Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  18.1. SOUTH OF ELOY, PINAL COUNTY, ARIZONA, 1940

  Lange once again seemed finely tuned to her country’s mood, for her 1939–1940 photography expressed the contraction of New Deal hopes and the growing fears of war. Like most liberals, she was horrified by the Nazis and fascism but not eager for war. In June 1939, on a trip to New York, she was shocked to hear “an American ‘storm trooper’ ” haranguing a crowd from a soapbox at Columbus Circle.3 Ominous international events intruded into her field notes, as, for example, in a caption reading “Close-up of door of Prophecy Tabernacle. Photograph made on the day Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg were invaded by the German armies.”4

  In some ways the FSA spirit continued. By now an agriculture expert, Lange made long essays out of some of her “general captions,” on topics such as alkaline or hardpan soil, cultural traditions of the migrants, housing options, and family budgets. One was a twenty-six-page paper with data from BAE research. She also introduced issues the BAE did not ask for, such as prejudice toward migrant farmworkers and race segregation in the camps.5

  As war buildup brought new jobs and the Depression receded, and it became evident that government work was petering out, Lange applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Edward Weston had held one in 1937 and 1938, Walker Evans in 1940 (and Paul Taylor in 1930). Henry Allen Moe, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, who would go on to chair the Museum of Modern Art trustees’ photography committee, had previously connected with Taylor.6 What influence Paul exerted for Dorothea is unknown, but her application, written October 1940, evolved from their joint thinking. “The theme of the project is the relation of man to the earth and man to man, and the forces of stability and change in communities of contrasting types.”7 She would study three communities: a Mormon village in Utah, Amana cooperatives in Iowa, and Hutterites in South Dakota.8 She got the fellowship. Thrilled to have financial support for a project of her own for the first time, she plunged into the work, usually with Paul’s company, during the summer of 1941.

  18.2. SOUTH OF CHANDLER, MARICOPA COUNTY, ARIZONA, 1940

  Working now without government supervision, she promised to send photographs to her subjects.9 Otherwise, her methods remained the same. Her field notes contain data (South Dakota, “a state in which one third of the population has been on relief, in which 75% of the banks have failed, and in which taxes have become delinquent on approx 1/3 of the taxable land”), self-criticism (“very bum careless snapshots in the old town”), and verbatim quotations from her subjects (“We’ve seen the rough”). By September, back in Berkeley developing and printing, she wrote Moe, “. . . feel that I am on my way, ideas fortified.”10

  BUT VERY SOON she had to write Moe to ask for a postponement. Family troubles overwhelmed her, not because she collapsed from worry but because she didn’t. Instead, she became again the fixer, the superwoman on whom the family depended.

  One trouble was already several years old. Just as the boys grew old enough that she no longer needed round-the-clock child care when she was gone, Daniel became, in his own words to me, a “desperate and delinquent” adolescent.11 Starting in 1938, when he was thirteen, he began skipping school and became insolent and defiant. Dorothea was worried enough to consult Maynard, who recommended placing him out again, away from the city, imagining that frontier life and hard work would straighten Daniel out. A sheep rancher and his physician wife in Smith Valley, Nevada, took him, but sent him back after a few months. Paul and Dorothea then tried Black Mountain College, hoping to harness Dan’s interest in poetry and the unconventional, but he only lasted eight months there. In the fall of 1940 Dorothea wrote that “the progress of my work has been completely blocked. I find my own home a slum. . . .”12 This choice of word speaks volumes about her need for domestic order; it likened her family chaos to the deprivation and squalor she had so often photographed, and expressed her sense that Daniel was disordered. He was indeed uncontrollable. He frequently did not come home at night, and he spent several teenage years as an off-and-on street person, keeping warm in libraries, eating out of dumpsters, occasionally dropping by home for food. He was never violent, but he was arrested several times for stealing. Once he stole and hocked his mother’s typewriter, and another time her Rolleiflex.13 There is not much mystery about the target of his rage. He felt that all his parents had deserted: his father to the desert, his stepfather to the university, his mother to her field work or to the darkroom—Dan remembered her disappearing to the studio for twelve-hour stretches, probably an exaggeration but emotionally accurate.

  The whole family saw a psychiatrist who worked for the Oakland Public School District. Paul and Dorothea had great faith in him, but Daniel calls him “a villain.” He pronounced Daniel psychotic and recommended institutionalization, a suggestion Dorothea vetoed. Ultimately Dorothea and Paul applied “tough love” and locked him out of the house. When he appeared, Dorothea would feed him but not allow him to stay. Dan felt close to Rondal Partridge, who was only eight years older, and Rondal offered to take him in, but Dorothea and Paul vetoed this. Then came a preposterous marriage: He met a girl in a dime-a-dance place, was immediately infatuated, and proposed to her on the spot. While his parents slept, he “borrowed” the car and drove to Reno, where they married. Returning, she asked him to let her stop at her “home,” which turned out to be a seedy hotel, and told him to wait in the car. She never came back.

  Dorothea was in agony. Then Paul offered a solution: the army. Dan had been rejected by the draft because of bad eyesight. Paul “pulled strings” with the Berkeley draft board and got him drafted anyway. But this didn’t work either: by the end of the war, Dan was in the stockade at Fort Knox, having been repeatedly AWOL.

  Dan worked his way back to a close relationship with his mother and became a successful writer who collaborated with her on several projects, but he did not get there easily. He carried a great deal of guilt; as late as 1954 he referred to the “whole, ugly truth” about himself, and called himself “in some degree a cripple.”14

  John, three years younger, was relatively composed, enjoying basketball in the park and biking around Berkeley, but he naturally resented the attention his brother’s bad behavior got. He still felt keenly the loss of a father. John described Paul as “distant—no this is too strong, because he was not unapproachable,” but he never felt emotionally involved with his stepfather.15 Dorothea worried that he had little ambition or passion for what he would like to “become,” so she nagged him.

  BEFORE DAN CAME to his senses, another of Dorothea’s dependents fell into delinquency. Her brother Martin was caught embezzling from the California state unemployment compensation agency.

  Baby brother Martin, six years Dorothea’s junior, had often trailed his dynamic big sister and she had often looked after him.16 He followed her to San Francisco just a year after she arrived; he changed his name to Lange soon after she did; he absorbed her politics; he bought her and Paul’s first Berkeley house when they moved to a bigger one. In the 1920s, Dorothea and Maynard provided his home base between jobs and apartments. He had high energy of a sort so different from Dorothea as to make the two of them a stereotypical older/younger sibling dyad: as she was ambitious and disciplined, he was fun-loving and seemingly free of ambition; as she was independent, he was dependent.

  Martin worked first for Pacific Gas and Electric, then as a seaman, then at odd jobs in Yosemite National Park—he was talented and absorbed skills quickly. In 1934 he got a job as a high-line rigger with the Boulder Dam construction project. He developed a romantic and adventurist version of “Wobbly” attraction to masculine, risky jobs and the brave men who did them.17 The teenage Rondal Partridge was infatuated with Martin, and remembers that he could build a boat from scratch. To Dan and John, he was playful “Unca’ Mucky” and his arrival was always cause for celebration. He was a loving uncle, and occasionally visited the boys when they were with foster parents. Dan remembers him as “an Apollo,” absolutely gorgeous, about six one
and slim, and John, even as a man of eighty, resembles him. Once he built a miniature zip line across Dorothea and Paul’s living room with a basket in which the kids could travel back and forth across the room. A “good-time guy,” he drank a lot, threw money around unwisely, attracted many friends and “lots of ladies.”

  In 1941 Martin, then an office manager for the California Division of Unemployment Compensation, was caught in a four-person ring that was arranging unemployment-compensation payments to sixty-nine fictitious employees of dummy corporations.18 His three partners in crime were hardly riffraff: Leonard Sledge was dean of Placer County Junior College; Raymond F. Killian was the principal of Templeton Union High School in San Luis Obispo; Albert Jilk was Killian’s cousin. The police considered Killian the “brains”; he pulled in Martin, whom he had met at Boulder Dam.

  The news of the crime broke on the front pages on September 12, 1941, although Dorothea knew it earlier when Martin telephoned from jail. She was shaken. Her brother was repeating their father’s disgrace, some thirty years later. She knew Martin was weak, yes, but she also knew him as a warm and loving man. At this moment he became another of her children. That night, she recalled, she got drunk and ruined a negative by leaving it with water running all night—the only time she had ever been so careless.

  But the humiliation and anger made her active, not paralyzed, and she devoted herself 100 percent to the case. Someone else might have refused responsibility for an irresponsible brother. Instead, Dorothea became even more invested in controlling and supporting him, and he cooperated—no matter how much she nagged him, he came to her and her alone when he was in need. As late as the 1960s, ill with cancer, she told an interviewer, “Even now I’m not absolutely sure that I’m not going to have to take care of him.”19 She and Paul found the money to pay for his bail and a top lawyer, and he got off easy. While Killian was sentenced to one to five years in San Quentin, Martin Lange got six months at a county road camp and ten years’ probation.20 Dorothea told no one outside her family of Martin’s crime, while Martin spoke of it easily. Within the family, she argued that Martin would never have stolen from the needy, that because he stole only from a state agency he was a criminal but not a bad person. “He’s done some pretty terrible things against himself [emphasis added],” she told an interviewer.21 They were both repeating childhood roles.

  She did not pick up a camera or enter her darkroom for three months.

  FOR THESE FAMILY troubles and the years of punishing work, she paid with her body. Already in 1936, when she was on the road for most of the year, she had reported ulcer symptoms—severe, burning abdominal pain. How long the symptoms had been building, how long she kept them to herself, can no longer be determined. In 1938 she had an emergency appendectomy, but it did nothing to relieve her more chronic symptoms. She had severe and protracted bouts of pain in 1940. Soon after her brother’s arrest, she developed the first symptoms of an esophageal constriction that would hound her for the rest of her life. She did not consult a doctor about these symptoms until 1943, when X rays found no cause for the pain. (She did not get an accurate diagnosis until 1945.) From now on, her work would be continually interrupted by painful illness—until the balance shifted and her ailing would be occasionally interrupted by feeling well.

  In the early 1940s she also experienced the first symptoms of post-polio syndrome, and once again physicians did not understand what was happening to her. The syndrome was unknown then, not recognized as part of a post-polio pattern until the 1970s.22 This second coming of polio produces muscular weakening, fatigue, muscle atrophy, and pain from joint degeneration, but individual experiences vary.23 For Dorothea, fatigue was the most pronounced symptom,24 although she would yet prove herself capable of some marathons of traveling photography.

  Despite illness and crises, in 1940 Dorothea made a new home for the blended family—one she would have for the rest of her life. She had never had a long-term nest. Even in Hoboken she had lived in three different locations. Then marriage to a man with wanderlust, followed by her own itinerant work, left her longing for stability and order. Virginia Street was too small. So they bought a new house, bigger and with extraordinary grounds.25 Decorating it cost much of her energy but gave pleasure in return. As her son-in-law Donald Fanger put it, one of Paul’s gifts to her was this chance to be architect of family and home.26 The house at 1163 Euclid Avenue in Berkeley is an eccentric redwood occupying an unusual lot on a steep hill, the backyard flowing into semiwooded Codornices Creek. As if in personal thanks to Lange, the WPA had built a rose garden with a terraced amphitheater and 220-foot-long redwood pergola directly across Euclid Avenue.

  The house was designed in 1910 in the Maybeck style.27 The floor plan was rambling and asymmetrical. Dorothea removed carved moldings from the fireplace to simplify the lines of the main room. She displayed only a few of her growing collection of Arts and Crafts objects at a time, so as not to violate her simplicity principle, but she frequently rearranged furniture and objects, so the house continually revealed new articulations of its spaces. Most of what she collected was used for cooking and eating, and if they were not regularly used, she would give them away. For every meal the dining table held a centerpiece of candles or pottery or flowers—sometimes a blossoming branch or wild grass that Rondal brought. As her assistant Christina Page Gardner recalled, “The house always had cleanliness and Shaker-like orderliness . . . the furniture moved from room to room. . . . It had the same mysterious quality of the wall sconces which puffed into flame spontaneously and magically in ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ Dorothea had the same qualities. Magical is the only word.”28 Her son-in-law Donald Fanger found the house filled with tranquillity.

  For Dorothea, the setting was as beloved as the house itself. From the kitchen, where Dorothea spent many hours, a winding path took you down past a picnic table and benches to the creek.29 She created a thick but informal garden, and over the years the spaces, shapes, and colors created by plants were elaborated by beautifully placed driftwood and rocks (Paul was frequently hefting her finds into and out of the car). She had a deck built off their bedroom, overlooking the back garden, and from this vantage point, she developed an intense emotional relationship with a live oak—she photographed it repeatedly over the next decades. In the right light, the tree could seem to enter the bedroom, which contained only a bed and a single chest of drawers. From John’s bedroom at the top of the house, he could see the Golden Gate Bridge.30

  When they moved in, she created a small workroom for herself with a table along one side and the flat drawers she needed built in. Above it a long corkboard held the photographs, newspaper clippings, and other images she wanted to take in at the moment. When Ross Taylor left home, his bedroom became her darkroom. Five years later, in 1945, Paul surprised her with a precious gift—an adjoining lot. This purchase not only guaranteed that their backyard would flow unobstructed into the park but also allowed her to have the “room of one’s own” she had so longed for, her first and only adequate work space. She designed a studio of about fourteen by twenty-two feet, featuring a wall of sloping frosted glass over the worktable and a wall of standard windows along the opposite side, with a darkroom at the end. She added a slender couch and some canvas director’s chairs. She could now put two doors and twenty-five yards between herself and the demands of house, Paul, and children.

  19

  Defiant War Photography:

  The Japanese Internment

  After the verdict in Martin Lange’s trial, Dorothea asked to get her Guggenheim reinstated. But the world did not permit. Just as her thoughts were returning to rural cooperative colonies, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States was at war, and the government commissioned her photography once again.

  On the West Coast, a racial hysteria against Japanese Americans was building rapidly. The first calls for massive internment came from long-standing anti-Japanese groups, big growers, and California politicians.1 The mass media, build
ing on a century of racism against East Asians, raised the fever by alleging that a Japanese American fifth column was signaling Japanese ships from the mainland, a charge that the secretary of war considered without merit.2 Lange and Taylor suspected something that has since been confirmed: that Associated Farmers, the organization of big commercial farmowners in California, supported the internment in order to gain cheap purchase of Japanese-owned land.3 Politicians joined the fear mongering, and on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, resulting in the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans.

  To Lange’s surprise and confusion, the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command offered her the job of documenting this internment photographically. She and Taylor never thought an internment necessary or justified. Taylor was already a prominent member of one of the few local groups to resist the internment, the Committee on American Principles and Fair Play, originating at the University of California at Berkeley.4 Lange felt that a photographic record could be valuable, might possibly even make the process more humane. So she asked for a second postponement of her Guggenheim Fellowship—not knowing that she would be unable to take it up again for ten years—and took the job. The more than eight hundred photographs she produced were so unmistakably critical that the army impounded them for the duration of the war and quietly placed them in the National Archives thereafter. “Impounded” was written on some of the prints in the archives, but luckily not on the negatives. Few of them were known to the public until 2006.5