Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  13. Doud, C. B. Baldwin.

  14. The fact that her name was not given in Taylor’s records suggests her status. In an interview thirty years later, Dorothea called her “a wonderful creature,” a disturbingly nonhuman label. Riess, 161–62.

  15. Doud, DL.

  16. Lange was on the State Emergency Relief Administration payroll starting in late 1934. DL to PST, undated but probably November 3, 1934, box 89, folder 54, PST Bancroft. Contrary to Lange’s recollection, in Riess, 159, that she worked for seven weeks, her expense-reimbursement requests show that she was working fairly continuously from February through April and then again in June and July. She was not happy about her salary, and Taylor tried to get her a raise on the grounds of her previous high earnings, but he failed, despite her powerful references—John Collier, commissioner of Indian Affairs; the director of J. Barth & Co. brokerage; the president of Mills College; the wife of a federal judge; Anita Baldwin; and a few others. PST to Harry Drobish, memo dated February 24, 1935, FSA, Bancroft; Civilian National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis (hereafter CNPRC).

  17. Riess, 160–61. This is almost $27 in 2007 dollars.

  18. Travel expense voucher, January 24, 1935 through January 27, 1936, CNPRC.

  19. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 131–32.

  20. Ibid., 133.

  21. Jessie de Los Angeles Cruz and Lillie Gasca-Cuéllar, quoted in Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 73.

  22. Lange supplied the photographs, printed and bound the mimeographed reports, and later found a bindery to apply a spiral binding and cardboard for the covers, which she hand-waxed.

  23. Lange field notes, March/April 1935, OM.

  24. Report number 3, Sacramento, May 22, 1935, OM.

  25. Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold, 127.

  26. A Mexican American woman in the Coachella Valley explained the low-wage versus relief problem personally in Spanish, which was translated for Lange: “We have never been so well off as we are now that we are on relief. We are getting $14 and $15 a week, because now we have a very good president. I don’t vote but all my children do. First we give thanks to God for what we have and then our President.” Lange field note to photograph number 35059.1, OM; reports to Harry Hopkins from his field investigators, November/December 1934, boxes 65 and 66, Harry L. Hopkins Papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, New York; Lorena Hickok, One-Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression, ed. Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley (Champaign: University of Illinois, 1981), 196 ff.

  27. Reporting from Arizona, Eleanor Roosevelt’s friend Lorena Hickok defined two classes of relief recipients: “[1] Whites . . . with white standards of living, for whom relief, as it is now, is anything but adequate. . . . [2] Mexicans—or, East of the Mississippi, Negroes—with low standards of living, to whom relief is adequate and attractive. . . .” Hickok, One-Third of a Nation, 238, 225–26, 231, 238–41, 244. The same division prevailed in the Southeast between whites and blacks and between whites and “white trash.” William R. Brock, Welfare, Democracy, and the New Deal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 223–24.

  28. Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 78, 87; Albert Croutch, “Housing Migratory Agricultural Laborers in CA” (M.A. thesis, University of California/Berkeley, 1948), written under PST’s supervision.

  29. My categorization is based on appearance when it provides clear identification, but also on clothing and the types of shacks built by the workers—e.g., Mexicans built huts of cactus, branches, palm fronds, etc.

  30. Lange field notes, undated.

  31. PST to Paul Kellogg, April 7, 1935, PST Bancroft. The RA/FSA soon began putting out press releases citing Taylor’s findings: RA Division of Information, press release, January 9, 1936, IF-FRS No. 34, copy in vol. 2, misc. material, OM.

  32. Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1968), 221. The size of the Okie migration is often exaggerated, with some reports indicating a figure as high as 1.25 million. Bureau of Agricultural Economics news release, March 16, 1940, in vol. 2, misc. material, OM. Taylor’s lower and more reliable estimate for the thirty-three months starting July 1, 1935, was 205,477. Taylor, “Refugee Labor Migration to California,” Monthly Labor Review, April 1939, table 1.

  33. Doud, DL.

  34. Lange field notes, undated.

  35. Camp-construction supervisor Irving Wood wrote a stinging response—“The right to evict would sooner or later be claimed on the same grounds. . . . If we permitted private growers to literally control the camps, their advantage over labor in the conduct of collective bargaining would be greatly enhanced”—and got Drobish to hold firm: The state would appoint a camp director, and the camp would have to be open to all who would abide by camp rules. George D. Nickel, director, SERA Kern County, to Harry Drobish, March 30, 1935; Taylor handwritten draft; Harry Drobish to George D. Nickel, April 5, 1935, and April 12, 1935, RG 96, box 10, file 028, NARA.

  36. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 138.

  37. Maynard Dixon hand-lettered the captions for the first two reports; later Lange printed or typed them.

  38. MD diary.

  39. TH interview with Van Dyke.

  40. Ibid.

  41. These quotations from Paul Taylor’s letters to Dorothea are from JDC.

  42. This was a Depression-era regulation officially aimed at distributing employment where it was needed most; underlying it was the common view of the time that married women did not have a need for or a right to employment.

  43. He first told Larry Hewes, a former colleague in California’s emergency relief program, then administrative assistant to Tugwell, Hewes first responded that there was no way this could happen. Taylor threatened to resign in order to be with Dorothea. This may have begun as a tactical threat, but it was soon a real possibility in his love-intoxicated mind. He wrote Lange that he would resign rather than have her lose the opportunity that, he knew, would mean so much to her. He strategized about how he might get the Rockefeller Foundation to fund his work so that he could travel with her without being a federal employee.

  44. They assembled a group of her photographs, printed in a fourteen-by-eighteen-inch format and mounted, and presented them in a portfolio to Tugwell. Tugwell wanted to show them to the president, but this did not happen.

  45. Doud, Ben Shahn, April 14, 1964.

  46. Taylor wrote to Lange that Stryker thought “you and Ward [sic] Evans . . . are in a class by yourselves. . . .” PST to DL, undated letter (1935), box 89, folder 54, PST Bancroft. Taylor’s plan was to announce their marriage only after she was on the payroll. She was uneasy with this tactic, but he responded that they should face problems as they arose rather than anticipate them.

  47. Riess/PST, vol. 2, 27.

  48. The FERA would not pay for this. Taylor enlisted Walter Packard of the FSA to ask for funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, but Will Alexander, head of the FSA, prohibited this. Packard to Alexander, September 21, 1935, and Alexander to Packard, September 25, 1935, in box 13, folder 17, PST Bancroft.

  49. Riess/PST, vol. 2, 28.

  50. Walter J. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973), 151–58. Historians disagree about how many RA/FSA camps were ever built. Richard Lowitt says there were ten permanent camps and five mobile camps by 1940; The New Deal and the West, 187. Don Mitchell says twelve permanent and three mobile; The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 182. Anne Loftis says sixteen in California and Arizona; Witness to the Struggle: Imaging the 1930s California Labor Movement (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998), 143. The discrepancy probably results from different decisions about which camps should be inclu
ded.

  51. PST to DL, undated letter (from the Capitol Limited train, summer 1935), JDC.

  52. PST to DL, undated letter, box 89, folder 54, PST Bancroft.

  53. Dorothea told Imogen Cunningham that Maynard had helped her come to the decision. MM interview with IC, quoted in Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 126. Taylor said that there was total cooperation. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 149. Maynard, on the other hand, wrote, “Beginning of break-up of family. Leave for Nevada; residence in Carson; trip to Las Vegas, visit Martin Lange; go to . . . Death Valley, Rhyolite, Beatty; cloudburst, great beauty of color; landscape sketches. . . . Sell paintings in Reno. Tragic interlude: divorce. Return to S.F.: begin bachelor life in studio.” MD diary.

  54. Dorothea Lange et al., The Thunderbird Remembered: Maynard Dixon, The Man and the Artist (Los Angeles: Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 1994), 63.

  55. TH interview with Van Dyke.

  56. Ansel Adams recalled that Imogen Cunningham was in his San Francisco studio when Dorothea came in and announced grimly, “ ‘I’m leaving Maynard.’ Imogen burst into tears. Harrowing half hour!” TH interview with AA, September 15, 1976, OM.

  57. Ironically, Cunningham had also objected fifteen years earlier when Dorothea announced that she was marrying Maynard, saying he was too old for Dorothea.

  58. TH interview with Sturtevant.

  59. “At first I wept bitterly . . . but then realized the rightness of it, for me as well as for him. I had been told when I awoke at the hospital that during my long sleep I had taken off both my wedding and engagement rings and put them down saying, ‘for Dorothea.’ My inner self wanted to give over the marriage to her. For me it had not been fulfilling.” She later felt cheated by their financial settlement, getting what she described as a “meagre sum for my own ‘rehabilitation’ . . . and a minimal monthly allowance for each child.” This allegation is mysterious, because Paul kept the children most of the time after the divorce. Katharine also said Paul had threatened that no judge would give her more because of her sins. “Yet I learned later that . . . I would have had half the estate since there was ‘immorality’ on both sides.” “Intimate Journey: the Autobiography of Katharine Whiteside Taylor,” typescript, in the author’s possession.

  60. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 149.

  61. HM interview with Fangers, April 16, 1999.

  62. The eldest, thirteen-year-old Kathy, was sent to her grandmother Rose and great-aunt Ethel, but they soon felt they could not manage, so she was moved first to the home of her Aunt Edna, Paul’s sister-in-law, and then, when that did not work out, either, to that of a stranger, Mrs. Robinson. Ross went to the Gay family, who ran a summer camp and had participated in the day-care center the Taylor children attended. Margot was also moved twice, staying with two different families.

  10. Blending a Family

  1. PST to DL, undated (1935), JDC.

  2. Author’s interviews with John Dixon, February 2003.

  3. PST to Paul Kellogg, March 23, 1936, PST Bancroft.

  4. Handwritten note by DL, November 14, 1951, OM.

  5. The house is important enough to be the feature of an article by John Ribovich, “Artist’s Retreat: Maybeck and Magic in the Berkeley Hills,” American Bungalow 56 (Winter 2007): 32–43.

  6. “Intimate Journey: the Autobiography of Katharine Whiteside Taylor,” typescript, author’s possession.

  7. Honored as the founder of progressive nursery school principles, Katharine was the author of three books on raising adolescents, including one for the Commission on Human Relations. In 1996, seven years after her death, she was inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame. The citation accompanying this honor credits her for, among other things, organizing California’s first cooperative preschool, developing family-life and parent-education programs in Baltimore, Denver, Seattle, and California, and publishing in 1954 a guide for parents in co-op preschools, a book is still in use. St. Lawrence College established an award in her name for a student of early-childhood education. She died in 1989.

  8. Margot recalled that she went to 21 schools in 21 years. HM interview with Margot Fanger, April 16, 1999.

  9. “Intimate Journey”; Riess/PST, vol. 1, 148–52.

  10. Riess, 147.

  11. Information about Taylor/Lange family relationships and feelings, unless otherwise cited, comes from the author’s interviews with Andrew Dixon, Daniel Dixon, Gregor Dixon, Helen Dixon, John Dixon, Donald Fanger, Becky Jenkins, Rondal Partridge, Lisa Dixon Perrin, Dyanna Taylor, and Onnie Taylor. Margot and Ross Taylor died before I began this research, but I have the transcripts of interviews by others and I was able to speak with their spouses. Katharine Taylor Loesch lives in Chicago, and I interviewed her by phone.

  12. Dorothea Lange et al. The Thunderbird Remembered: Maynard Dixon, The Man and the Artist (Los Angeles: Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 1994), 75.

  13. Several of John’s 1935 letters to his parents survive. Reading them with the knowledge of his situation makes them poignant, though if one did not know the context, they might seem like sweet and ordinary letters from a child away from his parents, perhaps at camp.

  Dear Father (or Dad)

  I am feeling good. I have a chart. I have 4 stars on my chart. I jumped 62 inches. I jumped and also I jumped 63 inches and I draw trees and leaves. I will see you next week, now I am having fun. . . . I sleep on the couch. Jimmy is a bad boy. Robert is a good boy. . . . Will you come over for me to get me on the train to go. JDC.

  14. John Dixon, “Recapturing the Spirit,” in Maynard Dixon, Images of the Native American (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1981), 73.

  15. HM interview with Mary Spivey, May 13, 1999.

  16. Dan Dixon, introduction to Dorothea Lange: Eloquent Witness (Chicago: Edwynn Houk Gallery, n.d.).

  17. HM interview with Spivey.

  18. KQED, 19.

  19. Riess/PST, vol. 2, 69–70. He had longed for these rituals, even if he had been unaware. Before their marriage, he had written Dorothea, “Wish I might have spent Saturday afternoon and evening with you and the boys. As never before I am coming to want that kind of experience. . . . It will be a real reorientation of my life, and I want it, now, I think, in something like the same way I want my work to increase its effectiveness.” Undated, JDC.

  20. They married legally in 1941, when they already considered their relationship “doomed,” to protect Becky from the stigma of illegitimacy. Lisa Rubens interviews with David Jenkins, 1987–1988, University of California/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft, 36, 123.

  21. After Consie and Dave separated, Becky remained with her depressed, economically unstable mother until she was eight. When Dave remarried she was taken permanently into the close, vibrant family Dave and his new wife, Edith Arnstein Jenkins, formed. Becky believes this saved her life. Edith Jenkins became her true mother and adopted her when she was an adult, Consie having resisted this for years. Later, Consie spent some time in a mental hospital and finally got some security from a Social Security disability stipend. Becky Jenkins to author, November 11, 2007, and November 19, 2007, and John Collier, Jr., to Becky Jenkins, undated letter on Consie’s death, author’s possession.

  22. Becky Jenkins to author.

  23. Dimitri Shipounoff, introduction to Charles Keeler, The Simple Home (orig. San Francisco: P. Elder, 1904; repr. Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1979), xxiv.

  24. Charles Wollenberg, Berkeley: A City in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), chapter 6.

  25. Henry F. May, Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 200–202. John Kenneth Galbraith recalled, “The graduate students with whom I associated in the thirties were uniformly radical and the most distinguished were Communists. I listened to them eagerly and would have liked to have joined both the conversation and the Party but here my agricultural background was a real handic
ap.” John Kenneth Galbraith, quoted in Irving Stone, ed., There was Light: Autobiography of a University, Berkeley: 1868-1968 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970), 25.

  26. HM interview with Clark Kerr, April 21, 1999.

  27. Author’s interview with Walter Goldschmidt, February 3, 2003.

  Scene 3

  1. Doud, DL.

  11. Father Stryker and the Beloved Community

  1. Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America 1935–1943 As Seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 10.

  2. My discussion of FSA politics is based on Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise And Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).

  3. Tugwell’s proposed interpretation of the AAA law was drafted by Alger Hiss, who had become an expert on cotton agriculture in particular. John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 155.

  4. Grant McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 89, 93.

  5. The RA’s budgetary orphanhood set up competition between Tugwell and FERA head Harry Hopkins, who wanted to centralize all relief programs under the WPA as the price of funding.

  6. Laurence Hewes, Boxcar in the Sand (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 57–61; Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 221 ff.; Culver and Hyde, American Dreamer, 153.

  7. Brenda J. Taylor, “The Farm Security Administration and Rural Families in the South: Economists, Nurses, and Farmers, 1933–1946,” in The New Deal and Beyond: Social Welfare in the South Since 1930, ed. Elna Green (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2003), 30–46.

  8. Will Alexander, FSA administrator, to Secretary of Labor, June 7, 1939, RG16, E17, box 3019, NARA.

  9. Memo and report from Alex McC. Ashley to W. A. Jump, Director of Finance, November 16, 1939, ibid.

  10. Johanna Schoen, Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 37–40; Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 299.