Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  PAUL TAYLOR ALSO suffered from the convergence of Dorothea’s life-threatening illness and the burial of the New Deal. At times he thought he might lose her, an unbearable idea, which only reinforced his drive to work as a way of managing the worry. He also had superb powers of concentration and a prodigious sense of social responsibility. He would continue to support farmworker causes with words and cash for forty more years, until his death in 1984. In the 1940s, however, as war jobs and the Bracero program suppressed farmworkers’ activism and pushed them off the public agenda, Taylor became a leader on California’s most critical social-environmental issue: water. The 1902 Reclamation Act had authorized the federal government to construct dams, reservoirs, and canals to make arid western lands arable, financed through interest-free loans and other subsidies. The law provided that an individual owner could receive only the water needed to irrigate 160 acres. That proviso had rarely, probably never, been enforced, and its disregard constituted a subsidy of enormous value to California’s big growers. Without federal water projects, there would have been no San Joaquin Valley or Imperial Valley agriculture.

  Taylor, ever on the side of the little guy, thought it a gross injustice that taxpayer-subsidized water furthered corporate agriculture’s dominance. Also concerned with resource conservation, he formed an alliance with Interior Department attorney Arthur “Tex” Goldschmidt, brother of Taylor’s graduate student Walter Goldschmidt. The tenacious Taylor agitated for enforcement of the 160-acre rule for the next forty years. Although right in law, he tended to sidestep the facts that California had never been primarily a family-farming state and that much of the state was too dry to make small farms viable. Yet his die-hard agitation on this issue had the benefit of exposing the power of the big growers.21 His water campaign further antagonized those who already considered him an enemy—agribusiness and their conservative political and academic representatives.

  He annoyed them even more through his activism in reform Democratic politics. After supporting FDR’s son James Roosevelt’s unsuccessful 1950 campaign for governor against Earl Warren, his most intense involvement was with the campaign of a forceful woman, Helen Gahagan Douglas. Glamorous Broadway and Hollywood actress, wife of film star Melvyn Douglas, she had been active in New Deal causes. In 1938 she had visited migrant camps with Lange and Taylor, hosted fund-raisers for farmworkers, and organized a Christmas party for five thousand farmworkers’ children.22 Dorothea photographed her when she was an alternate delegate to the opening UN conference, and the two dynamic women made a quick and enduring connection.23 Paul actively supported her first political venture, a campaign for Congress from California’s Fourteenth Congressional District in 1944; she won and served three terms. In 1950, enraged by what she saw on a tour of water projects with Taylor and Lange, she ran for the Senate, with the 160-acre limit as a major plank in her platform. Taylor functioned as an adviser to that campaign.24 Dorothea and Paul were disgusted by Nixon’s 1950 victorious campaign against her, which relied on the most odious and dishonest McCarthyist smears: Nixon called her a Communist in every way conceivable and at every moment possible (and said very little else), while at the same time smearing her with Hollywood’s licentious reputation—she was, he said, “pink right down to her underwear.” Nixon’s support came particularly from California agribusiness, and Gahagan Douglas’s forthright pro-labor and pro-environmental positions—in other words, her alignment with Paul Taylor’s causes—intensified Associated Farmers’ determination to defeat her at any cost.

  Taylor’s western enemies were among the founders of what we now call McCarthyism. It originated not from the Cold War, but in prewar conservative congressional opposition to the New Deal. It became an institution of state in 1938 when Congressman Martin Dies, Jr., of Texas transformed a House Committee established to investigate the KKK and pro-Nazi activity into a witch-hunt against alleged Communist influence in the New Deal.25 By repeating this claim over and over, the Dies Committee and the FBI helped create a new consensus that socialist and communist ideas were un-American. Their targets took in all of Lange’s employers and government allies—the FSA and other progressive endeavors in the Department of Agriculture; California’s programs of relief, public housing, and minority rights; and the OWI.

  The twirling noose of the anti-Communist frenzy swung closer and closer to Taylor and Lange. In 1943, parrying criticism of his own Nazi sympathies, Dies named thirty-nine federal officials as disloyal and sought to get Congress to stop their paychecks, including Taylor’s close ally Arthur “Tex” Goldschmidt.26 The FBI sought to discredit Taylor himself through invasive investigation and surveillance, interviewing several dozen people, including every employer but also every California enemy of Taylor’s, mainly the big growers.27 The Bureau checked to see that his divorce and remarriage were properly legal and obtained his credit rating—they not only got one from California but went back to Madison, Wisconsin, for a credit report on Taylor as a college student. Searching for a criminal record, an investigator was reduced to reporting a parking violation “in front of home in no parking zone,” Berkeley, 1937, “dismissed without prejudice.”

  The FBI alleged that he was a member of several “un-American” organizations, including the Communist party, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and several groups that probably did not exist, listed because of investigators’ mishearing or their informants’ misunderstanding.28 The charge that Taylor was a Communist is patently absurd, as anyone who worked with him knew, since he was explicitly anti-Communist and argued for socioeconomic reform as a means of preventing or challenging Communists’ appeal. Taylor’s FBI file shows that Associated Farmers and its allies were the source of these allegations.29 Once, Taylor walked into the university on a Saturday and found an FBI man inside his office. Taylor’s cool “Can I help you?” produced no answer—“he wriggles and wriggles and wriggles . . . makes all sorts of crazy apologies.” Anxious to get out, the intruder said that he could see Taylor was busy, to which Taylor wickedly replied that, on the contrary, he had plenty of time.30

  The FBI dossier on Lange, much thinner, consists mainly of copies from Taylor’s and others’ dossiers. She is referred to variously as Doretha, Dorthea, Dot, and Mrs. Taylor. In a guilt-by-association memo that would be comical if it had come from a less powerful source, the FBI implied that the Guggenheim Foundation was disloyal because it had had granted fellowships to Broadway composer Marc Blitzstein, song composer Earl Robinson, and Carey McWilliams, as well as to Lange and Taylor.31 One of the Associated Farmers sources charged that “by adroit use of lighting, composition and subject matter, Mrs. Taylor had conveyed a very dismal and depressing view of exploitation of migratory laborers by large and wealthy agricultural interests.”

  McCarthyism invaded Paul and Dorothea’s lives directly in its campaign to drive New Dealers and leftists out of the universities, an effort particularly strong against the University of California. Associated Farmers helped produce this campaign, too.32 When the state legislature set up a “little Dies committee,” known as the Tenney Committee after its chair, university president Robert Sproul, fearing an attack on his faculty, calculated that a loyalty oath could ward it off.33 In late June 1949, all university employees were ordered to sign an oath that they were not Communists, or face dismissal. (Universities usually impose unpopular decisions during summers, when faculty and students are dispersed and cannot easily organize opposition.) Sproul had miscalculated. A strong network of faculty from all eight campuses refused to sign, protesting this attempt to limit academic freedom and pointing out that they had already all signed oaths of allegiance to state and federal constitutions. Taylor was among them, and his daughter Margot was a member of the student movement supporting them. After a protracted and complex struggle that sapped the energies of hundreds of scholars, a compromise was accepted by almost all, including Taylor; several dozen resisters were fired but ultimately won reinstatement and back pay.

  Thirty year
s later, Paul Taylor still felt guilt about having joined the signers. “Dorothea was going through some of her very difficult months and years in and out of the hospital . . . I would have been out on the street, looking for a job somewhere else . . . Whether I am just hiding behind a woman’s skirts—well, you can put it anyway you like, but that was a factor . . .”34 His metaphor, “hiding behind a woman’s skirts,” suggests not only his need to support Dorothea but also his sense of having been unmanly. His problem, of course, was that either option—giving in or being fired—would have made him unmanly in that cultural moment. Yet in the same interview, he explained his decision in terms of his own political priorities: “. . . it was just not my battle. I choose my battles. I never . . . ‘scattered’ my efforts . . . for all the causes that I believed in. . . . The easiest way for your opponent to undercut you . . . is on his ground rather than on your ground.” This was a lesson he learned in the marines, he said. “I have been unwilling to offer them any openings. . . .”35

  McCarthyist poison soon reached Lange’s photographic community directly. It scored a direct hit on the extraordinary Photo League of New York, which she supported financially and, when in New York, with her time. A proudly left-wing program, inspired by the 1920s German worker photography movement, the League was a grassroots cooperative providing access to photography for the poor and an atelier for already-practicing photographers.36 It operated a photographic school and workshop with great success for fifteen years, training as many as fifteen hundred photographers.37 It bought chemicals in bulk and passed the savings on to individual members, provided darkroom access, loaned and rented out cameras, offered classes for low fees, sponsored lectures and exhibits, and produced a newsletter, Photo Notes, with high-quality articles.38 Paul Strand—Lange’s favorite photographer—exerted the greatest artistic influence on the League, but its prestige was such that virtually every important name in photography was listed as a sponsor, not only those on the Left but also Lange’s friends Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.39 Fund-raising parties featured performances by Zero Mostel, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Carl Reiner, and the Katherine Dunham Dance Company.

  Lange gave a talk at the League in 1939, offering advice on getting work published and critiquing members’ photographs. She endowed a scholarship for a photography student—its first recipient was Lou Stoumen who went on to an Academy Award–winning career. The League mounted a Lange exhibit. She got Aaron Siskind’s “Harlem Document,” a group project documenting black life in Harlem, included in the exhibit curated by Ansel Adams at San Francisco’s World’s Fair.

  Dedicated to democratizing photography and encouraging documentary, and including many Communists, the League was unsurprisingly vulnerable to McCarthyism. At first, when Attorney General Tom Clark listed it as a subversive organization in 1947, artists and photographers rushed to defend it and membership doubled. But in 1949, Angela Calomiris, an FBI informant who had briefly appeared at the League—to get help from Sid Grossman in salvaging poor negatives in order to complete a commercial job she had undertaken—denounced it as a Communist front. She charged that Sid Grossman had tried to recruit her into the Communist party, a dubious allegation, since he barely knew her. Nevertheless, her claim worked not only to smear the Photo League but also to delegitimatize the Left, by implying that the very act of asking someone to join the CP, a legal organization at the time, was treasonous. Conservative journalists such as Westbook Pegler, Walter Winchell, and Fulton Lewis, Jr., repeated denunciations at high volume. Frightened, members resigned, including Ansel Adams, Barbara Morgan, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall.40 Paul Strand, Dorothea Lange, and Edward Weston remained steadfast, but fear of persecution intimidated too many members, and as the McCarthyist repression continued, the League formally folded in 1951—a relic of a bygone, more hopeful age, like Lange herself.

  EDWARD STEICHEN INTENDED his 1955 blockbuster “Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art as resistance to McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the nuclear-arms race. In the massive job of collecting photographs, Lange functioned at first as an associate curator, in substance though not in name.41 The failure of Lange’s influence contributed to a paradox: the exhibit delivered an ambiguous message—preaching international brotherhood but also celebrating the superiority of the American way of life.

  Edward Steichen was in some ways the heir to Stieglitz. Born in Luxembourg, but only eighteen months old when he came with his parents to Michigan, he was both American and cosmopolitan. Mentored by Stieglitz, he became a renaissance photographer, expert in military, advertising, fashion, and glamour as well as art photography. (Some of the best-known photographs of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Loretta Young, Joan Crawford, and Gary Cooper are Steichen’s.) A man of progressive convictions, he curated a thirty-two-page section of FSA photographs for the U.S. Camera Annual of 1939, admiring Lange’s photography in particular. During both world wars, he worked for the military developing aerial photography.

  In 1947, Steichen got the job heading MoMA’s photography department, a contested hiring decision. Many photographers and critics had expected the position to return to Beaumont Newhall, who, like Steichen, had spent the war doing military aerial photography. The museum, opened in 1929, was funded largely by Rockefeller money, and the Newhalls were part of the Rockefeller/MoMA network, close friends of Ansel Adams and his Rockefeller-scion patron, David McAlpin. The Newhalls had become a power in the photography world.42 Their supporters, including Lincoln Kirstein, considered Steichen a sellout to lowbrow and commercial culture.

  During Steichen’s early years at MoMA, the Cold War drew the United States into a real war. The United States intervened in Korea in 1950, ending up facing Chinese troops and suffering severe losses. Nuclear war with the Soviet Union threatened. The McCarthyist hysteria limited antiwar sentiment to a tiny minority, but a somewhat larger public came to support nuclear disarmament. Hoping to build that support and convinced that photography could prove persuasive, Steichen hatched an idea for a photographic exhibition that could simultaneously encourage global peace and bring more people and income to the museum.43 (Ironically, MoMA was at this time accepting covert funding from the CIA to mount exhibitions calculated to make positive propaganda for the U.S. side in the war against communism.)44 Lange shared Steichen’s belief in photography’s progressive persuasive potential, although watching California’s anti-Japanese hysteria had made her understand it as a difficult task. However naïve Steichen’s thought that his exhibit could actually change the world, his hopes were at the heart of what documentary photography has been about. Lange would argue, in fact, that strengthening the public’s visual critical skills was an essential precondition for democracy.45

  Steichen got the title “The Family of Man” from his brother-in-law, poet Carl Sandburg, who had quoted Lincoln’s words in his biography, and Lange loved it. As soon as she heard of the plan, she volunteered to help and began showering Steichen with ideas. He was quick to accept her assistance: “. . . you have been appointed, and have accepted, the western section of the United States . . . jubilantly recorded. . . .”46 In their bantering but serious correspondence, she assumed the same voice she had used with Stryker—flirtatious, devoted, insecure but assertive. Steichen became another father figure. “Ask me to do anything, including the improbable and the impossible, also the unreasonable. . . . Scold, and be in bad temper, if you feel that way.” Later, it was “I am needing to hear from you. . . . Perhaps you are not enthusiastic. Perhaps you are even not approving. I need to know or I am . . . not certain of my ground.”47 She sent photographs, suggestions for finding photographs, and drafts of letters for Steichen to send. She reminded him of what was missing—fear, love, belonging.48 She influenced him to hire the young California photographer Wayne Miller as an assistant; then, concerned about photographers who could not afford materials, she got Miller to obtain a small fund from MoMA to help impoverished photographers submit prints.49

  By now
we recognize her familiar pattern: enthusiasm, more suggestions and more ambitious suggestions than her boss wanted. Miller cautioned Steichen, “I don’t know if you fully realize how completely she has thrown herself into this show. She is not one to be able to do something with ease or moderation. . . . If you don’t utilize her . . . fully . . . you will be having an unhappy Dorothea on your hands.”50 She organized three West Coast meetings to solicit photographs,51 but little that she gathered ended up in the exhibition. Many of the photographers at the meetings resented being asked to relinquish control over photographs to Steichen and having their photographs chosen for “content” rather than sheer artistic quality.52 (Lange, by contrast, was accustomed to such capitulations.) Wayne Miller got most of what was used by leafing through millions of photographs from the files of Life, Magnum, and other large photographic archives, including even Sovfoto. Yet Miller believed that Lange’s concern with the overall “message” brought coherence to the exhibition.53 John Szarkowski, who succeeded Steichen at MoMA, thought the strength of the exhibition resulted from her “insisting that [Steichen] settle for nothing less than a work of vaulting ambition.”54

  “The Family of Man” exhibit opened in 1955 to a slightly improved political atmosphere: McCarthy had overstepped by Red-baiting the U.S. Army, undermining some of his ability to intimidate, while nuclear buildups were raising anxieties about war. The exhibit broke all previous attendance records for art shows. More than 250,000 people saw it in New York, and six editions of the show then circulated to other U.S. cities and thirty-seven countries. The book version, a best-seller, is still in print. But it was panned by many reviewers, and their criticisms reveal how much the popular-front style had lost prestige. Conservative critics such as Hilton Kramer condemned its sentimentality, middlebrow taste and “message” orientation—this was the moment when Abstract Expressionism reigned supreme among the New York literati.55 But Leftist Roland Barthes agreed with Kramer that its “pieties” about the unity of mankind served as “a self-congratulatory means for obscuring the urgency of real problems under a blanket of ideology. . . .”56 Decades later, New Left critics Allan Sekula, Eric Sandeen, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau argued that it presented the liberal face of the Cold War, implicitly endorsing an evolutionary, even teleological story of humanity progressing to its current pinnacle—the American family.57 The overall impact of the exhibit was saccharine, and reactionary in its literal sense of trying to go back into a nostalgic harmonious age that had never existed.