Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  9

  The Romance of Love,

  The Romance of the Cause

  New love is more like a weed than a cultivated flower; it can sprout overnight, even in poor soil. Neither Paul nor Dorothea thought they were open to, let alone looking for, a new relationship when they met, never mind a love that would yield a thirty-year partnership in life and work. But their naturally good chemistry and their much-suppressed emotional longings were fertlized by a feeling for social justice. For Paul this had grown steadily over a decade; for Dorothea it arose from the nation’s crisis. By 1935, President Roosevelt was admitting that the Depression was as bad as ever, and calling for permanent economic reform. In doing so, he called into being a sort of government-sponsored social movement.

  IN 1934 PAUL TAYLOR learned that Willard Van Dyke exhibited socially engaged art at his 683 Brockhurst gallery in Oakland. Taylor became a frequent visitor there.1 When he saw some stunning photographs by a woman whose name he didn’t know, he got her phone number from Van Dyke and telephoned her to ask if he could use some in his article on the general strike. She asked about the fee. Taylor checked with the editor, who offered fifteen dollars, and Lange accepted. “She was cool. . . . There were no clues that she was suddenly overjoyed at this recognition by a professor whom she had never heard of. . . .”2

  9.1. DOROTHEA LANGE, CIRCA 1935, photographer unknown

  At her first meeting with Paul there was no spark, unlike her instantaneous attraction to Maynard. Taylor seemed like the professor he was, like a man who would have been uncomfortable with or even repelled by the goings-on at Coppa’s. His interest in photography was instrumental: He conceived of it as a forensic technology, a way of documenting wrongdoing.

  They fell in love by watching each other work. He was just beginning a new research project on the self-help cooperatives among the unemployed that had sprung up throughout California.3 These Unemployed Exchange Associations, known as UXAs, were arising across the country and often grew into elaborate organizations. California had some 175 UXAs, with 100,000 members. The largest Bay Area “Hooverville,” as shantytowns of the homeless were then called, was “Pipe City,” near the railroad tracks by the Oakland waterfront, where hundreds lived in sections of sewer pipe that had never been laid because funding had disappeared. Led by Carl Rhodehamel, an unemployed cellist, composer, and orchestra conductor, Pipe City’s down-and-out souls built an impressive UXA, with a labor force of six hundred by early 1933. They operated a foundry, machine shop, woodshop, garage, soap factory, print shop, food cannery, nursery and adult school, and produced goods for sale outside the co-op, with eighteen trucks—rebuilt from scrap parts—making deliveries. All work was credited with one hundred points an hour; there was no distinction between male and female, skilled or unskilled labor; objects were valued by approximating the labor time that went into making, finding, or buying them.4

  While Taylor was studying the UXAs, Van Dyke approached him, expressing his desire to contribute.5 So Taylor arranged a documentary photography study. He took five photographers—Van Dyke, his girlfriend Mary Jeanette Edwards, Preston Holder, Imogen Cunningham (all from the f/64 group), and Dorothea Lange—to Oroville, sixty-six miles north of Sacramento, where the Oakland group had established a sawmill.

  As Taylor interviewed the workers, his stiffness seemed to disappear, and his interest in his subjects produced exchanges that were more like conversations than interviews. Lange was entranced.6 The same thing happened to Taylor: he fell for her by watching her work. Her appearance was distinctly unconventional, he recalled—beret cocked sideways, very short hair, dressed in pants. “She just quietly went right to work . . . moved around inconspicuously” with her handheld Rolleiflex.7 In fact, Lange was so intent on her work that he hardly conversed with her. But as soon as he saw the photographs, he grasped something about Lange’s eye. The first photograph she made showed “the back of a man standing, resting on his axe as a man would rest on his cane, facing the forest . . . It is the expression of that man’s back that is telling”—resting but feeling good about his labor, breathing in the beauty and smell of the pines.8 And yet in many of these photographs her approach at this time was still quite like Imogen Cunningham’s, moving in close to create modernist compositions. Her documentary style was not born as a sudden revelation.

  Lange was not impressed by the UXA; she found it “sad and dreary and doomed.” The worst part, she thought, was that the participants had so much hope.9 She missed the social and political importance of what was going on: people cooperatively deploying their skills and ingenuity to save themselves, and in the process gaining other kinds of skills—organizational, citizenlike.

  THESE MISUNDERSTANDINGS WOULD soon be corrected. As they continued to work together, Taylor educated her in the importance of participatory democracy. Under his tutelage, she became the author of the iconic images of the rural Depression, a most atypical employee of the Department of Agriculture. “I didn’t know a mule from a tractor when I started,” she recalled.10 Maynard had shown her the mountains and desert; Dorothea took him into the slums and working-class neighborhoods; Paul now took Dorothea into the fields.

  Taylor was critical of the New Deal’s failure to offer anything to agricultural workers, even though the rural Depression was deeper, more extensive, and more protracted than the urban. One of Roosevelt’s campaign promises to the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation, dominated by large-scale growers, was to raise deflated farm prices. Only four days after his inauguration, his bill was introduced; two months later it was law. It paid farm owners to take land out of cultivation so as to allow scarcity to raise prices. As with most legislation, its impact depended on how it was administered, and the old guard dominated local Department of Agriculture representatives. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s payments for crop reduction were supposed to be shared with tenants, who, in the South and Southwest, constituted 75 percent of all farmers. In practice, most owners not only refused to share payments but reduced production by discharging and evicting tenants, and then often used the AAA money to buy tractors which, in turn, displaced still more tenants. Taylor compared the AAA’s impact to the enclosure movement in early-modern rural England, whereby landlords claimed and closed off land once treated as common fields.11

  9.2. DOROTHEA LANGE PHOTOGRAPH, UNEMPLOYED COOPERATIVE, OROVILLE, CALIFORNIA, 1935

  Early in 1935, Taylor secured another leave from the university to become field director of California’s new Division of Rural Rehabilitation. Working well beyond his instructions, he became a leading advocate for farmworkers. At the same time, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, pushing a reform agenda in his department, appointed a progressive and controversial undersecretary, Rexford Tugwell, to work on behalf of poor farmers, including tenant farmers. When the department blocked Tugwell’s attempts, Wallace gave him a new agency, the Resettlement Administration, later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).12 Taylor recognized an opportunity. The Department of Agriculture, fearful of antagonizing its constituency of big growers, had never had a labor division—its critics liked to point out that it knew how many hogs there were in the United States but not how many farmworkers.13 Moreover, Agriculture Department bureaucrats looked at the country through an East Coast frame of reference—for example, Tugwell thought he could help poor farmers by moving them to better land, a nonstarter in California. The fact that California’s farmworkers were overwhelmingly people of color, and unable to vote, made them even more invisible to the FSA.

  9.3. IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM PHOTOGRAPH, UNEMPLOYED COOPERATIVE, OROVILLE, CALIFORNIA, 1935

  Conditions were desperate, so Taylor moved quickly. He assembled a staff from among those he knew and those with the political influence he needed: Tom Vasey, one of his graduate students; a former University of Wisconsin classmate, Irving Wood; a former banker functioning as an “employer representative”; Edward Rowell, nephew of a university regent and editor of the San Fra
ncisco Chronicle; a young Mexican American woman to do interviews in Spanish;14 and Lange.15 When Taylor asked for a salary for a photographer, the state agency balked. So he hired her as a typist.16

  They began to drive through California, often in her car, perhaps because Taylor’s wife needed theirs. Lange’s 1935 mileage-reimbursement requests track her routes: January 1 and 2, Indio, 154 miles; January 3, Indio to San Bernardino, 126 miles; January 4, San Bernardino to Fresno, 347 miles; January 5, Fresno to San Francisco, 183 miles. These trips took longer than they would today because there were no freeways, and by March the heat could stagger even a healthy young man, let alone the children and the elderly who also worked. In the summer, as harvesting peaked, her trips lengthened. She left San Francisco at 5:30 A.M. June 10 and returned on June 28 at 11:00 P.M. She had passed through this landscape before, on route to the desert or the Sierra Nevada, and she disliked it. Vast fields unbroken by trees or houses. Long straight furrows extending to the horizon on flat, dry land, with irrigation ditches and pumps bringing in muddy brown water. Workers moving slowly in groups along the rows, often bent over for thinning or picking, sometimes more upright as they hoed.

  Describing her first experience of Taylor’s work drive, an energy quite compatible with hers, her complaints thinly disguised her admiration: “. . . we started at six o’clock in the morning and he never thought that anybody should have anything to eat. . . . We discovered that this man didn’t know anything about what people require in the way of food and drink and lodging. . . .” Lange’s own moralism soon showed: “I also remember all these men ordering dinners that cost $1.75. I thought it was sheer self-indulgence. To work with migratory laborers and then go into a hotel and order a dinner that cost for one person $1.75 was inhuman.”17 Lange’s own expense sheets requested, typically, $2.20 for three meals and $2 for a hotel.18

  Taylor reassured Lange that it might take her awhile to get used to field work, and that she shouldn’t worry if she didn’t make a single photograph the first day. But she was a natural, Taylor said: “. . . she just quietly walked up to them with her camera. No problems in her relations with the pea-pickers, at all. It went on that way, always.” Her comfort as a walker in the city soon made her equally comfortable in the fields and migrant camps. She also began, on her own initiative, to take down pithy quotations from her subjects. “She really had their phraseology, the essence of it,” Taylor recalled. She got her subjects to explain “how they had been mentally diagnosing” their problems. She learned to carry a small loose-leaf notebook, like Taylor’s, in which to take down what became her famous captions.19 (In the future the notebook would become a symbol of their partnership, because they often shared one, passing it back and forth.) In other words, she immediately grasped the radical democratic edge of Taylor’s research method, not just documenting problems from the point of view of an expert but trying, however limited the possibility, to hear the perspective of the farmworkers. She had no idea how unconventional these research methods were.

  Lange’s own technique evolved. She quickly lost interest in long shots that made the workers appear tiny and peripheral, as if mere accessories to the land, and wanted to get close, so she had to trek into the fields. She tried a silent approach first. As Taylor described it, she just sauntered up to the people and looked around, then began to fiddle with her camera, and “if she saw that they objected, why she would close it up . . . wait until it appeared that they were used to her, they didn’t mind. . . . Then she would take the photograph, sometimes talking with them, sometimes not talking with them. . . . She was naturally very skillful, not playing games, not maneuvering. . . .”20 It seems odd that Taylor approved of this approach, because it is not transparently respectful. Moving in with a camera without a request that allows the subject to say “Don’t take my picture” seems invasive, or, at a minimum, intrusive. Did the farmworkers feel they could say no to Lange? In any case, Lange soon shifted to introducing herself and what she was doing.

  Taylor and Lange began to function as a team. Taylor would keep a conversation going while Lange photographed; some of her best photos were of people engaged with him. Taylor also ran interference with employers and overseers who were not happy with researchers interested in their workers. Visualizing, sometimes for the first time, what the scenes of labor and life among these migrants looked like to outsiders, employers realized that photography threatened their interests. Some employers followed them around, with the goal of intimidating workers. Others refused permission for the research group to enter the fields, but with such vast plantations, they could not effectively defend their perimeters.

  Learning as fast as possible about farmworkers and about how to make photography under these conditions, Lange’s mind, emotions, and body were stretched. She felt a touch of the farmworkers’ exhaustion, aches, and distress. Their living conditions sometimes invaded her own body: the heat, the dust, the flies, the fleas, the smell. The solidarity of the team—including Paul—remained in her consciousness when she returned home. So she was tired and sometimes distracted when reunited with Maynard and the children, now ten and seven, who were, again, with foster parents. She was overjoyed to see her boys, but she could not always resist the pull of the darkroom, because without it she could not see what she had done.

  TAYLOR DECIDED TO campaign to meet an urgent need: government-built camps to house migratory field laborers. He won over his boss, Harry Drobish, with his idea that decent camps for the migratory workers could provide the best starting point from which to move toward better hygiene, health care, education, and nutrition. Drobish’s superiors turned them down flat, so Taylor asked the FSA for funding for between twenty to thirty camps, later escalating his request to forty-five. The FSA responded that camps would do nothing toward fundamental reform of agricultural labor relations and would amount to government subsidy of the large employers. Both claims were true, and Taylor and Drobish knew it, but to them, on the ground in California, the most immediate priority was alleviating suffering. So they wanted Taylor’s survey and report to be maximally persuasive.

  9.4. IMPERIAL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, 1937

  Lange had the breath knocked out of her by her first glimpses of farmworkers’ living conditions, which were beneath anything she could previously have imagined. They slept in shoddy tents or lean-tos attached to trees or cars. As one farmworker recalled later, “our bedding was always damp, no beds. . . . There was no floor, just the ground. And when it rained, water would just come under and everything was muddy. . . . We had to walk stooped over because if our heads touched the canvas it would spring a leak.” Another said, “No teníamos estufa. No teníamos camas. Dormíamos nomás con cartónes . . .—y a veces en las calles durmíendonos.” (We had no stove. We had no beds. We would sleep in boxes—and sometimes in the streets.)21 There was no access to schools, medical care, or legal services. Ironically, fresh fruit and vegetables were beyond farmworkers’ budgets and their diet consisted largely of beans and fried dough; there was no milk for the children. Malnutrition, dysentery, and hookworm were epidemic in the camps, and typhoid and scarlet fever were common. In 1936, 80 percent of migrant children had medical problems caused by malnutrition or poor hygiene and the infant mortality rate was high.

  9.5. NEAR CALIPATRIA, 1937

  Farmworkers often paid growers, typically from four to eight dollars a month, for a place to pitch a tent or park a jalopy. There would be well water from a pump, and, if they were lucky, a toilet and shower for every two to three hundred campers. Owners often hired armed men, frequently deputized by the local sheriff, to patrol the camps, report on suspicious activity (read: union organizing), and forcibly “restrain” resistant workers. At larger camps, they operated company stores, where workers could buy on credit, thus becoming trapped in an endless cycle of debt. For all these reasons many farmworkers preferred just to be near an irrigation ditch or river for water supply. They built shelters of canvas, tin, cardboard, and brush. Toilets we
re just holes in the ground or spots in the bushes, often dangerously near the water source. Even outside in the open air, the stench could be foul.

  Between March and August 1935, working almost nonstop, Lange and Taylor produced five phototextual reports. They knew they had a window of opportunity and were well aware that Roosevelt’s relief program could be ended at any time.22 Lange’s increasing responsibilities showed in the fact that the third report was filed as a memo from her, not Taylor, a ploy by Taylor to signal her essentialness to the enterprise.

  The report did not resemble a government document, for it included not only photographs but also direct quotations from farmworkers. “Somethin’ is radical wrong.” “My children ain’t raised decent like I was raised by my father.” “I don’t believe the President knows what’s happening to us here. Here’s all the facts but there’s no way we can get it to him.” One grower told her, “They want to sleep on the ground—they don’t want beds.”23 Since they had to represent the migrant workers as hardworking and capable, Lange began writing some of her own captions: “They have built homes here out of nothing. They have planted trees and flowers. These flimsy shacks represent many a last stand to maintain self-respect.” “One-legged man built his house himself.”24

  In making his case, Taylor confronted a policy contradiction that dogged federal relief endeavors everywhere. Relief was for emergency conditions only, but migrant farmworkers did not suffer from an emergency. They had lived under these conditions long before the Depression. For a large minority of workers, in fact, relief paid better than any wages they had previously gotten. Relief opponents accused the FERA and the WPA of violating their emergency mission, and, not coincidentally, making it difficult for big growers to get enough low-wage help. They were right. In the San Joaquin Valley, relief “created a de facto minimum wage. . . . Cotton workers making 25 to 30 cents an hour quit their jobs when they could receive 10 cents more per hour on Fresno relief.”25 This was not just a California phenomenon: in the South, relief investigators were “discovering” American poverty as if for the first time; an investigator in Puerto Rico concluded that no one there qualified for “emergency relief” because they were no worse off than before the Depression.26