Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  29. DL to RS, January 19, 1940.

  17. Dorothea and Roy

  1. In the summer of 1936, in late December 1936, twice in the summer of 1938, and in June 1939. The trip took four days by train, or nineteen hours by air plus four stops for refueling.

  2. RS to DL, October 10, 1935.

  3. TH interview with AA, September 15, 1976.

  4. These problems continued long after she left the FSA. In 1940, U.S. Camera wanted to feature her photography, but she had no prints from which to make a selection. DL to RS, undated (1940).

  5. DL to RS, June 18, 1937; for example, see DL to RS, January 12, 1938.

  6. Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 169.

  7. Charles Alan Watkins, “The Blurred Image: Documentary Photography and the Depression South” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1982).

  8. DL to RS, October 20, 1937.

  9. DL to RS, October 10, 1937.

  10. Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, 168.

  11. Jack Delano, Photographic Memories (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 52.

  12. DL to Miss Slackman, October 5, 1936, for example; see also DL to RS, February 12, 1936. At some level, Lange knew this. At a 1952 reunion, when the former FSA people were trading memories, John Vachon started to say to her, “I remember you . . .” and Lange responded quickly, “I am always afraid of something terrible when they start remembering me.” Conversation with Stryker and photographers.

  13. DL to Edwin Locke, September 10, 1936; DL to RS, March 19, 1937.

  14. DL to M. E. Gilfond, October 19, 1936; DL to RS, November 11, 1936.

  15. DL to RS, December 13, 1936; KQED 20.

  16. DL to RS, June 9, 1937.

  17. Service Rating Form, May 1939, OM.

  18. DL to M. E. Gilfond, March 12, 1937.

  19. F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1972), 60.

  20. Evans made half as many photographs as Shahn in an equal period of time, and Shahn was himself not one of the top producers. James R. Mellow, Walker Evans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 271. Evans’s low productivity was an irritant because it cost seven hundred dollars a month, over and above wages, to keep a photographer on the road. James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 11.

  21. Slipping into an odd third-person voice, Stryker continued, “And I imagine some of Stryker’s personal feelings were involved. . . .” Doud, Stryker. Historian F. Jack Hurley concluded that Evans never felt that Stryker could teach him anything. Hurley, Portrait of a Decade, 60–66.

  22. Doud, Shahn, April 14, 1964.

  23. DL to RS January 18, 1936; Colleen McDannell, Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 153.

  24. For example, see DL to RS, January 1, 1936, January 14, 1936, September 30, 1936, February 13, 1937, March 19, 1937, December 12, 1938, January 18, 1939, and March 2, 1939.

  25. RS to DL, January 3, 1936, and May 12, 1939.

  26. The darkroom workers made the same charge about Marion Post Wolcott’s film; was it just coincidence that they complained of the two female photographers? RS to DL, October 7, 1936; email to the author from Professor Sally Stein, January 16, 2007.

  27. TH interview with AA. At that time, film was not sealed as well as it is today, Adams recalled. According to Sara Halprin, the film Lange sent to Ansel Adams in Yosemite was actually developed by his assistant Seema Weatherwax. Sara Halprin, Seema’s Show: A Life on the Left (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 111.

  28. Halprin, Seema’s Show, 111.

  29. In the 1930s, professional photographers often “bracketed” their shots because film was slower, taking one picture at an exposure that seemed right and others just above and below. Margaret Bourke-White, for example, told Ansel Adams that she set her shutter at 1/200th of a second and then photographed once with every stop she had. Light meters were just coming out in the 1930s. Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 206; Ansel Adams, An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 265; Doud, Russell Lee, June 2, 1964.

  30. RS to Russell Lee, June 13, 1939.

  31. Jonathan Garst to RS, May 13, 1939.

  32. Doud, Edwin Rosskam, August 3, 1965.

  33. Doud, Marion Post Wolcott, January 18, 1965. Melissa A. McEuen, Seeing America: Women Photographers Between the Wars (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 137.

  34. Carol J. Payne, “Interactions of Photography and the Mass Media, 1920–1941: The Early Career of Ralph Steiner” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1999), 239.

  35. RS to Marion Post, September 21, 1938; Doud, Post Wolcott; McEuen, Seeing America, 158.

  36. McDannell, Picturing Faith, 10.

  37. She photographed a pregnant woman without asking permission, and the irate woman stood up so quickly that her chair tipped over backward and dumped her. Marion Post to “Chief Stryker,” July 28–29, 1940.

  38. Marion Post to RS, February 24, 1940, and March 2, 1940.

  39. RS to DL, October 22, 1936.

  40. RS to DL, April 16, 1937, May 10, 1937, September 28, 1938, and September 7, 1939.

  41. DL to RS, June 9, 1937, and September 30, 1936.

  42. Did Stryker harbor some racist attitudes, like virtually all white Americans at the time? Possibly. He referred to one of his staff as a “Negro boy,” in a 1960s interview. Doud, Stryker. But Stryker was right that racism in the District was appalling. Parks could not sit with the other photographers in the building cafeteria, could not get his son a soda at a drugstore, could be turned away at a movie theater. It was a “hate-drenched city,” Parks wrote. Gordon Parks, Voices in the Mirror (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 81.

  43. Quoted in Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 4.

  44. Doud, Gordon Parks, December 30, 1964.

  45. RS to DL, September 19, 1935, and October 30, 1935; PST to RS, October 24, 1935.

  46. Therese Heyman thought that Lange expected to get permission to keep a reservoir of photographs in California because of Taylor’s connections and influence. Judith Keller, ed., Dorothea Lange, Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 113.

  47. For example, see DL to RS, December 31, 1935.

  48. PST to Thomas C. Blaisdell, Jr., April 25, 1937, and May 2, 1938, carton 16, folder 19, PST Bancroft.

  49. DL to RS, December 13, 1936.

  50. DL to RS, January 12, 1938.

  51. DL to RS, November 16, 1937.

  52. Jonathan Garst to RS, November 21, 1939.

  53. RS to Jonathan Garst, November 30, 1939.

  54. I am inclined to agree with John Raeburn’s judgment that firing Lange was “the worst decision [Stryker] ever made. . . . Lange’s loyalty . . . was unmistakable, and her contributions . . . extraordinary. If dealing with her was sometimes nettlesome that was a price an administrator ought to have been willing to pay for such superior work.” John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 160.

  55. RS to DL, October 31, 1939, and November 27, 1939.

  56. Her response to the first layoff was typical: “I feel very grateful to the Resettlement Administration for the opportunities I have had and a great working experience. For this reason, whether I am on the payroll or off the payroll you may count on me to cooperate in any way I can.” DL to RS, October 19, 1936. Her tone continued to be needy and flirtatious, but never resentful. She just wanted to continue as part of the family: “Because I am no longer on the active list—does not mean that you will never write to me and tell me what is happening, does it? You know that I am always
one of your people.” DL to RS, November 16, 1937.

  Scene 4

  1. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 230.

  2. Author’s interview with Christina Gardner; HM interview with Caleb Foote, September 3, 1998.

  3. Caleb Foote to Al Hassler of Fellowship of Reconciliation, August 8, 1942, JDC; hearings before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, U.S. House of Representatives, 77th Cong., 2nd sess., pursuant to H.Res. 113, part 29, p. 11804K; HM interview with Foote.

  18. Family Stress

  1. She was to photograph in seven western states (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, California, Nevada, and Arizona), paid at the rate of $3,200 per year, plus travel expenses at $4 per day, to begin February 1, 1940. Impressed with the prestige of the FSA photography and considering it a coup to get the FSA’s most popular photographer, the BAE planned a photographic book about rural migration problems, but it had to give up the book project, lower Lange’s salary by 20 percent, and limit expense reimbursements because nondefense budgets were being cut. Correspondence of December 1939–October 1940 between DL and Russell Smith, Division of Economic Information, BAE papers, RG 83, NARA (copies in JDC). Approximately 500 Lange BAE images can be traced in the National Archives today, and one has to assume that many were weeded out and a few kept back by Lange. All photographs referred to in this chapter are from this source. The BAE photographs are not well known, partly because they were placed not in the Library of Congress with the FSA’s but in the National Archives.

  2. As with the famous Migrant Mother photograph, she made multiple images of this family, starting from a distance far enough back to get a view of the whole shelter with family members in front and in the doorway, then ending with close-ups of mother and children separately. See, for example, 522203, 522204, 522205, 522526, 522527, 522528, and 522529.

  3. DL to PST, June 23, 1939, box 16, folder 34, PST Bancroft.

  4. Caption to 521624.

  5. 521630; general caption nos. 1 and 2.

  6. They shared an interest in Mexican Americans. Moe would later become director of the NEH and president of the American Philosophical Society, and his brother headed the University of California Press.

  7. DL to Henry Allen Moe, letter with application materials, October 13, 1940, OM.

  8. She had developed the idea after an FSA stop at the Amana Society; and Taylor was interested in cooperatives as a substitute for failing family farms.

  9. Lange field notes.

  10. DL to Henry Allen Moe, September 5, 1941, OM.

  11. This description of Dan’s delinquence comes from author’s interviews with Dan Dixon, June 18, 2002, and with RP, March 21, 2002.

  12. DL to Russell Smith, October 2, 1940, OM.

  13. Daniel Dixon to the author, email dated February 5, 2008.

  14. Daniel Dixon to DL, April 9, 1954, JDC.

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

  16. Material on Martin Lange is based on author’s interviews with Dan Dixon, John Dixon, Donald Fanger, and Rondal Partridge.

  17. Wobbly is a nickname for a member of the radical union Industrial Workers of the World.

  18. The scheme rested on the lack of communication between the department collecting from employers and that paying out benefits. The ring had stolen at least $13,000 in unemployment insurance funds (worth about $181,000 in 2007).

  19. Riess, 8.

  20. Sledge and Jilk received only probation.

  21. Riess, 8. Lange also suspected, as I do, that his immature Wobbly politics made it easier for him to join the scam: He did not respect white-collar labor as he did blue-collar, and he did not consider stealing from the state an immoral act.

  22. It was unnoticed as a widespread problem because previously so many had not survived polio, and because the symptoms of those who did were identified as aspects of normal aging. Daniel J. Wilson, Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 229–30. Today, up to 60 percent of polio survivors experience post-polio syndrome (PPS), the National Institutes of Health estimate. See http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/post_polio/detail_post_polio.htm.

  23. In a typical case, not only damaged muscles but muscles previously unaffected become painful and weakened and there is systemic fatigue. But Dorothea could not have known of this syndrome. Polio was poorly understood when it attacked Dorothea in 1902, and the first big epidemic came only fifteen years later, so few survivors were old enough in the 1940s to experience PPS. Although reported in French medical literature in 1875, PPS went unnoticed until the 1970s. Even today, PPS is difficult to diagnose, a process typically accomplished only by excluding other explanations for the symptoms. Lauro S. Halstead, “Post-Polio Syndrome,” Scientific American 278, no. 4 (1998): 42–47; Marinos C. Dalakas, Harry Bartfeld, and Leonard T. Kurland, “Polio Redux,” The Sciences, July-August 1995, 30–35.

  24. See, for example, DL to Jess Gorkin of OWI, April 13, 1943, OM.

  25. They paid $7,500 (worth $110,000 in 2007). They had to borrow money from Mother Rose to do it, partly because they sold the Virginia Street house to Dorothea’s brother, Martin, for a low price.

  26. HM interview with Donald Fanger, January 24, 1999.

  27. It was designed by John White, a partner and brother-in-law of Maybeck.

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

  29. Courtesy of the current owners, I visited the house in 2005.

  30. After some years, however, trees grew and blocked the view. Author’s interview with John Dixon.

  19. Defiant War Photography: The Japanese Internment

  1. The American Legion, the Native Sons and Daughters of the Gold West, and the California Joint Immigration Committee hoped that war with Japan would provide support for their long-term aim of expelling Asians from the United States. Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 127. My brief discussion of the development of internment policy comes also from Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 1997); Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993); Roger Daniels, Sandra Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano, eds., Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986); John Armor and Peter Wright, Manzanar (New York: Times Books, 1988), 38ff.

  2. The FCC denied that there was any shore-to-ship signaling. Armor and Wright, Manzanar, 21. The press ratcheted up the fear with headlines such as JAPANESE HERE SEND VITAL DATA TO TOKYO; CAPS ON JAPANESE TOMATO PLANTS POINT TO AIR BASE; AND, MY PARTICULAR FAVORITE, VEGETABLES FOUND FREE OF POISON. Roger Daniels, The Decision to Relocate the Japanese Americans (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975), 14.

  3. Christina Gardner to the author, July 2004. They announced the goal publicly: A representative of the Grower-Shipper Association of Salinas said, “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do.” Quoted in Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis, The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the Japanese-Americans During World War II (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 26. I have wondered about the fact that the director of the Manzanar Camp, Ralph Palmer Merritt, was the owner of Sun-Maid raisins.

  4. Author’s interview with Christina Gardner, Santa Rosa, California, June 16, 2002.

  5. They can be seen now in Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro, eds., Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Image of Japanese American Internment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). I have included relatively few photographs in this chapter because they are now available in that book.

  6. A member of Los Angeles’s prominent community of Japanese American artists and bohemians, in the early 1920s Miyatake was a prominent member of Shaku-do-Sha in Los Angeles, a group dedicated to furthering
modern art. He studied with Edward Weston, became Weston’s assistant, and opened an extremely successful portrait studio in Little Tokyo in 1923. In 1926, he won a prize in the London International Photography Exhibition. His defiance of Manzanar rules was so risky that he did not even tell his wife what he was doing, and after nine months he was caught. Arguing his case, he got permission to photograph provided a Caucasian snapped the shutter of the camera. After a trouble-free experience of a few months, camp director Merritt agreed to let him do his own work, and soon he was functioning as an official portrait photographer in Manzanar, making, for example, all the photographs for a yearbook put together by Manzanar’s high school students.

  7. Joel Gardner, interview with Carey McWilliams, July 1978, UCLA Oral History Program, at http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2m3nb08v/.

  8. See http://www.who-sucks.com/people/dr-seuss-sucks-7-racist-cartoons-from-the-doctor.

  9. Gordon H. Chang, “ ‘Superman Is About to Visit the Relocation Centers’ and the Limits of Wartime Liberalism,” Amerasia Journal 19, no. 1 (1993): 46.

  10. C. L. Dellums (uncle of Ron Dellums, mayor of Oakland, and former congressman) was a leader in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Bayard Rustin, then with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, opposed the camps and spent months in the fall of 1942 traveling, speaking against the policy, and working to protect internees’ property. John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003), 44–45; Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 81–82, 340. My thanks to Melissa Milewski for research on Rustin. On the NAACP, see Harry Paxton Howard, “Americans in Concentration Camps,” Crisis 49, no. 9 (1942): 281–302; Robert Shaffer, “Cracks in the Consensus: Defending the Rights of Japanese Americans During World War II,” Radical History Review 72 (1998): 84–120; Greg Robinson’s email to the author, November 28, 2006, and his By Order of the President.

  11. Once someone decided to get photographic documentation, several paths led to Lange. Milton Eisenhower, brother of Dwight, appointed to head the War Relocation Agency, had previously been director of information for the Department of Agriculture; he was certainly in touch with the San Francisco FSA office and probably knew of Paul Taylor, so Lange’s reputation at the FSA had likely reached him. Or he might have asked Stryker for a photographer. Therein lies an irony. No doubt Lange had received an enthusiastic recommendation because her work had so perfectly advanced the earlier agency’s agenda; the WRA probably expected the same now but did not get it.