The following essay is excerpted from the introduction to "Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43," published in 2004 by the Library of Congress in cooperation with Harry N. Abrams Inc.
By PAUL HENDRICKSON
There is a powerful inclination for many Americans of a certain age, myself included, to believe that the Great Depression somehow existed in monochrome. The thought flies in the face of reason, but it isn't hard to understand why it persists. So much black-and-white photography, particularly documentary photography, comes out of the 1930s and the prewar forties, an era that's just ahead, incidentally, by about a decade and a half, of when I swam to consciousness (in the fifties, in the middle of the middle of the country, Kankakee, Illinois, "so successfully disguised to myself"—as the writer James Agee once said—"as a child"). Those old gelatin-silver prints, made by a corps of sublimely gifted government photographers working for the New Deal, have become part of our national identity. It's as if they're stored, burned there, behind our collective retina. We see them and understand about them even when we don't see them or know very many specifics about them at all—Walker Evans's sharecroppers in Hale County, Alabama. Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" in Nipomo, California. Russell Lee's square dancers in Pie Town, New Mexico. Marion Post Wolcott's domino players tilted on their wicker-back chairs in the afternoon shade and drowse of a Mississippi drugstore. These pictures amount to a kind of Movietone reel looping through our heads. So much of what we seem to value about ourselves as a nation—pluck, perseverance, individuality, self-reliance, agrarian roots—is encoded in these photographs. To know and love them—and there are about 160,000 [sic] such images archived in the collections of the Library of Congress—it isn't necessary to know, or even have heard of, the names Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange or Russell Lee or Marion Post Wolcott . (There were about a dozen photographers, altogether, who worked at various times during the eight-year life of the project.) Much less would it be necessary to understand all about the alphabet-soup federal agencies—the RA [Resettlement Administration], the FSA, the OWI—which authorized and sponsored the picture-taking in the first place.
In brief: the idea, at least in the beginning, was this: to record through the medium of photography—which felt something like a new art in the thirties—the ravages of the Depression on America's rural population. Why? Not for its own sake, of course, but as a political means, a tool, for spurring Congress and the American public to support government relief and resettlement efforts, which were thought controversial: big brother's intervention on the little guy. But somehow along the way the documenting of hard times turned into something much wider and surprisingly artful. It turned into a pictorial encyclopedia of America herself—a portrait not just of rural life, where so much erosion of land and spirit had taken place, but a portrait of millions of Americans going about their day-to-day living—sometimes joyfully, sometimes desperately—in mill towns and mining towns and mountain towns and huge urban centers. What started narrow—Okie dust bowlers, shanty towns in West Virginia—spread wide, and almost surreptitiously on the part of the documentarians and the far-sighted Washington bureaucrat who had hired them for the project and directed their activities. His name was Roy Emerson Stryker, and he didn't love anything but this country, as one of his photographers once said of him. It was astonishing how much film, and of such wide variety, was being mailed to the Washington office for developing by Stryker's "spies" on the road. By the time America entered the war—really, a good while before that—there were tens of thousands of pictures. But by then the overriding aim of the work was to aid in any way possible to keep Hitler off our doorstep (as Stryker himself liked to say). And so the documenting of a nation had turned far more positive in tone and nature. Essentially the pictures were about America the beautiful, America the productive, America the determined, America the mobilizing. Here was Rosie the Riveter, bent to her task in her B-17 factory in Long Beach. Still, the pictures were by and large wonderful. They were so American.
John Vachon—who was nearly as good a writer as he was a squinter through a box, and who started out as a messenger boy for the FSA in the Washington office—once tried to explain in print how the wider, surreptitious lens had come about from the project's original intent: "Through some sublime extension of logic which has never been satisfactorily explained to anyone, Stryker believed that while documenting these mundane activities [government housing loans and federal farm co-ops], his photographers should, along the way, photograph whatever they saw, really saw: people, towns, road signs, railroad stations, barbershops, the weather, or the objects on top of a chest of drawers in Grundy County, Iowa." Ernest Hemingway, who was practicing a different kind of subversive American art in the thirties and forties, once said something similar about literature: "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was." Substitute the word "photographs" for "books," and I think you have the basis of an explanation of the staying power of these pictures, of the strange way they have burrowed into our walking dreams.
Was the work, right from the beginning, propagandistic? Of course it was, and sometimes in greater than lesser ways. Propaganda is a loaded word. So is another word: politics. As one historian of this period has written, the motive of the FSA photography project was always "political in the best sense of that suspect word." In ways difficult to explain, the propagandizing was always there alongside the artfulness. The two co-joined and the one didn't seem to pollute the other, not most of the time. Later in this essay, I will return to the notion of propagandizing. But for now suffice it to say that the unlikely artistry that resulted from this tax-supported government relief project seems due in equal parts to the giftedness of the photographers themselves, to Roy Stryker's vision, and, not least, to the times themselves. Or, to put it another way, to what was always there, waiting, on the other side of the lens.
I have known and loved these old black-and-white FSA and OWI rectangles for most of my adult life. As I have said in another place, these images of ordinary, enduring Americans—easily the largest and greatest documentary project of a people in the history of photography—have always seemed most meaningful to me in my own times of stress. Indeed, the pictures epitomize for me the truth of what the great latter-day Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank called "the humanity of the moment." When I look at the struggle coming up out of these pictures, I feel somehow as if I'm combing through my own and the country's ancestral attic with Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck and maybe the Andrews Sisters and the Great Gildersleve, too, all of us lingering here and there to laugh but more often cry over every broken porcelain doorknob and rusting Dr Pepper sign. This was my own parents' time in America—two scared farm kids out of Kentucky and Ohio, who met and fell in love at a roller rink on the lip of a world war. (They were in a movie theater in a place called Xenia, nine weeks from their wedding, on that Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, when the lights went on and the manager delivered the news of what had happened out in Honolulu.) It must be at least a part of why the years between the Depression and World War II seem to exert such a deep, romantic pull on their child; of why the images, for all of their hardship in some cases, strike me as so oddly comforting.
So I would have never guessed that I could fall head over heels, all over again, and in some ways even more deeply this time around, for FSA and OWI color work. Shoot, until recently, I barely knew such color documentary work existed—and, as it happens, I am the author of a book (published about a decade ago) about the life of Marion Post Wolcott, one of the greatest photographers, in my view, of that whole crew and era. What we have of FSA-OWI color work amounts, relatively speaking, to a thimbleful of pictures—only about 1,600 images altogether. But let us be grateful for what is, for what survives, for what can be thought of, perhaps, as a new and complementary way of comprehending our national identity.
Paul Hendrickson teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania. A former features writer for The Washington Post, Hendrickson is the author of "Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott," "The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War" and his most recent work, "Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy."