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Photographing the Great Depression, Then and Now
Dorothea Lange's stark portraits of poverty-stricken Americans in the 1930s seem terrifyingly contemporary
Faces from the Great Crash of 1929 and its aftermath are haunting the 21st century. Wall Street brokers fleeing the trading floor in panic, or putting their cars on sale because they are suddenly broke, appear in old black-and-white photographs beside analyses of the current state of the markets composed by sombre authorities. Not only the collapse of confidence that shattered investors 82 years ago but the long years of misery that followed now seem to call out to us, to warn us, to show us a truth that is urgent and immediate. Can this really be so? Can that nightmare history be repeating itself?
Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker and mother of seven children. (Photograph: Dorothea Lange/Getty Images)
This week an American paper, the Los Angeles Times, republished one of the most renowned of all depression photographs. Dorothea Lange was working in 1936 for an American government agency called the Resettlement Administration, documenting the journeys of desperate farm labourers in search of work. In Nipomo, California she met Florence Owens Thompson and her children. Lange's picture of the road-weary family has endured because it is an intimate human portrait, that cuts through statistics and abstractions to show us real life in the Depression. The weather-beaten, stoical, dignified face of Thompson, her children burying themselves in her for protection, speaks of poverty that is not destined, or deserved, or inevitable, of people whose suffering is random, cruel and, surely, preventable.
Out of the Great Depression in 1930s America and Europe came a broad acceptance that society needed to do better, that markets could not guarantee universal wealth or even survival by themselves, that governments needed to do two things as a matter or course: manage the economy, and ensure the welfare of citizens. At least the western democracies reached this consensus by 1945, after 16 years of chaos, during which far more dangerous alternatives to capitalism took the world by storm. Lange's photograph was shocking in 1936 because it revealed that extreme poverty now existed on a frightening scale in the United States, the country where wealth was freest, industry most advanced, whose business was business. If capitalism was failing in America, did that mean it was finished?
In 1936, when this picture was taken, many believed Karl Marx right in his prediction that capitalism would be broken by its contradictions. They looked admiringly to Russia or even joined communist parties. Meanwhile, Hitler's Germany blamed the troubles on Jewish financiers and created work through massive public schemes. Liberal, capitalist democracy would only regain strength with the new consensus for welfare and planning that emerged from the second world war.
The face of Florence Owens Thompson in Lange's photograph is hemmed in by shadows of this dark period in history. So why did she make her appearance on the LA Times the other day, on the breakfast tables of film producers and television executives? The article was asking why today's artists have not risen to the challenge of depicting what it claimed is already a new depression – where is our Dorothea Lange? Yet the real question seems to be why we suddenly find images of the 1930s pertinent and recognisable and … contemporary.
The stark images of the 1929 crash and the 1930s depression that currently haunt us are forebodings, night terrors, nervous jitters. They express something essential about the state of the world in 2011: fear.
Nothing is scarier than the thought that we might be repeating the history of the 1930s. There is no more terrifying period in human history. The economic travails of that time tore apart societies. Americans suffered catastrophic poverty, as shown in Lange's photograph. Germans succumbed to the politics of hate, Spain became a battleground, soon Europe would be one. All that is evoked in chilling photographs of the depression era.
This is a moment of sweat and nerves. Over the summer, financial news got eerie. As it happens, the nightmare scenarios have not yet come to pass – some were predicting a collapse of the euro in August. The threat of Washington failing to raise the American debt ceiling was another panic averted at the last moment. But the fears continue.
Fear is a historical force. At the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 peasants were driven to violence by a "great fear", a panic that swept the countryside. It was, of course, during the Great Depression that president Franklin D Roosevelt made his famous speech denouncing the irrationality of fear. He used his inaugural address in 1933 to urge "that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance".
Here is something truly eerie – the thing we have in common with the people of the Great Depression is a mood of deepening fear, "nameless, unreasoning …"
In America in 1933, Roosevelt faced down fear and insisted that rational measures could defy the forces of destruction. Meanwhile, that same year Hitler took power with a politics of pure unreason that feasted on terror.
Today it is avowedly democratic politicians who seem ready to exacerbate terror. Deficits are talked up as ghoulish menaces, social ills blamed on moral decay. In America, government itself, as any kind of rational agent for reform, is widely portrayed as a monster.
When Lange took her photograph, times were terrible. But there were powerful voices of optimism and rationality, from Roosevelt to John Maynard Keynes, and these voices would win through in the end. In 2011 American politics seems headed in the opposite direction to the forward-looking road it took in the 1930s, while everywhere primitive gloom is in the ascendant. In this sense the situation does not resemble the 1930s. It is potentially far worse.
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10 Comments so far
Show AllThe people during the years of the Great Depression had ample reason to fear, and their President did what he could to turn their minds in a positive direction. Since 2001, the people have been force-fed fear. The government spews it into our minds, as does the media.The voices of sanity calling out to us are pretty much drowned out by the shrill cries telling us to be "BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID.
It should be noted that during the Great Depression, about 80% of people produced at least some of their own food. What is the fear going to be like now, when landless people in a changing climate go hungry and have no such option?
Yes.... I am thinking of the same thing.... why is it that there is no real explanation or acknowledgement of our reall issues.... climate change, peak oil, peak soil, over population.... why? because those at the top do not want any of us down here to get a heads up..... they wish we would just parish so they could have the whole pie... and those who don't think this? Do not have a clue of what is going on because they are too caught up in their delusion of fun and luxury shopping to pay attention....
This is an A-1 comment, shadre. Reporters must be held accountable for their "news". After all they are pretty much our only resource for information. MSNBC (except for Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes), CNN, Fox, et al, use each other as resources for information/news. Too often I have listened to a speech and then read about it and said "that's not what I heard"!!! Thanks for your thoughts.
Yes.Remember Dorothea Lange, and Grapes of wrath, and In Dubious Battle. Remember how the Salinas Valley hated John Steinbeck. He's profitably exploitable now by those who wish to suppress his honesty in exposing the cruelty & exploitation looming over our time.
The American people in the 1930s were real leftists who had a strong will and brains to organize and fight back and demand progressive populist leadership even if they only got some and then some. The Left today is nothing of that. It lacks organizational infrastructure to put together a mass movement so the Left will just stick with failure as always and if the left fights back, it can consist of no more than haphazard outbursts like riots and ignored, poorly attended demonstrations that are harassed and dispersed by police. In other words, it'll be just like the reactionary rightwing at best but with unfit punishments even for peaceful rallies and protests. For now, the conflict plays out mostly online and in verbal political exchanges all confined to the minds of individuals who withhold their angry feelings in most contexts. Eventually, the conflict might manifest as clashes on the streets but it might be too little too late.
Don't look for a black&white photo to definitively depict our current malaise. Consider YouTube. Try this piece as a jumping-off point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCpu8QhWS0w&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Respectfully, your youtube video has absolutely none of the human warmth and passion that a black and white photo of a real person contains. This is sad sad sad. Youtube videos are really trendy and they they're entertaining and all you want, but videos do not talk human. It is sad that you don't have the training and capacity to see the depth of a black and white photo, and have to lean on canned video. Really sad.
If you're going to post videos of this stuff, then they at least need to be real actual videos of it!, not some lame pastiche patchwork of junk. Sorry.
Well, all I can say is that people are simply not exposed to the photography and art that IS being created showing poverty in the USA. Somalia? sure!! no problem. Poverty simply does not exist in the USA. (The same way it didn't exist inside the Soviet Union, according to Stalin! No photos of THAT, understood?)
These things don't get gallery exhibition and they certainly don't get photo essay publication in newspapers. They don't sell. So where DO you show this stuff? And this art does actually exist; lots of it!
The photos from the Depression would never have been seen by the public if they hadn't been published in Life Magazine — now: do you think the equivalent, say People or Time or USAToday, read by millions, is going to publish photographs of bleak poverty? One photo, maybe, and it will be whitewashed. Dorothea Lange was doing research; historical documentation. It wasn't for public consumption. But nevertheless, there was an entire culture back then invested in art in those days — people had respect for it. Today, NOBODY looks at art, and on top of that they tear it down calling it "elitist." Morons.
One of the differences today is the "shock doctrine" aspect of our current depression. Not everyone is hurting.
In general, people targeted economically have a hard time fighting back. Deprivation has been a proven model of U.S. imperial foreign policy for a long time. It aims at achieving hegemony abroad and ensuring that corporate profits flow domestically. Now, the U.S. poor and middle class are targeted by a government that nakedly serves the interests of corporate power and plutocrats. That element was around in the 1930s, of course, but now they've got near full control in an almost proto-fascistic manner, especially via the two-party system, which completely shuts out the public interest in legislation.
U.S.-based corporations are doing quite well, and that was the case even before the housing bubble burst. Corporations had been cutting wages and outsourcing operations to increase profits many years before. Wages have been stagnant for more than a decade while cost-of-living requirements have grown more expensive - a situation that led to increased consumer borrowing. That debt, in turn, allowed banks to profit from the repo business in the post-bubble period when people couldn't pay the mortgages on their overvalued homes.
Increasing unemployment has served corporations well, especially if their markets are mostly located abroad. Unions, already weak, are easily busted when companies threaten to locate abroad. The U.S. government has mostly facilitated the outsourcing trends rather than trying to hold them down with regulations. So, you had NAFTA, GATT, etc. Tariff restrictions were eased for U.S. corporations that skipped the use of U.S. labor. It was a policy change that was highly profitable for corporations and ensured further weakening of organized popular opposition by bypassing unions.
Another difference is that Wall Street is doing just fine, while the criminal operations that lost money from pensions and 401Ks (if people had them) were never punished. So you had a U.S. representative saying that "the banks run the place" as if he had no power to check them through the laws. The contrast with the 1930s was summed up in a protest sign seen outside Wall Street high rises that read, "Jump, You Fuckers!" This time, no one jumped. A lot of investment houses responsible for high crimes, like Goldman Sachs (a big Obama supporter), dumped their collateral debt obligation investments in bad housing loans before the shit hit the fan. For the most part, the banksters did just fine.
The U.S. government bailouts of the banksters were more similar than different to the 1930s. Wall Street simply asked for taypayer dollars and got it - over $800 billion in TARP funds. It wasn't used to create more loans. It was used for bonuses and acquisitions of troubled banks and investment firms. Obama enacted the failed policies of Herbert Hoover when he approved the TARP bailouts, ignoring his campaign's portrayal that he was FDR. Obama explicitly stated that the government wouldn't get into the job creation business, which was the successful policy approach enacted by FDR during the Great Depression. The majority of the people opposed Obama's bankster bailouts, but the people were ignored by their representatives, which is pretty much a routine process these days.
The bust is a minor setback for the real estate industry. In the short term, financial brokers got fees from approving bad loans. Wall Street then profited by securitizing the bad loans to create securities, which were supported by collateral debt obligation insurance investments that were fraudulently rated AAA grade. (No punishment by government regulators.) It was calculated thievery, but that's also how capitalism "works." Capitalism actually loves and thrives on boom-bust extraction, even though it may devastate lives. That's why it can never serve as a substitute for societal organization, such as replacing governmental functions.
The U.S. homelessness of this current depression seems more prolonged, rather than being associated with the 2008 financial collapse. It seems chronic now. The government's response has been to cut welfare and housing subsidies to the public. Once again, a very hostile reaction that has kept insecurity high, and it's largely kept the public reaction suppressed by forcing people to keep their noses to the grindstone in a time of job scarcity. In that sense, it helps the corporate bottom line by enabling wages to be suppressed.
The author's point about the left is a good one. FDR responded mostly because socialism was a possibility given the political organization and public outlook at the time. Today, people in the United States seem confused about long-term solutions and won't participate, for the most part, in resistance movements. I guess you could attribute it to shock, but it seems even more empty than that.
I wouldn't blame the left for the public nonreaction. There is just something wrong with the way people think, or it's that they can't think beyond the next sitcom. Culturally, we're at zero point. It could be a result of having a political two-party system that can persist despite shifting votes.The policies are the same whether it's Dem or Repug that gets in office. This duopoly is functionally independent of the popular will because its funding comes from corporations. Alas, I'm afraid that most Americans don't see it that way. So, we have a shocked population that can't or won't think, whereas in the 1930s, people understood the forces arrayed against them.