by Linda Gordon
THESE CONSTRUCTIVE STEPS raised hopes but were never large enough to bring the country out of the Depression—only the colossal government spending on World War II did that. The downward economic spiral continued through the decade, with only intermittent upturns, as unemployed, underemployed, and low-wage workers became unable to purchase enough to keep production alive, thereby creating even more unemployed, underemployed, and low-wage workers. Spending even on food fell by almost half. Children roamed San Francisco’s streets, visibly hungry. The economic collapse intensified racial and class inequalities. The emergency relief programs—serving 20 percent of Californians—only demonstrated that more government help was necessary.
Adding to the shock was anxiety about fascism. In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor, and in the spring the attacks on Jewish businesses and books escalated. In Italy thousands of Jews were fleeing. The greatest cause for alarm, particularly among Lange’s community of friends, many of them Jews, was fascism’s growth in the United States. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, imagining a fascist coup in the United States, appeared in 1935 to great attention. Many in California thought fascist the right label for the alliance of big-business antiunionism with anticommunism, racism, and anti-Semitism. The big growers stirred up a Red-baiting hysteria against union organizers, and hired thugs to threaten or beat up resistant farmworkers. Local authorities frequently supported or, at best, ignored this violent vigilantism. In 1934 a mob six thousand strong, wrought up by claims that Communists were planning to take over, watched as two farmworker organizers were strung up and then released to the ground just before death; vigilantes armed with pickax handles beat many others and kidnapped a dozen. The governor praised the vigilantes, and the San Jose Evening News, speaking for the whole Hearst press, editorialized, “The citizens who accomplished that feat were doing their plain duty. . . .”11 In the Imperial Valley in 1934, an ACLU board member sent to observe enforcement of a federal injunction protecting workers’ right of assembly was kidnapped by vigilantes wearing state police uniforms, beaten, and dumped in the middle of the desert. In Santa Rosa in 1935, three hundred night riders tear-gassed the homes of several farmworker organizers, seized them, beat them, forced them to kiss the flag, then tarred and feathered them. In Los Angeles the American Nationalist party and related pro-Nazi groups conducted an anti-Semitic campaign, including sneaking thousands of leaflets into home-delivered copies of the Los Angeles Times.12 There were large Nazi rallies in San Francisco. Several right-leaning Hollywood stars, including Gary Cooper, supported by Hearst money, formed armed and uniformed groups that marched to “protect true Americanism.”13
Renowned intellectuals began arguing that artists had to lead in the struggle against fascism because it threatened culture itself; that commitment to art necessarily entailed resistance to totalitarianism; and that fascism was anathema to the bohemians’ cherished individualism.14 As artists and intellectuals moved to the Left, photographers had perhaps the most direct route to using their skills in the interest of social justice.
This progressive artistic community developed a “cultural front,” in the term used by historian Michael Denning. Disgusted that access to art had become a privilege of the moneyed, while the working and middle classes imbibed primarily commercial kitsch, cultural-front artists sought to create a fine art that was widely accessible. Their mode was uniformly realist, although it included diverse, contradictory, even opposing political and aesthetic streams. Official New Deal art excluded denunciation of inequality and representation of conflict, and instead emphasized national unity and a homogeneity constructed by a narrowed representation of Americanism. But all cultural-front artists made respectful, even honorific images of the “common people.” A century earlier, high-art representations of plebeian subjects had expressed the democratic revolutionary spirit of 1848; in the 1930s it often subordinated protest to nationalism. In contrast to the rebellion against America’s Protestant provincialism by modernist artists of the early twentieth century, the 1930s style could seem antimodern in its glorification of rural and small-town life. In unison with fascist, Nazi, and Soviet art, many of the cultural front condemned modernism as irresponsible and self-indulgent. Yet cultural-front art incorporated many modernist tastes, notably in its symbolism, simplification and abstraction of form, and repudiation of detailed verisimilitude. Becoming a cultural-front artist did not require recanting high-art sophistication.15
That many artists became left-wingers should not be taken for granted as somehow natural, however. True, they respected antiauthoritarian attitudes and practices, defined themselves as outsiders and nonconformists, and claimed to despise mere seeking after wealth. But their “defiant individualism,” in the words of historian Jane De Hart Matthews, often kept them at arm’s length from politics.16 Modernism, moreover, influenced them toward the notion that art should express a subjective, individual vision. Maynard Dixon was by no means typical, but he affords an example of the political ambiguity of the 1920s bohemian subculture: Respectful of people who worked with their hands, attracted to Deweyan principles of progressive education, disdainful of Babbittry and prudery, he was at the same time hostile to intellectuals, suspicious of African Americans and Jews, repelled by anything that seemed to him unpatriotic, and unmoved by radical critiques of the United States. Not even his own contempt for commercialism and the power of big money weakened his rejection of organized political action (although if there had been an environmentalist movement, Dixon might have joined it). Furthermore, the economic depression had a literally depressing effect on many, suppressing their energy and engagement; this was Dixon’s reaction. Lange’s response, by contrast, was a desire to do something.
While Lange watched and listened, her client friends, already involved in community service projects and charities, became more political: Edythe Katten was a Socialist party activist, Elizabeth Elkus an ACLU stalwart. Artists and writers of her network, such as Kenneth Rexroth, Bernard Zakheim, Consuelo Kanaga, Willard Van Dyke, Peter Stackpole, and many in Carmel were making and calling others to make socially relevant art. The progressive arts movement was national and the positions being taken by New York artists and writers such as Rockwell Kent, Paul Strand, William Gropper, Stuart Davis, and John Dos Passos were influencing the Bay Area. Zakheim and Rexroth established an Artists’ and Writers’ Union in San Francisco in 1933, and it was so popular that even Dixon was briefly drawn in. (Ansel Adams was the outlier in his determined opposition to progressive activism and much of the New Deal.)17
The Communist party gained widespread respect in this period. Many observers were impressed by glowing reports of the Soviet Union—its industrial growth, the educational and medical institutions it was building, and its resolute antifascist stand—while hearing less about Stalin’s crushing of dissent and massacring of peasants. In 1935 the Communist International adopted a strategy of alliance with other progressive forces, which they called a “popular front.” In fact, a popular front was already developing spontaneously in the United States, taking the form of alliance between Leftists and New Dealers, and became much larger than the Party sphere. Still, Communists often provided leadership. Although the Party never became large and artists were not numerous among its members, many progressive causes benefited from Communists’ energy, discipline, and personal sacrifice.18
Lange absorbed this energy directly, as the Monkey Block became a center of Left art activity. She was invited to some Communist party meetings, she recalled. “You wouldn’t be told at the first visit that they were party meetings. You would be somewhat flattered and cajoled and it [Party membership] was dangled before you as something that a person like you would be interested in . . . having made photographs . . . I would be valuable.” She was being looked over to see if she would make good material. She knew and respected some Communists at this time: “so many people of very good intentions, the best intentions, the best people. . . .” She explained that the reason she �
�didn’t go any further” was that Maynard was so opposed: “He was less socially moved than I.”19
Dorothea was conflicted. What she felt was not just a stretch, like a rubber cord pulled from each end, but a tug-of-war. She tugged left and tried to haul Maynard with her; he dug in his heels, allowing her to drag him a bit, then yanked her back with his skepticism. Dixon was no fascist sympathizer, but he longed for a return to a preindustrial West, certainly not a growing federal government, and he regarded all organizations as constricting to his freedom. The tugging made Dorothea feel stressed, yet also elated. Despite her words, it is unlikely that she would have deferred to Maynard’s objections had she herself been eager to join the Party. Lange would not have been comfortable in a political party demanding doctrinal and strategic obedience, and the CP demanded just that. San Francisco artist Shirley Taschen Triest remarked that “if you didn’t do proletarian art, you were just considered beneath contempt.”20 Lange never became active in any organization.
She grew closer to left-wing photographers, though, such as Consuelo Kanaga, who had settled into a studio a few doors down from her. She talked politics with many. A young German photographer couple—Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel—became lifelong friends. As adventurous teenagers, they had left their homes near Stuttgart (the home of Dorothea’s maternal family) to wander Europe; Johanna Mieth took the name Hansel because it was safer for them to pass as two boys. Seeking the land of Jack London, they made their way to California, where they supported themselves as construction workers at Yosemite and as migrant farmworkers throughout the Central Valley. Both began to photograph the conditions and conflicts in the fields; already strongly antifascist in Germany, they soon joined others in the American Left. Moving to San Francisco, Hansel and Otto stayed with Dorothea, she recalled, off and on for six months, and connected to other engaged photography colleagues. Taking up the new fast-action Leica camera, they gravitated toward photojournalism and moved to New York in 1937 when Mieth got a staff position at Life, joining a small, elite cadre of photographers that included Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Peter Stackpole, Carl Mydans, and seven others. (They married in a double ceremony in 1940 with Robert Capa and his second wife, Toni Sorel.) The Life job did not last long, as Mieth’s commitment to “social” photography did not fit its politics, and she and Hagel returned to California, bought some property in Santa Rosa, near Jack London’s home, and farmed there for the rest of their lives, committed to a simple, austere life out of both conviction and poverty. They maintained a close friendship with Dorothea, who was particularly supportive when they refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.21
ARTISTS EAGER TO integrate their political convictions with their work and to make that work public gravitated to murals. This required government support. Without it, art remained a luxury article, when it should be a right of the common people, they thought. New Deal relief programs provided an opportunity to get that support. Although the public works programs hired primarily construction workers, the white-collar unemployed also got some jobs: they did cataloging in libraries, inventoried historical records, produced historical roadside markers, promoted public health, supervised playgrounds, and helped teachers by working with special-needs children. (Such jobs were particularly attractive to women, who were otherwise excluded or segregated into sewing sweatshops.) Soon artists got themselves included, and they began to create a new political culture that considered art worthy of public support. The artistic boom of the 1920s meant that even more artists—an estimated 57,000 in the United States—needed help now, and federal programs came to employ thousands of them—estimates range from ten thousand to thirty thousand.22 These included eight Bay Area photographers, not, however, including Lange.23
The very visibility of what visual artists produced added to the political risks of including them in federal programs, however. To conservatives and others who did not appreciate the Keynesian argument for government spending, that artists should be supported by tax money seemed frivolous at the least, and borderline immoral. So getting the federal work programs to employ artists required agitation and lobbying. In San Francisco, Bernard Zakheim and Rexroth initiated a campaign to this end. The collapse of sales and commissions and the drying up of commercial-art jobs submerged their internecine feuds, and even Dixon joined. At a meeting in his studio, the group formulated a mural proposal. Ralph Stackpole “knew someone” in Washington and the artists combined their “small change” to send a telegram about their proposal to his contact. They were flabbergasted to receive a positive reply four days later.24 Stackpole’s acquaintance was Edward Bruce, a Treasury Department administrator and painter, who had been agitating for federally funded projects for artists. Gathering support from other New Deal administrators and, crucially, Eleanor Roosevelt and Elinor Morgenthau, wife of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who was a close friend of FDR, Bruce became director of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in December 1933.
When the old-guard arts patrons learned of the PWAP money, they moved quickly to seize control. Corporate head and Lange customer Herbert Fleishhacker, member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors and president of the Board of Park Commissioners, had been stung by criticism of his “last erection,” the ugly Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. He also faced allegations of conflict of interest, since his company had supplied the cement and concrete for the tower construction. So he corralled the PWAP money, originally sought for Golden Gate Park, to put art work in Coit Tower as a means of justifying its existence.25 Twenty-six artists were commissioned to do Coit murals, including many of Dorothea and Maynard’s friends, but Maynard was not among them. Bitter, he called the finished product “a planless mess.”26 (The reason for Dixon’s exclusion is unclear, and he might have decided, out of pride and pique, not to apply. Yet he frequently applied to other federal arts projects and was several times rejected. The rejections are hard to understand, since Dixon had developed a strong, simplified style, akin to that used for many murals and posters in the New Deal period.)27
The Coit project was a major opportunity—when completed, the Coit paintings would constitute three-quarters of all the murals in California.28 But within six months, Fleishhacker was ready to destroy them, enraged by the insinuation of left-wing politics into several panels.29 Zakheim had painted a library where a man pulled Capital off the shelf; Victor Arnautoff had painted newspaper kiosks where The Masses and The Daily Worker appeared; Clifford Wight’s painting included the hammer and sickle, among other symbols of political systems.30 It is striking that the objectionable depictions on the murals involved specific emblems or names. The overall proletarian imagery raised no hackles, or else those hackled were constrained from protesting. Since only the worst offense—the hammer and sickle symbol—was removed, despite other obviously provocative gestures, the result could hardly have functioned better for the politicized muralists had it been calculated: The explicitly leftist signs and symbols took the heat off the core content of the murals, the working class people who had built California.
Maynard did get a WPA commission to paint the construction of Boulder Dam, and spent nine weeks there.31 Through the eye of a modernist like, say, photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White or filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, the dam construction would have stimulated a visual exaltation of industrial/monumental design. Not through Dixon’s eye: “I decided to make my main theme ‘Pigmy man against everlasting rock. . . . Ultimate futility.’ ” He thought the whole project foolhardy. “The desert will have the last laugh.” He also objected, with his usual sympathy for the little guy, to the exploitation and dangerous conditions: “Boulder City like prison camp; armed guards; company houses and concessions; paying with one hand and taking it back with the other. . . . Exhaustion of men. . . . High average of deaths”—aspects of industrial might that other artists often ignored.32 Dixon’s refusal to celebrate these giant icons of industry—in this case, agricultural industry—expre
ssed his antimodernism as well as his instinct to protect nature, an early environmentalism that influenced Lange and that she acted on in her later photography.
Several artists, including the composer Ernest Bloch, a member of San Francisco’s artistic elite and one of Dorothea’s customers, tried to convince Maynard to take more responsibility for social causes, without success.33 Dorothea managed to cajole him into painting the urban Depression.34 As he had led her into the countryside, now she drew him into the cityscape. His paintings Forgotten Man, No Place to Go, Going Nowhere, and Destination Nowhere show unrelieved gloom: isolated, enervated men, their bodies heavy with fatigue and depression. Their depression, like his, was both external and internal. His asthma was worsening and he was often out of breath when he reached his studio on the top floor of the Monkey Block. He became self-critical: “Like other artists, I had dodged the responsibility of facing social conditions. The depression woke me up. . . .”35 Connoisseurs differ about the quality of these paintings, but in any case he did not continue in that vein. Concluding that the work was false to him, much as Lange had concluded about her photographs of plants, Dixon returned permanently to painting landscape and Indians.36