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Dorothea Lange's Portrait of Utah's Great Depression
Dorothea Lange's Portrait of Utah's Great Depression
By JAMES R. SWENSEN
From its public debut in 1839, the photograph has been an important means by which historians have acquainted the public with the people and landscapes of the past and with the events, both tragic and triumphant, that have shaped our lives. The photograph is a captured moment, a lingering image frozen in time for all generations to witness. Utah historians have looked to the images of Charles Savage, William Henry Jackson, and Timothy O'Sullivan, to name but a few, to help us understand the state's past. Yet we must remember that, like any other art form, the photograph is subjective. There is no such thing as a tabula rasa in photography. Every photograph is a reflection of the photographer's own biases, experiences, perceptions, and agendas, which are captured, either consciously or subconsciously, on film.
The photographer's hand is present in the work, whether in the handling of light or in the decision on what to include and what to exclude. 1 On the surface, this point may seem trivial, and yet understanding the photographer's ability to visually edit a photograph is essential in understanding historical photography. For example, Savage, a Mormon convert from Great Britain, used his camera to show that the Mormons of Utah's "Zion" were making the desert "blossom as a rose" in accordance with the prophecies of Isaiah. 2 O'Sullivan and Jackson composed photographs that helped propel the American myth of the great western expanse of majestic peaks, never-ending prairies, and unconquered natural wonders. 3 In fact, it should be remembered that every photograph is taken with a hidden or overt agenda, whether ideological, artistic, or political.
This idea of the photographer's agenda is nowhere more apparent than in the photography of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). From 1935 to 1942, FSA photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, and others scoured America photographing the Great Depression and pre-World War II America. In the process, they created one of the most comprehensive and complete portraits of America ever made. Over the last fifty years, Utah historians have often used photographs from the FSA or Resettlement Administration (RA), as the FSA was known before 1937, to illustrate books and articles about the depression and its impact on Utah's miners and farmers. 4
The practical goals of the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration were to help the rural poor of America. The goal of the FSA photographers was to take pictures that supported their agency. In covering their various assignments, the photographers did what was necessary to achieve this end. According to Susan Sontag, they would look for the decisive moments that best supported their own notions about poverty, dignity, and exploitation. She writes, "In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects." Likewise, David Peeler stated that the scenes the FSA photographers captured were pliable and were arranged "according to [their] own notion of just what the truth should be." 5 The photographers, therefore, created a photographic vision that was specifically designed to support the New Deal's PJV and FSA through the windows of their own personal ideologies. Each photographic assignment was therefore slanted to fit the agenda of the RA/FSA or that of the photographer rather than to mimic the reality of the actual scene.
Dorothea Lange, one of the agency's most renowned photographers, is regarded as having a sensitive eye and acute social consciousness. In the early spring of 1936 she traveled through Utah for the RA. The principal reason for her trip to Utah was to document the plight of the poor miners of Carbon County and conditions in the federally supported resettlement town of Widtsoe and in the Mormon frontier town of Escalante. In Utah, she used her selective artistic sensibilities to create a vision that supported and justified her agency, its presence, and its programs as well as her own beliefs and ideology. 6
To understand her work, one must first understand her. Lange was born in 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey. At the age of seven, she was struck by polio. The disease produced a profound but well-masked limp in her walk that she carried throughout her life. Speaking of her ailment, Lange stated, "I think it perhaps was the most important thing that happened to me and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. All those things at once." 7 The effect of her ailment would be as an aid and an influence in her photography. Because of her small frame, quiet nature, and marked limp, Lange would not be perceived as a threat to her subjects, who, she believed, more freely opened themselves for examination. 8 More important, she felt that her disability helped her understand, feel, and see the inner strengths of her subjects. Like Lange, her subjects would be handicapped, though not in body but by crushing economic circumstances.
By the age of twenty-three, Lange became restless. Having begun to develop her photographic eye under the tutelage of Clarence White and Arnold Genthe, she embarked on a journey around the world with a close friend, $140, and a camera. The duo made it as far as San Francisco, where their money was stolen and their plans grounded. From that point on, Lange made the West her home.
In San Francisco, Lange quickly procured work in a photo-finishing shop and later started her own portrait studio. With time, her studio attracted many of the Bay Area elite. It was here that she met her first husband, the painter Maynard Dixon, whom she married on March 21, 1920. The couple stayed together for fifteen years, during which time they had two sons, Dan and John. The two artists helped each other refine their uniquely personal styles. Maynard, it seems, helped Lange further develop her artistic eye for composition and an understanding of the West. It was with him that Lange came to know the land and people of Utah. Dorothea, on the other hand, was Dixon's guide to the streets of the depression. 9
Around 1933, Lange had found that her studio work was not indicative of the real world that passed by her window in the form of the homeless, penniless, and jobless. Eventually, she found herself wandering out to the streets to photograph their harsh reality. Lange's pivotal work, "White Angel Breadline" (1933), demonstrates her personal ideology of universal sympathy and a genuine concern for even the humblest being. 10 This ideology would come to fruition in her work for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration.
The change to photographing the poor was also facilitated by the sociologist Paul S. Taylor. Taylor, an economic sociologist firmly committed to the New Deal and to improving the agricultural conditions of the West, hired Lange in 1935 as a photographer for his research with state-funded projects scattered across California. By August 1935, both Lange and Taylor had been hired by the RA and were assigned to cover Region IX, which included Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Nevada. Taylor strongly believed that photography was an essential component to his work as a researcher. "[To] be able to see what the real conditions were like," Taylor stated, "my words would not be enough...to show the conditions vividly and accurately." 11 In covering their various assignments, the two worked as a team, with Taylor providing the text and Lange supplying the visual imagery. This team was further strengthened in December 1935, when Lange and Taylor divorced their spouses and married. 12
When Lange joined the PJ\. in 1935 the objectives and strategies of the newly formed New Deal agency were still in their infancy. The Resettlement Administration was officially created May 1, 1935, by Executive Order 7027. Its formation stemmed from Franklin D. Roosevelt's concern for America's rural population, which had for more than five years suffered greatly from the effects of the Great Depression. The president appointed Rexford Tugwell, a member of his famed "Brain Trust," as head of the new agency, which was a conglomeration of already-existing agencies aimed at helping the agricultural sector. The RA's primary objective was to aid the "forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid" 13 through resettlement, approved projects, and small loans. In all, Roosevelt hoped that these measures could rescue the one-third of the nation that he saw as "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." 14
Due to the "big government" nature of the RA's programs, Tugwell knew that his administration would come under serious attack from conservatives who saw his agency as strange, socialist, and even Communist. 15 He knew that the RA could not survive misrepresentation. He therefore created an ambitious public information program within the RA, designed to propagate faith in the agency and its programs. This Information Division, a propaganda machine, would broadcast the positive aspects of the RA through radio programs, magazines, yearbooks, circulars and bulletins, and documentary films. 16
Arguably the most successful sector of Tugwell's Information Division was the photography division or, as it became titled, the Historical Section. For Tugwell, photography was a perfect medium through which to publicize the activities of the RA. He believed in the camera's power to "educate" the public; he knew that a carefully composed photograph could be innocently and automatically accepted as reality. "You could never say anything about photography—it was a photograph, it was a picture," he said. "This was something you couldn't deny. This was evident." 17 To head the Historical Section Tugwell hired Roy Stryker, an economist and colleague from the University of Columbia. Stryker was zealously committed to the precepts of Roosevelt's New Deal and Tugwell's RA. Like Tugwell, he believed in the camera's ability to support the administration's political ideology, sway public opinion, placate misconceptions, and, most important, help America's rural poor.
Tugwell gave Stryker the task of documenting the agency's activities by photographing various RA projects that dotted the country, from Greenbelt communities such as Hightstown, New Jersey, to the resettlement of small rural towns such as Widtsoe, Utah. The collected photographs would be used by members of Congress to push for legislation, or they would be loaned out to various magazines such as Time, Fortune, Survey Graphic, or even Junior Scholastic. These outlets would, in turn, generate good publicity for the RA. In a letter to Dorothea Lange, Stryker reminded his photographer, "I am terribly glad that the photographs have had such wide use. That, after all is the first purpose of our existence—to get as much good publicity as we can for the Resettlement Administration." This "good publicity" was admittedly positive propaganda for the agency. 18 In photographing the poorest third of the rural poor Stryker and his team believed that they were showing the formidable need for the RA and its programs—and that they were acting in the best interest of their subjects. 19
Although, unlike Stryker, Lange was not committed to any particular political ideology, she was deeply devoted to the New Deal. 20 In a 1936 letter to Stryker she stated her allegiance: "I've said before that you can call on me for anything I can do to further the cause which we are both so vitally interested in." 21 Her dedication was based not on political grounds but on altruism. In visiting the various RA/FSA programs across the nation, she had seen the New Deal help America's rural population, and she felt the New Deal generally did help those in need. By producing sympathetic photographs of America's destitute rural communities, she knew that she could aid her agency's cause and in so doing benefit the poor. For Lange, it did not matter whether this was propaganda. According to her, "Everything is propaganda for what you believe in.... The harder and the more deeply you believe in anything, the more in a sense you are a propagandist. Conviction, propaganda, faith. I don't know, I never have been able to come to the conclusion that thats' [sic] a bad word." 22
When Lange arrived in Utah in 1936, the economy was slowly recuperating and unemployment was at a five-year low, yet the effects of the depression were still clearly visible. At one point more than 60,000 Utahns, or 35.8 percent of the total population, were unemployed, and thousands of farms and ranches faced foreclosure. In 1933 Utah governor Henry Blood looked to Washington for aid and through personal solicitation secured millions of dollars for Utah's families from New Deal funds. As a result, various New Deal programs began to spread throughout the state. The federal government eventually spent $569.99 per capita in Utah, a total of $289 million, to help pull the state out of the depression. 23
During her visit to Utah, Lange would focus on the hardships of three small rural areas. 24 She began in the snowy coal-laden hills of Carbon County by photographing the forgotten miners in the small towns of Consumers and National. Her next assignment documented the abandonment of Widtsoe during the RA's resettlement of its residents. Last, she traveled to the isolated Mormon town of Escalante. In each of these areas, she constructed, through her own visual editing, distinct portraits. These well-crafted portrayals reflected Lange's support of the RA as well as her own beliefs and ideology. The visions of Consumers, Widtsoe, and Escalante were not specifically designed to show the true nature of the towns or their reality; rather, the photographic portfolios were constructed to fit the needs of Lange and the RA. 25
After arriving in Salt Lake City on March 25, 1936, only days after recording her monumental "Migrant Mother" photograph, Lange traveled southeast to the depressed communities of Carbon County. 26 The Great Depression was not the beginning of hard times for Carbon County's coal mines. In fact, by the time the stock market crashed in October 1929 the mines had already endured eight years of depression. The year 1920 marked the beginning of a national coal recession that would last until the surging economy of World War II. By 1921, Utah's coal mines began to feel the impact of the national slide and were forced to curtail production. The slide continued, and by 1932 Utah's total coal production was less than one-half that of 1920. 27
The Resettlement Administration wanted to improve the appalling housing conditions in mining towns by providing small loans to the miners so that they could build sturdier homes and cultivate small gardens. These measures, it was hoped, would "shield [the miners] from the insecurity of company housing and seasonal employment"—and make them less dependent on the government for help. 28 The BJV needed to expose the poverty of the mining towns in order to begin to improve the situation. Lange's task, therefore, was to capture, in matter-of-fact images, the clear destitution of the families and the poverty of their homes.
When Lange arrived in Carbon County on March 27, the mining towns that dotted the landscape around Helper and Price were crumbling under the weight of hard times; to capture images of poverty Lange could have selected any of the county's mining camps. 29 For her assignment Lange chose the towns in the Gordon Creek area: National and its neighbor to the west, Consumers. Ironically, these were two of the newest coal camps, but they had already fallen into difficult circumstances. The snowy area, miserable homes, and worn mining families presented the ideal setting for her look into the plight of America's poor mining towns.
One of the most telling images Lange captured was a view up the main street of Consumers just beyond the Blue Blaze Coal Mine. Lange captioned the photograph: "Consumers, near Price, Utah, March 1936. A Settlement of workers in the Blue Blaze coal mine which is controlled by absentee capital. Main Street." 30 In their prime, National and Consumers had a combined population of nearly 500 people, 31 but in this image a lone figure appears. Making his way through the mud and snow, the figure glances back at Lange, his face blurred by his sudden action. This lone figure is bracketed by two rows of dark-looking homes of various sizes and shapes. The houses appear similar to those in any other coal settlement across the nation in the 1930s, which a contemporary described as "Crowded, unsanitary houses with leaky roofs, with floors and windows barring no cold." 32 Later, Lange would photograph the miners returning up the same street to their disorganized and disheveled homes, which they rented from the mine for up to eight dollars a month. 33
To get to this vantage point she had passed under the mine tipple—the looming gateway to the city—a three-story apartment house, well-kept offices, and the post office. The area of the town she selected to emphasize was visibly poorer than the more polished area of the community, represented by her photograph of the company store. She did not photograph other positive aspects of the town such as the service station, a model medical clinic featuring an x-ray machine, a five-bed hospital, and a well-stocked pharmacy. As historian Brian Cannon has pointed out, her vision of Consumers was skewed to emphasize the poverty and injustice facing the miners. 34 She created a vision that centered on the desperate aspects of this small Utah community; instead of concrete edifices, she photographed the dilapidated wooden homes of the miners. Repeatedly, her captions label the towns as the "Dumping Ground of the West." The source of this label is debated, but for Lange the phrase was possibly the only term that adequately defined the experience of living in the poor coal camps. 35
As Lange walked through National and Consumers, she continued to concentrate on the small homes of the camps, both individually and collectively. The images were carefully and deliberately crafted to show her audience the ramshackle homes built of scrap lumber and tar paper. To emphasize her vision, Lange took advantage of the cold blanket of snow, which she used to highlight the contrast between the dark buildings and the white landscape. By minimizing the size of the miners' homes in her viewfinder and final prints, Lange makes the houses seem smaller and more uninhabitable than they really were. For a middle-class viewer, these homes would appear to be nothing more than beat-up shacks.
During her visit Lange also focused on occupants of the dilapidated homes. The men of the coal camps were represented by a stark image of an older miner standing in front of a railway car. Although the miners of Carbon County were thought to be beaten and battered by depressions and strikes, 36 Lange portrays the man's dignity and pride despite his surroundings, the same unconquerable pride that the author Sherwood Anderson had noted when he visited another coal mine one year earlier. He stated, "There is something pathetic and at the same time magnificent in these men, the coal miners of America, in a certain something very hard to express but very real in them.... There is something distinct and real separating them now from the defeated factory hands of the cities. They are not defeated men." 37 Like those in Anderson's writing, Lange's miner exhibits an inner strength: With his strong, tightly set jaw, this is an individual beset but not overcome by his problems.
As this photograph shows, Lange was expert at making her subjects appear dignified no matter how difficult their circumstance. Referring to her photographs of similar subjects, Lange said, "It's very hard to photograph a proud man against a background [of poverty], because it doesn't show what he's proud about. I had to get my camera to register the things about those people that were more important than how poor they were—their pride, their strength, their spirit." 38 Everything around this miner reveals the reality of his situation. The rail car is black from its constant loads, and its ladder is well used and scuffed by continual climbing. The most noticeable element of poverty is his clothing. His pants are threadbare and torn at the knees. To stay warm above and below the earth he has layered three coats, which are stretched and torn. Everything contrasts sharply with the shiny lunch pail that glitters brightly against the darkness of the scene.
Lange shows a man of sturdy build. Through a low camera angle, she monumentalizes him and gives him an air of strength and presence. This presence is enhanced by his direct eye contact with the camera. As Pare Lorentz notes, "Her people stand straight and look you in the eye. They have a simple dignity of people who have leaned against the wind." The man does not hang his head in humility or shame. Rather, his directed gaze forces an equality. 39
Having symbolized the men of the mines with this photograph, Lange would now turn to their families. 40 She found a family in front of a small home just off the main street. A narrow wooden plank over the snow draws the viewer's eye to the young woman and her little girl and boy. The mother looks at Lange curiously as her children play cautiously around her. The house is similar to its neighbors, small in size and pieced together with wooden boards and tarpaper. Unlike in many of Lange's photographs of homes in Consumers, this small house has a human counterpart. She shows the public an actual family and the conditions in which they were forced to live. In her notes she recorded the frustration of raising a family in this environment and the "deteriorating influence on families [of] these mining camps." 41 In addition to the prostitution, disease, and drunken melees that plagued the coal camps, the miners and their families had to fear the constant threat of disasters such as the mine explosions of Winter Quarters in 1900 and Castle Gate in 1924. 42
After photographing the family in front of their home, Lange withdrew a few feet and shot them crossing the boards over the snow and mud toward her. In a few steps the family would be standing on Consumer's main street, and Lange would now show the family within their community environment. In the next photograph, the family stands on slushy Main Street. They have stopped and stare directly into the camera. In contrast to the miserable homes lining the street, the family looks composed and neat. The mother's patterned dress contrasts sharply with the worn garments of the miner. In fact, the mother seems happy, and her little daughter smiles affectionately at the camera. For Lange, this image did not equal the desperation of the tarpapered shack, the grime of Main Street, or the misery in the miner's eyes.
To capture their real situation—or, rather, the situation she wanted to portray—Lange had to create an image that highlighted the difficulties of the family's circumstance. The next photograph depicts the small family struggling through the snow and mud toward the photographer. This image captures everything Lange needed. 43 As they make their way up through the automobile ruts, one senses the real struggle of living in America's coal fields. Lange makes it seem as if they suffer from need as their inadequate shoes sink into the snow and mud. Despite the cold, they are out of doors without coats. The pleasant faces and smiles of the earlier photograph have turned into grimaces and misery. Only the little boy in his mother's arms remains fixed on Lange and her camera. His frowning straight-forward gaze, like that of the miner, connects directly with the viewer.
In this photograph Lange has captured the essence of what she wanted to portray in Consumers. In her vision, this family has become an archetype for any poor coal mining family anywhere. It echoes Sherwood Anderson's observation of a similar situation elsewhere:
Strength, determination, and will to overcome their hardships may be seen in Lange's last portrait of the family. In this, the closest examination of the family, the serious expressions are still present. The mother's face, in particular, reveals the stress of her situation and at the same time implies the strength required to survive. Lange creates the mother as the central figure that keeps this family together. Like Ma Joad in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Lange's mother represents the "citadel of the family," the place that could not be taken. 45 Through her embrace, she symbolizes the courage and strength that keeps the family together.
From Consumers, Lange traveled south to her next assignment, the documentation of the Widtsoe Resettlement Project. When Lange arrived in Widtsoe, she found a town already on the edge of decay. Today that decay is almost complete. Wandering through the quiet streets, one can hardly imagine that this ghost town was once a thriving community. The hotels, stores, and church are now nothing but piles of weathered lumber lying on primitive cement foundations. The few buildings that remain stand precariously, hollow reminders of the city's prosperity and its turn toward ruin.
The town of Widtsoe is located in the highlands of Johns Valley, just north of Bryce Canyon. It is a valley colored gray with sage and dotted with juniper. Unlike that in the fertile valleys of the Wasatch Front, the soil in this high valley is weak and susceptible to erosion. Despite this, however, the first Mormon settlers began coming to the area in 1876. The desire to settle the rather hostile environment of Widtsoe was not based solely on the constant search for new land but was also driven by a sense of spiritual destiny. The settlers of Widtsoe were among the many who desired to build up the "waste places of Zion" into a new corner of the kingdom even though official calls to colonize regions had ceased. Commenting on this pioneer trait of Mormonism, Wallace Stegner writes of lands like Johns Valley, "It was a sanctuary, it was a refuge. Nobody else wanted it, nobody but a determined and God-supported people could live in it." He continues, "Settle it then, in God's name, and build the kingdom." 46 This was the attitude of promise that the people of Widtsoe possessed. They believed that they could settle this area and through God's help could turn it into their own corner of Zion. This belief was further buoyed by Mormon apostle Melvin J. Ballard's promise that the valley would be a Garden of Eden if its inhabitants kept God's commandments and stayed out of debt. 47
By 1920, Widtsoe had become a thriving community with a population of more than 1,100. The city boasted two hotels, four stores, a post office, a Mormon church, a social hall, and many houses. | There was even talk of moving the county seat to the town. At its peak, Widtsoe's grain crop was greater than that grown in the rest of Garfield County combined. One resident remembered that the "whole of Johns Valley [was] a waving field of grain." Another Widtsoan, Quincy Kimball, remembered plentiful farms that produced peas, beans, strawberries, lettuce, and "turnips weighing seven and eight pounds." 48
Johns Valley, however, would prove hostile to the promise of Zion. The initial success eventually soured by the mid-1920s as changing climate cycles and soil limitations proved too much to bear. Widtsoe's high elevation only allowed for a short growing season between harsh winters. Adding to the difficulties were year-round frosts that plagued the harvests. After many taxing years of farming, the once-ample soil became depleted of its nutrients. Paul Taylor, who traveled to Widtsoe with Lange, recorded the recollections of one farmer, "This land used to raise forty bushels of wheat to the acre, but it won't now." The worsening circumstances impelled many citizens to abandon the town. One "stalwart young man" told the couple, "My father came here with $7,000, worked hard, and lost it all." 49 The land had become so unprofitable that eventually 85 percent of the families were on relief. The city that had once had so much promise was slowly becoming a ghost town.
No longer able to cope, the townspeople presented a petition to the government for federal aid in 1934. By July 1, 1935, Widtsoe was turned over to the RA as a resettlement project. The primary goal of the RA was the resettlement of the residents to farms across Utah where they could "gain a greater amount of independence, happiness, and achievement than any other manner they had ever been able to obtain." For Taylor this was an experiment that removed people "from lands where their future is hopeless to others where a good life is possible." 50
When Dorothea Lange arrived in Widtsoe in early April 1936, Omer Mills, the regional officer of the RA, had labeled the town a "Great Worry," and agents were scrambling to find land for the clients. 51 The situation was growing progressively worse. Lange's purpose in coming to Widtsoe was to document the actions of her agency and to make the controversial program look as necessary as possible. To accomplish this, she not only photographed the need for resettlement but also captured the human experience of resettlement. To catch such expressions, she used her exceptional skills and acute sympathetic perception, already demonstrated in Consumers, to document the polar emotions of anxiety/sorrow and hope.
To document the conditions of the resettlement Lange took many panoramas of the town and its environs, or, as Lange called the area, the "purchase area." 52 Each of the photographs emphasized the bleak landscape and local architecture that was already in decay, often ignoring structures that were in relatively good shape, such as the home of D. W Woodard, which still stands today. 53 Despite the arrival of spring, the ground was still blanketed with snow. As she had done in Consumers, she took advantage of the harsh elements to emphasize and even exaggerate the hostile conditions of the town. An example is the photograph captioned "Farm Home, in the FSA land use project purchase area." In the foreground of this image, Lange emphasizes the barren furrows filled not with budding crops but with snow. The dilapidated home in the background appears no more productive and almost seems abandoned. In such images, Lange accentuated the plight of the people in Widtsoe. Her images are testimonies that these families should be moved to their new farms and not trapped in this frozen landscape.
In visually implying the poverty of a family farm, the backbone of ideal agrarian life, Lange sought to show that America's farm families were in desperate need of aid. She dispelled the myth that poverty did not exist on the farm. In her field book she recorded the frustrations of one unidentified resident: "People jist been settin' here waitin' and hopin'." 54 Because of bureaucratic delay, the people of Widtsoe were being forced to make do on farms that they would have to abandon instantly when the time for their move came. Emotionally, they were torn between the hope of looking to the future and, at the same time, the pain of letting the town decay into the past. There was no reason to spend money on homes that they would be leaving in the near future, homes that would be torn down in a matter of days, weeks, or months.
In addition to the many photographs Lange took of the land, she made only two images that focused solely on the townspeople. 55 However, the two photographs perfectly sum up the two contrasting emotions of resettlement: hope and agony. The first photograph stands in sharp contrast to the rest. While most of the photographs mourn the resettlement of the town, this one radiates hope and optimism in the uncertain future. The photograph is of a young mother and daughter standing in the weathered doorway of their house. The inviting mother smiles down at her daughter, who seems happy and content. Lange's subjects are clean and well dressed. The mother stands in her apron and the daughter in her bib, suggesting that the home interior is clean and ordered. 56
Lange's longer-than-normal caption of the photograph reads: "Resettlement clients to be moved from the area to a farm in another county. Site not yet determined where they will have better land and a hopeful future. These people have been in distress throughout the valley." 57 For Lange, the mother and daughter represent a glimmer of hope—a future that can only be obtained elsewhere—for the people of Widtsoe. The image is carefully constructed propaganda that casts a positive light on the actions of the RA. The smiling faces represent a trust in the government and its programs.
For the second human portrait, Lange photographed an elderly woman walking down one ofWidtsoe's dirt roads. (See page 39.) She captioned the photograph: "Mormon Woman, a native of Denmark receiving her first old age pay check." If the family in the doorway symbolizes hope, the second reveals the agony of the town's failure. While the woman standing in the doorway is young, happy, and full of life, the second is old and sad. If the portrait of the young family idealistically represents the glowing future, the image of the second woman signifies the despair of the past. Both fulfilled the propagandistic needs of the RA. The photograph of the old woman evokes the despair of these victims and seeks to garner support for their plight. The other offers the viewer hope for these "good" people through government intervention.
The older woman, whose name is Christine Maria Hansen Snyder—a Mormon convert who traveled alone from Copenhagen to Utah at the age of fourteen 58 —is starkly centered in the foreground as she stands helplessly before Lange's camera. The photograph, taken quickly with Lange's smaller camera, reveals a woman whose face and hands are worn and wrinkled and whose hair is white. 59 The snap of the lens seems to have captured the decisive moment when she appeared the saddest. The aged woman, with her fur-collared coat tightly bundled around her and her purse in hand, stands in sharp contrast to the barren empty expanse behind her. She, like the women and children of Consumers, is an example of the faultless poor who suffer not because of laziness but because of forces beyond their control.
The photograph of the Danish woman does not exude unbridled hope and optimism for the future. Rather, it reveals the sadness and loss involved in the removal. Her downcast eyes, frowning expression, and closed body language illustrate a woman whose dignity and pride seem damaged by the difficult circumstances. For more than thirty years, Snyder and her family fought against the elements to try to make this area flourish. Their efforts, however, were ultimately futile, as the area became hostile rather than replenishing. In Snyder one may sense, as Brian Cannon stated, the agony "generated during the aftermath of resettlement, disrupted traditional values such as home, community, faith in God's promises, and self reliance for economic security." 60
Her sorrow and loss are further accentuated by the fact that her first old-age assistance check is clenched tightly in her hands. 61 In the seventy-seven-year-old Snyder, Lange shows a woman who appears shamed, as Cannon states, by the "stigma and dependence that cash relief carried in her small-town Mormon culture." 62 For Christine Snyder, this reluctantly accepted check was an absolute necessity: It represented her only means of survival as well as the loss of her independent pioneer spirit. Her oncestrong hands, which had helped everyone in her community, could now no longer sustain her. In Utah this attached stigma was statewide. When the Social Security Act was first initiated in Utah, only 504 out of 1,000 people eligible actually accepted their checks. 63
In the opinion of the RA, the Widtsoe resettlement was a tremendous success. With it, the government successfully accomplished its goals, removing the farmers to better agricultural areas, providing loans to help them pay for better farms, and letting the land recover from years of overuse. L. H. Hauter of the RA regional office in Berkeley considered Widtsoe a "showcase project" and a model for future programs. In fact, the RA was so proud of the project's final success that it calendared tours of the site. 64
Widtsoe was not only a showcase within the RA but it also became a showcase for the nation. It was to demonstrate to America that the RA's Resettlement Program was efficient and effective. 65 In April 1937, only one month after the town's complete abandonment, an article that appeared in the progressive magazine Nation's Business included three of Lange's photographs. Written by Khyber Forrester, it was entitled "Mercy Death for Towns: Widtsoe Utah Taken off the Map." In essence, the article was both a justification of the project and a public disclosure of one of the RA's most controversial programs. Forrester began,
Absent from the article are the pictures of the human consequences of removal. 67 Lange's intimate portraits of the hopeful young mother or the sorrowful Christine Snyder do not appear. Such photographs were probably carefully edited out. To support the positive stance on resettlement, Forrester or the editor chose photographs that removed the possibility of sympathy and that showed a ghost town instead of a radical experiment dealing with human beings. 68 It was, as Karl Sandberg argues, an outsiders' view that saw only poverty in place of the way the Widtsoans saw themselves—hardworking and honest. 69
From Widtsoe, Lange headed east to the small Mormon hamlet of Escalante, a struggling little town that was enduring the lingering effects of the Great Depression. She was no doubt curious whether Escalante would fall to a fate similar to Widtsoe's. The Escalante community would provide Lange an opportunity to view how the small Mormon towns scattered throughout her region were surviving the prolonged trials of the tumultuous 1930s.
There are many reasons why Lange could have chosen Escalante. The first was that Escalante was a "Potential Irrigation Resettlement Area," a fact she reported in a letter to Stryker. 70 Escalante was also the site where her young friend, the artist and wanderer Everett Reuss, had last been seen one and a half years earlier. 71 Additionally, Escalante was a perfect case study for the same two reasons that had originally appealed to sociologist (and, later, RJV colleague) Lowry Nelson in 1923: its typical Mormon characteristics and its isolation. 72 The contemporary Works Progress Administration Guide to the State termed Escalante an "Old fashioned Mormon community" where local ecclesiastical authorities still presided as civic leaders. Escalante was also isolated from the outside world by both distance and topography. As Lange learned, State Road 23 was the only way of getting to the town; in her field notes she commented that Escalante had only "1 road" in or out and it was "83 miles to nearest R.R." 73
Despite its visible signs of strength, Escalante suffered during the Great Depression. In the words of one resident that Lange recorded, Escalante had endured "One depression after another." By 1935 about two-thirds of the residents were receiving government relief. When Lange arrived in April 1936, the community was still struggling from the plummeting price of livestock, heavy debt, the effects of the Taylor Grazing Act, and a lack of cash flow. In addition, the town was also reeling from the effects of the 1934 drought. Lange's field notes reflect a sense of need and urgency. Twice in her notes she recorded the need for a local dam to help with the fluctuations in yearly rainfalls and even the need for a "cannin (sic) factory." 74
Despite its problems, the town survived. Like other struggling communities, Escalante possessed a defiant spirit of self-sufficiency and a sense of community as well as a permanence that was not visible in Lange's earlier Utah assignments. By working together, the residents were able to overcome their hardships. If members of the community were lacking, others came to their aid, ensuring that no one in the community went hungry. 75 When Lange arrived, the hardships of the depression were evident, and yet her photographs do not dwell on the town's difficulties. Rather, the photographs show a people who were successfully enduring the depression.
This permanence is illustrated in the three people Lange photographed for the RA's files. The first, a ninety-four-year-old immigrant from Denmark, is shown standing defiantly in front of a humble old home, dressed in his Sunday clothes. Like this man, another elderly couple she photographed symbolizes the pioneer virtues of the town. Lange notes that both husband and wife were eighty-five years old and converts to the LDS church from South Africa. 76 Through Lange's photographs these three people become living examples of Escalante's trials, longevity, and endurance. Their well-kept "church" clothing demonstrates their dedication and diligence to their religion. Together they reveal the strength of the community.
In another joint portrait, the same couple sit before a brick wall. In this second portrait Lange reiterates the qualities of the couple—their strength, hope, age, and vitality. But also, by including a brick edifice, Lange highlights the permanence of the town itself. The brick wall creates a drastic contrast to the worn wooden buildings of Widtsoe or the tarpaper of Consumers. Escalante, like Widtsoe, was a frontier town, and yet Lange seems to be suggesting that, unlike Widtsoe, this small town will survive—a fact that she correctly predicted.
In her work in Escalante, Lange was not only to show a people defiant to the depression; she also took the opportunity to emphasize the elements of the town that were distinctively Mormon. Lange was already quite familiar with Mormon settlements, More specifically, she was particularly familiar with the small communities of southern Utah. Through her travels she knew the arid terrain, the towns, and the people of these Mormon communities. She knew of their strengths and the economic and social resiliency of these settlements, and, like other travelers, she knew the characteristic signs of Mormon town life. 77
In his book The Mormon Landscape, Richard Francaviglia outlines ten elements common to the Mormon town: wide streets, roadside irrigation ditches, barns inside the town, unpainted farm buildings, open fields around the town, hay derricks, the "Mormon fence" made of crude unpainted components, a distinctive domestic architecture style, a high percentage of brick homes, and the Mormon ward chapel. Lange photographed nine of the ten elements in Escalante alone. From the layout of the city to its wide streets and irrigation ditches, her photographs read like visual descriptors of a typical Mormon community. In fact, in the outline she sent to Stryker, she summarized her work in Escalante as "A study of the Mormon Village of Escalante, Utah—Farm village community." 78
Lange's purpose in documenting the Mormon landscape must have been to enrich the files of the RA. Stryker had hoped that in addition to showing the poor and destitute his team could also record every aspect of American culture. His goal was to show "Americans to America"—the migrants in California, the baker in Texas, the steel worker in Pennsylvania, and the Mormon farmer in Utah. 79
Unlike Consumers and Widtsoe, where little now remains, it is possible in Escalante to see the extent to which Lange's work is an interpretation of the town and not a mirror of its reality. In that sense, Escalante allows one to see the extent of Lange's visual editing. She did not show Escalante as a young, busy, and industrious town. Rather, she emphasized the town's permanence and its Mormon pioneer heritage. These two virtues were not wrongly assigned to the city; they are definitely a part of the town's identity. Yet in Lange's portrait of the town these two qualities came to dominate all other aspects. With this focus, Lange's Escalante becomes decidedly slanted and incomplete.
Overall, her portrait of Escalante makes it appear empty and abandoned. In "Approach to the Church" and "Main Street and town center," the streets are completely bare and the town buildings are completely silent. Main Street and its stores appear more like a ghost town than a town surviving the depression. Another Lange photograph, taken in 1951, shows the same church she photographed during 1936. 80 This 1951 image is teeming with life and activity as scores of children parade down the gravel sidewalks of Meeting House Hill toward Main Street, but in Lange's 1936 photographs all of this activity is completely removed. Ironically, the city was anything but empty in 1936. Only four years later, in 1940, the city reached its highest population ever, with a total of 1,161 residents. 81
When the residents saw Lange's images, they were very displeased. Delia Christiansen, a longtime resident, remembers being angry about how Lange portrayed her town. "She made us look like the poorest town in the world," she says. "The town was damn mad. If you starved to death it was your own fault." 82
Not only did Lange portray the town as nearly deserted but she also showed it as old. In fact, her portrait of Escalante focuses only on the older pioneer generation; the three people she photographed for the RA/FSA files were all age eighty-five or older. Ironically, at the time, 73 percent of the town was age thirty-four or younger. 83 Lange's selection of homes to photograph may also be called into question. At the time, and even now, Escalante had a number of well-built red brick homes bordering its wide streets. These houses, most of which were built before 1910, were finely crafted with ornate carpentry and walls often several bricks thick. 84 But Lange focused on homes of an older generation. Instead of showing the best the town had to offer, she showed the town the way she pictured it, as a pioneer town, old and deserted—not the vibrant town it was.
Lange was to return to Utah as a government photographer on only one more occasion, in August 1938. At the time of her return, the nature of the Historical Section had fundamentally changed. Instead of focusing on the poverty of America's rural population, which Stryker feared was producing a false impression of farm life, he decided that his group should look at what was right in America. Stryker wanted to show an America that was not defeated by the depression; he hoped to produce a positive "visual account of how America's farmers live, work, play, eat, and sleep." 85
Lange's last official image of Utah is in keeping with this new focus. Taken in the vicinity of Springdale, Lange's caption reads, "Utah farm family in the orchard at the peach harvest." (See page 3.) The image shows a family surrounded by their harvest, escaping the August heat by sitting in the shade. They appear clean, prosperous, and content—if not happy. Their prosperity is accentuated by the ample baskets of peaches that fill the foreground of the photograph. In all, the photograph is a far cry from her RA work done in 1936. The Springdale family is a stunning contrast to the small family in Consumers. This is prosperity, not poverty. The lifeless landscapes of Widtsoe are here replaced with an image of harvest. The photograph seems to suggest that Roosevelt's New Deal did what it promised; it restored prosperity and good times.
Lange's 1936 photographs, however, have come to symbolize the Great Depression in Utah. Textbooks of Utah history contain the images of Christine Marie Hansen Snyder and the mining family of Consumers. 86 Yet hers was a selective portrait. Each photograph, whether of Consumers, Widtsoe, or Escalante, was carefully crafted to communicate her own personal altruistic ideology and the needs of the RA/FSA. These portraits may not have adequately represented the actual situation or the complete reality of the area, yet they represent a vision that, like that of all photographers whether in 1936 or 2002, was designed to convey a certain message to its viewer.
NOTES
James R Swensen teaches at the Salt Lake Community College For his master's thesis at BYU he wrote about Dorothea Lange and the Farm Security Administration in Utah
1 See Peter Hales, William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 44
2 Bradley W Richards, The Savage View: Charles Savage, Pioneer Mormon Photographer (Nevada City, CA: Carl Mautz Publishing, 1995), 44
3 Hales, William Henry Jackson, 58; Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: 1839 to the Present Day (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 94-103
4 The FSA collection, housed in the Library of Congress in Washington, DO , contains more than 270,000 images, all of which were collected under the direction of Roy Stryker The Resettlement Administration (RA), the agency under which the photography unit was established in 1935, was absorbed by the FSA in 1937. For the purpose of this article I "will refer to both agencies because a majority of the images and assignments discussed took place in the spring of 1936 and therefore fall under the aegis of the R A and not the FSA
5 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 6; David P Peeler, Hope Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 58 See also James Curtis, Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 5-18
6 Lange worked, at times sporadically, for the FSA from August 1935 to 1940 Walker Evans is typically considered the FSA's greatest photographer, rivaled only by Lange and Ben Shahn For a complete history of the Historical Section see Jack F Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 43-44, 94 For Lange's photographic vision, see Curtis, Mind's Eye, 45-67
7 Dorothea Lange, The Making of a Documentary Photographer, an interview by Suzanne Reiss (Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, 1968), 17
8 This fact is easily noticeable in her field notes Pervasive throughout are quickly scribbled statements from her subjects that are often of a personal nature See Therese Thau Heyman, Celebrating the Collection: The Work of Dorothea Lange (Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum, 1978), 84-85
9 See Heyman, Celebrating the Collection, 50-52, and Deborah Brown Rasial, "Dixon and Lange: The Give and Take in a Marriage of Aesthetics," in Linda Jones Gibbs, Escape to Reality: the Western World of Maynard Dixon (Provo, UT: BYU Museum of Art, 2000), 140-67 Dixon's short but profound move away from landscapes to street scenes, which he began in 1935, is typically known as his "Strike and Forgotten Man" Series.
10 Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978), 33-34; W Eugene Smith, "One Whom I Admire, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)," Popular Photography, February 1966, 88 See also Pare Lorentz,"Dorothea Lange: Camera with a Purpose," US Camera 1 (1941): 98
11 Karen Tsujimoto, Dorothea Lange: Archive of an Artist (Oakland: Oakland Museum of California, 1995), 10-11
12 Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, 128 For the quintessential example of their teamwork see Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939)
13 Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 48, 92 The construction of the Tropic Dam west of Bryce Canyon is a good example of a project administered by the RA; see Paul S.Taylor, "From the Ground Up," Survey Graphic (September 1936): 528
14 Franklin D Roosevelt, quoted in The Years of Bitterness and Pride: Farm Security Administration FSA Photographs 1935-1943 (NewYork: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975), 1
15 Tugwell's radical programs were a far cry from the conservative belief that the government could "not spend [its] way to prosperity"; see S. A. Spencer, The Greatest Show on Earth: A Photographic Story of Man's Strugglefor Wealth (New York: Doubleday, Dorant and Company, 1938), 158, 172, 176-77, and "Farm Trouble: Cooperative and Ex-director Call Each Other Communist," Newsweek, January 16, 1936: 40-41
16 Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 113-17
17 Heyman, Celebrating the Collection, 70.
18 For the various uses of the photographs see Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 108-13. Stryker to Lange, October 30,1936, quoted in Heyman, Celebrating the Collection, 69
19 Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 119
20 When asked whether his wife had any affiliations with Communism or any particular group, Paul Taylor responded, "No, no, not political or otherwise No, she didn't belong to any, she didn't even belong to the f/64 photographers club... She didn't belong to any thing." Her son Daniel Dixon also confirmed that Lange "had no interest in politicians"; see Paul Taylor, Paul Schuster Taylor: California Social Scientist, an interview by Suzanne Reiss, vol 1 (Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, 1973), 222 See also Elizabeth Partridge, ed., Dorothea Lange:A Visual Life (Washington DC : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 68
21 Lange to Stryker, November 1936, quoted in Jack F Hurley, "The Farm Security Administration File, In and Out of Focus," History of Photography 17 (Autumn 1993): 250.
22 Lange, The Making of a Documentary Photographer, 206
23 Thomas G.Alexander, Utah:The Right Place (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1995), 323ff; John F Bluth and Wayne K Hinton, "The Great Depression," in Richard D Poll, et al., eds., Utah's History (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989), 482, 485, 495; G. Melvin Foxely, interview by the author, March 1998, Salt Lake City, Utah, transcript in possession of the author O n Blood's lobbying in Washington, DC , see R.Thomas Quinn,"Out of the Depression's Depths: Henry H Blood's First Year as Governor," Utah Historical Quarterly 54 (Summer 1986): 233, 216-39.
24 She would also cover smaller assignment such as the Central Dry Land Adjustment Project, centered in Tooele County's Rush Valley, and the building of the Tropic Dam Both assignments received considerably less attention from Lange and her camera
25 Peeler, Hope among Us Yet, 46 See also Charles Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 2
26 Dorothea Lange, Field Notes, Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum, Oakland, California, 24. Upon arriving in Utah, Lange took a taxi to the Hotel Utah and paid for stamps, camera assistance, and a telephone call. Later she met with Ann Sundwall, assistant director of employment for the WPA, and headed out to her assignments While the field notes are rich in some areas, they are extremely spotty in others Piecing her complete activities together from her notes is rather difficult
27 Ibid.; Poll, ed., Utah's History, 465; A State Plan for Utah: Progress Report, April 15, 1935 (Salt Lake City: Utah State Planning Board, 1935), 197-98
28 Walter N Polakov, "Hovels that Miners Call Home," Shelter, October 1938, 7; Brian Cannon, Life and Land: The Farm Security Administration Photographers in Utah (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1988), 4; Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, 139
29 J Eldon Dorman, interview by the author, August 1999, Price, Utah, tape recording in possession of the author
30 Caption, LC-USF-34-9037-E, Library of Congress.
31 Stephen Carr, The Historical Guide to Utah Ghost Towns (Salt Lake City:Western Epics, 1972), 81
32 Polakov, "Hovels that Miners Call Home," 7. Other RA/FSA photographers would find similar situations across the nation See Shahn's "Jenkins, Kentucky, 1935" (LC-USF-33-006137-M5), Rothstein's "Coal Miner's Housing, 1937" (LC-USF-34-025461-D), and Post-Wolcott's "Main street, Chaplin, West Virginia, Sept 1938" (LC-USF-33-030204-M3).
33 Caption, LC-USF-34-009043-E According to the September 1933 payroll for the Blue Blaze Coal Mine, the average rent was around $6.50 per month. That same month, the average daily salary was $4.00, but, due to erratic mine operation, the employees only worked an average of fourteen days per month. The cited numbers are averages, as wages and days varied greatly Dave Parmley, the mine foreman, for example, worked thirty days in September at $7.50 per day In comparison, hoist-man Edgar Johnson worked only twenty-two days at $3.40 per day Although the numbers may be skewed due to the 1933 strike, the figures are quite similar to those of August and October 1933 See payroll for the Blue Blaze Coal Mine, Consumers, Utah, 1933, Special Collections, Harold B Lee Library, BrighamYoung University
34 Cannon, Life and Land, 4. For an understanding of the makeup of Consumers, see J. Eldon Dorman, Confessions of a Camp Doctor and Other Stories (Price, UT: Peczuh Printing, 1995) Stephen Carr provides a good description of what was left in ruins when the town was abandoned in the 1950s; see Carr, Utah Ghost Towns, 81. Today little of the original structures remains; the foundations of National's school and municipal buildings are about all that is left The rest was razed in order to create a larger road for a lumber company farther up the valley and a newly opened mine that stands on the site where the town of Consumers once stood
35 Dorman interview; Lange, Field Notes, 25; see caption for LC-USF34-009003-C
36 J Russell Smith, North America: Its People and the Resources, Development, and Prospects of the Continent as Home of Man (NewYork: Harcourt, Braceland, and Co., 1925), 622; Floyd A O'Neal, "Victims of Demand: The Vagaries of the Carbon County Coal Industry," in Philip F Notarianni, ed., Carbon County: Eastern Utah's Industrial Island (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1981), 37.
37 Sherwood Anderson, Puzzled America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935), 17
38 Daniel Dixon, "Dorothea Lange," Modern Photography, December 1952, 138
39 Lorentz, "Dorothea Lange: Camera with a Purpose," 67 See also Maurice Berger, "FSA: The Illiterate Eye (1985)," in How Art Becomes History: Essays on Art, Society, and Culture in Post-New Deal America (New York: Icon Editions, 1992), 7; Peter B Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 196; Robert Disraeli, "The Farm Security Administration," a review of FSA photography, Photo Notes (May 1940), in New Deal Network at http://www.newdeal.feri.org, accessed in October 2001
40 In her process of photographing the little family, Lange would work in a manner similar to that of her famous Migrant Mother series Focusing on one family helped her epitomize an entire situation Sec Curtis, Mind's Eye, chapter three
41 Lange, Field Notes, 24
42 Cannon, Life and Land, 4 See Allan Kent Powell, The Next Time We Strike: Labor in Utah's Coal Fields, 1900-1933 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1985), chapters two and eight; J Eldon Dorman, Reminiscences, 52-53; and Helen Z Papanikolas, "Women in the Mining Communities of Carbon County," in Notarianni, ed., Carbon County.
43 This photograph could be a clear example of Lange's "help me—help you" approach. In looking at the entire series (especially the negative in Lange's private collection) and taking into account the layout of the town itself, it is fairly clear that Lange instructed the family to walk toward her Whether this violated her stated "hands-off" policy or not is a matter for a deeper examination. For opposing views, see Dixon, "Dorothea Lange," 68, and Curtis, Mind's Eye, chapter three
44 Anderson, Puzzled America, 8 In her quest to find complete images, Lange created prototypes, or even archetypes, that summed up an experience, an entire situation, or a general emotion. "Migrant Mother" is the most obvious example In that photograph Lange used the mother and her three children to epitomize the plight of an entire migrant people See Margaret G.Weiss, "Recording Life-in-Process," Saturday Review, March 5,1966, found in Lange, The Making of a Documentary Photographer, 257.
45 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 95-96
46 Wallace Stegner, Mormon Country (NewYork: Bonanza Books, 1942), 51.
47 Brian Q Cannon, "Remaking the Agrarian Dream: The New Deal's Rural Resettlement Program in Utah" (Master's thesis, Utah State University, 1986), 20; Brian Q Cannon, "Struggle Against the Odds: Challenges in Utah's Marginal Agricultural Areas, 1925-39," Utah Historical Quarterly 54 (FaU 1986): 320.
See also Karl C Sandberg, "Telling the Tales and Telling the Truth: Writing the History of Widtsoe," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26 (Winter 1993): 103-104 The town received the name of Widtsoe in 1917 in honor of John A. Widtsoe, an expert in dry-farming techniques and future apostle of the LDS church
48 Carr, Utah Ghost Towns, 122; Linda King Newell and Vivian Linford Talbot, The History of Garfield County (Salt Lake City: Utah Historical Society, 1998), 277-78; Salt Lake Tribune, May 3, 1938
49 Taylor, "Ground Up," 527
50 Cannon, "Remaking the Agrarian Dream," 144; Land Policy Circular (Washington, DC : Resettlement Administration, April 1936), 7;Taylor, "From the Ground Up," 526
51 Cannon, "Remaking the Agrarian Dream," 148
52 Caption, LC-USF34-001327-C
53 Carr, Utah Ghost Towns, 123
54 Lange, Field Notes, 27A Lange always tried to record as accurately as possible the verbal expressions of her subjects; consequently, the notes often take on a "folk speak" quality See Heyman, Celebrating the Collection, 98
55 There are others who appear in her photographs, but these are not close-up, intimate portraits Instead, those who do appear—postmistress Madge Young Nielson and an unidentified couple (who appear only in her personal negatives stored in the Oakland Museum)—are only a part of the general landscape of the city itself
56 Capturing women and their children in the doorways of their homes was a device commonly used by the photographers in the R A and later in the FSA For instance, compare Arthur Rothstein's similar yet opposing "Sharecropper's Wife and Child, Washington County, Arkansas, 1935," LC-USF33-002022-M4
See also Theodore Jung, LC-USF-33-4038-M1, and Ben Shahn, LC-USF-33-6
57 Caption, LC-USF-34-1323-C
58 Mabel Nielson and Audrie C Ford, Johns Valley: The Way We Saw It (Springville, UT: Art City Publishing Co., 1971), 217-18 After finding what I believed was a picture of Snyder in Nielson's and Ford's book, I was not certain whether it was the same woman Lange photographed Since then, two of her relatives, her grandson Leo Twitchell and his sister-in-law Marjorie Twitchell, have both told me through phone interviews that Lange's subject is indeed Snyder. Snyder and her family arrived in Johns Valley in 1905, and, in a sense, Snyder never left In 1939, she passed away and was buried in the small cemetery located just south of town The cemetery is one of the last surviving vestiges of the town itself It is regularly visited, and former Widtsoe town members are still buried in its dry ground today
59 Lange typically used a more cumbersome 4X 5 inch Graflex, but for quick shots she would sometimes use a 2 1/4X 2 1/4 For technical details on Lange's use of cameras and film, see Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, V. 72, and Daniel Dixon, "Dorothea Lange," 77
60 Cannon, Life and Land, 5
"Assistance to those age sixty-five or older began in the 1936 fiscal year Utah was the first in the Union to receive all the benefits of the Social Security Act; see Wayne Hinton, "The Economics of Ambivalence: Utah's Depression," Utah Historical Quarterly 54 (September 1986): 282-85; see also Statutes at Large of the United States ofAmerica,Vo\. XLIX part 1 (January 1935-June 1936), 620-23
62 Cannon, Life and Land, 6 See also Lowry Nelson, The Mormon Village: A Pattern and Technique of Land Settlement (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1952), 124
63Bluth and Hinton, "The Great Depression," 483
64 Cannon, "Remaking the Agrarian Dream," 130; Garfield County News, June 4, May 28, 1937 Widtsoe was not the only site scheduled for tours on June 11 and 12, 1937; caravans also were to visit the Tropic Dam During the tours, local townspeople and R A and state officials, including Governor Blood, were to receive an "explanation of all costs and advantages" of the RA's work Despite the interest, however, the tours were postponed and later canceled
65 For those in Widtsoe, the program, as stated briefly above, was anything but smooth See Sandberg, "Telling the Tales," 103.
66 Khyber Forrester, "Mercy Death for Towns: Widtsoe Utah Taken off the Map," Nation's Business 25 (April 1,1937): 64
"There is one figure present in Forrester's article: Madge Young Nielson, the postmistress Unlike in the two portraits discussed above, Lange captured her at a distance, and the photo does not reveal the emotions of the situation See photo on page 2
68 This experimentation is precisely what A F Bracken, Utah's land planning consultant for the National Resource Board, hoped to avoid when he suggested that the R A take control of the Widtsoe situation. He understood that resettlement was "experimenting with human individuals." See A.F. Bracken, State Report on Land Use Studyfor Utah (Salt Lake City?: n.p., 1935), 145.
69 Sandberg, "Telling the Tales," 101
70 Lange to Stryker, fall 1936, Roy Stryker Collection, University of Louisville According to A F Bracken, a partial reclamation of the land was at least necessary; see A F Bracken, Utah Report on the Extent and Character of Desirable Adjustment in Rural Land—Use and Settlement Area (Salt Lake City?: n.p., 1934), 23. Escalante historian Jerry Roundy, however, believes that resettlement was never a true concern or option for the town; Jerry Roundy to the author, May 11, 2001, e-mail transcript in possession of the author
71 See W L Rusho, Everett Ruess:A Vagabond for Beauty (Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith Publisher, 1983), 113-15, 118, 136, 182 Not only was Ruess a friend of both Dorothea Lange and her husband Maynard Dixon but Lange also became a motherly figure to the young man
72 Nelson was a friend as well as a fellow RA employee; see Lowry Nelson, In the Direction of His Dreams: Memoirs (NewYork: Philosophical Library, 1985), 236-69, and Lowry Nelson, The Mormon Village: A Pattern and Technique of Land Settlement (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1952), 83 Nelson's research was a time study, with his initial visit to Escalante in 1923 He returned in 1950 to report how the town had changed through the depression,World War II, etc
73 WPA Utah Writers' Program, Utah: A Guide to the State (New York: Hastings House, 1941), 340; Lange, Field Notes, 26
74 Lange, Field Notes, 26—27; Jerry Roundy, 'Advised Them to Call the Place Escalante" (Springville, Utah: Art City Publishing, 2000), 253-56, 262-63; Nelson, The Mormon Village, 110 In 1934 Utah averaged nine inches of average rainfall, four inches below normal. Nationwide, rainfall was only 35 percent of normal in that same year Utah fared slightly better at 51 percent of normal, but combined with record—breaking heat, the drought of 1934 was particularly devastating; see Leonard Arrington, "Utah's Great Drought of 1934," Utah Historical Quarterly 54 (Summer 1986): 245-64.
75 Cannon, Life and Land, 6; Roundy, "Advised Them to Call the Place Escalante," 253; Roundy correspondence
76All of the information about this couple is from Lange's caption for photograp h LC-USF-34-001343-C Jerry Roundy questions whether Lange was correct in the couple's origin; he has never heard of any early residents from South Africa Additionally, Lange mentions in the caption of another photograph of the same woman (LC-USF34-001345-C) that she was the first schoolteacher in Escalante If that is the case, the woman would be Jane Coleman, who was not from South Africa Roundy correspondence
77 In 1933, Lange and her husband Maynard Dixon had spent two months traveling through southern Utah They lived with Mormons, traveled through their towns, and even left their boys with a Mormon family in Toquerville. I submit that her vision of Utah in 1936 was directly shaped by this earlier visit to the state For Lange's thoughts of and experiences in Utah, see Sandra S Phillips, et al., Dorothea Lange: American Photographs (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), 32, and Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, 78 See also Dorothea Lange, Daniel Dixon, and Ansel Adams, "Three Mormon Towns," Life, September 6, 1954, 91-100
78 Richard Francaviglia, The Mormon Landscape: Existence, Creation, and Perception of Unique Image in the American West (New York: AMS Press Inc., 1978), 67-68ff; Lange to Stryker, fall 1936, Roy Stryker Collection.The only indicator of the Mormon landscape that Lange did not photograph was the hay derrick, but according to Francaviglia, Mormon derricks are not common to the Escalante area anyway. Russell Lee would photograph a derrick, or "Mormon hay Stacker," for the FSA four years later in Box Elder County (LC-USF-34-37288-D).
79 Roy Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America 1935-1943 as Seen in the FSA Photographs (NewYork: Graphic Society, 1973), 9; Russell Lee,"Pie Town, N M.," US Camera, October 1941, 40
80 This photograph could have been taken when Lange returned to do preliminary work for her Guggenheim Award For this award, she looked at Utopian religious communities such as the Mormon settlements, Amana colonies, and the Hutterites. See Phillips, et al., Dorothea Lange: American Photographs, 79.
81 Nelson, The Mormon Village, 95
82 Delia Christiansen, interview by the author, August 1999, Escalante, Utah; notes in possession of the author The people of Escalante saw Lange's images in an unknown publication that I have yet to find. What is interesting is that townspeople like Christiansen knew exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned the "depression photographs." With Mrs Christiansen I barely mentioned the photographs before she told me all about them in clear detail
83 Nelson, The Mormon Village, 116 The photographs of Bishop Harvey Bailey, the only younger member of the town Lange photographed, remained buried in her private collection and were not sent to Washington, D C During his brief stay in Escalante, Everett Ruess noted the many residents his own age. He had many young companions and even noted that if he were to stay much longer he might have "fallen in love with a Mormon girl"; see Rusho, Vagabondfor Beauty, 176-80.
84 Christiansen interview In photographing the church on the hill, Lange would have had two elegant homes directly at her back.Yet Lange ignored these homes and instead photographed the older log homes that were some of the first homes to be built in the area; see Sheila Woolley, Walking Tours of Pioneer Homes and Barns, brochure published by Daughters of Utah Pioneers and the City of Escalante.
85 Hartley E Howe, "Have You Seen Their Faces?" Survey Graphic 29 (April 1940): 236.This change was boosted by Stryker's connection with Robert Lynd, co-author of Middletown. See Hurley, Portrait of a Decade, 96-98, and Edward Steichen, "The FSA Photographers," US Camera 1 (1939): 46-60
86 See S George Ellsworth, Utah's Heritage (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1992), and Alexander, Utah: The Right Place, 309ff See also Utah Historical Quarterly 68 (Spring 2000): 98ff
