Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  TAYLOR SAW THAT relief policy maintained and even exacerbated racial inequalities. Two levels of aid—white and nonwhite—were standard. In San Antonio, for example, whites “needed” thirty-five dollars a month, the authorities figured, while twelve to fifteen dollars represented a fortune for Mexicans because, it was alleged, all they liked to eat anyway was beans, grease, and cornmeal.27 In Los Angeles County, Anglo families received thirty dollars a month, Mexicans, twenty dollars (although the Mexican families were, on average, larger). When the WPA proposed building houses for Mexican farmworkers, local whites argued that the planned five-hundred-square-foot two-bedroom units with screened windows and doors were too good for the Mexicans.28

  When Taylor began these investigations, he expected to focus on Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers, and Lange’s photographs did this at first. Of the photographs of people in the first report, thirteen featured Mexicans or other people of color, and seven featured people who could possibly be white.29 Even when her photographs do not indicate ethnicity, her captions did. For example, in Calexico, she copied down what one farmworker told her, “I don’ like you make the picture because we have shame thees [sic] house.”30 Lange absorbed Taylor’s antiracism but, paradoxically, her urban-ness strengthened it. Familiar with New York’s Lower East Side Jews and San Francisco’s cosmopolitanism, she neither feared nor disrespected but enjoyed racial diversity.

  Only a month later, however, the story changed as Lange and Taylor detected an extraordinary national disaster: the dust bowl migration. No one spoke of a “dust bowl” yet. Taylor knew that “Okies” were entering California as early as 1933, as strikebreakers during the Mexican and Filipino–led cotton strike. In 1935 he realized that it was a mass migration, not a response to a strike-created employment opportunity, a migration that would equal the gold rush.31 As his team drove eastward to investigate its source, he hired a gas station attendant at the Yuma bridge to provide a daily count of the migrants heading west. This research improvisation initiated what later became more sophisticated data collection: In the five months from June to November, 37,000 migrants entered California on that route; in the next three years, the number rose to 250,000 men (this figure omits women and children and probably Mexicans).32 Lange, thrilled to be a pioneer investigator, tended in later years to magnify what they had witnessed at the time. “That was the beginning of the first day of the landslide that cut this continent . . . this shaking off of people from their own roots started with those big storms, and it was like a movement of the earth. . . .”33

  She was right that these people were refugees, uprooted from generations-old farms and dispossessed of all but what they could wear or stuff into jerry-rigged jalopies. Seeking to counter their defamation, Lange and Taylor labeled them “pioneers,” producing an article for Survey Graphic that they titled “Again the Covered Wagon.” (See figure 16.1.) Anticipating Steinbeck’s symbolism in The Grapes of Wrath, they imagined the flight in biblical terms, as an exodus of the oppressed seeking a promised land. Like runaway slaves, and like those African Americans who were part of the great migration to the North after World War I, the escapees were naïve about the land’s promise—about how California would welcome them. (Yet only five years later the despised Okies became the sought-after mainstay of the West Coast defense industry, as Lange would document. The Mexican farmworkers had no such opportunity.)

  So in their second report, Taylor delivered a slightly different message, revealing the limits of his antiracism. “Most of the refugees . . . are white Americans.” The phrase “white Americans,” sometimes “native Americans,” appeared frequently in the reports thereafter. It underscored not only whiteness but also the construction of Mexicans as aliens, literally as well as symbolically, even those who were citizens. Lange’s photographs reflect this changed focus: Of the twenty-three images of people in the second report, only three were of Mexicans. In their desire to awaken the Department of Agriculture to the unprecedented mass migration, they implied that the situation of whites from Oklahoma and Texas was less acceptable than the conditions of Mexican farmworkers; that whites had a right to help that people of Mexican extraction did not. Taylor and Lange did not explicitly call for aid because these migrants were white. But the photographs in their context did. Their conscious use of white images to win support for their recommendations reflected an unconscious shock that even whites lived in such terrible conditions. And, of course, the Okies and Arkies sang that tune to Lange and Taylor: “We did live like white people.” “We ain’t no paupers. We hold ourselves to be white folks.”34 White folks dominated the rest of the five reports.

  9.6. ON THE ROAD BETWEEN PHOENIX AND YUMA, ARIZONA, 1937

  9.7. OIL CITY, OKLAHOMA, 1937

  TAYLOR’S UNDERSTANDING OF his responsibility was such that after writing the reports, he campaigned for his recommendations, lobbying journalists, state officials, and university experts. The opposition from big growers and local officials was not only intense but devious, as negotiations with grower DiGiorgio showed. DiGiorgio offered to provide land, water, and electricity for a camp, gratis. In exchange, he wanted his people “to have a voice in deciding who shall be assigned [sic] to this camp . . . he does not want reds, Bolsheviks, or a red light district.” He wanted, in other words, the feds to build permanent housing that he would inherit when federal camps ended. In that way, he could get at government expense a camp for his workers that he would control. Kern county officials wanted to accept this proposal, but Taylor’s allies, familiar with the manipulation of anti-Communist hysteria to prevent farmworkers from organizing, rejected it.35

  Dorothea eagerly joined Taylor’s campaign. She and Maynard knew an editor at the San Francisco News, so she invited him and Taylor to dinner, and a week later he published an editorial supporting their recommendations.36 Taylor was learning about her energy and assertiveness, and the more he learned, the more he grew attracted.

  This dinner, and the fact that Maynard went along on several trips as late as June 1935,37 suggests that nothing overtly romantic was yet happening between Paul and Dorothea—or else that they were not yet ready to own up to a new relationship. On these trips, Maynard was as horrified by what he saw as she was. “Hoovervilles, migrant farm labor, roadside camps; menace of vigilantes in background,” he wrote. “Is this my country?”38 If political differences alienated Maynard and Dorothea, it was because of her growing satisfaction in working for a cause. Maynard’s soul was moved when he was alone in the western wilderness. Dorothea’s and Paul’s souls stirred as they talked to pickers in dusty fields under the baking sun. Sharing that experience generated emotional intimacy. Willard Van Dyke, who saw them together in this period, thought that there was “right away a kind of connection there . . . out of a feeling of, what kind of place is it that lets people be hungry?” Their emotions moved from pity to anger, spurred them, and conquered fatigue, and they recognized these feelings in each other. At the same time, Van Dyke understood, she had been in need of “validation for an approach that she was struggling with as far as this photography was concerned. And Paul gave it.”39

  By the end of the summer of 1935, Dorothea and Paul were making plans to divorce their spouses and marry. However unknown the timing of their relationship, its substance is clear: their attraction merged personal and political excitement. With Paul, Dorothea was entering the adventure of a lifetime. Magnetic attractions like this one are often found in social movements, where the emotions of camaraderie and dedication to a cause can fuse with personal passion. The intimacy developed in these situations—sexual or not—can run very deep. The two were not often alone together, but they were together fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Despite the discomforts of being on the road, and the anguish at witnessing, say, a slight seven-year-old boy dragging a huge cotton sack through the fields, the work was pleasurable, and the pleasure came from hope and from bonding with their compañeros of the road. Their sexual attraction soon became obvious. Wil
lard Van Dyke said he had “never seen two people fall for each other the way they did.”40

  Despite their striking dissimilarities, Maynard and Paul both offered Dorothea a fatherlike partner. To the end of her life, she saw herself as a bit of an orphan. Maynard’s fatherliness came from his twenty years’ seniority and considerable fame. When she met him, she was almost a teenager, out on her first trip away from home, her dreams and aspirations fluid and volatile. He was experienced and self-confident, with multiple skills both masculine and feminine, seemingly fearless, surrounded by fascinating friends, unbound by conventions. Paul proved a different father. Also self-confident and seasoned, also inner-directed and quite willing to defy the standards of his profession, his fatherly reassurance of Dorothea came from solidity and from his absolute certainty in the rightness of what he was doing. Maynard’s and Paul’s different kinds of masculinity both spoke to that raw spot of anxiety in Dorothea about her ambition. Ambition desexed a woman, as they used to say in the nineteenth century, so an ambitious woman often felt a bigger than life-size need to be reassured that she was feminine and desirable. Both Dorothea’s husbands provided this, but Paul celebrated her ambition and found it sexy.

  Paul loved her madly. There is more evidence of his feelings than of hers because his letters to her have survived. His passion shows all the more clearly because his words reveal at the same time his formal, somewhat pompous way of speaking, intermittently entering and leaving the realm of the emotional. From a train headed to Washington late that summer of 1935, he wrote:

  Dorothea my dear:

  If I needed something to make me realize the strength of the ties which draw me to you—this trip seems in a fair way to provide it. Why do I love you? For your complete honesty and integrity. For the clarity with which you see people . . . For the courage with which you face them. For the breadth and depth of your human understanding. For the fineness of your sympathy, which is extended in the same quality to all human beings low & high. (Any exceptions are based upon a sound discrimination). [Imagine writing this in a love letter!] For your conception of your own work—your superb achievement, and standards of the excellence and supreme artistry which you can achieve and the relation of your own work to the scientific and social objectives to which it can contribute. For the unalloyed fineness of your personal relations to those with whom you are most intimate. . . . For your gaiety, delicious sense of humor—perspective on one’s deepest aspirations and foibles alike. . . .

  He scribbled at the very top, “Not the ‘leave-on-the-desk’ kind of a letter, is it?”41 A day later it was, “My heart aches for you, Dorothea.” However romantic, his understanding of who she was far surpassed Maynard’s at the beginning of his relationship with her.

  He signed himself “Pablo,” because she had taken to calling him that when they were spending so much time speaking Spanish in the fields. He loved it because it was a lover’s nickname. “Muy buenas noches, mi chaparrito,” he ended one letter.

  Taylor’s agenda in Washington had doubled. In addition to lobbying for support for the camps, he began maneuvering to get a photography job for Dorothea that would enable them to continue working in the field together. This put the upright and moralistic Taylor in an embarrassing position, but he was powerless to abandon either his personal or his political passion. He knew that Lange’s photography would constitute a powerful tool for progressive reform, and he wanted to continue to travel and work in the field with her. He could not bear not to experience that again. He had to leap a high hurdle: married women were being excluded from federal government positions altogether, especially when their husbands were federal employees; and for the two of them to work in the very same program would make it yet more difficult to get that rule ignored or waived.42 As Taylor was introducing Lange’s work around the Department of Agriculture, to universal admiration, he had to confess to his allies in Washington that he was about to marry this photographer.43

  But persistence was Paul’s default approach. He showed her photographs to Roy Stryker, the head of a new rural photography project, who was ecstatic about them.44 Artist Ben Shahn was present when this occurred and he never forgot the impact of the photographs: “. . . this was a revelation, what this woman was doing. . . . Roy’s whole direction changed. . . .”45 Stryker hired her immediately.46

  Not even Lange’s eloquent photographs persuaded the FSA to build camps for migrant workers, however. Instead, Taylor persuaded Lowry Nelson, San Francisco regional head of FERA, to travel with him to see the farmworkers’ conditions for himself. Appalled, Nelson found an unallocated twenty thousand dollars authorized for California relief and got approval to use the money to build two camps.47 Moving quickly so as to make a start before the growers had time to mount an opposition, Taylor chose sites and appointed Irving Wood to supervise construction and handle community relations—the tough job of pacifying and/or standing up to the growers.

  Taylor’s hopes for substantial dollar amounts to provide decent housing for all migrant farmworkers never materialized.48 Tugwell, who had been resistant to the camp idea, went to California in October 1935 and visited the first two camps; commenting, “Well, it works,” he allocated ten million dollars for the program, intended to be sufficient to house 150,000 to 200,000 farmworkers.49 But the new regional FSA boss, Jonathan Garst, was never positive about the camps, the FSA itself was under constant political attack from the Right, and the project was again minimized. By mid-1936, the camp program was reformulated as a set of demonstration projects to serve as a model for some other entity to build. By November 1936, Tugwell was out of office. Ultimately, the FSA in California built only fifteen camps and three mobile camps which traveled by trailer following the harvest.50

  HAVING DECIDED TO marry, Paul and Dorothea faced difficult tasks: telling their spouses and children, convincing Maynard and Katherine to secure divorces. Paul particularly dreaded telling his mother and aunt, Rose and Ethel. He wrote to Dorothea with a progress report: “Spoke further to Mother and my sister, doing something along the lines we discussed. . . . I’m sure you will be received in such a way that time can do its work.”51 Paul urged Dorothea to move with him into the house they had rented without waiting for the divorces, pointing out that she could save on rent. “Why not collect the $100 for moving by Nov 1st? . . . Why go to Marge’s—do you like her pajamas better?”52 Dorothea said no. In an odd reversal, Paul was ready to defy the code of propriety, while she clung to the respectable. The divorces were outwardly amicable, but Maynard’s journal, terse as always, shows that he was bereft.53

  The Dixon children had no inkling of the impending separation. In hindsight Dan recalled one signal. “Our backyard had become a kind of playground for the neighborhood kids. We tore it up pretty badly. It was a disaster area—no flowers, no plants, just litter and untended weeds. That wasn’t like Maynard and Dorothea. If things had been right for them, our yard would have been cared for.” To announce their divorce, they summoned ten-year-old Daniel into their bedroom while they were naked in bed together (the way they always slept).54 This was supposed to be reassuring. But Willard Van Dyke recalls Dorothea telling a different and more painful version of informing her older son: As she tucked Danny into bed, she explained what she was about to do, and Danny said, “’Well, you got what you wanted again, didn’t you?’ ”55

  Their friends reacted vehemently. Lange confided the news first to Hansel Mieth and Imogen Cunningham, no doubt expecting support, but both were censorious—a reaction that illustrates the limits of their social liberalism.56 Just one year before, both Maynard and Dorothea had expressed disapproval when Roi Partridge told them that he planned to divorce Imogen; now divorcée Imogen sent a blistering letter telling Dorothea that she owed it to her children not to leave Maynard.57 Dorothea and Maynard seemed to their friends an institution, a mooring in the insecure Depression world of their crowd. “It was like someone slashing a picture in half,” Roger Sturtevant said.58 Their friends also
sensed how Maynard would suffer. They adored his irreverent, dramatic spirit—but they did not have to live with him. Some criticized Dorothea because she was leaving Maynard for a younger man, an interesting twist on the usual older man/younger woman liaisons. Dorothea was hurt by these reactions, but never wavered, any more than she had hesitated to marry Maynard in the face of disapproval. In the end, neither Dorothea nor Maynard lost friends.

  The Taylors’ breakup was less smooth. Katharine was taken by surprise. Just when she had planned to work on repairing her marriage, she wrote in her memoir, “Paul came home full of joy and explained he had developed a deep love for Dorothea Lange. . . . I really rejoiced and congratulated him.” She was trying to honor her free-love ideology, but it collided with her actual emotions, so her account seems inauthentic. Devastated and furious, she claimed that Paul asked her to take Margot and sleep overnight at his “Mother’s house for one night so he and Dorothea could have our house to themselves.” (This is so out of character that it provokes doubt—though who can know the imperatives of passion?) Katharine wrote that she complied (she did not mention the whereabouts of her other two children) but afterward became hysterical. In a handwritten insert to her memoir, she added, “Actually became psychotic.” Paul called her doctor, she wrote, who sent her to a “sanitarium where I was kept solidly asleep for about 2 weeks.” When she left the sanitarium, she appealed to a former lover, William Yandell Eliott, who took her to Inverness, in Marin County, to rest for four days.