Ben Shahn and the Medicine Show, Huntingdon, Tennessee, 1935

This is not a slave auction.  After all, the photo was made in 1935, 70 years after emancipation.  But our twenty-first century eyes might have trouble figuring out exactly what's going on.

The photographer, Ben Shahn, would have recognized the scene immediately.  It's a traveling medicine show, a once popular form of entertainment and commerce that was slowly disappearing from the American scene.

Ben Shahn:  Medicine show, Huntingdon, Tennessee.  1935.  (Click directly on any of the photos to see larger versions.)

In the fall of '35, Shahn, a painter and lithographer with a growing reputation, and Bernarda Bryson, a less well-known artist and Shahn's girlfriend, spent several weeks meandering through the South in a Model A Ford.  Shahn couldn't drive, so Bryson was always behind the wheel.  They were on an open-ended assignment for the federal government's Resettlement Administration [RA].

Shahn had been hired to design posters and exhibitions in support of the RA's efforts to help poor farmers cope with the hardships of the Depression.  His superiors sensed that, having seen little of country outside of New York City, he knew next to nothing about the lives of the people that the RA served.  They were right.  Looking back on the experience in a 1964 interview, Shahn called the trip "a revelation," that made him rethink his "very phony idea of what the United States was like...."

Already a published photographer, Shahn took his camera along (a Leica, fitted with a right-angle viewfinder) and used it, brilliantly, almost every day.

 

Ben Shahn:  Medicine show, Huntingdon, Tennessee.  1935.

Heading south and west out of Nashville, Tennessee, one Saturday in October, Shahn and Bryson stopped in the small town of Huntingdon and stumbled across a medicine show.

The shows combined vaudeville-style entertainment with medical quackery.  Brooks McNamara tells us that the "melange of songs, dances, instrumental music, and comedy sketches" were designed to amuse audiences and to prepare them for the "lecture," in which the "doctor" would proclaim the virtues of his particular patent medicine.

Medicine shows "borrowed heavily from the 19th-century minstrel show," a fact that accounts for the presence of the black man in blackface.  It also explains the ventriloquist's dummy, a caricature of an African American.  The pitchman, in the photo above, would have been performing a comedy routine, in "Negro" dialect.  (Remember, you can click directly on any of the photos to see larger versions.)

Ben Shahn:  Medicine show, Huntingdon, Tennessee.  1935.

But what explains the Native American headdress that this salesman is wearing?

To quote another of McNamara's articles, medicine shows traded on "the mystique of the Indian."  Many white and black Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed that the Native American was "endowed with an iron constitution because he possessed secrets of healing unknown to the white man.  ...Quacks and patent medicine men, recognizing the possibilities... borrowed the Indian and made him their own."

Ben Shahn:  Medicine show, Huntingdon, Tennessee.  1935.

Medicine shows were popular, even with people who didn't fall for the doctor's pitch.  It was cheap entertainment.  For most of the people in these photos, a radio would have been a luxury that they couldn't afford, and movies would have been rare treats.  In town to shop and socialize, they would have been happy to see a traveling medicine show preparing to perform.

 

Ben Shahn:  Medicine show, Huntingdon, Tennessee.  1935.

Shahn spent a good deal of time at the show, approaching it with a sense of curiosity, rather than condemnation.  He's aware of the racial dynamics at work in the show and in this town in Tennessee, but he seems to know that he doesn't fully understand them.  As an urban Jew, who had immigrated to the United States with his family when he was eight, he often felt like a fish out of water in the South.  He found southern conflicts to be "incomprehensible," at least temporarily, as what he saw and experienced blew apart his preconceived political ideas.

(He would have been more comfortable with the show's hucksterism.  In the early '30s, he had photographed an itinerant strong-man show, in New York City, at which patent medicines were probably sold.)

Ben Shahn:  Medicine show, Huntingdon, Tennessee.  1935.

What was the black man in blackface thinking?  We don't know, and neither did Shahn, as the photo clearly suggests.  Yes, blackface minstrelsy demeaned African Americans and mocked their culture.  The man in the photo would have known this perfectly well.  But it was the Depression, and jobs were hard to find.  One that was "dreary, ill-paid, [and] nomadic," as James Harvey Young put it, might have been better than no job at all.

We and Shahn know this history.  We and he also see hints of a slave auction in the first photo and notice the connection between the make up and the ventriloquist's dummy in the one above.  But we're not sure what it all meant on that Saturday afternoon in Huntingdon, Tennessee.  The man's expression isn't telling us, and the boy on the left is warning us to be careful in our judgments.

* * *

Traveling medicine shows turn up in many photographs from the '30s and '40s.  The shows were on the way out, as other forms of entertainment became more accessible, but they were common enough, especially in small towns.  Below is a photo that was made in 1942, by Bernard Hoffman, for Life magazine.

 

Bernard Hoffman, Life magazine:  Traveling medicine staging a minstrel show outside the Lumpkin County Courthouse (Georgia).  1942.  Copyright, Time, Inc.

And here (below) are two from Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration photographers that highlight the Native American connection.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Farmers listening to sales talk of patent medicine vendor in warehouse during tobacco auctions.  Durham, North Carolina.  1939.

Russell Lee:   Medicine sign, Pine Bluff, Arkansas.  1938.

* * *

The photos by Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, and Russell Lee that I show in this post are from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, at the Library of Congress.  While Shahn did work for the Resettlement Administration and, later, the Farm Security Administration [FSA], he was not employed by Roy Stryker's Historical Section, home of the legendary FSA photo documentary project.  Instead, he worked in the Special Skills section.  He admired, however, the job being done by Stryker and his photographers and donated the photos that he made on his southern trip to the Historical Section's archives.

You can find excellent accounts of Shahn's southern road trip in Nicholas Natanson's The Black Image in the New Deal:  The Politics of FSA Photography (1992) and Susan H. Edward's Ben Shahn and the Task of Photography in Thirties America (1995).

New Jersey public television recently broadcast "Ben Shahn:  A Passion for Justice," television program that explored Shahn's art and photography and their connection to his political convictions.  The program's website is very much worth a look.

Blackface and minstrelsy appear in other in FSA photographs.  You can see many more of them, here.

Comments

[Jon]

Very good article, Mr. Mason! Great for discussing Depression-Era photography for my high school AP US History class.
Thanks.