Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  There was another equally deep set of feelings: love. She loved Maynard and she remained attracted to him. Despite the age difference—he was now fifty-nine and she was thirty-nine—his looks, his spirited unconventionality, his inner directedness, and his extraordinary competence remained interesting to her. He was never boring. Aging sapped some of his energy, of course. His lifelong asthma had produced emphysema. He needed oxygen frequently. He was now dependent on her, and that itself was a powerful pull on her loyalty. His diminished vitality, she might have assumed, meant that his days of wandering and womanizing were over.

  In late summer 1934, after the marriage-mending trip to Utah and then the strike, Dorothea’s mother Joan arrived from Hoboken, this time without her new husband.52 Her diary recorded a harmonious family. They all met Joan at the station on the morning of Monday, August 6. “Would these fellas [Dan was now nine and John was six] kiss their Grandma? They would not,” Joan wrote, “too embarrassed—they wriggled and squirmed until the grandma gave up the effort.” Danny was carrying an unfinished gun cut out of a board, and John had a sword. Danny became nervous when they saw a police officer, perhaps influenced by his awareness of the strike violence, and went up to the officer to explain that these were not real weapons. They proudly escorted Joan to their new car. They then embarked on an active schedule: art exhibits, Coppa’s for lunch, trips to the shore (probably Marin County) and to Fallen Leaf, again as guests of Anita Baldwin, where Maynard and the boys caught sole, which they roasted in paper. She saw a close family bound by love of art, she wrote.

  They returned to San Francisco to await Martin, coming from his construction job at the Boulder Dam site. As always, he introduced a gay mood. Dorothea and the boys adored him. Dan remembers him as “an Apollo,” absolutely gorgeous, six-one and slim, engaged in adventurous occupations as a seaman and a high-wire rigger—a man of the same timber as their father. Joan “spent the night talking and laughing and drinking with my two kids. Never knew Dorothy could be so funny.” They socialized with Dorothea and Maynard’s friends, visited wineries, and shopped at the Emporium and in Chinatown. They took the kids to a Disney movie, and afterward Danny acted out the show, to the great appreciation of his family. As soon as Martin left, the house and even the kids became subdued, Joan thought, which suggests how superficial or wishful was her perception of an untroubled family. She was sad to leave. To have one’s children and grandchildren three thousand miles away in 1934 was to see them very rarely.

  Soon after Joan left, Maynard became again sullen and withdrawn. He commented that he despised the “postcard scenery” of the “too arty” Lake Tahoe region, and they never returned to Fallen Leaf.53 Whatever marital glue they had applied during the summer had not stuck. Dorothea was disappointed, though not surprised, that Maynard would not, could not share her desire to be involved in the great events taking place around them. His irritability burdened her, while his dependence made it hard to think of walking away from him. The greatest obstacle to her dream increasingly seemed to be the studio, and her responsibility as a breadwinner. She found herself longing, more every day, to be out in the city with her cameras, but could not do so without an income.

  8

  Paul Schuster Taylor, Maverick Economist

  The future second husband of San Francisco’s star bohemian portrait photographer could hardly have been more different from her first. From a mischievous western painter dressed like a cowboy and enthralled with the mystique of Indians Lange went to a stiff and slightly ponderous suit-and-tie professor of economics. He was a most unsuitable partner for her, or so one would have predicted. But Taylor was no typical economist. Lange would imbibe his learning and his intellectual approach through an extraordinary partnership that lasted for thirty years, until her death, a partnership sharing qualities with some of the great ones, such as that of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Dorothea’s two husbands, along with their communities, drew her into new worlds. As Maynard had introduced her to a world of art and nature, so Paul would introduce her to a world of progressive social-justice concerns. In the second marriage, however, the influences were more mutual. Paul taught Dorothea how to think critically and systematically about society, economy, and environment. Dorothea taught Paul to see more acutely the human emotional and aesthetic experience of the political economy he studied. Both already possessed great capacities for patience, discipline, empathy and self-sacrifice, and mutual influence made these capacities grow stronger yet.

  ALTHOUGH PAUL FOREVER revered small-farming culture and pioneer roots, he never lived on a farm. His ancestors—English (the Taylors) and German (the Schusters)—were archetypical sodbusters in Wisconsin, but their offspring became educated townsfolk.1 Paul’s mother, Rose Schuster, graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1885 and became a biology teacher—no small achievement for a woman at that time. His father, Henry James Taylor, earned a law degree, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, and got himself elected superintendent of schools in Madison’s Dane County. When his political career became stymied in Wisconsin, he moved his family to Sioux City, Iowa, in 1887. Paul Schuster Taylor was born there on June 9, 1895, exactly two weeks after Dorothea’s birth.

  The young Paul grew up in a small city but experienced farm life on his uncle’s 120 acres, where he once worked for six months, and through summer farm-labor jobs.2 He remembered community warmth, egalitarian relations with the help, who ate voluminous meals with the family, and bartering of labor, and from these memories he created a romantic view of family farming that would shape his research and politics.3 Even Sioux City in his day was a close and closed community of some forty thousand residents. The “diversity” in Sioux City consisted of Scandinavian settlers, white seasonal workers, and Catholics, whom Paul disdained, having been taught that Catholics were “authoritarians,” while Congregationalists, like his family, thought for themselves. Paul remembers one “colored” family in town. Paul sang in the church choir, although without any particular religiosity. (As a grown man, he still liked to sing at family gatherings.) His mother home-schooled all four of her children through grade three—not because of any objection to the schools in Sioux City, which were fine, but as a way of continuing her own career.

  Like Dorothea, Paul lost his father early, in 1902. His mother, Rose, like Joan Nutzhorn, coped well with widowhood. Unlike Dorothea, Paul was a top student. He was the senior class president in high school, then entered his parents’ alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, in 1913, majoring in economics and law. There, too, faculty and fellow students recognized his ability, ambition, and discipline. The caption under his photograph in his junior yearbook was “I can and I will.” Influential sociologist E.A. Ross became his hero and mentor. Fired from Stanford for advocating progressive reform, Ross also offended the conservative regents at Wisconsin by encouraging students to listen to Emma Goldman when she came to speak on campus. Paul studied economics under John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely, famous Progressive-era scholars who rejected the ideology that markets are a natural phenomenon and analyzed them instead as arrangements constructed and managed by man-made institutions—notably, governments. This approach, institutional economics, differed from neoclassical economics, which treats the individual, motivated by self-interest, as the unit of economic decision making; it was, instead, an approach that included social and historical analysis, and Paul Taylor never strayed from it.

  After graduating in 1917, Taylor enlisted in the Marine Corps as a captain. He commanded a platoon at Bois de Belleau, site of the heaviest American casualties—9,777—in the history of the marines. In the midst of a murderous and futile struggle to take Belleau Wood, on June 13, 1918, the Germans launched a mustard-gas bombardment (all the adversaries were using gas by this time). Mustard was the most lethal of all the gases, and it took twelve hours for the symptoms of the poison to manifest themselves: blistered skin, vomiting, internal bleeding, the stripping of the mucous membrane from the bro
nchial tubes. Nine hundred men died of this gas in that one battle. Taylor gave his gas mask to a wounded man and was badly injured as a result. He spent three and a half months in a French military hospital recuperating his bronchia and lungs, but his voice and larynx would never completely recover, and he lost the greater part of his sense of smell.4 Although he was awarded a Purple Heart, his efforts to get his recurrent bronchitis labeled war-related so that he could claim VA medical benefits were in vain.5 Yet his pride in having been a marine never flagged.6

  When Taylor returned to the States, he enrolled at Columbia for graduate work. But his injuries still plagued him and a doctor advised him to protect his throat by avoiding cold weather; this sent him from Columbia to the University of California at Berkeley and to his career as a scholar of the West. He completed a Ph.D. in record time and was appointed to the Berkeley economics faculty in 1922. He grew interested in agricultural labor in California and the Southwest and dreamed of complementing Commons’s renowned history of industrial labor with a history of agricultural labor.

  After four years of teaching, frustrated because he could find no funding for his research, a lucky coincidence launched his career.7 The great Progressive sociologist Edith Abbott, dean of the most prestigious social-work school in the United States, the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, happened to stop in Berkeley, accompanied by her sister Grace Abbott, head of the Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor, and Sophonisba Breckenridge, distinguished senior professor at the Chicago school. The three most distinguished female social scientists in the country, they were veterans of Hull House, the Chicago settlement house opened by Jane Addams, whose residents had developed the social survey method starting in the 1890s. They represented the most advanced sector of Progressive social science and reform in the 1920s. It was a coincidence that Paul Taylor met them, but hardly coincidental that this son of a forceful mother and the future husband of two ambitious women was chosen by and attracted to the human dynamo Edith Abbott.

  As it happened, Edith Abbott, then directing a Social Science Research Council study of migration, was looking for someone to undertake a study of the rapidly increasing Mexican migration to the United States. Since the Mexicans worked mainly in agriculture, the project was a fit for Taylor. Mexican migration was a controversial subject in California at the time, with anti-immigrant nativism confronting the big growers’ insistence that they could not produce food without these cheap workers, but Taylor’s mentors had taught him that good work might produce opposition. Within weeks after Edith Abbott’s visit, at the beginning of the 1927 winter quarter, he was on leave from the university and in the field, his salary paid by the SSRC.

  NO ONE IN the United States had studied Mexican immigrants or Mexican Americans at the time, so Taylor’s research began with basics. He audited an undergraduate Spanish class, which indicates that from the beginning he planned to conduct interviews as well as collect data. Even more unusual among economists, he decided to make photographs.8 He bought a new Kodak pocket camera, loaded up his 1924 Dodge, and set out. As would always be his practice, Taylor prepared for field research carefully, collecting available data and gathering letters of introduction from influential people. Nevertheless, his early mistakes show how little was known about Mexican Americans. He did not even know where to find the Mexicans. Someone told him to try Napa, but when he arrived there, he learned that February was too early for farmwork that far north; turning south to Merced and Madera, he learned that he got better interviews with farmworkers in cafés, bars, pool halls, and barbershops than in the fields. He quickly learned that California’s racial segregation could be as extreme as Mississippi’s.9 He collected corridos, Mexican storytelling ballads that often contained social commentary. He studied the workings of Texas’s white primary.10

  8.1. PAUL TAYLOR INTERVIEWING, PROBABLY 1935, by Dorothea Lange

  To consider Taylor’s research methods is to begin to understand his compatibility with Dorothea Lange. When he first tried to interview farmworkers, most would not speak with him. He looked and sounded very gringo although his Spanish fluency grew rapidly (in this period, few of these workers knew much English). By trial and error he worked out an unthreatening way to introduce himself, a method that Lange would later emulate. He would approach with a neutral question, such as “How far to the next town?” or “Where can I find gas?” then gradually add questions about what work was available and for how long, working conditions, wages, and housing. The subjects would, of course, want to know why he was asking so many questions. He learned not to say that he was a professor with a research grant, but simply “I’m a teacher,” a category that evoked respect without being intimidating. At first his notebook remained in his pocket (for this reason he only used small ones) until the informant gave a concrete answer; then he would say, “Do you mind if I write this down? I have trouble remembering.” Unfailingly polite, the Mexicans would say no, and from then on Taylor wrote constantly and speedily, developing a quick shorthand. After leaving the interview, he would sit in his car and write out the interview more fully before his memory of it faded. He became anthropologist, ethnographer, and labor historian as well as economist. Refusing to see these workers as just another production cost, or as members of a homogeneous proletariat, he wanted to understand their aspirations and decisions as individuals with a culture no less honorable than that of their employers.

  He also made photographs. “No amount or quality of words could alone convey what the situation was that I was studying. It [photography] was another language, if you will.” He would pull down the shades in a room in his Berkeley house and turn it into a darkroom at night. None of his pictures was particularly striking, but each contained a great deal of information. The photographs contained facts, Taylor thought. Even more important, they proved facts that might otherwise be doubted.

  In such unconventional research, Taylor was resisting the impoverishment of economics as it became an abstract, nonempirical, model-building science. He was searching for an economic scholarship that explained human economic lives. This approach reflected his Wisconsin education: a humanistic approach to social science and a fusion of scholarship with commitment to reform. Still, in his use of interviews he went beyond Commons-school economics, toward a distinctive, ethnographic method. Defending that method, he later remarked, “You free yourself from some responsibilities if you can reduce people to numbers.”11

  Like his university mentors, like his sponsor Edith Abbott, and like most social scientists of the Progressive era, Taylor never believed that research integrity required assuming a disinterested perspective. On the contrary, he thought the point of social research was to make things better, and he soon became an advocate for several social-justice campaigns. This sense of responsibility showed itself in an early personal kindness when he met Mercedes Durán, a young Mexican-American woman who impressed him with her potential. Uncharacteristically for a scholar committed to large-scale reform rather than charity, he paid to send her to college. Starting in 1929, she sent him letters from the University of Northern Colorado, written in the beautiful script of someone who had studied penmanship in school; in perfect English, she thanked him profusely and described her ups and downs, and she enclosed her report cards.12 “One woman told me I could stay with her and when I told her I was Spanish she changed her mind.” She experienced conflicts typical of the upwardly mobile: “While I was home the older people weren’t very nice to me . . . told grandmother that I was foolish. . . . They all think I’ll marry a beet worker. . . . But the young folks were eager to know about college.” She was asked to speak at her former high school where, she wrote, “The American [sic] people treated me so differently; they acted as if I were a wonderful person they had just discovered. . . . I couldn’t realize it was poor Spanish me.” The letters form a cameo of the consciousness of a young Mexican American: She called herself “Spanish,” as was the custom in the region,
to distinguish herself from the migrant Mexican farmworkers, yet referred to them as her own people and called the Anglos “American,” a synonym for white in the Southwest. Taylor never spoke publicly about this act of charity, nor did either of his wives seem aware of it.

  CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURE WAS not farming as Taylor knew it. Frank Norris compared it to mining—extraction, with no concern for long-term consequences: The first yields of wheat were forty to fifty bushels per acre, then dropped to ten or twelve bushels. “When at last, the land . . . would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else. . . .”13 It was also industrial—that is, mass production, with a labor force organized like that in a factory. California agriculture was never dominated by family farms. Most farmworkers roamed the state, harvesting one crop and then another as each ripened. Even stranger to a midwesterner, they were farming a desert. California agriculture required vast amounts of money, construction, and politicking to buy or steal vast quantities of water from elsewhere.

  Absentee landlords and giant corporations owned most of California’s farmland. The biggest “farmer” in California was the Bank of America.14 These large growers organized combinations to further their control, winning tax breaks, exemptions from antitrust prosecutions, and tariffs protecting them against foreign agricultural imports. Their biggest problem could not be solved by government alone, however. A fundamental, irreducible difficulty for large agribusinesses was the need for huge inputs of workers for short spells of time, while for most of the year only a tiny fraction of the labor force was needed. For example, in 1935, California growers required 198,000 hands in September, but only 46,000 in January. In fruit, the imbalance was twice as bad: 130,000 needed at peak, 16,000 at trough.15 Thus temporary labor seemed essential. The growers, as John Steinbeck put it, wanted peons, but wanted to pay them only for the actual days worked. The problem was, to paraphrase Harry Hopkins, that the workers needed to eat all year long.