Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Failing to stem the flow, Chief Davis took direct action. On February 3, 1936, he deployed policemen to sixteen entry points into California from Arizona, Oregon, and Nevada to stop all cars and determine if the passengers had “definite purpose” and “visible means of support.” He asked county sheriffs to deputize men to staff this “bum blockade.” Migrants were to be given the choice to turn back or serve thirty to eighty days at hard labor. This extraordinary and entirely unconstitutional move repeated an established Anglo strategy of trying to exclude “aliens.” Used against the Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans and Filipinos, the strategy was repeated throughout the Depression in several attempts to lengthen the residency requirement for relief.27

  Not all sheriffs were willing to enforce the blockade, and naturally the governors and attorneys general of the states that the migrants would be returned to—most frequently Arizona—were not pleased. But the blockade functioned. The Los Angeles mayor and the governor ruled that the blockade was legal. Representatives of the chamber of commerce spoke to the press as if they were elected authorities. Davis claimed that the state would save three million dollars in relief money and one and a half million that the vagrants would have stolen.28

  Stryker asked Lange to hunt down some photographs of the blockade, but she did not succeed, explaining that the migrants were terrified of being photographed, for fearing they would be identified as “aliens” and arrested or deported.29

  The ACLU brought suit, and after two months Davis withdrew his “foreign legion,” as opponents called his border patrol. (The blockade was ultimately ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Edwards v California.) But other unconstitutional practices continued. Paul Taylor kept in his files a State Board of Public Welfare directive of December 1936, urging county boards to seize migrants’ cars—“A part of the plan for the stabilizing of migrants is that we take from them the easiest mode of transportation, which is the automobile”—sell them, and use the money to send the people back to where they came from.30

  Meanwhile, the chambers of commerce and the California Citizens Association continued to ratchet up the anti-Okie fury. In today’s understanding, of course, Okies are simply “white.” But in 1930s California, they were another race, of “degenerate” and “degraded stock.” A California health official announced in a 1938 speech that Okies were “incapable of being absorbed into our civilization. . . .”31 Many Anglo Californians grouped Okies with Mexicans, Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, and “Hindus” as illegal aliens. The denunciation of the Okies anticipated another Lange subject, the anti-Japanese fury of five years later, and raised her consciousness still further about race hatred and how quickly it could be incited.

  15

  On the Road: The South

  Lange made her most sensuous FSA photographs in the South. The southern pictures seem to contain not only sights but also the smells, the humidity, the green, and the heat. When you compare them to those of the drought and dust area and the California agricultural valleys, you can feel the different natural environments with all the senses, as well as the environment’s links to human relations.

  The southern photographs were also her most beautiful. This may be because of the heat, which forces bodies to relax and move slowly. It may also be because her subjects were more rooted. Their rootedness made them comfortable in their skins, which made them good photographic subjects. But their rootedness resulted from lack of freedom, not from beloved tradition or contentment. Lange’s son Daniel summarized how she saw it: “Up until then, most of her work had been done in areas where Depression had shaken apart any form of social order. But in the South, a social order remained, and it held so tenaciously to those who lived under it that to photograph the people she discovered that she had to photograph the order as well.” Lange responded, “I couldn’t pry the two apart. . . . Earlier, I’d gotten at people through the ways they’d been torn loose, but now I had to get at them through the ways they were bound up.”1

  The FSA photographs represent the South as more fixed and unchanging than other regions. Photographs of the dust bowl and West Coast regions could not avoid showing the transformation of land and the wandering of people. These were less visible in the South. Walker Evans’s photographs are at one extreme in this respect: motionless. His portrait subjects, lined up in front of the walls they had built, tell us that they live just like their grandparents and great-grandparents and will never live otherwise. His love affair with folk architecture recapitulated the stillness. Every FSA photographer, including Lange, made a few of these “Evans shots.” Lange’s portraits, however, typically avoided Evans’s frontality and made everyone handsome. She chose attractive subjects, but she also found the attractiveness in everyone. An approach born of insight, it had become habit from years of portrait work, and was reinforced by her democratic politics.

  15.1. MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, 1938

  The photographs also reflect the beauty of the southern countryside. All the FSA photographers responded to this, and with some surprise. None of them were previously familiar with the South. The southern images they imagined from the reading Stryker assigned consisted of backwardness, ignorance, poverty, and racism. Compared to the orderliness and flatness of the California plantations and the bleakness of the parched prairies, the southern landscape was a feast of natural and human-made vistas. The rough plank or log houses and barns seemed to have grown out of the earth like the trees, the stone chimneys clung to the sides of their houses like off-center spines, and the porches rested on stems of stacked rock. Dirt roads curved up and down the hills as if they had emerged gradually over decades from the trampling down of weeds by those taking their daily work routes. Adding to the absence of a boundary between people and nature was the fact that so much of life’s work took place outside, not only the farming but also cooking, washing, mending, braiding hair, building, conversing, resting. Even environmental damage could be beautiful, as in a shot of a badly eroded Negro cemetery.2

  15.2. PERSON COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA, 1939

  But these impressions also created a trap for the unwary documentary photographer. More then other American regions, the South could seduce a photographer into the picturesque. Because of its economic and social “backwardness,” romanticism crept in not only to FSA landscapes but also to photographs of people. Urban photographers could not always resist seeing “simple” lives rich in community and tradition, happily absent the commercialism and tension of modernity. Their romance featured the very “backwardness” that the FSA hoped to remedy. Even Lange, a photographer of people, was moved to record the delicate patterns in the log or board houses, the tobacco barns, the fences, the laundry on the line, the wildflowers. At the same time, a bucolic photograph could disrupt clichés, as with a sharecropper, of a class often assumed to be illiterate, sitting under a tree on his home-built chair reading a newspaper.

  15.3. CHATHAM COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA, 1939

  The FSA respect for southern popular culture was at once a democratic political stance and a sentimentalizing of a “simpler” folk. It had a tinge of colonial Orientalism, the images sometimes reminiscent of National Geographic’s photo spreads on premodern societies. Evans’s pitiless, spare gaze saved him from sentimentality. Lange’s gaze, even in her rare frontal compositions, showed more mercy but avoided sentimentality by its emphasis on individual personality and complexity. The sharecroppers of her photographs are typically contemplative or conversational, and, because they are so often black, convey an antiracist message. Photographing African Americans in the South could endanger them, and this increased the occurrence of suspicion, even hostility toward the photographer. Far from avoiding those glances or suppressing those images, Lange saw in them evidence of pride and autonomy. (See plate 10, for example.)

  It was more difficult to show the violence that held southern society in place. Looking at Lange’s mellifluous southern landscapes and lyrical portraits, one could forget that this was the land of lyn
ching and the “legal lynching,” of the Scottsboro “boys.” Racism was not a holdover from slavery, but a thriving activity, continually reproduced but also adapted to new conditions, just as racism was reproduced and adapted by the industrial agricultural economy of the West.

  Directives from Department of Agriculture superiors, and the southern Democratic politicians whose political support Roosevelt needed, prohibited open critique of racism in the photographs. No blacks and whites in social contact, no references to racial oppression, no images of racial inequality or abuse of blacks were to be shown.3 The photographers themselves killed photographs that could provoke racist reprisal and disguised the identities of interviewees.4 Still, the photographers were shocked by what they saw—Jack Delano sent Stryker “two disgusting postcards bought in a drug store” and told him to put them in a “shame of America” file—and broke the rules when they could. They photographed whites only signs and African Americans giving way to whites on the sidewalk. This transgressive photography met resistance and even physical threats. Arthur Rothstein reported to Stryker that when he asked to get “pictures of miners and steel workers in the Birmingham area . . . it was as though I had asked them to raise their employees’ wages.” When he drove to a mine to photograph without permission, “a foreman . . . took Tom and me into custody . . . shotguns surrounded us . . . someone would have thought we had tried to blow up the place.”5

  In one extraordinary image of a plantation owner and his croppers at a country store, Lange succeeded in replicating the power structure visually, both on the picture plane and in the three dimensions it represents. (See plate 25.) A plantation owner stands next to the porch of a Mississippi general store, dominating the image from just right of center, with one leg set aggressively on the bumper of his car, looking off to his right.6 Behind him are five black men, probably his share croppers, sitting and standing on the porch, in postures almost exaggeratedly unassuming, withdrawing, small, even frail by contrast with the white man. As the white man makes himself, and is made by Lange, as large as possible, so the black men are shrinking themselves. The photograph lets us see the relations of power and deference on a southern plantation. Some viewers had no trouble understanding this image as subversive. One letter to a newspaper complained that “. . . indicative of the agency’s [FSA’s] vivid pink trend . . . is Miss Lange’s cunningly posed portrait of ‘The Plantation Owner. . . .’ ”7

  In response to such attacks, Stryker’s staff sometimes exercised verbal as well as visual censorship. Once someone excised a phrase from a Lange caption: “Old Negro—the kind the planters like. He hoes, picks cotton, and is full of good humor.”8 On the other hand, the office staff did not interfere with a Lange caption that included a direct quotation: “A tractor pioneer of the Mississippi Delta. In 1927 he had 160 colored tenant families working his land, in 1936 he won thirty Farmall tractors and employs thirty families on day labor basis. He says, ‘Now I can make money. Hours are nothing to us. You can’t industrialize farming. We in Mississippi know how to treat our niggers.’ ”9

  To get around the stricture on challenging racism, FSA photographers emphasized cross-race similarity. This was not only a tactic; it was also the dominant analysis of the South among progressive New Dealers, including Paul Taylor. To the FSA progressives, the South’s main feature was the tenant and sharecropping system, which imprisoned whites and blacks alike. This analysis, accurate but incomplete, was convenient to the Roosevelt administration’s policy not to confront racism, though it still evoked fury among southern planters and their political representatives. Although Lange and Taylor also stressed parallels between white and black farmworkers, and tenancy as the root problem, they were more conscious of the salience of race than others in and around the Department of Agriculture.

  Lange’s images of southern labor are mainly of blacks. Moreover, discontent as usual with simple condemnation, she showed the racial intimacy that constituted the reverse face of the southern racial system. She showed whites and blacks, even tenants and owners, working together in the fields. She photographed children playing and bonding across racial lines, white and black farmworkers relaxing at stores, and, above all, the extraordinary similarities between poor blacks and whites. Her captions told what she could not show, underlining complexities: “The three year old white girl at intervals slapped and switched the little Negro girl about her age and once called her a damn fool; but between these outbursts the children played together peaceably . . .” One black tenant “goes to the white folks church and sits in the front row. She wouldn’t go if she had to sit in the balcony.”10

  When you work a sharecrop

  you supposed to do all the work

  he supposed to supply all the ’terials

  They don’t do what they supposed to do

  IF THE MAJOR MASCULINITY THEME of the drought area was dejection, in the South it was the sweat-drenched labor of tenant farmers and sharecroppers—except here it was women’s theme, as well. Tenancy was a generic term that could include all farmers who worked someone else’s land, excluding wage laborers, and in this sense sharecroppers are a kind of tenant. More commonly, tenant referred to someone who paid cash rent, supplied his own tools, animals, feed, and seed, and kept all his produce for sale or consumption; a sharecropper was supplied by the landlord and turned the crop over to him, receiving, in turn, a share of it. Sharecropping dominated east of the Mississippi.11 In theory, croppers received a “furnish” of seed, food, animal feed, et cetera, from the owner each year and used the owner’s tools and plows. They repaid this debt after their crop sold, theoretically at an average 10 percent interest, but since the advance had been theirs only part of a year, they were effectively paying much higher interest, often up to 44 percent.12 In return for use of the land, they also gave the owner a proportion of the crop—sometimes half, sometimes a third.

  A crucial aspect of the system, at the core of the South’s “backward” character, was that there was no free market in labor. Farmworkers often moved from one landowner to another in search of better terms, but in practice sharecroppers were often indebted to their owner and not free to leave until they had paid off their debt.13 Plantation owners typically ran their own commissaries, or company stores, so sharecroppers had to buy at inflated prices. Forced to put up a future crop as collateral for an advance of supplies, an arrangement known as the crop lien system, a sharecropper could owe even his own part of the crop to the landlord or store owner. Sharecroppers lived on land belonging to their landlord and could be evicted for any or no reason. Their livelihood often depended on fishing, hunting, and gardening on the owner’s land, a “privilege” they would lose if evicted. As if all that were not binding enough, owners were able to dictate changes in tenancy contracts year by year according to what benefited them.14 Landlords further cheated tenants by making only verbal contracts, keeping false commissary accounts, and fixing the scales they used to weigh the crop.

  The system could not have survived democracy, but there was none. In the “solid South” less than half, and often less than a quarter, of white tenants could vote, because of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices designed to disenfranchise; almost no blacks could vote. Large landowners dominated all aspects of local government, including tax collection, criminal justice, education, and transportation.

  Because labor was so cheap, few planters mechanized. In 1930, there were approximately one thousand tractors on all southern plantations, as opposed to eleven thousand in California.15 The productive power of an Iowa farmer was seven to eight times that of a southern farmer.16 “The field tools used by the typical tenant farmer would not seem strange to Moses and Hammurabi,” Taylor’s friend Arthur Raper wrote.17 Lange showed the reliance on animal power—oxen, mules, and the occasional horse pulling wagons containing logs, people, and every conceivable kind of load.18 Neither government nor planters bothered to provide education or medical care to the poor because they did not need an educated or he
althy workforce. Southern farms were becoming “westernized” as sharecroppers were forced to become hourly wage laborers, usually migratory. In 1939, planters hired airplanes to drop recruiting flyers in Florida. Growers recruited workers just as they did in the West, gathering more than they needed or would pay. One operator used the same words as a California grower: “You can’t have too much labor. You just can’t have too much.”19 These workers followed the crops just as those in California did.20 In June 1937, Taylor estimated that between one thousand and fifteen hundred workers, most of them former croppers, were being taken from Memphis down to the Mississippi Delta to chop cotton.21 Lange photographed truckloads of farmworkers ferried to hours or days of work in distant locations, noting that they were not paid for travel time. One of Lange’s subjects explained it, and she transcribed his words as a found poem:

  Soil Consoleration would

  pay you for your corn . . .

  Then they knocked out the corn.

  Rather than go into the Soil

  Consoleration they won’t let

  you plant no corn.

  We needs bread thru the winter

  We want to raise hawgs.

  They want all theyselves.

  They aint begun to fill those houses

  They want day labor, haul em

  from town.

  He’s got some on the place

  but the biggest

  he gets em out of town.

  The FSA considered soil erosion one of the causes of southern poverty and backwardness, and Lange obediently made dozens of photographs of erosion.22 The timber industry in the South was particularly destructive, and she photographed barren, cut-over land. In such photographs she added human consequences in her captions. About the cut-over land, for example, she noted, “The tract extends for thirty-seven miles. A lumber industry owner did no replanting and cut out in 1931 after eighteen years of operations. They employed approximately 3000 men.”23