John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

Baseball! Opening Day with the FSA

One of the enduring myths about the Farm Security Administration [FSA] is that its photographers only made gloomy pictures of poor people.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Despite that fact that the FSA was a Depression-era federal agency that brought aid to the poor, its photographers -- under the leadership of Roy Stryker --  made plenty of photos of happy poor people, too.  Sometimes they were playing baseball.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Baseball game at recess, San Augustine grade school, San Augustine, Texas.  1939.  (All photos are from the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information collection, at the Library of Congress.  Click on any image to see a much larger version.)

I thought that it would be great to celebrate major league baseball's Opening Day with some photos of grassroots baseball from 70 years ago, a time when the game was indisputably America's past-time.  (Captions are the originals.)

 

 

Philip Bonn:  Keysville, Virginia.  Randolph Henry High School.  Baseball during gym period.  1943.

 

 

Marjory Collins:  Washington, D.C.  Players in an amateur baseball game between the employees' recreation association and a team recruited from garage workers.  1942.

 

 

Dorothea Lange:  Near mountain home, northern Arkansas, on U.S. 62. Farmers' baseball game in the country. From this area many have gone to California to work in agriculture.  1938.

 

 

Marion Post Wolcott: Atlanta, Georgia.  Watching a baseball game.  1939. 

 

  

Dorothea Lange:  Fourth of July, near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Rural filling stations become community centers and general loafing grounds.  The men in the baseball suits are on a local team which will play a game nearby.  They are called the Cedargrove Team.  1939.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Migratory laborers like to play baseball. Here is one of them in a catchers uniform at the Agua Fria Migratory Labor Camp, Arizona.  1940.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Spectators watch the baseball game on the fourth of July at Vale, Oregon.  1941.

 

 

Roger Smith:  Negro Marines prepare for action.  Breaking a tradition of 167 years, the U.S. Marine Corps started enlisting Negroes on June 1, 1942.  The first class of 1,200 Negro volunteers began their training three months later as members of the 51st Composite Defense Battalion at Montford Point, a section of the 200 square mile Marine Base, Camp Lejeune, at New River, North Carolina.  Evidence of the lack of racial friction may be seen in the sports program at the camp.  On the baseball team Negro enlistees and white non-com officers are teammates.  Camp Lejeune has its own baseball league, with the Montford Point team a strong contender for championship honors.  1943.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Night baseball, Marshall, Texas.  1939.  (Remember, you can click on the photos to see much larger versions.)

 

Review: "Hard Luck Blues: Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression"

In the 1930s and '40s, photographers employed by the federal government's now-legendary Farm Security Administration [FSA] created the most significant and, perhaps, most beautiful of all American photo archives.  The FSA's Historical Unit, which was established to document and promote the Roosevelt administration's New Deal policies, far transcended its narrow political purpose.  The unit employed some of the most important photographers of the twentieth century -- Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Russell Lee, among others -- and, as recent research has shown, their boss, Roy Stryker, gave them the latitude to pursue their own visions.  Not surprisingly, more has been written about the FSA than any other episode in the history of photography.

 

Cover photo, Marion Post Wolcott:  Beggers on main street corner.  Montgomery, Alabama.  1939.

I can't actually prove that last assertion, but I'll be willing to buy a drink for the person who shows that I'm wrong.  There are at least 29 books in my university's library about FSA photography, and that's not counting biographies and monographs about individual FSA photographers.  Any final tally would be at least twice than number.  Seemingly, no aspect of the FSA photo project has been left unexamined.  The books look at the structure of FSA photo essays, the ideology of the FSA and the New Deal, FSA photography and religion, FSA photography and race, FSA photography and the American Dream, plus FSA photography in states from Virginia to Colorado.  (I own five books on Dorothea Lange alone.)

Can the world possibly need yet another book on the FSA?  Yes.  That book would be Rich Remsberg's Hard Luck Blues:  Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression.  And I wish that I'd written it.  It's that good.

Russell Lee: Negro musicians playing accordion and washboard in automobile. Near New Iberia, Louisiana.  1938.  (All but one of the photographs in this review appear in Hard Luck Blues.  They're from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection at the Library of Congress.  Having been made by photographers employed by the United States government, they are not eligible for copyright protection.  Click directly on any of the photos to see larger versions.)

Hard Luck Blues justifies its existence in a couple of ways.  First, most of the more than 200 photos are beautiful, a real joy to see.  Lange, Shahn, and Lee are well represented, as are the Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, John Vachon, and Arthur Rothstein, wonderful photographers all.  Many of the photos have rarely, if ever, been published and will be new to anyone who hasn't spent hours rummaging through the FSA archives.

Second, the collection is, as Remsberg says, "almost certainly the best visual documentation of vernacular musical performance," during the Depression years.  It was a critical time in American music history.  An older world of street musicians, barn dances, and community concert bands was vanishing, as was the last generation of musicians "to learn [their art] without sound recording."

 

Jack Delano:  Fiddler (Mr. Ed. Lorkin [sic]) for the square dances at the World's Fair at Tunbridge, Vermont.  1941.

Remsberg's introductions to the various chapters (the book is divided geographically) are brief and to the point.  He's a master of knowing how to give enough information to allow the viewer to see the photos in their historical context, but not so much that the pictures are buried by words.

For instance, Remsberg tells us that Ed Larkin (above) was a Vermont farmer who had been fiddling since the 1880s.  At the time that Jack Delano photographed him, he was a leading figure in the revival of "the New England contra dance tradition," making him something of a forerunner of the folk revival of the '50s and '60s.  To this day, the Ed Larkin Contra Dancers are "still active in Vermont."

Ben Shahn:  Doped singer, "Love oh, love, oh keerless love," Scott's Run, West Virginia.  Relief investigator reported a number of dope cases at Scott's Run.  1935.

Street musicians are a well known phenomenon of the era.  But had it not been for the FSA photographers, there would be little visual documentation of the people who were actively creating the nation's musical culture.  Some preserved distinctive regional styles, while others, the itinerants, brought new musical ideas to once isolated areas.

Ben Shahn:  Scott's Run, West Virginia.  1935.

The photos not only show us the musicians themselves; they also tell us something about the social context within which they lived and worked.  (The full set of Shahn's photos from Scott's Run, West Virginia, two of which can be seen above, reinforces what musicologists already know -- that black and white musicians learned a great deal from each other.)

John Collier:  Local band leader leads with "An Old Southern Melody" and everybody cheered.  Home guard passes through Enterprise, Coffee County, Alabama.  1941.

Remsberg's definition of "roots" is broad enough to encompass concert bands, which is a good thing, since they show up in the FSA archive with great regularity.  In 2010, it's difficult to imagine a time when "commercial, military, and community bands" were popular, "prestigious and commercially successful."  That popularity was fading, in the '30s, but had by no means disappeared, especially in small towns, where many Americans still lived.

Russell Lee:  Acrobat and audience at Spanish-American traveling show.  Penasco, New Mexico.  1940.

A set of Russell Lee photographs, showing the musicians, acrobats, and clowns who were members of at Macia Brothers "traveling show" is one of the book's unexpected pleasures.  Like many of the book's photos, they will be extremely valuable for anyone trying to understand the popular culture of particular communities during the Depression.

Jack Delano:  A prisoner dancing while another plays the guitar at a prison camp.  Greene County, Georgia.  1941.

Remsberg's texts are short, as I've mentioned.  But the research is deep, and he knows when to use it to greatest effect.  The story behind the photo above, for instance, is a troubling mix of institutional racism and personal ambition.   Delano tells the tale in his memoirs, and Remsberg quotes it at some length.   A guard had ordered the prisoners to "dance for the photographer."  Delano remembered that

I was so nervous and excited by the opportunity to get these pictures that I blocked out my personal feelings.  I had only one thought in mind:  I must not fail to get these pictures!  ...It was only afterward, relaxing back in my hotel room, that the realization of what I had witnessed came upon me.  ...How humiliating it must have been for those men to be obliged to perform for me, as if they were trained animals!

 

Not incidentally, Remsberg is able to identify the guitar player as "the great Piedmont-style musician Buddy Moss, nearing the end of his six-year prison term...."

 

Russell Lee:  Entertainers at Negro tavern.  Chicago, Illinois.  1941.

Chicago gets a chapter unto itself.  And why not?  Lee, Delano, and Edwin Rosskam, another FSA photographer, spent a considerable amount of time in the city, largely to document African American community.  Despite the segregation and high unemployment that blacks endured, they had created a flourishing cultural life for themselves and sustained an influential cluster of professional musicians.

Singer and guitarist Lonnie Johnson (above, on the right) was "an enormously popular" entertainer and "an innovative guitarist."  Singing with him is either Dan Dixon or Andrew Harris, both of whom were members of his trio.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint, Saturday evening, outside Clarksdale, Mississippi.  1939.

Many of the best -- and best known -- photos in the book were made in the South.  That's no surprise, really.  As Remsberg says, the South has long been "high-yield territory" for folklorists, musicologists, and photographers.

Marion Post Wolcott's photo of dancers in a Clarksdale, Mississippi, juke joint is probably the most famous of all the FSA photos that involve music and musicians.  It's not in the book, perhaps because of its popularity.  It's been endlessly reproduced and is one of the photos that the public most often asks to have reprinted.  None of that detracts from its considerable charms.  Not only is it visually stunning, but it's also a powerful reminder that the Depression was not just about suffering.  It was also about people determined to keep their communities and their cultures alive and to live with joy and dignity.  The FSA photographers were aware of their era's complexity, and, as artists, they captured it in the photos that they made.

There's little in Hard Luck Blues to complain about.  Some of the photos are poorly reproduced -- flat and lacking any visual punch.  The book's publishers, the University of Illinois Press and the Library of Congress, haven't done these important photos justice.

Occasionally I wanted more context than Remsberg was willing to provide. 

Dorothea Lange:  Camp talent provides music for dancing at Shafter camp for migrants.  Halloween party, Shafter, California.  1938.

I was especially disappointed with his failure to discuss "blackface" entertainment, which shows up several times in the book's photos.  In this hangover from nineteenth-century minstrelsy, white performers darkened their faces with makeup and mimicked what they imagined were African American performance styles.  The result was either crude or sophisticated racial satire, depending on the skill and temperament of the performer.  Blackface was still acceptable in polite white society, in the '30s and '40s, but faded rapidly after World War II, under pressure from the growing civil rights movement.  The book's photos of grinning white adults (above) and slightly bewildered white children (below) in blackface makeup demand some discussion.

Marion Post Wolcott: Second and third grade children being made up for their Negro song and dance at May Day-Health Day festivities.  Ashwood Plantations, South Carolina.  1939.

Quibbles aside, Hard Luck Blues is an important book.  Anyone who is interested in photography or music will want a copy.  Anyone seriously engaged in the study of the history of photography or the history of popular music will need a copy.

And, thanks to those fabulous photographers, it's a delight to behold.

How Photography Lies, Even When It's Telling the Truth: FSA Photography & the Great Depression

Think about the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, and images like the one below will spring into your head -- a photograph of a homeless mother and her children who appear to have nothing to cling to but their clothes, their car, and each other.  It seems to sum up the desperate reality of people caught in the worst economic catastrophe of the twentieth century.

Like so many of the images made by photographers working on the federal government's monumental Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information documentary project, it feels utterly real, perfectly iconic.

Dorothea Lange:  Mother and baby of family on the road. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California.  1939.

It turns out, however, that Dorothea Lange made several photographs of this young mother and her children on that day in 1939.

Here's another one, the last in the series.  This photo is not iconic.  It never was and probably never will be.  In fact, it feels false.  The child's face is freshly scrubbed, and both mother and child are smiling.  It makes us wonder what's going on.  

Dorothea Lange:  Mother and baby of family on the road. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California.  1939.

Lange, brilliant artist and documentarian that she was, fills us in.

The explanation is in the "General Caption" that she wrote to accompany the series of photos:

The car is parked outside the Employment Office.  The family have arrived, before opening of the potato season.  They have been on the road for one month--have sick baby.

...Father washed the baby’s face with edge of blanket dampened from canteen, for the photographs.

Well, there it is.  The father washed his child's face.  He manipulated reality, and Lange let him do it.  Together they've created a lie.  Pretty simple.

In fact, it's a little too simple.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Dude at rodeo. Ashland, Montana.  1941.

There's no doubt that the second photo feels wrong.  The problem isn't with the photo, however.  It's with us.

Consider the photograph directly above.  It feels right.  We expect this evidently wealthy young woman -- we can't help but notice the expensive cowboy duds, the new boots, and that lovely Buick Special Deluxe -- to have a grin on her face.  After all, the photo speaks in the language of commercial advertising as much as it does in the language of documentary photography.  In that language, people who are wealthy, young, and pretty are happy.  And they show it.

The opposite is also true.  We know that the Depression was a time of great suffering, and we expect people mired in such miserable circumstances to show their unhappiness.

That's partly because none of us under 70 experienced the Depression first-hand.  We didn't see it.  Much of the visual information that we have to go on comes from the FSA/OWI photographs that are endlessly reproduced in books, especially history textbooks, magazines, newspapers, documentary films, blogs, and even on postage stamps.

United States Postal Service first-class stamp, issued in 1998.  [The photograph is by Dorothea Lange.  The original caption reads:  Destitute pea pickers in California.  Mother of seven children.  Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.  February or March, 1936.  The woman's name was Florence Thompson.]

Most of the FSA/OWI images that we've seen have emphasized the suffering and impoverishment that accompanied the Depression.  The photographers made plenty of those kinds of photos.  After all, they had been hired to produce images that would support the Roosevelt administration's efforts to bring aid to those who needed it most.  They were all, with the probable exception of Walker Evans, personally committed to the cause.

Ben Shahn:  One of few remaining inhabitants of Zinc, Arkansas.  1935.

Of course, we wouldn't have seen these images of the Depression if editors, then, (and historians and documentary makers, now) hadn't chosen to publish them.  Like the FSA/OWI photographers, their goal has been illustrate the trauma that people endured.

So, most of the photos that we've seen from the Depression confirm our expectations about how suffering people are supposed to look.

The problem is not that the images we conjure up about the Depression are wrong.  It's that they're woefully -- and misleadingly -- incomplete.

Russell Lee:  Negro cabaret. Chicago, Illinois.  1941.  (You can click directly in this image, and most of the others, to see larger versions.)

This isn't a new observation.  Over twenty years ago, Lawrence Levine made the point that people are never simply defined by their suffering, even in the worst of circumstances.  "One of the more elusive and difficult historical truths," he wrote...

...is that even in the midst of disaster life goes on and human beings find ways not merely of adapting to the forces that buffet them but often of rising above their circumstances and participating actively in the shaping of their lives.  ...To say these things is not to minimize the importance of... persecution [or] economic travail.  It is simply to assert that human beings are not wholly molded by their immediate experiences....*

 

Jack Delano:  Dancing to the music of Red Sounders and his band at the Club DeLisa. Chicago, Illinois. 1942.

The FSA/OWI photographers understood this perfectly well.  They were living through the era, after all, and they saw it in all its complexity and vitality.

They were especially aware of the nation's rich musical culture.  And ot the people who were creating it.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint, Saturday evening, outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. 1939.

This is one of Marion Post Wolcott's best known photos.  It's fabulous both for its beauty and for what it shows us about the refusal of the human spirit to allow neither poverty nor oppression to crush it.

This isn't the only photo that Wolcott made in a Clarksdale, Mississippi, juke joint.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Negroes jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday afternoon.  Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta.  1939.

This one is at least as interesting as the first, mainly due to the presence of the white policeman.  What's he doing there?  My guess is that he wanted to keep an eye on the beautiful young white women with a camera, who insisted on spending time with black people.

 

Jack Delano:  Fiddler (Mr. Ed. Lorkin [Larkin]) for the square dances at the World's Fair at Tunbridge, Vermont. 1941.

The FSA/OWI archive is, in fact, surprisingly full of people having a good time.  And they're often making music or listening to it.

Ben Shahn:  Doped singer, Love oh, love, oh keerless love, Scotts Run, West Virginia. Relief investigator reported a number of dope cases at Scotts Run.  1935.

"Doped?"  High on marijuana, I'd guess.  It was a common enough recreational drug at the time.

Russell Lee:  Negro musicians playing accordion and washboard in automobile. Near New Iberia, Louisiana.  1938.

The FSA/OWI photographers were drawn to musicians (as photographers have always been).

Russell Lee:  Specialty number of orchestra at the National Rice Festival. Crowley, Louisiana.  1938.

And, why not?  Musicians make terrific subjects.  (A decade and a half later, young men would be doing with electric guitars what this guy is doing with his string bass.  And they'd call it rock 'n' roll.)

Russell Lee:  Saturday night in a saloon. Craigville, Minnesota.  1937.

There are also a surprising number of photos in the FSA/OWI archives of people having a drink.  Or three.

 

Russell Lee: Lumberjack with bandaged head after being beaten up and "rolled" in a saloon on Saturday night in Craigsville, Minnesota.  1937.

Same photographer.  Same saloon.  Same Saturday night in Craigsville.  Russell Lee wasn't given to romanticizing things.

Arthur Rothstein:  Girls in beer parlor adjoining dance hall. Marshalltown, Iowa.  1940.

You get the sense, however, that most people didn't go out drinking looking for a fight.  They were looking for something else.

Esther Bubley.  Washington, D.C.  April 1943.

Bubley’s notes read:  "Girl who has picked up two soldiers since coming into the Sea Grill alone. They are drinking beer and exchanging life histories."

Russell Lee:  Sound effects man of orchestra at Savoy Ball Room. Chicago, Illinois.  1941.

If we force ourself to stop for a moment and think about the '30s and '40s, we'll realize that we do know what they photographers knew and what Levine wants us to remember.

While these were indeed the years of the Great Depression, it was also the Big Band Era and the Golden Age of Hollywood, phrases that call quite different images to mind.

With that thought in mind, I'll close with one of my favorite FSA/OWI photos, if only because of the name stenciled on the case.

Update, 18 March 2010:  Rick Scully made a very interesting comment on this post.  He says, among other things...

I wanted to let you know the gentleman in the photo playing the fiddle is Ed Larkin (not Lorkin) and to this day the Ed Larkin Contra Dancers still perform in and around Tunbridge, and always at the Tunbridge Fair which will occur this September for the 139th year!

* * *

*  Lawrence W. Levine, "The Historian and the Icon:  Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s," in Carl Fleischhauer and Beverley W. Brannan, eds., Documenting America, 1935-1943.

Note:  The photos in this post by Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, and Esther Bubley are from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, at the Library of Congress.  Photographs in this collection were taken by photographers working for the United States government and are not eligible for copyright protection.

America in Blackface: Photos from the Farm Security Administration

This is weird little photograph.  (You'll want to click directly on it to see a larger version.)  It shows a slightly bewildered group of white southern school kids gathering around their teacher to have blackface makeup put on their face and arms, and one little girl, looking in a mirror, scrutinizing her teacher's work.  It's shocking and repugnant.  The more you look at it, the more disturbing it becomes.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Second and third grade children being made up for their Negro song and dance at May Day-Health Day festivities. Ashwood Plantations, South Carolina.  1939.  (Click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)

But it wasn't always so.  When Marion Post Wolcott made the photo, in 1939, while she was working for Roy Stryker's legendary documentary project at the Farm Security Administration [FSA], there was nothing shocking about it.  The photo captured perfectly ordinary preparations for a perfectly ordinary school festival.  Most people who saw it would probably have been charmed.  Seventy-one years ago, the white kids in blackface were cute.

Dorothea Lange:  Camp talent provides music for dancing at Shafter camp for migrants.  Halloween party, Shafter, California.  1938.

It wasn't just a Southern thing.  Seventy-two years ago, blackface masquerading in a migrant workers' camp in California was, among other things, one more way of dressing up for a costume party.

 

Dorothea Lange:  Camp talent provides music for dancing at Shafter camp for migrants.  Halloween party, Shafter, California.  1938.

As much as we'd like to, we can't honestly read the expressions on the faces of these men in blackface.  We're tempted to say that at least one of them looks like a kid who was caught with his hand in the cookie jar.  We'd almost certainly be wrong.

Ben Shahn:  Circus poster, Circleville, Ohio. 1938.

It's hard to over-emphasize how commonplace blackface forms of entertainment were in American culture, during the first half of the twentieth century.  It was inescapable -- on stage, in movie theaters, at circuses, in newspapers and magazines, on billboards, and even on the radio.

Walker Evans:  Minstrel poster.  Alabama.  1936.

Blackface wasn't new.  As this poster suggests, it has roots in minstrelsy.  (You can enlarge the photo by clicking directly on the image.  It deserves a closer look.)  Even though actors sometimes blackened their faces in Shakespeare's day, blackface first became a popular form of entertainment -- the most popular form of entertainment -- in nineteenth-century America, when, as Eric Lott puts it in Love and Theft:  Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, white men began to caricature blacks "for sport and profit."

 

Sheet music for a nineteenth-century minstrel song.  (Blackface minstrelsy was a global phenomenon.  This song was published in England.  The image is from the Life magazine photo archive, hosted by Google.)

Many aspects of blackface minstrelsy drew upon and reinforced attitudes that were deeply hostile to African-Americans.  They and their culture were mimicked, lampooned, and held up to ridicule.

The title of Lott's book, however, alerts us that blackface was a complex phenomenon.  Yes, there was the theft, distortion, and denigration of African-American culture.  But there was also love.  Or, at least, the desire to appropriate elements of blackness which seemed to offer an alternative to the constraints of whiteness.

John Collier:  Bridgeton, New Jersey.  FSA (Farm Security Administration) agricultural workers' camp. Colored minstrels advertising their show.  1942.

To put it another way, black was cool.

The music and dance of the black community were new, exciting, and astonishingly beautiful, and whites wanted to sing black songs and dance black steps.  They wanted to experience blackness, while keeping actual blacks a safe distance away.  Love and theft, lure and loathing co-existed in an uneasy embrace.

It was this ambivalence -- the fact that blackface was not entirely about hatred -- that allowed African-American entertainers to participate minstrelsy and sometime to go as far as blackening their faces.  Given the racial climate of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blackface was, as Michael Rogin wrote in Blackface, White Noise:  Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, "...the vehicle by which black performers... gained access to the stage."

John Vachon:  High school jazz band.  Sikeston Missouri.  1940.

For the most part, the black public accepted blackface minstrelsy.  They objected, of course, to coarse and brutal caricatures.  And some African-American intellectuals, such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, deplored everything about it.

Premier of "The Jazz Singer," starring Al Jolson, New York City, 1927.

But black audiences (largely segregated, even in the North) were as thrilled by Al Jolson's blackface performance in The Jazz Singer as were whites.  It was, of course, the first "talkie."  Nobody had ever seen or heard anything like it.  Just as importantly, as far as African-Americans were concerned, Jolson's blackface was permissible blackface.  They knew that he had, to quote Rogin, "always avoided performing the most grotesque caricatures."

Bing Crosby in blackface.  A still from the movie "Holiday Inn" (1942).

The photo above is from 1942.  A year later, Crosby again appeared in blackface, starring in the movie Dixie as Dan Emmett, the most popular blackface minstrel of the mid-nineteenth century and the man who was credited with composing the song "Dixie."  You can read all about it in the June 5th, 1943 edition of Life.

I'm not picking on Jolson and Crosby.  Fred Astaire  (in Swingtime, 1936), Mickey Rooney (in Babes in Arms, 1939), and many of the biggest actors of their day also appeared in blackface.  The practice continued well into the '40s.  And that's the point.  What shocks us today was good fun (as most people saw it) not very long ago.

These days, blackface scenes are often cut from old movies when they're shown on television in an attempt to protect us from our own history.

Actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll in blackface, as radio characters Amos 'n Andy.  Life magazine.  1935.  Copyright, Time Inc.

Radio may not be a visual medium, but blackface found a home there, too.  Amos 'n Andy was the most popular radio program in the nation in the '30 and '40s, with both white and black audiences.  It featured white actors -- Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll -- vocally imitating African-American characters.  (They wore blackface for publicity photos and personal appearances.)  When the show moved to television, after World War 2, black actors were cast.  But times had changed.  And so had African-Americans.

When the NAACP and other civil rights organizations objected to the demeaning stereotypes on which Amos 'n Andy was built, people in positions of power began to listen.  CBS took it off the prime-time schedule in 1953.

Amos 'n Andy's cancellation marked the beginning of the end for blackface.  It certainly didn't disappear overnight, but by the mid-'60s it was something most people found embarrassing, at the very least.

Literal blackface has disappeared, except in the hands of the clueless, the shameless, and the avowedly racist.  Metaphorical blackface may be a different story.  I'll let you make up your own minds about acts like the Blues Brothers and Eminem.

* * *

I'll close with one last photo, something from my own university.

 

Rufus W. Holsinger:  Glee Club, University of Virginia.  1917.  Holsinger Studio Collection, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

* * *

Note:  The photos in this post by Marion Post Wolcott, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, John Collier, and John Vashon are from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, at the Library of Congress.  The collection, like all good archives, helps us to remember even those things we would prefer to forget.

The FSA Photographers and the Great American Road Trip

In the 1930s and early 1940s, a small group of immensely talented photographers, working for the federal government's Farm Security Administration [FSA], invented the visual language of the great American road trip.

Dorothea Lange:  Between Tulare and Fresno on U.S. 99. Farmer from Independence, Kansas, on the road at cotton chopping time.  He and his family have been in California for six months.  May, 1939.  (All photos are from the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection at the Library of Congress.  Click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)

"...invented the visual language of the great American road trip."  That's a pretty bold claim, given that road trips have been a part of American culture for a very long time.  It's probably too much of a stretch to call Lewis and Clark's two-year expedition to the Pacific coast and back (1804-1806) a road trip, but Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872), a rollicking account of his travels and adventures on the western frontier, California, and Hawaii, certainly qualifies.

Dorothea Lange:  On U.S. 99. in Kern County on the Tehachapi Ridge. Migrants travel seasonally back and forth between Imperial Valley and the San Joaquin Valley over this ridge.  February, 1939.

Twain was a writer, not a photographer, however.  He was responsible for many impressive things; creating a visual vocabulary wasn't one of them.  The photographers who did go west in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--Carlton Watkins and Alexander Gardner, among many others--didn't make the road their subject.  The FSA photographers very often did.  (Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, and Carl Mydans are those whose work is shown here.)  They also traveled by car.  Motor vehicles, especially cars, are essential ingredients of the modern version of the classic American road trip.

Dorothea Lange:  Billboard on U.S. Highway 99 in California. National advertising campaign sponsored by National Association of Manufacturers.  March, 1937.

The nation was in the midst of the Great Depression when Roy Stryker assembled his team of photographers, first as part of the Resettlement Administration [RA] and then within the FSA.  (Following the outbreak of World War II, the group was later transferred to the Office of War Information.)  Stryker's goal was to create a photographic record of the suffering that the Depression had caused and the succor that the RA and FSA had brought.  So, his photographers--as able and strong willed a group as can be imagined--took to the road.  They gave Stryker what he wanted, but their photos reflect their own sensibilities as well.

Dorothea Lange:  Mississippi Delta, on Mississippi Highway No. 1 between Greenville and Clarksdale.  Negro laborer's family being moved from Arkansas to Mississippi by white tenant.  June, 1938.

Most of the photos that the FSA photographers produced did indeed record suffering and injustice.  This was a necessary part of their mission.  Many urban and suburban voters had no real idea of what conditions in the countryside looked like.  It was an era before television, but it was the dawn of the age of the great photo magazines, such a Life and Look.  The FSA fed the nearly insatiable hunger of magazines and newspapers for images, and, in doing so, built support for RA and FSA programs.

Photos such as the ones above powerfully shaped Americans' ideas about the look of the Depression.  The impact of these images could be seen, at the time, in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, the movie made from John Steinbeck's best-selling novel.  (Their enduring influence on visual culture can be seen in The Beverly Hillbillies, both the 1960s TV show and the 1993 movie.)

Carl Mydans:  Scenes at the auto trailer camp, Dennis Port, Massachusetts.  August, 1936.  (Click directly on any image to see a larger version.)

Even in the midst of the depression, most people still had jobs and millions remained middle class.  The FSA photographers knew it and made many photos that show life among those lucky enough to have jobs going on more or less as it always had.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Guests of Sarasota trailer park, Sarasota, Florida, picnicking at the beach.  January, 1941.

These often ironic images of middle-class recreation have had as long a shelf-life as the photos of the poor and unemployed.  Think, for instance, of Bill Owens' book Leisure.

Dorothea Lange:  Santa Fe, New Mexico. Gas station price analysis.  August, 1938.

The road trip check-list that the FSA photographers created (and that contemporary photographers continue to consult) includes much more the suffering of the dispossessed and the foibles of the middle-class.  A road trip needs, for instance, picturesque gas stations.

Russell Lee:  Man in hamburger stand, Alpine, Texas.  May, 1938.

And hamburger joints, complete with local color and local characters.  (I don't mean to dismiss these photos.  They're quite wonderful.  It's not at all coincidental that, here, Lee anticipates Robert Frank.)

A road trip also needs curiosities and roadside attractions, as in the next three photos.

Russell Lee (doing a terrific Walker Evans impersonation):  Secondhand tires displayed for sale. San Marcos, Texas.  March, 1940.

John Vachon:  Paul Bunyan at used car lot, Bemidji, Minnesota.  September, 1939.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Cabins imitating the Indian teepee for tourists along highway south of Bardstown, Kentucky.  July, 1940.

Walker Evans:  Auto dump near Easton, Pennsylvania.  November 1935.

The great American road trip is meant to be fun.  But Evans reminds us where our obsession with the automobile is likely to lead.

Dorothea Lange:  The highway going West. U.S. 80 near Lordsburg, New Mexico.  June, 1938.

I'll end with an iconic image.  This photo is by Dorothea Lange, but just about every FSA photographer made one just like it.  As has every photographer who has followed them west, including, famously, Robert Frank.

* * *

I'm far from the first person to connect the FSA photographers to the great American road trip.  I'll let Luc Sante have the last word.  In his essay, "Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac," he writes that it was the "poetically adventurous" FSA photographers "who established an enduring model for their profession...."

PS  The painter and muralist Ben Shahn, who had a brief, brilliant career as an FSA photographer, made photos on road trips through the South which anticipate--in surprising and striking ways--the images that Frank made on the road in the 1950s.  I'll say much more about Shahn's work in an upcoming post.