional, photographers to document every day America. The goal was to showcase Americans, often at their most vulnerable, and win over popular support for the relief programs of the New Deal.

This slideshow begins with Mr. Metzendorf, Jewish poultry farmer of Ledyard, picking turkeys to get them ready for Thanksgiving. The turkey eaten by the Crouch family was likely from Mr. Metzendorf’s farm. The Crouches were Rogerine Quakers, a religious sect founded in 1674 by John Rogers (1648–1721) in New London, Connecticut.

Thank you to Photogrammar, a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). Because of Photogrammar, this video was easy to make.