"To Watch the Faces of the Poor": Life Magazine and the Mythology of Rural Poverty in the Great Depression

"To Watch the Faces of the Poor": Life Magazine and the Mythology of Rural Poverty in the Great Depression1 Charles Cunningham On the last page of a series of articles in its June 21, 1937 issue on the socalled "Dust Bowl," Life magazine ran a full-page, head-and-shoulders photograph of a grizzled man above the caption "Dust Bowl Farmer is New Pioneer" (Fig. 1); (65). The farmer, a man who appears to be in his fifties, peers into the camera, a grim, determined look on his weathered face, his thin-lipped mouth a downward crescent that mirrors the curve of his whiskery chin. Credited only to the Resettlement Administration, the precursor to the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the image was in fact cropped from a photograph made by Dorothea Lange in California earlier that year (Fig 2).2 Lange's original photograph showed three men—Life's "pioneer," flanked by two others with their heads lowered, perhaps in worry or discouragement. Assigned to take pictures depicting the need for more government-funded migrant camps in the region, Lange had titled the photograph: "Ex-tenant farmer on relief grant in the Imperial Valley, California." Remarking on Life's manipulation of the meaning of Lange's photograph , Lawrence Levine argues that it points to an ambivalence in Depression culture itself between a desire to witness both the "despair" and the "dignity" of those impoverished by the economic crisis (33-37). While JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 29.3 (Fall 1999): 278-302. Copyright © 1999 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. Life Magazine and the Mythology of Rural Poverty in the Depression 279 Figure 1: Dorothea Lange photograph cropped in a manner similar to that which appeared in Life, June 21, 1937. Figure 2: Dorothea Lange, "Ex-tenant farmer on relief grant in Imperial Valley, California," (1937). Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FASOWI Collection, reproduction number LC-USF34-T0106336 -C. 280 JNT Levine may be right about ambivalence in the culture, he fails to register what it meant that Life manipulated the photo and its caption so as to rid it of ambiguity. Life's version of the image excises the insecurity and despair in favor of a paean to the "pioneer" spirit, a move that suggests that despair was not part of the experience of poverty. Neither does Levine take into account the fact that the only way that these photographs could reach national audiences was in mass media. The version that Life published was the one that was mass-circulated, and thus the cultural signifier of rural poverty that was mass-circulated. In this essay, my concern is not only with how Life manipulated the meaning of Lange's photograph, but also with how the magazine generally represented the subject of the photograph, white rural poverty, during the Depression. Poor, rural whites—especially Southern sharecroppers and the so-called "Okie" migrants to California—were, and still are, icons of Depression culture, receiving extraordinary public attention in the press as well as in fiction and film. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), as well as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) were all best-selling novels about poor, rural whites. A stage adaptation of Tobacco Road (1933) broke the record as the longest running Broadway play in history (1933-1941) and logged thousands of performances around the country as a traveling show. The play became a film in 1941, while John Ford's film version of The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was a huge box office draw. Poor, rural whites were also major subjects of FSA photography and many prominent "documentary books" that combined photographs (often FSA) and writing to chronicle the agricultural problem.3 In fact, Lange's experience as an FSA photographer suggests that the whiteness of the popular representations of rural poverty was not accidental, but stemmed from assumptions embedded in U.S. culture. When she made a trip through the South documenting the collapse of the tenant farming system for the FSA in 1937, she asked Roy Stryker, the director of the photography section, if she should focus primarily on white tenants. His response indicated much about...