Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  On the farms and on the road, however, women are plentiful, and they reveal another Lange theme: the female heroic. They work in the fields alongside men, then feed and clean their families. They exemplify Lange’s and the popular front’s gender sensibility: They are the stronger sex but never seek to lead, to displace men, or to ask men to share their female chores. They are often without men, but not by choice. When women and men appear together, the men often seem more depressed. Of these two photographs, Lange, with her customary drive to simplification, preferred to cut the husband out, focusing on the woman’s steely gaze. The result is an image less of pity than of determination.

  Next in the story came the farmers’ decision to leave, a decision she could not photograph but recorded in her field notebook, for example, “That drought put the fixins to us.” To represent their migration experience, Lange used distance shots of auto caravans, usually stopped, because Lange’s relatively slow camera could not catch them in motion. The passengers in their ragged clothes stand or sit outside the hot cars as they wait—for the car radiator to cool off, for water, for a repair, for a used auto part. Close-ups reveal how the jalopies are packed—household belongings tied to or hanging from every surface of the car. (See figure 9.6.) Sometimes the vehicles are small pickups with homemade canvas roofs sheltering the people in the back. Other images focus not on the vehicles but on the families themselves—the new pioneers, Lange and Taylor wanted to tell us. Their trips may not have been quite so dangerous as those of the previous century, but they remained arduous. The men are haggard, not only worried but sometimes a bit glassy-eyed, possibly on the edge of cracking; they may well be dehydrated or suffering from heatstroke. The men are always driving. Women, children, and elderly folk crowd in elsewhere, the women often holding and feeding babies by bottle or breast. The children have dirty faces, legs, feet, and clothing.

  14.3. BLYTHE, CALIFORNIA, 1936

  14.4. BLYTHE, CALIFORNIA, 1936

  The families camp, often right on the side of the road. We see their ingenious makeshift constructions: a sheltering canvas strung to trees, open fires or small stoves, improvised cooking systems, and multitasking vessels used for cooking, washing dishes, washing clothes, bathing. Once camped, the women are at the family center, working and directing the work of others. The men and older boys might have been absent on errands or looking for work. Occasionally, only children are in the camp, because adults and youth are in the fields. The children mix play with looking after younger children and fetching water. In reference to several such scenes, Lange noted in her captions that drought refugees were “mingling” with Mexican farmworkers, and she photographed groups of Mexican and Okie children playing together—obviously an event rare enough to elicit notice.

  Families and groups often drove in tandem, because their cars broke down so often. At other times, groups formed in roadside encampments, where they could share resources and exchange information. Their culture required mutual help and generosity, no matter how severe their deprivation. Inversely, theirs was also a culture of resignation. “It is not for us to understand/Just leave it all in jessus hand.” “Don’t be what you ain’t/Jes’ be what you is . . ./If you’re just a little tadpole/Don’t try to be a frog.”3 Yet Lange also encountered critical awareness of that resignation: “ ‘Fellers like myself haven’t got brains enough to be as sore as they ought to.’ ”

  PAUL TAYLOR KNEW as much about the disaster as any other agricultural economist, perhaps as much as those farmers who lived through it. He became the leading New Deal expert on the Okie migration, “a churning documentary engine producing facts and statistics regarding the catastrophe,” as historian Kevin Starr put it.4 Part of Taylor’s skill and insight was understanding the environment as a story, in which nature and humans changed each other. To Taylor, “environmentalism” required sensitivity to that human-nature interaction so as to find a way not merely to preservation but to sustainability.

  The area hardest hit by dust was not, in fact, Oklahoma; the core of the dust bowl included only the tip of the Oklahoma panhandle and took in more of Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico. The whole dust bowl—comprising one hundred million acres—reached as far north as North Dakota and Montana and as far east as western Louisiana. Nevertheless, the name “Okies,” originally used by journalist Ben Riddick of the very conservative Los Angeles Times, stuck to all these refugees as they made their way west in search of work.5 Among them were an unknown but large number of those who, like Florence Thompson, were American Indians; and there were also several thousand African Americans, although these people were always called just “colored” or “Negro,” never Okies.

  We’ve been “tractored out.”

  Taylor traced the dust bowl to the 1870s, when white settlers began to erode the “bison ecology” in which the Plains Indians lived. Ignoring the typically dry conditions of this semiarid region, which received between half and one-third the rain of typical American farmland, settlers homesteaded and plowed the earth. They uprooted the prairie grasses that held down the dry soil, some of them, like mesquite, sending roots down 150 feet. With that kind of sod, the winds would stir up dust but never rip off the soil altogether. Heavy rains in the 1880s fostered the delusion that plowing the land would actually increase the rainfall—the slogan “Rain follows the plow” even gained support among scientists. Realty and railroad companies promoted settlement by whites by promising an inexhaustible shallow underground water belt that could be tapped. The Department of Agriculture recruited homesteaders, but under the Homestead Act of 1862, each family was allowed only 160 acres, later increased to 640, but even this proved not enough in this arid region.6 The Department of Agriculture provided instruction in dry farming, explaining that proper plowing would prevent evaporation. “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted. . . .”7

  Crop failure, along with a predatory, speculative market in land, ruined many homesteaders, and family farming soon gave way to absentee ownership, large-scale commercial agriculture, and tenant farmers.8 By 1910, 53 percent of the farmers in Texas were tenants, 62 percent in Oklahoma. Cotton was the major culprit.9 As cotton production moved west, those with capital accumulated larger tracts of land and more settlers were forced into tenancy.

  14.5. CHILDRESS COUNTY, TEXAS, 1938

  As the size of farms grew, and as the Depression lowered farm prices, it became cost-effective to mechanize and displace these tenants. “The west is being re-fenced,” Lange wrote in her field notes, referring to the enclosures that had displaced European peasants. Those tenants who hung on were being deprived even of small plots for vegetable farming and small stock raising when owners insisted that every square foot of earth be devoted to the commercial crop. In the five years preceding the drought, between 1925 and 1930, a million acres of grasses were being destroyed every year.10

  Consolidation of land ownership also changed farm technology. Earlier farmers had used the lister plow, which cut a furrow down its center so that the loosened earth fell symmetrically to both sides, and left untilled ridges as barriers to wind. When farmers sought greater productivity, they switched to faster one-way disk plows, a set of parallel sharp disks that reduced clumps more and turned all the soil to one side. These one-way plows could handle heavy stubble and hard sunbaked soil, and as mechanization advanced, they could be fitted with attachments for seeding. But they left a more finely pulverized surface layer, more vulnerable to the wind.

  Mechanization was not just the cause but the cause and effect of the ecological destruction. Faced with overcapitalization, excessive expansion of acreage, and periodic droughts, landowners saw mechanization as their only hope, oblivious that it was also their undoing—“destroying the Garden in the search for the Garden.”11 Many tenants reversed the analysis, in the Luddite tradition, treating mechanization itself as the problem. “Tractors should be in the bottom of the river. They ain’t nothing
but starvation for the people.” Some were more practical: “Tractor farming IS the cheapest way of farming but I’ll say this about it—it ought to be adjusted so one man can’t farm so much land.”12

  Then the Agricultural Adjustment Act made matters worse: growers, paid not to plant, evicted their tenants, and used the AAA money to buy tractors. As one former tenant explained, “My landlord said he could make more renting [his land] to the government, and so he couldn’t let me have the place.”13 A migrant told Lange, “I reckon the AAA gypped me out of my share and put me on the road.”14 Then growers adopted the California model, hiring wage labor instead of tenants. The employers owed nothing to the wage workers, not even regular work. One tenant’s meditation on being “let go” resembled Marx’s punning snarls at “free” labor:

  They’re fixin to free all us fellow.

  Free us for what. Free us like they

  freed the mules. . . .

  After transcribing this, Lange wrote, “He speaks for his class.”15

  So the 1930s droughts, the worst in U.S. history, found the earth of the southern plains naked. Unrelenting heat—the summer of 1934 saw thirty-six days straight with a temperature over one hundred degrees in the Great Plains—further dried the soil. There were fourteen major dust storms in 1932, thirty-eight in 1933, and seventy-two in 1937. It was often dark at midday. Paul Taylor, speaking in his unique humanist/economist voice, wrote, “Like fresh sores which open by over-irritation of the skin and close under the growth of protective cover, dust bowls form and heal. Dust is not new on the Great Plains, but never . . . has it been so pervasive and so destructive. Dried by years of drought and pulverized by machine-drawn gang disk plows, the soil was literally thrown to the winds which whipped it in clouds across the country. . . . They loosened the hold of settlers on the land, and like particles of dust drove them rolling down ribbons of highway.”16

  The black blizzards and drifts of fine soil not only made farming impossible but poisoned entire communities: the dust made everyone itch, made housework a Sisyphean task, destroyed machinery, caused illness and sometimes death. Oklahoma lost one-quarter of its soil; thirty-five million acres of formerly cultivated land were made unarable by the end of 1934. Half of Oklahomans were on relief, and in some counties, 90 percent were.17

  Taylor and Lange liked the metaphors social erosion and human erosion to describe the correlate and consequence of soil erosion. Lange photographed the multiple erosions . . . and then the departures. These were not people on a trip. They were leaving forever and often had to discard what they could not stuff into a vehicle.

  SO THEY BECAME “Okies.” Many started their journeys with hope. They traveled in every direction, including north and east, seeking urban as well as rural work. But most went west because they had heard of farmwork available there, from reports of earlier migrants or from California growers’ widely distributed recruiting fliers. “I heered tell of this here irrigation, plenty of water and plenty to eat.” Most of them traveled on Route 66, the iconic Will Rogers Highway, which took them across the Texas Panhandle, through the middle of New Mexico and Arizona, and to the California border at Needles.

  Highways carry immense symbolism in the United States, and Dorothea Lange used and changed that symbolism. Like the railroad, the highway means motion, mobility, and escape. As railroads are the great theme of the blues, brought north by African Americans, so highways go with bluegrass and country-western music. Railroads are public; you ride with strangers and you’re just a passenger. In the car, the head of the family becomes also the driver, and the experience is overlaid with several layers of masculinity: The machine itself, the control of the powerful machine, and the long highway stretching before one’s eyes all imply freedom and adventure. In Lange’s vision, the highway changes character. The machine carrying people along it is not powerful; it is an overloaded, aged jalopy, running anything but smoothly, not fast, and frequently breaking down on the road. Her many images of used-car and salvage lots, of men under raised hoods, confirm the feebleness of the jalopies and symbolize the human disrepair and wreckage. These vehicles also expose the domestic, the private female space, to the public: buckets and washtubs and lanterns hanging from ropes, high chair and table strapped onto the hood, bed linen and pillows rolled and bound on top, children leaning out the windows, grandparents cradling babies. The view of the highway ahead is ambiguous: It still leads to the future and the unknown, but it is lonely, barren, surrounded by sage, tumbleweed, nettles, barbed-wire fences. The highway and its vehicles now speak of failure, loss, and masculinity reduced.

  Lange also photographed those fallen to the nadir of masculinity, forced to walk or hitchhike. Nothing is as lonely, even pathetic, as the men and even families moving down the barren highways without a car.

  Can’t make it

  ate up the car, ate up the tent,

  living like hogs

  Itinerant life was harder on the women. If the family was working, the women worked double—in the fields and in the camp; if there was no work, their burden was differently heavy as they tried to feed men and children—they were not so much cooks as magicians, conjuring meals out of the poorest and fewest of ingredients. They worried about the children’s diet and health. As one migrant explained to an interviewer, “Where the men say, ‘To hell with the clean clothes, I’m too damn tired,’ the women will insist on trying to keep clean, and so may work from three to five hours longer than the man.”18

  When they had to move on, they had an established, efficient routine. The men would get rid of the bedsprings and other articles too bulky or heavy to take. Benches were knocked apart into their separate boards so they could be loaded and reassembled at the next stop. Everyone carried something to the car, and they all knew exactly where each piece went. The bedding was placed on top, some articles were tied on the side, and the tents were packed on the trailer. Their ingenuity was impressive. One photograph shows luggage carriers attached to the running boards and loaded with boxes, clothing stuffed in bags attached to the front fenders, boxes with cooking equipment on the floor of the backseat, and bedding on top of the backseat, with children on top of that.

  14.6. U.S. 80 NEAR LORDSBURG, NEW MEXICO, 1938

  CALIFORNIA’S UNION ORGANIZERS sometimes claimed that the Okies were hopelessly individualistic and incapable of solidarity, in contrast to Mexican farmworkers. It was true that Mexicans were more experienced with unions and grassroots activism. But Lange saw and showed collective spirit among the Okies, too: their generosity and mutual help, their love of singing, and, above all, their shared religiosity.

  Still, they were refugees, their communities shattered. Citizenship, in Lange’s and Taylor’s understanding, involved relationships not just between individuals and government but also between individuals and their community. Life on the road made community fleeting at best. One of Lange’s captions, written in a dry, social science tone, read, “Constant movement does not favor the development of normal relationships between citizens and community, and between employer and employee nor the proper functioning of democracy.”19 In so many ways, citizenship rests on having a home, a “settlement,” as it was called in early America. What historian Kevin Starr calls the “Tobacco Road canard,” the insinuation that Okies were incestuous, degenerate, sexually immoral, stupid “white trash” who would cause the hereditary decline of the California population,20 derived, if it had any truth at all, from the erosion of community standards.

  With this image to combat, Lange thought “a photograph should be above all a promoter of consequences.”21 Her captions became argumentative, though maintaining a documentary voice. About a group of men in Hardeman County, Texas, she wrote a fifteen-paragraph caption, which included a number of direct quotations from them. All seven were on relief and told the usual story of eviction, but Lange elicited more information from them: “None of us vote. It costs us $3.50 poll tax for a married man and wife to vote in Texas.” “We used to go to chur
ch when we had better clothes.” “The big landowners are on the WPA Committee, and they want us cut off so we can work for them for a few days at $1.50 a day harvesting their wheat. But if a man gets a job, he’ll lose his WPA card; it’ll take him a month to get back on WPA after the work is over, and another 20 days until he gets his first check.”22 Just as she selected her strongest photograph from among many of the same subjects, she framed her questions and then selected quotations to make points, as writers and scholars do. There is no doubt as to her purpose: to show how citizenlike were these farmers deprived of citizenship.

  Soon the Okies’ citizenship was directly challenged by the Los Angeles police. The number of migrants, as always, exceeded the work available, and the desperate people had no choice but to head for towns and cities and apply for relief. To discourage the migration, the state legislature authorized excluding those “likely to become public charges.” In December 1935, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce proposed that transients be convicted of vagrancy and put to hard labor.23 The legislature then toughened its antivagrancy statutes to provide that vagrants could be arrested and “lent” to growers to work off their fines.24 Antimigrant rhetoric escalated toward hysteria. A Los Angeles columnist thought the state should quit building and repairing roads as a way of keeping them out, and claimed that Rome fell because of migrant paupers.25 When none of these methods proved effective, Los Angeles chief of police James E. Davis, already notorious for his tolerance of brutality and intolerance of “Reds,” met in January 1936 with representatives of the city prosecutor and the chamber of commerce and decided to fingerprint all adult vagrants and residents of “jungles.” He asked housewives to report any beggars they saw. But nothing drove them back. “They won’t go,” Lange wrote in one of her captions, quoting a caseworker for transients in Imperial County, “until they get so hungry that there’s nothing else for them to do . . . not twenty-five percent will go.”26