In the years leading up to the 1930s, photographs of the people and places of the Plains reflected our aspirations and boosted our confidence. Everything was new and possible.
But dust, the great equalizer, rolled in by the middle ’30s and clouded the lens through which we viewed our success. When government photographers showed up to document this new reality, their images scratched the veneer of our invincibility and found us looking quite vulnerable at times.
One of the most unsettling photographs from that era shows a woman crossing a central Amarillo street in April 1936 as a dust-choked wind attempts to indecently rearrange the thin skirt clinging to her backside. This unidentified Amarillo lady likely started the day with an extra hat pin, fully intending to defy the wind as plainswomen are wont to do. As she made a break for the opposite curb that day, a 20-year-old government photographer named Arthur Rothstein stepped outside and snapped a photo of her mad dash. Anyone who grew up around here can almost feel the wind just by looking at the image he captured.
A year earlier, Rothstein had been the first photographer hired by the U.S. Resettlement Administration to document the hardships of rural Americans coping with the double blows of economic depression and extreme weather. Over the ensuing years, several other talented photographers joined Rothstein in this undertaking. Drawn by the dust, more than one found their way to Amarillo and the Panhandle.
The Resettlement Administration, or RA as it was known, was a 1935 creation of the Roosevelt Administration tasked with assisting farmers with loans, conservation support and a way out if the first two didn’t work. No doubt the RA had its political detractors from the beginning, so one way the agency sought to survive was to employ visuals in proving the urgency of its mission.
In addition to photo documentation, the agency released a film in the spring of 1936 titled The Plow That Broke the Plains. In short, the film blamed farming practices and technology for unleashing the monster dust storms that were choking the region’s vitality. But the idea that we had caused our own disaster was not popular locally, and many of the RA’s policies were perceived by some as veiled attempts at establishing socialism on the Plains.
Ralph Bray, the Amarillo-based regional information director for the Resettlement Administration, made headlines shortly after the release of the documentary film when he resigned his post, disgusted by what he saw as the agency’s portrayal of the plains as a wasteland. On his way out, he castigated the agency’s leadership under Roosevelt brain-truster Rexford G. Tugwell in a fiery statement in the Amarillo Daily News.
“The people on the Plains don’t want charity or they don’t want a lot of communistic philosophies foisted upon them, and they don’t want their country, which is one of the finest on earth, with tremendous possibilities once its lands are put to their best use and extended deserving credit, maligned and pictured as an American Sahara by a bunch of Tugwellian sophists,” Bray told the reporter.
The Amarillo newspapers had only recently reported that Bray was accompanied by a government photographer on a fact-finding visit to New Mexico, which was part of the RA’s Amarillo region. It’s likely Arthur Rothstein was that photographer, based on his travels during that same period. In April, around the time he took the photo of the Amarillo woman, Rothstein captured the iconic image of a farmer and his young sons running for the cover of a half-dugout during a sudden dust storm in Cimarron County in the Oklahoma Panhandle.
We don’t know what Bray thought of Rothstein or his photos, but he was not alone in his criticism of Tugwell and the direction the government was taking. By the end of 1936, Tugwell was forced out. The RA was moved under the Department of Agriculture and rebranded as the Farm Security Administration, but its photography division managed to survive and the amazing photos kept coming.
In 1937, FSA photographer Dorothea Lange, who was already well known for her haunting images of migrant farm workers, made a pass through the Texas Panhandle. Her images of flood victims walking on a road near Lakeview in Hall County capture the immensity of the land and sky, making the human subjects appear quite small but strangely dignified in their suffering. And a photo of four bedraggled men sitting on the stoop outside of the First National Bank of Memphis tells a thousand stories of stumbling, falling and standing up again, punctuated by a battered wooden crutch propped at their feet.
Like Rothstein’s photo of the Amarillo woman charging against the wind, Lange’s subjects and situations would not have been handpicked by the local chamber of commerce. But the government photographers happened upon everyday people in real predicaments and the photos they shot were mostly honest, which is what makes them so memorable. Likewise, the much-maligned documentary film released in 1936 took on some taboo subjects and focused attention on practices that were harming the land, even if its conclusions were somewhat one-sided.
But I can also understand how the government’s editorial focus might’ve garnered bad reviews. It’s human nature to complain when the camera highlights our rough angles, and it’s easy to think someone intentionally captured us in the worst light. More than once I’ve griped about state and national media only paying attention to the Panhandle when something bad happens. But our pastures are only as secure as the weakest link in the barbed wire fence, so to speak. Long term, seeing ourselves through the lens of objectivity is a solid strategy for meeting the dust and wind head on, as sure as a full can of Aqua Net. We’re nothing out here if not defiant.
