Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  30. A point also made by George P. Elliot in his introduction to Dorothea Lange (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966). This complexity extends to the way she depicted family and gender. See chapter 13.

  31. Riess, 205.

  32. KQED 23.

  33. She disliked “poetic” captions. Riess, 205–206.

  34. Lange caption to LoC 018899-E through 018903-E.

  35. Lange caption to LoC 019285-D.

  36. Big grower Wofford B. Camp belittled the old idea that “ ‘Nobody picks cotton but Negroes.’ ” His racism was not at all biological; he scorned the old belief that the Chinese could not pick cotton because their fingers were short and therefore broke the staple. Workers would do what they had to. Willa K. Baum interview with Wofford B. Camp, 1962–1966, 205, Bancroft.

  37. Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870–1941 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 67; State Relief Administration of California, “Migratory Labor in California,” mimeographed report, 1936, 29–33.

  38. From Lange’s field notes, OM: 3. White-Amer (carrots) 2. Cantaloupe (Mex) 1. Lettuce Filipinos

  39. Raymond P. Barry, ed., A Documentary History of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Oakland, California: Federal Writers Project, 1938), on-line at http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=hb88700929&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00122&toc.depth=1&toc.id=div00122&brand=calcultures.

  40. “Helen Hosmer, A Radical Critique of California Agribusiness in the 1930s,” interview by Randall Jarrell, Santa Cruz, 1992, transcript, University of California Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft, 38.

  41. Memo for Will Alexander, December 28, 1938, RG 16, E 17, box 2782, NARA.

  42. DL to RS, February 16, 1937.

  43. Albert Croutch, “Housing Migratory Agricultural Laborers in CA” (M.A. thesis, University of California, 1948), 49. (This thesis was written under Taylor’s supervision.)

  44. Eric Thomsen, lecture, January 29, 1937, box 4, folder 15, FSA Bancroft; “Helen Hosmer, A Radical Critique of California Agribusiness in the 1930s,” 43.

  45. Mercer G. Evans, “Housing for Migratory Agricultural Workers,” Public Welfare News 7 (1939), 2–4; Paul S. Taylor, “From the Ground Up,” Survey Graphic 25, no. 7 (1936).

  46. Marsha L. Weisiger, Oklahomans in the Cotton Fields of Arizona, 1933–1942 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 108.

  47. Taylor, “From the Ground Up,” 526.

  48. Mimeographed newspapers from Shafter Farm Workers Community, 1939; 5/8, in FSA Bancroft; James Frederick Hamilton, “(Re)Writing Communities: Dust-Bowl Migrant Identities and the FSA Camp Newspaper at Arvin, California, 1938–1942” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1993), 95.

  49. For example, Marysville camp residents listened as a group to a radio broadcast of Paul Taylor’s lecture to San Francisco’s prestigious Commonwealth Club in 1935. Several listeners said that he knew what he was talking about and that they hoped some growers were listening. Anne Loftis to PST, June 23, 1981, box 10, folder 20, PST Bancroft; Anne Loftis, Witnesses to the Struggle: Imaging the 1930s California Labor Movement (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998), 149. On January 29, 1937, Eric Thomsen of the FSA gave a lecture on the camps to an educators’ forum, entitled “Maverick University: or How the Migrant Gets an Education.” He used Alexander Meiklejohn’s definition of a liberally educated man as someone “who is trying, with some success, to understand what is happening to him in the midst of the civilization in which he lives.” Meiklejohn was in the Bay Area during this period, and he influenced those in Lange and Taylor’s network through his advocacy of continuing adult education.

  50. Collins, quoted in Charles J. Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 64.

  51. Lange caption to LoC 000825-ZC.

  52. Lange general caption #2, May 1939; KQED, 12.

  53. La Follette Committee Hearings, part 62, 22637.

  54. McWilliams, quoted in Linda C. Majka and Theo J. Majka, Farm Workers, Agribusiness and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 111.

  55. Sanora and Dorothy Babb, On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps, ed. Douglas Wixson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 79.

  56. Frederick R. Soule to PST, July 3, 1937, box 15, folder 5–8, PST Bancroft; KQED 5.

  57. PST to Garst, May 22, 1937, box 6, folders 12–13, PST Bancroft; Loftis, Witnesses to the Struggle, 151–52. Taylor succeeded only at Arvin where a new director, Fred Ross—the man who recruited César Chávez to farmworker organizing—overruled the segregation policy; see Walter J. Stein, “A New Deal Experiment with Guided Democracy: The FSA Migrant Camps in California,” Communications Historiques (1970): 132–46, 138; Verónica Y. Martínez, “Inside the Federal Labor Camp: Exploring Race, Community and Resistance in the U.S. New Deal Era,” 2005, at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/history/content/news/spring_2005/tex_mexico_conf/ponencia_v_martinez.pdf. Photographs of thirty-one actual signs at FSA camps making segregation explicit can be found at http://www.loc.gov.rr/prints/list/085 disc.html, accessed 10/20/2006.

  58. One editor sarcastically changed Taylor’s title, “From the Ground Up,” to “From the Ground Up . . . Into the Air” and posed the usual tough question: “To what extent are government toilets etc a subsidy of the large fruit and vegetable interests . . . ?” VW to BA, June 23, 1936, and VW, notes, n.d., PST Bancroft; Cara A. Finnegan discusses this in Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), 112ff.

  59. For Taylor’s overestimation of the camps’ contribution, see Riess/PST, vol. 2, 47. For Lange’s, see KQED 17.

  60. PST to Paul Kellogg, June 3, 1935, PST Bancroft.

  61. DL to RS, February 24, 1936.

  62. Carol Shloss, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer: 1840–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 224.

  63. KQED 26.

  64. Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), 249–251. Growers built stockades prior to strikes or unionizing drives in several locations, including Toppenish, Washington; Lange field notes, August 1939.

  65. McWilliams, Factories in the Field, 254–59; John Steinbeck, “Poison Gas in America’s Salad Bowl: Vigilantes Hunt Reds in the Lettuce Fields of California,” Literary Digest, October 10, 1936, 5–6.

  66. McWilliams, “A Man, a Place, a Time,” The American West 7, no. 3 (1970): 5.

  67. McWilliams, Factories in the Field, 236–37.

  68. As cotton spread, it changed seasonal migration patterns by providing late-fall and winter employment in picking and early-spring employment in chopping. Workers who had once returned south now stayed to await early spring jobs, establishing homes in the San Joaquin Valley and finding it easier to organize. Ramón D. Chacón, “Labor Unrest and Industrialized Agriculture: The Case of the 1933 San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike,” Social Science Quarterly 65 (1984): 336–53.

  69. Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), chapter 7.

  70. DL to RS (undated, received November 27, 1938).

  71. Sally Stein, “Starting from Pictorialism: Notable Continuities in the Modernization of California Photography,” in Capturing Light: Masterpieces of California Photography, 1850 to the Present, ed. Drew Heath Johnson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

  13. Migrant Mother

  1. Biography of Thompson from her grandson Roger Sprague, at http://www .migrantgrandson.com/the.htm; and from Geoffrey Dunn, “Photographic License,” New Times, at http://web.archive.org/web/20020602103656/http://www.newtimes-slo.com/archives/cov_stories2002/cov_01172002.html#top. The various accounts of Thompson’s life offer somewhat different chronologies.

  2. Lange’s narrative is from Dorothea Lange, “The Assignment I’ll Never Forget:
Migrant Mother,” Popular Photography, February 1960, 42–43.

  3. Ibid.

  4. The number and sequencing of Lange’s shots is uncertain because her film consisted of unnumbered sheets. I follow the reconstructions of Sally Stein, “Passing Likeness: Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ and the Paradox of Iconicity,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003); Sally Stein, “Whose Family Romance?: Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Biographic Public,” unpublished paper presented at Art History and Biography Workshop, Getty Research Institute, February 2003; and James C. Curtis, “Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression,” Winterthur Portfolio 21 (Spring 1986): 1–20.

  5. Curtis suggested that she did this because evidence of so many children might raise questions about Thompson’s morality, as he also suggests that Lange might have consciously excluded the father of the family from the picture, but he offers no evidence for either charge. James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 52.

  6. See www.capital-flow-analysis.com/Essays/migrant_mother.htm.

  7. Raymond Williams, quoted by John Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism and Democratic Public Culture,” Rhetoric Review 20 (Spring 2001): 40.

  8. The “Madonna” discussion is indebted to Stein, “Whose Family Romance?” and Wendy Kozol, “Madonnas of the Fields: Photography, Gender, and 1930s Farm Relief,” Genders 2 (Summer 1988): 1–23.

  9. In fact, Stryker and his PR man were as much responsible as Rothstein, for they distributed different versions of the photograph, with captions implying that each skull was from a separate steer. RS to Russell Lee, June 21, 1937.

  10. LoC 018227-C. In a group of photographs, a mother holds the hands of two young daughters, an adolescent boy pushes a baby carriage, and a father pulls a wagon with a toddler girl in it. Scholar James Curtis reasoned that Lange had first photographed the family from behind and then asked them to turn around; then, because that turn left the toddler in the wagon facing away from the camera, Lange deliberately tossed out an object to catch the girl’s attention and get her to turn toward the camera. To Curtis, it was cheating to move people around. But the full set of negatives, as interpreted by Henry Mayer, suggests that Lange made a series of exposures, starting from when she first saw them walking toward her, far down the road, and that the shot of the family from behind was made after they had passed Lange. The object that caused the little girl to turn was likely a negative sleeve; whether it was dropped deliberately or accidentally is impossible to know. HM to Beverly Brannan, undated letter, and HM to Sam Stourdze, November 25, 1998, author’s collection. This procedure—making numerous photographs of the family, catching the little girl as she turned her head to look at something in order to animate her image, then sending only one negative on to Stryker—was consistent with Lange’s customary practice.

  Other scholars have challenged the “authenticity” of Lange’s several photographs of “tenants without farms” in Hardeman County, Texas, made in 1938. She photographed these men in various groupings and positions. In other words, Lange moved her subjects around, framed her photographs differently, and cropped her prints variously in search of the strongest image.

  11. RS to Arthur Rothstein, April 29, 1936. Then Stryker criticized the result: “. . . it looks a little bit too posed . . . men have fountain pens in their hands poised for writing which would be unlikely in an actual situation.” RS to Arthur Rothstein, May 29, 1936. Writing Rothstein at another time, he said, “. . . you had best have them do a little staging for you . . . [but] if they [the pictures] aren’t good, you may look forward to having your ears knocked off. . . .” RS to Rothstein, February 5, 1937. In 1940, Marion Post Wolcott asked him, “Do you want me to try to pose or ‘fake’ some of the things . . . which are ‘out of season’ . . . ?” Marion Post Wolcott to RS, September 25, 1940.

  12. William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 67–73.

  13. Maren Stange, “ ‘Symbols of Ideal Life’: Technology, Mass Media, and the FSA Photography Project,” Prospects 11 (1986): 85.

  14. Delano, quoted in Hank O’Neal, A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and Its People, 1935–1943 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 234.

  15. Christina Page Gardner, “The Contemplation of Dorothea,” unpublished manuscript, author’s possession.

  16. Riess, 158.

  17. Historian Nicholas Natanson computed that in the 60,000 FSA photographs he sampled, blacks constituted about 10 percent of the images, a proportion better than that of any other agency publishing materials on America and Americans. This is, however, 10 percent of the images in the file; of those distributed, far fewer showed any people of color. Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 61–67, 72.

  18. U.S. Camera sent the letter on to Lange. Previously, at least one other had claimed the woman in the photograph: In 1956, Barbara Crawford wrote to MoMA saying that the woman in the photograph “could easily be my identical twin” and that she hoped to find her in order to donate to “this less fortunate ‘sister’ . . . if such could be accomplished in a discreet manner.” After some delay, the letter got forwarded to Dorothea, who replied on March 5, saying that she could not track down the subject but was “very happy that the photograph has had meaning for you. This is the kind of success that I really wish for.” She added, regarding the woman’s neediness, “This is not a story of how it used to be; it still is,” and urged Mrs. Crawford to make a donation to the American Friends Service Committee for its efforts on behalf of migrant workers. DL to Barbara Crawford, March 5, 1957, box 68, folder 3, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Papers, GRI.

  19. Author’s interview with Helen Nestor, March 20, 2002.

  20. Peggy McIntosh speaking to CNN reporters, December 3, 2008, at http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/12/02/dustbowl.photo/. Nevertheless, a few critics have used Thompson’s reaction to condemn Lange as instrumental and manipulative and her photography, again, as inauthentic: Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 228; Curtis, “Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother.”

  21. Roger Sprague Web site.

  22. Lange field notes, February–March 1937, Imperial Valley.

  23. Robert Coles, untitled essay, in Dorothea Lange, Photographs of a Lifetime (Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1982), 34.

  24. Critic Jacqueline Ellis argues that such pictures close off the possibility of working-class self-representation even as they engender “a sense of social responsibility into the consciences of middle-class Americans.” Jacqueline Ellis, Silent Witnesses: Representations of Working-Class Women in the United States (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1998), 22, 29.

  25. Judith Keller, ed., Dorothea Lange: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 107.

  26. Miscellaneous clippings in OM—for example, New York Times, September 17, 1983, and L.A. Times, September 17, 1983; Bill Ganzel, Dust Bowl Descent (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1984). By the time she wrote to Lange, the three daughters in the photograph had all married: The girl on the left is Katherine (Peggy) McIntosh; on the right, Ruby Sprague; and the baby is Norma Rydlewski. In October 2007 the southern California wildfires destroyed the seventy-five-year-old McIntosh’s home in Modesto and all her belongings, including a print of the Migrant Mother photograph. In late 2008 the Red Cross set up a fund to help her. See articles in Modesto Bee of October 27 and November 1, 2007, and December 11, 2008.

  14. On The Road: The Dust Bowl

  1. Lange captured this storm near Mills, in northeastern New Mexico, but was terrified and did not try it again: “. . . it was a death storm . . . we were in this thing before I realized what it wa
s . . . I knew that that much grit would sandblast the lens and . . . get into the gears and I couldn’t work the rest of the way. . . .” Another time, she tried to photograph by keeping her head directly on top of the ground glass but found the heat on the back of her neck unbearable. KQED 17.

  2. She made 61 pictures labeled as belonging to the dust bowl, 104 identified as drought, and 222 whose captions included the word Oklahoma, for example, but these are underestimates, because so many photographs were captioned differently and because so many people fleeing the drought and dust came from other states.

  3. Quoted in James Frederick Hamilton, “(Re)Writing Communities: Dust-Bowl Migrant Identities and the FSA Camp Newspaper at Arvin, California, 1938–1942,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1993), 92.

  4. Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 233.

  5. Gerald Haslam, “Grapes of Wrath: A Book that Stretched My Soul,” at www.californiaauthors .com/essay_haslam.shtml.

  6. Future of the Great Plains, report of the Great Plains Committee, House of Representatives document no. 144, 75th Cong., 1st sess., 1937, 45.

  7. John Opie, “Moral Geography in High Plains History,” Geographical Review 88, no. 2 (1998): 246–247; Brad D. Lookingbill, Dust Bowl, USA: Depression American and the Ecological Imagination, 1929–1941 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 12, 17–18; Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 24, quotation on 51.

  8. Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

  9. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1951), 407, 415.

  10. Egan, The Worst Hard Time, 22, 58.

  11. Quoted in Louis Owens, The Grapes of Wrath: Trouble in the Promised Land (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 52–53.

  12. Lange field notes, box 16, folders 30 and 31, PST Bancroft.