Projects

A Human Face

1. The Farm Security Administration sought to build support for the New Deal in and out of Congress by commissioning photographers to depict the severity of the Depression, its impact upon ordinary people, and the promise of New Deal measures to alleviate the crisis. Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" portrait is perhaps the most famous of the thousands of photographs the Administration commissioned. Gordon Park's "American Gothic," now almost equally famed, was initially suppressed by Roy Stryker who headed the FSA and then the Office of War Information.

• The Migrant Mother image(s) — shot in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Two decades later Lange gave this account:

  I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

  The woman was Florence Owens Thompson. In later years she complained that the photograph "exploited" her. Geoffrey Dunn told her story and that of her children in the San Luis Obispo New Times.

• American Gothic — the title was an ironic reference to the painting of the same name by Grant Wood (All rights reserved by The Art Institute of Chicago and VAGA, New York, NY). The subject was a cleaning woman who worked for the federal government in 1942, Ella Watson. As noted above, Roy Stryker did not much care for the picture. And Parks himself came to view it critically.

  My first photograph of [Watson] was unsubtle. I overdid it and posed her, Grant Wood style, before the American flag, a broom in one hand, a mop in the other, staring straight into the camera. Stryker took one look at it the next day and fell speechless.
  "Well, how do you like it?" I asked eagerly.

  He just smiled and shook his head. "Well?" I insisted.

  "Keep working with her. Let's see what happens," he finally replied. I followed her for nearly a month--into her home, her church, and wherever she went. "You're learning," Stryker admitted when I laid the photographs out before him late one evening. "You're showing you can involve yourself in other people. This woman has done you a great service. I hope you understand this." I did understand.

  . . . .

  That was my first lesson in how to approach a subject, that you didn't have to go in with all horns blasting away.

  Parks wound up taking many pictures of Watson, coming to emphasize her church and family connections. But it was the first image, the one he took with "all horns blasting away" that became an American icon.

The stories of the two pictures raise crucial questions about the use of photography as historical evidence. One is the role of the viewer in determining the meaning of an image. Lange's Migrant Mother became the face of the Dust Bowl evacuees even though she had lived in California for more than a decade and had not experienced the terrible storms. Viewers saw her as beaten down. But she held her family together, and they managed to weather the Depression and share in the wartime and postwar prosperity. Gordon Parks came to share Roy Stryker's view that American Gothic was propagandistic and preachy. Viewers saw what he initially saw, the savage irony of a victim of discrimination standing in front of the American flag and the appropriateness of Parks' claiming that she represented America as faithfully as did Grant Wood's stoic farm folk.

What other questions about the use of photographs as evidence do these images raise?

2) Advertisements for radios — The radio quickly became an integral part of American life. The impact of FDR's fireside chats is one sign of this. So is the enormous popularity of radio personalities like Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Fanny Brice, Edgar Bergen, and their numerous counterparts. At the start of the Depression radios were not considered necessities. And they were expensive. They were sold as large pieces of furniture encased in wood.

Look at some of the ads for radios developed by the J. Walter Thompson agency. How did they seek to sell radios and radio tubes? In the 1920s ads emphasized the entertainment the radio could bring into your living room, the reliability of the product, and the beauty of the radio. How did these points of emphasis change? What might the changes suggest about the impact of the Depression?

3) Dear Mrs. Roosevelt — Although disliked, even hated, in some Republican circles, Eleanor Roosevelt was loved by millions who thought of her as friend, advocate, and protector. People wrote to her in unprecedented numbers and often poured out their stories and those of family members. These letters provide a window into the experiences of ordinary folk as they tried to cope with the Depression and into their sense of connectedness to the New Deal and to the Roosevelts.

How did the writers of these letters describe their relationship to Mrs. Roosevelt? What sorts of confidences did they share? What did they want her to do for them?

A New Deal

1) Life in a Civilian Conservation Corps Camp — One of the measures passed in "the Hundred Days" created the CCC. The program had a special place in FDR's vision of a better America. In his second fireside chat he said of the bills passed:

First, we are giving opportunity of employment to one-quarter of a million of the unemployed, especially the young men who have dependents, to go into the forestry and flood prevention work. This is a big task because it means feeding, clothing and caring for nearly twice as many men as we have in the regular army itself. In creating this civilian conservation corps we are killing two birds with one stone. We are clearly enhancing the value of our natural resources and second, we are relieving an appreciable amount of actual distress. This great group of men have entered upon their work on a purely voluntary basis, no military training is involved and we are conserving not only our natural resources but our human resources. One of the great values to this work is the fact that it is direct and requires the intervention of very little machinery.

The New Deal Network has a collection of materials dealing with African Americans in the CCC. Over 250,000 black men between the ages of 17 and 23 participated over the life of the program. The vast majority worked in segregated camps, a measure of the New Deal's lack of enthusiasm for challenging white racism as well as its determination to improve the lives of black Americans.

You can look at the argument within the administration over integration and over the appointment of black supervisors. Or you might look at daily life in the camps. The photographs are helpful here.

2) The New Deal in Carbon Hill, Alabama — a "photographic document" (1938) by William C. Pryor underwritten by the Works Progress Administration, one of the more controversial New Deal programs of employment. This was one of several such projects funded by the WPA to show the impact of the New Deal on people's lives.

• How did Pryor portray life in Carbon Hill? i.e., what subjects did he choose? what captions did he supply? did he leave anyone or anything out?
• How did the "photographic document" portray the impact of the New Deal?