McFreedom

Two days before Christmas, Roger Rosenblatt was on the NewsHour, presenting his thoughts after reading Michael Lesy's A Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943. Mr. Lesy's book is a compilation of 420 photographs from the archives of the Farm Security Administration. The FSA was a uniquely Depression-era government program charged with helping the farmers displaced by the combination of a the devastating "dust bowl" drought and the economic crises. In an interesting twist, however, the FSA hired a number of photographers to chronicle its mission, eventually taking more than 160,000 black-and-white photographs of everyday Americans and their surroundings during this time.

As the government is unable to own copyright, all of these images are public domain. In fact, the Library of Congress has made the vast majority of these images available digitally at their American Memory site, and it is fascinating to flip through these gorgeous pictures. My only complaint is that so many are presented at so low a resolution.

Dorothea Lange was one of the photographers so employed by the FSA, and she took what is probably the most famous picture from the collection. Commonly called "Migrant Mother," it shows a tired, thin woman staring past the camera. Her coat has ragged cuffs, and her dirty children nestle their heads in her neck. She seems to be trying to figure out what she's going to do next. All of the pictures presented here are Ms. Lange's, and clicking them will provide higher resolution versions.

The photographs taken by the FSA are known for their starkness. Many of the subjects stare directly into the camera, or past it; to the extent the subjects are posed, they are not generally smiling for the camera. The Library has made available a selection of the most popular requests from the collection. It's well worth perusing. These "most popular" are digitized at higher resolution than the lesser known images.

Mr. Lesy's mission in his book was to showcase some of these more obscure works from the collection, so all of the "well known" are absent. I was particularly taken with this picture of a mother and child. The low-resolution available online doesn't do it justice. In a high-quality print (such as in Mr. Lesy's book), the blonde-haired child's eyes are haunting. Another detail, less apparent in this photo, is that the child is holding a Coke bottle with a nipple on it; the crate behind the two of them is of Karo syrup, presumably the child's food. Based on the sparse comments available in other pictures of this family, it seems they were migrants who left South Dakota a month previously, and were living "on the road" in California, presumably as migrant farm workers. Those wishing a happier memory of mother and child may wish to view this photograph of them smiling.

Mr. Rosenblatt, for his part, used this new book as a launching pad for a thesis that life in the Depression was, at least in some ways, better than now. "Here is the failure of our times: We have forgotten how to grieve for others," he laments.

"Here's one that gets to me, a picture of a man with his hand to his head... He seems to be beyond thinking, posed in a state of loss and perplexity that lies even beyond asking for help. The question he poses is, would we help if we could? Is the idea of helping among our priorities?"

The day before this essay was shown on television, I had listened to a lot of a radio play of The Grapes of Wrath, by Steinbeck. The book, written as the Great Depression was ending, is the story of the Joad family's migration from a devastated, repossessed Oklahoma farm. Hearing rumor of work in California, they pack who and what they can into a truck.

One of the most moving passages in the book presents the words of a migrant farmer, who has been out to California, and camps with the Joads for a night. The Joads are traveling to the green fields and vineyards of California, but he has been there and is heading back to the land he knows, and wants them to know that all is not milk and honey at the end of their road:

I tried to tell you fellas...Somepin it took me a year to find out. Took two kids dead, took my wife dead to show me. But I can't tell you. I should of knew that. Nobody couldn't tell me, neither. I can't tell ya about them little fellas layin' in the tent shiverin' an' whinin' like pups, an' me runnin' aroun' tryin' to get work -- not for money, not for wages! Jesus Christ, jus' for a cup a flour an' a spoon a lard. An' then the coroner come. `Them children died a heart failure' he said. Put it on his paper. Shiverin' they was, an' their bellies stuck out like a pig bladder.

Mr. Rosenblatt asks, "[A]s another war is pending, and unemployment is up, and money is down... Would we see the same sense of loss and desperation in ourselves, the same unsmiling confusion...?" Look at the face of the anonymous man in the picture above. It's the face of a man who wants nothing more than to find work so that can afford enough food to keep his children from starving to death. There are certainly people in this country today whose lives are miserable; people who deal with deprivation on a daily basis.

In the Great Depression, however, millions of people - intelligent, hard-working people - were put in a position where there was nothing they could do to feed their families. It is almost impossible, today, for a committed mother and father to spend all day every day doing nothing but trying to find food for their children and failing. That's the face of a man who doesn't know what he's going to do. Doesn't know where his next meal is going to come from - and not because he just spent the last of his money on a bottle of cheap wine, but because he just wore out his shoes walking all over Greenville, Mississippi looking for someone, anyone, who's hiring. A farmer who needs a field picked. A manufacturer who needs something assembled. "Sweep your floors, maybe, Mister?" he asks, broken-brimmed hat in hand. He questions not "our priorities" but how the world could be so hard that he can't even give his kids a meal.

That misery is worse than the misery of the addict who destroys his family, or the misery of the welfare mother. It certainly must be unpleasant not to be able to buy nice clothes for your children, not to be able to live where you'd like. But the misery of doing everything you can simply to give your children food - and failing - must be worse than the deprivations even the poorest of Americans know today.

In part, things are better because we are a lot richer than we were, then. I'd also argue, though, it's because we care more about each other now than we did then. Maybe not on an individual level - certainly the "bonds of community" at the local level were stronger - but on a national level. If a disaster of that proportion took place in this country, today, we'd be more organized in our response, and would provide these people with basic living, medical care and enough food to keep them alive.

The current economic downturn Mr. Rosenblatt makes so much of in his essay have left all of us tightening our belts, certainly. But to liken this period to that demeans the suffering ordinary men and women went through then.

The reason we don't take pictures like these anymore is because no one in this country is that miserable, today. I, for one, am very proud of that. I'd encourage Mr. Rosenblatt to count his blessings, rather than spending his time romanticizing that horrific experience.