by Linda Gordon
The FSA arose out of conflict within the Department of Agriculture.2 Progressives in the Department were enraged that the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (discussed in chapter 9) ended up victimizing hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. The guru of these progressives was Rexford Tugwell, Stryker’s former professor, a prolific author, and the charismatic undersecretary of Agriculture. He threatened to resign unless the department enforced sharing AAA benefits with tenants and sharecroppers.3 At the same time, a storm of militant social protest movements, on both the Left and Right, made it harder for Roosevelt to stick to his conservative alliances. Tugwell did not get the progressive enforcement he wanted—on the contrary, liberals were purged from the Department of Agriculture—but he did get, on May 1, 1935, a new agency, the Resettlement Administration (RA), which was independent of the Department of Agriculture, established by presidential order. It was a “poor man’s Department of Agriculture,” and it could never have been inaugurated within the antidemocratic Department of Agriculture.4 To head it, Tugwell chose a complete outsider: Will Alexander, a minister, president of Dillard University in New Orleans, and the leader of what there was of a white southern antiracist movement. There could hardly have been a more provocative appointment. As assistant administrator Tugwell appointed another progressive, C.B. Baldwin, a Henry Wallace loyalist. So from the moment of its birth, the RA was the target of anti-Roosevelt opposition.
The RA had at first no independent appropriation and had to hustle for funds from emergency relief programs, although the RA’s whole premise was that rural poverty was not an emergency because it was chronic.5 The progressive Agriculture Department network, Paul Taylor included, saw its task not as emergency relief but as a permanent democratization of land ownership and use, a policy that would be called “land reform” elsewhere.6 Tugwell built his agency rapidly, enlarging it from twelve employees in April 1935 to sixteen thousand by the end of the year. Its main program, however—resettlement of the poorest farmers on better land and in suburban garden towns—required suitable land to move farmers onto, which could only have been obtained through buying or taking land from large plantations and ranches, and the RA had no authority to do this. Due to political attacks on “collectivist” alternatives, the FSA clung mainly to archaic family-farm and small-town projects. The RA also provided loans for modernization, grants in cases of natural disasters, and loans to producer and consumer cooperatives. But these programs developed only on a small scale, and any slight improvement in agricultural conditions was produced mainly by emergency relief.
Despite its weakness, the RA immediately evoked political attack from the Right, squeezing it in a political pincers: strong opposition yet little accomplishment. Tugwell resigned in November 1936 in order to free the agency from his taint as a leftist. The program was moved into the Department of Agriculture and renamed the Farm Security Administration the following year—a title whose vagueness was precisely the point. This move made the FSA literally surrounded by its enemies, protected only by the man at the top—Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.
Despite opposition, the FSA managed some impressive initiatives. Its “home supervisors,” for example, were supposed to advise farm women on nutrition, clothing, and hygiene. The supervision could be patronizing, but through the supervisors’ reports back to the FSA, farm women tried to educate Washington about their problems—notably poor health, ranging from abscessed teeth to corneal ulcers to venereal disease to infant diarrhea, pellagra, and malaria.7 The FSA then embarked on substantial medical-aid programs. It introduced group medical-care programs in some drought states, setting up nonprofit HMO-type corporations that hired physicians, dentists, and nurses. The FSA justified this program with the finding that poor health was a widespread cause of improverishment and, thus, of defaults on loans.8 The field workers also recognized the inverse: that poverty caused ill health. In twenty-nine states, the FSA contracted with state medical associations to provide care to the rural poor.9 Even more controversially, the FSA cooperated covertly with the Birth Control Federation of America—Margaret Sanger’s organization—to provide contraceptive advice to its clients and to residents in migrant labor camps. “One FSA official put it this way: ‘We are doing this service as emissaries of the Lord, if you please, and never as emissaries of Uncle Sam, who does not officially know we are doing it.’ ” Migrant farmworkers were among the eager beneficiaries of this service.10
The most intense opposition targeted the FSA’s very modest attempts to provide services to black as well as white farmers.11 Growers complained that loans to blacks were “killing what little thrift and initiative our negroes had to start with,” that even agreeing to meet with negroes “tended to grant them certain privileges which . . . make the [racial] situation more serious. . . .”12 Powerful Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia was irate when he learned that the FSA was paying poll taxes for its southern clients. FSA administrator Baldwin responded that he was proud to do this: “. . . we took the position that a person couldn’t be a good citizen without being a voter.”13
On the whole, though, the FSA was forced to defer to the department’s racism. Even racial liberal Will Alexander, head of the FSA, approved segregating not only FSA projects but even information about them—for example, issuing press releases about aid to black farmers only to the black press. The same principles guided the FSA’s distribution of photographs. The first FSA traveling exhibit omitted all images of blacks except for one Lange portrait sanitized of its context and caption, and even this was objectionable to the Texas staff. A Grand Central Station mural composed of twenty FSA photographs by Ed Rosskam showed not one black face, although it was mounted by a black assistant.14 Even when Florence Loeb Kellogg of the magazine Survey Graphic specifically asked the FSA for photographs showing racial diversity, she did not get them.15 Such racism saturated New Deal agencies. Almost no government photography showed whites and blacks together.16 Throughout the public arts projects, administrators told artists to observe southern racial codes.17
The photography project, intended as a minor appendage of the FSA’s public-relations section, became, unexpectedly, its most influential activity. Tugwell established the project in 1935 to help neutralize or counteract the inevitable conservative attacks, and he hired his former student, Roy Stryker, to head it, encouraging him to “turn to new devices, the movie and the still picture and other things. . . .”18 Many federal agencies were using photography to promote their work to the public. At first, Stryker ordered up images of land, machinery, crops, and especially land misuse and mismanagement, as well as pictures that promoted FSA programs.19 It was only when he saw Lange’s pictures, he said, that he realized that agriculture was more than “machines, homemade harrows and so on.” He then began talking to his photographers about the “sociological implications” of what they saw.20 However great Lange’s influence, it would not have been absorbed had Stryker not been the creative, open-minded man he was. Lange thought he had a “hospitable mind.”21 His leadership created an extraordinary, eccentric, and capacious project: a public photographic record of America’s rural life. It was extraordinary because of the quantity and quality of the photographs; eccentric because of its administrative location; capacious because Stryker included social and even political aspects of life as well as agriculture.
STRYKER’S PROJECT ALWAYS functioned on a shoestring. At peak in 1939, Stryker’s staff totaled twenty-one. There were three female typist/stenographers; three male laboratory technicians; Ed Rosskam, hired to design publications and exhibits; five or more photographers; and six assorted employees with titles like draftsman and assistant photographer, all male. Stryker was a political appointee, but all the others had civil service ranks—CAF-9 for Rosskam, CAF-6 for the photographers, CAF-4 for the lab guys, down to CAF-1 for the most junior.22 The annual budget at its simplest was:
salaries $38,460.
travel 11,000.
procurements 13,525.
&nb
sp; salary increases due to reclassification 3,540.
Total $66,350.23
Stryker knew that newspapers and magazines were publishing pictures as never before, and he set out to supply them, further kindling the print media’s interest in photography. Journalists and photojournalists came to depend on FSA material; they would telephone to request specific images or drop by just to browse.24
Stryker spoke of his role with a modesty partly real and partly a pose: “I’m the guy who sat in the middle. I kept the store.” In fact, his flexibility, seat-of-the-pants procedures, and lack of sophistication in photography were assets, because they left him open to new insights and initiatives and saved him from the arty and the elegant: “. . . it was so fortunate,” he wrote, “that . . . we were some distance from the ‘salons’ of New York. . . .”25
Stryker did not look for extensive photographic skill when hiring. Asked how he picked photographers, Stryker responded that he looked for curiosity, a desire to know.26 His first hire was a former student at Columbia, Arthur Rothstein, who became a fine technician and set up a decent darkroom—at his arrival, the Department of Agriculture’s darkroom was so antiquated that it could not even handle film, only glass-plate negatives.27 A New York Jew, the son of immigrants, Rothstein was some twenty years younger than Stryker. A product of New York’s meritocratic high school system and a quintessential first-generation Jewish American, Rothstein was a “type” that Stryker had come to know and respect at Columbia. (He took an FSA job because he was discouraged by anti-Semitic rejections at medical schools.)28 Stryker then took in journalist Carl Mydans, also Jewish, but he stayed at the FSA only a year, recruited away by Life magazine.
Then came two young artists, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn. Both were bestowed upon Stryker by an extraordinary woman whose influence on the photography project is little known. Ernestine Evans (not related to Walker) had been a writer and children’s book editor, one of the first Americans to publish on Diego Rivera. Then she moved into a position at the FSA for which she was overqualified, not an atypical experience for women at the time. Well connected in international art circles, especially with documentary photographers and filmmakers, she gained a reputation as someone “always pioneering new ideas in the new agencies” of the New Deal. She got Walker Evans a significant photography assignment—taking the photographs for Carleton Beal’s book on Cuba.29 Evans came from a wealthy family, grew up with servants, attended boarding schools and Williams College, and then spent time in Paris. His elegance of style and manners won him influential friends, notably the arts philanthropist Lincoln Kirstein, and enabled him to move “with ease up and down the social ladder in New York.”30
Evans shared a studio with his good friend Ben Shahn in a relationship that must have involved the attraction of opposites.31 In their photography, Evans savored the stillness and formal beauty of vernacular architecture and lined faces, Shahn the fleeting, the marginal, taking a narrative approach, a possibility created by his fast Leica camera. An immigrant from Jewish Lithuania and a Leftist, Shahn was already a serious painter in the 1920s, having worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on the Rockefeller Center murals (destroyed at Rockefeller’s insistence because of their Red content). He, too, came to Stryker at Ernestine Evans’s recommendation. When Shahn saw Lange’s photographs for the first time, he was shaken by their power, thinking, this is fantastic and I want to do something like this.32 So Stryker just put a camera in his hands and said, “Go.” His technique was terrible, most of his early work was out of focus, or underexposed, or overexposed, but Stryker learned to love his eye and figured, absolutely correctly, that he would learn to use the camera wisely.33
Later more photographers joined the project, notably the multitalented Jack Delano, born Jacob Ovcharov in Kiev, a composer and artist as well as photographer; Russell Lee, who wanted to be a painter until he picked up a camera for the first time in 1935; Ed Rosskam, also a painter before becoming a photographer. Gordon Parks, the only nonwhite photographer on the team, arrived at the bitter end of the project. Parks was not actually hired by the agency: a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship supported him as an intern. (No other photographers, not even neophytes, had served as interns without salary.) Even then, Stryker was reluctant and had to be persuaded to take him in; the FSA darkroom workers didn’t want to process film for him. Two other women were hired by Stryker: Marion Post Wolcott in 1938, Esther Bubley in 1942. So this was a white men’s space that Lange entered, although she did not meet the others for a year and never met some of them, including Jack Delano.
Making the group even odder was the fact that most of them hailed from urban or immigrant backgrounds, and five of the eleven major photographers were Jews. Had it not been for the FSA project, some of them would have gravitated toward the left-wing New York Photo League. Instead these urbanites featured rural folk as symbols of America. Moreover, because of their focus, the images and concept of the Depression in American minds were more rural than they would have been otherwise. This aberration contributed to the particular form of democratic populism that characterized New Deal political culture: imagining the nation and its citizens as rooted in farms and small towns. Thus even as FSA photography expanded the nation’s sympathy for the needy and support for New Deal programs, it may also have hampered an understanding of the roots of the crisis. Because structural reform of American agriculture failed, the Department of Agriculture’s net impact on rural society was to drive several million more off the land and into urban poverty.
Lange began doing FSA work well before her appointment was official.34 California state and California federal rural aid officials were so interlinked that Stryker, the local FSA representatives, the state relief people, and, for a time, Taylor pooled funds from several agencies to pay her. The arrangement made sense because several agencies were using her work, and Stryker was using Taylor’s work.35 In the spring and summer of 1935, Taylor and Lange were working on the reports for the California SERA. In September they went to see the first FSA camp at Marysville, north of Sacramento, which was being built in response to their reports. Sometimes she filed for reimbursement of expenses, sometimes he did.
She earned $2,300 yearly, more than twice the Depression’s average full-time salary, which was then $1,137 a year; 77 percent of American workers earned less than she did, and the average female white professional at the time earned about $676 a year. Yet her salary was discriminatory. She earned what photographers Arthur Rothstein, Paul Carter, and Theodor Jung got. Yet Rothstein, just graduated from college, was twenty years younger than Lange, and his only photography experience was the Columbia University Camera Club; Carter, the son of the head of the FSA’s Information Division, and Jung were both very young and Stryker fired them after less than a year because they did not show any aptitude. Mydans, twelve years younger than Lange, a journalist who had just discovered photography, earned $2,600; Walker Evans, eight years younger than Lange, was already in the public eye as a photographer, and he earned $3,000. Although Stryker had been bowled over by her photographs, he set wages in line with the ideology then justifying why women were paid less: that she was not responsible for a family and had a husband to support her. Her relation to Taylor further relieved Stryker of any responsibility to pay her equally. (That she had had no male breadwinner for the past fifteen years did not distinguish her from millions of other working women who had families to support.) Moreover, when the FSA budget tightened, Stryker viewed Lange as the employee who could most easily make do with less income.36
On the other hand, Lange’s location in California brought her a few perks that the others did not have. Having closed her San Francisco studio, she had no darkroom. While she worked with Taylor for the state of California, he arranged for her to have access to a UC/Berkeley darkroom. Then she built a darkroom in the Virginia Street basement, and the FSA agreed to give her twenty-five dollars a month to cover water and electricity, insurance on her cameras, a small fraction of the rent, a
nd a bit of depreciation compensation.
THESE PHOTOGRAPHERS MADE by one estimate 272,000 photographs, by another 100,000, and no one has been able to look at them all.37 So much film, so many negatives and prints piled up around the office that no one could keep track. Like the best parts of the New Deal, the work was hectic, fluid, volatile—in a nice slip of the tongue, Lange called it “a state of foment.”38 But in retrospect, everyone in the shop considered the disorganization a necessary condition of their creativity.39 Given the sense of urgency the Depression and New Deal engendered, it is not surprising that Stryker limited the proportion of his budget spent on archiving and record keeping.
Stryker was above all an educator, and through his respect for education and his insistence that it become an essential part of the FSA documentary project, he raised the level of what the photography revealed. He read widely and assigned readings to his staff, including the antiracist 1936 Preface to Peasantry, a study of the sharecropping system by southern white sociologist Arthur Raper, a professional friend of Paul Taylor who also spoke out against lynching.40 Everyone in the Washington shop, including the clerical workers, was included in Stryker’s educational requirements. “He used to give us homework,” secretary Helen Wool recalled. “He told me to read Beard’s History of the United States and if I didn’t understand it then I wasn’t ready for pictures. . . .”41
