Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Anna Sommer labeled both Dixons as artists—yet the article was part of a series called “Their Other Halves.” Dorothea tried to finesse the artist identity. She was happy, she said, to describe her work as a “trade”: “Too much has been said for and against photography as an art. . . . I don’t care whether or not you dignify it with a highbrow name. I think it is more important to find all life interesting than to seek out just the high levels.”

  Knowing what we know now, it might appear that the lady was a hypocrite. But she was deceiving mainly herself. She had no access to alternative prescriptions for womanhood. Like most women of her time, Lange never imagined that husbands could share child care and domestic work. Her life required trying to do it all, and her peace of mind required convincing herself that it could be done successfully.

  DOROTHEA’S SANCTIMONIOUS PAEAN to wifely virtue was a downright sham, because she and Maynard had just decided to live apart—apart not only from each other but from their children. They gave up their Taylor Street home. Maynard moved into his studio and Dorothea into hers. Many artists were doing this at the time because they couldn’t manage two rents, but for Lange and Dixon it was a trial separation. They placed out the children, now seven and four, sending them to a school in San Anselmo, in Marin County, that boarded children with private families. For the two adults, both driven to work, giving up the Taylor Street house was only a modest sacrifice. They each had a home, only three doors from each other. But they took the children’s only home away.

  Had there been no children, Dorothea and Maynard might have developed a de Beauvoir–Sartre kind of arrangement. But there were children. They had previously placed the children with friends when they traveled. Consie had been sent away on several occasions. In 1931, in a first effort to rebond, Dorothea and Maynard had taken a brief holiday from the boys, sending them to stay with friends in Watsonville. But this latest separation was not intended to be brief, and the children were not brought home on weekends, because this would have meant two lengthy round-trips each visit for the parents. (There were no bridges yet and you had to go to Marin County by ferry.) Instead the parents went to the boys. Dan Dixon recalled, “I remember standing outside the place where we lived, waiting and waiting for that black Model A to appear. And when the day was over, I remember watching it go, weeping and weeping as the red taillights receded.”9

  To understand this arrangement, the historian must grapple not only with Dan’s and John’s pain at the time, their anger as young men, and their recollected sadness as adults, but also with changing standards about mother-child bonding. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was still common for lone mothers, even married employed mothers, to place out their children temporarily, either in private homes or in institutions. Among the poor, this practice (today called foster care) was entirely ordinary. Early in the century, for example, the majority of children in orphanages were not, in fact, orphans, in the meaning of that term today; most had living mothers—single, widowed, or separated—who could not manage to support and care for their children simultaneously. Employed women of all classes often solved child-care problems with temporary placements in institutions, with foster parents, or with relatives. Lange knew of several artists who had done this.10

  The alternative, organized day care for children, was still rare and still carried the stigma of being a “charity” (today one might translate that as “welfare”) intended only for the poor. Such care was characterized by overcrowding, rigid discipline, and poor facilities. Conservative discourse associated day-care centers with Soviet communism.11 Furthermore, the dominant child-development assumptions of the time held that foster care was the superior choice. In a day-care center, experts reasoned, as in an orphanage, children would be cared for by strangers who were responsible for groups of children; in foster care, by contrast, children would have a mother and a family, possibly even a father. The prevailing child-development wisdom at the time also assumed a somewhat contradictory premise: that separations and shifting caretakers need not be traumatic for children so long as their fundamental physical needs were satisfied. Although most experts today consider children’s developmental need for deep bonding with one or two parents to be a timeless and irreducible fact of human nature, that was not the conclusion of childhood experts eighty years ago. Today, foster care is rare among the middle class, although the wealthy send their children to boarding schools and to all-summer camps at very young ages. The practice remains common, however, among immigrants, the poor, and the ill and disabled, and in these cases the state is often an intermediary, licensing and paying the foster parents.

  Still, boarding out children was a declining practice in the 1930s, and day nurseries were becoming more common. Previously the Dixon children attended the all-day Golden Gate Nursery School on Pacific Avenue, a modern establishment quite unlike the charity nurseries. Maynard was away from his children as much as he was with them, but his contemporaries did not consider this problematic. A mother, by contrast, was expected never to leave her children for long. But placing out was still common enough that Dorothea felt less external disapproval than private anguish. The very fact that she normally did virtually all the domestic and child-care labor made this decision both more rational and more painful. Later she explained this pithily: it was never “he and I, and the boys [but] myself and the little boys, and he.”12 She agonized, while Maynard did not. “Even now when I speak of it I can feel the pain,” she said thirty years later. “It hurts me in the same place as it did then.”13

  There is no doubt about the boys’ feelings: pain, fear, anger. Dorothea’s were complex. She ached in the same place she hurt when she was twelve and her father left, and yet now it was she doing the abandoning. Despite all her rage at him, was she not repeating his behavior? She recalled her anger at her “wuzzy” mother, who would not defend her against her grandmother, and brooded about how the boarding mother treated Dan and John.14 Dorothea could not shed her anxiety, and this anxiety led to denial. She spoke of the children’s absence in the passive voice, as if she had had no responsibility for making it happen “. . . if the boys hadn’t been taken from me by circumstances, I might have said to myself, ‘I would do this, but I can’t because . . .’ ”15 Four years later, she developed the first symptoms of the severe ulcers that would cause so much pain in her later years and would ultimately lead to her death.

  Placing the boys, a practice that would be repeated several times over the next seven years, was an only slightly masked indication of Lange’s ambition. Her greed was for time and freedom, not money. She could, after all, have kept the boys in her studio. Her drive had previously showed in her willingness to be father as well as mother, to be breadwinner, wife, and child-raiser. This triple labor was a way of supporting Maynard’s right to be an artist, but it also reflected her love for her work. It was this ambition, more than sending away the boys, that caused her shame. Ambition was an unacceptable, hidden drive among women, Dorothea being no exception, so she dared not confront it.

  The new arrangement also provided her space away from Maynard. She was freeing herself not only of child care but also of care for a husband quite demanding in his own way. Her declarations that his art always came first, she would later admit, were only partly true. After twelve years of marriage, she was fed up with his irresponsibility, his jokes, and his philandering. Maynard was a sexy, romantic mate and friend, but not a good partner. He wounded her repeatedly by his affairs and flirtations. As it became clear that their friends knew about his womanizing, it was harder for her to bear her hurt and humiliation.16 His frequent long trips not only left Dorothea alone but revealed the limits of their closeness. She was beginning to feel a longing for a missing intimacy. “I knew that this man . . . while he loved me . . . still didn’t share the depths of his life with me.” And, perhaps, neither did she: “I wasn’t really involved in the vitals of the man.”17

  If the separation brought Dorothea more freedom, it
gave nothing of the sort to the boys. Dan and John retain, more than seventy-five years later, a deep store of remembered pain. They have never forgiven her. One of Lange’s grandchildren called her action “monstrous,” having absorbed the anger from her father. John remembers that whenever his mother said, “I met the most interesting people today,” he shivered, because it meant that he and his brother were going to be “shipped out” again.18 The boys missed Maynard, too, but they were not, and are not, angry at him. They counted on their mother, and felt betrayed; they never counted on Maynard, but experienced him as a delightful visitor who arrived bearing gifts. He could play with the children as Dorothea, like many busy mothers, could not: with the boys he drew and painted, wrote and told stories, built and manufactured things with his hands, these activities becoming games that ranged from the silly to the mischievous to the ecstatic. The younger Dorothea had loved Maynard’s playfulness, and she still did occasionally, but she was increasingly resentful that it was always she who had to be the responsible one. The economic depression made that responsibility, and her aloneness with it, more burdensome.

  The most intense reactions I have encountered about placing out the children have come not from Dan and John, but from my own contemporaries, particularly women. When I mention it in conversation or in a lecture, they are shocked. I can tell from their faces and questions that this information changes radically how they think of Lange. As I present these facts, urging listeners to consider them in a historical context, I become worried that I am being perceived as too cool about it, too matter-of-fact. I frequently reshuffle my points, trying to find a perfect balance among my historian’s consciousness of the customs of that time, my emotional understanding of the abandoned children’s suffering, and my perception of Dorothea’s pain and guilt. There is, of course, no perfect balance, only oscillation.

  THE RETURN TO San Francisco also confronted Dorothea with another kind of violation and loss. While she was away, her brother Martin, thinking to do her a favor, had rented out her studio for thirty-five dollars a month, expecting that the couple would be happily surprised on their return to get the money. But the renter had trashed the place. He went on a rampage with Prussian blue paint, daubing it all over the walls and furniture; he had smeared it on valuable drawings, including those that Diego Rivera had given her. She had to burn them. Then the tenant had cut his wrists—but survived—and there was blood all over.

  She cleaned up, and those few of her clients who still had discretionary income began coming in. Although her “mind was over in San Anselmo most of the time,” Dorothea worked as never before.19

  The family regathered in the summer of 1932. Unlike most others suffering from the economic collapse, they were able to take a blissful vacation. Anita Baldwin loaned them a cottage on her two-thousand-acre, breathtakingly beautiful estate on Fallen Leaf Lake, just south of Lake Tahoe, and they spent the whole summer there, “not a human soul but us”—the four of them, the servants, and Imogen Cunningham and her children, who had become part of the family. Dan and John remember it as paradise. To get there, they went by riverboat to Sacramento, boarding the elegant Delta King at dusk, eating in its restaurant amid chandeliers, silver goblets, candlelight, and “stately black stewards in starched white jackets.” In the morning they drove the car off the boat and up winding roads into the Sierras. Baldwin owned the whole lakefront on this miniature Tahoe, connected to the big lake by a stream, and she maintained a timbered hunting lodge with a retinue of servants who cleaned and cooked. Maynard built an Indian sweat lodge. The boys ran naked all summer and rarely came indoors. Fallen Leaf was rich in game fish, and they ate what they caught. There were mishaps: John, whom they had begun calling “Chunkin,” burned his bare backside in a collision with the potbellied stove on which Dorothea cooked. Maynard caught Dan fooling around with his Colt pistol, and gave him a hiding with a switch. The cabin had no amenities, so Dan got the task of lugging drinking and cooking water up from the lake.20 Everyone got stronger.

  It was in this maximally escapist location, paradoxically, that Dorothea took her first steps toward documentary photography. Wandering through the estate, she tried making Cunningham- or Weston-style pictures of nature: close-ups of young pine trees, stumps, and “skunk cabbage, with big pale leaves and the afternoon sun showing all the veins.”21 This approach was by then a trend: “During the ’twenties and ’thirties,” photography historian Naomi Rosenblum wrote tartly, “the sharply detailed close-up of no matter what subject constituted a typical modernist strategy. . . .”22 Lange had experimented with outdoor photography in Arizona and New Mexico, and now that she had the time to work at it systematically, she expected the pleasure that came with perfecting a new technique. But the pleasure did not come, and she never seemed to like what she produced, although she enjoyed the time alone and the challenge of looking closely at natural beauty.23 One day, she recalled later, a realization came to her with sudden clarity. She described it as an epiphany, an insight into her own nature. Characteristically, she experienced it in terms of freedom and unfreedom, the great moral and personal theme of her bohemian consciousness at the time. “I was not free when I was trying to photograph those things which were not mine.” Freedom required being true to your nature, and this meant feeling photography as a calling, not just a business. “And I then decided that when I went back to the city I would only photograph the people that my life touched.”24

  For a time, however, “the people that my life touched” remained her rich studio clients. She was aware of her dilemma as a craftswoman—that she had to rely on the rich as clients—and wished it could be otherwise. “I enjoyed every portrait that I made in an individual way but . . . photographing only people who paid me for it bothered me.” Looking back, she saw her decision clearly: “. . . I was . . . aware that there was a very large world out there that I had entered not too well.”25 But her family depended on her income. Lange announced her new direction with a slight alteration in the business card she made to notify clients that the studio had reopened. Instead of “Portraits in Photography” it read “Pictures of People.” This had more meaning to her than to others, since she had always done pictures of people. What had changed was who she identified as subjects. Both literally and figuratively, she looked out her window and the view made her studio seem remote, stifling.

  NINETEEN THIRTY-TWO was an election year, but at first the presidential campaign seemed uninteresting. The Democratic platform could almost have been Hoover’s, calling as it did for tariffs, sound currency, a balanced budget, and cutbacks in federal expenditure. Many of Lange’s friends—both artists and customers—were supporting Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas or Communist William Z. Foster, and Lange was sympathetic. As the content of Roosevelt’s campaign speeches became more substantive, however, she was attracted to his energy and optimism, as well as to his rhetoric. In April he called for restoring the purchasing power of farmers and finding a way to stop foreclosures when mortgage payments could not be met. In May he suggested that the United States should consider social planning and argued that “we cannot allow our economic life to be controlled by that small group of men whose chief outlook upon the social welfare is . . . that they can make huge profits from the lending of money and the marketing of securities. . . .” July’s nomination speech returned to the Party’s conservative platform: repeal of Prohibition (supposedly without the return of saloons), cutting government spending, and limiting public works to reforestation projects. After being nominated, however, Roosevelt called for regulation of investment, banking, and utilities, and in September, he defended the right of local governments to own and operate power plants if private utilities were doing a poor job. On September 23 in San Francisco he again denounced the “great industrial and financial combinations” and their “princes of property” who dominated industrial life, although he added that “government should assume the function of economic regulation only as a last resort. . . .” FDR
’s rhetoric of the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” affirmed what Lange was seeing.26

  At some point during his campaign, Lange learned that FDR was a polio survivor. She had tamped her polio memories so far down that she rarely spoke of the disease, but now she was undoubtedly riveted, scrutinizing every FDR photograph as if it were one of her own negatives. In a carefully calibrated precampaign public-relations move, Roosevelt had arranged an early magazine interview, published July 1931, under the headline IS FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT FIT TO BE PRESIDENT?27 In the usual photographs of FDR, he did his best to hide his infirmity, as did Dorothea. Now one photograph, however, showed his gleaming leg braces, not so different from what hers had looked like, and another revealed his powerful arms and thin legs as he sat in a swimsuit. Roosevelt’s way with his disability seemed to Lange of a piece with his activist stance toward the Depression, in contrast to Hoover’s calls for patience and faith in market forces.