Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  13. Taylor’s transcript of remarks of an Oklahoman from Washita County, n.d., box 16, folder 24, PST Bancroft.

  14. Caption to BAE 521659.

  15. Lange field notes, February 16, 1939, Shafter, California. When this sharecropper said “freed the mules,” he was referring to replacing them with tractors.

  16. Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, An American Exodus (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939).

  17. Egan, The Worst Hard Times, 174; W. Richard Fossey, “ ‘Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues,’ A Study of Oklahoma’s Cultural Identity During the Great Depression,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 60, no. 1 (spring 1977): 12–33.

  18. California State Relief Administration, Migratory Labor in California (San Francisco, 1936), 179.

  19. Caption to LoC 002464-E.

  20. Starr, Endangered Dreams, 241.

  21. KQED 13.

  22. Field notes, June 8, 1937, as typed out and sent by PST to Thomas Blaisdell, Jr. of the Social Security Board, box 16, folder 20, PST Bancroft.

  23. Los Angeles Herald-Express, December 11, 1935.

  24. These laws were declared unconstitutional in 1941.

  25. Leonard Leader, Los Angeles and the Great Depression (New York: Garland, 1991), 200.

  26. Lange caption to LoC 016251-C.

  27. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford, 1989), 98.

  28. Los Angeles Herald-Express, February 6, 1936.

  29. Lange field notes, February 19–20, 1936, south of King City, California. In a letter to Stryker, Lange said she was trying to find the photographs, but I have never seen them in any collection. DL to RS, December 12, 1938.

  30. Circular no. 556 from Miss F. M. Warner, State Board of Public Welfare, December 16, 1936, box 14, folder 25, PST Bancroft.

  31. Quoted in Owens, The Grapes of Wrath, 4.

  15. On the Road: The South

  1. Quoted in Howard M. Levin and Katherine Northrup, eds., Dorothea Lange: Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1935–1939 (Glencoe, Illinois: Text-Fiche Press, 1980), 39.

  2. LoC 019773-C.

  3. These strictures limited most New Deal public art. Maynard Dixon had also been constrained by them: Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes rejected a Dixon mural for the Bureau of Indian Affairs because it showed an Indian farming with an automobile nearby; he said he would approve it only if Dixon eliminated the car and showed “a white man teaching agricultural methods to the Indians.” Erika Doss, “Between Modernity and ‘the Real Thing,’ ” American Art 18, no. 3 (2004): 15. The FSA photography project’s successor agency, the Office of War Information, similarly censored interracial images in its wartime propaganda. George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

  4. Jack Delano to RS, April 19, 1941; Russell Lee to RS, March 19, 1940.

  5. Arthur Rothstein to RS, March 7, 1937.

  6. One version of the photograph shows a sliver of Paul Taylor along the left border, doing his usual two jobs—interviewing and holding the subject’s attention while Lange did her work. Notice that this man stands in the same posture as that of the Mexican farmworker father with his baby in plate 18. It is a posture of power.

  7. Letter to Washington Times, August 2, 1938, quoted in Charles Alan Watkins, “The Blurred Image: Documentary Photography and the Depression South” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1982), 316.

  8. The original caption in Lange’s hand is in OM; the LoC caption is 017079-C. Publications featuring FSA photographs frequently cropped blacks out of the images. Pete Daniel et al., Official Images: New Deal Photography (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 100.

  9. Caption to 017138-C.

  10. General captions 7 and 18, North Carolina, LoC.

  11. This is a great, though necessary, simplification, and I am grateful to Pete Daniel for helping me with it. The Lange-Taylor interview-photography team had found, to the surprise even of Taylor, an enormous variety of owner-tenant agreements. Many tenants worked under combined wage and share agreements, as the Mexican “patch croppers” in Texas, who received wages plus the produce of a small patch of the owner’s land. Some worked independently, provided they made the required payments to owners, while others were supervised as closely as wage laborers, although they earned no wages. Some supplied their own mule and plow and some supplied almost nothing. Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 177–78; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1951); Jonathan M. Wiener, “Class Structure and Economic Development in the American South, 1865–1955,” American Historical Review 84, no. 4 (1979): 970–92.

  12. Arthur F. Raper and Ira De A. Reid, Sharecroppers All (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 22; Daniel, Breaking the Land, 37. Landowners typically borrowed money at 6.5 percent.

  13. This restriction was in violation of the federal antipeonage law, but it happened nevertheless.

  14. Wiener, “Class Structures and Economic Development in the American South, 1865–1955,” 980.

  15. Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 77.

  16. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913, 408.

  17. Raper and Reid, Sharecroppers All, 21.

  18. Examples include LoC 017162-C, 018150-C, 017684-C, 009634-E, 017763-E, and 009303-C.

  19. Terrell Cline, FSA representative at Belle Glade, Florida, to John Beecher at FSA Birmingham, May 14, 1939, OM.

  20. Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 151–81.

  21. Daniel, Breaking the Land, 181. In photographs LoC 017296-C, 017330-C, 017302-C, and 017595-E, Lange tried to make visual the evictions and the shift to wage labor.

  22. U.S. National Emergency Council, Report on Economic Conditions of the South (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1938), 9–12. Lange’s photographs of erosion include LoC 020035-C, 018071-E, 018086-C, 020160-E; UNC P-3167B 188, 189, 191, and 196.

  23. LoC 017969-C. There are several photographs of impoverished African Americans left without livelihood as lumber industries closed in at least three southern states. See 017852-E, 017778-E.

  24. Daniel, Breaking the Land, 173.

  25. Lange made several photographs of this woman’s house and yard—019952-E, 019953-E, 020033-C—but apparently none of the woman herself.

  26. LoC 018173-C.

  27. Interviewed July 4, 1939.

  28. Lange field notes, July 4, 1939.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Arthur Raper, Tenants of the Almighty (New York: Macmillan, 1943), quoted in Jess Gilbert, “Can Government Bureaucrats Foment Democracy? The Case of New Deal Agricultural Policy,” paper given at Agricultural History Society meeting, June 2006, in author’s possession.

  31. Lange field notes, nd; DL to M. E. Gilfond, FSA Director of Information, July 20, 1936, RS mss.

  32. See, for example, LoC 020204-E. For an ironic story about how one of these country-store pictures was used for World War II propaganda, see page 328.

  33. KQED 19.

  34. Caption to LoC 019972-C; William Stott, “Introduction to a Never-published Book of Dorothea Lange’s Best Photographs of Depression America,” Exposure 22, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 28.

  35. See, for example, LoC 020128-E; KQED 26.

  36. UNC P-3167B/45 and P-3167B/316.

  37. LoC 018027-E.

  38. Arthur Raper calculated that in two counties in Georgia more than 50 percent of white sharecroppers and 40 percent of black sharecroppers owned autos, Kirby, Rur
al Worlds Lost, 257.

  39. LoC 019953-E.

  40. Thirty years later, she could describe how rice and cotton agriculture produced different social and economic relations. KQED 19.

  41. The UNC Press published Paul Taylor’s study of binational Mexican workers, An American-Mexican Frontier, in 1934. In some ways, the research community that Odum had established around Chapel Hill was analogous to that of Taylor and his students at Berkeley.

  42. PST to Arthur Raper, August 9, 1937, box 16, folder 20, PST Bancroft. Raper had worked for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, a rare, even unique, southern initiative that Will Alexander headed before becoming head of the FSA.

  43. Anne Firor Scott, introduction to Margaret Jarman Hagood, Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977; orig. University of North Carolina Press, 1939). A leading expert in statistics and demography, possibly the first to use analysis of variance and covariance, factor analysis, and principal components in demography and agricultural economics, Hagood helped plan censuses and developed the “level of living” index for each U.S. county, thereby creating the basis for comparative studies.

  44. She also helped Lange write captions. Linda Grant, “The Relationships Between Gender, a Feminist Perspective and Research Methods,” keynote address, Qualitative Interest Group, University of Georgia, 1993, at http://www.coe.uga.edu/quig/proceedings/Quig93_Proceedings/grant.93.html.

  45. See, for example, LoC 020088-E.

  46. LoC 019780-E and caption; general caption 13, July 5, 1939, UNC.

  47. This account of the STFU was taken from: misc. memos in carton 17, folders 5–6, PST Bancroft; Howard Kester, Revolt Among the Sharecroppers (New York: Covici Friede, 1936); H. L. Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land: The Life and Times of H L Mitchell, Co-Founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (Montclair, New Jersey: Allanheld, Osmun, 1979); David Eugene Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965); Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971); Greta de Jong, “ ‘With the Aid of God and the FSA’: The Louisiana Farmers’ Union and the African American Freedom Struggle in the New Deal Era,”Journal of Social History 34, no. 1: 105–39; Jess Gilbert and Steve Brown, “Alternative Land Return Proposals in the 1930s: The Nashville Agrarian and the Tenant Farmers’ Union,” Agricultural History 55 (1981): 351–59.

  48. Kester, Revolt Among the Sharecroppers, 57.

  49. KQED 2.

  50. Donald Holley, Uncle Sam’s Farmers: The New Deal Communities in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Joseph W. Eaton, Exploring Tomorrow’s Agriculture: Co-operative Group Farming—A Practical Program of Rural Rehabilitation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943), 199.

  51. Colleen McDannell takes Lange to task for not mentioning that this cooperative was funded largely by Eddy, a missionary, attributing this omission to Lange’s secular bias. A valid criticism. Colleen McDannell, Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 122–23.

  52. Lange field notes, July 4, 1936; Jane Cassels Record to MM, December 13, 1976, photocopy in carton 89, folder 21, PST Bancroft.

  53. H. L. Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land, 133; PST field notes, Carton 14, folder 70, PST Bancroft.

  54. KQED 2.

  55. LoC 009610-C, 017271-C.

  56. The photograph of H.L. Mitchell, 018193-E, is a classic Lange portrait, thanks to the grace of his lean body and worried face; see also J. R. Butler, 018285-C; unidentified black leader, 009549-C; unidentified white leader, 009598-C, all LoC.

  16. An American Exodus

  1. Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, An American Exodus (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939). It “pointed the way to a new medium, where words and pictures . . . reinforce one another . . . to produce [a] ‘third effect.’ ” Beaumont Newhall, introduction to Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1967), 7. A more recent critic considered it “prophesying and anticipating the multimedia presentation forms of the digital era.” A. D. Coleman, “Dust in the Wind: The Legacy of Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor’s An American Exodus,” in Pierre Borhan, Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 157.

  2. HM, unpublished manuscript, 9, author’s possession.

  3. Older photo-textual books included Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), but both its photographs and text seemed dated by the 1930s and its halftones and woodcut illustrations did not do justice to his photographs. Closer to home, Rexford Tugwell, Thomas Munro, and Roy Stryker’s American Economic Life and the Means of Its Improvement (1925) was saturated with photos, chosen by Stryker, but the photographers were not the authors of the book. Lewis Hine’s Men at Work (1932) had little text, only captions. Carleton Beals’s The Crime of Cuba (1933) featured Walker Evans’s photographs. The genre was stimulated from the mainstream side by the new photographic magazines, Life and Look.

  4. Quoted in David P. Peeler, Hope Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 67.

  5. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937), note facing half title page.

  6. Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitations and Authenticity in American Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 97.

  7. Jack Delano to RS, April 9, 1941.

  8. Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), 120.

  9. Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938); John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 173–176.

  10. This may have been in part because MacLeish had never himself seen what the pictures showed. MacLeish, then an editor at Fortune, was doing a piece on rural folk and asked Stryker for photographs. According to Ben Shahn, when he saw them, he said he was abandoning his text, “just using your photographs and I’ll write a sound track for it. . . .” Doud, Ben Shahn, April 14, 1964.

  11. MacLeish, Land of the Free, 7.

  12. Roy Stryker, quite possibly at Lange’s suggestion, envisioned an FSA photographic book about democracy, but it never materialized. Russell Lee to RS, September 22, 1940. Other photo-textual books would follow An American Exodus, including James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Richard Wright’s and Edwin Rosskam’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), and Wright Morris’s The Inhabitants (1946). But these authors did not notice, did not grasp, or chose not to emulate what Lange and Taylor were doing.

  13. Four of the five pictures of people in chapter 1, and eleven of the thirteen in chapter 2 show blacks. The book’s second photograph, Hoe Culture, Alabama, 1937, shows, in a typical Lange trope, rough hands holding a hoe—no head, no legs—and for quite some time, viewers and critics assumed these worn, dirty hands to be black, while they actually belonged to a white man. This fact underscores, accidentally, an explicit argument of the book: “Rural poverty in cotton is no longer a problem of race.” American Exodus, 19.

  14. Coleman, “Dust in the Wind,” in Borhan, Dorothea Lange, 162.

  15. Sally Stein, “ ‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbors’: American Resistance to Photomontage Between the Wars,” in Montage and Modern Life 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 129–89.

  16. Conversation with Stryker and photographers. Stryker sneered at “the extreme angle German twist,” displaying an attitude both populist and nationalist.

  17. PST’s handwritten note on letter from J. A. McKaughan of Reynal & Hitchcock, September 23, 1939, OM.

  18.
Ed Locke of the FSA wrote to Stryker about The Grapes of Wrath, “When you read it, notice how like the pictures of D. Lange it is.” Ed Locke to RS, April 28, 1939. When Life and Look did stories on the novel, both requested FSA photographs. RS to Arthur Rothstein, May 12, 1939; RS to Russell Lee, June 13, 1939, and June 22, 1939.

  19. D. G. Kehl, “Steinbeck’s String of Pictures,” Image 17, no. 1 (1974): 1–10.

  20. The title was suggested by Taylor’s old friend Paul Kellogg, of Survey Graphic. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 113.

  21. The pioneer metaphor occurred to other writers, including federal employees, such as David Cushman Coyle, Depression Pioneers (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939), 4.

  22. It was this strategy in An American Exodus that Gary Okihiro and I tried to emulate in Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

  23. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 217.

  24. Taylor recalled her self-discipline: “. . . if the subject dictated that a certain photograph should be there, one that wouldn’t meet the same artistic standard . . . that didn’t bother her at all. The criterion for selection of photographs was: What were we trying to say . . . ?” Riess/PST, vol. 1, 295.

  25. Roosevelt’s column read, “It seems to me that in the pictures and in the spirit [that is, she had not actually read the book], this book marks a high point in artistry and shows us what life means to some of our citizens.” “My Day,” April 10, 1940, at http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1940&_f=md055550.

  26. AA to “Dorothea and Paul, Paul and Dorothea,” January 25, 1940, OM.

  27. Edward Weston to “Paul & Dorothea,” April 1, 1940, and June 1, 1940, JDC.

  28. Paul Strand, Photo Notes 4 (1940). Keep in mind that Strand was a Marxist at this point and would have found Taylor’s text insufficiently focused on capital/labor relations. Furthermore, he had worked as director of photography and filmmaking for the Mexican Department of Fine Arts; in Mexico, he had been saturated not only with an extraordinary flowering of visual arts but with the intoxicating spirit of seeing the “masses” connect to the arts. James Krippner-Martínez, “Traces, Images, and Fictions: Paul Strand in Mexico, 1932–34,” The Americas 63, no. 3 (2007): 359–83.