Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Returning to school presented new difficulties. There were no programs for “special needs” children. Disability was neither respected nor accepted. Paralysis was often associated with idiocy, and physically and cognitively handicapped children were often placed in the same separate classrooms.22 Many polios recalled teachers who suspected them of faking or exaggerating paralysis and weakness, and being thus disbelieved worsened the sense of isolation. As other children ran to get outside at recess, the polio child limped slowly down long hallways. Once outside, she would likely stand and watch the games. Some children were instructed not to play with her, and the less well-mannered children stared, whispered, or even taunted the cripple. An older sibling might protect a younger, but Dorothea had only a one-year-old brother. Perhaps there was a loyal, sheltering friend, but friends might also desert.

  Could a seven-year-old contemplate life as a “cripple”? Or predict a life with stigma and discrimination? Her parents could certainly contemplate these outcomes. In Dorothea’s case, their anxiety ebbed, as she recovered almost complete mobility, but her passage through her parents’ panic left a scar, a sensitive area of the psyche then toughened by this resilient child. Decades later, the polio Mia Farrow wrote, “I was nine years old when my childhood ended.”23

  Yet no two polios responded alike. Dorothea’s polio experience was shaped by her innate character, and intensified not only her self-discipline and independence but also her determination to transcend the wound.

  EXCEPT FOR THE polio ordeal, the Nutzhorns’ friends and neighbors might have considered them a model American family. Until it wasn’t, and Joan and Henry separated. This event, in 1907, when Dorothea was twelve, became another core part of who she was. She always spoke of her father “abandoning” the family. Mysteriously, she also seemed to regard her father as a criminal, or at least a man of poor character. Some archival research yielded a set of secrets that Dorothea’s mother kept from her children in order to protect a faltering man whose success had masked considerable weakness.

  In understanding her father as a deserter, Dorothea was fitting her experience into standard early twentieth-century presumptions about marital breakups. Marriage was understood then, in both law and custom, not as a contract between individuals, but as a contract of spouses with state and church. Marriage was, and still is, a public institution, not a private one—but it was even more so a century ago. The only way out of a marriage contract then was to prove that one party had violated its terms—that is, committed an offense against the law of marriage. Furthermore, divorce required not only that one party to the contract was guilty but also that the other was innocent of wrongdoing. If both were guilty, there was no legal basis for dissolving the contract. As a result, divorce had to be an adversarial proceeding, with one party trying to dissolve the marriage and the other trying to maintain it. Evidence that the wish for divorce was mutual—that is, that there was “collusion” between the parties—would produce automatic denial of the divorce. Evidence of an amicable separation produced the same. One spouse or the other had to sue for divorce.

  Divorced mothers faced additional problems: unless they could get support from relatives, they would find it very difficult both to earn a living and care for children. One result was that orphanages at the time were packed with children of living mothers who could not find a way to support them.24 So mothers were loath to leave marriages, and if husbands left, wives and children were often, in fact, deserted, especially since it was difficult to get fathers to pay child support. In this context, all marital separation was commonly named, and perceived, as desertion, even when wives were eager to escape the marriages.

  1.1. DOROTHEA AND MARTIN NUTZHORN, 1903 OR 1904

  Couples who voluntarily separated, however, might well collude in presenting their story as one of desertion, in the hope of getting financial support from a charity. Desertion, as historian Nancy Cott put it, “was another name for self-divorce.”25 In these early twentieth-century years, numerous husbands dropped in and out of familial households, hiding from public view but surreptitiously visiting and providing financial support. Another common complication of marital separation was ambivalence. Spouses vacillate about separation and divorce today, and they had far more reason to back off from such a precipice then. Today, trial separations and even divorce and remarriage by the same people happen all the time. In 1907, those moves could only be made in secrecy, and children surrounded by secrets often construct stories even worse than the reality.

  Henry Nutzhorn did not desert in any of these meanings, however; rather, he fled.26 Joan might well have been ignorant of his financial finagling until everything collapsed at once. In July 1907, they were evicted from their Weehawken home, their rent three months in arrears. Joan had to sell some jewelry to pay the maid what was owed her. Joan and Henry separated; Joan went with the children to her mother’s in Hoboken, and Henry left New Jersey for Flatbush, in Brooklyn. He grew a beard and took an assumed name. A police officer soon arrived at Sophie’s home to serve an indictment on Henry, leaving the papers with six-year-old Martin because Henry was not there. The sum of money in question was $4,000 to $5,000, equivalent to $110,000 today. This could not have been only a matter of debt, because criminal indictments for debt, and debtors prison, had long since been abolished in New Jersey.27 A “special master” appointed by the court in the Nutzhorns’ ultimate divorce hearing called him a “gambler” and a “speculator.” My best guesses are that Henry gambled with money he had embezzled or with a client’s money, or enticed clients into scams, or entered seamy deals that clients offered him.

  For the next eleven years Joan Nutzhorn continued to meet him surreptitiously, in rendezvous at restaurants arranged by letter. Joan found employment immediately and she and Henry helped each other financially.28 In 1914, Henry asked to end their marriage, thus implying that at this point they still had a marriage, but then he reversed his decision. He never came to the house, and for the first seven years of the separation, the children never saw him. Between 1914 and 1918, Joan testified, he saw his children about six times, each visit at a public place, also arranged by letter; he likely felt himself safer after seven years. He brought them gifts. In this period Joan tried to have his criminal indictment nol-prossed, and Henry hinted that perhaps she could pay off the debt. If she considered buying him out of trouble with her own earnings, it would not be the first time a woman sought to rescue a ne’er-do-well man.29

  The fact that Joan clung to this marriage through eleven years of separation, despite having a decent and stable income of her own, may speak of her continuing affection for Henry, but it was also characteristic of many women’s understanding of marriage as necessary to respectability. Finally, in July 1918, she filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion since 1907, which turned out to be an embarrassing mistake. Her deposition not only admitted to their many meetings but also stated that she had lived with Henry “as his wife” in the summer of 1910. She later told Dorothea that she had had an abortion at this time.30 This could mean that Henry moved back in with his family briefly or that he and Joan had sexual relations once—or anything in between. Whatever the case, she had to amend the divorce petition in March 1919 to date the desertion from September 1914. The divorce became final in December 1919. I could find no trace of Henry Nutzhorn in later years in any location where Joan thought he had been: New York, Delaware, California, Florida, or New Jersey.

  Dorothea felt deserted, and the feeling was partly her mother’s creation. The intensity of her emotion, however, suggests her own early attachment to her father. This father, who had carried Dorothea on his shoulders throughout a Shakespeare performance, whose success and importance Dorothea was old enough to appreciate, had abandoned his children.

  The marital separation changed the children’s lives drastically. They moved into grandmother Sophie’s house. Controlling, explosive, and a heavy drinker, Sophie would fly into rages, particularly at Dorothea. Her temper g
rew worse as she aged (and quite possibly as her house became more crowded). She would even hit Dorothea, who, in turn, became furious at her mother, who would not interfere. Dorothea felt herself doubly orphaned, not only by her father but also by her mother. The teenage Dorothea began to build a case against her mother as a weakling, easily intimidated and deferential both to Sophie and to her husband. Fifty years later, she even blamed her mother for overdeference to the doctors when she was ill with polio.31 Yet Dorothea’s cousins Minelda and Joy considered Joan domineering, at least toward her little brother—their father—John.32 These contrasting appraisals should not be surprising; after all, what daughter can see her own mother objectively? The Nutzhorn/Lange family dynamics led Dorothea to a tangled view of her mother: she loved Joan and sided with her entirely against her father, but she also disdained her passivity. Joan’s was not a take-charge personality, and she expressed her fears. Dorothea’s own impatience produced an occasional role reversal and she would sometimes reassure her mother. Martin adopted his sister’s view, and from the time they were teenagers, Dorothea’s and Martin’s affectionate name for their mother was “Wuzzy.”

  Still, the extended family household created when the Nutzhorns moved in with Sophie also bore gifts for Dorothea. Despite her irritability, Sophie encouraged Dorothea and imbued her with cultured tastes. A connoisseur of “fine things,” Sophie taught Dorothea to disdain the shoddy, the fake, the cheap; and Dorothea would ever after condemn such objects by saying they were not “fine.” Sophie’s little sister Caroline, a school teacher, lived there too, and Dorothea called her great-aunt “the only completely reliable person, to me and to the whole family.”33 Joan and Dorothea both relied on Caroline to mediate and to pacify Sophie. Dorothea used Caroline, as she used Sophie, to establish independence from her mother but also to belittle her mother, referring often to Caroline’s fine mind and to how her students adored her. When citing Sophie’s remark about the beauty of an orange, Dorothea added, “My mother needed an explanation for that. . . . I knew what she meant, perfectly.” She blamed her mother for throwing away one of her uncle’s lithographic stones, something she believed her grandmother would never have done. “My grandmother knew that I was smarter than my mother . . . more sensitive. . . .”

  1.2. JOAN NUTZHORN, 1927, by Dorothea Lange

  Joan’s work history challenges Dorothea’s claims about her passivity. She had been employed in a library before her marriage and she continued to work after marriage, while still cherishing the hope of becoming a professional singer, until she was visibly pregnant—unusual for a woman of her class. Now she got a good job quickly. Between 1902 and 1908, New York City built forty-two public library branches, creating a demand for qualified staff, and Joan was hired at the Chatham Square Branch on the Lower East Side. Her salary (described alternately as twelve dollars a week or fifty-five a month) was twice the typical wage for a working woman (six dollars a week). After working at this job for six years, Joan took a position with the Hudson County juvenile court as an investigator of probation compliance. The court appointment carried significant responsibility and some risk—moving about the city alone, frequently after dark, in the worst neighborhoods. Joan was good at it. Dorothea accompanied her occasionally and saw that Joan “had an uncanny way of knowing if they [the parolees] were in and not answering.”34 So Wuzzy actually provided an example of competence and independence for her daughter.

  Adopting the myth of Joan’s weakness was functional—it anchored and justified Dorothea’s defection from Hoboken and the family. Other Nutzhorns, Vottelers, and Langes stayed there. By leaving permanently when she did, at age twenty-three, and going as far as she went, three thousand miles, Dorothea never quite shed her teenage resentments. She associated the family’s Germanness with her mother’s alleged obsequiousness: “She had what bothers me in Germans, some kind of a respect for authority that I don’t like.”35 But of course this comment about Germans is an ethnic cliché and one more likely to have entered Dorothea’s consciousness after leaving Hoboken and living through two world wars.

  Joan’s employment meant less supervision and greater independence to the adolescent Dorothea. But Dorothea’s mythology about her mother as doormat, while inaccurate, also functioned in establishing her own identity as strong. Joan herself contributed to that mythology by assenting to the notion that Dorothea’s temperament resembled Sophie’s, skipping a generation, as such traits sometimes do. In this family knot, Joan and Dorothea collaborated in building Dorothea’s assertiveness. “My mother once said to me,” Dorothea recalled, “ ‘You have much more iron in you than I have.’ And it’s true. I have more iron.”36

  But listen to her very next sentence: “Yet I made a photograph of her, which is through and through my mother, and it reveals that I loved her very much.”37 By speaking of her photographic work as having a mind of its own, as if she were its medium rather than its creator, she was not hedging, but perhaps expressing quite precisely her relation to her mother. As Dorothea’s love for her mother welled up and expressed itself despite her best efforts, she was perhaps still struggling to fend off her guilt and shame about ambition, about putting work first, about her iron will.

  2

  Apprentice to the City

  In the most important ways, Dorothea Lange was an autodidact, self-taught. In this regard, she was in fine company, with Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emma Goldman, and Doris Lessing, to name just a few. Dorothea did complete twelve years of public education, as a mediocre student. But from the beginning of her adolescence until she was twenty-three, she was designing and executing, however unconsciously, her own curriculum. Her master teacher was New York City and its lessons shaped her. She might have learned in the same way had she grown up in San Francisco, but the lessons would have been less powerful, for New York was in her time the citiest of American cities. It featured rich and poor, natives and foreigners, whites and people of other colors, bums and aesthetes, slums and mansions, vaudeville and opera, promiscuity and prudery, diverse radicalisms and domineering conservatism.

  Dorothea’s bridge to that world was her mother. When her husband decamped, Joan Lange Nutzhorn took her twelve-year-old daughter to New York City in 1907—for reasons of practicality but also because Joan herself had no fear of it.

  DOROTHEA WAS A pretty child, beautifully dressed and posed in the professional portrait her mother commissioned. She seems thin, intense, and lively, ready to laugh or speak. There is no mark of disability. As an adolescent, she appears a bit more robust, her blond hair long and loosely tied back, her forthright gaze meeting the camera directly, her posture relaxed and self-confident.

  That confidence had been put to the test at home. Joan was loving and warm but would not stand up to Sophie, whose temper tantrums grew more frequent. Six-year-old Martin was more often alone with Sophie but he was an easygoing child, and it was the obstinate Dorothea that most provoked her. Joan tried to keep Dorothea away from her grandmother when possible, and this was one of the reasons that, having taken a job in New York City, she decided to send Dorothea to school there. She arranged this by using the address of Dorothea’s godmother, Emily Sanderfield, who lived in New York City. So Dorothea and Joan left home together early every weekday morning, riding with the throngs of New Jerseyans commuting to work in the city on the fast ferry to the Christopher Street pier or, after the Hudson tunnel opened in mid-1908, by train. They returned together after the library closed. Dorothea now twelve, was on her own for several hours each day—walking to school after her mother peeled off, later walking from school to the library, where she was supposed to spend her after-school time doing homework in the staff lounge.

  Dorothea spent seventh and eighth grades at Intermediate Public School 62 on the Lower East Side of New York City, on Hester Street between Norfolk and Essex.1 The school was exemplary, owing to both its leadership and its constituency. Lower East Side district school superintendent Julia Richman, a dynamic
progressive reformer, had chosen to work with the poor and poorly educated Lower East Side immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe.2 But the school’s effect on Dorothea was not what her mother had hoped. In primary school in Hoboken, Dorothea had felt herself a very good student, quick and bright. Now she “fell from her perch,” as she remembered it later, because the students at PS 62 were so smart and diligent. Dorothea later claimed she was the only Gentile among three thousand Jewish children, the only child in school on Rosh Hashanah, and although this was likely an exaggeration, it was the way she felt. But she perceived the Jewish students with more respect than resentment. “They were hungry after knowledge and achievement and making, you know, fighting their way up. . . . They were too smart for me . . . aggressively smart. . . . To an outsider, it was a savage group because of this overwhelming ambition.” This understanding had developed over many decades, but the imagery and emotional tone of her memories had been acquired earlier. Bright as Dorothea was, she did not share quite the intense zeal of these newer and poorer Americans for upward mobility and success in America’s mainstream institutions. No one was rude to her, she said, but she was always an outsider.3

  School was only part of her experience of these alien people. Through the windows of “Jewtown,” as photographer Jacob Riis had called it, she saw their crowded flats, their multiperson beds, their kitchen sinks doubling as bathtubs and tripling as worktables. “Never a September comes that I don’t stop and remember what I used to see in those tenements when they had the Jewish holidays . . . all the women wore sheitls, the black wigs, and the men wore beards and little black hats, yarmulkes. . . . I just looked at everything. I can remember the smell of the cooking too. . . .”4 She saw the men bent over books, whole families bent over hand sewing. Yet these strange poor people produced the brilliant students at PS 62. She had to reconcile the poverty of the tenements with the abilities of the students who lived in them.