Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Lange’s sensitivity to dejected men reemerged. Her pictures testify to the idleness, humiliation, and domination that corroded masculine self-esteem. Almost every aspect of the experience undercut customary manly identity: Men were no longer breadwinners; they could no longer be strivers to better their families. Men lost authority; the whole interned population, men, women, and children, were leveled in their subordination to the army. Everyone had to ask permission to do almost anything; no one had to ask a father’s or husband’s permission anymore. Men were as domestic as their wives and mothers; there was no way to go into the outside world. Although many of the men sought energetically to reproduce their work lives in the camps, in agriculture, art, carpentry, or medicine, they could extract only limited benefits from their labor. Other men, whether as a result of temperament or of their skill set, responded with idleness, low energy, and depression.

  To some extent the camps created a zero-sum enterprise—while men lost power, women and children gained in autonomy. Women slid into organized camp activities as much, if not more than, men. Living in barracks, they saw as much of neighbors as of their husbands, and spent more time with other women. In their degree of autonomy, they often experienced a leveling upward, in that the most independent women set the norm for womanly behavior. This was by no means an entirely happy or appreciated development, however. As in the Depression, when men’s unemployment was so severe, women were by no means always pleased to gain in autonomy and power at the expense of husbands. Meanwhile, the camps deprived women of sources of identity and pride. They no longer cooked, as there were no family meals. They could not easily individuate their living spaces or make them into places of peace, quiet, and beauty. And above all, their authority as mothers diminished.

  Manzanar, the last “chapter,” was the only long-term internment camp Lange was able to visit, because others were not yet open.34 Located just west of Death Valley and just east of the Sierra Nevada, the place suffered extremes of weather: The snow-covered mountains looking down from the west did nothing to cool the one-hundred-plus-degree summer heat, and there were neither trees nor hills to break the fierce winds, whether icy or hot. These barracks could not keep out the weather, either, constructed as they were of quarter-inch boards covered with tar paper.

  In this desert, Lange showed, internees worked to create civilization, their ingenuity recalling that of migrant farmworkers. They decorated their “apartments” with curtains, rugs, pictures, and flowers. They built room dividers, shelves, closets, chairs, benches, and tables out of scrap lumber. They cleared the brush, then planted and irrigated both vegetables and flowers. They built libraries (although nothing written in Japanese was permitted), produced camp newspapers (whose contents were censored by the army), and put on talent shows. They created rock gardens and set up art classes in both Western and Japanese styles. They organized sports and folk dancing.

  The project was not entirely thankless, for Lange received gratitude of a personal nature. A number of Japanese Americans grasped what she was doing and thanked her after their release. Dorothea and Paul went to visit one family in Utah, and Paul said it “was like old home week. . . . When I went [there] with her, they received us like—well, like guests.” Every Christmas, they received cards from former internees. After Dorothea’s death, the Japanese American Citizens League gave Paul Taylor a honorary plaque, but he thought, “That was for Dorothea, probably more than for me. . . .”35

  IMPOUNDING THESE PHOTOGRAPHS deprived Americans of a more accurate and complex view of World War II and of our national strengths and weaknesses. Visual images always help construct political attitudes. World War II became a proving ground for photojournalists, and their heroic and celebratory photographs shaped the national memory of this “good war.” Movies in the heroic mode sometimes shifted this memory toward the sentimental. Whether raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima, holding a wounded GI buddy, or flying bombing runs from England, Americans were standing up against tyranny, saving the rest of the world from it.

  Defining Japanese Americans as an enemy was itself partly a visual process. The Japanese face was imprinted on the public through posters, grafitti, atrocity films, cartoons, and caricatures. The epicanthic eye fold and prominent teeth in particular became visual tropes for a despised, allegedly untrustworthy, and now enemy “race.” The racist images then circulating were particularly authoritative to a public only just beginning to be saturated with photographic images. Entering a stream of anti-Japanese racism on the West Coast, photography both intensified and reshaped racial categories, molding “Japanese” as a “visual field” signifying disloyalty and treachery.36

  Of course it is a myth that race is readily visible. Store owners put up signs identifying themselves as Chinese or Filipino because they understood the uncertainty of physiological categories, especially to outsiders’ eyes. Life published two marked-up head shots to teach “Americans” how to tell the Japanese from the Chinese. Rounding up the Japanese Americans depended on the cooperation of the census bureau in providing the army with supposedly confidential population numbers and the outlines of Japanese neighborhoods.37 Still, getting Japanese Americans to report and register without the army having to apprehend them in their homes relied in part on their understanding that they could not hide, that they could be identified visually and turned in by the “American citizens”—that is, the “white” citizens. Thus the internment strengthened the racial content of American nationalism. Lange was the first of several major photographers who tried to challenge this with countervailing images, but no other photographer so explicitly damned the internment policy. Her photographs rank with the best war photography.

  LANGE DID NOT see these photographs for over twenty years. In 1964, just one year before she died, already very ill, she went to the National Archives to look at them. She had braced herself with low expectations because she had compromised her photographic standards in order to record everything she could. For once, she relaxed some of her tendency to self-criticism regarding the photographs: “I had never had a comfortable feeling about that war relocation job . . . the difficulties of doing it were immense . . . but really it’s surprising what I did. . . . Gosh I’d worked . . . and some of them are beautiful, some of them are really compelling pictures, not a very great many, but the factual ones are also there. . . . In 1967 it will be 25 years since that thing happened, and I think it would be time to make a television documentary to say, this is what we did [emphasizing each word] how did it happen, how could we?”38

  20

  Unruly War Photography:

  The Office of War Information and Defense Workers

  Apparently, news of the War Department’s displeasure with Lange’s work on the internment did not reach other agencies, because the Office of War Information hired her for six projects between 1942 and 1945.1 Despite the bitterness left by her War Relocation Authority experience, the state of the war made it impossible for her to refuse: The Nazis were on their way to Stalingrad, Rommel had captured the strategic port of Tobruk in Libya, Italian torpedoes were destroying British submarines in the Mediterranean, the Japanese had captured Burma and were headed for India, and, unknown to the Western press, the Nazis had begun extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz.

  In this period of wartime propaganda, movies were of highest priority, now that eighty million Americans a week saw films, but OWI also required still photographs for its glossy magazine, Victory, published in six languages for distribution abroad.2 Lange and Ansel Adams supplied many of its pictures. Both supported the war effort fervently, but once again Lange clashed with her government employer. Although the OWI swallowed up the FSA photography project, the work did not feel like a continuation to Lange. Her convictions aligned her with a progressive faction in OWI that wanted to promote a democratic ideology, seeking to continue and even advance the New Deal. The dominant OWI group, however, would countenance nothing that suggested social division in the United States and sough
t to limit OWI messages to those of national unity and determination. FDR himself announced that Dr. New Deal was dead and Dr. Win the War had taken over. When OWI progressives published the small photo-textual pamphlet Negroes and the War, at a time when the armed forces were still segregated, it came under heavy assault, despite offering mainly handsome images of African American successes and counseling patience.3 At the same time, congressional Republicans charged that the OWI was just another Roosevelt self-promotion vehicle.4

  Lange found OWI products offensively simplistic. Many American allies, even those entirely dependent on U.S. aid, agreed. A photographic exhibit sent to England, with text by Carl Sandburg as captions, was roundly panned by British critics: “. . . the rather grandiose Americanese of Sandburg’s text met with considerable criticism . . . the nativist streak, amounting almost to jingoism, when seen by overseas eyes, would not have promoted better transatlantic understanding. . . .” The OWI’s glamorous shots of women war workers with perfectly coifed hair and makeup, intended to assuage fears that they were losing their femininity, did not go over well where women were sleeping in bomb shelters.5 The OWI’s propaganda operation even used and defanged Lange’s FSA work. In one case, a 1939 photograph of a typical run-down North Carolina country store/filling station with a group of young men goofing off on the porch was transformed into a World War II poster by cropping and superimposing a message: “This is America . . . Where a fellow can start on the home team and wind up in the big league. Where there is always room at the top for the fellow who has it on the ball This is your America! . . . Keep it Free!”

  Lange had made five photographs of the scene, showing about a dozen figures, several in baseball uniforms, preparing to play with a local league; mugging for the camera, they began picking up and swinging one guy by his arms and legs. In the original context, these images signaled the economic backwardness, inactivity, and racism of the rural South. At the far end of the porch, distinctly removed from the others, was a black man who did not participate in the roughhousing, but sat tight with a tense smile. In the poster, both sides of the image and were cropped and it showed only young white men standing in manly, confident but relaxed postures, ready to play the quintessentially American game.6

  The OWI built a campaign around unity in diversity—“Americans All, Immigrants All” was the slogan—aimed at countering Axis propaganda that the U.S. treated minority groups no better than its opponents. With her usual enthusiasm and assertiveness, Lange sent suggestions to her supervisor, Jess Gorkin. Trying to compromise, she would not deny American inequalities or exclude people of color, but proposed a story about Negroes who had escaped or surmounted some of the cruder forms of discrimination. Other suggestions included the Chinese working in the shipyards, and the crops being grown for lend-lease—with “Mexicans, Filipinos, Indians, Negroes, boys and girls . . . war prisoners and Jamaicans . . . participating in the harvest to feed the world.”7 None of these requests was approved. The only diversity Lange was allowed to show was white ethnics.8 This concept of diversity fit an expansion of the category “American” developing at this time, seen in many World War II movies, to include Jews, various categories of Slavs, even Greeks, as American and white. Their inclusion only confirmed the exclusion of nonwhites. She did manage some photography of the Mexicans on the OWI tab. The federal Bracero program recruited 125,000 Mexican workers into the United States every year to work for the war effort, placing them in jobs in agriculture and on the railroads. We see these young men arriving, hopeful at their first glimpse of the USA. But to the best of my knowledge, the OWI never used these.9

  20.1. BRACEROS, 1942

  Lange fumed at restrictions and hassles resembling those of the internment job. She had to get separate credentials from the Western Defense Command, the U.S. Navy, the San Francisco Police Department, and the Port of Embarkation Authority.10 When she wanted to photograph North Beach from the top of Telegraph Hill, she was told there should be no photographing at all from hills, roofs, or windows. And how could she photograph fishermen when no photography was allowed at any time on the waterfront? Before she could send her photographs to Washington, they had to be reviewed and censored by army, navy, Coast Guard, and Port authorities. Her complaints reflect also the chronically subversive potential of photography, and the resultant anxiety that it produces in authorities.

  Overall Lange did six OWI assignments: photographing Italian, Spanish, and Yugoslav Americans, UCB student life, the Volunteer Land Army’s vegetable seed production, and, finally, the opening of the United Nations in San Francisco. The photos reflect her persistent attempts to go beyond her orders. Regarding Spanish Americans, captions explain that they traced their settlement back to a Mexican land grant to Juan Manuel Vaca in 1843 and that Spanish farmworkers, recruited by Hawaiian sugar companies, supported the Spanish Republic against the fascist coup; they “call themselves ‘Fighters for Democracy, not only for Spanish democracy but for democracy anywhere.’ ” But they were also pleased to take over the leaseholds of interned Japanese Americans, she dryly pointed out.11 This, of course, is not what was shown in Victory. There one sees a mother from a family that operated five ranches; the restored seventeenth-century mission church of San Juan Bautista; a pastoral vision of a Basque sheepherder with his herd under snowcapped mountains; and a generic shot of shipyard workers—the last two photographs probably by Ansel Adams.

  The Italian and Yugoslav American work was similarly bland, a tone that may have resulted not only from OWI strictures but also from Lange’s own idealization of family farms and small-town life. The relative weakness of the OWI photographs also raises the question of whether the strength of her FSA pictures derived in any part from the helplessness of the subjects. Poor farmworkers were, to a degree, captive subjects, living exposed lives with little privacy, often deferential toward elites. And some of the revelatory punch of the FSA photographs derived from the tension between the subjects’ economic dishonor and their honorable appearance as captured by Lange’s camera. The OWI subjects suffered no such deprivation. In general, Lange’s best mode in these years was the tragic, not the contented. Yet her photographs of prosperous and optimistic defense workers, made without government supervision, would be stunning.

  Lange’s assignment to photograph the University of California and the student body presented no problems. Her feeling for the Berkeley campus shows in loving photographs of the beautiful bark texture and branch shapes of a eucalyptus tree (brought to California from Australia), of the Italianate campanile nestled against the East Bay hills, and of students making architectural drawings, experimenting in a petroleum lab, playing woodwinds in the band, and relaxing on the union terrace.12 But even here she could not resist going beyond her instructions, adding in a smaller feature on foreign-born students.13

  LANGE’S BEST WAR photography emerged when she was freed from the government payroll. In 1944 she worked with Ansel Adams on a commission from Fortune to cover defense shipbuilding in Richmond, California, and then on her own made a series on the war’s impact on Oakland. By then it looked to be only a matter of time before the Axis was defeated, so her anxiety on that front was diminished. Always seeking complexity, she focused on radical changes the war brought to the California home front, the making of a “new California.”

  Defense workers were arriving by the tens of thousands. In Richmond, a shipbuilding harbor just north of Berkeley, a single Kaiser plant—the biggest shipbuilding facility in the country—built more Victory and Liberty ships than any other U.S. location, and once built a ship in five days. Richmond’s population was 23,000 in 1940; then 90,000 defense workers arrived. Oakland absorbed 82,000 new residents. Military bases proliferated. Twenty-three million tons of war materiel and 1.6 million military personnel shipped out through the Golden Gate.14

  Many farmworkers seized the defense-work opportunities, so Lange was often photographing the same social groups she had portrayed in the 1930s. As she wrote, the migratory
workers now slept under a roof while the Negroes came by the truckload from the cotton fields. The majority of these were “Okies,” but many African Americans and some Mexican, Chinese, and Filipino Americans managed to get hired, and the racial complexion of the Bay Area changed radically. Oakland had previously included 8,000 African Americans, but by 1950 it held 42,000. Richmond, an almost exclusively white town in 1940, had 6,000 at the end of the war.15

  This “second gold rush” gave money to the masses, not just lucky prospectors and merchants. Billions in defense contracts lifted consumer spending, finally ending the Depression’s deflation and unemployment. The boom also created hardships that good wages could not quickly solve. The many women employed—about 25 percent of shipyard workers—were often harassed, rather than supported, by their male coworkers. Housing could not keep up with demand and even well-paid workers lived in overcrowded apartments, garages, cars, or tent encampments that reminded Dorothea of migratory farmworkers’ camps. Workers often took turns in the same beds. Black workers in particular encountered discrimination, especially in finding housing. In schools, sixty children were frequently assigned to one teacher. Lack of child-care provision and the fact that schools operated with shorter hours in three or even four shifts left children often unsupervised. In fact, the whole of Richmond lived on shifts: Three times a day, somewhere between twenty and forty thousand workers crossed one another, some leaving, some coming to work.16