[The work of the new year must be to keep the orange fascist out
of the White House. But there must a concomitant effort to inform,
organize and persuade political leaders and the masses to address the
national and planetary crisis.]
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JOE BIDEN AND DOROTHEA LANGE: POLITICS AND ART REVEALED!  
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Stephen F. Eisenman
December 29, 2023
CounterPunch
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_ The work of the new year must be to keep the orange fascist out of
the White House. But there must a concomitant effort to inform,
organize and persuade political leaders and the masses to address the
national and planetary crisis. _

President Joe Biden and White House Guests, Dec. 14, 2023. Photo: The
author,

 

AN INVITATION TO THE WHITE HOUSE

About a month ago, I received an email with the subject heading
“coffee date with me and Joe.” It was sent by “Kamala Harris”
via [email protected]. If I donated $35, I’d be entered
into a contest to have coffee with Joe and his unpopular veep. I
shouted across the room to my wife Harriet: “We’ve been invited to
have coffee with Joe and Kamala” (long pause) “if we send them
some money and win a raffle.” Harriet replied at once: “I can top
that. I just got invited by Joe and Jill to the White House for a
holiday reception. I can bring a guest. Do you wanna go?”

We searched online for “White House invitation scam” but found
nothing. The invitation was genuine and a few weeks later, we were on
our way to Washington. Harriet’s environmental justice work had
garnered presidential attention!

Progressive readers of _CounterPunch_ may at this point wonder why
we didn’t return the invitation in protest: The U.S. is funding two
brutal and pointless wars; pulling more oil out of the ground than any
other nation in history; illegally preventing asylum seekers from
applying for refuge; and presiding over a large increase in child
poverty. 81 y.o Joe Biden is determined to stand for re-election
despite polling behind a 77 y.o. sex abuser, thief and insurrectionist
facing 91 state and federal felony counts. But a protest isn’t a
protest if nobody knows about it. Was the White House event planner
going to tell Joe we weren’t attending? Would _The New York
Times_ cover our remonstration? And we had good reasons for going:
meeting other environmentalists, challenging environmental regulators
to do a better job, and maybe even meeting the president himself and
offering advice on how to end the wars, tackle climate change, and
defeat Trump. Plus, we never get invited to parties.

The reception wasn’t what we hoped. As far as we could tell, no
other environmentalists or environmental regulators were in
attendance. In fact, the guests appeared to have little in common. To
be sure, we met some nice people: a recently retired, New Jersey union
boss, the head of a national foster care network, the president of the
National Association of OB-GYNs, a lobbyist for private universities,
and a man who leads the oldest AIDs support group in Baltimore. There
was also an “interagency liaison” from the NSA who may have been a
spy; I asked him why he was invited but didn’t get a straight
answer. I suppose if he told me he’d have to kill me.

There was champagne and fine wine and a lot of meat — steak, lamb
chops, ham, crab, shrimp — but little for us vegans, except platters
of Brussels sprouts and parsnips which, to be fair, were excellent.
Christmas decorations were everywhere – colored lights, decorated
trees, gift-wrapped boxes, reindeers (sculpted), tinsel, toy trains,
sleighs, gingerbread, and candy canes. I avoided them as best I could
and admired landscape paintings by John Caleb Bingham, Jasper Cropsey,
Martin Johnson Heade, and Albert Bierstadt
[[link removed]],
plus the many presidential portraits. If Trump gets back in, he’ll
surely banish to a basement the prominent effigies of Barack and
Michelle [[link removed]];
that will be the first time he ever exercised sound aesthetic
judgement.

At 8 pm, we all squeezed into the dining room to hear Biden. He
appeared spry and confident. His ten-minute speech was boilerplate
delivered with the ease of a grandfather re-telling a war story. He
avoided unpleasantness — nothing about Ukraine or Palestine, or his
sinking poll numbers. Frankly, I can’t remember much of what he said
except that the word “abortion” got the biggest applause. What
struck me most was that he said nothing about us. It was all about
him. The purpose of the reception, I realized at last, was not to
honor Biden’s guests, but to celebrate the president and bolster his
re-election chances. Harriet and I should have realized that from
moment she got the invitation, but we’d been intoxicated by the
whiff of influence. Still, maybe I’ll send Kamala and Joe that 35
bucks for coffee and see what happens.

PHOTOGRAPHY AS PROPAGANDA FOR THE WEAK

Unknown photographer, Dorothea Lange, Resettlement Administration
photographer, in California, 1936, L.O.C.

Just a mile from the White House reception, at the National Gallery,
was an exhibition called “Seeing People” consisting of photographs
by Dorothea Lange. If the former event was intended as puffery for the
powerful, the latter was propaganda for the weak. Lange documented
poverty, migrant labor, racism, and internment. Her photography for
the U.S. Resettlement Administration, Farm Security Administration and
War Relocation Authority from 1935 to 1941 comprises one of the most
achieved archives in the history of the medium, rivalling Jacob
Riis’s documentation of New York tenements, _How the Other Half
Lives_ (1890); Lewis Hine’s photos for the National Child Labor
Commission (1908-18); and James Van Der Zee’s pictures of the Harlem
Renaissance. Lange was one of 11 photographers – including Walker
Evans, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, and
Marion Post Wolcott — commissioned by Roy Stryker (a government
economist and amateur photographer), to represent the struggles of the
rural working-class during the Great Depression with the goal of
increasing public support for New Deal programs. Evans and Shahn were
the best artists in the group, but Lange was the best
photo-journalist. Her pictures told stories that people could
understand.

_PLANTATION OVERSEER. MISSISSIPPI DELTA, NEAR CLARKSDALE, MISSISSIPPI_

Dorothea Lange, Plantation overseer. Mississippi Delta, near
Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1936. Art Institute of Chicago.

_Plantation overseer_ shows a group of men in front of the Volunteer
General Store [[link removed]] on the
Sterlingwell Plantation. A heavy-set, mature white man stands in the
foreground with his right foot on the bumper of a shiny new car. On
the porch behind him are five Black men, probably local field hands,
one of whom is nearly hidden by the vehicle; only his head is visible.
At the far left of the picture, cut off by the frame, are the face and
hands of a young, white man, the economist Paul S. Taylor, who is also
the husband of the photographer. He’s holding a cigarette and
talking to the older white man, distracting him so Lange can take a
more candid shot.

The overseer’s name is Boon Mosby Partee, described by A.J. Cowart
[[link removed]], (a fieldhand on
the Hillhouse Plantation
[[link removed]]),
as “the meanest man there ever was.” Born in 1868
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Boon was the son of “Squire” Partee, who owned Hillhouse near
Clarksdale and 100 slaves. After the Civil War, the Squire lost the
farm, but decades later, his son wound up managing it. No information
is available about the identities of the Black men. The car is a
Chevrolet coupe. Circling the taillight is visible the name “Chip
Barwick
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who owned a Chevy dealership in Memphis beginning in 1931. To buy his
ride, Boon probably took the Yazoo Delta Railway — aka “Yellow Dog
Railroad” — from Clarksdale. The rail line was the subject of
Robert Johnson’s Travelling Riverside Blues
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and white in the Mississippi Delta led segregated but overlapping
lives.

Interpretations of Lange’s photograph usually focus on the
proprietary gesture of the white man with his foot on the bumper; it
suggests his proprietorship of the Black men as much as the car. (The
Museum of Modern Art titles the work _Plantation Owner and his
Fieldhands_.) And that was likely Lange’s intention too. But unless
Partee brought the five men with him in his fancy new car, they
probably have nothing to do with him. The store was located on
Sterlingwell, not Hillhouse plantation, and Partee probably drove to
the Volunteer Store to buy gas or other provisions.
Lange’s photograph of the store
[[link removed]] taken a month later
indicates that Black men and women – and white children – were
regularly seen on the porch and on the dirt road in front. Lange and
Taylor likely thought the man with the white hat and new car would be
a good subject, engaged him in conversation, and took the picture. The
Black men just happened to be there, or else gathered to see the car
and the female photographer.

The fieldhands may have known Partee from his reputation for cruelty,
but there’s no evidence they were cowed by him. The area was a
hotbed of union organizing
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(sharecroppers) challenging evictions and reduced pay. Efforts by the
Agriculture Adjustment Administration to raise crop prices by paying
farm owners to limit production had the unintended consequence of
increasing unemployment and depressing wages. In addition, plantation
owners and overseers reused to share federal payments with tenants as
required by law. Unionized tenant framers challenged the injustice.
They met – often surreptitiously — in halls, churches, and private
homes across the Delta, supported by white lawyers, and local
Communist Party members (white and Black). Some carried guns. Cotton
pickers in the Delta even went on strike in 1935
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demand fair distribution of farm subsidies and higher wages. Though
the strikers suffered physical attacks – including several murders
– they succeeded in obtaining a significant pay raise and partially
stemming evictions. An extensive oral history
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the STFU, collected in 1974, reveals the courage and resilience of
union members. The Civil Rights organizing of the 1950s and ‘60s had
its roots in the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s.

Dorothea Lange, Delta cooperative farm. Hillhouse, Mississippi, June
1937. Library of Congress.

A year after Lange photographed Boon Partee and the Black fieldhands
in front of the Volunteer General Store, she returned to the area to
photograph the Christian socialist founded (and STFU
supported), Delta Cooperative Farm
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Plantation. The farm was dedicated to efficiency, cooperation,
[[link removed]] racial justice, and equal
pay for equal work. Lange’s photos
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most part unremarkable: Neat crop rows, community gardens, new
tractors, well-built cabins, and farmhouses. There’s no evidence of
what Mr. Partee thought about his new neighbors, who may have included
the very Black men in _Plantation Overseer._

_MIGRANT MOTHER – PHOTOGRAPHY INTO ART_

Dorothea Lange, Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven
children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California, [“Migrant Mother”],
March 1936. Library of Congress.

Lange’s best-known photo for the Resettlement Agency and Farm
Service Administration — and among the most famous pictures ever
taken — is one now called, _Migrant Mother_, which shows a woman
named Florence Owens Thompson with three of her children. Lange much
later recounted that the picture came about almost by fate. Driving
home to Berkeley after a long assignment in Los Angeles, Lange passed
a sign outside Nipomo (south of San Luis Obispo) that read: “Pea
Pickers Camp.” She drove 20 miles past it before deciding to turn
back. Lange had been there briefly some months earlier and decided she
needed more pictures. Arriving at the rain-soaked camp, she got out of
her car and looked around. Lange wrote
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“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn
by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my
camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions…She told
me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been
living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds
that the children had killed. She had just sold the tires from her car
to buy food.

Pea picking was done by migrant workers
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swollen by thousands of families displaced by the Dust Bowl that
decimated the Great Plains. Though farm conditions in California were
much better due to better irrigation, regular rainfall and seasonally
cool weather, the Depression reduced commodity prices and wages there
too. Pickers earned barely enough to eat, and not nearly enough to pay
for housing. Area residents, often driven by racial bias (many of the
pickers were Latino or Asian), resisted the provision of permanent
housing. A U.S. government report from 1938
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conditions in the camps:

“[Migrant workers] must either provide their own housing or take up
their residences in any abandoned shack that may be handy. In many
instances improvised habitations are built of burlap, boxes, brush,
packing cases, tin cans, cartons or whatever may be available on the
location, and occasionally we find them housed in abandoned
stables.”

In 1937, a law was passed by the California legislature forbidding
residents from knowingly bringing “any indigent person” into the
state. (It was later overturned
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the U.S. Supreme Court.) Other exclusionary measures were also taken.
In February 1936, a month before _Migrant Mother_, Los Angeles police
initiated a “Bum Blockade” at key points of entry into the state,
arresting and deporting anybody deemed indigent. We know from
Lange’s letters to Stryker that she was aware of these measures,
disturbed by them and aimed to challenge them through her photographs.

Unfortunately, Lange’s memory of the origins of Migrant Mother was
partly mistaken. As the photo historian Sally Stein
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others have shown, Lange mixed up the story of Owens Thompson with
another of her subjects. The woman in Lange’s famous picture was not
a pea picker at all. She and her family were in fact on their way back
to Oklahoma after her husband lost his lob in a sawmill in Northern
California. Their car had broken down, and Thompson’s husband and
son had gone off to try and fix it. (They had not sold the tires for
food.)

When Lange approached the Thomson family in their tent, was she struck
by the resemblance of the scene to a Christian nativity, like the one
below by Piero della Francesca?

Piero della Francesa, Nativity, National Gallery, London, c.1475; and
Dorothea Lange, Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry
children. Mother aged thirty-two. Father is native Californian.
Nipomo, California, March 1936

After taking a few medium shots, Lange turned her Rolleifex camera
vertically, and took a pair of close-ups, including _Migrant Mother_,
which recalls another subject in Christian art, the Madonna and child
and John the Baptist.

Finally, _Migrant Mother_ also brings to mind work by Julia
Margaret Cameron [[link removed]],
Lange’s greatest female antecedent. Cameron aimed to “to ennoble
Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by
combining the real and the Ideal.” Something similar could be said
about Lange’s _Migrant Mother._ It combined the self-consciously
artistic pictorialism of her teacher Clarence White, with the
rationalism and facticity of her contemporaries, including Walker
Evans
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Mother_ was Lange’s most ambitious effort to turn documentary
photography into art and put it to use to ennoble and empower the poor
and vulnerable.

Julia Margaret Cameron, Faith 1864. Scottish National Portrait
gallery, (public domain).

ART AND POLITICS

Not all art seeks to persuade. Some is simply itself and nothing else,
providing a brief and salutary respite from a global capitalist order
that seeks at every turn to sell, coerce, persuade, dominate, and
sometimes even kill us. Autonomous art, however, is a poor tool in the
fight against fascism – which artists in the 1930s and again today
must confront. Lange and the rest of the RA/FSA photographers were
among the best anti-fascist, artist-warriors of their time. Their
photographs reached millions of people. John Steinbeck’s
novel _Grapes of Wrath _(1939) and the film adaptation by John Ford
a year later were both deeply influenced by these photographs and
reached millions more in the U.S. and around the world.

There is today no equivalent to the New Deal art programs that
functioned in the 1930s, which included the Public Works of Art
Program (1933-34); the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture
(1934-43); the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress
Administration; and the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security
Administration. The failure of the current administration to recognize
and respond to the depth and breadth of the crises we face –
political, environmental, economic, military – was once again
apparent when I saw President Biden in the White House two weeks ago
and heard his anodyne remarks. My concern was reinforced when I saw
the exhibition of photographs by Lange – engaged, informed,
challenging, and ambitious – the following day. The work of the new
year must be to keep the orange fascist out of the White House. (Under
conditions of fascism, no progress of any kind is possible – there
is only regression and death.) But there must a concomitant effort –
including by artists — to inform, organize and persuade political
leaders and the masses to address the national and planetary crisis.

_Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor Emeritus of Art History at
Northwestern University and the author of Gauguin’s Skirt (Thames
and Hudson, 1997), The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion, 2007), The Cry
of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (Reaktion, 2015) and
other books. He is also co-founder of the environmental justice
non-profit,  Anthropocene Alliance
[[link removed]].
He and the artist Sue Coe have just published American Fascism,
Still for Rotland Press [[link removed]]. He can be
reached at: [email protected]._

_CounterPunch is reader supported! Please help keep us alive
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_The CounterPunch website is offered at no charge to the general
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* Joe Biden
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* Donald Trump
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* Dorothea Lange
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