Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Nineteen-thirties social realism and its respect for working people were simultaneously an international and a nationalist phenomena. In the United States, influenced by both Mexican murals and regionalist Americana, this aesthetic featured bulky-muscled, sweaty workingmen and their earthy female helpmates. In this highly urbanized country, paradoxically, the wide distribution of FSA photographs popularized rural images, and that ruralist version of America then intensified a populist nationalism that, in turn, popularized the style. FSA photography sometimes resembled Soviet socialist realism, with its sturdy peasant women wearing head scarves and Stakhanovite men pouring steel.25 Spinning socialism in a racist direction, the Nazis—who, after all, called themselves “National Socialists”—shared this aesthetic: their art and photography also featured muscular workers and sturdy women, in a confounding convergence of political cultures that seemed antithetical. In other words, the social-realist style arose from both Left and Right, its nationalist and populist content allowing it to cross ideological boundaries.

  American social realism came in several versions. The upbeat, mainstream style, found in post office murals, most resembled the Soviet, signaling confidence that hardworking Americans would overcome all obstacles to restore prosperity and a healthy future for their children. Its emphasis on national unity across class lines paralleled Soviet hammer and sickle ideology, emphasizing the unity of workers and peasants. A more highbrow style, modernist photographic abstractions of large industrial forms, as in the work of Margaret Bourke-White, owed much to the avant-garde art and design of 1920s Soviet Union and Weimar Germany. The American Left version of social realism was, in keeping with Marxist theory, more industrial than rural, and stressed exploitation and suffering, behind which lay the promise of a workers’ uprising. Its images of oppression often appeared in prints, especially woodcuts, reproduced and circulated in magazines, pamphlets, and posters. The FSA version served the agency’s agenda of agrarian reform.

  Lange’s version of social realism stands out, first, in its racial politics. Despite her and Taylor’s decision to feature Okies in the 1935 California reports, her FSA photography featured people of color prominently. Historian Nicholas Natanson calculated that approximately one-third of her photographs showed people of color, a proportion greater than that of any other FSA photographer until Gordon Parks joined the crew.26 The qualities of those images, treating subjects as attractive, intelligent, hardworking, and trustworthy, were as important as their quantity: white people rarely saw respectful images of black or brown people in the mid-twentieth century.

  In the main, all social realists honored workingmen and their families. Lange’s work, however, and that of later FSA photographer Esther Bubley stand out for their gender politics, a refusal to accept the myth that the nuclear family was the only “normal” family form and the muscular man the quintessential worker. Among the migrant farmworkers, communities of interdependence often constituted fractured or extended families and unrelated groups of fellow travelers. Lange photographed so many lone parents with children that we might consider her particularly drawn to such families. Her captions sometimes called attention to nonstandard family forms, such as “Age 70, she came from near Greeley, Nebraska, with sister age 65, nephew age 30, and brother age 68.” Where she did show intact nuclear families among migrant farmworkers, husbands and fathers often appeared weakened, reduced from head-of-family confidence, more fragile than the mothers and wives. This was by no means a “feminist” reading of family scenes, but, rather, an insight into the impact of traumatic insecurity on men; these images contrast with those she made in the Southeast, which feature more stable—though equally poor—sharecropper families. (See chapter 15.) Nor was it an expression of animosity toward men. Lange’s male subjects often ooze sex appeal. None of her photographs is more tender than her many—strikingly many—images of fathers with children.27 (See plate 19.) Her attraction to paternal love may have derived from her own identity as fatherless, but it must be seen also as an openness to the more egalitarian, less conventionally gendered family forms that became more common and more honored later in the century. This this was one of several indications that Lange’s visual sensibility picked up new democratic possibilities that many did not yet sense.

  Her photographs of the handsome homeless could be said to argue a New Deal analysis of the Depression. Refusing to search for the causes of poverty in individual character, the dominant approach several decades previously, New Deal relief rested on the premise that the economic crisis was structural. The economy, not the people, needed moral reform. Because the Depression crisis had thrown so many respectable working- and middle-class people into poverty, it became clear that those who appeared disheveled might well be entirely upright, their economic wretchedness no longer a sign of weak character. To the victims, then, New Deal relief provided no moralizing, only money and jobs.28 To support this policy visually, to subvert centuries of blaming poor people, required showing that they worked hard, maintained good morals, and behaved with restraint. One of Lange’s visual metaphors for this discipline was order, a composition both aesthetically and morally reassuring, achieved through careful, often centered framing of subjects, and the use of landscape or tidy agricultural fields to provide restful background. To counteract the chaos of the migrant camp, she emphasized stable elements, and these were often female-centered: mothers with children (perhaps the most universal symbol of the human order), the repetition of homely tasks—washing, cooking, grooming—despite obstacles.

  12.6. PORTERVILLE, CALIFORNIA, 1936

  Like other 1930s social realists, Lange ennobled, monumentalized, even exalted working people. Her poor people are virtuous and resilient, rarely resentful, never lazy or violent. They evoke respect, as did her 1920s portraits of the rich. Perhaps more important, her images of farmworkers, as those of her studio customers, show individuality and complexity, and this usually saves the photographs from rank sentimentality. The standard adjective applied to her subjects is dignified, but at least equally compelling is the fact that they are interesting. Lange’s desperate farmworkers are simultaneously victimized and vibrant; often sexy—both women and men—vigorous, animated, or contemplative. They may be depressed, but not only depressed. Her subjects sing, play banjos and guitars, dance. The children are excited and curious; the grown-ups laugh. She copied out a song she heard:

  Oh I wisht I was a handsome bitch

  I’d never be pore, and I’d allus be rich

  I’d sleep all day and I’d work all night

  and I’d live in a house with a big red light

  Oh onct a month I’d take a rest

  and drive my customers wild!

  The most destitute women walking the highway could be well dressed, the migrant workers often well groomed even as they slept and ate on the ground. Her subjects are thoughtful and intelligent; they are using intellectual as well as emotional and physical faculties to figure out how to survive.

  Lange sought out mixed emotions, mixed character. Photography “ought to be contradictory,” she maintained.29 Her portraits grip the viewer through their internal tensions, between the disordered lives of their subjects and the integrity and stability of their composition; between their subjects’ deprivation and their richness of personality. However broke and broken, her subjects remain captivating, and capable.30

  In yet another dimension, Lange’s work resembles Soviet socialist realism: its concentration on active labor. Of course many of her finest and most well-known images are portraits of people conversing, resting, thinking, or watching her warily. But others show her attraction to how people work. She saw skill, ingenuity, even creativity in the labor despised by so many: people making a kitchen from a campfire and a bucket; pulling boll weevils off cotton blossoms; picking strawberries with a soft touch so they do not bruise; leaning far off a ladder high in fruit trees while moving heavy citrus fruit into a shoulder bag. Influenced by Maynard Dixon’s attraction to sk
illed physical labor and disdain for paper pushers, by the time she entered the FSA that orientation had become for her habitual.

  There remained a tension between the portraits she could do best and the social context required for the agency’s political agenda: portraiture required close-ups, which often eliminated context. She became adept at portraiture in context, but also at building up the context with captions, which she developed far beyond Stryker’s original instructions. She became the model captioner for other FSA photographers. Explicitly rejecting the notion that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” she was frustrated that exhibits and publications almost never used her captions. She did not want her photographs to be timeless insights into human universals, the icons so many of them have become. “. . . Every photograph . . . belongs in some place, has a place in history—can be fortified by words,” she argued.31 “I’m just trying to find as many ways as I can think of to enrich visible images so they mean more. . . . A purist would just put not a line. . . .32 (Purist was for her a word of opprobrium.) Her captions were substantive, not literary, and they did not repeat information contained in the photograph.33

  Unsurprisingly, her captions owed a lot to Taylor. For example:

  Salinas Valley, California. Feb. 1939. Large-scale commercial agriculture. This single California County (Monterey) shipped 20,096 carlots of lettuce in 1934, or 45% of all US carlot shipments. . . . Production of lettuce is largely in the hands of a comparatively small number of grower-shippers. . . . Labor is principally Mexican and Filipino in the fields, and white American in the packing sheds.34

  Or:

  Kern County, November 1938. Night street meeting of cotton strikers near end of defeated strike. Strikers receive 75 cents per 100 lbs.; demanded $1. In 1910 cotton growers in Imperial County advertised for pickers in the Southwest to come to Imperial Valley to pick for $1 per 100 lbs.35

  AS LANGE BEGAN her FSA work in 1935, the California agricultural labor market was being reconstructed by the “dust bowl” immigration of “Okies” and the deportation of Mexicans. Actually, the drought refugees were not mostly from Oklahoma, but from a number of plains states. What made them “Okies” was their whiteness, as distinct from the customary farmworkers. Their mass migration westward agitated California’s politics in contradictory ways. Their whiteness made their sufferings more shocking to the elite. Both political sides—conservative growers and liberal reformers—virtually erased from public discussion the equally suffering Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian agricultural laborers. At the same time, the “Okie” label became so pejorative that it threatened their whiteness. They were so “low-grade” that in the estimation of many white Californians, they seemed a different race. The farmworkers’ roadside camps were often called “jungles,” a word later applied pejoratively to black urban neighborhoods.

  Before the “Okie” migration, growers had argued that white people simply would not do the backbreaking labor that Mexicans and other nonwhite people would. The Depression then showed the growers that white people would do that work.36

  Having learned that lesson, the growers hoped that the so-called Okies would provide a less volatile labor force, in contrast to the strike-prone Mexican and Filipino farmworkers.37 But the Okies presented another problem—they were not planning to return to the plains states. Many Mexicans did their employers the favor of “disappearing” to Mexico when there was no work. Many lived fully binational lives, trying to earn money in the United States that could create economic betterment for their families in Mexico. As Taylor and Lange were among the first to discover, the Okies, by contrast, were refugees who could not return to their homeland, convinced that the land they had fled could not be recovered for farming by small farmers with no resources. They had no choice:

  Makin a livin

  even this kind of a livin

  beats starvin to death.

  Back there we like to starve to death.

  They aimed to resettle permanently and to own land. “They would squat . . . and sift the dirt in their hands and say, ‘All we want is a little bit . . . of this good dirt.’ They’d never seen such soil . . . such fruit . . . such magnificent abundance pouring out of the land. . . .”

  Okies were privileged workers in California agribusiness, receiving higher wages and better jobs. Filipinos could get jobs in asparagus and lettuce, but not peas, for example, and the crops you picked made a considerable difference in earnings.38 Okies frequently asserted their white supremacy to Lange: “You turn over everything to the sheenies—” But their race talk, like all race talk, expressed a complex variety of relationships. Sometimes they were expressing class anger in racialized terms: “A white man that will work for the wages a farmer can pay is worse than a nigger.” Most often it was a complaint about the erosion of their status: “We did live like white people.” “We ain’t no paupers. We hold ourselves to be white folks.” They were asserting self-respect and demanding respect from others, albeit through invidious comparison to people of color. They had few other ways to argue for respect. Their understanding of “white,” in a vocabulary recognized throughout the United States, was not merely colloquial but functional. It set up whiteness as an ideology, a fantasy that mythologized poor whites’ commonality with men of power, an identity that worked to assuage the insults of poverty, illiteracy, and political weakness. Their words rang of injured pride and rage at the undeserved misery in which they were living.

  New Deal progressives like Lange and Taylor believed they could not afford not to exploit racialized sympathy for the Okies as a means of mobilizing support for better treatment of farmworkers in general. Taylor wrote, “It should be understood that with this new race, the old methods of repression, starvation wages, of jailing and intimidation are not going to work. These are Americans.”39 Such talk confirmed the idea that Mexican Californians were aliens. One white migrant told Lange:

  Tain’t hardly fair.

  They holler that we ain’t citizens

  but their fruit would rot

  if we didn’t come.

  He was right that they were being effectively deprived of citizenship. Okies were rarely treated as badly as people of color, but their rights were routinely violated. NO MEXICANS OR OKIES signs appeared on many establishments. Not only the private sector but even government denied them the entitlements of citizenship. All were discouraged from sending their children to schools, using local hospitals, or exercising rights to old-age assistance or general relief. Children’s protective service agencies ignored them. They were disfranchised and unprotected by protective labor legislation. They were denied many federal citizenship rights as well: no workman’s compensation, no Social Security old-age pensions. Just about the only New Deal program to treat farmworkers as citizens was emergency relief, and despite federal policy, local relief administration often rejected farmworker applicants. As one migrant said to Lange:

  Now I want to ask you a question

  Can you tell me whose entitled

  to this relief and why —

  It’s broke me up — I used to have furniture

  The FSA’s attempts to bring farmworkers into citizenship enraged the growers. As a local FSA staff member recalled, the FSA “was probably the most unpopular organization that Washington could have possibly sent out here.”40 Growers charged that “California would have no migrant problem if it were not for the activities of the Farm Security Administration.”41 Growers’ economic power and control over state and local officials enabled them to resist or scuttle FSA initiatives. Watching the growers block the camp program was a political education for Lange. If she had not previously understood their power, she did now. She wrote to Stryker, “. . . what goes on in the Imperial Valley is beyond belief . . . [the area] has a social structure all its own. . . . Down there if they don’t like you they shoot you . . . beat you up and throw you in a ditch. . . .” She informed Stryker that she would not travel alone there.42

  You might
think that the growers would have welcomed the FSA camp program. It subsidized them by assuming some of the costs of maintaining their labor force. But their fears of farmworker unionization dominated. Since they saw any refusal to work for any wage offered as evidence of Red influence, they argued that the camps would serve as breeding grounds for communism, by allowing organizers to hold meetings, recruit the allegedly simple migrants, and create conspiracies. In general, the improved standards of the federal camps would make workers too demanding.43

  The growers were right that better facilities elevated farmworkers’ sense of what they deserved, for the FSA camps seemed to them like paradise. The typical camp provided metal shelters or tent platforms arranged around utility buildings. Clean water came out of numerous outdoor faucets; the central buildings featured flush toilets, hot and cold running water, showers, and laundry and ironing rooms. There were garbage cans. The facilities that created the greatest delight were the baths and showers. When someone noted that one new arrival took three baths in one day, the farmworker replied, “If you had had to go without a bath as long as I have . . .” A local FSA employee reported that a woman who had just arrived in a camp “stood under the shower all afternoon, crying, drying herself, and going back into the shower. . . .”44 The camps operated day-care centers, infirmaries, and first-aid centers, garages and workshops with tools and, often, skilled mechanics. Families typically paid ten cents a day and were required to contribute two hours work a week.45 The camps were far from luxurious and sometimes ill-conceived, as in Arizona, where the FSA built prefabricated houses of metal that become hot as ovens.46 They offered little privacy and supplied no food, but compared to the grower camps or the roadside, they were high civilization.47