Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  22.7. OAKLAND, 1957

  22.8. BERKELEY, 1957

  She could not get back to the San Francisco she had loved thirty years previously. She had changed, and was no longer a carefree bohemian, no longer connected to the city’s counterculture. So had the city changed, its population having grown by 50 percent, tourists forming a higher proportion of its occupants on any given day, its flavor increasingly corporate. Lange was no longer a San Franciscan, but her friends who remained San Franciscans did not live in the city she remembered, either.

  22.9. WINTERS, CALIFORNIA, 1952

  IN 1957, DOROTHEA gained a restorative site of delight and contentment— a cabin on the ocean in Marin County. For Lange, it became more than a retreat; it was a veritable idyll. She liked to watch and listen to the water, to study the life in the tide pools, and to photograph there. She and Paul went there many weekends, often with a few grandchildren—it was too small for the whole extended family to sleep there—sometimes with friends. The cabin, called Steep Ravine for its location, came to stand for freedom.

  Throughout the 1950s, both at the cabin and in the Euclid Street backyard, Lange made photographs of her domestic surroundings and of her extended family, which had now multiplied. She made numerous still lifes. That of her kitchen recapitulates the migrant farmworker’s kitchen (see plate 13), a testimonial to women’s work and pleasures and reassertion of sisterhood among women. Many photographs of her garden speak of another source of work and pleasure. She made loving fun of Paul and expressed equally loving sympathy for Helen Dixon, John’s wife, during her second pregnancy. This new photography was simultaneously an appreciation of family, a withdrawal from travel, and an artistic challenge—to turn family snapshots into photography that could communicate far beyond family. It would become her final project, but another adventure would intervene first. She would finally make the trip around the world that she and Fronsie had dreamed up in 1918.

  22.10. WINTERS, CALIFORNIA, 1955

  22.11. PAUL TAYLOR, BERKELEY, 1957

  23

  Diplomat’s Wife

  For several decades Paul Taylor had configured his work whenever possible to join Lange in her projects. That pattern reversed starting in 1958. Taylor worked as a consultant on agrarian reform in the underdeveloped world from 1952 through 1967 and she accompanied him on three of these jobs, spending many months abroad.1 On these trips she was no longer a coworker, but a wife. Taylor was greeted and escorted by government officials, translators always at his side. He took her along to official dinners and tours when he could. Lange worked at photography on her own, walking the streets when that was possible and otherwise riding in a taxi or with a chauffeur, but she could not speak the languages, could not understand the cultures, and did not know the rules of safety or courtesy. Had Lange taken these trips at a younger age, or had she been a healthy sixty-year-old, she might have made these travels more productive despite the obstacles. Her photography was enriched and diversified by new visual influences. The exquisite design sensibility of some Asian cultures, the communal quality of village life, the beauty of the farms and farm homes, the arduous labor of peasants, the frequent subordination or even invisibility of women, the luxury of the ruling elites—having seen these, she saw America anew. As it was, however, although she produced some stunning photography, her body of work from these trips was not comparable to her U.S. photography; and the travels probably worsened her health.

  To family and closest friends, Dorothea’s assertiveness and Paul’s devotion suggested that he was the one who loved more, who shaped his life to fit hers. No one reading her travel journal could be so sure of that. Weak, in chronic pain and enduring frequent major health crises, she would, on balance, have preferred to stay home. She had many reasons: She wondered if she could photograph in strange, underdeveloped places. Her garden had never been lovelier, a quiet life never more desirable. Her darkroom work went slowly and she had backed-up demand for exhibition prints. Above all, she had five grandchildren nearby. “Gregor will be 6 years old on Monday! No teeth in front. Dee in the 1st grade. Leslie can tell wonderful fairy stories, with all shades of expression . . . Andrew can sing and Paulie just smiles and smiles.”2 Aside from photography, the grandchildren were her greatest source of pleasure, especially because with them she felt she could repair her maternal history. (She would miss major family events while she was gone: Two more grandchildren, Lisa and Seth, were born. John and Helen decided to move back to Berkeley and live temporarily in her studio until they found something better, a move that brought three of the grandchildren right next door.)

  Lange consulted her doctor, quite possibly hoping he would prohibit the trip, but instead he said, “What’s the difference whether you die here or there? Let’s go.”3 And there was an attraction: she had been outside the United States only once, to Ireland and England, and her youthful dream of going around the world had been halted by a San Francisco pickpocket.

  Paul pitched the 1958 trip as a grand adventure—eight months, twelve countries. He “eased” her into these trips, she recalled; disavowing any desire to pressure her, he would let her know how sad and lonely he would be without her, then add that he had “just left some [travel] material on your desk for you . . . to look at when you have time.”4 Once she seemed to agree, he would leave all the trip preparations to her because, as she put it, “my liege is entirely absorbed in water and power.”5

  Her travel journal shows a side of Paul Taylor that was previously only visible to the immediate family. He would not be distracted from his work. Yes, he adored Dorothea; no one revered her genius more. But he could put her needs out of his mind when immersed in the issues he cared about. Like all love, Taylor’s was partly selfish: he wanted her with him. She knew this: “. . . in some peculiar fashion [he] is ruthless and non-comprehending. Part of me he banishes. . . . I plead, but he cannot and will not change. I must give, and do.”6 She was repeating what she criticized herself for doing to and for Maynard: “I should have been a more critical and less agreeable wife.”7 These trips expose Dorothea’s controllingness to a different light, showing it to be entirely compatible with willingness to defer, even sacrifice, on matters important to her husband.

  So she spent many months between 1958 and 1963 on long and exhausting trips, despite weakness and pain, because he wanted her company. She packed and repacked dozens of times; spent days alone in hotel rooms, writing hundreds of postcards and letters; sat through official dinners that she could not eat; and engaged enthusiastically in tourism and shopping with Paul. By contrast, the foreign work represented a new career for Paul Taylor and it energized him. As Dorothea weakened, he got a second wind. Yet this second career, ultimately, smashed his aspirations once again. Having lived through the defeat of an agricultural New Deal in the States, he then relived that defeat abroad. Lange, no longer invested in government work, but also emotionally braver, recognized this first and more unsparingly.

  FOR TAYLOR, THESE foreign consultantships continued his New Deal work. He was among a number of Department of Agriculture people who began to work abroad as New Deal programs shut down, and some of them, progressives like Taylor, wanted to foster rural democracy abroad. They perceived that the huge inequalities in landowning in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Pakistan stood in the way of political democracy and freedom. In the end, their advocacy of land reform stalled as badly in the Third World as it had in the United States, stymied by the Cold War and the American government’s determination to protect its anti-Communist allies no matter how corrupt, brutal, and antidemocratic. Paul Taylor’s appraisal was less blunt, in part because he enjoyed the work. But there is plenty of evidence of his frustration, and his denial of the overall futility of what he did was like that of a soldier unable to acknowledge that he had sacrificed for a futile and unjust war. Besides, Taylor was a never-say-die activist, who campaigned for agricultural democratization to the end of his life, in 1984, and never quit believ
ing that the United States could help poor countries if its foreign policy were only a bit smarter.

  That Taylor was working for the State Department even as the FBI was investigating him for disloyalty was not an unusual contradiction in American Cold War politics. Many in Washington knew him to be staunchly anti-Communist, arguing for land reform and democratic participation as the only way to stop Communism. In this perspective, he was a Cold War liberal, never questioning the need to check Soviet influence. But liberal opposition to Communist authoritarianism varied, and Taylor, unregenerate New Dealer, valued economic and social democracy as much as political freedom. In fact, he believed that without that democracy, political freedom was uncertain, if not impossible. He had seen that unrestrained corporate power threatened democracy and civil liberties. When critics of the big growers in California compared their rule to that of fascism, he listened, even if he did not use that word himself.

  What Taylor wanted for the United States came to be called land reform (or, more broadly, agrarian reform) when it was prescribed for the Third World. It included not just redistribution of land but also credit for small farmers, rent controls for tenant farmers, higher wages for landless farmworkers. His international agenda flowed from his commitment to small farms as part of the ground of American democracy. By the early 1950s, the success of Japan’s land reform, designed in part by Taylor’s Ph.D. student William Gilmartin and imposed by the United States after its victory in World War II, made it seem a promising strategy for other countries where the United States had economic or strategic interests.8 His foreign consultantships connected him to old allies, including Wolf Ladejinsky, a former McCarthy victim now working for U.S. AID in Vietnam.9

  Agrarian reform was to be accompanied by “community development.” For Taylor, this meant popular participation in decision making, a radical democratic idea pioneered by the settlement-house movement and continued later by the civil rights and farmworker movements. Taylor believed that agrarian reform could be accomplished only as a grassroots movement.10

  This vision did not resemble what the United States actually did. The State Department leadership, concerned to stimulate economic growth so as to lessen the attraction of Communist-promoted radical redistribution, cared little about democratization. It feared not only the Soviet challenge but also liberation movements in the former European colonies, which it believed to be supported by Soviet rubles and Chinese yuan. U.S. foreign aid and technical advice had counterinsurgency as its purpose: lessening the appeal of nationalist and leftist movements. In one country after another, rulers were too dependent on landowners to cross them, even after accepting multiple millions of U.S. dollars supposedly contingent on reforms. The traditional elites of these small countries were more successful in using the United States for maintaining their power and wealth than the United States was in using reform to resist the popular appeal of Communism.

  Taylor wrote report after report on the need for democratic agrarian reform, but his recommendations were never implemented. He tried without success to get aid funds cut when rulers blocked reform.11 The State Department refused to publish the 1967 report it had hired him to prepare, on “Communist Strategy and Tactics Employing Peasant Dissatisfaction. . . .”12 Soon Taylor and the other New Dealers working abroad gave way to a younger generation formed by Cold War thinking, with no experience of the New Deal era.

  In the years since the disastrous U.S. intervention into Vietnam, critical scholars have shown that American expertise functioned more to suppress than to advance democracy. Most blame the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA and, sometimes, the big foundations. Taylor, his thinking formed prior to the Vietnam debacle, would, in retrospect, blame the Department of Agriculture, with which he was, of course, intimately familiar.13 If he was wrong to let the others off the hook, he was calling attention to a neglected dimension of the problem. The Department of Agriculture men were accustomed to representing large farmers for whom mechanization and heavy use of chemicals were cost-effective. They tended to write off peasants who were not immediately convinced to try new methods, and failed, Taylor saw, to understand peasants’ rational reluctance to experiment.14 Agriculture’s Foreign Advisory Service sought to increase productivity as an alternative, rather than a complement, to land reform. It also disdained cooperatives, which could have brought poor farmers economies of scale—though Taylor was skeptical of the department’s view that bigger was always more productive, and instead he favored cooperatives.15 The “green revolution” thus exacerbated inequalities and increased land monopolization, sending hundreds of thousands of ruined peasants to swell the urban shantytowns. Worse than diplomats and soldiers in their disregard for social structure and environmental sustainability, the Department of Agriculture was interested only in modeling short-term costs and yields.16

  Yet Taylor aided these antidemocratic projects. He knew his recommendations to be futile, he knew how corrupt and tyrannical were many of the rulers he encountered, and he knew the power of large plantation owners in agrarian societies. Despite disappointment and frustration, he never refused these consultancies. In the United States, he combined research with advocacy, campaigning even for causes his employers called “lost,” such as better wages and living conditions for farmworkers and the 160-acre water limit.17 He did not attempt this regarding foreign policy, and would have lost his consultant jobs if he had. To do the foreign consulting, he had to resign himself to functioning as a government agent, his usually strong ethical passions muted.

  LANGE, WITH HIGH hopes, packed a great deal of film for the trip. And at their first stop, Tokyo, she was upbeat. She bought a 35-mm camera and experimented with it. She was impressed by Japanese design consciousness, produced and displayed even in manufactured goods: “These department stores [she had just been to Takashimaya] are like museums of contemporary life.” In the Japanese countryside, she saw “the Art of farming . . . the curves and shapes of the fields . . . where the fruit is tied in little bags, on orchard islands” and, of course, the grace of the workers.

  But the second stop, Korea, shook her confidence. She had seen far more poverty than most Americans, but she was not prepared for “Third World” wretchedness. The war that divided the country had ended, but the suffering had not. An orphanage “wrung my heart, turned my stomach, and rocked my complacency. . . . Infants, lying in their dirty boxes, with running sores. . . . Tiny gray-white bundles of sick flesh that I could not bring myself to touch. . . .” She also noticed Korean hostility to mixed-blood, notably Negro-Korean, children. In Vietnam she photographed an American GI with his mixed-race baby, whose future she thought in doubt.18 Yet racist clichés that she would have rejected in her own country appeared in her early observations: “Human life is cheap in Korea. . . .” Speaking of Manila, she wrote, “People look like jungle creatures.”

  However painful the poverty, she wanted to see it, but her handlers struggled to keep her isolated. In Korea “they took us by the back of the neck like puppies and put us out there on the government thing which was like living in the suburbs.” When she walked about on her own, she attracted crowds who, at a minimum, blocked her line of sight and sometimes made her frightened: “a pushing mob of children, and curious adults . . . I am surrounded, my clothes examined, my hair stroked.” She had lost her cloak of invisibility.19 In Asia she could not be the walker in the city she had been in New York and San Francisco.

  As a result, the Asian photographs do not offer the critique found in her travel diary. But her own reluctance also played a part. She had never liked making images of wretchedness or filth, and she did so in the 1930s only because it was her assignment and because she believed it might help her subjects, while here in Asia nothing constructive would have flowed from such images. One has a sense that she was making photographs as a diplomat’s wife, discreet, tactful, deferential.

  She often saw pictures she could not photograph because she was in a moving train or car. “Twice
yesterday I saw what could have been a recording,” she wrote, and her aural rather than visual metaphor conveys her sense that she was blindly reflecting, rather than interpreting, what she saw. She would ask drivers to stop, but they would refuse or pretend not to understand. “I sit in that car, cameras on my lap, and seethe.”

  Repelled by the arrogance and privileges of the Americans and their disrespect for Asians, she picked up visual signs of inequality, such as the bench in front of a PX on which Korean soldiers were not allowed to sit.20 She was disgusted by the behavior of American soldiers with their Korean girlfriends, their radios drowning out even the street hubbub.21 Her greatest discomfort was in Vietnam. Visiting there in the midst of Diem’s repression campaign—a reign of terror in the countryside, where prizes were offered for turning in the names of neighbors and relatives, and where jailing or simply shooting suspected Vietminh sympathizers was commonplace—she called it a police state. She found her handler there obnoxious: “We are in the hands of . . . Sergeant Droopy-drawers, old Redneck, Sergeant Jug-ears, an imperious, egotistical, conceited old Big Game Hunter with a twisted outlook.” Even the circumspect Taylor registered an official complaint about this man, and hoped that their “Vietnamese interpreter could not understand the stream of English talk that this fellow would let loose . . . disparaging the Vietnamese. . . .”22

  23.1. KOREA, 1958

  23.2. EGYPT, 1963

  23.3, PALESTINE, 1958

  From her peripheral perspective on these U.S. aid programs, Dorothea was less likely than Paul to blame only individuals. “There is something here that is at the core, rotten,” she wrote. In Vietnam, she wondered, “. . . if American aid moved out of Asia . . . If they had the courage to stand up to us and deny us our intentions would, in the long run, these countries be in a better position to take their place among nations? Are we weakening them at the source? Are we interrupting the course of their development? . . . We are like a conqueror nation.”