To The City: Urban Photographs of the New Deal

Introduction

 INTRODUCTION P hotographs of the Great Depression fill our repository of images of the American past, giving us a snapshot not only of the material characteristics of that era but of its values as well. Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” perhaps the best known picture of the period, combines the fortitude associated with farmers with the pathos of struggle, bringing forward the mythical yeoman farmer into the unsettling circumstances of the twentieth century. Such photographs have shaped our view of the 1930s. Most of them were produced through the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (first called the Resettlement Administration), which was led by Roy Stryker, who sought nothing less than a detailed, panoramic documentation of American life by some of the best photographers of the era, such as Lange and Walker Evans. Their mission was to photograph rural Americans, to capture the receding of the country’s agricultural sector, as farmers moved westward and toward urban centers.1 While the photographs helped make this passing of the agricultural era symbolic—and nostalgic—they also inevitably caught the irrepressible spread of urbanization, the march to the city. The early decades of the twentieth century marked a demographic shift in the United States from rural to urban, with the 1920 census revealing that the majority of Americans lived in an urban environment for the first time in the country’s history. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) charged photographers to reckon with this change, to grasp a previous era and its values at a time when anonymous crowds, mechanized routines, and dense living encroached upon the countryside. Although 2 I N T R O D U C T I O N Stryker and the photographers he directed did not set out to capture the urban element of the transformation, it was unavoidable. “As the FSA file seizes the scene of the changing today, it will have within itself, and in proper perspective, the scene of yesterday,” proclaimed John Vachon, who assisted Stryker in setting up the project and later became one of its more prolific photographers.2 But if the scene of yesterday was captured in “the changing today,” so too was the scene of tomorrow—the propulsion to the city. Pictures of migrants showed a nation on the move, not just from the farm but to the city. Work, home, family, neighbors, leisure—these general categories of everyday life that shaped the shooting scripts of the FSA photographers—meant that pictures were taken of houses piled atop one another, factories and warehouses, movie houses and swimming pools, as well as a growing web of transportation that included streets, highways, cars, buses, trains, and planes. When the FSA documentation project was transferred to the Office of War Information (OWI) in July 1942, the pictures of cities increased as the aim shifted to showing a country ready for war, proud of its ability to mobilize and fight, and armed to defend its core principles.3 At its grandest, the scope of the project encompassed nothing less than the entire country, its past, present, and future, its emptied plains, struggling towns, and bustling cities. By necessity, Stryker narrowed that embracing scope to focus on the small town, which he saw as the “cross-roads where the land meets the city, where the farm meets commerce and industry.”4 This perspective reflected the influence of sociologist Robert Lynd, who, in his 1929 study of a small American city—later identified as Muncie, Indiana—sought to reveal the patterns of daily life by conducting interviews, analyzing demographic data, and knitting together values and beliefs alongside work, leisure, and community activities. Stryker sought out Lynd near the beginning of the FSA project, in early 1936, recognizing in the documentary detail of Lynd’s book, Middletown, goals similar to his own for the FSA. Lynd quickly saw the opportunity the project posed and spurred Stryker to focus cameras on smalltown life and core American values such as community and fortitude. On the train ride back to Washington, D.C., after his meeting with Lynd, Stryker wrote up a draft of a shooting script on small towns that was to become a permanent directive for all photographers in the field. It suggested photographs of everything from fire hydrants to “menus in windows” and “Post Offices— Unusual—humorous.”5 While there were notable similarities between the investigative principles underlying Middletown and the FSA project, Lynd’s publication of a follow-up study less than ten years after the original...