by Linda Gordon
32. These paintings were exhibited at San Francisco’s de Young museum and then sent off to Washington, where they were lost. MD diary; LaVerne Bradley Rollin, typescript memoir of Dixon, 1967, in the author’s possession; Grant Wallace, “Maynard Dixon Biography and Works.”
33. Winona Tomanoczy, “Remembrances of a Friend,” in Maynard Dixon, Images of the Native American (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1981), 81.
34. TH interview with AA, September 15, 1976.
35. Hagerty, Desert Dreams, 206.
36. TH interview with AA, who felt strongly that Dixon’s Depression paintings were inauthentic.
37. MacLeish, quoted in Belisario R. Contreras, Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1983), 170. One hundred and seven federally funded community arts centers served more than eight million adults and children. The Federal Art Project produced gallery tours and traveling exhibits, and allocated funds for long-term displays of artworks in public buildings.
38. William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff, New York Modern: The Arts and the City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 291–92. The rules imposed by the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts led artists to coin the phrase “painting section,” meaning sticking to pleasant and agreeable imagery. Open conflicts were uncommon, usually because artists knew enough to avoid provocative subjects. News of the conflicts that did happen spread quickly and created further self-censorship. Roy Rosenzweig and Barbara Melosh, “Government and the Arts: Voices from the New Deal Era,” Journal of American History 77, no. 2 (1990): 596–608; Catherine Barnett, “The Writing on the Wall,” Art and Antiques (March 1988), 90–99, 124–28.
39. These photographs, in OM, are numbered LNG3305, LNG34021, LNG34008.1.
40. Lester Balog, from the radical New York Photo League, who was temporarily in the West, may have been the organizing force behind the group. Unfortunately, nothing more seems to be known about this exhibit. Barbara Head Millstein and Sarah M. Lowe, Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 35.
41. Doud, DL; Riess, 150.
42. A copy of the poster is in box 21, folder 22, Alexander Meiklejohn Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.
43. Some curators have identified this photograph as May Day 1933, but that is unlikely, because it poured on May Day that year, while in this picture, the day is dry. Another expert dated it 1936. Elsewhere it has been identified as the San Francisco general strike of 1934, but this is also unlikely, because the signs protest Japanese aggression against China (including several signs in Chinese). Lange likely made this picture at a Chinatown demonstration directed specifically at that issue. The photograph appears, for example, in Dorothea Lange, Photographs of a Lifetime (Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1982), dated 1934; Therese Thau Heyman, Sandra S. Phillips, and John Szarkowski, eds., Dorothea Lange: American Photographs (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Chronicle Books (1994), dated 1934; Keith F. Davis, The Photographs of Dorothea Lange (New York: Hallmark Cards, 1995), dated 1933; Mark Durden, Dorothea Lange (New York: Phaidon, 2001), dated 1934.
44. Dock workers were so numerous that two-thirds of the city residents were male and a full one-quarter were male blue-collar workers. Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 84.
45. Paul S. Taylor and Norman Leon Gold, “San Francisco and the General Strike,” Survey Graphic 23, no. 6 (1934): 405 ff.; “Helen Hosmer, A Radical Critic of California Agribusiness in the 1930s,” interview by Randall Jarrell, Santa Cruz, 1992, transcript, UCLA, 72.
46. Wesley M. Burnside, Maynard Dixon: Painter of the West (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1974), 114.
47. Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 26.
48. Dorothea Lange et al., The Thunderbird Remembered: Maynard Dixon, the Man and the Artist (Los Angeles: Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 1994), 56–57.
49. It was this visit that interested Maynard in painting the dam.
50. Lange et al., The Thunderbird Remembered, 61.
51. Riess, 123.
52. This account was taken from Joan Bowly’s diary of the trip, JDC.
53. MD diary.
8. Paul Schuster Taylor, Maverick Economist
1. All biographical material on Taylor, unless otherwise cited, was taken from Riess/PST.
2. Anne Dewees interview with PST, February 17, 1941, RG 83, BAE, NARA; Abraham Hoffman, “Unusual Monument: Paul S. Taylor’s Mexican Labor in the United States Monograph Series,” Pacific Historical Review 45 (1976); 255—70.
3. Paul Schuster Taylor, “Goodby to the Homestead Farm,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1941, 589—97; Richard Stewart Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1966), 113.
4. PST Bancroft, carton 88. In 1959 X-rays showed he still had a long abnormality on the right border of the upper mediastinum; I. Kurita, M.D., to I.C.A., August 3, 1959, in box 29, folder 33, PST Bancroft.
5. Carton 88, folder 19, PST Bancroft.
6. He cherished a rifle and a box of smaller WWI mementos he had brought home with him, and he liked to wear his Purple Heart. All his life, he loved military band music and found John Philip Sousa particularly stirring. Author’s interview with Anne Taylor, April 14, 2004; HM interview with Margot and Don Fanger, January 24, 1999.
7. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 97 ff.
8. He had been interested in cameras as a child, and took one into combat, photographing from his foxhole in the Verdun. He got the idea of using photography in scholarship from UC Berkeley anthropologist Arthur Kroeber, who photographed the Indians he studied.
9. Hoffman, “Unusual Monument,” 264.
10. Since primary elections were ostensibly private affairs, run by political parties, not governments, it was legal to exclude nonwhites. Since the South was a one-party, Democratic region at the time, the primaries determined who held office and the general elections were insignificant.
11. Riess/PST, vol. 1., 17.
12. The Durán letters are in PST Bancroft.
13. Norris, quoted in Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin, Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 51–52.
14. Its holding company, Transamerica, owned more than half a million acres by 1936. Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “An Overview of the History of California Agriculture, Working Paper number 89, Agricultural History Center, University of California, Davis, 1997, 10; Dawson and Brechin, Farewell, Promised Land, 69; Riess/PST, vol. 2, 135.
15. State Relief Administration of California, “Migratory Labor in California,” mimeographed report, 1936, 8. This uneven demand for labor was much greater in California than, for example, in the Southeast, because California’s relative freedom from weeds and pests meant that its farms required less labor before harvest time.
16. Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 7; Richard Steven Street, “Poverty in the Valley of Plenty: The National Farm Labor Union, DiGiorgio Farms, and Suppression of Documentary Photography in California, 1947–66,” Labor History 48, no. 1 (2007): 25–48.
17. Moses S. Musoke and Alan L. Olmstead, “A History of Cotton in California: A Comparative Perspective,” Working Paper number 6, Agricultural History Center, University of California, Davis, 1980, 20.
18. The burden was heavy. Kern County spent $4.3 million for relief in the 1938–1939 fiscal year, while the value of the cotton crop that year was about $5 million. Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 186–87.
19. The system constituted a seasonal taxpayer-funded unemployment insurance: private employers could lay off workers in sla
ck times and let the state pay them a low subsistence, cutting them off when employers wanted help. When the New Deal brought in federal relief, growers fought to continue these cutoffs, because with continuous relief, farmworkers could demand wages at least above relief levels. Linda Gordon, “Shareholders in Relief: The Political Culture of Relief and Public Jobs in the Depression,” Russell Sage Foundation Working Paper number 135, 1998; Martha Gellhorn to Harry Hopkins, November 19, 1934, box 66, Harry L. Hopkins Papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, New York; Wayne Parrish to Harry Hopkins, December 1, 1934, box 65, Harry L. Hopkins Papers.
20. In cherries in 1936, one contractor got 35 to 45 cents a bucket and paid his workers 20 to 30 cents a bucket; his only expense was running a truck to get workers to the fields. Louis Adamic, “Cherries Are Red in San Joaquin,” The Nation, June 27, 1936; comments of Helen Horn, from minutes of Resettlement Administration conference on transients and migratory agricultural labor, San Francisco, December 14, 1936, box 4, folder 21, FSA papers, mss. CR, Bancroft.
21. Riess/PST, vol. 2, 16; “Helen Hosmer, A Radical Critic of California Agribusiness in the 1930s,” interview by Randall Jarrell, Santa Cruz, 1992, transcript, UCLA, 40–42.
22. Lamar B. Jones, “Labor and Management in California Agriculture,” Labor History 11 (1970): 23–40.
23. Quoted in Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (New York: New Press, 2004), 67–69.
24. Leonard Leader, Los Angeles and the Great Depression (New York: Garland, 1991); Ramón D. Chacón, “Labor Unrest and Industrialized Agriculture: The Case of the 1933 San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike,” Social Science Quarterly 65 (1984): 336–53.
25. The 1930 and 1940 U.S. censuses show a 40 percent decrease in the Mexican-origin population. But censuses and legal immigration controls were even less reliable then than now, so these numbers are unreliable. On deportation/repatriation, see Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004); Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans During the Depression (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974); Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers & American Dreams; Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration.
26. Quoted in Jorge L. Chinea, “Ethnic Prejudice and Anti-Immigration Policies in Times of Economic Stress: Mexican Repatriation from the United States, 1929 to 1939,” at http://www.people.memphis.edu/~kenichls/2602MexRepatration.html.
27. Paul Taylor, “Uprisings on the Farms,” Survey Graphic, January 1935; State Relief Administration of California, Migratory Labor in California, Special Surveys and Studies, 1936, 61–62; Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 177; Gilbert G. González, Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1994), 139; Robert W. Cherny, Richard Griswold del Castillo, and Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Competing Visions: A History of California (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 251.
28. Two thousand large farms dominated cotton. Its profitability was so great that growers quadrupled their acreage between 1932 and 1936. James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 25. Strikers were refusing to pick for 60 cents per 100 pounds, especially since they were aware that growers’ profits had been raised by New Deal price guarantees.
29. Clark Kerr, Taylor’s graduate student, later to be chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, described it as “a world of hatred, of exploitation, of ideologies right and left, of the raw power of guns and hunger and damaged crops,” noting how the situation exposed the falsity of the prevailing (among economists) competition model of wages. Clark Kerr report, box 8, PST Bancroft.
30. John Steinbeck, “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” Monterey Trader, April 15, 1938.
31. They advanced the Brentwood Plan, by which law officers would coordinate with AF, giving each worker an identity card, thus enabling the effective blacklisting of union sympathizers. U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Employers’ Associations and Collective Bargaining in California, report no. 398, part 4, 1308–9, 78th Cong., 1st–2nd sess., 1943–1944.
32. New York Times, October 22, 1933.
33. Carey McWilliams, “The Farmers Get Tough,” American Mercury, October 1934, 241–45; Carey McWilliams and Clive Belmont, “Farm Fascism,” Pacific Weekly, April 6, 1936, 181–88; Carey McWilliams, speech in Los Angeles, March 21, 1940, box 14, Carey McWilliams Papers, University of California, Los Angeles; Steinbeck, quoted in Carey McWilliams, “A Man, A Place, and a Time,” American West 7, no. 3 (1970): 63.
34. Taylor had some trouble getting his work published, as the University of California Press committee thought his scholarship was not really economics. Riess/PST vol. 1, 100, 109. Luckily, he had backing from other progressives in the department, including three senior women—Jessica Peixotto, Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong, and Emily Huntington—who worked on issues such as welfare, poverty, and social reform, thus introducing social structure into their analyses (there was no sociology department at this time).
35. Ann Foley Scheuring, “A Learned Profession: A History of Agriculture at the University of California,” Working Paper number 61, Agricultural History Center, University of California, Davis, 1990, 182–211.
36. Making him still more threatening to the agricultural tycoons, Taylor developed collegially supportive connections with reformers and with Mexican scholars, such as Manuel Gamio, Mexico’s most distinguished anthropologist, whose studies of individual Mexican immigrants to the United States formed a companion piece to Taylor’s work, and historian and writer Ernesto Galarza, who wrote about and helped to organize farmworkers.
37. John Kenneth Galbraith, “Berkeley in the Thirties,” in Economics, Peace and Laughter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), repr. in Berkeley: A Literary Tribute, ed. Danielle La France (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1997), 46–47.
38. Correspondence with Monroe Deutsch, October 1933, box 5, folder 7, PST Bancroft.
39. Paul Taylor and Clark Kerr, “Documentary History of the Strike of the Cotton Pickers in California 1933,” Hearings Before a Subcommittee on Education and Labor, U.S. Senate, 76th Cong., 3rd sess., part 54: Agricultural Labor in California; Riess/PST, vol. 2, 1–5; Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 80. The report included photographs that Taylor got from Otto Hagel, a friend of Lange, whom Taylor had not yet met. The desperate situation of farmworkers intensified Taylor’s conviction that he needed the power of photographs to provide evidence and move people to action. Richard Steven Street, Photographing Farmworkers in California (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79.
40. “Intimate Journey: the Autobiography of Katharine Whiteside Taylor,” typescript, author’s possession.
41. Oddly enough, many years later, after the divorce, Katharine reported that E. A. Ross asked her to marry him.
42. HM interviews with Clark Kerr, April 21, 1999, and Greta Mitchell, May 21, 1999.
43. HM interview with Mary Spivey, May 13, 1999. Katharine’s “crushes” included John Haynes Holmes, a prominent Unitarian minister; Paul Douglas, an economist and Quaker who was to become a three-term U.S. senator; and Jaime D’Angulo, an anthropologist who became part of the Carmel artist crowd. At D’Angulo’s rustic “gypsy-like house” there were parties “wild and free beyond anything I had imagined. . . . Much wine . . . very free dancing, and lovemaking to a degree I never dreamed would go on with others present,” Katharine wrote.
44. HM interview with Fangers, January 24, 1999. A friend of Margot’s, Mary Spivey, heard a different version of the story: When Margot was seven, Aunt Ethel gave Kathy and Ross “edelweiss” pins. Margot asked where hers was, and
Ethel said, “Hasn’t anyone told this child?” HM interview with Spivey.
45. HM interviews with Spivey and Margot Fanger.
46. “She had a lifelong yearning for ‘real’ status . . . The yearning was . . . rooted in a basic lack, i.e., she was female. So she tried, time after time, to get it through a prestigious lover.” Margot’s handwritten annotation in her mother’s memoir.
9. The Romance of Love, The Romance of the Cause
1. Van Dyke typescript, “683 Brockhurst,” in Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Papers, box 122, folder 22, GRI; TH interview with Willard Van Dyke, 1977, OM.
2. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 112.
3. The project was funded by the Social Science Research Council and a Rockefeller Grant.
4. Clark Kerr, “Productive Enterprises of the Unemployed” (Ph.D. diss., University of California/Berkeley, 1949); John Curl, History of Work Cooperation in America: Cooperatives, Cooperative Movements, Collectivity and Communalism from Early America to the Present (Berkeley, California: Homeward Press, 1980); John Curl, “Living in the U.X.A.,” at http://www.red-coral.net/UXA.html; Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
5. Van Dyke, “683 Brockhurst.”
6. Riess, 166.
7. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 125.
8. Ibid., 122.
9. Riess, 165–66.
10. Doud, DL.
11. See PST to Tom Blaisdell, Jr. (of the Social Security Board), June 2, 1937, and June 14, 1937, carton 16, folder 13, PST Bancroft; DL to RS, June 30, 1937, RSS mss. Lange scribbled in her notebook, “The West is Being Re-fenced.” Lange’s 1936 notebook is in PST Bancroft.
12. The agency’s name was changed to the Farm Security Administration in 1937 as part of the Bankhead-Jones Act. For simplicity’s sake, and because the photography project continued the same across this administrative change, I refer to the agency as the FSA both before and after 1937.