Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Paul lost his temper only once: Dan called his mother an old sow and Paul threw him down the stairs—could have killed him, Dan thought. Even if this incident became exaggerated in memory, the message Dan received was clear: Paul would tolerate no serious affront to Dorothea. When Dorothea first joined the Taylor family, she received, as had Paul’s first wife, Katharine, a message not to defy Mother Rose. But Dorothea took on the challenge and won. After an initial standoff, according to Margot, it was not long before Dorothea had established her absolute supremacy. Paul visited his mother on his own once a week.

  As Dan and John grew up, these tensions gave them a new view of their mother: authoritarian, the “magisterial lawmaker,” in Dan’s words. “Dictator Dot,” they called her; “. . . she governed like a Bismarck,”16 Dan wrote. There was a great deal of pressure to achieve. Margot told her friend Mary, you don’t know what it’s like to have both parents in Who’s Who; she was fearful of not making Phi Beta Kappa.17

  The children may have been noticing Dorothea’s irascibility more as they got older, but the “devil” Dorothea felt inside her may have been gaining strength. The thrills of that year’s developments did not dilute the stresses and pressures of running a house while meeting deadlines.

  THE CONTRAST BETWEEN this domestic tyrant and her approach to photographic subjects is so great that at first it was difficult for me to integrate the two. Yet everyone who saw her at home described her as taking control, orchestrating every detail. Her daughter-in-law Helen Dixon described this with maximum charity. Extremely close to Dorothea, Helen loved her, took pride in being her friend, remained living on the Lange/Taylor property even after divorcing John Dixon, and nursed Dorothea as she died. Still, Helen recognized that Dorothea always had a plan and needed to orchestrate others into it.

  The least obnoxious venue of this obsessive control was the house: it had to be spotless, and no one was allowed to move anything out of its place or to leave items on surfaces, as she could not bear clutter. Dorothea’s intolerance for mess was, however, a modernist design sensibility, not a dirt phobia. She liked simple wooden furniture and not too much of it, preferring bare windows and wooden chairs or canvas director’s chairs to upholstered chairs. She placed objects, art, and photographs sparingly and changed them frequently. Her purpose was to encourage looking and noticing, not to allow interiors to become too customary. Her rule was, never have anything in your house that you don’t truly like to look at. You only need one set of dishes, she insisted; the best should be used every day.

  Her impulse for simplicity was neither spartan nor withholding. She loved to shop, and preferred the interesting to the fashionable. She liked to stand out. Although she frequently rearranged her home, on her body she never strayed from the look she had created for herself in the 1920s, when her San Francisco social circle confirmed her taste for elegance through simplicity. There was one exception: she no longer felt it imperative to cover her lame leg. Moving into a more staid faculty community altered her style not at all. She had bobbed her hair in the twenties, as was fashionable, never grew it out again, but cut it gradually shorter and shorter. She continued wearing a beret, cocked far to one side so as to create an attention-getting asymmetry. She discovered ethnic clothes, mainly Mexican, long before they became fashionable in the 1940s: white embroidered blouses and long, full skirts. On the road, photographing, she wore work clothes: pants and shirts, and often kerchiefs on her head. She liked what she called “fine” things but did not measure their fineness by cost. In 1957 she attended the Academy Awards ceremony with her cousin, film star Hope Lange, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Peyton Place; Dorothea crowed about having found a zebra-striped dress at Sears for twelve dollars, only to have people at the event gush, “Who is your designer?”

  She was proud of her excellent cooking. She served meals with such spare elegance that Margot recalled them as Japanese tea ceremonies. The price of this fastidiousness was, of course, overworking herself. But she could also improvise. Margot was with her once when she dropped a whole turkey onto the floor. She picked it up, put it back on the platter, and winked at Margot, making it a secret just between them. Margot was delighted.

  Dorothea’s ritual became particularly elaborate and rigid on holidays; Dan called her “the Bonaparte of the holidays.” Hers was a childhood ritual—her mother had also made grand holiday occasions. Christmas gatherings were especially spectacular, choreographed and performed identically each year, but each year adding new layers. Candles in white paper bags bordered the path to the door. Real candles in antique German candleholders burned on the Christmas tree, because this was her grossmama’s tradition. (Paul kept a fire extinguisher and buckets of sand at the ready.) She took down the photographs she kept posted on the long white wall of her work space and substituted holiday mementos: family pictures, a child’s letter to Santa. Dorothea had a special Christmas outfit—an all white, delicate lace and cotton Mexican dress with very full sleeves, her usual heavy silver Navajo bracelet, and an equally heavy necklace she wore only occasionally. When Paul invited foreigners from the university, she asked them to wear their “traditional native costumes.” (I cannot imagine these Korean economists or Egyptian agronomists complying, but perhaps their wives did.)

  These were large gatherings, including Maynard and the Partridges, but also guests connected to Paul—sometimes thirty people. The groups grew still larger in the early 1950s, when the children’s partners and their children began to arrive. Dorothea did all the cooking—no one else’s dishes would do—and decorating, spending so much time that she typically did little photographic work between Thanksgiving and Christmas. There would be two turkeys or one turkey and a roast beef or one turkey and a ham, with many side dishes: creamed onions, yams, mashed potatoes, homemade rolls, vegetables, salad. Simple and earthy cooking, unpretentious but generous, and served with style—an inheritance from Joan. Often there were dueling carvers: Paul, cutting meticulous and thin slices; Martin at the other end of the long table, cutting big chunks—so the boys tried to sit at his end. After the meal came coffee Diablo, served in special cups reserved for this use. As the years went by, the holiday meals grew ever more scripted. “Thanksgiving was warm and wonderful,” recalled daughter-in-law Onnie, “but it was Dorothea’s show.”

  The music was also ritualized. Dorothea insisted on playing an old 78 recording of Madame Schumann-Heink singing “Stille Nacht,” although family members complained that they could hear nothing but static, with a faint singing voice in the background. The blended family soon added its own songs. From Maynard came “Little Old Man As I Do Tell,” the Taylors brought “When Cockle Shells Turn Silver Bells,” and Ross liked “Rye Whiskey,” also a Maynard favorite.18 The family lore included codes, secret handshakes, and a nonsense lyric:

  Ve belong to a club vott’s fine

  The president’s name is Finkelstein

  Every night at a quarter to nine

  Ve get together in a time vott’s fine . . .

  It was pronounced with a German or Yiddish accent, and the first line was repeated often in family letters, as an expression of love. If it was anti-Semitic, that was not recognized by the family.

  After supper, bells would sound outside and Santa Claus (Paul) would enter through a French door with his bag of presents, including oranges for all the children—oranges he had to fetch from Chinatown in San Francisco because Dorothea insisted that only these would do. He soon added his own rituals: At Thanksgiving he would read aloud Lincoln’s original Thanksgiving proclamation, or Daniel Webster’s comments on the two hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing: “The consequence . . . has been a great subdivision of the soil, and a great equality of condition, the true basis, most certainly, of a popular government.”19 (For Paul, there was no distance at all between his personal emotions and his political ones.) He would often add Maynard Dixon’s irreverent poem “Death of a Pagan.” That Dorothea and Paul had both lost fat
hers contributed, no doubt, to their mutual pleasure in the bonds of ritual. These occasions provided a structure in which he could express warmth and patriotism and paternalism. They were among the gifts Dorothea brought him.

  All this togetherness made life more painful at times for the family member outside the “club vott’s fine”: Consie. When the blended family formed in 1935, Consie was becoming a political activist. She wrote for a progressive newspaper and supported the longshoremen’s union, through which she met Dave Jenkins, a leader in that union. They became a couple and their daughter Rebecca (Becky) was born in 1937. After short stays in Taos, in Woodstock, and in the West Village in New York City, where they lived in a group household with other radicals and artists, she and Dave separated and she returned to San Francisco with Becky.20 (Dave Jenkins went on to become an important San Francisco labor leader and political activist; had Dorothea’s relationship with Consie been better, she would have continued to feel more connected to Bay Area Left politics.)

  A loving but unstable mother, Consie was unable to provide emotional security for Becky—she could not keep a job for any length of time, and soon began drinking too much—repeating the pattern of her mother, Lillian Tobey, Maynard Dixon’s first wife—and taking up with no-good men, in the opinion of the loyal John Collier, Jr., who rescued her from disasters several times.21 She made several more short-lived marriages. In the 1940s and 1950s, Consie would have refused the Euclid Street holiday invitations, except for the fact that her daughter Becky loved the ritual, bustle, and warmth. Still, even young Becky felt “the dark cloud” that hung over Consie.22 It is difficult to reach the core of this family tragedy, but it was probably constructed both by Dorothea and Consie: the stepmother did not extend her usual warmth and hospitality to Consie, and the stepdaughter could not accept what was offered her. But Dorothea held the power, and it is hard to understand her lasting emotional stinginess toward her stepdaughter. It is as if she were stuck in her 1920 jealousy of the girl’s hold over her scintillating father.

  DOROTHEA’S EMPHASIS ON family togetherness was partly compensatory, as she was on the road so much. It also fit her new location, however. At first Dorothea worried about leaving her beloved San Francisco, the arts community that had stimulated, sustained, and shaped her, and the European-style café life, to become a faculty wife in what must have seemed to her a suburban college town. As a California architect once wrote, “North Berkeley’s artistic colony was a health-oriented one and . . . did not associate itself with San Francisco’s brawling bohemia at Coppa’s den.”23 To her own surprise, however, Dorothea soon learned to love Berkeley’s sunnier weather, healthful living, spacious houses, and the benefits bestowed by a great university.

  Berkeley was originally part of the approximately 45,000-acre Rancho San Antonio, granted to the Peralta family in 1820 by Spanish governor de Solá. Domingo Peralta built a home on a creek his family named Codornices, meaning “quail”—a creek next to which Lange and Taylor’s second home would be located. No Anglos lived there until the gold rush, when the Peraltas sold them some land and then donated more for the first schoolhouse. Anglos started grabbing the land, however, through various deceptive strategems, including a fraudulent survey in the 1850s that stole seven thousand acres and the entire waterfront from Peralta. Ultimately, they bought the rest for $82,000. A small railroad line to the ferry, built at the turn of the twentieth century, made commuting to San Francisco easier, and in 1906 the great San Francisco earthquake sent many survivors across the Bay to settle.

  When Lange moved to Berkeley in 1935, it was thriving. The Bay Bridge, completed in 1936, allowed fast travel to San Francisco for a toll of fifty cents. Berkeley spawned a large industrial area near the Bay, and the university enrolled about fifteen thousand students. To Dorothea, a place where you went everywhere in a car, where all the people were white, and where the aromas of Italian and Chinese food were hard to find was not a city. But during the New Deal it picked up other sources of energy. The WPA was stoking the construction industry, building a small amphitheater in Hinkel Park, the Berkeley Rose Garden just across from the Euclid Street house, the Aquatic Park, and the Berkeley Yacht Harbor. Civilian Conservation Corps boys built most of the vast Tilden Park’s facilities, bushwhacked fire trails and hiking paths, and planted redwoods and Monterey Pines in the East Bay hills.24 The university bubbled with activism, most of it left-wing. Historian Henry May recalled, “Campus political argument was carried on between New Dealers on one side and Marxists on the other.”25 The Taylor-Lange home became a site of animated discussions among faculty, visiting scholars, graduate students, California progressives, and agricultural experts. Dorothea listened, learned, and participated when not in the kitchen. Visitors noted that she did no small talk, but plunged into serious conversation. Graduate students in particular loved being there and found the atmosphere lively, relaxed, unsnobbish. Clark Kerr, who visited with Taylor during both his marriages, described Dorothea as informal, unconcerned with people’s status, oblivious to fashion, the complete opposite of Katharine.26 Walter Goldschmidt, who became a distinguished anthropologist, and his wife Gayl felt comfortable dropping in of an evening and inviting Paul and Dorothea to grad-student parties. Walter Goldschmidt lived with them when he taught for a term at Berkeley, and he saw their differences and the complexities of their connection. While Paul was “angry” at injustice, Dorothea had a spiritual approach, he said. “She was no radical, but a sentimental liberal, a flower child a generation before flower children were born. . . . She had a tough streak. . . . I admired it but I didn’t like it.” They arrived at the same opinions from different points of view, Goldschmidt noted, “two very genuine people . . . who really cared about the world . . . on the same wavelength.”27

  It is noticeable, however, that none of these guests mentioned the children.

  Part III

  CREATING DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY

  1935–1939

  LANGE AT WORK, CIRCA 1935, by Rondal Partridge

  SCENE 3

  “I found a little office, tucked away, in a hot, muggy early summer, where nobody especially knew exactly what he was going to do. And this is no criticism because you walked into an atmosphere of a very special kind of freedom. That’s the thing that is almost impossible to duplicate or find. Roy Stryker was a man with a hospitable mind. You know there is a word élan. There was something that I would understand better myself if it applied to one of us only. But it didn’t. It caught. And it caught like it was contagious. What you were doing was important. You were important. Not in the way in an organizational chart, not that way at all. You had a responsibility. Not to those people in the office, but in general. As a person expands when he has an important thing to do. When you were out in the field you found your way, but never like a big-shot photographer, not as the big magazine boys do it now. We found our way in, slid in on the edges. The people who are garrulous and tell you everything, that’s one kind of person, but the fellow who’s hiding behind a tree, is the fellow that you’d better find out why. So often it’s just sticking around, not swooping in and swooping out in a cloud of dust; sitting down on the ground with people, letting the children look at your camera with their dirty, grimy little hands, and putting their fingers on the lens, and you let them, because you know that if you will behave in a generous manner, you’re very apt to receive it. I don’t mean to say that I did that all the time, but I have done it, and I have asked for a drink of water and taken a long time to drink it, and I have told everything about myself long before I asked any question. ‘What are you doing here?’ they’d say. ‘What do you want to take pictures of us for?’ I’ve taken a long time to explain, and as truthfully as I could. They knew that you are telling the truth. Not that you could ever promise them anything, but it meant a lot that the government in Washington was aware enough even to send you out.”1

  —Dorothea Lange

  11

  Father Stryker and the Beloved Communi
ty

  Between 1935 and 1939, Lange spent most of her working time—a time broken by several layoffs—making documentary photography for the Farm Security Administration. Their work represented at once the most advanced, farsighted dream of the New Deal and its most ahistorically nostalgic, with the result that it created a paean to the New Deal’s most ineffective program. But this is not how it felt at the time. The FSA photography team was a “beloved community,” to use a phrase from the southern civil rights movement of the early 1960s. Like family members, the photographers subordinated their individual careers for a time to a collective social-justice project at once patriotic and intimate. Also like families, there were disagreements and inequities. Yet everyone on the staff knew that they would seize an opportunity to do it again.

  ROY STRYKER, HEAD of the FSA photography project, was another of Lange’s “fathers.” His own father, a radical Populist in Great Bend, Kansas, once interrupted the family prayers, shouting, “ ‘Damn Wall Street, damn the railroads and goddamn Standard Oil.’ ”1 After serving in World War I, he enrolled in Columbia University—as Taylor had—where he studied economics under Rexford Tugwell, who “set his mind afire.” Like Lange, Stryker walked in the city. He saw poverty and discrimination, and he wanted to do something about it. As an adjunct instructor at Columbia, he took his students on “revolutionary field trips” into the city—to union meetings, printing plants, slaughterhouses, and slums. And he began collecting pictures that would allow his city students to learn about agriculture and rural life. Then Tugwell hired him to assemble a “Pictorial Sourcebook of American Agricultural History.” Stryker became obsessive about collecting old pictures, his pockets always bulging with notes and references on three-by-five-inch slips of paper. The book never appeared, but the project grew into something much more important.