Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  This backwardness once led experts to conclude that southern agriculture operated not only in a preindustrial but also a precapitalist system. This was not the case. These plantations had been tied in to the world economy since their establishment in the seventeenth century and continued those ties in the twentieth, as suppliers of international trade and borrowers from global lending institutions. In 1934, a third of southern cotton plantations were owned by banks and insurance companies; in the cotton belt, absentee ownership was at 60 to 70 percent.24 Southern “backwardness” was created by modern capitalism.

  Lange became aware of this contradiction—that the rural South could be part of a global economy even as its workers knew only their local community—through her conversations with subjects. She was shocked to find that a Gordonton, North Carolina, woman had never heard of California25 and that a “colored plowboy” on a Texas cotton plantation had never heard of Joe Louis.26 This was changing, Lange observed as she listened to the aspirations of her interviewees. The woman who did not know about California had heard of Amelia Earhart and wished she could travel. “I’ve never been nowhere except to Durham and Danville. All I’ve seen is corn and tobacco—and a houseful of children.” An old black sharecropper thought her sixty-nine-year-old husband deserved a pension and would have liked to let their land “rest” every other year.27 A black father working in the sweet potato fields with his thirteen-year-old daughter wanted to send her to high school.28 A mother, proud that her children were doing well in school, wanted to send them to college.29

  The FSA did help some sharecroppers, predominantly white ones. Arthur Raper found that an FSA program in Greene County, North Carolina, produced much-improved nutrition, increased home production of canned fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, bread, and meat; it built twenty-six new school buildings (segregated) and organized several 4H-type clubs (segregated), a county library system, a bookmobile, a motion-picture projector, and a hot-lunch program—even a small cooperative, HMO-like medical-care program.30 Results like these made Dorothea and Paul comfortable creating propaganda for the FSA when asked.

  But at the same time, they documented FSA corruption, which was particularly widespread in the South. One group of displaced sharecroppers were, to Lange’s and Taylor’s disgust, refugees from a nearby FSA resettlement community, Dixie Plantation, where local Department of Agriculture official Yates was cheating them. “Never had a settlement for last year’s crop—no statement—no receipt, no gin tickets,” a sharecropper told Lange; living on credit at the store, they could not even find out what they were being charged for their purchases. About Yates, they reported, “Bad as on a plantation.” “He owns a store in Shelby, Bolivar Grocery and Supply. He’s a planter hisself.” He told them the federal government required them to turn in all their animals to him. Another Agriculture agent, Stirewalt, had forged their names on government checks and kept the money.31

  LANGE DISPLAYED A more ambivalent attitude toward another part of the South’s “backwardness,” its local general stores/gas stations, usually conjoined in the same structure. She photographed them nearly everywhere she went because they were natural social centers, and the images are picturesque: dilapidated board structures with porches, on which men—rarely women, who, as usual, were busier—sit on boxes to relax, smoke, and visit. On the facades are metal commercial signs advertising Coca-Cola, Pop Kola, Orange Crush, Armour Fertilizer, Texaco, Chesterfield, Old Gold, Raleigh, and Camel cigarettes, and snuff; there are also hand-lettered signs, such as these:

  LIBITY.

  CASH GROC.

  M. POPE.

  Crates of empty green glass Coca-Cola bottles are stacked outside.32

  She very rarely shot inside homes, not only because of her dislike for flashbulbs but also because she did not want to embarrass or endanger her subjects by asking to come in. Once, she listened to an entire sermon from outside the window of a black church, reluctant to intrude.33 Besides, her subjects usually spent their days outside, even if they were not in the fields. So her photographs could show men sawing, hammering, and stretching gunnysacks to make the bins for transporting tobacco. The women and children are seen churning, sewing, hairdressing, pumping water, cooking, feeding and watering animals, gathering eggs, killing chickens, and nursing babies. Kids are playing in the dirt. The photographs are full of dense activity.

  Hesitant as always to make anyone look bad, Lange photographed some run-down homes, but most appear neat. One historian claimed that her photographs show that blacks are neater than poor whites, and Lange thought the black women did more decorating and flower gardening, but in general the sharecroppers’ tiny houses all look tidy.34 Clean laundry hangs on the line. Nearby wildflowers and tubs of flowers on the porches bloom profusely. Very occasionally, there is a vegetable garden. Household vessels and tools rest in precise patterns on outside shelves or hang from nails. Describing one of her photographs years later, she pointed out “the dignified, almost queenly gesture of a cotton tenant farmer’s wife. . . . It’s the quality of the gesture.”35 Did she avoid the wretched? She could not or did not show what they ate: corn, sweet potatoes, fatback; nor could her photographs show pellagra, hookworms, or anemia.

  She used housing to depict both inequality and beauty. The croppers usually lived in dogtrot houses, with an open passage from front to back through the center of the house, one room on either side, although many had only one-room cabins. Lange’s lens lingered over the grain on the unpainted boards, the bits of bark clinging to the rough-hewn four-by-fours, the carved joints, the flow between indoors and outdoors, as well as the impromptu construction, the houses resting precariously on rocks to provide airspace under the floor. A painted house, a two-story house, or one with sanded boards marked a rich person.36 Some planters still lived in the old mansions, and Lange recorded the pretentiousness of their columns, grand entryways, and second-floor verandas. Most old plantation houses were decrepit and unoccupied, or occupied by tenants. Houses, like highways, are dense with symbolism in Lange’s photographs: a white woman tenant sitting on the collapsing front steps of a former “big house” surrounded by eroding fields;37 a black teenage woman sitting on her porch, staring disconsolately out at the photographer through the bars made by beautifully trained butter-bean vines secured to the porch roof. (See figure 15.1.)

  The most visible sign of economic transformation in her photographs is the automobile.38 Unlike their significance in the plains and California, however, where they were a means of travel to find work, for southern sharecroppers cars meant escape, literally. The deference black pedestrians had to offer whites on the sidewalk did not extend to the road, a further attraction of cars for African Americans. But many cars went unused, for lack of money to buy gas or license tags. One black woman sharecropper, clearly the household’s financial manager, told Lange, “I always say rations and clothes come before riding. . . .”39

  ON HER FOUR southern trips, during the summers of 1936 to 1939, Lange focused on three major agricultural products—cotton, tobacco, and turpentine. She documented the cycle of production for each crop as best she could, given her schedule.40 On her last trip, she executed an unusually fruitful commission, working in collaboration with social scientists at the University of North Carolina, which yielded a photo-textual study of tobacco production. An extraordinary group of social researchers had gravitated to the University of North Carolina, drawn together by distinguished sociologist Howard Odum and his Institute for Research in Social Science. Established in 1924 with Rockefeller Foundation money, it was dedicated to studying southern society, with a particular, though quiet, emphasis on race. The energetic Odum started the Journal of Social Forces, which was to become influential in the field, and made the UNC sociology department and the UNC Press nationally eminent, particularly as a hub of interracial and antiracist scholarship.41 Editor William Couch began including FSA photographs in the press’s books. Odum’s colleague Arthur Raper knew Taylor’s work and showed Pau
l and Dorothea around Greene County in 1937.42

  15.4. PERSON COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA, 1939

  15.5. LANGE INTERVIEWING, GREENE COUNTY, GEORGIA, 1939

  The Odum group included Margaret Jarman Hagood, a woman of considerable achievement, who became a nationally known statistician and birth-control advocate.43 When Lange showed up, Hagood was just finishing a study of white sharecropper mothers, Mothers of the South, which produced some surprising findings. Eighty-eight percent of the women, for example, preferred field work to housework—so much for “protecting” women by trying to keep them in their homes. Yet even when they worked in the fields alongside men, as at harvest time, it never occurred to them to ask that men share in the housework. They had little or no expectation of being able to “improve themselves,” but they agonized when their poverty deprived their children. Like Lange’s, Hagood’s portraits defied the stereotypes of “tobacco road” degenerates. But Hagood interviewed only white women. Surrounded as she was by the Odum network’s racial liberals, she may have had charitable feelings toward blacks, but she was unwilling to include them as “mothers of the South.”

  Hagood requested some FSA photographs for her book, and Stryker sent her both Lange and Marion Post Wolcott. Hagood was a strong partner for Lange, not only because she offered better access to subjects but also because her methodology resembled Taylor’s, but with a feminist slant, even offering birth-control information.44

  Tobacco was the main crop in the region. Because of the nature of the plant, and because of North Carolina’s history and geography, there were more small farms and fewer large plantations here than in the deep South, or the cotton South. Lange was photographing and interviewing workers who knew and controlled every aspect of tobacco production. Her respect for their labor shows in the detailed “general captions” she wrote. Lange was not there for the planting, so we first see the tobacco in June, when it was about two feet high. Lange shot close-ups of tobacco plants to contrast healthy plants to those with wilt, for which there was no remedy at this time. The worms were particularly bad this year. Photographs show the croppers picking them off, pointing out that they sometimes lie on the underside of top leaves, or hide deep in the center of the plant. A father and his toddler daughter move through the rows together, he topping and suckering and she worming; she appears proud when she finds two worms. Children participate in all the farmwork—in the fields, barns, house, and yard, tending chickens and gathering eggs, cultivating vegetables, and working in every aspect of the tobacco culture. The boys particularly took pride in their skills, and sometimes bragged about how good they were.45

  15.6. PICKING OFF WORMS, PERSON COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA, 1939

  Meanwhile, farmworkers were also building and repairing tobacco barns, which required frequent upkeep. The average life of a barn was fifteen to twenty years, because the fires burned out the bricks in the flues. Most were built of logs, but an especially prosperous grower might have had one built of planks. Workers also built and repaired tobacco slides or sleds. These containers, about five feet by two feet, were made of burlap hung from a wooden frame. Their bottoms are like sleds, with planks placed on end beneath each container to skid along the muddy paths from fields to barns. Occasionally the sharecroppers built a giant wooden dolly to move several sleds at once. Lange saw them topping tobacco—breaking off the tops of plants before they blossom except for a few that are saved for seed. One elderly man bragged that he could do two rows, swinging from right to left, as fast as he could walk, even as he accurately topped the plants to ten, twelve, or fourteen leaves—whichever he chose.46 At first ripeness, priming started. Because the bottom leaves ripened first, this was stoop labor and exhausting as well as skilled. The leaves were loaded into the sleds, which were pulled and pushed by men or by mules, or both. Women and children took over next, carefully bunching the leaves, tying their stems together, then stringing them upside down on sticks to be hung in the barns for curing.

  Firing and curing of the tobacco came next, a delicate process. Because the wrong temperatures or timing could spoil a crop, this operation had to be monitored twenty-four hours a day, and there was often a “bed shed” for the use of the man who tended the fires at night.

  There is a special feeling of care and attentiveness in these photographs, as if Lange were trying to reproduce the care with which farmworkers handled the crop on which their living depended. The barns are treated particularly lovingly, as if, having now understood the logic of their construction and their function as a part of the production process, she cared for them more than for less productive buildings. The materialism of her photographs and captions speaks of her respect for sharecroppers’ expertise and experience and her refusal to treat manual labor as unskilled.

  OUT OF TENANTS’ and sharecroppers’ frustration grew an important labor and civil rights movement, a movement that, despite its ultimate failure, left a vital legacy. Arkansas sharecroppers, aided by a few outside organizers, including a few Communists and, unofficially, some FSA people, organized the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union.47 Eighteen sharecropper organizers first met in July 1934 and planned a secret association, a vigilante group of sharecroppers “punishing dishonest landlords and oppressive managers and riding bosses” with nighttime attacks.48 Accustomed to violent reprisals, their subsequent decision to go public required extraordinary courage. Supported by two local small businessmen, trusted white socialists, they formed a union, aiming to better their conditions through collective bargaining with planters. Their meetings often included prayer, hymns, and oaths of loyalty. They took place outside or in friendly homes, not only to avoid violence but also because planters padlocked the doors of churches and schools to keep them out, and the locations were revealed only to trusted members. As in much of the civil rights movement two decades later, members were required to leave their shotguns at home despite the likelihood of armed attacks.

  Risking an integrated union so as to head off the inevitable divide and conquer strategy of the local power structure, they asked that tenants share in AAA payment and that evictions be prohibited; the Department of Agriculture retaliated in support of the planters, on the grounds that the union was a Communist conspiracy duping ignorant sharecroppers. (Roosevelt’s legislative clout depended particularly on Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas, Democratic majority leader.) Despite violence and eviction threats from landlords, sheriffs and local racists, the STFU grew. After a few months, it claimed 1,400 members, and by early 1935, 4,500 to 5,000. Locals arose in Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Mississippi, the membership totaling 20,000 to 25,000 at peak.

  Lange was one of several FSA people who got access to the STFU. She was escorted to meetings by a trusted member after giving assurances that she would photograph no individuals without their permission. So she photographed only sparingly, and rarely showed interracial groups. Only white leaders allowed her to make their portraits—president J.R. Butler and secretary H. L. Mitchell—although she photographed several unnamed black activists. STFU’s nighttime meetings once led her to try to use a flashbulb, which she immediately regretted. Trying to follow directions on a very dark night, she got lost and asked for help from a man who “started to talk,” she recalled, “and tell us his life story and I got out a camera with a flash gun. . . . I don’t think he’d ever seen a camera, let alone this thing that goes off in his face . . . he was so frightened that he just didn’t move, I fired off . . . five negatives, one after another, he was just paralyzed. [Voice drops] I’ve often thought afterward, how really, what a terrible thing I did. . . . Do look at that picture . . . etched out of the black, what an awful thing it was to do that. . . .”49

  One unanticipated result of the violent repression of the STFU was a cooperative farm, which particularly attracted Taylor, an ardent supporter of farm co-ops. A grower evicted twenty-one families without notice and left them camped on the roadside. Local officials refused them relief. To help, the STFU decided to build a cooperative
farm, calling in aid from Memphis white allies who led them to Sherwood Eddy, an upper-class New England missionary and religious writer. When Eddy arrived in Arkansas to investigate, he was arrested by local deputy sheriffs and held without charge, warned not to help “these damn niggers who won’t work.”50 But he had powerful friends: the U.S. attorney general, Homer Cummings, got him released, and then Reinhold Niebuhr helped him raise the money to buy two thousand acres at Hillhouse in Bolivar County, Mississippi, just across the river—the croppers considered Arkansas just too dangerous.51 Here, the STFU established the Delta Cooperative Farm in March 1936, with twenty-four families, of which thirteen were black.

  When Lange and Taylor first drove up to the co-op in their dusty Ford station wagon in early July 1936, they were a sight. Even here in deep Mississippi, Dorothea dressed eccentrically, and some other visitors to the cooperative worried about how she would be received. They needn’t have: Her usual technique, moving about unobtrusively, absorbed in her camera preparations, made her subjects comfortable with her presence. Paul’s back was hurting (hardly surprising after so many weeks on the road), and Dorothea wanted him to rest it; she asked for help from members of the co-op, who laid boards across sawhorses, on which he stretched out—a perfect icebreaker.52

  Her photographs and Taylor’s notes document an extraordinary social experiment, one so inspiring that they returned in 1937 and 1938. The cooperators were particularly proud of their houses, and Lange photographed them dutifully. Built of weatherproof boards instead of logs, they featured screened windows and porches, curtains in the windows, and a water pump by each. The cooperators also built a store and a community center that housed a library, a clinic, and school and meeting rooms. They recruited a nurse and a doctor to provide medical care to people who had never had any. They developed adult-education programs and enlisted American Friends Service Committee volunteers to work at construction, child care, and chopping cotton, prefiguring the thousands of northerners who came to help in the civil rights movement two decades later. To head off violent attacks, the members defied southern white racial etiquette only gingerly: black and white members lived on opposite sides of a road, and children attended segregated schools. Since the white children got eight months of schooling in classes half the size of those the black children attended for only four months, the group set up a supplementary education program for the black children. Co-op meetings and community facilities—the store, clinic, church, and credit union—were integrated. Visitors were housed in the same place whatever their race, as when researchers Arthur Raper, white, and Charles S. Johnson, black, appeared together. The members got around the ban on calling African Americans Mr. or Mrs. by addressing everyone by his or her first name. At the end of the first year, each family had earned $328, plus $122 in deferred credits for their labor in preparing the land and constructing houses—more than they had ever earned before and more than twice the current average tenant income.53