Dorothea Lange Read online

  The growers were also right that the camps made it easier for farmworkers to act collectively. Campers elected governing committees that established and enforced rules. They planted cooperative gardens, held classes, published newsletters.48 Above all, they traded information, grievances, and gossip. The camps functioned in some ways as citizenship schools, analogous to those created by the civil rights movement twenty-five years later.49 Had there been many more FSA camps, they could conceivably have changed California’s politics and power structure. Arvin camp manager Tom Collins believed that the camps led many residents to register and vote in state and national elections. He called his job the “ ‘repatriation of American exiles,’ ” meaning exiles from the nation, from citizenship.50

  The word citizenship does not appear in Lange’s captions, but the concept directed her images and captions nevertheless. Her respectful portraits of farmworkers showed them to be thoughtful, hardworking, responsible—visually demonstrating their citizenly capacity. When she could, she used words to this end as well, captioning one portrait of father and baby “Future voter & his Mexican father.” She copied the words of a female farmworker: “I want to go back to Mexico but my children say, No we all born here we belong in this country. We don’t go.”51 Had the photographs been available to their subjects—lacking any control over her work, Lange had no way of sharing the pictures with her subjects—they might have helped construct as well as represent citizenship. Lange’s was not just a legal but a stronger, more demanding meaning of citizenship: active participation in self-government. So she was particularly interested in the governance of the FSA camps. Her pictures focused not only on camp facilities but also on bulletin boards, sewing clubs, and camp council meetings, representing them as exercises of citizenship. She made extensive notes on the proceedings of such a meeting and captioned the matching pictures, “the beginnings of democracy.”52

  12.7. SOUTHERN SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, 1936

  The growers’ charge that the camps offered a “harbor for agitators” was also true to an extent.53 Communists did indeed try to recruit among farmworkers, although not all the Communists were outsiders and not all the agitators were Communists. The Communist-led union UCAPAWA (United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America) established regional headquarters in at least one FSA camp. Carey McWilliams even saw the camps as an “initial step toward a collective agricultural economy.” 54 But the majority of camp residents were more depressed than furious, suspicious of collective action and uncomfortable with the rhetoric of class conflict. Besides, their patriotism tended toward racism. Okie political culture differed in these respects from that of Mexicans, and the union organizers had overestimated Okie potential for collective protest.55

  Meanwhile, the FSA Left had the opposite fears—that the camps not only subsidized employers but could serve to police workers. Fred Soule of the California FSA complained about “thoroughly-policed, thoroughly-regimented camps . . . and the death of the democratic, cooperative, morale-lifting and self-guiding spirit. . . .” Lange also perceived dangers, as in her take on Tom Collins: “a slim, dark, wiry, nervous fellow . . . intensely close to the people, and it got so when he hoisted the American flag over that camp every morning it was his camp and he protected it from the outside world and he was just master of it, although he was dedicated to the benefit of the people. It was one of the most curious combinations. . . .” Paul Taylor feared that the camps would “freeze” the migrants as an “army of cheap and plentiful labor. . . .”56 The farmworkers understood this:

  I’m not a kickin’.

  I’m being tuk care of

  but if I should live to be a hundred, this way,

  I’m not getting ahead noways.

  But Taylor would not ignore immediate sufferings for the sake of a long-term, and radical, agenda. Besides, the Left critics had no alternative to offer.

  Taylor found intolerable, however, the camps’ racial discrimination: almost all took in only whites. His protests failed. Even the mythologized Tom Collins, role model for the camp director in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, turned away blacks. The segregation was illegal, but tolerating it was Department of Agriculture policy. People of color knew it and did not try to get in to the camps. Threat of deportation made Mexicans fearful of encountering authorities of any kind. The whites-only policy was enforced not only from the top but also from the bottom—by residents. The all-white Arvin camp council voted that “Negroes, Mexicans, and Filipinos be placed in a separate unit”—which did not exist.57 There is bitter irony here, because the impetus for the camps came from Mexican and Filipino strikes, but the program they won by their activism was closed to them.

  Always hoping for incremental improvement, Taylor would not criticize the FSA camps publicly, not even their inadequate numbers. Even Survey Graphic, for which Taylor was a regular writer, found his article on the camps “superficial and too rosy—a look at a few small spots where a little something has been done; but it disregards the big problem . . . at no points takes up the criticisms of the RA. . . .”58 Taylor revised his piece and the magazine published it, but it still dodged the large questions.

  Lange’s photographs similarly flattered the camps. This perspective was an occupational hazard among government insiders trying to create reforms against powerful interests: They had to work so hard to put small programs in place that they became proud of limited, even drop-in-the-bucket achievements, and pushed the overall failure out of mind.59 On the other hand, the pride and optimism that led to the fantasy that he was making a dent was also what kept Taylor going, and he supported farmworkers until the day he died. Of course he was frustrated, writing in an emotional tone unusual for him, “At times one is fairly heartsick.”60 But had he continually reminded himself how slim were his chances of success, he might well have quit.

  Lange was less patient. Always “emotional,” as critics have called her, she was also more introspective and self-critical than Taylor. She rarely dodged big questions or settled for fractional gains. Blaming herself for imperfect photography expanded to blaming herself for photography not strong enough to change a policy. Her appraisal of what determined the quality of her photography changed as her photographic wisdom grew. In 1936, she felt emotionality as a negative: “I make the most mistakes on subject matter that I get excited about and enthusiastic. In other words, the worse the work, the richer the material was.”61 In later years, she came to think the opposite: that her best work arose from her deepest feelings.

  But Paul’s concrete policy goals never displaced her own photographic ones. As she moved irrevocably into documentary, her primary commitment to photography grew. What drove her and made her most excited was the challenge to make photography maximally revealing—to show truths not evident to the superficial eye, ear, or mind.

  To her, the camps not only provided shelter but prefigured the freedom that was her artistic as well as social ideal. While her 1920s bohemian sensibility imagined freedom as absence of restriction, now she understood that government might have to act to nurture freedom. To her, the FSA camp project had a utopian dimension. As scholar Carol Shloss put it, “. . . in a world where the state has become a private police state, the only freedom is to be found in enclosure, in space that protects people from the vigilance of those who want to frighten them into quietness and submission.”62 There could be no freedom without a home, Lange perceived, without a place of mutual respect, of stability, even a step toward rootedness, for people shattered by insecurity. The experience of the homelessness of migrant workers gave deeper emotional resonance to an assignment she used later as a teacher, to photograph “where you live.” Even a temporary moorage could reduce anxiety and raise the quality of living above mere survival.

  Women’s mental health in particular required a minimum of domestic order. That the camps provided a bit of decency—showers, toilets, laundry rooms—reverberated with Lange’s visceral love of homemaking. Her own
itinerancy, however privileged her conditions in comparison with those of her subjects, intensified her commitment to the FSA camps. Never a feminist in the sense of challenging gender, she believed that women were meant to mother and to make homes. “I hope through these pictures to express or to delineate or to reveal my love for women and their function,” she said. “Not only my love for women but my respect for their function. . . .”63

  An aroma of rescue mission in Lange’s and Taylor’s visions of the camps evokes the question, did they see themselves as saviors of the farmworkers. Probably, but not in a simple way, because they understood that the camps functioned in part as a pacification program, responding to farmworkers’ strikes by providing temporary aid, as opposed to higher wages and union bargaining power. As a middle-class urbanite photographing the uneducated, often darker-skinned rural poor, often in the company of an academic who wrote about the poor, was Lange like an anthropologist studying natives in their “primitive” society? Her “invisibility” trick, her skilled “palaver,” may well have increased the inequality of the transaction. Did some viewers find her images titillating? These problems are not easily avoided. Lange knew that good documentary requires both intrusiveness and emotional distance. She also knew that her photographs often elicited outpourings of charity. To condemn documentary photography on account of its inequality is to say that no privileged person can ever help others less fortunate through creative work. And that is patently untrue.

  Lange’s and Taylor’s work contributed to at least one major political development. Lange’s sympathetic photographs of farmworkers, along with the growers’ arrogance, built public condemnation of big-grower rule in California. This public opinion contributed to the election of progressive Democrat Culbert Olson as governor in 1939 (over notoriously antilabor incumbent Frank Merriam), which delighted Taylor and Lange.

  OVERT CLASS CONFLICT in California’s vast plantations, however, threatened to rip apart Lange’s stitching together of objective reporting and propagandistic advocacy. After a relatively peaceful 1935, Lange began to experience agricultural strikes firsthand and up close. She was not assigned to cover them, but she wanted to, felt she needed to.

  In June 1936, 2,500 Mexican citrus workers in the Imperial Valley walked out when they heard that the growers had just received a two-million-dollar cut in freight rates. Strikers beat up strikebreakers and growers responded with armed warfare. Orange County was in a “state of siege,” with four hundred armed guards, commanded by former “football heroes” from USC, ordered by the sheriff to shoot to kill. Two hundred workers were arrested and locked into a stockade built by the growers; food trucks sent by strike sympathizers in Los Angeles were hijacked and dumped.64

  Afraid to venture into the Imperial Valley, Lange thought she could photograph a strike in Salinas, “salad bowl of the world,” which supplied 90 percent of the nation’s lettuce. The sheriff and police chief there literally abdicated to Associated Farmers, which established a general staff to run the battle, swearing in 2,500 of their supporters as deputies. This army of “clerks, service station operators, shopkeepers,” in John Steinbeck’s words, “dopes and suckers” of the big growers, arrested hundreds of farmworkers, forcibly stopped picketing, and brought in strikebreakers.65 In Salinas, too, the growers built a stockade in advance of the strike. Carey McWilliams wrote, “I came across a strange sight . . . a concentration camp protected by barbed wire fencing, strong gates, and sentry posts or towers. . . . One might say the camp symbolizes the prevailing model of labor relations in shipper-grower circles. . . .”66 When local officials raised questions, the growers reassured them: “but of course we won’t put white men in it, just Filipinos.”67 The growers’ strategy of segregating workers by race was effective, and the resultant disunity made strikers unable to resist the violence directed against them. Once again, Lange drew back from this violence.

  Two years later, in 1938, she did try to cover a conflict in cotton, by now California’s leading crop.68 Associated Farmers threatened retaliation against any grower who offered wage concessions, and refused to accept Department of Labor mediation. There were too many hungry migrants to prevent strikebreaking, and the strike collapsed.69 In a letter to Stryker explaining why she could not photograph what was happening, Lange wrote in a distraught tone, “The tail-end of a long heart-breaking strike, unsuccessful . . .”; since there was no one in the fields except “strike breakers . . . it was too dangerous to go. . . .”70

  As in San Francisco in 1934, Lange’s attempts to document social conflict consistently failed.71 Her few photographs of strikes lacked intensity and provided little information. Her problem was partly inherent in war photography, summarized by Robert Capa as, “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Lange could not get close enough—it was dangerous to do so, neither side trusted her, and she did not move quickly. For strikers, the very existence of photographs was dangerous and could lead, at the least, to being blacklisted out of work. Strike photographs by her more adventurous young friend Otto Hagel were not much better. Lange’s photographic temperament, however, suggests that she had no affinity for overt conflict, let alone violence. She raged at the growers, of course: The inequalities were so great, the methods used against the workers so violent and unfair, the power concentrated in the hands of the growers so overwhelming. Her photographs, however, wept more than they raged.

  13

  Migrant Mother

  It is fitting that Lange’s most famous photograph, one of America’s most famous photographs, showed a drawn, hungry farmworker mother of extraordinary beauty. (See page xii.) This was Lange’s signature: beauty in expected places. Yet this specific picture, like White Angel Breadline (see chapter 6), was almost accidental, its creation an exception to everything we know about Lange’s usual practice.

  Florence Thompson, the subject of Migrant Mother, as the photograph has become known, was an Okie, but she was a Native American Okie, born in 1903 in a Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma—in a tepee, she reported.1 Both her biological parents were Cherokee, but her father, Jackson Christie, abandoned her mother before Florence was born. Her mother then married Charles Akman, a Choctaw, whom Florence came to regard as her real father, and they settled on a farm near Tahlequah, Oklahoma. At age seventeen, Florence married Cleo Owens, and a few years later the young family moved to California, where her husband worked in sawmills and fields in Porterville, Oroville, and Merced Falls. He died in 1931, leaving her with five children, and pregnant with her sixth. She worked in the fields by day and as a waitress by night, and in 1933, she became pregnant again, this time by a prosperous Oroville businessman. Fearful of having this illegitimate child taken from her by welfare authorities, she returned to her parents in Oklahoma to give birth, but in 1934, the whole extended family moved to Shafter, in California’s Central Valley. Florence worked in the fields, from Redding in the north to the Imperial Valley in the south. There she entered a relationship with James Hill, with whom she had four more children as they followed the crops. When Lange saw her, Hill and the boys were off trying to get the family car fixed.

  Lange usually had an assistant with her and worked on a schedule; she made this photograph alone and she almost passed up the opportunity.2 She was driving north on U.S. 101 on a cold and miserable rainy day in February 1936, returning from a month of working on the road alone. She was exhausted, “worked out,” and eager to get home to her family, figuring on seven more hours of driving. About two hours beyond Santa Barbara, near the small town of Nipomo, she saw a small hand-lettered sign, pea-pickers camp. (Nipomo is in the coastal foothills, an area less hot and more rainy than the Central Valley, so cool-weather crops could be grown there.) She ignored the sign and kept on driving for twenty miles, almost to San Luis Obispo, but something kept pulling her back. She conducted, she recalled, an argument with herself:

  Dorothea, how about that camp back there?

  What is the situation back there?


  Nobody could ask this of you, now could they? . . .

  Haven’t you plenty of negatives already on this subject? Isn’t this just one more of the same?

  Besides, if you take a camera out in this rain, you’re just asking for trouble.

  The chance nature of this photograph, however, resulted from the kind of luck that comes only with years of practice. The atypical was conditioned by the habitual. Lange’s fleeting glance caught something important because her eye was so trained. Then a second part of her photographic discipline took over: a sense of responsibility—to document conditions and seize visual opportunity. She turned around and drove back—like a “homing pigeon,” she recalled.3

  Arriving back at the camp, she learned that a freak cold snap had killed the peas, so there was no work. As Thompson’s grandson recounted later, retelling the story he had heard so often from his grandmother, “The look of hunger was already in the camp; within a week death would be there too. First, the very young, and the very old. Soon the locals would descend on the camp, arresting some, beating others, but scattering all to the four winds.” Lange saw a lean-to of torn canvas stretched from two short stakes in back to two higher stakes in front, the stakes held by ropes pegged into the ground. The only furniture visible in it was a suitcase with an empty pie plate resting on it and a small open trunk. Inside was a family group: a mother with a baby at her breast, two very young children, and a sullen teenage girl. Something about them attracted Lange. Very tired, she abbreviated her usual conversation with subjects. She learned that the mother was thirty-two, that the family had been living on frozen vegetables stolen from the surrounding fields and on birds that the children killed—and that 2,500 people in this camp were in similar desperate circumstances.