Earl Warren Oral History ProjectCalifornia Social ScientistVolume I: Education, Field Research, and FamilyPaul Schuster TaylorWith an Introduction by Laurence I. Hewes, Jr.Interviews Conducted by
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Introductory Materials
Legal Information
Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the Nation.Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between anarrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record.The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee.The corrected manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use.Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events.It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.
All uses of this manuscript are covered by legal agreements between The Regents of the University of California and Paul Schuster Taylor.The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes.All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Paul Schuster Taylor, California Social Scientist, an interview conducted in 1970 by Suzanne B. Riess, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1973.
Abstract
Paul Schuster Taylor (1929-1996) A California Social Scientist Volume I: Education, Field Research, and Family, x, 342 pp., 1973.
Interviewed for the Earl Warren Oral History Project in 1970 by Suzanne B. Riess
With an introduction by Laurence I. Hewes
Acknowledgements
The two-volume memoir of Paul Schuster Taylor was produced within the scope of two of the Regional Oral History Office's interview series--The Earl Warren Years in California, and the Biographical series. Started as an interview in the Earl Warren series, it soon became evident that Paul Taylor's significance extended far beyond both the Warren Years (1925-1953) and the geographic boundaries of California, and that to truncate his memoir to conform to the Warren series guidelines would be a disservice to research. The problem was presented to Professor Clark Kerr, former graduate student and then colleague of Professor Taylor, who offered to take responsibility for raising funds to enable the Regional Oral History Office to produce a full-length memoir with Professor Taylor. Our special thanks go to Dr. Kerr and Mrs. Kerr for their successful carrying out of this task.
In behalf of future researchers, the Office wishes to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities which underwrote the Earl Warren series, The Friends of The Bancroft Library who matched funds for the Earl Warren series and acted as treasurer for the Paul Taylor project, and Professor Taylor's many friends and colleagues whose contributions made possible the completion of the memoir and whose names are listed on the following page.
24 July 1973
Regional Oral History Office
Donors to Paul S. Taylor Oral History Project
(Names as listed on the checks)
- Mrs. Lucy W. Adams
- Senator and Mrs. Clinton P. Anderson
- Mr. Peter Barnes
- Professor and Mrs. Walton Bean
- Mr. and Mrs. Roger J. Blobaum
- Professor and Mrs. Herbert Blumer
- Mr. Arthur Brunwasser
- Mr. Berge Bulbulian
- Mr. Shirley Burden
- California Labor Federation AFL-CIO
- Mr. Winslow Carlton
- Mr. Orin Cassmore
- Professor Mary M. Clawson
- Professor and Mrs. Arthur F. Corwin
- Professor Ira B. Cross
- Professors Judith and Kingsley Davis
- Professor and Mrs. Paul A. Dodd
- Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas
- Senator Paul H. Douglas
- Mrs. Faith B. Drobish
- Justice Abe Fortas
- Professor George M. Foster, Jr.
- Professor Varden Fuller
- Christina B. Gardner
- Mr. and Mrs. William Gilmartin
- Representative [U.N.] and Mrs. Arthur E. Goldschmidt
- Mr. Karl Goldschmidt
- Professor Walter Goldschmidt
- Professor Robert A. and Margaret Gordon
- Mr. and Mrs. Herman Grabow
- Professor and Mrs. Ewald Grether
- Professor and Mrs. Roger Heyns
- Mr. and Mrs. Walter Hoadley, Jr.
- Professor Emily Huntington
- Professor and Mrs. Clark Kerr
- Mr. and Mrs. Harry Kingman
- Professor and Mrs. Albert Lepawsky
- Professor and Mrs. Jack London
- Professor Arthur Maass
- Professor and Mrs. Ray Marshall
- Mr. Angus H. McDonald
- Professor Davis McEntire
- Chancellor and Mrs. Dean E. McHenry
- Mr. and Mrs. Carey McWilliams
- Mr. Gerald H. Meral
- Professor and Mrs. J.D. Mezirow
- Professor and Mrs. Edgar L. Morphet
- Mrs. Walter E. Packard
- Professor and Mrs. James Shideler
- Mr. and Mrs. Charles Smith
- Senator Adlai E. Stevenson III
- Mrs. Marilyn K. Stout
- Councilman John Sutter
- Mr. and Mrs. David Tatsuno
- Mr. Thomas K. Vasey
- Mr. and Mrs. Donald Vial
- Congressman Jerome R. Waldie
- Mr. David Weiman
- Professor Harry R. Wellman
- Mr. Ralph Wertheimer
- Mr. and Mrs. Samuel E. Wood
- Professor William W. Wurster
- Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Wyckoff
- Ben Yellen, M.D.
- Mr. and Mrs. Martin J. Zonligt
Preface
The Earl Warren Oral History Project, a special project of the Regional Oral History Office, was inaugurated in 1969 to produce tape-recorded interviews with persons prominent in the arenas of politics, governmental administration, and criminal justice during the Warren Era in California. Focusing on the years 1925-1953, the interviews were designed not only to document the life of Chief Justice Warren but to gain new information on the social and political changes of a state in the throes of a depression, then a war, then a postwar boom.
An effort was made to document the most significant events and trends by interviews with key participants who spoke from diverse vantage points. Most were queried on the one or two topics in which they were primarily involved; a few interviewees with special continuity and breadth of experience were asked to discuss a multiplicity of subjects. While the cut-off date of the period studied was October 1953, Earl Warren's departure for the United States Supreme Court, there was no attempt to end an interview perfunctorily when the narrator's account had to go beyond that date in order to complete the topic.
The interviews have stimulated the deposit of Warreniana in the form of papers from friends, aides, and the opposition; government documents; old movie newsreels; video tapes; and photographs. This Earl Warren collection is being added to The Bancroft Library's extensive holdings on twentieth century California politics and history.
The project has been financed by four outright grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a one year grant from the California State Legislature through the California Heritage Preservation Commission, and by gifts from local donors which were matched by the Endowment. Contributors include the former law clerks of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Cortez Society, many long-time supporters of "the Chief," and friends and colleagues of some of the major memoirists in the project. The Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Foundation and the San Francisco Foundation have jointly sponsored the Northern California Negro Political History Series, a unit of the Earl Warren Project.
Particular thanks are due the Friends of The Bancroft Library who were instrumental in raising local funds for matching, who served as custodian for all such funds, and who then supplemented from their own treasury all local contributions on a one-dollar-for-every-three dollars basis.
The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record autobiographical interviews with persons prominent in the history of California and the West. The Office is under the administrative supervision of James D. Hart, Director of The Bancroft Library.
Regional Oral History Office
486 The Bancroft Library
University of California at Berkeley
Key Participants to the Earl Warren Project
Principal Investigators
* Deceased during the term of the project
- Lawrence A. Harper
- Ira M. Heyman
- Arthur H. Sherry
Advisory Council
- Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong *
- Walton E. Bean *
- Richard M. Buxbaum
- William R. Dennes
- Joseph P. Harris
- James D. Hart
- John D. Hicks *
- William J. Hill
- Robert Kenny *
- Adrian A. Kragen
- Thomas Kuchel
- Eugene C. Lee
- Mary Ellen Leary
- James R. Leiby
- Helen McGregor *
- Dean E. McHenry
- Sheldon H. Messinger
- Frank C. Newman
- Allan Nevins *
- Warren Olney III *
- Bruce Poyer
- Sho Sato
- Mortimer Schwartz
- Merrell F. Small
- John D. Weaver
Project Interviewers
- Miriam Feingold
- Amelia R. Fry
- Joyce A. Henderson
- Rosemary Levenson
- Gabrielle Morris
Special Interviewers
- Orville Armstrong
- Willa K. Baum
- Malca Chall
- June Hogan
- Frank Jones
- Alice G. King
- Elizabeth Kirby
- Harriet Nathan
- Suzanne Riess
- Ruth Teiser
Introduction
Nearly four decades ago, Paul Taylor made me aware that rural misery was not a simple, transitory problem but a persistent, complex aspect of American life. And it was Dorothea Lange Taylor who effectively illustrated Paul's teaching by her artistic talent and her great compassion.
We first met, Paul Taylor and I, in the dingy offices of the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the California State Relief Administration at 49 Fourth Street, just off Market, in San Francisco during the grim Depression winter of 1935. The State Relief people had been puzzled about the increasing number of indigent rural people who were wandering around California's agricultural counties, and Paul had been asked to come over from the University of California, where he had gained a reputation as a perceptive scholar of poverty and migration among California's agricultural laborers.
Paul quickly demonstrated that the problem of rural poverty, till then conceived as disparate episodes of no general significance, was in fact a major catastrophe, transcending state and local boundaries. Earlier studies of migratory Mexican labor enabled Taylor to diagnose the California problem as the leading edge of a large regional migration of destitute rural people from the drought-blasted cotton fields of Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. He sensed that the scope and depth of this flood of destitute rural people would swamp the resources of California agricultural counties and even of the State itself.
What was needed would constitute a massive federally financed program. And since rural people migrated in family groups, it should be a comprehensive system for shelter, food, medical care, and job opportunities. Paul sketched the outlines of a plan to provide all this. But more than a statement of need was required. The federal government would have to be convinced of the problem by effective documentation. The most effective presentation, Taylor insisted, would involve photography. And so it was that Dorothea Lange, a well-known Bay region photographer, entered the scene.
What happened next was that events caught up with Paul's early warnings. A minor disaster was in the making in a small valley near Nipomo in San Luis Obispo County on the south central California coast. There several hundred migrant families had come seeking employment in the early pea crop. But adverse weather spoiled the crop. There were no jobs and an endless cold rain fell on desperate families cooped up in ancient Model T Fords or crouching under makeshift shelters of blankets and tarpaulins. They had come to the end of the line. They couldn't even buy gas for their old jalopies. And there was nothing in the little valley but an expanse of empty, sodden fields, no shelter, no sanitation, and no food. Appeals began to pour in to us in San Francisco from beleaguered county authorities for help we were not prepared or able to render. Somehow we did finally cobble up a patchwork arrangement that narrowly averted disaster. But Paul realized at once the drama of the situation. He felt that the Nipomo story could provide documentation necessary to attract national attention.
Paul was insistent that somehow he and Dorothea would have to go to Nipomo. Dorothea's photographs and Paul's narrative would constitute the essential document. But how could it be done within existing State regulations and procedures? I found out then that Dorothea's gentle voice conveyed a vibrant, urgent eloquence that went with her great spirit. She was indomitable and Paul was equally determined. I found out, too, that under the bright spell of Dorothea's gay personality I actually enjoyed breaking rules and cutting red tape.
A major difficulty was that we had no authority to hire a photographer; there was no photographer on the personnel charts. So, in a sort of defiant euphoria, I hired Dorothea as a State relief typist at about $100 a month and assigned her to Paul! Then we procured photographic supplies, also proscribed, by calling them office supplies. I've forgotten our unconventional tactics for defraying travel expenses--doubtless they were equally ingenious! Thus from being an onlooker at dramatic events, I became an innovator and co-conspirator in outwitting bureaucracy. So Paul and Dorothea went to Nipomo, an event that for the three of us was to be the first stage of a great adventure. Official returns on my unorthodox hiring of Dorothea weren't long delayed. I received a stern lecture on proper procedure. This I took meekly. I had it coming! I was not so meek however in the face of an important charge by a lady Social Worker when Dorothea was promoted from typist to Junior Social Worker. The charge was that I had violated professional social work standards in bestowing a social worker title on a non-member of that professional guild. I thought this was bureaucratic hair-splitting and said so. I've forgotten what penance I was assessed but anyway they left Dorothea alone.
When they returned from their field trip, Paul and Dorothea threw themselves into the task of preparing the Nipomo Document. Our plan was to send it to the New Deal leadership in Washington--everybody from the White House to Capitol Hill. Of course it was a gamble that there would be any response. But we had become incurable optimists. We hoped as hard as we worked that somehow the story of this great westward movement of disinherited rural people could be told to people who had the power to help.
Shortly afterward, when I went to Washington to work for Rexford Tugwell, I carried several copies of the document with me. Under Tugwell's inspired leadership, the Resettlement Administration set up a substantial Migratory Labor Program that extended from the Salt River in Arizona to the northern San Joaquin Valley in California. Wherever these forlorn wanderers went there was help where before there had been none.
As everyone knows now, Paul Taylor became a national authority on the Dust Bowl migration; Dorothea's photographs of that period became classics of American photographic art. Today all this is history, much of detail forgotten. But perhaps there are people alive today who may remember that they survived as infants and young children because of the imagination and dedication of Paul and Dorothea Taylor.
Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions April 1973
Santa Barbara, California
Interview History
"Go see Paul Taylor." From the thirties, when he began his studies in agricultural labor and water development in California, unto today, when he still grapples with powerful resistance to the 160-acre law, Paul Taylor has been a one-man clearing house for what's needed and what's happening in his field. Most currently he advised Nader's Raiders when they put together their 1971 report on Power and Land in California. Not to suggest that he sits in one place and answers questions. On the contrary, a most characteristic Paul Taylor is the man in stride, "going down the street," "pushing buttons," listening, convincing, tying the right people together to "get jobs done."
In an attempt to document and fully develop the way such an effective, conscientious man works, the Regional Oral History Office asked Paul Taylor, in April 1970, to be an interviewee. Long acquaintance with the oral history project in various advisory capacities since 1955 made him well aware of the value of such an interview, and he agreed to it, despite its necessary diversion of his time from other current work.
Given the mass of available writings Paul Taylor has done in his field, the interviews had to be conceived as a filling-in, a connective tissue between the work and the man. In Volume I, especially, Paul Taylor's family and early experiences are woven in with his work to create a unique personal history of a man devoted to a multitude of homeless migrants, displaced in one way or another by the tremendous effects of agribusiness; and, as well, a man devoted with the same caring and energy to a single other person, his late wife, photographer Dorothea Lange.
As a valued advisor to the oral history office, Paul Taylor has filled two roles, reflecting, almost, the two aspects of his life documented by the interview. After his wife's death, his help was essential in seeing Dorothea Lange's manuscript--the transcript of oral interviews conducted in 1960--to its completion. Miss Lange, who died in 1965, was very occupied in her last years with travels and resultant new work, and then with what was her final work, the Dorothea Lange retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. She was ambivalent about her oral recorded self, and so it fell to Paul Taylor to approve, and, in the process, to emend in small ways, her memoir which appeared in 1968, The Making of a Documentary Photographer.
His continuing advisory relationship with the Regional Oral History Office, which has extended through nearly two decades, has been in suggesting a group of interviewees through whose lives and work a history of the politics of land and water development in California could be traced. Walter Packard, W. B. Camp, Frank Adams, Frank Swett, Charles Lambert, J. Rupert Mason, Philip Bancroft, John Miller, all these were interviews to which Paul Taylor gave support and advice.
A memoir with Paul Taylor himself was always in the plans of the office, but it wasn't until the Earl Warren Oral History Project that there was a funded project into which the recording of his memoir could be fitted. Not wishing to be required to limit Paul Taylor's account to the time and geographic perimeters of the Earl Warren Project, further funds were sought through the good offices of Clark Kerr. The success of Dr. Kerr's efforts was the go-ahead to tape-record Paul Taylor in the fullness of his busy and productive career.
It is possible that the circumstantial postponement of his interview until 1970 was fortunate. Paul Taylor took a strong hand in guiding his own destiny, and it is good to see him at this date looking back with satisfaction in achievement. He takes cheer in the current interest in ecology that helps a mass of people become aware of the persuasions and powers of agribusiness and its representatives. And surely, great pleasure can be taken in the always growing appreciation of Dorothea Lange's photography.
Those who know Paul Taylor can visualize him as an interviewee, well settled into a comfortable chair, thoughtful, amused, yet alert to the chance to put things in a persuasive and enlightening manner, master of a certain drama in the presentation. He was a full participant in the interviewing experience, and, in the process, a good teacher. His editing of the manuscript was a magnificent job of getting the sense of the sentence in the most readable fashion. His guidance in gathering illustrative material was vital, and his involvement with his own heritage and the background of his families in this country and in Germany contributed to the full sense of family conveyed in the beginning of the interview.
The tape-recording sessions took place in eight meetings at the Taylor home, 1163 Euclid Avenue in Berkeley, from April 28, 1970, to July 23 of that year. In December 1970 Paul Taylor was given the interviews--transcribed, chaptered, edited by the interview to eliminate repetitions--for his editing, which he completed with great thoroughness, and yet without letting the current interviewing for Volume II ensnarl his work on Volume I.
In mentioning illustrative material, I am pleased at the chance to again thank Pirkle Jones for his prints of the photograph he took in 1965 of the Family, under the Oak Tree; the Oakland Museum of Art, Prints and Photographs Division, in the person of Theresa Heyman, for the prints of Paul Taylor photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1963; and Hansel Hagel for her permission to use her late husband Otto Hagel's photograph of Paul Taylor with his seminar class. Those three encounters and the generous response echoed back fine relationships with Paul Taylor.
Laurence Hewes responded with evidence of his own pleasure in the invitation to do a reminiscent introduction to the interview. I wish to thank him for his introduction and his enthusiasm. The contributors to the fund developed to support the interviews were many, and essential, and are mentioned elsewhere in the beginning of this volume.
June 1973
Regional Oral History Office
486 The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
Biographical Information
-
Biographical Information
- 1895
- born, Sioux City, Iowa
- 1917
- B.A. University of Wisconsin
- 1917-1920
- U.S. Marine Corps
- 1920
- M.A. University of California at Berkeley
- 1922
- PhD. University of California at Berkeley
- 1922-1962
- Instructor, later professor, on staff of Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley
- 1927-1929
- Chief Investigator, research project, Social Science Research Council, of Mexican Labor in United States.
- 1930-1931
- Consultant on Pacific Coast of studies of crime and the foreign born: Wickersham Committee
- 1931
- Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship for study in Mexico
- 1935
- Field Director, rural rehabilitation, CERA
- 1935-1936
- Regional Labor Advisor, U.S. Resettlement Administration
- 1936-1941
- Consulting economist, Social Security Board
- 1935-1943
- President, California Rural Rehabilitation Corp.
- 1935-1942
- Member, State Advisory Council, California Department of Employment
- 1939
- Member, Governor's Committee on Reemployment
- 1940-1944
- Member, California State Board of Agriculture
- 1943-1952
- Consulting economist, Department of Interior
- 1950-1951
- Consultant, President's Migratory Labor Committee
- 1955-1968
- Consultant with AID, U.N., Ford Foundation; field studies in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela, Jamaica, Colombia, Mexico, Egypt, Iran, Panama
- 1970
- Research Director (part time) California Labor Federation AFL-CIO
- 1971
- Consultant California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO
I Out of the Middle West
The Schusters and the Taylors
RiessI think we should start with what you were telling me in our telephone conversation, about putting together the history of your grandparents.
Taylor
Yes. To give you an idea of what I have been doing, we could look at this. [A binder full of materials of family history.]
On the paternal side I am third-generation American, half English, and that English is Cornish, with apparently a touch of Welsh, and on the maternal side, half German and half Swiss. Here is my maternal grandfather's account of his boyhood and his coming to America in 1848 which you can have if you want.1
[Referring to binder] You can see what I did here. Dorothea and I went back in 1963 to the village from which Grandfather Schuster came, Morbach, about twenty miles from Kaiserslautern, and also to the village from which my grandmother came -- Wilchingen, in Canton Schaffhausen, Switzerland. I put them on modern maps, you see here.
This is my mother's account of her childhood. This is a photostat of the original German account of my Grandfather Schuster's history, of which I gave you the translation.
Here are various other things, such as this
Riess
"The Patron's Benevolent Aid Society."
Taylor
This is the aid society affiliated with the Grange, which is called also "The Patrons of Husbandry."
[Looking at photographs included in the binder:] Here is Grandfather Schuster's photograph in the seventies. Here is the wedding photograph. Here is, I suppose, my great-grandfather's discharge from the Bavarian Army in 1826. Here Dorothea photographed the road from Morbach to Niederkirchen -- several villages clustering about Niederkirchen are like separate wards or, as the Spanish call them, barrios. Niederkirchen is the political or administrative center, where the town clerk and the church are. The villages don't each have a church.
This photograph shows the facade of the church. You know the photograph in the dining room that Dorothea made of the Bible on the lectern? Well, that was made in this church, in the village from which my grandfather came.
Here is the village clerk. I went to him, and in about five minutes after I had given him my grandfather's name and birth date, he had found the original record. We also went over to the nearby church and quickly found the record of his confirmation.
Here am I in the church. Here am I looking up, reading the inscription. This is looking into the courtyard; there are the peasants' homes. And the homes were not only the family's homes, but the people and livestock were all together.
And this is in Switzerland, the vineyards in the village from which my grandmother came. And I have here the account that the Niederkirchen village clerk sat down and dictated to his secretary in German. He knew the earlier family names before Schuster, i.e., the ancestry, and traced some of these way back.
Riess
What will you do with this collection?
Taylor
I don't know who wants those family records, whether they belong here in Berkeley or at the University of
And then, on my father's side, I have just received, within the last couple of months, rather extensive documents of various sorts from my cousin Harold Taylor Haynes, who got them from our Uncle Thomas Taylor, my father's brother. They just came to me two months ago, and I'm xeroxing them so that I'll have more records on my father's side than before.
Then, I have a short, strictly genealogical statement that will trace back to my grandparents, all four of them with their birthdates, some of them going back into the 1790's. Some of these documents you might want to include in this oral history.
And then Grandfather Schuster's account of his coming to the states in 1848 -- it's an interesting account -- you might want to include it.
Riess
And the other grandfather, Grandfather Taylor's account?
Taylor
I don't have his account, I just have the bare facts. I know why he came. It was the playing out of the Cornish tin mines. Members of his family joined the gold rush in Australia about the same time. They went from Cornwall to Australia, and to the Cape of Good Hope. One of them, a great-uncle of mine, turned up in the California foothills where there were many Cornish miners, in Penryn, near Auburn.
I know what my grandfather did in America. I have a small booklet of a mining company; the account is by Whitney, probably the most distinguished geologist of his day. This was in the early 1850's. My grandfather was in charge of lead mining operations in Connecticut, near Middletown. Later he mined copper in Michigan and probably lead near Galena, Illinois. He went to Mexico in about 1867 to mine copper in Neuvo Leon. I have the contract under which he went to Mexico.
1-TAYLOR, Paul Schuster, b Sioux City, Ia., June 9, 1895.
3-Thomas Taylor (1819-1904), from St. Just, Cornwall, Eng., 1847, settled at Black Earth, Wis.; m 1839, Elizabeth Grylls (1819-1905);
2-Henry James (2 below).
3-Peter Schuster (1829-1918), from Morbach, Germany, 1848, settled at Rochester, N.Y.; migrated to farm near Middleton, Wis., 1855; m July 10, 1851, Barbara Halleur (1832-88);
2-Rose Eugenia (b 1863), m 1887, Henry James Taylor (1855-1902), supt. schs., Dane Co., Wis.; lawyer, Sioux City, Ia.; issue: I-Ethel Rose (b 1888); II-Henry Sterling (b 1890; m Edna Biles); III-Paul Schuster (1 above); IV-Arthur Chandler (b 1899; m Edith Black).
1-m May 15, 1920, Katharine Page Whiteside, b Louisville, Ky., Dec. 24, 1897; dau. Harry Robert Whiteside, Louisville; issue (all b Berkeley, Calif.): 1-Katharine Page, b Apr. 13, 1922; 2-Ross Whiteside, b Apr. 27, 1925; 3-Margaret Agnes, b Dec. 1, 1929.
1-m 2d, Dec. 1935, Dorothea Lange.
1-A.B., U. Wis., '17 (Chi Phi, Phi Alpha Delta, P.B.K., Delta Sigma Rho, Delta Sigma Pi); M.A., U. Calif., 1920, Ph.D., 1922. Instr. economics. U. Calif., 1922-24, asst. prof. economics, 1924-28, asst. prof., 1928 (see Who's Who in America). Served with U.S. Marine Corps, 1917-29, advancing to capt.; with 6th Marines, 2d Div., A.E.F. Residence: 1075 Cragmont Av., Berkeley, Calif.
From Compendium of American Genealogy, Vol. VI
Riess
And the family was left?
Taylor
The family was left behind in Black Earth, Wisconsin. That was the base of operations; that was where I knew my Grandfather and Grandmother Taylor.
Black Earth is about fifteen miles from Middleton, where my German and Swiss Schuster grandparents pioneered on a farm in I believe 1853, just before the coming of the railroad. It cut through their farm two miles west of Middleton during their first years. The Indians were still around. I have a beautiful Indian axe-head found on my grandfather's farm. [Shows it.] It's as fine a specimen as I've seen.
Riess
Was that a stroke of luck that the railroad came through? Did that make them into land speculators?
Taylor
[laughter] No, no. They broke the sod with oxen. They didn't get rich off the farm. No, no speculation to speak of. Grandfather bought the virgin land from a speculator who had bought it for less from the Government, and its value did rise slowly over the decades. The farm still looked pretty simple the last I saw it, about 1951. It's just nine miles west of Madison. My mother used to tell me that as a child she'd go to the hilltop of the farm from where she could see the summit of the main building of the University, which was on the top of a hill at Madison. She made up her mind very early that she was going to go to the University -- women didn't do that much in those days. But she made up her mind that she was going, and she did, graduating in 1885.
Riess
Why did your Grandfather Schuster come all the way to Wisconsin? Often the Germans immigrating in those days got off and stayed put on the East Coast.
Taylor
Well, speaking now of my Grandfather Schuster, in 1848, his father was a shoemaker and I suppose also a farmer. Grandfather came over at age nineteen. Farms were opening up in Wisconsin on the American frontier. He stayed in New York hardly any time at all, went up the Hudson, then west on the Erie Canal, and stopped off at Rochester. In those days the Erie Canal was the highway to the West. After a time in Rochester, which he describes in his account as a period of shoemaking, he married my grandmother. Her Hallauer
Then Grandfather went west and bought a farm from a land speculator, who got it I suppose for a dollar and a quarter an acre. My grandfather paid a much higher figure, probably six hundred dollars for eighty acres. There he broke the sod with oxen.
Riess
Why did he leave Germany?
Taylor
I'll tell you, 1848 was a period of distress in Germany, and of the liberal democratic revolutions in Germany which were put down. I doubt that my great-grandfather had personal participation in that, but the period was disturbed. Morbach was not far from the Rhine, and the Rhine was the highway to the New World. In those times water was the highway.
So it was down the Rhine to Rotterdam, then to London, then to New York, then up the Hudson and along the Erie Canal to the West -- water practically all the way.
My mother used to recount a little story of the departure of my grandfather's parents from Morbach.
My great-grandfather's name was Johann and my great-grandmother's was Anna. On the last evening in Morbach, sitting before the fire in their peasant home, Johann said to Anna, "Well, you know, we don't have to go. We could unpack our goods and stay here."
Anna's response was firm: "Johann, wir reisen nach Amerika!" -- John, we're going to America!" -- and they went to America! [laughter]
That's on the Schuster side. I have no similar personal accounts of the departure from Cornwall on the Taylor side. The tin mines were playing out and I think there were five sons who scattered over the world.
On my Grandmother Taylor's side, my great-grandfather -- named Grylls -- was keeper of the light at Longship Lighthouse, just off the coast of Land's End, in England. I have a brass button from his uniform.
Well, those five sons scattered. Two of them I've kept track of, my grandfather and my great-uncle, who had died before I got to Penryn in 1906. His widow, my Aunt Margaret, was living there in a very simple white-washed frame house in the foothills, with an irrigating ditch going right by. (Revisiting Penryn in 1972 I encountered a "Taylor Avenue" street sign on the lane I had known as a boy leading from my Great-Aunt Margaret's cabin to the still standing village store, now a public library.)
Riess
How old was he when he came? Was he married?
Taylor
My grandfather? He came practically the same time as the Schusters and Hallauers. I think he came over in advance in about 1847, then went back and brought his wife in 1848. I told you about his mining experiences in widely dispersed places. Then he ended up in later years with a home in a small town, Black Earth. I think the family operated a general store there.
Riess
How did your mother and father meet?
Taylor
Now we get to the next generation. Black Earth and Middleton were about fifteen miles apart. Of course that was not close in those days.
Riess
These distances seem amazing. Certainly when somebody could come to America and then return to England and get a wife, the distance of fifteen miles should seem puny!
Taylor
But across the ocean was by water. Fifteen miles by land was something else. Eventually, of course, there was a railroad bringing them closer together, but they did not meet in either Black Earth or Middleton.
My father was eight years older than my mother. He was born in 1855, she in 1863. She made her way by main force through the University of Wisconsin. I remember a story she told about it.
Her older sister Bertha was sent to Cornell University for two years by my grandfather. He, with my mother, drove Bertha to the train two miles away by horse and buggy. Upon return, when they got
Said my mother to herself, as repeated to me, "I made up my mind then that I was going to the University." And she went. She taught school to save up enough money to go -- seventeen dollars a month and board at a country school, where all the elementary grades were in the same room at the same time.
Riess
She did this for a year before she started college?
Taylor
Well, she did it partly before and partly in the middle of her college course. Besides, one older brother, Otto, was a student at the University. She kept house for him and he contributed something toward her support. But she really made her way through the University by herself. When she graduated, her father, my grandfather, came to the ceremonies and presented her with a five dollar gold piece, which was money in those days. That's the way she made her way through the University.
Riess
What did she study? What do you think she wanted to be?
Taylor
Biology. She wanted to be a teacher and she was a teacher. She taught in small-town schools in Wisconsin. One was Sparta, and Viroqua was another, and a third was a country school. I've forgotten where.
My father also went to the University, graduated in 1878, and from law school in 1880. I have a photograph of the entire class. He became a Dane County Superintendent of Schools. There were two superintendents, one for the part of Dane County of which Madison is the county seat, and he had the other. In making his tours of inspection of the teaching, he met my mother. She had graduated in 1885 and they were married in 1887. Then they moved west from Wisconsin, to Sioux City, Iowa, where they settled and where I was born.
Riess
What were your grandparents' homes like? Do you recall?
Taylor
Well, let's go back first to my mother's home. First they had a log house, but I don't remember that.
I saw their house in 1899 as a child aged four, but I don't remember any more than that it was a very simple farm house with a porch.
My grandfather retired two miles away to the little village of Middleton, to a simple but comfortable home I know very well. I spent the summer of 1902 with him, my Aunt Mary Schuster and my sister Ethel, while my parents sailed to New Zealand where my father died. Later, when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin before the first World War, I used to go to Middleton for Thanksgiving dinner and on other occasions. We'd invite our friends, go in couples, hike the seven miles out and after dinner return by bus.
Well, music always a part of my grandfather's home. He describes in his own account how he, with his trumpet, walked from Morbach, near Kaiserlautern, down through southern France into Italy, and back through Geneva, Switzerland. The way he paid for his expenses and got his food was by playing. It was traditional that Morbach farm boys would become musicians as well as farmers, mainly brass musicians.
I remember as a boy in Sioux City that roving German bands with four or five players and brass instruments sometimes would play at the street corner half a block away, sometimes in the bitter cold winter. They would play for twenty minutes or half an hour, then come to the door and invite you to contribute maybe a quarter. A quarter was money in those days, and that's the way the travelling players would pay their expenses.
When I went back with Dorothea to Morbach in 1963, an elderly man told me how he had gone around the world that way, to a big exposition in Oregon. But World War I and the accompanying wave of anti-German feeling put an end to travelling German musicians in the United States. They were no longer welcome. By 1963, he told me, the boys of Morbach no longer were musicians.
At the British Museum in 1963 I picked up a picture postcard, which I put in here [referring to binder] because it shows in a painting how widespread must have been the early custom of playing your way through the country, playing for your supper as it were.
Riess
So, they had music in the home.
Taylor
Yes. My grandfather used to play in the Middleton band on festive occasions before I knew him. The Middleton band was a pick-up band [laughs] of whoever could play anything! I remember I was told that they would march around the Capitol at Madison, my grandfather playing the trumpet with these little things on it that have the music clipped to the horn right in front of you.
In later years, after Thanksgiving dinner, or whatever the occasion, my grandfather would get out his flute and play for us. So music was part of the daily life of that household.
Riess
Do you think they talked about politics?
Taylor
His politics were the politics of Germany. In one sense, he lived in Germany all his life. He was very proud of the way the Germans had defeated the French in the Franco-Prussian War.
One of his Middleton neighbors, a German, had been wounded in action against the French and was regarded as an heroic figure. After the first World War, my mother told me that my Grandfather Schuster had dropped the remark to one of her sisters -- remember he was then 89 years old -- "Wasn't it too bad that Rose's sons were on the wrong side?"! [laughs] That is a commentary on how he clung to Germany. He wasn't anti-American or unpatriotic, but he had lived always as a German. Well, he talked German on the farm and in Middleton all his life!
When, as a small boy of seven, I'd go down with him to the barber shop, there he would talk German with the barber. It was a "German" community; Wisconsin was a "German" state. When I was a student at the University German names were given true German pronounciations.
Riess
You were not in the other grandparents' house?
Taylor
The Taylor grandparents? I was in their house at age four, and saw the painted white frame house with porch and woodshed then, and once later after they had died.
Riess
Do you have any feeling about how oriented they were to American politics, or whether they were back in England?
Taylor
I have no clues as to that.
Going back for just a moment to the Schuster side, I told you of the last evening at Morbach, when my great-grandmother said, "Johann, wir reisen nach America!" Well, my Swiss grandmother came from a different kind of farming village than Morbach. You could see in 1963 the difference between those German peasants and the Swiss peasants with their neat vineyards. Wilchingen, shall we say, was culturally a step above. The visit helped me to understand a story my mother used to tell me. "My father" (my grandfather) "domineered over our home," she said. "My mother dominated it."
The LaFollettes, Sr. and Jr.
RiessWhy did your father move to Sioux City?
Taylor
The reasons why he went to Sioux City, which was really a frontier place in 1887? If there is any single reason it was political.
He had political ambitions. In Wisconsin he had become a Dane County Superintendent of Schools, an elective office, and he was important in local politics. He was among the few professional lawyers just coming into existence in what was predominantly a farming community, with only small towns and small businesses. His political ambitions were cut off, so he left.
Riess
Because he couldn't rise any higher in that community or because his politics were "wrong?"
Taylor
Because of the first reason, not the second.
Shall I tell you this part of the family story as I have it from my mother and my uncle? My father was running for district attorney of Dane County, Wisconsin, in 1882. At the same time Robert M. LaFollette, Sr., was running for Congress. It was understood that my father would throw his support to LaFollette at the famous Dodgeville Convention, and tradition has it that my father's seconding speech assured LaFollette's nomination and early election to Congress. In return, my father understood that he would have LaFollette's support in his own race for district attorney. But this was not forthcoming. My father's political hopes were dashed in Wisconsin, and he left within a few years for Iowa.
Naturally the experience left scars on my parents. I remember, when I was a boy perhaps ten years old, that a man from Wisconsin visited Sioux City, and knowing my mother was living there, called at our home while he was awaiting his evening train. Reminiscing about Wisconsin he told with a certain pride how LaFollette had managed to win support for his own nomination from both my father and my father's opponent, without delivering his own support to my father in return. He told the story about as I have, and added, "You know, I am the man who stuck the pin in... and I can't remember the name of the man." He was
(The breach did not survive into the second generation, and eventually at this same level it was perhaps healed even for my mother.)
In 1917 I was in training in the Marines at Quantico, near Washington. Bob LaFollette, Jr. was my classmate. I went to the Capitol and at his invitation his father, Bob, Sr., joined us at lunch. I can remember the warm greeting that I had from the Senator.
He said, and I believe not insincerely, "I loved your father." Well, he was very fine to me then. Whether he remembed the incident that dashed my father's political ambitions at Dodgeville, I did not know.
Riess
You didn't talk with him about the old political "deal" of 1882?
Taylor
[Emphatically] Oh, no, no. In political life there are some sharp deals. Well, it just came that way. Which doesn't mean to me that at another time he wouldn't have helped my father, had it been politically convenient.
LaFollette, Sr. had a reputation, as I used to hear it put, of always wanting to "cut off the head of the highest stalk of wheat that was around."
Riess
Sounds like a safe thing to do.
Taylor
Well, you see, it offers political advantages.
Riess
Do you think that that was his motivation, and that your father might have risen...
Taylor
[Positively] Oh, indeed my father might have risen. Yes, of course, I simply suppose this: that LaFollette, Sr. got support from two quarters, by promising on both but delivering on one.
Bob, Jr., I am sure, knew absolutely nothing
Long after, in 1939, Bob, Jr. brought the famous LaFollette Committee to California to inquire into violations of civil liberties of unionists trying to organize under the protection of the Wagner Act of 1935.
Bob's first studies had been all in the industrial East. There was question whether he would come to California and study civil liberties in California's peculiar agriculture. In the Middle West there was no farm labor "class" as in California. There were farm laborers without land, down at the bottom, but not a farm labor class. The farm laborers of the Middle West were on their way out, one way or another. Either they would go to industry in Chicago, or wherever, or they would become tenant farmers moving up to farm ownership.
But out here, there were Vigilantes, the Associated Farmers, and the resistance to the efforts by farm laborers to improve their condition. Facing these problems, many people went to Bob saying, "Come to California. We need you." I was among them. So the LaFollette Committee came here, and I was asked to become his consultant. I was also asked to be his opening witness in San Francisco.
The Committee came to California thinking to hold hearings for only two or three days, as I was told later by Henry Fowler, the chief counsel -- later U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. The presentation I made of the industrialized character of California agriculture evidently helped to change the minds of LaFollette's colleague, Senator Elbert Thomas, of Utah. They had thought they'd have to wind the hearings up fast, to avoid the charge they were attacking farmers. I showed them that this was no ordinary farmer's situation, but a totally different agricultural structure resembling industry rather than the family farm. The Committee stayed on. They had hearings stretching in print from Volume 47 through Volume 75, which suggests the extent of what they did here.
When I was working with Bob as consultant at the hearings, I asked him to come to dinner with us, of an evening. Dorothea and I were then living on Virginia Street. Remembering the past in Wisconsin in the early 1880s, I invited my mother. I wanted to heal the scars of the past as far as I could. She came, she knew how well Bob, Jr. was doing in public service, and how well he was doing by me, and I am sure the effect was healing.
Bob LaFollette's service to public interests as I saw them did not cease with the LaFollette hearings on labor in industrialized agriculture. You've heard of the 160-acre limitation? You know what that means -- control of gigantic landholders' speculation in the unearned increment from the gift that we made to them of the public water, brought to them by public investment?
Sheridan Downey, our Democratic senator, was leading the fight against the 160-acre limitation in 1944. In the midst of that fight I went to Bob -- I was then consultant to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes -- I went to Bob in his office in the Capitol, and told him what Downey was doing. With an exemption from the 160-acre limitation already tied into the House-passed Rivers and Harbors Bill, Downey was determined to ram it through the Senate.
When I got through telling Bob the true story, and returned for a second conference, Bob said to me, "I have told Sheridan Downey that if he presses for that exemption in the Rivers and Harbors Bill, I will deliver a three-hour speech against him on the floor of the Senate -- and I want you to write the speech."
That threat by LaFollette killed the exemption. Except for that there would be no 160-acre law today to preserve. The Congressional Record shows it; Downey backed down; the Rivers and Harbors Bill failed of passage in the Senate. Bob said, "That's the gravy train. The gravy train bill is never defeated." But it was defeated by Bob LaFollette.3
Then there's the final tragedy of Bob LaFollette, Jr. What came unfolded in the McCarthy era in the late forties. Wisconsin had a primary law in which voters registered in one party but could say at the polls, "I want a ballot of the other party." You see, LaFollette was the liberal Republican, but the Democrats wanted their liberal Democratic congressman to become Senator. So, the first liberal Democratic tactic was to knock out the liberal Republican, LaFollette, in order to get their liberal Democrat into the Senate. I know a lot of them crossed over into the Republican primary. One of them told me this within the past year out here; he said, "I guess I did it. I was among those who did it."
They crossed over and voted for McCarthy, the unknown, who thus won the Republican nomination by about 6,000 votes. It was the liberal Democrats who crossed over and put McCarthy in, hoping to beat him easily in the finals, but they lost. On the very eve of his narrow defeat, Bob LaFollette had just got national recognition as one of the finest of America's public figures. Their leaders told me that they would accept LaFollette as a Democratic candidate for the Senate if he would change his party registration, but this he was unwilling to do.
Within weeks or months the Congressional seat from Madison became vacant, and many, including myself, urged Bob to run for it. We believed the prospects for success were excellent, but he declined to run. I saw Bob LaFollette after that a couple of times in Washington. His final act, as I have heard, was about like this: One morning he went to the Capitol, in which his father, and then Bob, Jr., had lived from the 1880s. His father's statue is there. Bob, Jr. went by the statue, then went home and shot himself.
Riess
He felt that he failed his father.
Taylor
Exactly. His father, at his deathbed, apparently spoke his hopes and expectations for his son. His father, you remember, ran for President in 1924, carried Wisconsin, and ran well in California. I voted for him. Bob, Jr., I am sure, felt that he had failed his own and his family's aspirations for him.
Father, Henry James Taylor
RiessWhen did your parents go to Sioux City?
Taylor
In 1887, the year of their marriage.
Riess
You were born in 1895. Do you have older brothers and sisters?
Taylor
Yes. I have an older sister, who lives in Oakland in St. Paul's Towers. She is 81. [Eighty-three in 1972, P.S.T.] My older brother [82 in 1972] lives here in Berkeley. My younger brother, four years my junior, is a physician and surgeon in Appleton, Wisconsin.
We all were born in Sioux City, in the same house, which is still there, which I revisited last October [1969].
Riess
Did your mother go on with teaching in Sioux City?
Taylor
She taught continuously but not regularly. She gave private lessons to young people who needed special coaching in some subject or other. Then when regular teachers in the public school were sick, the principal of the high school would call my mother, "Can you teach this morning?" -- whatever the subject, Latin or algebra or anything. She could teach anything.
Riess
Did your father go on in politics?
Taylor
My father was a very fine lawyer. He went through the depression of 1893, which wrecked financially just about everybody in Sioux City. It was a boom town; it even had a cable car and an elevated. Imagine a cable car in a city of 25,000! Out into the middle of nowhere it ran -- nowhere then -- between downtown and the golf links it ran in my boyhood; that is, the tracks ran there, not the cable cars.
Well, he apparently took savings for investment from his father and mother, and perhaps from others. (I have some letters documenting this, which I've only glanced at; I got them in the past couple of months.) Came the depression and everybody was broke. He couldn't pay what he owed at the time, but he did not take bankruptcy. Eventually, when times picked up,
One in paticular was only a quarter of a block from the very center of the city and the rentals were substantial. It was largely that piece, and to a lesser degree another downtown lot rented to a lumberman for his lumber yard, that really enabled mother to raise the family after he died. (He died in 1902, at age forty-seven, very young and very tragically.)
As an attorney, father was very, very highly regarded. Recently I went through U.S. Supreme Court records for about four years beginning in the late nineties, seeking from the case name to identify Sioux City cases. I came upon eight in which he had appeared as attorney before the Supreme Court.
Riess
What kind of cases was your father arguing that would have gotten as far as the Supreme Court?
Taylor
They were commercial transactions that involved banks, determining the nature and degree of their liability. Also he was the attorney for the Combination Bridge that still spans the Missouri River to south Sioux City. I have the case citations. It was in the beginning days of the corporations.
I remember he took me East with him in 1899 when he had to appear before the Court. First he took me to New York where I remember the 23rd Street crosstown horsedrawn street car. They'd turn the horse around at each end of the line and haul the car back. That boyhood memory stays with me.
In Washington, I remember well the Washington Monument; he took me up to the top. Also he took me to the Supreme Court -- then located in the Capitol building -- when he was to make one of his arguments before the Supreme Court.
I remember how he put me aside, saying, "Now you stay with Mr. Chamberlain." Mr. Chamberlain was his client, also present. So, as a four-year-old, I sat beside his client while my father went up front to talk to the judges on the bench.
He took me also to Mt. Vernon. All this goes way back, yet remains a very, very vivid memory. Dorothea said once, "That must have made a great impression on you." What she meant was it gave me direction for my future.
My father was politically active -- a Republican. There were but a handful of Democrats in Iowa then, as a heritage from Abraham Lincoln. I can remember the torchlight processions for William McKinley in 1900. Because the sparks from the torch would come down on one's shoulders, it was necessary to wear a protective oilcloth cape. I can remember my father picking me up and letting me hold the torch.
My father was offered a judgeship on the State Supreme Court of Iowa, which he declined because it came at a time when the family finances were not yet in very good condition, and he wanted first to give the family a solid base. The court salary then was $5,000, which I suppose was money in those days. But he wanted to bring his affairs that had sunk so low during the nineties into better shape. The entirely credible story that comes down in the family is that had he lived longer, he would have been offered a Federal Judgeship.
He died in 1902. He was ill, as I remember very well, but the doctors didn't know the cause of the illness. They never did get it diagnosed, and as happened frequently, then, they said, "Well, take a sea voyage." Presumably this was to lesson the stresses and strains he appeared to be living under.
So my father and mother came out by train to San Francisco, took the ship "Alameda" from here to Hawaii, and from there to New Zealand. They planned going to Australia, where there were some Cornish relatives at that time. (We children didn't come; my younger brother stayed with a Sioux City neighbor.) At Auckland, New Zealand, they went ashore because of worsening illness, and in a few weeks he died.
It was a very traumatic event. You see, my mother was way off by herself in the middle of nowhere. I have her written accounts which I haven't gone over yet, but I am sure that they are very, very vivid.
Riess
I wonder now whether in retrospect you can remember the bitter feelings in the family about the political events in Wisconsin described earlier?
Taylor
Well, my mother of course, felt bitter over the political double-crossing, yes. My father must have felt it, because he left for Iowa in 1887.
Riess
But was the bitterness sensed in the family or was it put behind?
Taylor
It was put behind at least as far as we children were concerned, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you these stories except that the strong parental memories endured. Besides, my father was politically a leader in Iowa, with very good personal prospects. Of course, when years later a man comes out from Wisconsin to Sioux City, and he says, "And I'm the man who stuck the pin in, but I can't remember who that man was," that revives the original hurt.
So my mother felt again the bitterness, but she never permitted it to dominate our childhood lives; indeed, I was only dimly aware of it until in 1913 my Uncle Thomas, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, told me his version of the story.
Childhood in Sioux City, Iowa
RiessWhat was Sioux City like?
Taylor
Well, I suppose that when I was born, it had a population of 25,000, which went up to 50,000 by the time I graduated from high school in 1913.
Riess
You said it was a boom town?
Taylor
Yes, and booms always collapse. Until the last census, it was always the second city in Iowa. Now it has become the third; Cedar Rapids has passed it. Sioux City is located right at the junction of Nebraska, South Dakota and Iowa. The Missouri River is the western boundary going north until you arrive at Sioux City; then the Big Sioux River becomes the boundary. The geological formation is wind-blown loess -- a very, very fine yellow dust was blown up from Kansas during geological time after recession of the iceage. I never saw a pebble during my boyhood at home; because the soil was all wind-blown. The pebbles were buried way, way, way down deep somewhere.
Riess
Did it continue to blow whenever the wind blew?
Taylor
No, no. It was all covered by what we called buffalo grass, which is bunches of grass which the buffaloes used to feed on. The surface formation was like the waves of the sea, really a very beautiful formation.
Riess
That was the way the land lay?
Taylor
Oh yes, like the waves of the sea. This was all on the Iowa side of the river. On the Nebraska-Dakota side of the Missouri and Big Sioux Rivers the land surface was as flat as this floor.
I remember the grading necessary to level those waves to make streets. Then it was just like living in a dust storm. The mules and the graders would come, and they'd expose all this flour-like dust, so breathing the air almost choked you. It was a relief when the grading crews left.
The rest of the surface of Iowa was gently rolling, what they call "rolling prairies". The loess formation was not as good for farming as the country from about ten or twenty miles to the east. It extends clear down to Omaha and Council Bluffs. So it was farming country all right, but not the richest Iowa corn-hog farming of today. That best land lay some 50 to 100 miles to the east, and then continued to the Mississippi.
What determined that Sioux City should not really grow was the location of the main railroad lines. In the early days of the transcontinental railroads the question was whether the route from Chicago to the West Coast should pass through Sioux City or through Omaha, and Omaha won out. The Union Pacific decided to cross Nebraska via the Platte Valley. So Sioux City, 80 miles north of Omaha, was left off the main line. Sioux City had railroads, of course, but it wasn't on the main line to the Pacific Coast. They got a western line out as far as O'Neill, Nebraska, but it ended there. You see, it was an era of tremendous speculation, of tremendous booms that busted.
They always talked about "boosters" -- that was the phrase. People were urged to be "boosters" to "Boost for Sioux City!"
Riess
Reminds me of Babbitt.
Taylor
Babbit was in Minnesota, just to the north of us.
Riess
Where did you go on vacations from Sioux City?
Taylor
On the left bank of the Big Sioux River, before my father died, they had built a fine, two-story "Sioux City Boat Club." After he died, my mother planned our own vacation shack, also on the bank of the Big Sioux. At 1711 Douglas Street we had a little one-room out-building, combination of store-house and study room. Whether my father went out there to do some of his work undisturbed, and when it would save him walking a mile downtown to his office, I don't remember. But after my father died my mother arranged to rent an acre of a Frenchman's farm on the Sioux River right bank, South Dakota side.
The movers took that little one-room building --
So summers, we would go out there to what we called "Ambleside." On the Sioux City side of the river, right across, was the Sioux City Boat Club, and three other boat clubs were nearby. They provided the recreation for business and professional people. The Sioux City Boat Club was as fine a summer recreational institution as I have ever come across.
It was family-oriented. The women of the family would take the electric train out in the afternoon, about a twenty minute ride from Sioux City. They'd go out with the macaroni and cheese and the meat and the potatoes and salad and whatever. At the club was a community kitchen. Any member could prepare the family dinner there. Then later in the afternoon the men would come out after five o'clock when the offices closed. Or some would come out earlier. Sometimes they would come out and go swimming in the river before supper. The club acquired a golf links out on the South Dakota side, renting the farm of the man from whom we rented our one acre. They'd finish their games of golf and then the families would go to outdoor tables to have supper. If it rained, they'd put tables up on the porches, under the protection of the club house.
On the second floor of the club house was a dance floor. It was the finest dance floor that I ever saw in my life anywhere! Marvellous! Beautiful! I think it was made of maple. At the first dance, the fathers usually would dance with their wives and their daughters, even with their little tykes, leading them through the steps. Then after a dance or two, the elders departed and left the dance floor to the high school and college age youth for the rest of the evening. The dance ended, of course, promptly at ten o'clock, with "Home Sweet Home" the last dance with no "encores."
There was boating on the river and canoeing. They had Vermont canoes, the most beautiful canoes I ever saw. You'd take your lunch in them and go up the river, paddling up and back.
Riess
Willow trees along the river?
Taylor
Oh yes, you could go under the trees and be screened from sun and from sight, if you wanted to.
When they put the golf links on the South Dakota side, it was on a farm, you see. So at first the farmer cut the fairway with his farm mower -- the kind with the blade that cuts back and forth, not like a rotary lawn-mower.
When the businessmen would come out to play golf in the afternoon (they would come out especially early on Saturdays) I used to caddy for them. One of my high school teachers gave me a "cleek" golf club and a golf ball as a present. With that one club I learned golf playing by myself. Then in the afternoon I would caddy, making twenty-five cents for nine holes, sometimes fifty cents for eighteen.
At the clubhouse we had a bowling alley where we bowled not ten pins but "cocked hat," which is three pins. The club had tennis courts, clay courts. We could always just go across the river from our little cabin and play tennis, especially mornings before the adult club members came. It was a very happy setting for vacation time. Sometimes I would invite a high school friend to come out to the river and spend a few days with us. My sister sometimes would have her friends. Sometimes an aunt would come, then as a gesture in repayment for my mother's kindness in giving her a summer vacation she would teach us German. We regarded that as a mixed blessing. [laughter] Now I am very glad she did it, but then we preferred to play.
Riess
But it stuck?
Taylor
Oh yes! It turned out to be a big help. I've been complimented on my high German pronounciation which I learned as a child on the river bank of the Big Sioux.
Recalling Some Early Influences
RiessSounds like a nice childhood. Was it carefree or did you have the feeling that you had things to do?
Taylor
Well, I felt pressures upon me, yes. I felt both. I felt the inspiration of my father, who was so tragically taken from us. I felt the responsibility of going on and fulfilling in some kind of way what he couldn't complete. I am sure that at times this feeling was oppressive. No one intended it to be that way but it was there all the time. It couldn't, I guess, be otherwise.
So my youth wasn't altogether lighthearted.
I don't look back on it as a purely "happy" childhood; at the same time, there were many, many happy aspects. I don't look back on it as an oppressive one, either, yet there was a feeling of pressure. It took quite a long time before I began to feel that I was getting out from under. Maybe I'm not out from under yet. They say those things stay with one: it's entirely possible. But they don't rest heavily on me now.
I'm sure they left their marks. When I look back, I can think of some very uncomfortable moments in my childhood, when I know that the unreasonable pressure was the cause. Although no one spelled it out to me, I just felt it. I know my mother felt very heavily upon herself the responsibility of being left alone to bring up that family, which in many ways she did well, but with a heavier hand than would be recognized as desirable today. In fact, I'm sure that she, in her later years, had some comprehension of this, too.
Sioux City was a small, isolated community, you know, a big city. It was, in a way, a tight little community.
You asked about the church. Yes, there was a church. We attended the Congregational Church. We regularly went every Sunday morning; didn't usually go to prayer meeting Wednesday. Sometimes my mother would go, but I don't remember going.
Then when I reached high school age, I sang in the church choir. That was fun, a social event. On Sundays I would go in the morning and sing in the choir and go again and sing in the choir in the evening. That was really very pleasant. There you'd meet the other boys and girls.
The church program, as I remember, said, "This church has no creed." So there was nothing dogmatic, in the theological sense. Relatively to the day, the church didn't lay a heavy hand... but... well, it was part of the atmosphere. [Gestures indicating heaviness] While it contributed much that was beautiful and pleasant in some ways, it didn't lighten the pressure.
When I went to the University of Wisconsin as a freshman, I went to the Madison Congregational Church one Sunday morning. I never went again. My church attendance just ended. I don't mean that I had a revulsion, just that I was through, I never went again.
I've been since in churches, of course. But I never attended church after the fall of 1913.
Riess
Maybe in Sioux City the church was the institution...
Taylor
Well, it was a social institution as well as a religious one. Sunday school -- well, the wife of my father's law partner was our teacher, and the boys and girls were my age. It was fun to see them, and we liked her. I must say that of the things that I can remember out of the Bible -- whether it was from the sermons and the texts that were read, or the Sunday School -- today I value a lot of them. I understand the meaning of many of those passages of the Bible, today, because they are based upon very deep and enduring and repeated human experiences. I think in some ways that it is unfortunate that the present generation doesn't know the King James Version, it's a wonderful book, with a lot of junk in it, but also with many marvellous, marvellous passages! So that stays with me and I am grateful for it.
Riess
Do you think it is a more relevant book to somebody in a rural environment?
Taylor
Of course, it came out of a rural environment. I'm not in a position to really answer that question. I would just say that there are some very beautiful passages.
Indeed, within the last year, I did a chapter in a book on the Grand Colorado. The title of it is, "The Desert shall Rejoice, and Blossom as the Rose." Wasn't that a beautiful title for a story of water development with an aura of aspiration about it?
Then I describe how the Colorado desert blossomed--but not as the rose. That's a subject I spent my life working at, the past twenty-five years -- this program of making deserts blossom as the rose. But gee, it doesn't blossom like the rose. It blossoms like something else, often like a lot of thistles.
But reclamation began under that slogan back in the 1890s. That's the Biblical phraseology familiar to the National Irrigation Congress delegates who said they assembled to make the desert "blossom as the rose." That was the genuine aspiration, yes. Only the drive for reclamation covered up a lot of things not well-described by that phrase.
Riess
That would be a good example of getting "right" on your side by just using the Bible.
Taylor
Yes, of course. On my side of the 160-acre limitation there is a Biblical passage in Isaiah, the prophet, who wards of the evil things that are in process of coming. I'll have to get you that passage.4
[Pause while he finds a quotation.]
This isn't the Bible, but this is Pliny. This we included in our first edition of An American Exodus.5 Here it all is again:
"Here we bear our honors; here we exercise our power; here we covet wealth, here we mortals create our disturbances, here we continually carry on our wars, aye, civil wars, even, and unpeople the earth by mutual slaughter. And not to dwell on public feuds, entered into by nations against each other, here it is that we drive away our neighbors, and enclose the land thus seized upon within our fence; and yet the man who has most extended his boundary, and has expelled the inhabitants for ever so great a distance, after all what mighty portion of the earth is he master of?"
Pliny, A.D. 77
Schooling
RiessWhat did you want to do when you were in high school? What were your plans?
Taylor
I had no finally decided upon objective, but especially since my father was a lawyer whose career had been cut off, and since he was such a very fine lawyer, that career certainly was the most concrete possibility. I don't recall any alternative that was as clearly in my mind.
I think now of what others said about me when I was in high school; this may be relevant to your question. In the high school annual, every junior had his photograph and below it somebody -- editors, teachers, whoever -- put a little motto underneath. Are you familiar with that?
Riess
Oh yes.
Taylor
Well, what they put under my photograph in the junior annual was, "I Can and I Will."
When I was a senior, someone put "Senator" underneath. I think I know who did it: one of my teachers, a man who himself later became a United States Senator from Iowa, David W. Stewart.
Riess
They must have recognized a great deal of drive.
Taylor
Well, they didn't miss it, did they?
Riess
Did you ever want to be a senator?
Taylor
[Hurriedly] Oh no, I never wanted to be senator enough to take any of the steps necessary to become one. I never wanted to get personally in the arena, although always I have been concerned with public questions of the kind that would concern a senator.
Riess
You are seeing drive as a positive thing.
Taylor
Well, I have taken some subjects, some fields in which
The two that your colleague [Mrs. Chall, ROHO interviewer] wants to interview me about, Agricultural Labor and Water Development, are both of them subjects I have stayed with for a long, long, long time. In both of them, I have been in favor of an action program; there are policy issues behind them both. Both of the subjects came before the United States Congress, are still before the Congress, and probably will be before the Congress for a long time to come. So I've been pretty persistent.
Riess
Yes, persistence and pursuit. Drive, if I were defining it for myself, would be in a more personal sense, a drive for position.
Taylor
A somewhat unflattering term, you say?
Riess
I think of it as that.
Taylor
Well, there are those that think that I might be a little less persistent or driving. But that's the way I am, and I think that motto that they put underneath when I was a high school junior -- I don't know who did it -- was not too far off. [Chuckles.]
Riess
"I Can and I Will!"
Taylor
[Gently] Yes.
Riess
Were there teachers that you recall?
Taylor
Oh, yes, yes indeed. I had fine teachers. I had fine teachers in grammar school. I can remember only a very few that I did not regard very highly.
I had one in the sixth grade, well, she was all right but... not on the top shelf. But my others [glowingly], oh, they were fine in my eyes.
One thing that could be of interest. I told you that my mother taught school. She had an idea that it would be better if she taught each of us four children in succession, which she did. She taught us the equivalent of the first three years, so each of the
That was a pretty hard experience to go into that school room for the first time with all of the other children having been in school the first three grades. I remember the first month as pretty hard going. Oh, I was in a sort of a terror. I remember (you see we went morning and then back again in the afternoon) that the first day I couldn't make it back on my own in the afternoon. My mother had to take me back to the schoolgrounds. Which tells you how hard it was for me to go. The first month was pretty awful, but after that I caught on and there was no problem.
Riess
Did it give you a special boost, do you think, the tutoring she gave to you in the first three years?
Taylor
Well, I had no trouble holding my own after the first months. The first month there was trouble because she hadn't given us any geography, she hadn't given us any physiology; what she had given us was arithmetic and reading and writing. On those subjects there was no problem at any time. But when suddenly I was presented with a physiology text and had to read and study about the bones, and all the rest -- well, it was tough going to hear the other children answer so easily, when I was unable to answer just because I had received no background in the subject.
Riess
Your older sister and brother had already gone through this.
Taylor
Yes, they'd gone through it.
Riess
And your mother thought it was still worthwhile despite the trauma.
Taylor
My younger brother went through it, also. All of us did. There was a great gap in age between my older sister and brother and myself, so I wasn't aware of what their difficulties might have been when at eight they entered the fourth grade. I was three when my brother was eight and quite unaware of any problems he may have faced.
I remember my teachers all through grammar school. My sixth grade teacher was the only one I felt wasn't too smart. We could catch her up ourselves. If we
I had very good teachers through grammar school and again in high school. My Latin teacher, Marie Lynch, was wonderful, and my German teacher, Helen Struble, oh, I idolized her! On my last trip back to Sioux City I saw her husband, David Stewart. He was the United States Senator who I think put that little label under my photograph. Miss Helen Struble was like an angel standing before you. You'd sit there in your first or second row seat and look up at this lovely woman, who was your teacher... pretty fine, pretty fine.
Then we had men teachers, too. The principal, Carlos M. Cole, took charge of our beginning Latin class through the freshman year. He was an excellent teacher.
The Community
RiessWas it a nice group of children or were there a bunch of rowdies in the back row?
Taylor
Oh no, oh no. They were nice children. Nothing like the problems of children going to the city schools today. The cities now have been inundated with people of all kinds, cultures and classes.
I don't mean to say... well, we were practically a one class group, if you want to put it in terms of classes. We were of a generation whose parents were professionals, lawyers, physicians, merchans, people of those straa in society.
As for colored, I can remember only one colored family in Sioux City when I was young. There may have been more but I cannot recall any. The Morgan family lived about five or six blocks from my home. The father was a postman, who delivered our mail. His children were in class with me or if not always in the same class, at least in the same school. But I can't recall there were any other colored. The origins of the children of a more recent foreign origin than myself were Swedes and Norwegians, quite a lot of 'em. There were a few Irish and a very few Italians.
The New England strain in the community was very strong. The Congregational Church almost always brought its ministers from New England, going back to the source.
We were quite a homogeneous group in Sioux City. The social events were not social events of an inner group. School events were class events, the junior prom, or the sophomores had a dance, or the seniors' dance, and everybody could go to anybody's dance. So you went socially with the boys and girls that you went to school with. You went to the basketball games. I recall no lines drawn.
I do remember the conspicuousness of a small group. They were the Catholics. It was a strongly Protestant community. The Catholics were largely Irish, who generally had come over later than the ancestors of my family and most of the rest of my
Two blocks away from the Bancroft public school where I started was St. Mary's. The teachers at St. Mary's were Catholic sisters. I remember the first thing I heard about St. Mary's was that the boys at St. Mary's put cinders in the snowballs. I couldn't understand how the sisters would tolerate that.
It interested me that about three years ago, in San Francisco, at Mia Dixon's home (my step daughter-in-law) was a young woman, fresh from Ireland. When I started to tell this same story, I strung it out, and got to the words, "In the snowballs they put..." then before I could finish she said, "Rocks." Which suggests to me that she was familiar with that practice. And I said, "Well, with one correction, in Sioux City with that wind-blown loess formation, there were no rocks, so they substituted cinders."
Riess
Cinders sound much more benign than rocks.
Taylor
No, cinders were much more jagged.
As a matter of fact, I never saw a snowball with cinders. I'm just telling you what was "in the air," and one way it troubled me was that I couldn't reconcile boys who would put cinders in a snowball with these churchly nuns who were their teachers. The sisters were obviously fine, religious people. It was so utterly incongruous, you see, that their pupils should put cinders in snowballs.
Riess
As a group, they did attend the parochial school?
Taylor
Oh yes, it was a parochial school only about two blocks from my public school.
Riess
There weren't some who chose to attend public school?
Taylor
Oh, of course. As a matter of fact, my first teacher, a lovely golden-haired Miss Sullivan, was Irish-Catholic and I thought she was marvellous, just marvellous.
Riess
You remember them! You seem to have been impressionable!
Taylor
Teachers made an impression on me all right.
In the packing house section of the city were some recent East-European immigrants -- Russian, etc., but few of them had families with children.
Riess
What became of fellow high school students that you remember?
Taylor
Well, Maxwell Hamilton, the son of the Presbyterian minister, went to Princeton. He and I were on the same debating team in high school. He became the number two man in the Asia Division, that is, the Japan and China Division in the State Department in Washington. After he graduated from Princeton, he went to China, learned the language there, rose in the State Department. One of the political science professors at Wisconsin became the number one man; my high school mate, the number two. Both were very able, high grade people. Hamilton ended his career as Minister to Finland.
Riess
From what you have described of the general background of the students in your high school, it sounds as though "I Can and I Will" would have applied to a lot of people.
Taylor
[Enthusiastically] Yes, yes. It applied to the era, to our generation. That was the motivation. What was before you was the question, "Could you make good?" That was the common phrase, "make good," and you felt a responsibility to do it.
Riess
Was there a sense of having to go away and make good and then come back?
Taylor
No, return to Sioux City was not essential. Although Sioux City was growing in number, it has been a population exporting area from 1900 on. Iowa was the first state in the Union, I believe, to lose population; it lost for the first time between 1900 and 1910.
The movement was westward into the great plains -- Nebraska, the Dakotas -- and then even more into Southern California. There still is a tremendous Iowa population in Southern California around Long Beach, about 100,000. Both city people and a lot of farmers emigrated. As Iowa land values went up, the farmers developed their farms, then sold them at high prices, and lived the rest of their lives in Southern California. That was especially true prior to the agricultural depression that struck almost immediately after World War I.
Riess
You are saying that they retired to Southern California?
Taylor
Well, a lot of them retired. A lot of them were continuing in business in some way. The whole family would move out, then the sons as they became of age would go into business in California.
Of my classmates in high school, one, as I've told, ended up as Minister to Finland. Then just before me by a few years was J. Darling. He was son of a Congregational minister and sang in the choir at my father's funeral in 1902.
J. Darling was a cartoonist, first for the Sioux City Journal, then for the Des Moines Register. His signature was "Ding." Unquestionably, Ding was one of the top cartoonists of the United States in his era. He and Fitzpatrick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were probably the top two.
Before me were Harry Hopkins, whom I never heard of until he became one of FDR's top aides, starting as director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Also George P. West, associate editor of the San Francisco News, whose mother was friend of my mother. I crossed the paths of both these Sioux City "boys", Hopkins when I reconnoitered North Dakota during the 1934 drouth for the Relief Administration, and West when initiating the migrant camp program in 1935.
Riess
Did you have any summer jobs?
Taylor
Well, I did not work my way through school in the sense that I had jobs when I was in college, no. But in those days, all of us boys worked summers, that's whatyou did. You got a job. After my junior year in high school, I "wrapped bundles" in the mail room at the Sioux City Tribune.
The papers addressed to individual subscribers had to be wrapped in bundles addressed to the towns, where, upon arrival of the trains they would be thrown off at the station, opened, and individually delivered. That work took about two hours every afternoon and brought me fifty cents.
High school was over about one o'clock, I'd have lunch, go right down to the Tribune, be there about two-thirty, and stay there 'til five-thirty, or sometimes when the editions were very big we would stay through supper and into the evening. They would pay us overtime and they allowed us 25 cents additional for our supper, which actually paid for it.
That was in high school, 1912-1913. When I graduated from high school in 1913, my family all went to Europe, leaving me behind. I was class president, and didn't want to miss the graduation.
After graduation ceremonies I got a job on a big 2,000-acre farm about fifteen miles from Sioux City, near Luten. The boy who later became Minister to Finland worked there, too.
I worked on that farm for two summers. Part of the first summer I worked also as a laborer in the building trades at 20 cents an hour for a ten-hour day and 60-hour week. To get to the job I walked close to a mile to catch the electric train at about 7:30 in the morning, rode the train for about 20 minutes to the end of the line, then walked about a mile further to the speedway grandstand under construction. I was on paid time only from the end of that line; when I walked across into South Dakota to that grandstand, then I was on their time. So the ten hours, you see, was from the end of that line back to that line. So my day was 20 minutes on the electric and a mile walk added twice to a ten-hour day.
Riess
When you described high school, and the background of most of the children, I thought, "Where are the laborers in this town, where are the working people?" Their children were going to high school too, weren't they?
Taylor
The sons of skilled laborers, a really skilled carpenter, possibly even a foreman carpenter would be in school with me. I worked for the uncle of one of my classmates at 20 cents an hour. He was my foreman. His nephew and I, and the other classmates were friends like anybody else. But it is true that the youths at high school were largely from professional and businessmen's families.
The laborers tended to be immigrants. On the farm, they were either Danes, Hungarians, or Germans,
When in the late twenties I went back to Sioux City studying Mexican labor migration, a very active young woman social worker on whom I called I found I had known as a young girl, the American-born daughter of a little Italian fruit-merchant. Grown up she was a wonderful person. I remembered her as a child. Her father's store was a couple of blocks away from church on Sundays. I would see her skipping on the street near the fruit stand.
When I went back in the twenties she was the top social worker in Sioux City. As children and youths we knew there was this difference, that she was an immigrant daughter, but this didn't demean her in our eyes. We knew that she was a fine girl and her parentage was all right. We recognized the difference from the earlier American ancestry, but it wasn't really a class difference. Everybody was coming up the social and economic ladder, and more or less coming up together.
Riess
How about the difference between that, and acceptance of the Catholic families?
Taylor
Well, one of those Irish-Catholics turned up wrapping bundles with me, right alongside of me.
Riess
The only kind of discrimination I can remember in my childhood was against Catholics. I don't know what people thought they did, but it was as if they definitely did things.
Taylor
Well, the main thing that I remember was the authoritarianism of Catholicism. You see, we were Congregational, professing that "this church has no creed."
Riess
You've told me that your mother and older brother and sister went back to Europe in 1913. Did they go back to family lands and look around, do you think? Or what kind of a trip was it?
Taylor
They did not get back to the village from which my grandfather came. I did in '63, and '72.
My mother, brother and sister got back to Wilchingen, the village in Switzerland from which mother's mother came. I was there, too.
Going to Europe! That was what you hoped to do once in a lifetime!
Riess
Did you have a feeling that you had missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime thing by not going that year?
Taylor
No, no. I was graduating. I was class president; I couldn't walk out on that. So, no, I didn't feel discriminated against at all. They'd have taken me to Europe if I had wanted to go. My mother didn't put any pressure on me to go and I have never had any regrets that I didn't go.
By arrangement, my sister was to have stayed with a family in Germany for the winter of 1914. She wanted to major in German, did major in German. Then, of course, the war broke out in 1914 about two or three weeks after she returned to stay with that family. She had to make her way out of Germany at war.
Riess
Was this in some traditional sense "the grand tour?"
Taylor
Yes, you would know, "This family, they've been to Europe!" Well, "This summer, my family goes to Europe." And that distinction came only once!
My family had one other trip, to Alaska. Of course, my mother had had that trip to New Zealand with my father, but that was of different origin and of a totally different character.
Oh, and the few people who traveled more extensively were marked people. There was a Dr. Hoyt, "He had
Riess
Egypt was a popular destination, wasn't it? And the Holy Land?
Taylor
Number One was western Europe. Egypt, we'll say, was Number Two, and the Holy Land, well, Number Three.
Asia, I can't remember that anybody went to Asia. In those days, what would you go to Asia for? We are talking about my boyhood and youth. Now, of course, it's all changed since.
Remember, then it took about two nights and three days or three nights and two days to get from Sioux City to New York, where you got aboard ship. Then add a week or more to get to England.
Riess
Where were you, and how did you get along while your mother was gone?
Taylor
I told you how I worked as a building trades laborer, and on the farm in 1913 when the family went to Europe. We rented the family home to a young couple, but reserved a room for my use when I was in the city. When the family went to Alaska my sister and I stayed at "Ambleside" on the Big Sioux.
Choosing The University of Wisconsin: Labor Economics and John R. Commons, 1913-1917
RiessDid you have any teachers who were particular advisors or counsellors?
Taylor
Oh, you didn't have them in those days.
Riess
Well, when it came to applying to colleges and so on? It sounds like a group of students who mostly would have gone on to college.
Taylor
Oh, a high proportion of my friends. Of course, in those days the proportion of all high school students that went to college was far lower than now.
The girls, they would go to Smith, Wellesley or Wells, or to Grinnell. And there was Morningside.
The boys, well, they went to Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, Grinnell. Then I, with one of my classmates, we went to Wisconsin. Those are the ones I remember particularly.
Riess
Where had your older brother and sister gone?
Taylor
Wisconsin. You see, we were deeply rooted in Wisconsin. I told you how my grandfather pioneered there, and how my parents made their way through the University. As their children, you can see the drive behind our going to Wisconsin. I can remember my mother saying, "Now, you can go to Harvard if you want to." But the twig had been already bent, so that it was just not possible for me to be, shall I say, flexible and objective in choosing where to go.
But I have no regrets, because going to the Wisconsin of those days gave the bent to my whole life.
Riess
How far away from Sioux City was it? How much of a trip?
Taylor
To get to Madison? Well, we took the Illinois Central at 6:00 in the evening, changed at Rockford, Illinois early in the morning about 5:30, waited for the connecting "milk train" which took us to Madison and got us there about 9:00 a.m. It was, oh, about 400 miles. Four hundred miles was a long, long distance in
Riess
And you didn't come home...
Taylor
We came home only for Christmas.
Riess
It doesn't sound as if you had chosen Wisconsin because it was close to home.
Taylor
No, no. I chose it for family reasons. The president of the University of Wisconsin when I went there was Charles R. Van Hise, one of the top geologists of the world and an early conservationist. He had been my mother's mathematics instructor in the early 1880's. He was the son of immigrant Dutch farmers in Wisconsin. His presidency from 1904 to 1918 became the "Golden Age" of Wisconsin. In my personal account in There Was Light 6, I speak of the Wisconsin professors who really, really shaped the lives of many of us. In the 1930's when the New Deal came to power, the students of John R. Commons staffed a lot of its agencies. The government suddenly expanded, you see, into areas in which there had been no administration before, e.g., unemployment compensation. I worked in the Resettlement Administration and Social Security Board, concerned with migrant agricultural laborers. There was no background of previous concern for them in government administration, except to guide wheat harvesters to the fields as the wheat ripened.
Well, John R. Commons had been concerned with problems of that kind when I went to Wisconsin before World War I. He was one of the great figures. His students just branched out and did all kinds of important things after they left the University! You might say he created the field of labor economics, and I came through the same field here at Berkeley.
And I had as seminar teacher Richard T. Ely, who was historically a great figure in the field of economics; also I was in classes under E. A. Ross, sociologist.
I think I told you that as an undergraduate I
When I came back from France, I decided that I would give law a serious try. So I went to summer school in 1919, taking all law, no economics. Well, it was all right, I had good professors, but the law didn't quite grip me.
I asked advice of some of my older professor friends, and particularly of E. A. Ross, who was a leading sociologist of his generation. His response, when I put my question to him, was this: "Well, if you go into law, within a reasonable time you will probably be in one of the best legal firms of the country, perhaps in New York, and by the time you are in your forties, some case will come along on which you will work that will really grip your attention and your faculties and your interests. It will go to the United States Supreme Court. It will be an important case.
"If you go into economics, from the time that you start, you can choose the subjects into which you wish to inquire, do your researching, make your studies. You can do that throughout your professional career."
I remember that as the decisive point that clarified the issue in my mind. Right from the start I could work on what I thought was important.
Riess
Of course, he was speaking from the background of Wisconsin. Was it really so in other places?
Taylor
I think it was so in a lot of places.
Riess
Where had Commons come from? What was his training?
Taylor
Commons had come from Oberlin. He had done some work for the U.S. Industrial Commission in 1901, and for the Department of Labor. He had been very early with government, in one way or another. It was natural that his students, in time, should go into government service.
Many things were started by him, for example Workman's Compensation. In 1911, Wisconsin, Ohio and California were the first three states to adopt Workman's Compensation. Commons drew the first bill for unemployment compensation. It was introduced in Congress in 1919, but not acted upon. He always always concerned with the application of knowledge. The question behind studying was always, "What do you do about those problems?"
Riess
As a student of his did you get a sense of the responsibility of being an economist, a sort of social responsibility, I mean in a heavy way?
Taylor
[In surprise] No, not in a "heavy" way.
Riess
But after Commons one couldn't just go into an ivory tower.
Taylor
Oh, he took us out into the world. Yes, indeed.
Riess
Even more out in the world than studying law?
Taylor
Yes, in the sense that you could pick up one policy question after another, one problem after another.
I went to E.A. Ross to ask him my question after I had graduated in 1917, with Commons what today we'd call my major professor.
Riess
Why didn't you go to Commons rather than Ross?
Taylor
Oh, I went to Commons, too. I went to three or four professors. But Ross was the man who really put it in a few words, so that I thought I'd got it clearly and knew what the real issue was.
Riess
Did you come out feeling as though you owed time to government service after such an education? As though you owed involvement?
Taylor
I don't recall thinking of it as something I owed, although there was some sense of social responsibility. Government was a natural place to go to study public problems and to come up with whatever solutions you could. But government was only one route to the study of problems and to application. Commons didn't rule out employers, or unions as access routes to understanding of labor problems. Some of his best students went into industrial relations from the point of view of management, and sought to encourage more enlightened labor management than was then the rule.
I have found myself involved in programs calling for administrative or legislative decisions or both. I have done a great deal of government consulting. I cannot recall that I ever consulted or was asked to consult by employers -- by government, yes, and now last week by the California Labor Federation, where one young fellow called it, I think I told you, my opportunity for "recycling" myself. I've started to work by giving them my first draft memorandum, of a proposal that they asked me to prepare. The man who asked me to do this I first knew when he was research director, which he now calls me. He was research director of the California Labor Federation in the 1950s. Years later he became Undersecretary of Labor in Washington, and then Ambassador to New Zealand. After that he came back again as research director, then in a few months became Executive Secretary Treasurer of the California Labor Federation.
Over the years he remembered me. One evening I got a telephone call to ask, would I be his research director on a part-time basis, three days a week. I told him that I would need to think it over over the week-end. Then I went to see him. I said, "How about making it two days?" "No," he said, "Not two days, three days." So it's three days, but the
He said, "You have a study on campus, don't you? And library facilities?" "Yes."
I'll be over in San Francisco sometimes, but it is not a "9 to 5" job over there. I keep in touch with what he wants over the telephone. He's a very fine man and I'm glad to be "recycled", or at least I've told him that I would take it on for through the summer. Then when fall came, we'd see. [Brightly] So you see, I'm right back on the old grind, on labor problems where I got my start.
That influence of Wisconsin came clear down into Sioux City high school. In those days we had debating societies and the debate subject was normally a public-political question, "trade unions," or "the Sherman Antitrust Act" or something of that sort. In high school, through my brother, then in college, I'd get informed on the subjects being debated at Wisconsin. So when subjects were to be proposed for high school debates, well, I would toss some of those in for consideration. They frequently took them, or subjects like them, and that's the way we got our public speaking training.
While high school was interesting, I was still living at home, and I still felt, well, what I referred to as "pressures." These lessened when I went to Wisconsin where I was more on my own.
Riess
Although you had felt the pressure to go to Wisconsin...
Taylor
I was responding by going to Wisconsin. So that when my mother said, "Well, you can go to Harvard if you wish," I couldn't really consider it on an equal basis. I just couldn't do it.
Riess
Wasn't there more leeway for you, as the third child?
Taylor
Yes, there was. There was less pressure on me than on the first two and, I think, less on the youngest than on me. Yes, there was a relaxation.
Riess
What was the Madison campus like? What were your living arrangements?
Taylor
I went to Madison with one of my classmates, Walter R. Webb, as roommate. My brother before me had lived in the YMCA dormitory. The "Y" was a four-storey building. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors were rooms for students, men, of course. We were on the 4th floor. The man in the room immediately next to ours, Arthur J. Altmeyer, was to become the first chief administrator of the Social Security System of the United States in 1935. He was a senior when I was a freshman, and also a student of Commons.
We lived in the "Y" the first year. The fraternities couldn't take in freshmen, but in the Spring of the first year they could "rush." Walter Webb and I went into a fraternity that at the time was a "local," not a "national." I was "rushed" by a couple of national fraternities with Wisconsin chapters.
But this "local," known as "Red triangles," was unusual in that it was filled with people who were very active in student activities, rather than what were called "fraternity types." It was a very, very unusual and interesting group. I guess that is why my roommate and I joined. They were people up to their necks in the middle of all student activites, including debating and journalism as well as athletics.
A number of members were Commons' students. That wasn't the social fraternity tradition at the University. There was nothing against labor economics, but the members of social fraternities generally were less involved in that field than in others.
This fraternity took as its members "diamonds-in-the-rough" as the old phrase had it. [Laughing] Some of them were pretty rough! But they were a pretty good lot on the whole, and you lived daily and intimately in the midst of that very diverse group.
Riess
You weren't a "diamond-in-the-rough" type of person.
Taylor
Well, perhaps not. You can let me out of that category, if you want to. But I am thinking of others. One came out of the Chicago municipal political machine, what is now the Mayor Daley machine. Well, from boyhood he was trained in that city hall machine. Alfred P. Haake came to the University at an age two or three years above his classmates, and he became politically very active on campus, especially in class elections, debating and journalism.
Riess
And he came knowing he wanted to go right into labor economics, then.
Taylor
Or else he found it out promptly when he got there.
Well, you see in that period, just before World War I, Van Hise was elevating Wisconsin to be the Number 1 state university in the country. It isn't that today, although it's one of the top ten. But in that era it was clearly the Number 1 state university, and right along in the top four or five universities, whether state or private. Wisconsin drew students from all over. From New York City there was an influx of very able Russian and Polish Jews.
You see, there had been the revolution of 1905, preceding the 1917 revolution, and in that intervening period a lot of them got out and came to New York and Chicago. The immigrant parents, as their children got older, wanted to send them to Wisconsin, because it was a university where professors were concerned with political and labor problems of the day.
One of them in that group was Louis Bloch. I believe he still lives in San Francisco. At Wisconsin he was a year ahead of me. He came out here as the economist in the Department of -- what is today called the Department of Industrial Relations. It was then under direction of Will J. French, a Hiram Johnson appointee.
I've heard it said that FDR, who drew so heavily on Wisconsin, for staffing his administration, had recommended Wisconsin or Harvard to his son Jimmy. Well, James chose Harvard. But if you wanted to know where to send your son to get a vigorous contact with the problems of the day, Wisconsin was certainly one of the places to think of first. Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, well, those perhaps were the first three.
Riess
Did Commons come around to the fraternity? Did he associate in that way?
Taylor
No, Commons did not. I didn't see him much out of class. Had I taken graduate work, then I would have.
Riess
I think it was Henry Erdman who said that the one thing that was really lacking in his Wisconsin education, in retrospect, was any kind of mathematical statistical work.
Taylor
No, we didn't have that. There was one statistician, but his personality was not especially attractive to me, or to the students generally. So there was a minimum of mathematics and statistics. The Wisconsin labor economists were not mathematical economists, nor am I.
It was in years after World War I that Commons went into economic theory and into institutional economics. My own view, as of now, and it has been for a long time, was that he did his best work when studying the problems of the day and seeking application of solutions to them. That was much more valuable than his entrance into the field of economic theory, in my opinion.
When Commons wrote "Legal Foundations of Capitalism," then he had institutional tangibles to deal with. But when he went into elaborate theories, I don't think those works were as fruitful, and enduringly useful, by any means, as are his historical, legal, and public administration studies.
The senior LaFollette, as governor of Wisconsin in the early 1900's, drew heavily on Commons for counsel in setting up the administrative side of the state government. That's one reason why Wisconsin took an early progressive lead. His son, Bob, Jr., followed in the same tradition as his father.
Riess
Was there a political science department?
Taylor
Yes. My professor was A. B. Hall, later president of the University of Oregon. Some students liked him very much. I found him interesting, but not exciting. He practically dictated his lectures to us, "Roman I,
Riess
Your classmates who went into politics, did they get their grounding in economics? One didn't major in political science and then go into politics?
Taylor
Well, they'd go from majoring in economics at least as easily as from political science, and the economics faculty was stronger than the political science faculty in those days.
As a freshman, I had two exciting history professors. One was the professor in English history, an Englishman. The other was Dana Carlton Munro, who later went to Princeton. His lectures on the Middle Ages were delivered sing-song, and I thought at first of a gramophone. But after a little while I completely forgot that sing-song monotony, because his descriptions of medieval society were so fascinating.
To show how it stayed with me, his teaching helped me to recognize and understand the old market place in Karachi, where craftsmen worked and sold their wares in small stalls on narrow streets. When Dorothea and I were flying in 1958 from Pakistan over Afghanistan, as I looked down on those walled villages in Afghanistan I remembered how Dana Carlton Munro had explained the rise of feudalism in Europe, a system in which you affiliated yourself with someone more powerful who, in a fortress or castle, could give you security in return for your loyal service.
There below were these walled towns, walled for security against depredations.
Riess
We don't have those walls in the United States.
Taylor
Yes, and to take a current example, I remember when I was in Paris during World War I and I saw the stores on the main avenues of Paris with these rolling steel shutters. When the shopping hours were over, the shutters were rolled down. In this country, stores had glass fronts, with the windows illuminated in the evening.
Well, do you see, with the insecurity that we have now and the rocks going through the windows, the Wells Fargo Bank on Bancroft way now walls itself way up because their windows were broken about six times. Domestic insecurity.
Riess
It seems like a basic animal instinct to have walls.
Taylor
Yes, the greater the insecurity the greater the importance of walls. What one hears now in Berkeley is the depredations which are committed increasingly. An emeritus law professor, who used to be our next-door neighbor, was mugged, I guess they call it, her purse taken.
Riess
Oh yes, I've heard -- Barbara Armstrong.
Taylor
At about 8 o'clock in the evening on College Avenue, where as long as I've been here, anybody could walk safely at any time of the day or night! It is true that many years ago there was a drug store robbery within two or three blocks of where that happened to Barbara Armstrong.
But practically speaking, physical insecurity on Berkeley streets apparently is rising. Well, that is getting away from medieval history, or is it? I've taken you from 1500 A.D. up to 1970, and back again!
Riess
Is there anything else that Wisconsin was as famous for then as labor economics?
Taylor
Well, Van Hise, the geologist, wrote one of the earliest books on conservation. You see, divisions between the fields didn't make so much difference in those days as they seem to now; you didn't say to yourself, "I am an economist, that means this is my area, not that, and that aspect belongs to another speciality."
The geologist got interested in the lumber industry, in mining, in conservation generally. Those things were in the air! You had the feeling that if you studied them, something could be done to meet our problems.
Riess
What a good feeling!
Taylor
Yes, when I contrast that with what I get from young people now! Then you could. It was not only, I Can and I Will, but anybody could; if you had the stuff, you could do it.
There were those two elements in the air at Wisconsin. I am sure there were others, but those are two big things: Labor and Conservation. We talked about them outside of class. Goodness, students who were two and three years ahead of you would talk to you about the excitement of being a student of Commons. There was no question of "relevance" or "boredom" then. Heavens, no.
Riess
That's what I was getting at. It seems particularly poignant now.
Taylor
Yes, the students that I talk with now -- it came up very plainly when I went down to Riverside during the environmental teach-in week (Earth Day, April 22, 1970) -- they were debating whether it is any use to try to do anything. They were frustrated. Their question was, how do you get anything done? The public relations people manipulate you so that you don't know what is happening. The corporations have the power. What can you do?"
Well, in their lowest mood, what they say is, you must destroy before you can build, and as to the method of destruction, well, the only question is whether it should be non-violent or violent. They say, "Well, they didn't listen to us until we got violent." You hear all the time, "That's what it takes."
Look at today's Chronicle (6 May 1970) and you'll see. The combination of the climax at Kent and spread of war into Cambodia is a Vesuvius.
Of course, what I say to students is: well, I know the power of the corporations on the water question. I know the power of the public relations people, I know the power of the press to smother the news, distort it, to keep you uninformed. I know all of that, but if you would take the trouble and make the effort to find out what to do, and choose your targets
Riess
You're telling them aren't you?
Taylor
Well, they hardly come around to ask me. They come around to me a little bit. I've tried to reach them, but I've not found it easy.
Here Mr. Hickel has come out with a good letter this morning.7 Good! His department is doing the worst, THE WORST! No respect for law at all in water matters! But he is sensitive to the protests of youth.
Well, I tell the students, I would not only like to have law and order in the streets, but in the Department of the Interior. I don't know whether we'll ever make it or whether we won't. Or whether they are going to rivet on us this monopoly of land perpetuated with a monopoly of water. It is going to be very bad if that program goes clear through to the end.
The land monopolists have controlled the enforcement of the reclamation law and torn the law to ribbons. What bothers them is that controls over speculation and monopoly still are the law. They haven't been able to wipe them off the statute books yet; so they know they are in an uncertain, prehaps even precarious position violating the law.
Riess
But that's not enough -- to know.
Taylor
Well, you see, they know it but they keep the knowledge from spreading widely among the public.
Riess
You've exposed this in writing, haven't you?
Taylor
Sure. The law journals are full of my articles on it. The Bay Guardian prints it -- 30,000 circulation, an underground sheet, they call it.
I fill the congressional hearings, year after year, with my testimony exposing and documenting what they are doing.
Riess
But nothing happens.
Taylor
No. What I say is buried in print. That is my frustration.
The Times: Industry and Agriculture
RiessDo you recall any landmark moments, like realizing the inequities of life, and wanting to do something about it? What was your introduction?
Taylor
Well, going into the field of labor economics you saw that pretty fast, the terrific efforts of laborers to improve and protect their condition, especially with this pre World War I tide of immigration, which always meant an influx of labor at the low level, the bottom level. So that there was this great disparity between the skilled and the people at the bottom, the immigrants. That was impressive.
Paul Kellogg (who became the editor of the Survey Graphic, and through whom later I came to know Dorothea), was affiliated with a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation, called the Pittsburgh Survey. Pittsburgh was the city where the immigrants poured in, the Austrians and the Hungarians and the Poles, and everybody going to the steel mills.
There had been the Homestead Strike of 1892, terrifically violent, a bloody strike. Andrew Carnegie, who was out of the country at that time, felt very badly about it. Judge Gary, the tough old Judge Gary, formed the U.S. Steel Corporation -- and was U.S. Steel down on unions! They kept them out.
The Pittsburgh Survey was a study of the conditions of the people in the steel mills. They worked the twelve-hour day, seven-day week. And every two weeks, they had the longshift. They added two more hours to it when changing shifts. It wasn't until about 1923, when President Warren G. Harding publicly called on U.S. Steel to abandon this twelve-hour day, that they did it.
That was going on all the time, you see, when I was an undergraudate, and that was one of the books that Commons gave us to study.
As a student we were exposed to that sort of problem in industry. On the farms, labor was somewhat different. On that big 2,000-acre Iowa farm where I worked summers, the migratory Missouri wheat harvesters
Well, these people in the steel mills weren't on much of a ladder. So at that time it was very different to be on the bottom rung in agriculture, from being on the bottom rung in industry. But as to an awareness of where my sympathies lay... I cannot cite you the time and the place and the circumstance of awareness. For as long as I can remember, I was concerned with social situations that I thought were out of kilter.
My sympathies seem naturally to have gone against the labor policies of the United States Steel Corporation, for example, which was the first billion dollar corporation (not billion dollars income a year as we have today, but billion dollars capitalization).
In school debates I always wanted to be on what today we would call the "liberal" side.
Riess
The Socialist Party was an active third party, at that time, wasn't it?
Taylor
Yes, Eugene B. Debs pulled over a million votes in 1912, I believe.
I was a Wilsonian Democrat. In 1908 I was sympathetic to Bryan, rather than to Taft. My family, however, was all Republican. Iowa was all Republican. There was only one party in Iowa, practically speaking. But, for whatever reason, I was against Taft and for Bryan, the Great Commoner. I think I told you, my father introduced me to him at a Sioux City hotel when I was a child. Then, when I went to Wisconsin, even before I had Commons in class, I was aware of the LaFollette "Progressive" thought that just permeated the atmosphere. The students talked about it; our class of 1917 was absorbed in it; it was just the spirit of the place.
Riess
Do you think labor economics at Harvard would have had the same spirit at that time?
Taylor
No, definitely not. Johns Hopkins and Columbia would have come closer to it.
Riess
What were the Iowa farms like in those days. How did they differ from California's?
Taylor
In those days I didn't know anything about California farms at all, except that they grew oranges in Southern California. We got Florida oranges and we got California oranges, and those farms were small, then. Los Angeles County was the leading orange-producing county, and one of the leading agricultural counties in the United States. As an agricultural producer it's way down now, obliterated by urbanization.
Personally, I didn't know any Iowa farms, except this decidedly unusual 2,000-acre farm on which I labored during summers finishing high school. That farm was atypical. In those days, if you wanted to cross Iowa, you went by train at night. Crossing Iowa en route to Chicago or to Madison, I had no occasion to stop anywhere, so I never saw my native state until 1927, except immediately around Sioux City. In that year I drove my car across it on a macadam road while studying Mexican labor in sugar beets around Mason City.
The Wisconsin farm that I knew was my uncle's. I stayed there from June to Christmas once in 1908, and was on it briefly two or three times. That was a typical family farm. My uncle had 120 acres in southern Wisconsin, four miles due west of Dane, about three stations northwest of Madison. The terrain was very like Morbach, where my grandfather came from in Germany. The resemblance of the landscapes was quite striking -- wooded, rolling country.
Riess
I guess this is the size farm I would have expected. The neighbors would come in and help?
Taylor
The time when neighbors came was notably when harvesting grain -- oats and wheat. My uncle was one of about eight neighboring farmers served by one among them, a Czech. This Czech farmer owned a
When the harvest was on, at each farm in turn, the women would gather as well as the men. There was really an exchange of labor in both house and field. The farm women, wives and daughters, would prepare the mid-day dinner for the harvest crew. And when I went with my uncle when it was his turn, helped with the harvest on a neighbor's farm, why, I sat at the dinner table there like anybody else.
The harvest meals were wonderful. Usually loaded with pumpkin pies. You know Grant Wood's "Harvest?" Well, there you have it.
It was exchange labor. In a little book, my uncle would keep track of how many days labor he owed to whom, and who owed him. His neighbors probably kept track the same way.
Riess
I should think that this would be a very important backbone tradition that didn't get to California. Did it?
Taylor
No. The contrast is enormous! California agriculture is not American agriculture at all in the Northern and Middle Western sense! This is plantation agriculture, more in the Southern than in the Northern tradition.
California agriculture is based, you see, upon the monopolization of the large Spanish land grants, not on the homestead land pattern. One way or another, these lands were all gobbled up by a few owners in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
Speculation was on a gigantic scale! First they grabbed most of the land. Then, especially when they knew the water someday would come, they grabbed the rest of the land, every acre of it that they hadn't grabbed already!
From then on they've been working, working to pump the money out of the Treasury, to pay the costs of bringing the public's water to their private land, and so to reap the harvest that they've been after for a hundred years. That last step is what they're working at now, to rivet (permanently) their power over land and water. This is the corporate takeover of land and water resources, two of the state's most important resources.
Riess
How far has the corporate takeover gotten in the Middle West and the North?
Taylor
Well, it is moving in that direction there, too, in various ways. In the Middle West it's come another way, and the incremental values have been shared more equitably along the way by a succession of sales over the years, rather than monopolized by permanent ownership.
The first series of sales that I knew of was when Iowa farmers retired to enjoy life in Southern California. There they could live on what they had saved in Iowa and could get by way of rising land prices in Iowa. In California, reclamation, as administered, tends to produce one gigantic unearned increment for the holder who has had the dry land for maybe ninety years without ever selling it.
World War One
RiessDuring your college years I wonder whether students were in touch, by newspaper reading, with what was going on around them?
Taylor
Well, yes, we read the newspapers some, but in those days, in the field of labor economics, there might be an item in the newspaper about organized labor, oh, once in two weeks.
Riess
I mean it more in the sense, were you and your contemporaries interested in what was going on in the world or was it "four years of college and then we'll emerge."
Taylor
Our interests were not particularly world interests. World War I broke out between my freshman and sophomore years.
Riess
Was that a matter of debate among people, or was that far away?
Taylor
What began to bring it home to us was the unrestricted submarine warfare, the sinking of the "Lusitania" and Woodrow Wilson's protestations, and the Preparedness Parades in the fall of 1916. The question posed was whether Germany would cease unrestricted warfare or whether she wouldn't. For a while she did, you know, and then it broke out again.
Riess
You volunteered when the war started?
Taylor
Oh, yes.
The Marine Corps offered ten appointments to all of the colleges and universities that were rated "distinguished" class, on what today is called "ROTC," but then was limited to a couple of hours a week of military drill in uniform for two years.
Well, with my closest college friend, Herman A. Zischke, I went to the president's office one day and said, "We understand the president has the power of appointing ten people to the United States Marine Corps. They will be made 2nd lieutenants, with the mental
The answer came back, "Yes."
So we went down to Chicago in May 1917, took our physical exams, got our commissions, and reported for duty a month later in Maryland.
Riess
It's hard for me to really accept this idea of wanting to go off and fight in that war.
Taylor
Oh, Woodrow Wilson gave us something to fight for. Oh yes, that was the right thing to do. Not that we didn't think about it, we did discuss it. The clincher was this: That although war certainly was undesireable, after all, it had had some manifestly good results. Some wars, at least; notably, the Civil War. After all, there was Abraham Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves. The war was a bad business, but good did come out of it. We hoped to make the world safe for democracy, and to put down the autocracy of the Kaiser.
In college, at my time, I can remember only two students prominent in student activities who became what today is called "a conscientious objector." One of these, who was in my sister's 1910 class, was imprisoned for a year or two in Alcatraz. The other, I don't remember the details. He fell afoul of the law for it, all right. But remember this, that at the beginning of World War I there was no such thing as a recognized "conscientious objector."
Roger Baldwin, who founded the American Civil Liberties Union and is still living, largely brought about the origin of conscientious objection as a recognized status.
Riess
This was the original Quaker...
Taylor
Well, I don't know whether or not Baldwin was a Quaker. I don't recall all the details, but the issue of conscientious objection came up at that time. It was raised by very, very few.
Taylor
I got my commission in the Marines in May. I reported
We went into the training area in the department of the Vosges, at a little village called Robecourt. I have the record I kept in a book, the dates and places where I was, if you ever want it.
We were in the training area for about six weeks. Then, in March, we went into the trenches at the front, in the Verdun sector, at Mont-sous-les-Cotes.8 The Verdun sector was relatively quiet in 1918; 1916 was when they had those terrific struggles, in which half a million soldiers were killed.
After we came out of the Verdun sector, I was assigned for a month to the 1st Corps School at Gondre-court, Meuse. This was a school to train officers, i.e., lieutenants and captains, in minor tactics. I had a very good month at that. At the end of the month I returned to my regiment. You don't want all the war experiences.
Riess
You have a phenomenal memory of it, I think.
Taylor
Well, do you think that that isn't burned into one's
Riess
I guess the alternative would be to burn it out, completely.
Taylor
[Quietly but emphatically] It's burned in, burned in. A tremendous experience, tremendous.
And I have a little trouble, sometimes, explaining to people of your generation, that for all its terrible side it was a great experience. It did a lot for me personally -- a lot.
It made the difference for the boy growing up, as I told you, under the weight of boyhood pressures, to become a man. It made a difference, to bear a responsibility for lives of others, going through what I went through. A tremendous experience.
We certainly believed that we were doing right. And as I say, we went through it. We knew the horrible, wrong side of it. But we believed that it was nevertheless justified, and we were hoping for results as good as came out of the Civil War.
Do you see that? [Showing an object to the interviewer.]
Riess
What is it? Is that the end of a shell?
Taylor
Yes, sure. I went back the week after the Armistice, to the place where I was gassed, and picked that up, brought it home. That's the nose of a German gas shell picked up at our position near Bouresches, Chateau Thierry sector.
Riess
Did the gassing leave you invalided for a while?
Taylor
For three months and a half. I was two months and a half in the base hospital at Royat, near Clermont-Ferrand, then a month in Biarritz at the convalescent hospital. Then I was returned to duty.
Riess
Oh, you didn't come home?
Taylor
No; only hopelessly invalided cases could go home. I was gassed on the night of the 14th of June. When
The man who produced that assignment had been my opponent in the inter-collegiate debate between the Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota in 1916. He was an instructor at the 1st Corps School when I came. We remembered each other and after I left he asked General Headquarters to have me assigned at the school as an instructor.
But in the meantime, I had gone back to my regiment, was gassed and in the hospital. So it wasn't until I finally came out that those orders reached me. Then came the Armistice, on the 11th of November. Finally I got home to New York on the 23rd of May. You see, there wasn't enough available shipping to bring us home earlier.
Riess
So you were just waiting in some port?
Taylor
For a long time I continued instructing at the 1st Corps School at Gondrecourt, then at the 3d Corps School at Clamency, Nievre. You see, the troops were there in France, and not to be left idle. So I continued as an instructor for quite a while. Then I was assigned to a post in Gondrecourt, where we were waiting to be sent to the port when shipping became available. I must have been there about six weeks. One reason that lengthened it out was, that on the sheet with the orders for my personal return to the States, there were two names. The first name was somebody else, the second was me. Well, the clerk who handled it passed the order on to number one and forgot me. Soon I noticed people who came to the post after me going out. So I got an inquiry sent to headquarters, and they said, "Oh, yes, the orders for you were issued some time before."
So finally I went from Gondrecourt to Brest. I was at Brest for a couple of weeks before the ship came in and I went aboard. It was the third largest German merchant ship, one we took over after the war, known as the "Kaiserine Augusta Victoria." Well, now you've got me back to the United States.
Riess
Did you plan to go to graduate school?
Taylor
Yes, I knew that I wasn't finished. The question was, would I go on in economics or in law?
Riess
And in economics, you still would have had to have another degree.
Taylor
A Ph.D. in economics or an Ll.B in law. You see I had only the A.B.
Riess
Lots of people stop there, don't they?
Taylor
They don't go into the academic or legal professions.
Riess
And that is what you knew you wanted to be doing?
Taylor
Oh, yes. With the examples of Commons and Ely and Ross, and then the history professors who meant so much to me, oh, I knew by that time that I wanted either the teaching profession or law.
You asked me about the students whom I'd known who accomplished things later? Well, I started and gave the answer for high school. At Wisconsin the roll would be longer than I know or I had thought about. But there's Arthur Altmeyer. [See page 47.] Then, of a later student generation, whom should I meet at the Social Security Board, when I was consultant there, but Wilbur Cohen. He was a young fellow, then just out from under Commons. He became secretary of what we now call Health, Education and Welfare.
Well, I don't now recall others, but they were all over the place!
Riess
Somebody like Wilbur Cohen or Arthur Altmeyer, did they go to graduate school?
Taylor
Well, Arthur Altmeyer, I think, did a year or so of graduate work. I don't know that he got his doctorate; I doubt it. But I'm sure he did some graduate work with Commons.
Riess
Do you remember others who had your goals of university teaching and research?
Taylor
There are the later ones that I know, who were not students when I was. But Commons' students staffed the Department of Economics at Wisconsin.
Riess
You came to California because of the climate and your need to continue to recover from the gassing. Otherwise, where would you have gone?
Taylor
I was on my way to Columbia with a modest scholarship in hand. At Wisconsin, they recommended that I go to Columbia for my doctorate, so that's where I was headed.
Riess
And then did you want to come back and teach at Wisconsin?
Taylor
Well, they didn't say that, although I would have regarded it as an honor. But I came out to Berkeley and Wisconsin never made me an offer. They talked about maybe my coming back, but when I got my offer to stay on right here, that ended all talk of going to Wisconsin, and I was well pleased with Berkeley.
[After an interval of two weeks, Dr. Taylor, in a telephone conversation prior to the next meeting, indicated that he had been thinking more about his World War I experience, and would be willing to talk about it for the interview.
I am glad that you would like to talk more about World War I.
Taylor
In thinking about what I wanted to say about that experience, I sat down to the typewriter and I typed out three little items.
The first is from a Marine lieutenant, from Washington State College, Pullman. We were riding on the trucks, up to our brigade and regimental headquarters near Chateau Thierry. We both had been on detached duty for a month, and we knew that our regiments were at the very, very front, the very point of where the Germans had driven down toward Paris.
Here is what he said:
"Some of us may not live to see the end of this war, but the world will be the better for it. I just hope I do not get machine-gun bullets through the stomach, linger on, and die."
Within days, that's exactly what he got.
If you want to go back to our view of the propriety, the morality, the necessity of doing what we did, I have already told you that we raised questions. In my own mind, and I think many others, the Civil War answered that. Abraham Lincoln, he freed the slaves. It was a rough way to do it, but he did it. He held the country together and he freed the slaves. Of course you remember his Gettysburg Address, "testing whether that nation or any other nation, so conceived and so dedicated can long endure..." -- we were in that tradition, you see.
Of the people who questioned, to the point of open opposition, I can now remember only three names. One of them was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, of 1914, three years before me. He spent a year at Alcatraz. His name was Hessler.
There was a man either one or two classes ahead of me, Clark Getts; he objected. He wasn't on the campus; neither of them were there when war broke out.
The third I knew only long after. That was Roger Baldwin, who is still living, who founded the American Civil Liberties Union and has a very fine record. The other two I've heard nothing of since the close of the war.
There was some Socialist and other opposition to the war. Senator LaFollette was one of the "willful" men in the Senate who voted against the war, as Woodrow Wilson called them.9
Riess
Why was LaFollette against the war?
Taylor
I don't recall. He gave a speech in Minneapolis, before our entry into war. The Middle West, Wisconsin in particular, was what today is called "isolationist." The heavy German population, especially in Milwaukee, was then, and I suppose to a degree now, politically socialist. Socialist Congressman Victor Berger of Milwaukee lost his seat during the war, or was under some kind of cloud.
But there was no serious questioning, that I ever heard, of my generation serving in the war. The 32nd Red Arrow Division was made up of Wisconsin and Michigan recruits, and filled with Wisconsin Germans and with an active record at the front.
Riess
Do you remember bad feelings about German immigrant settlers at that time?
Taylor
Well, most of the flare-ups came during and just after the war, while I was in France. When I got back home I read, I think in Harper's Magazine, how people went around painting yellow the fence-posts of German farmers whom they regarded as unpatriotic. The German language was almost stamped out in high schools and in universities in the Middle West, as a result of the war.
Riess
Did that heal over by World War II?
Taylor
I haven't been back to the Middle West recently. I remember my freshman year University of Wisconsin German professor. When I came back from France I found he had had to change his field entirely, so he retrained himself to go into the teaching of accounting. Otherwise, he would have had no job at the University of Wisconsin. So there was an anti-German fury in that area. But I went off so fast into the War that I didn't know what was happening at home. It was April 7th when war broke out, and in May I was in Chicago receiving my commission.
Riess
You said that there was an on-campus training that was not ROTC.
Taylor
You mean the training that we had as students? We called it "Military Science", but it was hardly more than close-order drill in uniform. We drilled two hours a week our freshman and sophomore years, and that was it. That was the heritage of the Civil War, and intended to avoid shortage of trained officers if war should come again. The Union Armies had had no place to recruit their officers. They were picked up out of West Point, of course, which split both ways, North and South, in the Civil War.
In the Civil War there were men of political influence, men who would raise a company of men. Some leading energetic person would raise a company, so they would make him a captain in command of his company.
Riess
Right out of a town, you mean?
Taylor
Yes, right out of his neighborhood. Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers, and the phrase was, "We're coming, Father Abraham, one hundred thousand strong," -- three-month volunteers. That was the tradition that came down from the Civil War. So, Congress asked the land grant colleges to offer
Riess
This arrangement that the Marines offered to every land grant college and other institutions -- was something that was distinct from commissions in the Army and Navy?
Taylor
That's right. If you wanted a commission in the Army you could go down to Ft. Sheridan near Chicago or to Ft. Snelling near Minneapolis, for 90 days training. That would give you a commission as a 2nd lieutenant in the Army.
Well, I had a chance to get a commission in the Marines without going through 90 days training before I got it.
Riess
At that point, what made it distinct from the other services?
Taylor
The Marine Corps was founded in the 18th Century, prior to either the Army or the Navy. It predates them, and it had a special internationally recognized legal status. That is, if the Marines were sent to Haiti or to Mexico (remember Vera Cruz? Woodrow Wilson sent them in), legally that was not war. They were there for the protection of life and property. Legally, it was not like sending in the Army.
There were only a handful of them then. I went in on a doubling of the strength of the Marines. The strength was being raised from 13,500 to 27,000. Since they had to get officers from somewhere, they promoted some from the ranks, and got the rest from places that gave military training, like the University of Minnesota.
Riess
Where did the Marines get a certain reputation for brutality?
Taylor
A reputation for brutality? Well, I assure you, there was nothing of that sort, at no point in the training. I never heard of any such thing prior to, or in World War I.
Riess
I wonder when they became such a leathery, kind of tough...
Taylor
The Navy provided the sailors who sailed the ship, but those who preserved order, and saw that everything was in order, were the Marines. In early times they wore a leather stand-up collar, so they were called "leather-necks."
Riess
That set them apart.
Taylor
Oh, yes. There was always just a little rivalry, the tiniest bit of friction between Navy and Marines, historically, just a family rivalry.
Riess
I guess it is only in the recent training camp scandals that the Marines have had their...
Taylor
Of course I can speak personally only of World War I and I was not in an enlisted man's "boot camp" then. But I never heard anything then that would go by the name of brutality, and I believe I would have heard of it had it existed. The sergeants bawled the men out; they did that sort of thing. But I never heard anything from my men that would suggest brutality at all!
Riess
It sounds as though the authoritarianism that an army necessarily needs was tolerable then and it isn't now.
Taylor
Well, we understood and our men understood that when you got an order, you followed it. But I remember very early my company commander remarked to us that an officer never touches a man. Never! That is one thing you never did. I don't mean you wouldn't help a wounded man. But in the line of duty to enforce an order, you never touched him.
Riess
Is this in the sense of not striking him or not having any physical contact at all?
Taylor
You just didn't have any physical contact with him.
You remember General Patton, who slapped a man in Italy? And Eisenhower made him apologize to the man and apologize to the whole assemblage of troops? That's the old tradition -- you don't do that!
Riess
Would you be willing to generalize about family structure and its parallels to this? Whether a father, relating to his children back in those days, lived somewhat by the same rules?
Taylor
You mean in my childhood days?
Riess
I am interested in the relationship between the generals and the men and between the fathers and the sons, and the general disintegration of this kind of thing.
Taylor
Well, I remember what is told of my German grandfather, how he best some of his sons, and severely, to the point that one of them ran away from home. The stories of those beatings came down to me from my mother. She told of the time her father was beating her brother with, whatever it was, probably some leather harness, the reins of the horses, and when he was striking she jumped in and took the blow on her legs. Well, that sort of thing comes down from old Germany.
My father died. He was of English parentage. He died when I was seven, so I had short acquaintance with him. But I assure you that I would remember it if there were any sort of physical punishment.
As I remember, my mother and others of that generation discussed the issue, whether to "spare the rod and spoil the child." Before, it had been affirmed, "spare the rod and you spoil the child." But my mother's generation, raising me in Iowa, questioned that. It was an extreme exception if anyone in my boyhood generation was beaten, among the families I knew. I cannot now remember any whom I would call "beaten." I won't say never spanked. That would be a little extreme, but the spanking was not beating and it was rare.
Riess
"Beating" was the real corporal punishment of the English school.
Taylor
That's right. It was practically gone from the Sioux City schools when I was a boy. We would hear it said that a certain principal had done it, "in an extreme case or two," but nobody knew exactly that he did it on a Friday afternoon and to whom -- it wasn't precise
Riess
It sounds as though there was a respect for verbal authority.
Taylor
Oh, yes. I'm sure that in the Marines, there was no physical disciplinary contact between officers and men. I don't mean refusal to talk with them, but to discipline by touching them, absolutely not!
Riess
Among the men, was there a sense of pride in the Marines, the peer group thing?
Taylor
Pride in the Marines? Tremendous! Tremendous. We were so glad that we weren't Army, we weren't Navy -- we were Marines and very proud of it.
I've got all kinds of memorabilia here. I've got photographs of my company, my battalion. You can see the morale of it, the relationship. I am sure that the men of my company, my platoon, my company and battalion, I am sure that they had confidence in and liked their officers, at the distance we were from them... and yet, right with them.
When we drilled, when we hiked, in everything, we were right there with them. And at the front we were right there with them. Well, that gives you something of the difference of the atmosphere then and perhaps now.
As for the actual war experience, I think I told you it was a tremendous experience.
Riess
I'd like to know more about why, and what you felt as you went in. You expected to survive, clearly, as you went in.
Taylor
When I completed my convalescence in France, after I was gassed, I sat down and wrote a letter home, which was printed in the Daily Cardinal (like the Daily Californian). I have it here, if you want to see it. [See illustration.]
Here's the kind of experience at the front. I read you of this Marine officer in the truck, going up. Here's another one. This is probably two or three days before going into battle, just as we were completing our month of special duty in the 1st Corps training school. We knew we were going to the active front. We could read in the daily papers about the German drive getting closer and closer and closer to Paris, and we knew that our own company, battalion, regiment, and brigade, were being thrown in to stop it.
A few days earlier than the incident that I told you of when we were in the truck right up close to Belleau Wood, another incident occurred of similar character. Another Marine Lieutenant, Charlie Ullmer, from Pottsville, Pennsylvania, said as we broke up after our month of infantry training at Gondrecourt, en route to rejoin the 6th Regiment at Belleau Wood:
"How does it seem to know that 72 hours from now, you will have been dead 24 hours?" I do not recall that any of us who heard him, answered.
He died pretty close to the schedule he prophesied. So you see, he knew what he was going into, or he wouldn't have said that, and I heard him say it more than once.
My own reaction at the very front? This is one part of it:
"The question in my mind changed imperceptibly, but inexorably, from, `Will I get something?' to `what will I get?' On a brigade strength of 7,200 at Belleau Wood, the Marines suffered 5,711 casualties, and almost half its officers."
So we were there, right there at the front.
There's my letter; it's toned down. It's an unforgettable experience, I can tell you that. That's the way I wrote it home. [Pause] I can remember it much more vividly than I ever wrote it.
You asked about the relationship of the men to the officers. One of the men in my platoon, who went through that last night of shelling and gassing
Well, we were in a wood, being shelled very hard, with gas shells. One of the things that I had remembered from that month of special training at 1st Corps School was that an artillery officer told us how the ground bursts of shells land in an ellipse with the long axis in the line of fire. He said, "The bursts scatter, but they scatter only a little bit to right or left." Knowing that meant saving lives to us, that night under fire, because if you watched the groundbursts, you could tell where the shells were likely to land from each of the four guns of the German battery, and choose to escape through "safe" narrow lanes in between the lines of the bursts. So we sought to use those lanes between those shell bursts to reach the rear of the wood that was under fire. I wouldn't let my men go sideways out of the wood, because then they'd have to cross that line of fire.
Now, the story of the incident: My runner came to me very excited, and he started to call out to my men to tell them, "Come on, this way! Come on!"
I was afraid he would take my men across the line of shell-bursts, so I told him to "pipe down," and slapped my hand on my.45 pistol holster to let him know I meant it. He could talk to me, I said, but I was in command here, and he could not tell my men what to do. Anything he had to say, he had to say it to me, not to my platoon.
Coming up the steps toward South Hall in 1920, my ex-Marine, Wells Graham, said, "Weren't you with the 78th Company, 1st Platoon?"
I said, "Yes."
Then the next thing he said, "Do you remember when you threatened to shoot that fellow?" (I've forgotten his name now.)
"Oh," I said, "I wouldn't have shot him."
Graham's response was, "We'd have all stood by you, if you had."
Does that tell you something about Marine morale? All I -- and they -- wanted was for him to shut up, and not take my men out into the lines of fire. I was responsible for them, and was doing the best I could, and I wasn't going to have him taking my men God-knows-where! I think that that illuminates the relations of men to their officers.
Riess
And the unique opportunity to save men's lives, too.
Taylor
Well, yes. I think I saved lives that night. I had my platoon, and another platoon of my company right with me; I was senior to that lieutenant, which meant he was responsible to me, and I was responsible for him and his men. Soon an officer of the 96th Company came to me and said, "I'm gassed. I can't stay any longer. Will you take my men?" I said, "OK, I'll take them." Then a lieutenant from M Company of the 23rd Army Infantry on our right came to me, saying he couldn't stay in the gas any longer, would I take his men? Yes, I would take his men. As the time went on, we got all the men back toward the rear of the wood. I told the lieutenant, James Pickens Adams, to lead the way out to the rear. I said, "Go back and find a first aid station, these men are all gassed. You start out first, with the men following you at intervals of ten paces."
The reason for ten-pace intervals was so that there'd be minimum exposure of the men to enemy fire. We didn't know where the Germans were, or whether they could see us at dawn. We didn't want them to open fire with their machine guns and get more than one or two men at most. As soon as I found that Adams could go on safely, we just sent them out of the wood. We got them to a first aid station, one hundred per cent of them gassed!
Later, in Paris, after the Armistice, as I was passing outward through the revolving doors of a hotel, an army captain, a doctor entering the hotel,
When we went back to the old front, Dorothea and I, in 1959, and came to a certain place, I stopped the car and said, "That is the Wood!" Unforgettable. Tremendous.
All this is totally apart from any question of justifying war. I'm giving you a little clue as to what an experience it can be for a young man just out of college. I mean, in war you are up against it -- you are up against the ultimate. You have responsibilities, and you do your best.
Riess
All in all, I felt that what you were saying last week is that you were better for having been in it at all.
Taylor
That is what I am telling you now. Isn't that a tremendous human experience?
Riess
Yes, it is.
Taylor
You're never the same again. You've been right up against it.
Riess
And you found that you could do it.
Taylor
And you got through it. Yes. You weren't a boy any longer.
Later, after I took my preliminary exam for the Ph.D., Professor Ira Cross made an observation in which he related my conduct in that exam to my war experience: apparently he felt something. I wouldn't have thought of it.
Riess
That might be very true, yes, that you'd been up against worse.
Taylor
If you're lucky enough to come out of it, you've had a tremendous experience.
Riess
I don't know what gassing means. Is it something you eventually recover from completely, or what?
Taylor
Well, I was severely gassed. Gas burns like acid everywhere the body is moist, including the eyes, so you are blinded. But I think it was only in two respects that it held on in any way. One, the doctor said it had damaged my lungs, but he also said, even with the damage, they were as good as most people's. Then the other, the chronic bronchitis, because it burned in here [pointing], above the lung and the doctors told me at the time that in my later years I probably would have some symptoms from it. And now I have the impression that I do. Not that I have anything really to complain about.
But when I was in the hospital recently in Washington, D.C. they noticed it, and worked on my bronchitis, trying to get me to make the effort to clear out the thick mucus that collected. They worked pretty hard on me, to get me to do that.
Well, that's the war episode. 10
II On to California
Graduate Work at the University: Berkeley and Solomon Blum, 1919-1922
RiessDo you recall your expectations of the "Golden West," and how it all looked when you arrived in Berkeley?
Taylor
Yes, of course. I went from Sioux City to Omaha, where I picked up the Union Pacific, then the Western Pacific. The train took about two days and two nights out of Omaha, and arrived in Berkeley on the 26th of September.
I can remember coming over the Sierras and down into the foothills and seeing the poppies (the golden poppies that the Southern Pacific had scattered along the right of way), and arriving in Berkeley down at the old University Avenue S.P. station with the sun still shining pleasantly. From there I took the cablecar type streetcar which was not a cable car. That is, the center of the car was enclosed, glassed in, and at each end, the seats were arranged so that you sat facing outward in the open.
I can remember coming up and asking people where to go to a hotel. They said, "Well, we recommend the Shattuck." But when we got to Shattuck Avenue, I didn't hear the conductor sing out "Shattuck" so I went clear up Bancroft Way and College Avenue to Dwight Way. Then he gave me a transfer to the electric going down Dwight to Shattuck.
I had my two suitcases and started to walk from Dwight Way toward the Shattuck Hotel. Standing on the street corner, whom should I see but the surgeon whom I had known in my ward in Base Hospital 30, at Royat, in France. So on the first afternoon, here was the very doctor whom I had known, who became shortly head surgeon of the Standard Oil Company of California, Dr. Thompson. He had skillfully avoided a leg amputation on one of the officers in my ward.
Riess
So then you moved into the Shattuck?
Taylor
I moved into the Shattuck, then in the morning I went onto the campus. I had wired out, "Would they admit me?" You see, Berkeley was on that unusual schedule, starting classes in August instead of September -- all the universities in the rest of the country started in September. I said, "I'm just back from France, will you admit me?" They had replied they would admit me at my own risk.
So I went to old California Hall, and asked at the Graduate Division window, "Where can I get a room?" Someone picked up a memo and said, "Here's a woman who called in, saying, `We don't take roomers,' " (you see, as the number of students was rising rapidly, they'd been asked to take students in) "but added, `Maybe we would do so now.' "
I said, " "That's just the kind of a place I want." So I went there; the Garlands took me in and it was fine. It was at 2815 Channing and Piedmont, just above the circle. The people were Minnesotans in origin.
Riess
There was a crush of returning veterans at that time?
Taylor
Yes, with the end of the war the student population was just ballooning! I came late, and they had heard the appeals for rooms, and they responded late, so we got together and it was fine. And then, in a day or two I went to what was called the "Cozy Cafeteria" -- (now Standard Plumbing, or it was the last I knew, on Durant Avenue just east of Telegraph on the south side of the street). As I started down the line, who should I see ahead of me, but Irving Wood, one of my Wisconsin classmates who had been with the 1st Division in France and was wounded in Cantigny -- the first big battle of the 1st Division.
And then walking across the campus, on another of my first days, whom should I see but Marshall Madison, who I had known in France; he was in the 5th Marines while I was in the 6th. He is in one of the leading law firms of San Francisco, Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro.
Riess
Were these people out here for the same sort of reasons you were?
Taylor
No. The family of my 1st Division classmate lived near Idora Park in Oakland, and Marshall Madison lived in San Francisco because his family was here.
Then I met another Marine, Abrams, who took me to lunch at Bachelordun, his fraternity house at Durant and College (it's torn down now and is a parking lot).
You asked, "What was it like to come here?" I came out here knowing nobody, expelled from the Middle West and east, you might say, and here in no time flat I bumped into that surgeon before I got to my hotel and then into a succession of friends.
Riess
Actually, you all had a common experience that probably the professors didn't have. Was there that feeling in the beginning, that "Nobody knows quite what we've been through?"
Taylor
You mean the difference between a person with my experience, and Irv Wood's experience, and Marshall Madison's experience and the students we were thrown with? And the professors? (They had no war experience, of course.) Well, yes. Those of us who had that war experience, in a sense, were marked men.
In the first place, there was the division between those who were in the service but were never in France, who had never been in battle. Battle was the ultimate.
Then there were the others who were our juniors by two years. Because we had been two years in the service, we were, academically, right with them. I remember how hard the first month or so was in class. Of course, I was a month late getting into class in the first place. It was another month or more before I
Riess
Were you drawn to the Pacific Coast-Berkeley thing? As a midwesterner, how did you find it?
Taylor
I found it interesting, exciting -- I didn't feel at home right away -- but it was an interesting place to be. The professors, notably Professor Solomon Blum -- the kind of man he was, having his seminar at his home, and bringing interesting people to meet with us -- well, I felt a warm attachment here, right quick!
And, of course, I liked the climate.
The graduate students were interesting. A lot of them came from British Columbia, and some from Utah. Those British Columbians were a good bunch of students. So you were in a seminar with lively people. I also remember an interesting Englishman, a Dutchman, who later became a Yale professor. So it was a stimulating atmosphere.
I kept thinking I would be here for one year and then go, but then I decided not.
Riess
Why, precisely?
Taylor
I suppose it was a combination of two things. One, I still felt the effects of the gassing. I used to run a low fever in the afternoon sometimes for weeks. That suggested the verge of TB, and my diagnoses had been recorded as "Arrested TB." They never found the bugs on me. So, on the health side, I was doing all right in Berkeley but I still needed to take care.
Then the other side was that I liked the professors and the graduate students here. So I didn't chafe under it, but was glad that I had come.
Riess
When did you meet your first wife?
Taylor
I met her in Wisconsin, as undergraduates. I knew her before I went to France, and we were married in May, 1920.11 She came out here and we were married here.
Riess
She didn't have anything to do with the decision between California and going back to Columbia, though?
Taylor
No. She came out because of the desirability of staying here.
Riess
Do you have any other memories of the feeling of being here in Berkeley then?
Taylor
I liked it. I liked it fine. I liked the California coast.
I used to go to Berkeley Echo Lake Camp over-looking Lake Tahoe; you know that? Well, I was there in its second, third, fourth, fifth years. That's a magnificent site! Magnificent!
Riess
You are really more a scholar, though, than a romantic about the hillsides, I think. I keep trying to ask these questions that are maybe really inappropriate for you.
Taylor
What is inappropriate about asking? I liked the Berkeley homes. I liked the homes of Professor Blum; I knew him in about three successive homes. You see, he was burned out in the 1923 fire. He had a magnificent site at Hilgard and La Loma. It's a magnificent height with all of the Bay before it. Well, it was a wonderful place to hold seminars.
In 1925 I bought 1075 Cragmont, which is about ten minutes walk from here, a fine old house. Old Berkeley, you know, with redwood shakes like this house (1163 Euclid Avenue). That was a fine home to live in. You know Pinnacle Rock?
Riess
No.
Taylor
Well, you know Cragmont Rock Park? Southeast of Cragmont Rock is a big sugar loaf rock; the house is right below it. If the rock had fallen, it would have rolled right down on the house. All the pine trees up there now, I planted.
No, I had no urge to go back and teach elsewhere after I started teaching here. I felt the appeals of this Bay and California landscape.
We used to hike in these hills that are covered with houses now. There was no road on the summit along Grizzly Peak. One of the reasons the road was later put there was because there had been no fire break in the hills there to stop the 1923 fire. The grass fire just came right over the crest into Berkeley.
We used to hike up back of the big "C", where the cyclotron is. One of the things you did was take a bag lunch, hike up, have your lunch then come down. We'd even take a sleeping-bag and sleep in the hills, up Panoramic Way where now it is all built up. Can't do it now.
Riess
What do you remember of the Berkeley fire? Where were you that day?
Taylor
I was on campus. I remember the smoke darkening the skies, and the Campanile tolling a single note and then the sound of the fire engines. I walked up to Hilgard and La Loma (I was living then at Channing and Piedmont), to see my professor's house. Gone... gone.
That fire swept down.... At Ridge Road and Euclid, I remember the firemen bombed a frame apartment house from the inside, thinking that they could stop the fire by bringing the house down. Well, they couldn't do it, because a frame house doesn't bomb down very well. You can destroy it, but it stands just the same, even if in rickety form, and it burns.
San Francisco fire trucks came over on the ferry. They came down to where University Hall is now, at Oxford and University where a frame residence stood. Flying, burning shingles from the fire carried there by the wind landed on that residence. The San Francisco firemen extingusihed them, so the fire didn't get beyond Oxford and University.
Riess
The fire got that far?
Taylor
It burned everything right down to Oxford and Hearst! And I believe it burned some even beyond.
Riess
Did your Professor Blum lose a lot of papers?
Taylor
No. His wife was very foresighted. He collected
It was one of the stories, told of any professor who didn't have much publication, giving him an easy out! [laughter] "Everything he had was burned." Well, maybe his manuscript was burned, maybe.
I've been told that the fire came down the leaves, even into this Codornices canyon, but was extinguished on what is now my home property.
Riess
A few weeks ago, we talked about why you came to California, your decision to go into economics, rather than law, and the guidance of Professor Ross. There's a quote that I would like to throw back to you, from Let There Be Light; it's the surprise at finding that Cal was no backwater. Of course one has to ask you why you thought it was going to be a backwater?
Taylor
Well, in the general academic opinion of the day, California had no reputation for graduate work in economics. Reputations rested on work leading to doctorates, and you don't build a reputation when you don't have anybody taking the degree. Before I came to Berkeley, economics had awarded only two doctorates in 1912 and two in 1916. In 1920, the year I took my masters degree, economics awarded two more. I have never heard that any of these persons pursued an academic professional career.
Four of us received doctorates in 1922, when I received mine. All of these four continued in the academic profession, one at the University of Oregon, one at the University of Virginia, and two of us at Berkeley. So you see why, at the time my decision was made to come to Berkeley, this University had no national reputation for graduate work in economics.
Riess
Yes. I guess when I think of backwater, I think of the surprise with which people found that California was not a cultural backwater. But you're talking in terms of the academic.
Taylor
I'm speaking in terms of my particular field, economics. There was no reason at that time why I should expect
But economics at Berkeley actually had good people who built the record so that within a decade or so California's high national standing in economics was nationally recognized by the National Education Association. That California had no national reputation was not true of chemistry and physics and anthropology, astronomy, mining, and doubtless some other fields.
Riess
Professor Solomon Blum, could you talk more about him?
Taylor
He was the man under whom I worked. He was a first-rate man, first-rate! He came out of Johns Hopkins. There were three places with high standing in labor economics in my student days -- Wisconsin, Columbia and Johns Hopkins. In fact, Richard T. Ely, one of my Wisconsin professors, had come originally from Johns Hopkins. There he had published a history of the American labor movement in 1887, at a time when people were saying, "Well, whoever heard that there was a labor movement to write about?"
There were Hollander and Barnett, and I knew while I was still at Wisconsin the series of doctoral studies they oversaw at Johns Hopkins. Then when I came out here, you see, I found in Solomon Blum of Baltimore one of their students.
Riess
He was not a young man.
Taylor
Yes! He was a young man.
Riess
Oh, he died so soon, that surprised me.
Taylor
He died about 1925, at age 42. His widow is living about a mile and a half from here right now. So I had him as my professor, you see, when he was in his late thirties.
He had tuberculosis, and had been down in the Central Valley trying to recover his health. When I came out here I think he was an associate professor: Just on the eve of his death from tuberculosis when they were sure his first-rate book on labor economics was accepted for publication, they made him a full professor. He had come out here for his health, as I had, and was taken on the staff of the department. He was an excellent, excellent man.
He was a totally different type from John R. Commons, under whom I had worked at Wisconsin, who already had a tremendous reputation. The two men, I found as their student, complemented each other beautifully. Commons would go right to the actual situation, legally, historically, into its public administration aspects. As he used to say, "Go out and get the facts."
Solomon Blum would philosophize, think about the facts, speculate, discuss them. All of my life, time after time when some subject comes up for discussion, I remember and say to myself, "Oh, we discussed that in Blummie's seminar." Well, that's a mark of a great teacher, I think.
So I had two great teachers, opposite in kind, complementing each other, and both of them tops. I'm the only person who both started and finished his Ph.D. under Blum. Others worked under him also, and got their Ph.D.'s, but they finished after his death.
Riess
And it was because he was here that you stayed here, in fact, to do it?
Taylor
Yes. Then after I received the doctorate, they invited me to stay on as instructor. You see, here was a professor with tuberculosis, and I could be his understudy. First I had been a teaching assistant under Ira Cross; then my last year before the doctorate, they made me a teaching assistant to help Professor Blum. On any particular day, if his health wouldn't permit him, I'd take the class for him. After I got my Ph.D., one of my assignments was to stand ready to meet his 11 o'clock lecture class.
Then, when he died, I inherited his labor classes, including his seminar, which for me was a very wonderful experience. It gave me as a beginning instructor the full teaching range of full professor, right from the start.
Riess
I noticed that in the catalog.
Taylor
Before he died Blummie finished a book on labor economics. I was one of those who helped him. It has an enduring quality; it is worth reading now. The New Deal developing new programs put it out of date, the Labor Relations Act, Social Security Act, all of that. The facts of the day made his facts out of date, but his analyses are very fine. You can pick it up today and know you are reading a book of quality.
I myself am much more of a Commons type. Solomon Blum allowed me to do that type of thesis, didn't discourage it in the slightest, in fact he welcomed it.
Riess
The Commons type of man gets the facts and comes home and thinks about them.
Taylor
Yes. You analyze them, set them down in intelligible order.
Thesis on the Sailors' Union of the Pacific
TaylorThe subject I chose to write on, with Solomon Blum's help, was the Sailors' Union of the Pacific. That was my first book, my doctoral dissertation.
Riess
I read the master's.
Taylor
Well, the doctoral was a continuation of the master's.
Riess
The master's, from what I read, was an historical study. How did you extend it and what did you do?
Taylor
Well, I finished it in two more years.
You see, the subject was chosen on the expectation that I would be here for one year, then go to Columbia. At Columbia is the Port of New York and headuarters of the International Seamans' Union, of which the Sailors' Union of the Pacific is the Pacific coast branch.
Riess
So you were going to possibly cover it from that angle.
Taylor
Yes. I'd be a leg up on my doctoral dissertation when I went to Columbia. The subject also hooked up with my Wisconsin tradition. Andrew Furuseth, head of both the Sailors' Union and the International, and next to Samuel Gompers, probably the top labor leader of his generation, when Furuseth wanted a national statute to help free the seamen from their historic legal shackles, he appealed to Senator LaFollette of Wisconsin. LaFollette then put the Seamans' Act through Congress.
So, in a sense, I was at home all the time.
Riess
When you did the master's thesis, was it your first interviewing in the field experience? How did you handle that?
Taylor
Yes, but it was minimum interviewing in the field. I went to the union officials. They opened their minute books to me back to the beginning, 1885. They just let me take them and write the history right out of their minute books and whatever other sources I
Riess
You were content then to do it in the historical research way at that point?
Taylor
Yes, I worked mainly from documents.
Riess
Were you yearning to get out and...
Taylor
No. Oh, well, I talked to some old-timers, you understand, not a large number of them, but I went to them, interviewed in that sense. Got along very well with them.
After I got my degree I wanted to have some contact with the sailors afloat, so I shipped aboard a Standard Oil tanker, out of Richmond. We sailed to San Diego, then up to Seattle and back. I worked as a deck hand. So I had that contact with the seamen themselves.
Directions of Growth in the Economics Department
RiessSome of your other professors were Carl Plehn, Jessica Peixotto --
Taylor
Yes, Jessica Peixotto, she was very fine. I took her courses in social economics. You see, they had no sociology here; they didn't want it. She was a good and an interesting teacher, and a lovely person. She, as would all of them that I mentioned, had us to evening dinner at her home, or to meet there for the seminars. And she would always have interesting people, usually from the city.
Blummie had his evening seminar at his home. He'd often have other professors, or other guests. I remember one evening he had two IWW's (Industrial Workers of the World) who were then on trial in Oakland for criminal syndicalism.12 They came and talked to the seminar, in the living room, just like in this living room where years later I held my own seminars.
Carl Plehn, who took his doctorate in the late 1880s in Goettingen, was another wonderful professor! He had the finest sense of what it meant to be a professor. He was personally conservative, but oh my, what a sense of the dignity of a professor and academic freedom! That was really something. And he, too, would have us at his home of an evening.
Ira Cross, oh my relations with Ira were primarily as his teaching assistant. Saturday mornings we would spend an hour with him going over the program for the week ahead. Then, during the week, we would attend his two lectures and meet our quiz sections. We each had three quiz sections.13
Riess
Was there a sense, among these four or five people, of a building department?
Taylor
There was close feeling in the Economics Department faculty in those early days, and it was personal and intimate as well as professional. After the war in 1919, we were almost their first graduate students working for the doctorate, and they took us right in.
We were the products that proved to the world that they were a first-rate department, that they could produce us. True, it worked both ways. We, in our lifetime, also helped build the department. The fact that they launched us, that established them in the eyes of the university world.
Riess
What was sociology then?
Taylor
Nothing. There was Frederick J. Teggart's "Social Institutions." After he lost everything of his research papers in the fire of 1923, he busted out of the history department to set up his own department of social institutions. He didn't want sociology on campus, nor did Jessica Peixotto. She wanted social economics for herself as he wanted social institutions for himself. There was no sociology here until about the second World War; it took on life and faculty strength after the second World War.
When I was at Wisconsin, there was E.A. Ross in sociology and another man, whose name I don't remember. Ross's courses were called sociology, but given in the Economics Department. Sociology became a separate department there soon after.
Riess
There was also an incipient department of social work here.
Taylor
Social work grew out of our Economics Department. Martha Chickering was in our department, and Emily Noble, who married Professor Plehn sometime after his wife died, those two people began in our department, then went into a separate social work department. Of course, originally many and many years earlier, what we now call political science, history and economics had been all scrambled together. Professor Plehn was perhaps the first professor who was called
Riess
What seems to be the conclusion to draw from this is that it wasn't until there were the social institutions that certain studies, social work and sociology, were necessary.
Taylor
Well, sociology didn't come to Berkeley til the forties. Social work started within economics and didn't separate out from economics until the 1930s. The Depression accelerated the separation. The government assumed responsibility for social welfare for the first time.
In the days of the Depression, between the 1929 crash and the 1933 New Deal, I can remember meeting at Jessica Peixotto's with someone from the Associated Charities. Charity then was private, not governmental. Jane Addams in Hull House had initiated private work, not public. It was during the New Deal that public responsibility was assumed. In Chicago the visiting nurses, public, sprang from the earlier visiting nurses, private, begun at Hull House where they had worked in the immigrant neighborhood.
Riess
Also in Let There Be Light you mentioned the influence of Priestley and Bolton.
Taylor
Yes, they were my history professors. Herbert Eugene Bolton was a Wisconsin graduate, so he was in a tradition familiar to me. Herbert Ingerham Priestly had taken his history doctorate in Berkeley. He was one of the earliest to do so. Almost nobody had taken doctorates in the social sciences in California. I found him very good, indeed.
Riess
Both of them had connections with the Bancroft Library. Was that just an automatic thing, back then?
Taylor
Bolton was the director, and they called Priestley, curator.
Riess
Was any of the tradition of the interviewing of H. H. Bancroft still engaged in by Priestley and Bolton?
Taylor
As I recall, they collected manuscripts but I remember no writing of history from interview with participants, i.e., no oral history. Bolton was concerned with Spanish expansion into Mexico and the Southwest -- well, into the entire western hemisphere. He assembled manuscripts and diaries of the leaders of the expeditions.
Riess
I wondered whether Priestley was influential in getting you interested in the business of Mexican migration, many years later, in a very direct way or not?
Taylor
Only indirectly. I emphasize that Priestley was very good. I found him very helpful. In his seminar -- well, actually I wrote my first published study in Priestley's and Bolton's seminars. It was on the Spanish seamen in the New World in the Colonial period.
When I finished it, Priestley said, "Would you mind if I took that to publish in the Pacific-American Historical Review?"
Of course I was very pleased. About three years ago it was republished by a Columbia professor who included it in a couple of volumes on readings in Latin-American history. Priestley was one of the main reasons why the paper was as good as it was. Bolton helped too, but it was more in Priestley's area of interest.
I took the Spanish seamen as my subject in history because my economics doctoral dissertation was on modern American seamen. When I found myself working with Latin-Americanists, I said, well, why don't I deal with the seamen in that era and that part of the New World? It turned out to be, for me, a most interesting work.
Riess
I think of you doing your research not in libraries, but out in the field.
Taylor
Well, of course, on my water subject, I've done a tremendous amount of library research, tremendous. Now it is almost entirely library, but it involves also a collection of contemporary materials that appear in the press, in the releases of newsletters of interest groups and so on. I've done lots of library research on the history of labor in agriculture, as well. But in terms of going out and interviewing people, it was
Riess
When you started teaching, your fellow-teachers, Charles Gulick, Ewald Greather, Paul Homan, did they come out of the department? Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong came out of the department.
Taylor
She came out of the department; Felix Flugel also came out of the department.
Charles Gulick came from Columbia in 1925. We shared the labor economics field. He came also strongly oriented in the anti-trust field. He's still here, A Berkeley emeritus, recently honored signally by Austria for his work in the history of that nation.
Paul Homan, I don't know where he came from, but he came about the same time. I think he left us to go to Cornell, and later to UCLA. He was in economic theory and as colleagues we weren't very close because of our different interests.
Gulick and I were closer in that we shared the labor field. We've always had very fine relations, but not especially close personally. We've gone our separate ways, always associating on a high personal rather than professional level. As time passed, he immersed himself in the history of Austrian socialism; I slid off, as you see, into field studies in agricultural labor, and then water, and I taught rural sociology in the Department of Agricultural Economics.
Riess
What was Grether's field?
Taylor
Grether started out not too far afield from my own interests. His thesis was on John A. Hobson, English economist, and author of Work and Wealth. It was sort of a British Labor Party point of view. Grether, of course, later became Dean of Business Administration, and did very well in creating that school. He held a much broader conception of business administration and its social responsibilities than prevailed in the business school at Stanford, much broader and in my view, much better. Now, Grether, too, is emeritus. He was three years behind me in receiving his Berkeley doctorate.
I am quite sure that the bitterness which Bob Brady felt in childhood followed him through the rest of his life.
Mexican Studies: Financial, and Other, Difficulties, 1926-1934
RiessI would be interested in hearing anything else you have to say about the California you came to.
Taylor
Well, let's put it this way, I found that here in California I could feed my Wisconsin-nourished interests in a fresh field, so in that sense I felt at home in California. There are some very fundamental California conditions that are different from the Middle West, in agriculture, for example.
This California land-water situation is totally different from the Middle West. It is a shock for a middle westerner to learn of it. I've been up against it, you might say, studying it and trying to change it, all of my life. My agricultural labor, and my water studies -- that has meant exploring land and the water monopoly, and the power structure of California. Neither are middle western situations at all!
Here I could go out into it to study it, as I could do, as I did as a youth in the Middle West. The things I like to do -- was encouraged to do -- to go out and get the facts of a situation, that eventually I was able to do here in California. For my first four years after my 1922 doctorate, I was up to my neck teaching, with no opportunity for research. I wanted to get out into the field, as we were encouraged to do at Wisconsin, to get into actual situations.
Riess
You couldn't because of the great teaching load you had inherited?
Taylor
That was one aspect of it, that I was needed for teaching. The other was that without financial support I couldn't go into the field. Professor Commons had received Carnegie Foundation support. With $25,000, which was money in those days, he turned out a four-volume unique history of labor in the United States. Well, I wanted to start something new, but I had no resources to pay salary and costs of field work.
I wanted to do on agricultural labor something
Commons encouraged me to apply to Laura Spelman Rockefeller. They declined; I was told later, indirectly, that if I had persisted I probably would have got funds. But I accepted the "NO" answer as final.
The way in which I got my wish was, in a sense, quite accidental. Edith Abbott, Dean of the Graduate School of Social Welfare Administration in the University of Chicago, Sophonisb a Breckinridge, her colleague, and her sister Grace Abbott, head of the women's bureau of the Department of Labor, were travelling to and from Hawaii and stopped off in Berkeley. They were guests of honor at a Faculty Club dinner that included Professor Plehn, Professor Peixotto, and all the rest of the Economics Department.
Professor Plehn, knowing my research interests, passed me a little card with "See me after dinner" written on it. So after dinner, while we were still at table, but people were shuffling their positions around, he brought me beside Edith Abbott.
She was then chairman of the Committee on Scientific Aspects of Human Migration of the newly formed Social Science Research Council. She was trying to find somebody who would study Mexican immigration. Immigration was one of her own special fields of interest, and she was intimately familiar with European immigration. Mexican migration was the last of the great migrations, with European immigration recently cut off by Congress. So she wanted Mexican immigration studied contemporaneously.
Since Mexican laborers were employed overwhelmingly in agriculture, Edith Abbott's interests merged with my interests.
The outcome, with Social Science Research Council support, was that I spent three years continuously in
So I went down into Mexico and studied a community of origin of much emigration. I went there in 1931 and 1932 for a total of six months. I got deep into field research so I could meet and talk with people on their own ground.
Riess
Was the University agreeable to all this?
Taylor
Well, I can remember being told after I was out a couple years or maybe a little more, by one of my fine professors, I mean a really good professor -- this was what was said to me: "Now it's time for you to come back and be a professor."
You see, I'd been doing something else that wasn't being a professor! My chairman said it to me this way: "Now it is time for you to come back to the center of your field." I replied, "Well, what is the center of my field?"
"Oh," he said, "something like workman's compensation." You see, to go out and study Mexican labor wasn't working in the center of my labor economics field.
Riess
So it was important to them that you be doing research and study, but that you be doing it "inside the gates."
Taylor
Yes, I researched excessively; I was gone from campus teaching too long. You see, that was long before the days of "publish or perish" -- those hadn't started yet. Here I was, putting out the stuff, coming out with one monograph after another. Very quickly I was drawing an inordinate amount of the limited funds assigned by the University to finance publication.
Riess
That really is the other extreme of publish or perish!
Taylor
Oh, yes! Absorbing so much of the limited publication funds, I became competitive with others on the faculty who had less publication, but wanted access to financial support. I ran into that with my fourth monograph on Mexican labor.
Fortunately in Santa Barbara I met a woman engaged in Americanization teaching and therefore interested in Mexican immigrants. (That was a new and special effort by educators to do something for adult Mexican immigrants, to aid their understanding and a familiarity with American institutions, and to make them feel more at home. Schools, through adult education, could do that.) The Americanization teacher took me to meet a Santa Barbara woman from North Dakota, evidently a person of means. I told her the University didn't want to publish my study for financial reasons.
She asked about how much would be necessary to publish it. When I said, "The estimated cost is $600," she said at once that she would give the $600. To whom should she give it? I said, "Let me go back to Berkeley for the answer."
So I went to the University vice president Walter Morris Hart. He knew of the pressures on the printing budget. I said to him, "I have this offer of $600 for the printing costs, and the willing donor asked me to whom should she give it -- to the Social Science Research Council which financed the study, or to the University of California which so far had been publishing it?"
That took care of it. [laughter] The answer was to the University of California, and the UC Press printed it.
My second study was on the Valley of the South Platte, Colorado. That came out when William Wallace Campbell was president. Apparently outside pressures of a different sort had been building up on him. Agricultural employers didn't exactly like what I was doing, studying the agricultural labor situation, and coming up with some observations other than, what we need is more and more laborers from Mexico in order to have an ample, if not a surplus, labor supply.
One of my colleagues was told by Campbell's
I know what it is to have objections made to my work. The pressures on Campbell blocked me from asking for $1,000, which I probably would have got, under the Purnell Act, which was intended to finance rural sociological research. Dean Merrill of the College of Agriculture had told me about the Purnell funds in the first place, saying he believed we could get $1,000 to study migratory children. The subject was my suggestion, and I thought the prospect of funds was fine.
But in about a week or two he called me over and said, "I'm sorry, we can't do it. The President won't allow it." You see the pressures?
I tell in There Was Light about another example of University uneasiness over my work. Fluctuations in the seasonal movement of Mexican laborers over the Tehachapi Ridge into the San Joaquin Valley were very pronounced. The idea of counting them systematically came to me after listening to the agricultural employers' own labor agent tell how, when driving over the Ridge, habitually he counted the number of passing vehicles carrying Mexicans. So I arranged with Standard Oil to count the vehicles passing their Gorman service station. This they did, and when I inquired of employees at the station they told me there was no trouble identifying and counting the Mexicans in their jalopies -- they could hear them coming, they said.
Much of the time I was off somewhere else, making studies. But I arranged for the tally sheets carrying those figures to be sent in to the Information Office of the University, week by week, and for that office
Somewhere among my papers I have a release which says, "These figures are from the study by Dr. Paul Taylor of Berkeley. The University of California has no connection with his study and its name must not be mentioned." You see, it was a Social Science Research Council Study.
Riess
Who put the pressures on Campbell?
Taylor
Undoubtedly it came from big employers down in the San Joaquin Valley.
Riess
Does the pressure then come through the legislature?
Taylor
No, no. Some of the employers at one time or another were Regents, but I don't know that they used any influence.
Riess
So they'd just get on the phone with him, that kind of thing?
Taylor
I can't tell you just how they did it.
Here is another example, one having nothing to do with Mexican labor. President Sproul once told me that at a gathering -- whether it was a University alumni gathering or simply a social gathering, I don't know -- a man from the PG & E kicked to Sproul about what I was teaching in my labor economics classes. He said his son was in my class, and that I told the class the PG & E had gas bombs, or tear gas bombs, or something like that.
So President Sproul, unlike Campbell, who never told me of these things, picked up the telephone and in the nicest way, not cringing, but in a big, hearty voice, said, "I have this complaint, what shall I tell him? Could you draft me a letter?"
"All right," I said, so I drafted him a letter quoting my source and adding, "This is what was read
Riess
With these first experiences with Campbell, when was it that you asked this question of academic freedom out here?
Taylor
That I talk about in There was Light? Well, in the very early time when I was an instructor, I was thinking, "What future have I here? If I were in Wisconsin, I would have academic freedom. Would I have it here?" So I remember asking Professor Plehn. Well, Professor Plehn was a conservative, but he was a German-trained professor from Gottingen, and the principle "Lehrfreiheit und Lernfreiheit," ("Freedom to Teach and Freedom to Learn") -- that was just imbued in them in Germany in those days, and he wouldn't yield on that; not at all! I remember speaking to Plehn again when Campbell went out and Sproul came in, and he said, "You'll have no trouble over academic freedom with Sproul"; that proved to be true, and I am sure that Sproul had plenty of kicks against me.
In my files somewhere I've got one letter that just pastes me up and down, on the water question, from a U.C. alumnus, mining, 1909. He was up in arms about what I was doing on the water issue, and said it would be remembered when the University needed financial support from its alumni.
Oh, yes. I caught it on my Sailors' Union of the Pacific, too. In my preface I thanked the sailors, who had opened their records, and I thanked the employers representatives with whom I had spoken,
Riess
Did you ever actually talk to Campbell?
Taylor
No, no. I never talked to him about this. But I knew what he had done because the dean of agriculture told me, and at least one of the professors who read my Mexican labor study told me. No, Campbell never raised the question with me directly.
Oh, I got it other ways, too. I have not been popular down the Valley, you can be sure of that. Clark Kerr told me that when he was Chancellor under Sproul and wanted to appoint me to the Industrial Relations Institute advisory committee, Sproul said, "Well, you know, they don't like him very well down in the Valley." Clark said, "I know it, but I want him anyway," and I was appointed. I've heard that Sproul has said nice things about me; so far as I know he never said anything against me. He's done good things for me that he wasn't obliged to do.
My salary advances were held up while I was doing those Mexican labor field researches. I hit a salary ceiling and stayed right there, while colleagues who were with or even behind me passed on ahead. I hold the record in economics for being an associate professor for the longest period, nine years.
Riess
So they gave you the opportunity, in other words, to resign.
Taylor
[Objecting] Oh, No! I never felt any pressure to resign. It's just a faculty and administration cast of mind! Going over the budget to economize, what can you do? One of the standard ways was to say simply, "He's away now. Well, then we don't need to consider him for an advance."
You see, if you're away on a sabattical, while you're away they don't consider you for an advance, or
It wasn't like today, when a grant comes to the University, and the University pays it out, and they think, "That's fine." Look at all this government money that supports the Radiation Lab and all the rest of it! Why, now you're supporting your University by grants from the outside.
Riess
How was your money handled?
Taylor
The University received it from the Social Science Research Council and the University paid it out to me. In the social sciences that was breaking ice.
Riess
It sounds as if it would be in the very nature of any kind of a study one would be doing, that some evils might be exposed.
Taylor
I knew from my Wisconsin days that if I went into this labor field I would encounter opposition. It was part of what I took on by choosing labor economics. What I wanted to know here at California was, would I be supported with the freedom necessary to do the work.
You see, I had known that E.A. Ross was canned from Stanford for some of the things that he said as a sociologist. Mrs. Stanford demanded and forced President David Starr Jordan to fire Ross. So Ross went to Nebraska. From there Van Hise brought him to Wisconsin. He also picked Ely up. When Ely was attacked at Wisconsin for things that he did in the labor field, the University regents supported him. There is a plaque on the front of Main Hall, at the University of Wisconsin, quoting the regents in 1893, "Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state university of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found." And so, instead of canning Ely, the regents protected him. Commons was under fire repeatedly.
Riess
In Campbell's time, was there anything similar, any other departments that would have been investigated or anything?
Taylor
I was in an exposed department. There was no, well, I can't quite say that. I heard of two or three people without tenure who were let go before Campbell became president. I think they were in the English Department. It was rumored that their views were not entirely acceptable to the administration. They didn't have the fullest academic credential either, i.e., the doctorate. It was during the end-of-the-first-war furor. The conservative reaction hit California a year or two after it swept the East.
Riess
When you were doing your investigations for the Social Science Research Council, were you doing it all by yourself?
Taylor
I had assistance at some times and in some areas. In the Imperial Valley I had a Mexican-American to assist me with his knowledge of the language; also a graduate student in geography who later became a professor at Louisiana State University. I had assistants in Chicago and elsewhere from time to time, but I had no assistants in Colorado, in Texas, or in Pennsylvania.
Riess
How much had you designed your research before you started out?
Taylor
Designed it? I went out in the middle of it, stumbled into it.
First I asked people, "Where are the Mexicans?" I asked people in agriculture.
"You find them up around Napa," wrote the response, so I went up there. Well, it was in February, the wrong season.
In the vinyards they told me, "Yes. We have them in the grape-picking season, but they are not here now." Others suggested, "See what you can do over in the city."
So I went over to the Southern Pacific in San Francisco; I knew the SP used them. I arranged with them, by name-checks, to get for me the record of the increasing use of Mexicans on maintenance of way.
I spent a month or so around the Bay, trying to see what data might be available in governmental offices or in employers offices. Then I started down the Valley. When I got as far as Madera and Merced, then I ran into Mexican colonies. At Los Angeles, I got glimpses of the magnitude and spread of the Mexican population. When I got into Imperial Valley, I found that a third of the population there was Mexican. So that was where I made my first intensive field study.
Riess
Had the Mexicans ever experienced an investigator in their midst before? Was anyone else studying their migrations at that time?
Taylor
Most of the European immigrations to the United States had been studied not contemporaneously, but after the peak, after their colonies were built up. This was, I think, the first immigration studied at flood tide.
There was a minister, Charles Thompson, who went with the State Department for a while, who made a study of Mexicans, and as far as he made it, it was a good study, mimeographed. I am sure it is among my papers somewhere.
There were people interested in making real contacts with Mexicans, especially in Southern California where there were so many of them. The people who were doing that were civic minded, like Jane Addams in Chicago. In Los Angeles, a principal one was Ethel Richardson Allen, in charge of the adult Americanization program of the public schools. A number were at Pomona; such people were apt to have either an educational or Protestant church orientation, and a feeling they ought to do something for the less fortunate and the strangers in their midst.
There was some academic work being done on the Mexicans, some publication, notably by Professor Emory S. Bogardus, at U.S.C., who published a book on them. And then importantly, and financed -- as I was -- by the Social Science Research Council, there was Dr. Manuel Gamio, Mexico's most distinguished anthropologist. He published two volumes on the Mexican migration which came out from the University of Chicago Press while I was still doing my work and beginning my own publication.
Riess
How did the Economics Department handle the coursework load that you left when you went into the field for four years?
Taylor
The man who took my lectures in the big labor economics lecture class was Will J. French. French came into public life as a member of Hiram Johnson's administration on the Workmen's Compensation Commission. He gave the lectures to the labor economics class and conducted the course. My seminar was taken by my colleague, Charles Gulick.
Riess
When you were chafing, in 1926, and when you had gotten to that point where you had to get out and be doing something, were there any other alternatives? Would you, for instance, have left and gone on to some place else?
Taylor
No. I wanted to do research and there weren't many alternatives. There wasn't much opportunity to do research anywhere. Foundations were not putting money into social science research at that time. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller was something new.
Riess
Was there any possibility of going into any kind of government position?
Taylor
None that I knew of at that time. No, we were in the Coolidge era. I had no alternative. I just was trying to get outside support from a foundation, as John R. Commons had gotten it, for his study of American labor history, and I did.
I tell in the chapter in There Was Light about Dean Armin O. Leuschner, the U.C. astronomer, who started about 1916 or 1917 to build a university research fund, originally for natural scientists primarily. Social scientists weren't asking for funds for research then. His first year's fund, I believe, totalled about $17,000. When I came along in 1927 or 1928 and asked him for money, it was more than that. But by today's standards it was tiny. He gave me $700, for my Mexican studies, and told me he wanted the fund to be open for social science as well as for natural science research.
Riess
So after four years of the Mexican migrations and getting extensions and so on...
Taylor
That stretched from 1927 through about 1931. I finished my last publication on the subject in 1934.
Oh, I should tell one more little item: I told you how this woman in Santa Barbara financed publication of one of my studies. Then I came along with the next regional study, this time of "An American-Mexican Frontier," in South Texas. That would have rounded out my three U.C. volumes of Mexican Labor in the United States, but the U.C. Press wouldn't take it without my sawing it to pices, reducing its cost, you see. The faculty editorial committee called me to a meeting to discuss revision downward. The committee chairman said that the first portion of some 80 pages appeared to be history, and asked what did that have to do with my study of contemporary Mexican labor?
I said I thought the connection between the past and the present was rather obvious, and I thought my study showed it. But you see, there I was blocked by the shortage of money. The way I finally got that study published was as a separate volume from the University of North Carolina Press. The Social Science Research Council gave me $1,000, making publication possible. So it broke the order of my series, but achieved publication.
You see the pressures; I was taking up too much of limited funds. Well, I can understand why they felt as they did.
Riess
The financial pressure wasn't a cover for the pressure against publication of the material?
Taylor
No. They weren't against publication... oh, I was subjected to that criticism, too. As one of the members said to another, and as it was passed on to me, "You know, he goes out and he talks with Mexican laborers, and he puts down what they say, and then he wants us to print it!" Why would anybody want to print what a Mexican laborer said, gee! Who's he?
Riess
Weren't there those who responded to what you were doing?
Taylor
Oh sure, I had supporters. That faculty committee of three, the one President Campbell asked whether my work was scientific, they read it over and they said,
Riess
I wondered if you had actual followers, in the second year or so. Did you have any graduate students?
Taylor
No, not yet; not really, not until I returned to teaching in 1930.
Paul Kellogg, and Survey Graphic, 1929-1934
RiessIn Dorothea Lange's story, the point at which the two of you come together is when you first saw her pictures at Willard Van Dyke's studio.15 What was that exhibit, and why would you have even seen it?
Taylor
It is one of those accidents. Did I tell you that down in Mexico, with my ccolleague, Leslie Simpson (we were both down there on Guggenheim Fellowships), I got a Rolleiflex camera? I had been taking photographs,when I started my Mexican labor studies, with an old Eastman postcard-sized Kodak. In Mexico I had a chance to get a Rolleiflex, which stepped things up a lot. Nobody had heard of a portable reflecting camera before.
Well, Leslie used the camera too, for pleasure, and I was using it for my work. Leslie had told me about this fellow Willard Van Dyke, who had a studio in Oakland at 683 Brockhurst, and suggested that I go down and see what he had on exhibition. He said that Willard was interested in the social effects of the Depression unemployment, etc. (Although I don't think he showed only the photographs of social situations; what he exhibited depended upon what photographers photographed.)
So one day I went down to 683 Brockhurst. The current exhibition turned out to be by Dorothea Lange, who, for a couple of years before, had been going outside of her studio onto the streets in San Francisco to photograph unemployment and labor demonstrations.
I had just finished, in collaboration with Norman Leon Gold, an article on the San Francisco general strike of 1934. The manuscript was on Paul Kellogg's desk at the Survey-Graphic in New York. It had some photographic illustrations that I'd made on my own, or picked up one way or another. But at 683 Brockhurst
So I asked Willard Van Dyke to put me in touch with Dorothea Lange, which he did by telephone. I asked her, could the photograph be used as an illustration to accompany the article on the San Francisco general strike? She was agreeable and asked the terms. I said I had no authorization, but I would put her in touch with the New York editor, Paul Kellogg, and I thought that they could arrive at a mutually agreeable arrangement, which they did. Her photograph became the frontispiece of our article on the San Francisco general strike.16
Riess
When you talked to her, was she excited at the idea of this more national recognition?
Taylor
She didn't give any particular evidence of excitement. She was interested and co-operative; I am sure she welcomed the prospect. But there were no clues that she was suddenly overjoyed at this recognition by a professor whom she had never heard of and by a journal she may or may not have heard of.
Riess
But when she was taking that sort of picture, pictures of problems, why, she would hope that other people would see them.
Taylor
Well, I am sure she did hope. I am sure she welcomed the exhibition at 683 Brockhurst. Who saw it there? I don't know. Other photographers, mostly. I stumbled into it in the manner I told you. That's how I met Dorothea, over the telephone.
You remember, in one of her accounts of her work she says that you take pictures not knowing what the use will be. You just take the pictures. Yes, I am sure that she welcomed the use. I'm sure of that. I'm just saying that she didn't speak the words that
She was very co-operative, and oh, I think she probably got $15 from the Survey-Graphic. Fifteen dollars was money in those days, not like now.
Riess
They gave her credit for that, didn't they?
Taylor
Yes, and photographers in those days generally didn't get credit in print.
Paul Kellogg is an interesting person. He was a member of the group that conducted that early Pittsburgh Survey before World War I. Pittsburgh was the big steel center. The industry produced great growth of towns around the plants, what we would call slums or ghettoes. There were terrific strikes; there was the bloody Homestead Strike of 1892, and other strikes. The Russell Sage Foundation financed the Pittsburgh Survey, a study of these problems. Well, Paul Kellogg was in that group; he was interested in social problems.
He also became interested, I don't know exactly at what point, in photographs as a means of aiding an understanding of the problems. He originated the magazine, the Survey, and then the Survey-Graphic, as alternating issues. The middle of the month issue was the Survey, presenting text only. The first of the month issue was the Survey-Graphic, with copious illustrations. The first of my text and photograph articles that he published was in May 1931, entitled "Mexicans North of the Rio Grande." In the next few years after the 1934 beginning that I have just described, Paul Kellogg published many of Dorothea's photographs, sometimes accompanying an article, sometimes independently.
When together we went to New York in 1939, with our illustrated book "dummy," we took it to Paul Kellogg and asked him for a title. He gave it to us promptly upon inspection -- An American Exodus.
Riess
Did he solicit the photographs? Was he in touch with the photographers?
Taylor
Yes, oh yes! He was in touch with the photographers like Lewis Hine (1874-1940), one of the very earliest.
Riess
Somehow I thought he was gone by then.
Taylor
Well, I never met Lewis Hine, but Paul Kellogg was of an earlier generation and he knew Hine well.
Riess
Was Paul Kellogg an economist?
Taylor
No. There weren't many economists in those days. He was journalistic rather than academic. Even in universities the number of economists before World War I was not large. They were becoming an identifiable group in universities like Wisconsin, California, Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, but their numbers were small.
There weren't many photographers of the social scene then, either. Lewis Hine began as a sort of social worker, he went into the slums, took a camera along with him, and became a photographer consciously and in fact. He was interested in immigration, child labor, etc., and joined photography to study of social problems at ground level.
Riess
Was Survey-Graphic a popular magazine in its day?
Taylor
Oh, yes.
Riess
Like Life Magazine?
Taylor
No. More like The Nation, The New Republic, The Outlook. It wasn't just like any of these, but more comparable to them than to Life. I don't know what the circulation was, as it preceded the development of social work as an organized profession. It became the organ of social workers when they really began to professionalize themselves in the New Deal days. So Paul Kellogg was a pioneer, a journalist in the field of contemporary social studies. Often I think we would be better off if we had a Survey-Graphic now.
The new magazine Trans-Action is put out by professionals trying to reach popular audiences by going out into the field and examining and analyzing contemporary social situations. It comes at it from the professionalized end. Paul Kellogg came at it from the amateur and the journalist side.
Riess
What caused its end?
Taylor
It lasted only a few years after his death. The editors who succeeded him didn't have the same spark that he had. There may have been other reasons, too. The rise of professional journals, perhaps.
Riess
I wondered if it had a college board of editors, or anything like that.
Taylor
No, Kellogg was not academic, although he had many academic writers. It was a popular journal and then it became a professional journal; it was already in progress when the social workers were trying to professionalize themselves. I am sure they have their professional journals now, but different from the Survey-Graphic.
Riess
Would the Graphic issue be related to the preceding Survey issue, or would it just take up different topics?
Taylor
Each issue stood on its own feet.
Riess
It looks, according to your early publications, like a very logical place for your writing.
Taylor
Well, yes. You see, I was interested professionally in immigration, in labor -- those were both included in Paul Kellogg's interests, as shown by the Pittsburgh Survey before World War I. So it was quite natural that I would find myself establishing some kind of a connection with him.
My labor economics professor, John R. Commons, in Wisconsin, had us buy the Pittsburgh Survey book. He was trying to promote professionalized study of social situations, and here in the Pittsburgh Survey was one conducted, not by professionals, but by very competent, intelligent people. When Commons started his work there wasn't any professional background for this kind of work in the United States, or virtually none. So anything that came near it, he put in our hands. That's how I first heard of Paul Kellogg. We met at Hull House about 1929 during my Chicago study.
He, as I, welcomed photography as a part of the documentation and presentation of social situations. Then in the late twenties when I was studying Mexican labor in South Texas, he came down to Carrizo Springs after conclusion of a San Antonio convention, and spent a couple of days with me in the field. Carrizo Springs was a small town county seat in the Wintergarden district. The first thing when I took him out, he said, "What did you bring me down here for?"
I said, "If you will wait an hour or so, I think you'll have the answer to the question." And he got the answer very quickly. In 15 or 20 minutes he understood why I invited him down.
Riess
What was the scene?
Taylor
Well, he saw immigrant Mexican laborers under rural conditions. Of course, he had been familiar with the European immigrants in the urban slums and ghettoes in New York and the towns of the Pennsylvania steel industry. But this was his first glimpse of rural Mexican labor. He may or may not have known about the Black workers in the South, I don't know.
But you can see how I was led into the kind of work that absorbed me, and pointed me in the direction of photography where I stumbled into Dorothea's work.
There is another man early in this tradition, whom we should mention, and that is the Danish immigrant, Jacob Riis, who wrote How the Other Half Lives, and illustrated it with photographs.
Riess
Was Paul Kellogg using any of the other photographers who later were picked for the F.S.A. team?
Taylor
I don't recall that he used any others, although he may have. But he established a connection, you see, with Dorothea and her work, and that fitted very well. He used some of my photographs in that same 1934 article, but Dorothea's was the frontispiece.
Riess
As a photographer you had taught yourself, I guess as a tool for your...
Taylor
Yes. I picked it up, worked at it myself, that's right.
Riess
How interested were you in pursuing it as a medium?
Taylor
As something contributing to my work? Very interested, very interested! I used to pull the shades down in one of the rooms of our 1075 Cragmont house and turn it into a darkroom at night. I never developed negatives, but I did enlarge prints quite a lot.
You see that photograph of Dorothea in 1935? Well, I made that and the one made in 1953, also.17 I got the negative developed of the one made in 1935, but never printed it because I became so involved in my Relief Administration work that I had no time.
Riess
Why did you go into photographing?
Taylor
In relation to my work, I wanted it because no amount or quality of words could alone convey what the situation was that I was studying. It was another language, if you will. Originally I had fun doing it -- I photographed my children and so on -- but the growing basis of interest in photography was its use for my professional work. I began with that old Eastman postcard-size Kodak in 1927 when I started to study the Mexicans. The Rolleiflex that I got in Mexico really set me up.
Photographing UXA Cooperatives
RiessTo continue our narrative, you talked to Dorothea on the telephone. What next?
Taylor
The next step again involved Willard Van Dyke. In 1934 I was studying the self-help co-operatives among the unemployed that had sprung up all over the state. With my initial interest in photographs, I continued to see Willard, and he, appreciating my connections with the social problems of the Great Depression, said he had friends, among them Dorothea, eager to photograph the conditions prevalent during the Depression. But the photographers were uneasy about getting out into the field and pointing their cameras at people. So many of the people were in distress, and they didn't know how they might receive someone with a camera, saying "I want to take your picture." But these photographers did want to see and photograph the conditions of the people.
I told Willard that I knew very well the people at the head of the Oakland U.X.A. (Unemployed Exchange Association). If he wished, I would ask them if they were willing to have a group of photographers come and make photographs of them just as they were living and working.
The U.X.A. was then on a project in the foothills near Oroville, where they had taken over a closed-down sawmill. The owner couldn't operate it longer because he didn't have the money to do it, so the U.X.A. offered to operate it on their basis, i.e., exchanging their labor for a share of the proceeds.
I asked, were they willing to have people come with cameras, and photograph them? I had been doing some of this myself at Oakland meetings of their board of directors. Any member of the U.X.A. could attend the board meetings who wanted to. My next-door neighbor was a young fellow who was interested not in social situations but in using a camera. When I invited him to come down with me, he took photographs that were used in my article on the U.X.A. in the Survey-Graphic. So it was a natural step for the U.X.A. people to say, "Yes, come on if you want to."
So Willard got his little group together, Mary Jeanette Edwards, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, himself and Preston Holder, an anthropologist. They turned up at my Cragmont Avenue home, on the morning of the day agreed upon. That's when I met Imogen and Dorothea for the first time.
Riess
In what sense were they a group?
Taylor
Dorothea had known Imogen for years. Imogen's husband, Roi Partridge, was a distinguished engraver. Dorothea and Maynard Dixon had known Imogen and Roi for I don't know how long.18 So, most of the members of the party knew each other, and I knew Willard.
Riess
Was this the f/64 group?
Taylor
No, no. [laughing] Now you are getting into something else. The f/64 group was built around Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. Their idea in using the f/64 name was to emphasize perfection of focus, sharpness of detail. That characterizes Ansel's and Edward's work. They'd carry their 8 x 10 cameras around, photographing seashore, desert, or mountains in beautiful detail. Well, that's how they get the name f/64.
Dorothea was not an f/64 type of photographer. She was taking pictures on the wing, quick, with the minimum time to focus and to adjust the instrument. So she was friendly with the f/64 members, but never joined the club. [laughter] I don't know that she ever asked to join, I don't think they ever turned her down.
So you see how the photographers were going each their own ways. They had their own bents. There was another woman photographer at the time, Consuelo Kanaga, who was interested in photographing social situations. She and Dorothea were acquaintances, and in the very first years, people locally confused Dorothea and this woman, because both were interested in photographing the Depression. Except for that parallel interest, their paths were quite separate.
Did I tell you that I had an Ansel Adams photograph as frontispiece to my 1931 article?
After Paul Kellogg was with me in the field in South Texas, he wanted me to write an article in broad perspective on Mexican immigration, which I did.19 Some of my photographs accompany that article, but the frontispiece is a pair of cotton-pickers, one above, where they're dumping the cotton into the wagon, the other below. I'd never heard of Ansel Adams; how he and Kellogg made connection, I haven't the foggiest notion.
Compare those two frontispiece photographs, one by Ansel Adams in 1931 and the one by Dorothea Lange in 1934, and you will understand the difference between these two photographers. Ansel Adams has perfection of composition, fine definition, everything is fine, but it is as though the cotton pickers were just stopped cold. Now perhaps I am exaggerating a little bit, and of course Dorothea's photograph of the man at the microphone is stopped motionless in a sense, but I assure you, not cold! Study the two photographs and I think you get a sense of the difference between those two photographers, each excellent in his own way.
Riess
It is the essential difference throughout their careers.
Taylor
Throughout their lives! And they both knew it, knew it well, I am sure.
Riess
As a matter of fact, didn't Ansel really more or less stop photographing people?
Taylor
Probably so. I think he photographed very few people. Certainly he emphasized photographing nature, which of course he does superbly. I was told long ago by a very good friend of mine that Ansel himself knew and regretted this limitation.
Ansel was also a very fine musician. Over the years he kept up his playing, but did not become professional.
Riess
Would you say he was more technically superior than feeling, as a musician?
Taylor
It is a little hard for me to say that. He played beautifully.
He made one effort in the direction of photographing people. That was a series of photographs done in a separate book. I have it here somewhere. It was All Men Are Created Equal. The subject was the Japanese evacuation. But his strength, clearly, was his very great photographs of inanimate scenes in nature, which he could do superbly.20
Riess
[Returning to the narrative.] So they all arrived at your place on Cragmont.
Taylor
Yes, This group of photographers was groping for an opportunity to photograph the social situation. They arrived in Berkeley in the morning and we drove to Oroville. They put us up in the lumbermen's wood cabins.
I remember well seeing how the photographers started to work in the very first minutes, each in his own way, and each choosing his own subjects.
The U.X.A. members had been told the photographers were coming and they didn't bat an eye; they didn't put on any show. They just went about their own way. They were wonderful subjects.
We were there two nights. Upon our return, I arranged a photographic exhibition on unemployed self-help co-operatives in California. We held it on the top floor of Haviland Hall. Among the photographs
I have suggested that sometime the Oakland Museum put on that show again, as illustrating a phase in the early California history of documentary photography. 1934 was close to the beginning, you see.
You could see even then the difference in the way those photographers saw. You could see the difference between Imogen's and Dorothea's work very clearly. Both of them very fine, but very different.
Riess
They were all using big cameras then?
Taylor
No. I think Dorothea had a Rolleiflex. I think Imogen was using a Graflex. 4 x 5 Graflexes were used a good deal in those days.
You see, the films were not as good as they have become. Dorothea wouldn't use a 35mm in those days, because the enlarged photograph was grainy and lost quality. Now the films are so much better that you can enlarge from a 35 mm negative without losing quality.
Riess
I would be interested in hearing more about their style of photographing, the way in which Dorothea was different from the others. For instance, did she talk to the people who she was photographing?
Taylor
I do not remember on that occasion about her talking with the people. The first photograph I think that she made (and it's like Dorothea), is the back of a man standing, resting on his axe as a man would rest on a cane, facing the forest preparatory to going to work with the axe. It is the expression of that man's back that is telling.
Imogen was soon photographing a man working at a power saw, or something of that sort, where he was in a more or less fixed position and she could take plenty of time to set up and take the photograph with her very fine skill. The distinctive characteristics
One of the best articles ever written on Dorothea as a photographer was by Willard Van Dyke in 1934. He had her dead right! The article is still good today; Willard understood her as a photographer.21
The characteristics of the other photographers in the group I don't remember especially, although if I saw the exhibit again I could probably identify them. I told them I would welcome it if they would sign all their work, but they didn't, saying that some of the photographs, however useful to me, didn't come up to their own professional standards. They were willing I should exhibit the prints, but without signing their names.
I said, well, for my standards of the documentation of that situation, they'd contributed to this exhibit. So you see the double standard.
Riess
That is interesting to me, that they had this sense of...
Taylor:... of being a photographer. Yes, and certain photographs were a little below the standard to which they wanted to put their name. They all put their name to some of their exhibition photographs.
I was concerned with the documentation of that saw mill activity among the unemployed. If the photographs showed the unemployed in an organized enterprise they were running and staffing, they served my primary objective. If the photograph was a little below the standard the photographer would want to apply if he were going to hang it in a gallery of photographs, that was not decisive for my exhibit.
Riess
What percentage, would you say, were vetoed?
Taylor
That they didn't sign? I could figure it out if I saw the exhibit. I would say they signed anyway a third of the photographs.
Riess
It had never occurred to me before to ask if many of Dorothea's F.S.A. photographs had gone to Washington, and then she had asked, perhaps, that some not have her name to them.
Taylor
Oh, oh, so few! You mean when she got the negatives back, or developed her own? What percentage did she put in the trash can? Oh, a very tiny percentage!
Riess
Was it a difference in standards here, or was her work so much more developed that she didn't miss?
Taylor
She discarded very, very few.
Remember what she said later: That she had put aside negatives because she didn't think that they were worth preserving, but nevertheless had preserved them. Then suddenly she found that they had within them exactly what she wanted for a particular situation! So she said, "On what basis can you discard?"
So, what I think, is that her discards were because of some imperfection of the negative. You know the acid sometimes doesn't develop properly. So the discards were extremely few. One in twenty is putting it, I'm sure, much, much, too high. Maybe one in fifty, I don't know.
Riess
What was the difference in standards that she was applying back in 1934 in the U.X.A. pictures?
Taylor
The only question at that particular time was, to what photographs were they willing to put their name, and what photographs were they willing that I should use without their names.
So they recognized the importance of the documentation. They weren't concentrated and fixed exclusively on, or anywhere near exclusively, on exhibition photographs. They had their standards, but they didn't insist that every photograph in my exhibition should meet them.
Riess
What was Dorothea like then? What was her demeanor? Serious? Gay? As she went about her business.
Taylor
You mean on that occasion? Quiet, intent on her work. That's all that I remember. She just quietly went right to work.
Riess
Inconspicuous?
Taylor
Oh, yes.
Riess
In contrast to Imogen?
Taylor
[Pause] Well, Dorothea moved around inconspicuously. Imogen set up and made a few studied, well-arranged, well-executed photographs. They just had different ways of working.
Riess
Imogen was an f/64 person, wasn't she?
Taylor
Well, my description would put her over in that group. But she took people more than many photographers. Of course, Edward Weston did photograph people, too. He did studio portraits of people almost entirely.
Riess
Did you get to know Dorothea on that expedition?
Taylor
Not particularly on that expedition. No. She was intent on her work and I did some photographing myself, and I saw to it that the group met the U.X.A. personnel. Evenings, and so on, I stood between them, as the liaison between U.X.A. people and the photographers.
No, I didn't come to know her particularly, then, although I observed her way of work and I saw how she did it.
Riess
What was your approach to interviewing the U.X.A. people?
Taylor
I think what we did was, we sat down in the cabins, with, say, three or four of the executive committee. I always had my notebook out. I made notes. It helped me and I did it in a way which did not impede the conversation, but I think on the whole was pleasing and acceptable to the people I was interviewing. It implied that I thought they were of importance. I would just take down what they said, portions of it in a little book. They rather liked it.
Using a Photographer in Social Documentation: Hiring Dorothea
TaylorThat was the first occasion of our working together. Toward the end of 1934 I was asked would I do research for the Division of Rural Rehabilitation of the California State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA). That was the state division of Harry Hopkins' Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The question was, would I do the research work to help decide what rehabilitation program was fitted to the needs of rural California? California conditions are peculiar and were largely unknown in Washington. Questions were: who was in distress, what was the nature of the distress, and what would be a sensible thing to do to alleviate it?
Eventually the discussions came to a focus and I was asked by Director Harry Drobish, Rural Rehabilitation division, to join the SERA. He had been recruited from the U.C. Agricultural Extension Service. He was graduated from the University of California, an ardent YMCA worker in his student days -- a fine person with public spirit and good purposes. When it was decided that I would do the research, he asked me what staff would I need? (This story I've told in part in American West, May, 1970.) I told him what I would need as field workers and as office workers, not many, but a few. Then I said I would like a photographer.
"Why did I want a photographer?"
The answer came slowly. Well, because we were going to go out into the field to see what the conditions were. I knew in general what they were, because I had done so much work among the Mexican laborers and was quite familiar with rural California. Recently I'd been down to the cotton strike of 1933. So I had a pretty good idea of the conditions I would be looking into. But knowing the conditions and reporting them in a way to produce action were two different things.
That was the main point I made. I said that I would like for the people in the Relief Administration, who would read my reports, evaluate them and make the
Well, we talked back and forth a good deal. One of the questions was, "Would social scientists generally ask for a photographer on their research staff?" To which I answered, "No, they wouldn't, but I wanted a photographer."
(Incidentally, this very afternoon at 4 o'clock I ran across one of my colleagues whose interest has been largely in Yugoslavia, and he raised the question of using photographs to accompany his work. He asked me about Dorothea's work. So he raised essentially the same subject that you are raising right now. He, like me, wanted to do it. When I told him what I just told you, he said, "Conditions haven't changed very much, most of the social scientists still don't use photographers, but I'm like you, I want to do it, too." So photography is not yet firmly incorporated into the workings of the profession, although it has much more recognition now than it used to have.)
Riess
Does the social scientist maintain that the photography is too emotionally loaded, or something, to be scientific? Does social science have to be statistics?
Taylor
No, it doesn't have to be statistical, no.
Then it was, "photographs?" In those days who ever saw photographs of a social situation either by professional photographers or anybody else? Lewis Hine's eastern photographs didn't get around very much in his day. People out here never had heard of Lewis Hine, most of them. You just didn't see photographs of social situations. There were no TV cameras then, remember. The movies were formalized, and you didn't think of anybody making motion photographs except the moviemakers.
Riess
But I am wondering, why not now?
Taylor
Photographs are used a very great deal more now than then. Among social scientists they were used first by anthropologists. Generally they were not very good
In those days, when someone would come on the campus with cameras we'd say, "Oh there are the Japanese again, with their cameras." Now on the campus, with the students in these... well, riots, if you will, that they get into, cameras are all over the place hanging around the necks of lots and lots of the students. So the change is enormous!
Riess
I am thinking of the quality of the camera as a "hot" medium, and the word as the "cold" medium and how, maybe, to certain social scientists, it is too much to have this "hot"...
Taylor:... Oh, I think so. I think if they were expressing it, their questions would be, "Well yes, but is it scientific?" "It's emotion." Yes, I think so.
Riess
It's distracting...
Taylor
That's right. From cold words, cold numbers, etc. They weren't used to doing it. And there was then, even more than now, a resistance to facing people as human beings. You free yourself from some responsibilities if you can reduce people to numbers. You don't have to bother with people. They are just numbers you can manipulate any way you want. But to associate with people as human beings, that is something else.
Now the sociologists do it increasingly. The anthropolotists do it, and as I said this afternoon, here is this junior colleague of mine interested in doing it and asking me about my early experience -- this afternoon.
Going back to the Relief Administration. The back and forth between me and the director of the division, Harry Drobish, was cut through when the office manager felt that he had heard a sufficient approval from his chief, Drobish. He put Dorothea on the payroll as a typist. There was no provision in the Relief Administration budget for a photographer. The man who
Larry Hewes had been a bond salesman in the 1920's. What was his life? You go to Dartmouth, then you go into business, into the stock and bond market, with the market going up -- wonderful! Wonderful! Then comes the 1929 crash. Stock and bond houses don't need their salesmen any more.
So Hewes, like others fresh out of college, found himself suddenly out of a job. Helped by political influence, he managed to get himself appointed office manager in the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the California SERA. [laughter]
Another man, Irving W. Wood, came in similarly. I took him on my research staff. He was one of my classmates, a John R. Commons student, who, like Hewes, had gone with a San Francisco bond house. Came the crash -- finish! He was a very fine colleague of mine, very fine classmate. After the bond market crash he and his family were very, very grateful to find any kind of work for him to do. Wood had been in the 1st Division in World War I, wounded by a machine gun bullet at Cantigny, one of the first American attacks, perhaps the first attack in which American troops participated.
When the director of the Division heard that Dorothea was on the payroll, he said, "We'll try it for a month, then we will see."
I arranged for Dorothea to go into the field with my team. We went first to Nipomo, where a year and a half later she made the famous "Migrant Mother" photograph. An employer's labor representative had told me about the pea-pickers at Nipomo and suggested I go there, which I did. I took my field team of four down there, three men and Dorothea.
Riess
The typist in disguise.
Taylor
[laughter] The typist! I asked her if she had ever
Riess
You said an "employer's labor representative."
Taylor
He represented agricultural employers. I'd met him down in Imperial Valley.
Riess
And he was happy enough to send you in to see the situation?
Taylor
Yes. He urged me to go to Nipomo. I had met him first when he was on the staff of a bank, when I was studying Mexicans in the Imperial Valley in 1927. Well, in 1935 we met at a conference in Sacramento and when he found that I was getting into this subject he urged me to go to Nipomo.
I said, "Why on earth should I go?" He said, "Go down to Nipomo; among the pea-pickers, the conditions are very bad."
So on the employers' tip I went.
On my staff was Edward Rowell, the nephew, I believe, of Chester Rowell, regent of the University and editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and who lived just across the canyon from here. A justly famous California citizen of that era. He had been the editor of the Fresno Bee, then moved up to the Chronicle. A very fine man, very broad gauge. Well, his nephew, Edward, was an economics graduate student at Berkeley, and I took him on. I remember on that first trip down to Nipomo giving him this instruction:
"This is the first time that we've had a photographer out in the field, and I don't know how she will be received. Will you go with her? Your instructions are, see to it that nothing untoward happens. I don't want anything to disturb the relations between ourselves as a team, and those pea-pickers. Carry her cameras, she'll need somebody to do that. Just quietly stay with her, and see that nothing goes awry."
To Dorothea I said, "This is your first day in
[Chuckling] Well, she made `em all right! Made them the first day! And made good ones that we put into the report. She had no trouble. As up at the U.X.A. in the mountains, she just quietly walked up to them with her camera. No problems in her relations with the pea-pickers, at all. It went on that way, always.
The Team of Taylor and Lange, Working and Interviewing
RiessOn this first expedition, was Dorothea doing any note-taking of her own?
Taylor
Well, she must have made notes because in that first report (now at Oakland Museum) she included the quotes of what they said to her. So that same method of working that she showed later on -- using her ear as well as her eye -- she showed right from the beginning at Nipomo. She would talk with the people she photographed. As I recall, there was one Nipomo man she photographed up against his automobile, and her caption, in quotes, was what the man said to her, "This life is simplicity, boiled down." She not only saw, but she heard, and she recorded both what she saw and what she heard.
I know that later on she carried a little looseleaf notebook. She really had their phraseology, the essence of it. They showed in what they said how they had been mentally diagnosing, boiling down their own conception of what their condition was. They said it beautifully, like that pea-picker who said to her, "This life is simplicity, boiled down."
Riess
What was the attitude of the migrants toward you as interviewers?
Taylor
Well, as it came about, usually I'd just get out of my car, go up to them, and talk. I didn't habitually say, "I am with the California State Emergency Relief Administration." I didn't do that unless it was so formal that I had to. In general I would, and I think Dorothea too, just go up to them and start talking.
One thing I learned when I was studying Mexican laborers in the 1920s, one of the things that worked best was to go up to them and just ask a simple question, to which probably I knew the answer, such as, "How far is it to the next town?"
To them it was understandable, that a man driving along in a Dodge roadster would stop and ask how many miles to the next town. After they told me how many
Riess
No suspicion then, no feeling that you were some agent?
Taylor
Of course that is what I wanted to avoid. Sometimes after I would ask a series of questions, they would suddenly change a little bit and begin to wonder why this fellow was asking all those questions, and start to question me. Then, immediately, I would explain my own role. Either that I was from the University of California, as in the 1920s when I was making a study of Mexican immigration; or, as in 1935, that I was from the Emergency Relief Administration of California, and had been asked to come out and find out the conditions and to report back what the people said about their conditions. So I placed myself in the role of an emissary of the government, come out to get from them at first hand what they could tell me of their conditions. That same role covered Dorothea, too, and was accepted by people with whom we talked, I'm sure.
Her method of work was often to just saunter up to the people and look around, and then when she saw something that she wanted to photograph, to quietly take her camera, look at it and if she saw that they objected, why, she would close it up and not take a photograph, or perhaps she would wait until it appeared that they were used to her, they didn't mind, and that she could do it. Then she would take the photograph, sometimes talking with them, sometimes not talking with them. She used to say that she covered herself with a "cloak of invisibility." It made her feel that she could go up and do things which otherwise seemed to be intruding on their privacy. It gave her a feeling of confidence in working with the camera. That is what she said, to herself.
Riess
It was like saying magic to herself. "They can't see me."
Taylor
That's right. Just playing that they couldn't see her. Well, actually she was naturally very skillful, not playing games, not maneuvering, but just naturally skillful in her relations with people.
Of course, when I was with her (possibly likewise when Ed Rowell or others on the staff were with her), often I would go up to the people, I would start the talking, keep the talking going,and out of the corner of my eye I would see that she had got out her camera. So I would just keep the talk going. I had their attention.
Riess
Then you would get out of range?
Taylor
Yes. Keeping out of range generally wasn't a problem. She worked pretty close to them for the most part. If I thought I was interfering I would just sidle out of her way as inconspicuously as possible, talking to them all the while. My purpose was just to make it a natural relationship, and take as much of their attention as I conveniently could, leaving her the maximum freedom to do what she wanted. So I am sure that I helped her often, but you can see on how many great occasions she didn't need my help. [laughter] She proved that she could do it all by herself on so many occasions, photographing "Migrant Mother" for example. But I am sure that often I made it easier for her.
Riess
In the case of this expedition to Nipomo, was there a leader among them? Did you have to make yourself known to anyone?
Taylor
No. I do not recall any leader. The pea-pickers were a group under a labor contractor or labor contractors. I don't remember anyone to whom I felt, "I've got to go to clear it with him, so that he knows what I'm doing." I don't recall that, although on one visit I did meet the friendly landowner. Sometimes employing farmers were suspicious. An employer of fruitpickers in the Sacramento Valley came along while we were talking with and photographing them. I am sure he was quite concerned, and even uneasy about our presence.
On that trip, I was there, and both Maynard Dixon and Dorothea were there; that was before Dorothea's and my marriage. The employer invited me to get into his car, on some pretext or other, so I got right in and told him what I was doing, and drove around with him. It chanced that he had a niece who was one of my University students. So I was in a natural, normal position, even though he was uneasy about having anybody talk with his fruitpickers.
Riess
Their problems, their living conditions, were certainly something that he could have done something about, weren't they? Really, he should have been uneasy.
Taylor
[laughter] Yes, he properly might have been. Sure. Their conditions weren't very good. But I satisfied him, reasonably at any rate, although I don't think he particularly enjoyed having me there.
Riess
But what did you explain to him was going to happen about these pictures and what was going to happen within six months to conditions around his place, as a result of the investigation?
Taylor
Oh, I didn't discuss it on that basis. Of course I couldn't be sure what would happen in a few months. I simply explained that I was up there with my team, looking into the field conditions to find out what the problems were, and report to the Division of Rural Rehabilitation what I thought would be a sensible program to help out.
Often in the field I would ask, "Do you have any suggestions?" Whether I said it to that man, I don't remember. I was just trying to clear his mind so that I wouldn't have any adverse repercussions. You see, the growers didn't exactly welcome what I was doing, and they didn't welcome the migrant worker camp program that I did recommend, and that the Division of Relief Administration adopted.
Some of them came to the Relief Administration and objected directly to me. On a different side, one of the men who is with the American Civil Liberties Union, Los Angeles office right now, came to me in 1935 in San Francisco. He wanted to know what, in the government camps that we were setting up, what would be the reaction if the workers wanted to hold a meeting and discuss a possible strike at midnight. So I got it both ways, but neither stopped the camp program.
Speaking of how we approached people, do you remember that West Texas lineup, where those fellows were inside that cabin? (American Exodus, p. 66). There was a time when I had to explain myself before they would talk. With those people, I took out my identification card -- on that trip I was with the
They looked the identification card all over and then they said, "Well, what did I want to know?" So I started asking questions. Anything, any simple questions to get them started talking and to make them feel at ease. Only then, one after another, did they come out of that dark room, single file, onto the screened porch. I thought the last one never would come out, there were so many.
Then we talked. Their problem was that they had been let go from their tenant farms and had only WPA to support their families, with no prospect of getting another farm. After I talked with them quite a while, finally they filed out from the screened porch onto the ground outside. By that time, our relations were all right; they had confidence that I was what I said I was. That I was trying to take back to the government, from the people in the field, what they had to say about their own conditions. When Dorothea lined them up to photograph them they were perfectly willing, and she took their pictures.
In the later photograph they had broken up and informally sat down on the ground to discuss their problem among themselves. By that time we were just incidentally there. They were so used to us that they went back again to discussing their problem between themselves. That's, of course, what we welcomed, that we would be just accepted.
Riess
There is this caption, "who are we going to fight?"
Taylor
Oh, yes, they were frustrated, they were displaced, they were all on W.P.A. They said, "If we fight, what we gotta whup?" They couldn't find out who to fight! ("Whup" is West Texas for "whip.")
I remember stopping at one of the stores in the nearby town, a pharmacy or grocery. The storekeeper very uneasily told me he had bought up four or five farms. He was quite uneasy as he told me about it. He must have known how these displaced fellows felt.
Why, on a Sunday morning, were they in an isolated tenants' farm cabin, not outside, not on the screened porch, but in the dark room inside? They were trying desperately to figure out what if anything could they do in this situation in which they found themselves?
They were not playing cards or anything like that. They were considering what in the Sam Hill they were going to do about it! To whom could they go? Who were their enemies? "If we fight, who we gotta whup?"
Riess
Back at the first time out in the field, did Dorothea now develop all those pictures for you?
Taylor
Well, when we came in from the field, she did the developing at her studio on Gough Street in San Francisco.
Riess
And did she just give you the batch to pick from?
Taylor
I went a time or two to her studio to see the prints coming through. Sometimes she would bring them to me in the morning when she came to the office which was at 49 Fourth Street, 3rd floor.
I was preparing my textual report to my chief, to tell him the conditions, and what I recommended should be done. Very quickly I recommended government camps where the migrant workers could have decent facilities and clean up. We discussed whether they should have tent platforms, be provided with tents or not, what toilet facilities should be provided, what facilities for washing clothing and bedding, and so on. These were the essentials of the initial proposal that I made in the text.
(The original copy is in Washington, in the prints and photographs division of the Library of Congress. A second edition, very similar to the first, is in the prints and photographs division, Oakland Museum. In these volumes you can see Dorothea's photographs made on the two or three earliest field trips, and see her handwritten reporting of "what the people said." She started doing that, too, right away, on her own.)
The Field Reports and the Camps, I: Marysville and Arvin
TaylorMaybe I should bring up some other aspects. When we made the report, I had never made a report with photographs attached to it, although I had illustrated some articles. So Dorothea took the initiative, telling me that there was a new wire spiral binding technique for making up reports. I had never heard of spiral binding before, but she knew a place in San Francisco that would do it. So she got good strong cardboard covers and waxed them to make them look well. Maynard Dixon helped us with the lettering to accompany the photographs, and drew a map of California suggesting principal routes travelled by the migrants, and so on. That way we prepared the report, text and photographs in the same volume.
Riess
I would love to see it. I had no idea it was such a beautiful thing.
Taylor
[Proudly] Oh, it's something. Why didn't I have sense enough to bring it here this evening -- well, I'll bring it so the next time you will see how we started out, and the ways we tried to weave photography into the work of the Division of Rural Rehabilitation.
The next step with that report was this: Dorothea knew an associate editor of the San Francisco News, by the name of George P. West. As a boy I had known him in Sioux City. He was older than I, but his mother and my mother were friends; I was a little boy and George West was a big boy. Dorothea invited George and me to evening dinner with herself and Maynard Dixon. I remember George paging through this report as Dorothea and I talked to him, wondering if anything would come of it.
About a week later, I think it was on August 18th, 1935, a very nice editorial appeared in the S.F. News. The News supported our camp program from then on. Out of that, later, came this: a lead editorial on "Starving Pea Pickers" and a page headlined "Ragged, Hungry, Broke, Harvest Workers Live in Squalor." The page carried two photographs, both of the Nipomo migrant mother and her children. (San Francisco News, March 16, 1936.)
Riess
The News wouldn't have sent its own photographers in to take some pictures?
Taylor
I don't know that it had any staff photographers in those days! Newspapers first got reporters who used cameras. Then after a while, and pressure from the Newspaper Guild which insisted that a reporter was a reporter and a photographer was a photographer, they recognized photographers as members of a separate profession. Photographers, you see, regarded a reporter using a camera as a competitor. They wanted to have photographers employed in their own right.
Riess
Shall we follow the trail of the report at this point?
Taylor
I certainly made a mistake in not bringing several of those reports home. They would show our experiments with different types of reports. These formal ones with text and photographs to support a program to construct camps, they went, through to my Division chief, to the Relief Commission in San Francisco. After we were transferred to Resettlement on July 1, 1935, they went to Rexford Guy Tugwell, the national administrator in Washington.
In addition to the reports proposing program, we made some informational reports. One series we called "Reports from the Field." Its style was to carry a small notation in words (by myself), perhaps a paragraph, perhaps a page, and opposite the text to carry a relevant photograph.
We wanted to bring conditions as we saw them into the offices and to the officials. You might call this kind of report an interim report to the division. One spiral bound report I encouraged Dorothea to make by herself, directly to the head of the Division, without me as intermediary. I wanted to elevate the status of her work in the Division, you see. Its message was, "Here's a photographer's report," a justifiable innovation from every point of view.
Riess
How long a period of time was this going over? Was this a full-time thing that Dorothea was engaged in at that point?
Taylor
Oh, she was employed full-time. She was taken on
The way those two camps got started was, that Dorothea and I took Lowry Nelson into the field with us. Nelson, from Utah, was regional representative of Rural Rehabilitation in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). We tock him and his wife with us in my station wagon down as far as Yuma, Arizona, east of the Imperial Valley, an entrance to California for many thousands of families. So for the length of the state, except for the Sacramento Valley, he saw first-hand what the actual condition was. By that time we also knew what our camp program was for.
The Washington FERA had allocated $20,000 out here for some project or other, which they decided later not to go ahead with. Nelson wired Washington recommending that California FERA be allowed to keep the $20,000 to enable us to start two camps. Washington said OK. With those $20,000 given us in a quick, emergency decision, rather than a thoroughly considered one, we were able to start two camps.
If, almost accidentally, Nelson hadn't nailed down that $20,000, I don't know when if ever we would have got our camps started. There was unease over the camp program in Washington; there was grower opposition. There were precedents for state and city public housing, but never yet for federal. Fortunately this housing for migrants that we proposed turned out to be the first federal public housing in the United States.
Riess
What did the growers think was going to happen?
Taylor
They feared that if you brought migrants together in
Riess
I think it is remarkable how much you did from beginning to end. You didn't just hand your report in; it sounds like you went on and practically built the camps.
Did you have anything to do with the contractors, or anything like that?
Taylor
I turned the actual work of building the camps, in so far as our division had to supervise carpenters, graders, and so on, I turned that over to my Wisconsin classmate on my staff, Irving Wood. He took charge of the work out on the ground, saw that things moved, and handled community relations. In Kern County, where we started a camp at Arvin, for example, there were grower elements that didn't like the camp idea at all.
We started another camp at Marysville. The head of my division, Harry Drobish, staunchly stood by the principle of my recommendation. He knew people on the Marysville city council, and got the council to rent us a piece of land on which we would construct the camp.
In Kern County, where the Kern County Land Company is, and where other big land owners are, who are not friendly to the organization of farm workers at all, there was opposition to a camp. But a woman there, a small land owner, was friendly to labor and not friendly to the big land owners. So she rented forty acres as a site to allow the Relief Administration to set up that camp. There was internal conflict in that county, you see, between smaller land own ers and bigger ones and we got the support of the smaller.
Riess
This was an early sample of community development for you, probably. Anybody would envy you this experience of not having to struggle with bureaucracy then!
Taylor
Well, you see FDR -- having new jobs to get done -- set up new bureaucracies to do them that weren't crystallized in old ways. Through this newly created
When I undertook to prepare my researches, my idea was not just to study the conditions, but to use the studies to get something done. We had to find out first what it made sense to do, and after that how to get it done within the internal bureaucracy of the government. We had to answer the questions the bureaucracy raised as to why it was proper for the Relief Administration to build camps for migrants.
They had all kinds of questions to put to me. If I answered one way, why the answer might stop the whole project. I was asked, for example, "After all, hadn't this condition of misery among the migrant workers existed for a long, long time?"
When I answered, "Well, yes, it had," then I was confronted with the assertion, "But the Relief Administration is an `emergency' administration, and this isn't a new emergency."
You see how I was caught? I had to admit that the condition had long existed. But I declared that it was also an "emergency" because it was magnified extremely beyond anything before in volume and pervasiveness on the agricultural landscape.
Then I was asked, "Have you referred the recommendation to the lawyers?" At that time Louis Heilbron was attorney for the Relief Administration. Now he is a director of the state college system. He was a very intelligent man, fortunately for us in our effort to satisfy the various bureaucrats.
When we opened the camp at Marysville, Tugwell came out and was present at the ceremonies. He said very little there, but at the Marysville railroad
Riess
What was "it", the camp or the approach?
Taylor
The approach, the program that I had recommended to him, he saw it "working" on the ground. He saw the people there representing many elements of the community.
The Farm Bureau was not particularly friendly to our doing anything. Drobish was closer to the Farm Bureau than I, and he invited the Bureau's secretary to attend the camp dedication. The substance of his comment on the formal opening of the camp was that from his own farm experience he understood the desirability of having showers where, at the end of the day when you are all sweaty and dirty, you could wash up. So quietly he gave the camp his commendation.
Nevertheless, despite the auspicious start, it was a long time before we got any money to extend that program. We had just those two camps going. I remember I was asked on one of my trips to Washington to leave a full list of places in the United States where I recommended that camps be established.
I said, "Well, I don't see any prospect that you are going to build any. I'll give you about ten locations, because I don't see any use of giving you any more." So I gave them ten key locations scattered from Florida and Texas (in the Wintergarden District where I had taken Paul Kellogg years before) through Arizona, California, and maybe Washington.
Well, eventually they did build these camps. Dr. Will Alexander went to Congress for the Farm Security Administration in the late thirties as spokesman for the Resettlement Administration. He described the conditions, and the camp program that they wanted appropriations to enlarge. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia spoke of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and said, "Yes, something ought to be done for those people.23
Riess
From that $20,000 what were you able to do, other than just the bare boards?
Taylor
We had $10,000 for each of the two original camps that launched the camp program in 1935. Remember that with $10,000 you could do a heck of a lot more in those days than you could do now. Also, you could use the products of WPA labor in setting up the simple camp buildings, without drawing on our own funds.
Riess
Was there any money in reserve for support, upkeep or anything?
Taylor
No, no. But they could put people on the government payroll as camp managers. So they could put in the facilities, the washtubs to do the laundry, the toilets, the stoves where they could cook, the tent platforms and the tents, build the manager's office, and that's about what they had to work with.
You can see those camps today; they have been taken over by county public housing authorities.
Riess
Are there any photographs in American Exodus?
Taylor
Of those camps? No, but in our original reports now at the Oakland Museum and the Library of Congress are photographs that Dorothea made of them in process of construction.
Riess
You didn't give me the date.
Taylor
The Spring of 1935.
In those first few months, by holding on to that $20,000 and not having to get a decision from people uneasy about how this program would be received in some quarters, we were able to get two of those camps actually on the ground and so to get the jump. Well, the opposition couldn't take the camps off the ground! The most they could do was to check expansion of the
Riess
What is the $200,000 mentioned in the American West article?24
Taylor
The $200,000? Well, that is correct; it is $200,000 which the State Commission voted for the program when Division Director Drobish presented it and distributed Dorothea's photographs among the members to show the conditions camps were needed to improve. But a lawyer or somebody on the Relief Administration staff determined that the Commission lacked authority to spend the money because they were a state commission, and the money was federal.
Riess
Oh, I thought it was a misprint.
Taylor
[Emphatically] No, it was not a misprint! The Commission voted it, but we never got it for the camps. When you speak about the camps, remember that it was the federal $20,000 that put the first two camps on the ground. And with those camps on the ground, you see, it made it harder for the administrators not to expand their number. They were slow about doing it, but eventually they and Congress, as I said, got around to it.
Riess
It is interesting that Dorothea photographed a second time, in Nipomo, and things were just as bad or probably worse.
Taylor
It was just a repeat. We did start to set up a camp down there in 1935, and then the question arose over the clouded title to the site. The Rural Rehabilitation Division scraped off the land and was going to set up a camp, but then couldn't go through with it. So the second season (1936) when Dorothea photographed the "Migrant Mother," the pea-pickers were just encamped in the fields as they had been in 1935.
Riess
When Dorothea was photographing these things, and you
Taylor
I saw the conditions, and I was sympathetic with the people. I wanted to do something. I was in a position where I thought I could do something and before we got through, we did do something! So I felt very gratified.
Riess
So it wasn't going around and saying how terrible this all is?
Taylor
No, no! We weren't wringing our hands, by no means!
I would do everything, from meeting the people in the depressed conditions, to people in the community, including sometimes their employers and the labor contractors. In San Francisco I spoke upon invitation before the Commonwealth Club, presenting both problems and camp program with many of Dorothea's photographs displayed as example. Repeatedly I was asked to speak before this or that group. In that way I was able to handle the public relations, and build enough community support so that the officials could feel that they could go ahead with the program.
Riess
How about the University? What was the tie-in at that point?
Taylor
Well, I had three courses and the University gave me two-thirds leave for the spring semester, 1935. Then it gave me the full academic year 1935-1936 to serve as Labor Advisor to the Resettlement Administration in the five southwestern states. Oh, the University gave me complete freedom, of course. No problem at all.
Riess
There wasn't a reaction from the growers reporting back?
Taylor
To the University?
Riess
This would have been under Sproul, and probably you would have been insulated...
Taylor
I was protected under Sproul, all right. If there were complaints to him about me I heard nothing of them.
Riess
So you would have been insulated from ever hearing about a problem, if there was one.
Taylor
Yes. But of course I was doing this work among the migrants in my capacity as an official of the Relief Administration, not as a member of the University faculty. As I told you, some critics would come to me in my government office and kick about the camps. They didn't like what I was doing. I got inquiries from everybody, from growers to the American Civil Liberties Union. [laughter] The one was fearful that the field laborers would organize, and the other was fearful that in the camps they wouldn't be given the opportunity to organize.
Down in Kern County, my 1st Division friend told me what someone said to him as they were putting up that first Arvin camp. They asked what would be the rules covering the camp. The response of my former Wisconsin classmate, and 1st Division friend, was that the inmates of the camp would have their rights under the Constitution.
This person wanted to impress him, apparently, with the fact that they weren't going to have these fellows organizing, and suggested that they would come around, if necessary, with machine-guns, or whatever to prevent it. To which my 1st Division veteran friend replied, "Oh, no, you won't come in this camp with guns."
The man said, "Why not?"
My friend said, "Because we won't let you." That tells what the local opposition attitude was.
And then the first thing my friend did in arranging for the dedication of the Arvin camp was to get the local American Legion to donate an American flag to be run up the flag pole of that camp. See how the public relations were handled? That tells you some of the hostility we ran into.
Riess
That was a good way of dealing with it -- including as many people as you could in your plans.
Taylor
Yes, take them in on it then you have community support and it isn't you vs. the other, opposing, people. Instead, you have them where they have to face their own neighbors who support you.
A sample of some more of "the hostility we ran into." (See preceding page.)
THE INDEPENDENT, REDDING, SHASTA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
Letters to The Editor
CHANGING IDEALS
Editor, The Independent:
An associate professor at the university of California (a so-called doctor of economics) has inspired and devised a new American ideal. Under this inspiration of the doctor the federal government will build 15 to 20 model labor camps. The editorial in the Independent stated that these camps were "for the pickers."
Now, Dear Editor, where did this notion that these camps were "for the pickers" originate? Did it originate where that old American ideal of "comfortable quarters" for the slaves originated? That is, in the minds of those who owned the slaves, the quarters, and the jobs? Can you tell me in what economic principle these model campus "for the pickers" differ from the slave's quarters of the 1850's? Except, of course, that the planters of California in 1935 do not own the bodies of the pickers as did the planters of 1950?
And can you tell me how a man can get a doctor's degree in economics and make statements so far from the economic facts and their inescapable conclusions as this bunk of Doctor so-and-so: that these camps are going to do anything but reduce the wages of the pickers and make possible the seggregation of the meek, the humble, and the willing workers from the independent pickers who see through these false claims of benefit to the workers, who do not own or control their jobs or the rate of wages any more than did the men who occupied "quarters" in 1850? Can the doctor believe for one minute that any pickers other than the meekly submissive, the humbly satisfied, will be allowed to live in these cabins during seasons of unemployment? Or at any other time, if there is an abundance of labor on the market? Do you notice the similarity of terms used in 1850 and in 1935? "Labor Market?" The distinction between "good" nigger and "sassy" nigger? The same as between a "good" citizen (a submissive laborer) and an "agitator" (meaning one who is not satisfied with things as they are, but is as ignorant of the right thing to do as is the doctor himself)?
Here is an attempt, in this state socialism of the owning class, to right a human wrong that arises inevitably from a property wrong. That is to say, arises out of the ownership by one class of the means that support the lives of another class. Here is a childish, cowardly dodging of the paramount issue in the United States today. It is on a par with hiring cotton land out of production and throwing 260,000 families out onto the highway; and furnishing cheap electric current to supplant coal and poking 50,000 miners out of their jobs with this so-called "yard stick;" and then building for these unemployed $5,000 houses to live in without any income to live on.
My Gawd! says I. What says you?
LINCOLN BRADEN
Nov. 27, 1935.
Mr. and Mrs. Frank Corby of Anderson will be guests of Mr. and Mrs. Rex Cross on Thanks-giving day.
Marriage to Dorothea
RiessIt sounds as though you and Dorothea had turned pretty much into a working team.
Taylor
Yes. Of course sometimes I didn't go out into the field with Dorothea, but then she went out with her staff.
I went out with her the first time, as I said, at Nipomo, and then I went on a field trip into the Sacramento Valley when Maynard Dixon went with us; also, I was on a couple of the trips to Imperial Valley, that first one with the Lowry Nelsons joining us, and with the staff.
Riess
What was the next step in your relationship?
Taylor
Administratively, I was asked in 1936 if I would transfer to the Research Division of the Social Security Board. Congress had established the Board in 1935. Farm labor was excluded from all Social Security programs. But Congress specifically instructed the Board to make studies of the excluded occupations.
So I got a telephone call when I was in Los Angeles from Tom Blaisdell, who's there now in the Political Science Department. Then he was the Board's associate director of research. The Board asked, would I do the research on the excluded agricultural labor? Well, yes, I would. So I transferred to the Social Security Board on or about June 1st, 1936.
In August of 1935 Dorothea had been transferred from the California SERA to the regional office of the Resettlement Administration. You see, Roy Stryker had been taken onto his staff by Rex Tugwell. Tugwell knew Stryker as a teacher on the faculty of Columbia University. Tugwell wanted a photographic record of the conditions with which the Resettlement Administration had to deal, and what the Resettlement Administration was able to do to meet them.
The first time I went into Washington in the spring of 1935, someone said to me, "You should go and see Stryker," so I did. I found him interested in
So, in August 1935, Stryker asked Dorothea to transfer to his section of the Resettlement Administration, which she did. So, Dorothea and I found ourselves in two different branches of the government: I with the Social Security Board, but concerned with agricultural labor, and she with the Resettlement Administration, photographing agricultural labor -- migrants, tenant farmers, etc.
Our two chiefs, Roy Stryker and Tom Blaisdell, were in perfect harmony. In December 1935 Dorothea and I had been married. Stryker and Blaisdell supported our summer field travel together; one summer, one agency would pay for the car mileage, and the following summer the other would pay. Each agency would pay salary and the per diem for one of us. My salary was $15 a day. Both agencies found our teamwork satisfactory service of their ends, and I'm sure the results were much better than if we had worked separately. Of course, for Dorothea and me the collaboration was fine.
Our marriage, as I said, took place on December 6, 1935. There were two divorces, mine and hers. There was cooperation in both respects. Both Maynard, and my first wife, went through the legal processes in Nevada. When Dorothea and I went to Albuquerque in early December, we were married there. On the afternoon of the same day she went out and photographed. And our work went on from then, together.
Riess
Of course it wasn't all the team thing of working together and traveling. Eventually running a house and a regular life...
Taylor
After we were married you mean? Well, there were family situations to face. There were the children of two families. Yes, it was not altogether easy.
Riess
I guess what I am think of is the difference between
Taylor:... has to do the cooking.
Riess:... is harnessed to the house. Yes. In a way.
Taylor:... not a liberated woman. [laughter]
Riess
Dorothea talks about this in her interview. I think she was really thinking about it, about what one can do and the decisions you have to make.
Taylor
Yes. It competed, of course, with her work. That is, she was not free to do nothing but her work in photography.
Summers we were able to arrange for the placement of the children, so that we could take the summer continuously for two-and-a-half to three months. For that time we were freed; otherwise, well, it wasn't so simple.
For the first year, we had the children placed with others in Berkeley, in three separate places, because I was back at the University and Dorothea was working and couldn't be at home all the time. We wanted to establish as firm a family foundation as we could. Weekends, you see, we would have the children come to our home at 2706 Virginia Street.
Riess
From both marriages?
Taylor
Yes. We often went with them to Chinatown. There they always had a big table for us all to sit around. Chinatown in Oakland or San Francisco was a good place to go, so we would take the children for a party to Chinatown for supper. Or we would go to the movies.
We had a house at the head of Virginia Street, 2706, and the children always liked to come there and spend the night with us, and we liked to have them. So gradually, as we could, we knitted together the members of the family, and also kept our work going, both Dorothea's and mine.
No, she wasn't as free as a bird, of course.
Riess
Was her studio there, at Virginia Street? Was that where she was doing her darkroom work?
Taylor
Let's see, yes, she did some work there.
We didn't have a good darkroom there, that's true She could always air mail her films in to Washington to be developed and proof printed. That was done. Also, the architects of the Resettlement Administration who designed the camps and housing projects -- Vernon de Mars and Garrett Eckbo, now with U.C., were with that group -- had a darkroom at Shattuck and Center Streets, and on some occasions Dorothea used their darkroom.
No, it wasn't altogether easy to pull up stakes of two families and recreate relationships, but on the whole, it was done.
Riess
Was there any idea of eventually getting all the children into one house?
Taylor
Well, the second year, my three went with their mother to Bronxville, New York. John and Dan [Dixon] were, of course, here in Berkeley. The next summer, the summer of 1937, we planned for at least a couple of the children to spend a few weeks each with us in the field in the South.
My son, Ross, joined us in Memphis and was with us for a month or so. Then when it was time for his older sister to come, she didn't feel like coming. This very clearly delighted Ross because he wanted to stay with us the rest of the summer and was overjoyed to return with us to California. So, there were problems...
Riess
When did you buy this house?
Taylor
Our Virginia Street house we rented. Dorothea got that ready for us before our marriage, the week before we left for New Mexico, and we returned to it before Christmas of 1935. We bought this one (1163 Euclid) in December of 1939 and moved into it January of 1940.
Riess
Were John and Dan then here?
Taylor
John and Dan and Ross were here from then on. Summers,
Riess
You mention Dorothea getting the house on Virginia Street ready. Was she a good and efficient manager type?
Taylor
Excellent! Excellent! And in handling the difficult family readjustments, she was beautiful, marvelous! Maynard gave us every help that could be given in personal ways.
Riess
So she wouldn't have been leaning on you for things like buying a new house? I mean that wouldn't have been a great burden for you?
Taylor
Actually, she found the Virginia Street house. It happened to be owned by one of my former students, but Dorothea found it through real estate people. Then in 1939 she found this house (1163 Euclid).
Her ability to handle personal relationships was marvelous, marvelous... unbelievable.
Riess
Did she enjoy handling the details, the business of life? It wasn't done grudgingly?
Taylor
[Feelingly] Oh, my, no. Oh, no. Didn't Dan at her Memorial Service speak of her, in this respect?25 I think he did. What we came through was not easy. She was simply superb, she made a family out of most diverse relations.
Well, look here. [Showing photo of family.]
Riess
Oh, how fine. I've never seen that.
Taylor
That was on June 10, 1965, less than four months before her death. There's the family that she built, all the branches. (Photograph by Pirkle Jones of Mill Valley. Kathy not present.)
Riess
Everybody seems to be focused on this baby at the bottom.
Taylor
A nice touch. That's my grandchild, little Miss Kitty, Margot's youngest, Katherine Fanger. When I was east in February, I said, "Miss Kitty, do you remember Dorothea?"
She said, simply, "No."
Yes, every eye there is on that little child. [laughter] She's the only one who doesn't remember it!
That's the family picture.
She was a master at human relationships.
When we came to 1163, we had the problem of no darkroom. So we built the workroom and darkroom that you see below us, now, the main room of the enlarged house. The workroom and darkroom were built just before World War II.
Then, some years later, John and Helen came down from Winters assuring us that they were not going to live close by us. No, they were going to have their own place. But as it turned out, they stayed right there. You see how the house has been built out from the darkroom. As they built it out, we moved Dorothea's darkroom upstairs into this house.
You see, her work went on with the Resettlement and Farm Security Administrations. Then she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, then came photographing the evacuation of the Japanese for the War Relocation Authority. Oh, I've skipped over a period when she left the Resettlement Administration to photograph for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, but continued essentially the same kind of work. Those negatives taken for the BAE are in the National Archives, instead of in the Library of Congress; also the War
Riess
The Office of War Information?
Taylor
That came after the Japanese Evacuation.
Economics Curriculum: Population and Immigration
RiessIn 1931-32, you taught a class in population and immigration, in the Economics Department.
Taylor
Yes. I was asked to give the course in population and immigration. In the early 1920s, or possibly even before, the department had offered a course in immigration reflecting public interest in the great tide of European immigration coming into this country prior to World War I, which then was cut off when we adopted our restrictive policies in 1917, 1921 and 1924. That's why immigration was tied in with population.
Population was just then becoming an academic subject, reviving the work of Malthus more than a century earlier. What stimulated my own interest in it was that because of my current studies of Mexican immigration I was invited to participate in a summer conference in 1929 at the University of Chicago called the Norman Waite Harris Memorial Conference. That year the subject was population.
That was a landmark conference. I was asked to that, as I say, because I was studying Mexican migration. William F. Ogburn, the University of Chicago professor in charge of the conference, was also the Social Science Research Council Policy Committee chairman who screened my annual applications for funds and gave me the money I needed. The proceedings of that conference should make very interesting reading even today. I placed my mimeographed copy in the University Library.
It was a landmark conference for this reason: people were just beginning to be concerned about possible hazards from excess population. In the early '20s, Edwin M. East of Harvard had written his book entitled Mankind at the Crossroads. Then my own professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, E.A. Ross, had just published his book, Standing Room Only.
Then came a Czech, Robert R. Kuczyinski, whose contribution was statistical. He studied what is called refined birth rates, in other words, not simply birth
Because so many women were in the child-bearing age, the total number of births was indeed great, but among young women the birth rate was falling way off. So at that conference, the shocking upset question became: "Were we headed into a situation in which the women of the United States (because that was where the statistics were from) would fail to reproduce the population?"
As a matter of fact, the 1940 census, only ten years later, showed on refined birth rates that one hundred women of childbearing age were producing only ninety-six children. That was just before World War II! The question then was, if the women slack off bearing children to the point where the population declines, what, if anything, can you do to raise it sufficiently to continue the human race? What could you do if the birth rate fell below what now is called ZPG, zero population growth. If the women bore fewer children, would they ever turn around and bear more?
Then, of course, came the war.
Riess
I don't understand about the war and the baby boom. Why was there a baby boom? Was it because there was more money?
Taylor
Only partly. I think it was mainly the temper of the times. There was a great war going on. I think the boys and girls just decided that, war or no war, they were going to get married and have families. You see, it was different in World War I. Then there was a great deal of feeling that since war was hazardous, it wasn't right to marry a girl if perhaps you were not going to survive. You would leave her a widow,
Riess
How about during the Depression years? Was there a conscious effort to keep the birth rate down?
Taylor
During the Depression decade of the 1930s, the birth rate fell, as had been discovered in 1929 by the Czech statistician at the Chicago Population Conference.
The reaction at that conference was one of great apprehension about a decline in the birth rate. Today the fear is that maybe it won't decline. That's a fast change from 1930 to 1970. Besides, the statistical data available, and the perspective in which the population problem can be viewed, are now worldwide.
Riess
If a declining population were a possibility, that would mean a different feeling about migrations, too. You had room and the land.
Taylor
Yes. The Conference gave a fresh look to everything. The light fell differently on everything.
Riess
Were Ross and East suggesting any radical solutions to what they saw as the coming problem of overpopulation?
Taylor
Ross was at the Chicago conference, and it knocked the props out from under him. He had said in Standing Room Only, "What are we going to do about this planet filling with people to overflowing?" And at the conference Kuczyinski said it -- or at least the United States -- was going to be de-populated!
Riess
Did Ross actually advocate, as Paul Ehrlich does?
Taylor
No, he didn't get up and advocate Z.P.G., but he pointed to the problem.
Riess
He wasn't panicky about it?
Taylor
No. But he wrote his book about it to raise the question. He just wasn't that same kind of a propagandist, that's all. But he raised the same question, and now Ross' question is thoroughly revived. It was only postponed.
Riess
What was the picture that presented itself to people who were afraid the population would not reproduce itself?
Taylor
Well, this wasn't spelled out, but everyone had simply assumed that an enlarging population was normal and a declining population abnormal. After all, there was only one important western European country, all through that period from the late 19th century, with an occasionally declining population. That was France, regarded in this respect as abnormal. People questioned what was peculiar, and wrong with France? No other country wanted to be in that position. The normal thing was to grow.
We've inherited that assumption right down to the present time. In all our economic affairs "growth is normal." The more the population in California, the more real estate values go up and all that! It's a myth that we accept, which has validity in some of its aspects and is very questionable in others. (Now, late in 1972, there are public proposals to limit population growth in California.)
Riess
I wonder, about population control, how much "Brinksmanship," or getting to the edge of disaster, is necessary? Is there any hope of doing anything until...
Taylor
Until we are right up against it?
Riess
Yes.
Taylor
That's about the way we operate.
Planning? Of course in the New Deal days, planning was a bad word to the opponents of the New Deal; the New Dealers wanted to plan. The other boys, they didn't like planning and to them planning was a bad word.
Riess
Why?
Taylor
Why? Because they didn't like the New Deal's plans. Personally, I believe that public planning is necessary. I want the public to plan water development.
I want to control monopoly. Those who disagree with me want the giant land-owners, the speculators, to do the planning.
It isn't so much a question of planning, as it's a question of who does it, and in whose interest. But it isn't easy to bring about public understanding of the question. Just try to tell the public their own interest, and that they ought to do the planning. It's hard, it's hard.
There are many times when one feels exhausted and discouraged, and then you say, "People get the kind of government they deserve." The only thing is, I don't feel easy about that very long. I am not built that way, that's all.
Riess
Besides which, government is one thing, but when you get the kind of world that you deserve -- not everybody is in on that decision at all.
Taylor
Well, if they don't pay any attention to what kind they are getting, it's their own fault if they get what they don't like. That's what that means. In one way you can say it, and up to a degree you can accept it. "What a bunch of dumbbells!" But I can't say that very long, because I want to do something. [laughter] Even if they don't deserve it!
Broad vs. Specialized Learning
RiessWhy was population and migration taught in the Economics Department? Why not in history, American history?
Taylor
Why does a department pick up a course? Now you are really raising a question!
I know that now historians do deal with immigration. In Chicago in the twenties it was in the School of Social Welfare under Edith Abbott that immigration was taught. Where it is taught depends upon the time, upon the personal interests of the people in the department, upon the departmental budget. Now I find that the historians begin to pick up the subjects that I dealt with contemporaneously in the 1930s and the 1940s. Of course I did go back into the historical aspects of it, too. Now there is a Mexican-American History Association organizing in Santa Barbara.
In my own field of economics, my training at Wisconsin was the kind of training in which we never separated history, economics, sociology, law, political science from each other. We followed a problem, a subject; where history could contribute to an understanding of that, we went after its history. If law contributed, we went after that.
Now academic fields are much more fractionated, so a person takes only a slice of a subject or a problem. He justifies that by saying that he can do it more intensively. He "sharpens the blade of the knife by narrowing it" -- that's the saying. But he also excludes a tremendous amount of fact and questioning that is relevant to an understanding of the problem. Problems are presented to us whole, not in fractions. You can see in the University right to this day how they are trying to come back together across the disciplines, recognizing that they have been split up.
In the College of Environmental Design, for example, you'll find economists, planners, sociologists, lawyers -- all together. We split up altogether too much, from my point of view.
So I don't suppose that today there is any course in immigration anywhere. After all, a long time ago immigration closed as far as this country is concerned.
Population? It was given in sociology after Kingsley Davis came here from Columbia. When I gave it in economics, we didn't have any sociology department at U.C. The Sociology Department didn't come into existence until sometime in the 1940's, and didn't really flower until after World War II. (Then came the Department of Demography, which has just been closed down (1972). Remember that Social Welfare and Business Administration both grew out of the Economics Department in this University.
Riess
This thing of "sharpening the knife and narrowing it," is this the result of scholarship in the field, rather than the result of what the students want?
Taylor
Yes [laughs slightly], I think the "sharpening" has come from the faculty, rather than from the students. My own view is that this is one of the reasons why students have been asking for more relevance, because we tended not to focus on problems whole, as much as upon fractions of problems yielding to narrowed methods of analysis.
Personally, I generally have tried to take problems. I didn't say, "Now I am an economist, what is my contribution to this problem as an economist?" I never went at it that way. I went at the problem, and brought to bear whatever I could bring to bear upon it, not saying, "What am I? What is my speciality?" I was influenced by my economics training, but I hope not circumscribed by it. I welcome the broadening of approach that is occurring now through closer collaboration between specialists in different disciplines.
Riess
It sounds as though it is a big administrative thing now, to get all the people back together, in inter-departmental studies and so on.
Taylor
It is a little hard to say how it will be done; probably in more than one way. There are budgetary questions and inter-departmental and cross-departmental interests. History? Well, everything becomes history, or a field for history. And as one of my history professors, Frederick Logan Paxson, once remarked, "In the future, historians are going to find a great deal of their source work already done for them."
What he meant was that people, like myself, working on contemporary problems, would do the intensive work upon which an historian would then draw for later work done in a wider time perspective. I now find history students getting their Ph.D.'s out of collections of material that I have put into the Bancroft Library; materials which I collected and worked over contemporaneously.
I think I've always had a strong sense of history. So whatever I worked upon, whether contemporary agricultural labor or water problems, I've gone quickly to historical sources to find what light they could throw on the problem, and I've never been disappointed. Historical sources always have helped and enriched my understanding enormously.
I think there is another aspect of fractionation of academic work. It can shield one from some of the responsibilities of coming close to politically controversial issues. It makes it easier to say, "Now this is my contribution as an economist." You can speak with authority in your own narrow area, but beyond that, well, it is somebody else's responsibility, not yours.
On the contrary, with an approach to the problem as a whole, you find yourself obliged to come up with recommendations of some course of action that seems justified. That involves values and choices among values, and goes beyond the yield from any single discipline narrowly defined.
Personally I prefer the way that I have worked. I do not wish that I had modelled my work along narrower lines.
Chairmanship of a Changing Department
RiessHave there been changes in the style of the Economics Department, fluxes?
Taylor
Oh enormous! Enormous.
Riess
When you were chairman, did you try to change things back?
Taylor
Yes, but I couldn't do it.
The four years I was chairman I haven't talked about yet, have I?
Riess
No.
Taylor
In the first place, there were personnel clashes in the department.
Malcolm Davisson was attacked by some and particularly by Howard Ellis, a senior member of the department who had been president of the American Economics Association. Although Davisson had been chairman for a long time, this colleague complained to President Sproul that Davisson lacked the national standing due to the chairmanship of a department as distinguished as the Economics Department of the University of California. The result was that Davisson lost the chairmanship and found his career seriously damaged.
Had he wanted to be, I am sure that Davisson would have been a higher administrator. This attack upon him, so to speak, shot him down in mid-career and split the department wide open.
Clark Kerr, then Chancellor, asked me to step in, as a person who had not led any department faction. Nobody had anything against me because I hadn't allied myself with anybody particularly. I accepted, and tried to heal the wounds.
The "Ellis group" wanted greater emphasis upon economic theory, econometrics and mathematical economics and what I have been describing to you as the more fractionated approaches to economics. They were less
Well, for me, it was an unhappy experience. I weathered it, and I guess the department weathered it.
Riess
How is it that Ellis could have done so much damage?
Taylor
He went to Sproul. He had been made president of the American Economic Association, so he spoke with all the prestige of the top political position in the profession.
If you want me to really get into the personal aspects of it, I could do it. But I don't like to dredge them up... oh gee, is that what you want?
Riess
Well, you have a sense of history, I think you can evaluate it. I think it doesn't seem so much personal as maybe a trend.
Taylor
Well, I am giving you the trends and identifying the personal element. You can see that I am not sympathetic with the trend taken by the department.
Riess
I am surprised that Sproul would have been so easily swayed to make these changes.
Taylor
Yes, well Ellis apparently told Sproul that the chairman of this department was, in his professional standing, not up to what a chairman of a California Economics Department should be.
Riess
But departments select new chairmen every few years anyway, don't they?
Taylor
About every five years, yes. If they had waited about one more year, Malcolm Davisson probably would have relinquished the post anyway.
Riess
Why couldn't they wait that one more year?
Taylor
From my point of view, not to wait was totally unjustified! You know, even capable professors are sometimes small potatoes, and do small personal things!
Riess
I am interested in why the department, as an entity, should mean so much to the individual professor. Can't they just go on "doing their thing" with enough money so that they can do it?
Taylor
Yes, of course! I don't know what moved this fellow to attack. Human frailties, human frailties!
Riess
I should think it sounded like he wanted to be chairman of the department.
Taylor
Well, maybe he did, although of this I am uncertain. The Chancellor wanted me to take the position, which I did out of a sense of duty. As I say, those four years were the only unhappy years of my academic career from 1922 to 1962.
Riess
When you were made chairman, there wasn't any question in the minds of the two groups that you were the man whom they would accept as chairman?
Taylor
So far as I know they were all willing that I should be chairman of economics. No, I never felt that I was personally objectionable to them, although probably I was not the choice of a number.
I know, because I heard him say it, that it hurt Ellis to know that he was accused of having damaged the career of a colleague, possibly even outside the University. I didn't make the accusation, but I had heard it made, and evidently so had Ellis. I think he did hurt our colleague; I don't say he intended to do so.
As chairman, I had awfully hard experiences. [Feelingly.] We got along, weathered it all right, but it wasn't any fun presiding at department meetings. For instance, once at Harvard I met an economic history professor from either Oxford or Cambridge, named Habbakuk -- really a first-rate fellow! I tried to persuade the department to allow me to call him as a professor of economic history, to fill a vacancy in our department. Well, I couldn't put the appointment through. He was coming out for the summer. They said, "Well, wait til he comes."
I wanted to be able to say to Habbakuk, "You're coming to Berkeley for the summer, we want you permanently, will you accept?"
Well, they just said, "Wait until he comes."
Then, after he came, some of my colleagues fell
Riess
Was it now the powerful group of econometric people, when you talk about "they?"
Taylor
Well, the group holding the balance of power, the group generally mathematically oriented. It was sometimes a little larger, sometimes a little smaller, depending on the particular issue before us.
Another man that I wanted on our department faculty later became the United States Director of the Budget, the head of the Agency for International Development, and now is a vice-president of the Ford Foundation.
It was a struggle to get department approval to make him any kind of an offer.
So, from my viewpoint, I proposed two top men, and had to go through the struggle that I had to and then couldn't get department approval to make either one of them a good, clean, first-rate offer that I thought they deserved and might have accepted.
Riess
Was it that it was too democratically run? Didn't you have the power?
Taylor
No, I didn't have the power. I didn't have the votes. Stronger powers came to the chairman, I think, a little later.
Making Studies Relevant
TaylorWell, you can see today, my field of labor economics has suffered greatly within the department. When I was there, it had two of us. Now it has one, who is really there part-time. The theoretical and the statistical and the econometrics -- those interests pretty much define the prime interests of the department. That exaggerates somewhat, but has a large element of truth.
Riess
And yet maybe you would go along with that because if the things that you are interested in, like labor economics and immigration and population, have slid into the History Department, you would be as happy that they were turning up in another place, wouldn't you?
Taylor
In other words, you are saying the University gives them attention, but elsewhere?
Riess
Yes. Is that true?
Taylor
There is something to what you say, yes. If I were young today, just entering the academic profession, I wouldn't go into economics for the reason thatyou have just put up. I would go into something else. I would find the place most hospitable to my interests. That's right.
Riess
So maybe economics is in the process of disappearing. Maybe it is all going to be swallowed up in statistics or the Math Department. Perhaps this is just life. [laughter]
Taylor
[laughter] Yes. The opening of opportunity for my interests under new titles is the silver lining to the cloud. As we said earlier, people in various fields are beginning to see a necessity for coming together. But I assure you, there are losses while the processes of readjustment are going on.
Riess
Can you remember the department in the 1930s or 1920s?
Taylor
Of course, from the point of view of my labor interests, the twenties and the Depression were wonderful times. Especially during the Depression, my seminars were always well filled. I had as many first-rate graduate students, I suppose, as anybody in the department. Later I suffered from lack of good students when the
But in my very closing years, for whatever reason, there was apparently a return of student interest toward my field. In my last year before retirement, I had two very good students who completed doctorates with me on land reform. But during the 1960s, the kind of student who wanted my work was increasingly screened out of economics by the imposition of requirements which my kind of student didn't want to accept.
Riess
Where did they end up? Did they come to you in the Agricultural Economics Department then?
Taylor
That association of course helped me by giving opportunity to teach in a field of my real interest. I gave a course in rural sociology in the Department of Agricultural Economics in the College of Agriculture from 1936 to 1962. You see, that opportunity came to me under the influence of the Depression. Carl Alsberg, the director of Giannini who came from Stanford, said that they needed to do something in rural sociology to balance the emphasis on marketing and that sort of thing. So he asked me to come over and give rural sociology; the invitation was a blessing to me. I had interesting classes, with students drawn from many parts of the University.
You see, I did work in fields that overlapped -- economics and sociology, economics and history, economics and law, economics and political science, economics and public administration, economics and business administration. The kind of work which I taught is now given to a degree in all those fields, and even in engineering where time and motion studies were given. Of course, I didn't give the technique of time and motion studies, but I did give the responses of labor to scientific management, as it was called.
So the subjects which I gave in economics have been picked up as portions of work a number of places in the University.
Riess
You described the students with you in Wisconsin, who went into labor economics before and just after World War I. Maybe then and in the thirties there was this urgent interest in the field and now not so much anymore?
Taylor
In other words, was it a reflection of the period?
Yes, that interest in the 1920s and earlier was a reflection of the period in Europe, the revolutions in Russia, the rising labor party in Britain. That is true. The Depression, of course, enlarged that interest and brought it home.
Actually, with the coming of the Depression and the New Deal, students of Professor Commons and the likes of Professor Commons were to a considerable extent called on to staff New Deal programs.
Talk about relevance! Here were the problems of a country in the throes of the Depression, and it was Common's students who were called on to assume responsibilities for doing something about them.
Riess
This all seems inevitable, as you describe it. It seems acceptable.
Taylor
Both inevitable and acceptable! [laughter]
Riess
[laughter] First inevitable and then you have to accept it.
Taylor
Well, of course I don't like to wait for the inevitability to be clear to all. I think with foresight you can deal with problems to advantage earlier. If you wait for the inevitable, some pretty rough things happen... Outside universities I've tried to work on problems where, if the things were done early that I would recommend be done, I think this would moderate the severity of the conditions and moderate the conflicts that developed in their absence. That's true, I think, in both agricultural labor and the water situation; of course, these fields are inter-related. I think we could have smoother transitions. We've certainly got an unstable situation right now!
Riess
Maybe what seems to be lacking in public officials these days, is a kind of total education. Maybe it is a result of the "sharpening the knife."
Taylor
I don't want to push that too far, but we get alignments of political forces that see their own interests narrowly defined, to the point of eventually great hazard to themselves, a hazard which they only dimly recognize and do not really face.
If we were discussing the water situation -- reclamation -- I would read to you right now what Theodore Roosevelt said in 1911 before the Commonwealth Club. He warned the "very wealthy men" he was addressing of the "ruin that they would bring upon themselves" if they pursued on exactly the course they are pursuing today.
I think a heavy price is paid both within the academic world and outside because instead of emphasizing foresight to avoid problems, we wait until the problems hit us in the face and then try to figure out what to do.
Riess
Cycles are interesting. History is interesting. If you were an historian interviewing yourself, what would you ask yourself next? [laughter]
Taylor
I find now that people historically oriented pick up what I did as a contemporary problem in the 1920s. They encounter my work in the libraries and seem to think it is useful to historians. Yesterday I got a letter saying my Mexican Labor in the United States, originally printed 1928-1934, now has been reprinted to sell for $39.
A request arrived two days ago, from the University of Colorado, asking me for a copy of two monographs in that series, published in 1930. I find the work that I did for my doctorate on the Sailor's Union of the Pacific has been reprinted. Also the first article of mine ever published was re-published in a volume of readings edited at Columbia University.
So I find now that historians pick up my early work. The reason is that I chose subjects of enduring interest.
The water subject, in which I became involved in 1943, has been intermittently in the field of public interest ever since. It was hot in Congress in the mid-1940s, at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. Now, it is very hot in the courts.
For many years few paid attention to the subject of western reclamation or understood why I studied it so hard and wrote about it professionally. But now people whom I don't know come to my study door to ask me about the subject. They want to draw upon the knowledge I have gained working on the subject of reclamation during the past twenty-five years. In between times, hardly anybody was interested in the subject or came to my door.
Over many years my friends who knew of my interest in water and the acreage limitation provisions of reclamation law, were satisfied that my position was right because they had confidence in me, but they didn't really understand what the issue was about or make great effort to find out. Now, people coming to my door seek to understand and put to use the information they get.
I gave my paper on the acreage limitation issue before the AAAS yesterday. KRON-TV came to me yesterday while preparing a national program on the subject. [23 June 1970] That's how it is; at one time the subject is hot and everybody wants to know all about it, and so people come to me. The rest of the time nobody wants to know and I am left alone. You see what the historical cycles in public interest and apathy can mean to me.
Riess
I do.
Really, how do you think it was that you got into all these things?
Taylor
I guess you'd have to trace it to high school and possibly even earlier. In school debating used to be an important student activity. My first debate was in grammar school and the subject was: "Which colony progressed more rapidly, Virginia or Massachusetts?" In high school we had inter-society and
Look at the enormous growth of the power of corporations. The title of one of the recent books by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, is The Corporation Takeover. People are only mildly aware of what is happening to us, and how the power of corporations permeates our lives.
Corporations perform many valuable services, but they also affect our lives in some ways much less useful, and I think in some ways very damaging. The questionable aspect is the power that goes with the corporation, and the inclusion of more and more people within a bureaucracy, whether government or corporate. Those organizations have enlarging power over not only economic matters, but over political matters as well. One result is that what we used to call "civic-minded persons" tend to shy away from what I regard as the more fundamental political issues, and to go instead into good "civic works" that avoid the deeper political questions. In this way they keep out of the way of issues where the pressures are too great.
On the subject of water, I recall one young man -- Richard L. Boke -- who was driven out of his post as Regional Director of Reclamation because he was devoted to my position in support of the acreage limitation law and tried to enforce it. He and others -- a stream of them -- were driven from their government positions because they supported their basic law. One day Boke asked, "How are you able to keep your position at the University?"
Well, I was able to keep it because the University of California under President Sproul cushioned and rejected the pressures. Don't think I haven't been the object of pressures, most of which never reached me personally; the administration shielded me, yet, my belief is that the administration has plenty of
Riess
You did a lot of university committee work over the years.
Taylor
Oh, did you go through my bibliography and record in the department? Yes.
Riess
Did you enjoy it? Were you able to be effective in committees?
Taylor
Did I enjoy the committee work? Well, of course, some of it more than others. I don't recall any that was unpleasant. I do recall one incident that was amusing. Our committee had little more to do after a couple years, and one member proposed the committee be disbanded. The chairman squelched that by reminding us that if this committee was disbanded we were likely to be reassigned to some other committee that really had work to do.
At one time I was on the Library Committee. That was interesting, and my relations with Librarian Donald Coney always were good. He was interested in my recommendations about what newspapers to get and what things to do. I thought that committee work was useful and I liked doing it.
I never served on the Committee on Committees, nor on the Budget Committee -- those two are the most powerful faculty committees.
For two or three terms I was in the elected Representative Assembly. I regarded that as part of the day's work, something that needed doing, so I tried to do my part.
Riess
How did your graduate seminar in labor economics or your labor economics courses in general change over the years? How did the teaching by problem work?
Taylor
I always joined the historical to what was occurring contemporaneously, perhaps even filling the newspapers of the day. I don't mean that I walked into class every day and said, "Well, let's see what the newspaper said." But I would try to analyze contemporary problems historically. I used the law, a very great deal, because law is an instrument for dealing with problems. Commons did that, and I had considerable legal training myself, about the equivalent of going half-way through law school. For several years, particularly in the fifties and sixties, my principal publications were in law journals and on the acreage limitation issue.
Well, I tried in labor economics or whatever I was teaching to have in mind the problems of the day, problems that would be in the minds of, or seem vital to, the students. Then I tried to bring to bear everything that I could through history or law, or whatever. I would relate trade unions to the market, since they were instruments for influencing decisions in the market. Trade unions rejected judgments of the market place, uninfluenced or undiluted. Neither were they wholly satisfied with the judgments in the political sphere. So they challenge judgments in both spheres. So in my teaching, as in my research, politics, economics, law and history all merged.
I usually encouraged my students to take up contemporary questions in their class reports and theses. Some chose to study a particular trade union; many studied particular strikes, especially agricultural labor strikes. There were lots of those in the 1930s, and the students found great interest in going into their history and conduct. In so doing they learned a great deal about the structure of their society, and the location and exercise of power.
Riess
Who were some of the good students, that you remember?
Taylor
The one who has had the most distinguished academic career is Clark Kerr, who became President of the University and then was kicked out when Governor Reagan came into power. Then, Arthur M. Ross, a vice president of the University of Michigan, who died just within the last ten days or two weeks.
Also Walter Goldschmidt, professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A., and author of the famous Arvin-Dinuba study of 1946 comparing the effects on rural society of large-scale and family size farms. With cooperation from the Anthropology Department, and serving as member of his doctoral committee, I was de facto in charge of and responsible for Goldschmidt's doctoral dissertation. I had similar relations to the doctoral dissertations of Samuel E. Wood in Political Science, and of La Wanda in History. I wasn't the titular chairman of their committees, but as a member the chairman from each of the departments was happy to leave responsibility for supervision of the dissertations to me. After all, the subjects they chose were in my field of interest.
Riess
Just what did Goldschmidt study with you?
Taylor
[laughter] The historical cycle again. The KRON-TV man who came to my office yesterday, he said, looking at my shelves, "Oh, there is that book by Walter Goldschmidt which I just got a hold of, As You Sow." The KRON-TV man is going down this evening or tomorrow into the Valley to make his video-tape on the water fight in the Valley, so for his background he got Walter Goldschmidt's doctoral dissertation, published in 1947. If you choose the right kind of subject for research, it has a date but it doesn't die.
Riess
Anthropology?
Taylor
Social anthropology. Goldschmidt was comparing the structure of two communities in the Valley, one surrounded by large-scale farms, and the other built upon smaller family farms.27
Actually, anthropologists always have had difficulty separating themselves from the sociologists. When you read the definitions of their fields, each one tried to tell how different their fields were from the
The emphasis of the actual work in those days, between sociology and anthropology, was largely divided between the contemporary society of the western world, and the societies of the primitives. Now the anthropologist and sociologist are both increasingly interested in contemporary developed society, and the differences between them are diminishing.
Elias Tuma, one of the students who took his doctoral dissertation with me in 1962, my very last year before retirement, is now on the faculty at UC Davis. The other, who wrote also on problems of land tenure, is on the staff of the International Labor Office, Geneva, or was there the last I knew. Stuart Jamieson is professor at the University of British Columbia. Beverly Tangri is professor at Winnepeg. John Huttman is at San Francisco State and his wife, Elizabeth, is at Hayward. Phil Broughton, now retired, is in Carmel, was with the Mellon Foundation at Pittsburgh for many years. A couple were for some years in the California Legislature, one in the Assembly and the other in the Senate. My students are just all over!
Riess
Is there any one person who is fighting your battles, who will continue to fight your battles, do you think?
Taylor
If you had been at luncheon with me today, I think you would have said the answer is yes. But he wasn't my student.
Riess
Who is he?
Taylor
His name is James Lorenz. He is doing law work for the case challenging the illegality of the State Water Project's exemption from acreage limitation. Now Alvin Duskin, with his ads, is financing the litigation.28 James Lorenz, whom I met in Los Angeles as head of California Rural Legal Assistance, is taking on
Riess
Do you think he has a real feeling for the whole thing?
Taylor
The answer is yes, he certainly talks that way, and seems to be acting that way, and my morale on that subject is up.
Effectiveness Within the System: The Water Issue
TaylorI told you how people have asked me, and how Dorothea used to ask me, too: "Are you going to end up writing the history of your defeat on the water issue?"
Well, I never was able to answer that question with certainty. All I could say was, "Well, they haven't defeated me, they've nicked me." I've had some "non-victories." But it wouldn't be an issue in the courts and Congress today if I, with the people who supported me, had not worked at it. It is an issue today because we had enough victories to make it an issue. And Lorenz has ideas of how to take the offensive, and to take advantage of peoples growing awareness of the environment. Ecology, environment, the interests of the youth are coming to bear upon this issue.29
Riess
Yes, you have all those current concerns going for you.
Taylor
That's right.
The other side -- the interests which I oppose -- they indicated a few weeks ago their great apprehension over Proposition 7, which was to raise the interest rate on the bonds of the State Water Project. They were very fearful that the environmentalists might be able to kill Proposition 7. Now, having won on Proposition 7, they feel, at least for the moment, that they have taken the political measure of the environmentalists. Now they know how much they weigh politically. And they believe they don't weigh enough to defeat the developers! Well, I don't think the story is all told yet. That is only the first round of this recent awakening of the issue.
Do you want to hear about the ways of getting things done? You see, on the one hand you have the issue as an abstract political issue. On the other hand is the participant. I have been a participant; I've played a role. Some things wouldn't have happened if I hadn't happened to be at a certain place at a certain time. Like Dorothea, who happened by "chance," as the San Francisco News said, to be at Nipomo so she could photograph the "migrant mother." Was my participation by "chance?" I do not know how many "chances" I missed. But some I did not miss.
How do you take hold of a public issue and get something done about it? There are these two ways of looking at that 160-acre water problem, for example, or the agricultural labor problem. One is to discuss the problem -- this aspect of it, that aspect of it. The other way is to play an active role as a person, as a citizen, as a professor. [Emphatically] I've played a role, seeking to get something done, namely, enforcement of the acreage limitation law. I haven't been content simply to record what happened, although I have done that, too.
Riess
Yes, how to be an effective citizen. I want to get that down, as a subject in itself.
Taylor
Yes, and that is what I am saying to you, that it is a subject in itself. What I have learned is mainly
I have learned, as an informed citizen, how to be effective. I have learned also some of the limitations facing a citizen trying to be effective. I've run up against the obstacles, but I think that subject might be an interesting phase which wouldn't come out in this interview if one said only, "Well, the 160-acre limitation, let's discuss its meaning, how it originated and whether changing times have changed its usefulness."
You see? Analysis and action, although related, are two different things.
In commenting on the effective-citizen aspect of my work, I'd like to begin by dredging up memories of my studies of Mexican immigration. Both questions I have studied most intensively -- agricultural labor and water -- were public, political issues, and still are.
I was not attracted to make my studies of Mexican labor because it was a public issue. After commencing work I soonlearned, however, that it was becoming one, and I avoided direct personal participation. At the time I thought participation might make study and analysis more difficult, block sources of information, and possibly interfere with the objectivity of my inquiries. Toward the close I did furnish the Department of State, upon request, my view on the adequacy of farm labor supplies in the Southwest, i. e., that the market was more than well supplied with laborers and that few if any crops would be lost if the supply was not replenished by continued influx from Mexico.
As Research Director of the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the State Emergency Relief Administration in 1935, I came closer to politics by recommending a program to establish camps for migrants, but the recommendation was to administrative superiors with power of decision, not to Congress. I learned quickly through experience the importance of public relations to the success of a program, i.e., public understanding of problem and program; but I did not learn this through direct political participation in the decision-making process.
Taking up the water issue, it was not long before I found myself very aware of, and active in the political process. Did I get into this position by "accident" or by chance?"
If I had to generalize, I would say that I do not know how, at the moment of its occurrence, to surely identify an important event, an important decision, and to distinguish it from what is unimportant. In perspective, the important event or decision may stand out very clearly, but important things at the time often don't appear to be important. It's afterwards that they can turn out to be enormously important, and to be so recognized. I'm not sure I am making myself clear, but I'll be more specific and perhaps my meaning will become plain.
In 1934 I was in Washington, D.C. studying self-help cooperatives among the unemployed on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. I found my way into the office of Jacob Baker, one of Harry Hopkins' assistants. I had met him in Oakland at the UXA cooperative one day when he was there looking into self-help cooperatives among the unemployed. So when I got to Washington I went to see what reports or information he had that might be helpful in my researches.
It was in the midst of the severe 1934 drought, and he said, "I am going out tomorrow to North Dakota. We are fanning out all over the Great Plains, and I am to reconnoitre North Dakota to see what needs to be done. If you will go I'll put you on as a dollar-a-year man. You won't get any salary, but I'll pay your train fare and expenses."
So I went to North Dakota. On the train was Arthur Goldschmidt, whose most recent official position was United States Ambassador to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, under L.B.J.--ousted, of course, when Nixon came in. In 1934 he was a young fellow, just getting married. Well, we reconnoitered North Dakota together. That was a first step.
A second step came in 1943. Goldschmidt was now head of the Power Division in the office of Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes. Construction
One of the Problems, No. 19, was acreage limitation. The question: what to do about the 160-acre law. That is how, by a series of "accidents," I found myself in the middle of the water issue where I've been ever since. I had learned only a year or two before that there was such a thing as an acreage limitation law. That fact had been largely kept in the dark, smothered. I didn't know there was such a law until my friend and neighbor, Walter Packard, with whom I had served in the Farm Security Administration, told me.
Packard said, "They should limit the land-owners to water for 160 acres."
I said, "You meant that is what they ought to do?"
"No," he said, "that's the law."
"Do you mean that that is the law now? That a landowner is not to get water for more than 160?"
He said, "Yes. That is the law now."
Well, that is how I found out about it. When Arthur Goldschmidt took me on as a consultant I began to talk with people who were, or might properly serve on the study of Problem 19. I was in favor of that law. I watched as attention to the problem began to come to a focus. Soon it became clear that the large land-owning interests opposed to it had adopted a tactic of silence on the issue, in which they were generally joined by Bureau of Reclamation engineers.
The Bureau of Reclamation administrators found that professionals from the Bureau of Agricultural Economics who were invited to participate in the studies -- in fact they were even paid by the Bureau of Reclamation
Observing that word of the law's existence was spreading, its supporters got the Irrigation Districts Association to adopt a resolution asking Congress to exempt the Central Valley from this "unreasonable, etc." law. With that, the issue began coming out into the political open.
I saw this. I didn't know how fast they would move, but they moved within a few months. Their tactic was to avoid any publicity on the issue that might mobilize supporters of the law. At House of Representatives hearings concerned with the project, they waited until hearings were over then slipped through with no advance warning what is called a "committee amendment" proposing exemption of Central Valley Project from acreage limitation law. So, no witnesses likely to oppose exemption were aware that such a proposal was going to be made. The exemption amendment was learned by Bureau officials about 8 o'clock on the morning of the day when it was going to come to the floor in the afternoon. That gave no chance to rally forces to block exemption. Congressman Jerry Voorhis, whom Richard Nixon defeated in the next election, tried to substitute a compromise with partial enforcement in place of outright exemption, but the effort failed. The exemption successfully obtained by Congressman Elliott from Kern and Tulare counties, slipped through the House on March 22, 1944, in about 20 minutes.
By grapevine I heard that opponents of the law then expected to have their exemption through the Senate within three weeks. Well, they never got it. They didn't get it because the Senate had to hold public hearings on the bill including the exemption.
Riess
So that's the safeguard in this.
Taylor
That is the safeguard of the democratic process. Do you want me to tell you what I did, from which I
The Senate Commerce Subcommittee hearings on H.R. 3961 were held in May of 1944. I talked with friends who shared my views; some were in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in Washington, notably Marion Clawson, and did their part in spreading word of the importance of the acreage limitation issue.
I went to the AFL. I said, "Here is what is proposed; is this what you want?" "Oh, no, that isn't what we want." Before that, I had been to the AFL in San Francisco, and had told Secretary C. J. Haggerty the situation. He responded immediately. Labor didn't want the exemption. The labor people in San Francisco told the AFL in Washington that they didn't want the exemption. So, when I went to the Washington AFL and said, "The hearings are going to be held soon. Do you want that exemption to go through?" the response was immediate: "No, we don't want it to go through!" So, a representative of the AFL was at the hearings. All that was necessary was that they be informed.
I went likewise to the separate CIO, to Robert Lamb, an economist whom I had met a few years earlier in Senator LaFollette's office. So, there was also a CIO spokesman at the hearings.
I had met James G. Patton, the president of the Farmer's Union, when he was in Berkeley (in this room, incidentally). So, I went to the Farmer's Union, and also to the National Grange. The Grange, the National Farmer's Union, the AFL, were all there to testify against exempting Central Valley from the acreage limitation law.
It was during the war and I went to veterans' organizations -- Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. Their representatives testified against an exemption. You see, if irrigated land was to be opened to settlement, they wanted veterans to have opportunity to get land. That was the historic position of the government; veterans had a preference. So they wanted no exemption. Church organizations, too, were alerted. I didn't do all this informing
Riess
I thought we were talking about within a three-week period.
Taylor
That was in its final Washington stage. But of course the issue had been building up, and we had been spreading information earlier in California.
Riess
So there had been prior warning?
Taylor
Yes. I don't remember all the things that I did, and I don't want to claim that I did everything -- for others were active, too -- but I did quite a lot.
Riess
How about going to newspapers?
Taylor
I'll tell you about that later.
The California Grange Master, George Sehlmeyer, moved because one local grange, the Farmersville Grange, down in the Valley, passed a resolution to support the acreage limitation. Robert W. Pontius, with Farm Security Administration experience, pushed the right button down there, and as a result of that Sehlmeyer took his strong stand for acreage limitation, and the National Grange testified.
It was during the war, and the National Grange representative asked the Senate committee, "Who ever heard of a man shouldering his musket for his boarding house?" He'd shoulder his musket for his farm, but not for his boarding house. [laughter] That was his own idea.
So you punch the right button and (snap!) like that comes the response. Legislative representatives of national organizations didn't know about the acreage limitation issue in Congress until they were
Democratic Senator Sheridan Downey undertook to do in the Senate what Congressman Elliott had done in the House, notwithstanding that the exemption had been struck from the Senate bill. Still thinking he could win an exemption, he obtained authority under S. Res. 295 to hold hearings in California in July. But these largely blew up in his face. Witnesses favoring exemption spoke, of course, but the surprise was the number of California witnesses who opposed exemption. For example, Catherine Bauer (later Catherine Bauer Wurster) ended her oral testimony against exemption with these words: "And so there is just one thing I hope for. And that is that the Senate, with wisdom and foresight, will prevent our admirable but short-sighted Senator, and this great but immature and heedless State, from making a mistake which the whole country will later regret."30
Well, many people participated then. It was far beyond the early phase when two or three of us were the informed key people getting it started. It just fanned out and was picked up by many others, and they just snowed Downey under at those hearings!
Riess
Was there a sense of outrage on the part of the AFL and CIO and the Grange people, that they didn't know about this thing happening under their noses?
Taylor
No. They were moved to act, but didn't expect their opponents to inform them.
What I am telling you is, that action came because of what somebody did. For my own part, I can feel the heat of the Washington pavement yet. There is a place that when I go back there I still remember that building and how hot it was that day. But that's the way you get things done!
Riess
A one-man lobby!
Taylor
Well, you just go on and punch the buttons, and if you know what buttons to punch, you can do it.
Riess
When you use that image, though, it is as if you are trying to make it sound like it was an easy thing to do.
Taylor
It sounds easy?
Riess
Yes. When you use the image of punching a button.
Taylor
I would usually explain the situation to people. I'd say, "Is that what you want?" The answer in the places that I went, the answer was, "No! We don't want that." "Well, the hearings of the Senate Commerce Committee are being held," and I told them when they were being held. Then they would ask to appear as witnesses.
The net result was that the Senate Commerce Subcommittee rejected the exempting clause in the Rivers and Harbors bill, and the Senate did the same. But interests favoring the exempting clause were strong enough to have it restored in conference. So the fate of the exemption was tied to the fate of the entire bill filled with flood control and harbor appropriations for many places throughout the United States. The issue had reached its critical point -- all appropriations and exemption, or no appropriations.
Well, I've told you earlier how it came out, with LaFollette forcing Downey to back down.
Riess
I asked you about newspapers before. What about public response?
Taylor
Oh, newspapers. All right.
The story of the local newspapers is primarily the story of the San Francisco News, the Scripps-Howard paper, now merged. Well, as I've told you, I knew the associate editor, George West. (see p.138) Here, nine years later, the acreage limitation was coming up. I remembered my old friend who had taken our side on the migrants' camps.
And then I got to know the News's Washington correspondent, Ruth Finney. The way we in California kept in touch all those years was because Ruth Finney wrote a Washington letter about three times a week, which was published in the San Francisco News. She kept track of that issue and told us in print what maneuvering was going on in Washington. That's how we knew then; it's not that way now. I used to go to the cigar store at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph and upon occasion would buy fifteen to thirty copies of Ruth Finney's letter, and send them back to our people in Washington, or down in the Valley, to let them know what was going on.
(I bought thirty copies within the last week of the Chronicle, when Duskin's ad on the water issue was in the paper. [week prior to June 24, 1970] The cigar store man looked at me. I said, "Oh, do you remember?" He said, "Yes. I remember.")
Riess
Were there letter-writing campaigns, like there are now?
Taylor
Oh, down in the Valley they used petitions with lots of signatures that sometimes got inserted in the Congressional Record. I didn't circulate petitions. I would notify some people of the latest facts and prospects. By that time, informing people was enough; there was already momentum.
Grace McDonald of the Farmer-Labor-Consumer Information Committee in Santa Clara did tremendous work when the Downey Committee went into the Valley. She would go down there and inform farm people who would act.
There was Edward Banfield, who at that time was with the Farm Security Administration here. He came to my home at an early stage, bringing a young woman with him. Banfield later became successively a professor at Chicago, then Harvard, and now the University of Pennsylvania. As a Farm Security man, he was interested in the land and water issue, you see. He said to me, "She will go down the Valley and spread the word down there. She needs a little
She went down; also Father Charles Phillips, an Oakland Catholic priest, went into the Valley. They spread the word all over, and we fixed Sheridan Downey's July hearings through their work. You'd say to people, "What Downey wants is to exempt the Central Valley from the 160-acre limitation. Is that what you want?" "No!"
Riess
Were there organizations down there that they could spread the word through?
Taylor
Yes, sure, largely the Grange. And after you'd punch the right buttons they'd rise up and do their part.
This doesn't work so well now. The Grange isn't so numerically effective. Then they wanted to rise up and say, "We're for the family farm." They would still do that, down in the Valley. But today California is increasingly urbanized, and the urban-raised generation thinks the family farm belongs to history, that it is passing out, and that efforts to save or revive it are "fuddy-duddy." Down in the Valley, family farmers still don't think the family farm is dead, although they know it is under heavy pressure. But the city people fall for the argument that a farm has got to be bigger, because of bigger machinery, and to be more efficient, etc. They swallow that propaganda, you see. So today, you've got to punch different buttons than in the forties, although with some persons the "family farm" slogan still works. It doesn't work with the citified liberal; most citified liberals don't know what a farm is, anyway.
Riess
But there are different buttons.
Taylor
Sure. Now the buttons that you punch are called "conservation," "environment," "stop the urban sprawl and slurb," "preserve open space." Then you go to the educators and you say, "Under Abraham Lincoln you had land grants for education. How about water grants for education?" Educators rise to it, and they approve, but educators are not action people.
Conservationists want to act. Educators are much slower to act, but they do respond. So that's the new face of the alignment today. Labor has been consistent in its support of acreage limitation all through. In fact, their battle against land monopoly in California dates from the 1870's.
Now, I can't tell you just how it will come out, but I've given you something on the episodes in the long struggle. I've told you how in 1944 we halted the exemption in the U.S. Senate.
When I went to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Francisco, I went to their State Quartermaster-Adjutant, M.C. Hermann, and I took with me one of the officials of the Bureau of Reclamation who was then on my side; (now they are not). "Sam" Hermann rose to the occasion. He went to Washington and testified before Congress; he had his speeches inserted in the Congressional Record. He could speak very well himself, and then some other things written for him he had put into the Record. He did fine.
Later, after Hermann left, the other side closed off action by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The Arizona delegation to a National VFW Convention persuaded the resolutions committee that acreage limitation was of no important to veterans, notwithstanding it was the VFW that had put through the first resolution for government purchase of the excess lands to improve veterans access to farms.
Government purchase of excess lands is the guts of bills in Congress today. It would be effective in law enforcement, and would get "water grants" for education in the form of revenues for the treasury instead of for the pockets of private speculators. The National Education Association supports government purchase as means of getting "water grants" for education. The Sierra Club supports government purchase as means of controlling land use and preserving open spaces.
What government purchase means is this: the government buys the excess lands above 160 acres per owner at the pre-water price prescribed as the sale price in present law. Senator Paul Douglas gave me the idea of government purchase, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars were the first ones to put through a resolution proposing it.
How did the VFW learn about acreage limitation and government purchase? One day I went to the Veterans Building in San Francisco. I just walked in. Well, I'm a veteran of foreign wars. The fellow in charge, M. C. Hermann, was interested and he responded. The VFW did marvellously as long as Hermann was in office.
That's another example of the way to get things done. That's why the acreage limitation law is still on the statute books. I didn't say it was enforced; enforcement is another story.
I could give you the story of the pressures from the large corporate interests that tear enforcement of the law to shreds, so that administrators, so far as possible, just ignore it, pay no attention to it.
Riess
What are citizens supposed to be doing? I think it is incredible, the nick-of-time quality to all this. If you hadn't been on the scene, if you hadn't done anything...
Taylor
I believe I told you how "accidentally" in a sense, I was asked to become consultant on the staff of the Power Division, in Secretary Ickes' office?
One day in the middle of the struggles in Congress that I described earlier, "Tex" Goldschmidt, the head of the division, said, "I guess we'll have to rename this the 160-acre Division!" Goldschmidt responded beautifully. Immediately above him and fully supportive was Abe Fortas, Undersecretary of the Interior, later member of the Supreme Court.
Riess
Back then you hadn't had a history of defeats and unheeded petitions behind you...
Taylor
I hadn't had a history of defeat? Yes, I can tell you that side, too. But you are speaking of the sense of frustration which the young generation is expressing?
What I say to you and to the young generation is this: Study your targets. Study what buttons to push and when to push them. Then push them, and you will get results.
Riess
You are saying that you should deal with a specific
Taylor
Sure. If you are talking about the young students, what I say is, they are likely to pick the wrong targets. They have elevated Governor Reagan, I am afraid, to re-election, and to become a senatorial or even presidential possibility -- well, that is exactly the wrong result.
Why don't they take him on, for example, on my issue? They could tear Governor Reagan apart on the water issue; it would expose him. But, they don't do it!
They get rocks and throw them through the glass doors, they "reconstitute" the University, put posters all over the place, and all of that! And Governor Reagan loves it. The more the mess here, the surer he is of re-election.
I say they don't know what buttons to push. Or, if you want to break it down, there are really two answers. There are the people who don't want to deal from within, that is, the outright revolutionaries. They want a mess! The saying is, things have got to get worse before they get better, so get everybody in a mess! I say they pick the wrong targets; they say, that doesn't make any difference. The students are here, so the University is the target. What they say in effect is, "Reagan? Yeah, sure we may be re-electing him now, but that will make things still worse and that is what has got to happen before we have a revolution."
I say, from the different premise, "Work within the system and knock Reagan out. Tell people the truth about water issues and about economic and political aspects of this. This is the guts of the power structure of California; this is how this place is run."
"Giant landholdings, giant corporations, now they want the water in addition to the land." This is a century-old development. This was all foretold beautifully in the Visalia Delta in 1877.
I think I told you, a government commission came out here and said, "Yes, it is feasible to
That's exactly what is happening today, exactly! As I told you, at lunch today, here's this young man who has done the legal work on this suit to compel application of acreage limitation law to the California State Water Project, James Lorenz, Jr. And it is just the first of a bunch of suits. That's choosing the right target.
When Ralph Nader was out here several months ago, his sister invited me over to meet him at her home. I had, oh, twenty minutes to a half an hour with him. I understand his people are likely to be at my door most any time now. What with the law suits, and if you get Nader's Raiders going, and if the students will get busy, maybe I won't just be writing the history of my defeat. I don't know, I don't know.
But do you see the little things on which this depends? In my case, I do the extra thing, beyond making the study. I take one step more. I go out onto the streets, I talk to somebody. I try to find the right somebody.
Riess
James Lorenz must draw not only information from you, but a lot of the spirit and the feeling that things are possible.
Taylor
Well, he's a young Harvard law graduate who got into the California Rural Legal Assistance. I don't know how he got into that. But anyone getting into CRLA learns the condition of farm laborers.
Did I go to the California Rural Legal Assistance? Yes, I walked down the street to the CRLA office in Los Angeles. I had never heard of Lorenz. I met him and he showed interest. That was some years ago.
Now, as an individual, he is the attorney in that suit. He asks me key questions about the legal history of the law and I can turn to my shelves and say, "Here it is." Now he wants to carry it on, and he is thinking about the buttons to push!
And if Nader's Raiders will get going... fine!
I don't know how much perserverance and guts the conservationists have. I am not just sure about that, but I have hopes. We have a good bill prepared to improve enforcement of reclamation law. Lloyd Tapling, Washington representative of the Sierra Club, said to me, "If we arrange a meeting with the relevant people in conservation, education and anybody else that you want to come -- labor, the National Farmers' Union, and so on -- will you come to Washington?" I said, "I will," and I went.
Well, we had two meetings. One before I went into the hospital, and one when I came out. That bill is not yet introduced! That bothers me. Why isn't that introduced? If I were walking the streets in Washington, could I get that introduced? I pick up the telephone and call them and they say, "Well..." they always have some reason for inaction.31 So don't think it is all walking down the street, punching a button. [laughter] That's a shorthand way of describing it. Sometimes you have to walk down the street more than once, punch the button more than once.
Riess
It's such a sharp contrast to sitting in back rooms and saying, "It is all so hopeless!"
Taylor
Of course you have your problems. The church people responded beautifully in those early days. [sadly] They are hardly responding now. I think they could be got to respond, the Protestants particularly. They never changed their position to the other side, you understand, they just don't do much of anything.
The Catholics, they don't change their position. I knew two priests who did marvellously over the years. One went down to the Valley, cooperating with that young woman I gave $25 to, in spreading news to set the stage for action down in the Valley.
Another one, under his influence, became involved as a younger man studying for the priesthood. Father James L. Vizzard says he heard me speak at a San Jose bishop's meeting. Marvellous! He has been very effective in Washington. Recently he went to Santa Clara University, where he was not functioning on the water issue. More recently he went to San Joaquin Valley to work among farm laborers. In Washington his absence makes the difference between night and day.
So the fences that you build, well, weathering knocks them down. You have to rebuild your fences all the time.
Riess
You shouldn't have to keep doing this.
Taylor
That is, you think it would be nice if it didn't all depend on me. Well, it doesn't all depend on me but more of it depends on me than should, that's right. From one point of view then, it would depend less on me if people were less apathetic. But people are apathetic. They are not well informed. They are "busy," you see.
Riess
I know.
Taylor
And it is not easy to tell people the meaning of the 160, not easy to tell them that. You've got to have their attention, with an open mind. When they open their minds on the subject of the environment, then you can shoot it in, and they say, "Oh, oh is that it? Is that what it means?"
And you have waited years for that to happen. Then they talk open spaces and you can hook the 160 onto where they think they are going. And you can say, "Why don't you do this?"
"OK, I'll go right on with it," they respond. Before, when they were not going anywhere, they wouldn't carry your banner at all.
You can get results only when you can get people's minds open. But it is amazing what results you can get at the right time, with the right people!
You asked about the newspapers. The San Francisco News is now merged, it is no longer in existence. The newspapers of California, you might say, are all on the other side. All of any importance, all that I know, are on the other side. Their main tactic is silence.
I am wondering how far Ed Hart, the KRON-TV man, is going to get. He's a good man, and gave the issue some publicity, but I don't know how far he is going to get before somebody yanks him by the collar and says, "Well, you've done about enough of this now."
I had this little incident. A colleague of mine at the University put this idea of water grants for education before, I believe it was, the science editor of the Chronicle, or maybe it was the education editor, I don't know. He was interested, even telephoned me about it. Then he went to his superior.
The version that came back to me, roundabout, was this: his superior said, "Yes, that's an interesting idea; it belongs in the field of your colleague over there." In other words, it is not your responsibility. But nothing ever appeared in the paper. Nobody ever said, "No, it isn't the paper's policy to play that up," but silence is the result.
Things come back to me. I can't prove them on paper, but you see what they do, what they do not do. It's perfectly plain. Silence. You see, the other side can't stand publicity on the issue. We always win if we can get the publicity.
If they hadn't enveloped us on Proposition 7, we could have killed it. But the media smothered us.
The citizen loses his independence in a big political area where decisions that affect economic and political power in a big way are made at the top in corporate hierarchies. And the able, good men below them, they are not independent. They are well taken care of, they are well-meaning. They will do many good things, but they will lay off public policy issues and so avoid friction with their organizations.
My friend, Marion Clawson, whom I told you was with the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in 1944, went to alert the Grange in Washington, and testified before Congress. Well, before long, they just crucified him when the Interior Department wanted to make him head of the Bureau of Land Management. Interior finally succeeded, but Senator Sheridan Downey went clear up to "Ma Perkins," the head of the Federal Civil Service Commission, and previously the Secretary of Labor, to oppose Clawson's appointment, and to declare his unfitness. In that way Senator Downey just put Clawson through the wringer because Clawson had opposed Downey's effort to exempt Central Valley Project from acreage limitation.
The United States Commissioner of Reclamation, and the Regional Director of the Central Valley Project -- Senator Downey put them off the federal payroll by a rider to the appropriation bill. For seven months neither family knew if they would ever get on the payroll again. What got them back was the re-election of Harry S. Truman as President in 1948 -- when the pollsters said he wouldn't make it. You see the pressures? They take your job away from you, or if they can, they prevent you from getting a good job, like becoming the head of the Bureau of Land Management.
I survived because I was protected by the University of California, under Bob Sproul, President. On
Riess
You called yourself a citizen, when you did this?
Taylor
Oh, yes. I was an informed citizen.
Riess
But it is hard to be an informed citizen.
Taylor
That's right. I've tried very hard to inform others.
Riess
It is hard to know even what you have to guard against. That is what you said in the beginning, that it was accidental that you even knew what the battle was that you had to fight.
Taylor
I stumbled into it, but I recognized it quickly when I learned the facts.
Riess
You knew what the implications were.
Taylor
Oh, then I knew right away. I said to Walter Packard, "Then you mean to say that the 160-acre limitation is the law, or that it should be the law?" He said, "It is the law."
You see, from the picture of farm labor that I had known so well, I never had heard of the 160-acre limitation, not even though in 1935 I saw the All-American Canal under construction under the Boulder Canyon Reclamation Projection; and although construction of Central Valley Project was beginning.
Yes, on the one hand, there is the sense of frustration today, and I can understand it. But also, I am a strong believer in the possibility of working within tbe system, if you will work it! It takes knowledge, information and a will to work it, and then the doing it! Doing it means going to talk to somebody. After you have talked with somebody, then you can perhaps write him a letter to follow through, but you've got to go talk to him first. That can produce some action.
Well, you have got some glimpses of my experiences and views.
Effectiveness Within the System: Mexican Immigration
TaylorNow maybe I can go back into my studies of Mexican labor, Chapter I in all this. You see, that involved a big practical question. The big growers wanted seasonal labor admitted and there was friction within Mexico. Congress held hearings on it, just months before I started my studies. I stumbled very fast into the fact that it was a hot political issue. Just as I was starting my researches, a visiting Harvard professor of rural sociology, Thomas Nixon Carver, was asked to speak at the annual State Agricultural Extension agents Berkeley meeting in January, 1927. Carver talked about unlimited Mexican immigration and said what a bad thing it was for smaller farmers: we should not allow unlimited immigration. He used the analogy of slavery, which injured smaller farmers while building big plantations.
He even said unrestricted Mexican immigration was the death of the family farm, because it flooded the labor market to the advantage of large-scale operators. As in the South, a flooded labor market reduced the value of labor. Since the family farmer was laborer as well as land-owner, wage income was tied to the wage of the competitive Mexican laborer. I understand Carver's talk was protested by citrus-growers down the coast, notably by C. C. Teague, later a Regent, who got up in arms and practically climbed all over B. H. Crocheron, the director of Agricultural Extension. So Extension never had any more speakers like that.
When I went to Crocheron to ask a letter of introduction to his agents, whom he had in every county and who knew a good deal about their local labor situations, I didn't know at the time just why it was that I got such a perfunctory, cold letter. By contrast, from President Campbell I carried a beautiful, cordial letter with a big gold seal, saying that I was making this study for the Social Science Research Council, that any assistance would be appreciated, signed William W. Campbell, President. From Crocheron at the Extension Service, I got a little note that read about like this: "This will introduce Dr. Taylor, who may wish to call upon you for some information."
At some point I met Congressman Albert Johnson, in charge of House hearings and leading a fight to check Mexican immigration. He was from Hoquim, Washington.
And on the other side I met Chamber of Commerce people who were trying to block restriction, and there were really very fine men among them. As for myself, I leaned to the side of limiting immigration. As my studies advanced I learned increasingly the pressures against restriction. So I saw as my best position, while studying, to keep out of the political contest. I was just starting my study. So I said, "I am trying to find out, so I am not taking any sides in this."
Well, eventaully, and at request, I did use my knowledge in relation to administrative decision. It came about this way: a high school classmate, with whom I had been on the same debating team, had gone into the State Department in Washington. In 1929 I called on him. Knowing what I was studying, he said he had a State Department friend concerned with the immigration question, and would I talk with him about Mexican immigration? Well, sure I would.
Here was the story of the State Department: A bill was up in Congress to limit immigration from Mexico, with heavy congressional pressure behind it, notably from Johnson, of Washington, and Box, of Texas. The State Department's position, I learned in the course of conversation with an assistant secretary of state, was that the State Department did not want the bill to go through. The reason given me was that our natural posture with respect to Latin-American countries was, that as New World nations our relations are on a different basis than among nations of the Old World. Basence of quota or other restrictive immigration legislation was tangible evidence of this difference.
Previously, I was told, the State Department had tried to stop restrictive legislation bearing down
So when they called me in to talk with the assistant secretary, I learned that the assistant secretary wanted most to know whether the U.S. agricultural employers really needed so many laborers from Mexico. My answer was: I had been all over the Southwest, and I had never seen or heard of a crop lost for lack of labor. Rather, what I had seen was unemployed Mexican labor, labor seeking work all over the place!
He asked me to write it down. He said, "We won't use it publicly unless you say we can. We don't expect to." So I wrote that down, and apparently they relied on it. Accepting as a fact that crops weren't going to be lost if immigration was limited, the State Department said to Congress, in effect, "We will restrict immigration without any quota law. We will do it by stricter interpretation of existing law. We have been allowing Mexicans to come in freely, in any number. But there is a law that says, "persons liable to become a public charge are inadmissible."
The Mexicans, they had said, were not liable to become a public charge, because down the street in El Paso a half a dozen blocks from the immigration station at the border, the Santa Fe or S.P. recruiting agencies were ready to feed them for two days, three days, a week, or whatever time until they send the railroad crews out, as free passengers. At the end of the season, the railroad would bring them back to El Paso or other point of entry, and the laborers would cross into Mexico. So they were not liable to become public charge immediately. The State Department now began to say: "We will change that interpretation. Laborers from Mexico are the kind of people, and in the kind of occupations where sooner or later they are going to become a public charge if they remain in the United States. So they are liable to become a public charge in six, eight or nine months or whatever."
So they reinterpreted that and made immigration procedures more complex. To anybody who appeared at the border, immigration officials began to say, "You must present your birth certificate, with certificates from reputable Mexican police authorities that you have no criminal record." In such ways they built up the problems of providing documentation, and tried to discourage prospective immigrants at their homes rather than coming to the border only to be rebuffed there. They tried to do it as skillfully, quietly, gently as they could, but do it so as to draw the fires of advocates of restrictive legislation. Actually they cut that migration down, as I recall, from about 25,000 or 30,000 a year to about 5,000 in just a few months.
So they gave the restrictionists what they wanted, in fact, and they saved our face with the Mexicans and Latin Americans, who didn't want their restriction written on the statute books. The State Department could continue to say, "Our immigration laws are different with respect to Europe, than they are with respect to Latin-America. With nations of the New World, we are on a different basis." They didn't place my statement in the public record, but they cited my denial of labor shortage to Congress in State Department testimony.
That's the only way that I got into the hot public issue while making my studies.
But, as you see, when it came to the water issue, I did get around to action early as a citizen. That is my Chapter II, and I've just sketched the beginnings of my Chapter I, on agricultural labor. But I did get into action on agricultural labor eventually. How it happened is just coming to me as I speak... I was appointed by Governor Merriam to the advisory commission of the California department of employment. I testified for this advisory body before the Legislature in Sacramento, not representing myself personally, but rather a citizens' body, recommending the extension of Social Security to agricultral labor.
Riess
When was this?
Taylor
That must have been about 1941. The legislature did not act then, and unemployment compensation is still denied to the workers most exposed to unemployment. Previously, of course, I had testified as an invited expert witness before the LaFollette Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1939. The same problems and the same interests, you see. Even before that, I had been appointed in 1933 as consultant to the Governor's Fact-finding Committee that settled the San Joaquin Valley cotton picker's strike. Then in 1938, I had testified by invitation of the Senate Committee on Unemployment and Relief, in Washington. My LaFollette Committee testimony I think made me known to those interests of which I was critical, and remain critical to this day. In 1940 I testified before the temporary National Economic and Tolan Committees. So that's how, step by step, I got into action on public questions.
The System and the Future, for Water
TaylorThen, in the 1950's, the reclamation issue came to the fore again. I'd known Paul Douglas when I was still a graduate student in Berkeley. He came out from Chicago as a summer school instructor in about 1921. He is three years older than I. I met him, got to know him. Going from Berkeley to Washington, there was always a change of trains. You'd get into Chicago in the morning, and out in late afternoon to Washington or to New York. So habitually I'd take the opportunity to go to the University of Chicago on the South Side, and call on him. That way I kept up my personal relations with him. In 1948 he was elected senator. Before taking office he and his wife, Emily Taft Douglas, came out to California. Dorothea and I invited them to stay at our home. They stayed with us for one or two nights.
Then Paul was going down to Santa Barbara, so he and his wife got in my station wagon and I took them for a day and a half through the Central Valley. First I drove them down the west side so that the new senator could see what it was like -- the big holdings and nobody there. Then I drove them over to the east side and showed them the family farm areas around Dinuba. The community of Firebaugh on the west side -- if you can call it a community -- to this day is nothing.
I showed him around both kinds of communities. He saw the difference. From then on, as a senator, he fought the 160-acre issue.
On August 15, 1958, Douglas and Wayne Morse, of Oregon, tried to stop an exemption of the California State Water Project from reclamation law, but they were defeated. The bill didn't go through Congress, but died with the session. In 1959 it was taken up again. With three senators, Douglas and Morse taking the lead, and supported by Neuberger, of Oregon, they killed the exemption in four days of debate in the United States Senate, May 5, 7, 11, and 12.
Newspapers around the Bay carried practically nothing on their debate over major resource policy. Going through their final editions as preserved in the
Riess
Yes.
Taylor
Well, that's an example of giving it the silent treatment. Four days debate in the United States Senate and there is nothing I can find in the library files on it!
At the time, after a couple of days of debate, I wrote a letter to the editors of the Tribune, Chronicle, and Examiner. The Tribune printed my letter, but nothing on the debate. The Examiner made no reply, and as far as I know, did not print my letter. After a while I got a reply from the Chronicle. They had run about eighteen inches at one time in an early edition, but omitted it from the final. edition.
In 1960, the following year, the proposed exemption came up in the House. My former student and later Congressman, Jeffrey Cohelan, together with Al Ullman, of Oregon, led the fight to deny the exemption. In my last trip to Washington, preceding the debate, at Cohelan's suggestion the Ullmans joined us at evening dinner at the Cosmos Club, and we laid the groundwork.32 When the time came in May 1960 they defeated the exemption in two days of debate. So you see what taking Paul Douglas through that Valley did, giving him a first-hand look at the problem. A couple of times he referred on the floor of the Senate to that trip through the Central Valley. "He'd been there, he'd seen it," so he knew what he was talking about.
Well, now I've lost my senators; I've lost my Congressman Cohelan. I don't know who I can pick up. Maybe new ones will arise. The left-wing, you see,
So the personnel that was built up for the fights of the 1940s, then for the battles of 1959, 1960 -- they are all scattered now. In 1970, the fights over the law are springing up in the courts. Well, if we can get the conservationists and the educators really to move, if they would really move, they could really do something.
With Nader's Raiders, if they will move, and I am told that they are interested... and if the students who are interested in conservation -- one of them came to me, seemed much interested. He is with ACT, which means "Action, Conservation..." I don't know what the T means. But of course he has lots to do for the summer besides taking up this issue. I don't know when or whether he will come to me again. He was really interested, I know he was. I heard it later from others who said he'd talked to them about it. Maybe he'll come back to me and say, "What do we do?" I'll tell him what to do. I gave him an idea of the kinds of things to do. I think it can be shown that if the students hit the right target they can get results.
I can understand their frustration. There were times when I felt frustrated myself, but from other occasions I know enough ways to deal with it so that it can be done. I haven't lost faith in the system. I am very much impressed with what a handful of people can do, because I have seen them do it.
The Field Reports and the Camps, II
TaylorWhat we have here [looking at them] are some of the reports that Dorothea and I made in the first months of 1935, working for the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the State Emergency Relief Administration and for the Resettlement Administration.34
When I would bring these out in recent years [laughing], Dorothea would always want me to shove them aside. But despite her regular protests I would keep bringing them out, just the same, because I liked them, and because I think it shows part of the process through which she and I started to work in the field. These pictures show what she was doing.
Riess
Some say "Photo by Lange," and some say "Please credit F.S.A." and some say "Return to Pacific News Bureau."
Taylor
Yes, they were probably turned over to that news bureau, and that's why I don't think of this particular group as a report. She may not even have printed all of these. "Outskirts of Bakersfield": there's the home-made privy, and the screening is by Standard Oil, "Unsurpassed," as it says. That was a joke -- I think I told you of a telegram that I got from her when I finished my talk at the Commonwealth Club in 1935.35 She heard it over the radio, and before I left the Palace Hotel, where it was given, a wire came in to me with the message, "Of its kind, Unsurpassed." [laughter]
Riess
Were the negatives sent to FSA?
Taylor
No, the prints were sent to them.
Riess
This one says, "Lange, for Resettlement Administration."
Taylor
Yes, in about August of 1935 she transferred from the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the State Emergency Relief Administration to the Photograph Division of the Resettlement Administration.
Riess
Which was called the Farm Security Administration.
Taylor
Later, in about 1937.
This [typed report] is one of my reports. So what you see is the combining of photograph with the usual, textual method of reporting.
Here is some of the response we got. This is a friendly editorial from the Tri-County Labor News. This is from The Western Worker, the Communist paper, and their headline is, "Is the Government Planning Camps, or Cages?"
Riess
You had people checking on you from all sides, didn't you?
Taylor
Yes, I was caught in the middle.
Riess
Did you talk to the Commonwealth Club often?
Taylor
Twice. I haven't talked to the Commonwealth Club since 1938.
Riess
How receptive were they to these problems?
Taylor
Well, the Commonwealth Club was very receptive. But I suspect that when I became interested in the water issue, in the control of speculation through the 160-acre limitation, then they lost interest in hearing me.
These newspaper clippings must have been picked up by Dorothea; this is her handwriting. [Quoting headlines] "Speaker defends migratory fruit workers plight." That's an odd way of saying it, that I "defend their plight."
Riess
This article puts it oddly too. "What is California to do about the hordes of homeless? The question got a sane answer from Dr. Paul Taylor. He may have thought they all ought to be deported but this he did not say. He realized it was impossible. He did
Taylor
Well, you can see that it was a hot subject, and I was pretty much in the middle, and Dorothea with me.
This all shows how we combined the words of the migrants, our own reports, speeches, and the temper of the times as reported in the newspapers.
Riess
I can see where the newspapers responded to your Commonwealth Club speech, but other than that, were your reports circulated to the press in any way?
Taylor
No, these were administrative reports, circulated within the government, within the Resettlement Administration.
Riess
Where did the newspapers get all their information, from news releases?
Taylor
Yes, probably news releases from the administration.
Riess
Your name always appears in the releases, though, not just the Resettlement Administration.
Taylor
Yes, because I was the voice of that program.
Riess
Did the writers follow it up by getting in touch with you?
Taylor
The editorial writers who took it on were on the San Francisco News, George West of the News, as I told you, I had known from the time I was in short pants, back in Iowa, though he was much older than I. Within a week after that August, 1935 dinner metting that Dorothea arranged at her Gough Street home, out came the first editorial; West used to write, oh, about one or two editorials a week for years.
Riess
Smaller newspapers might pick up on something like that.
Taylor
Yes. And we had an information division within the Resettlement Administration whose responsibility it was to get the information out.
My Commonwealth Club speech in 1935 was mimeographed and distributed in at least 15,000 copies. It was the business of the information man, who was an old newspaper man, to get it around where it would be picked up.
What we're looking at here is not a formal report, it's a sort of collection. This report we called Notes from the Field. You see, we'd take a swing out for a week or ten days or two weeks, depending on how far we went. And, remember the skepticism about having a photographer? So one of the things that I wanted was to keep the photographs coming in to the head of the division. Here are Notes From the Field, June 1935. Here is the way we reported [spiral bound book with pictures pasted in, newspaper clippings included, text sometimes typed, sometimes handwritten notes and quotes facing the pictures].
Here is the site of the Marysville Labor Camp before it was made into a camp. In this we bring the administrators the latest information, that the city council at Marysville had approved a labor camp at this site. Here [rusty pump] is the water supply. You can see what guided Dorothea in her photographs -- we needed to convey information.
[Looking at photograph of man sitting under leanto] I remember that fellow very, very well. Here is what he said. Later we went to his home; he had an acre near Porterville. We went there -- I think he was not home when we went, but he had told us about it. In other words, he was a very small landowner, a laborer with about an acre which he tended with the greatest care. And yet here you see him as a fruit-picker, living in this condition.
Riess
[Reading quote with picture] "When they see my acre they say, `Gee, if I had a place like this it would be a lot different."' In this picture he is out with his family, picking.
Taylor
Yes, picking fruit in Pinehurst, and his own acre is in Porterville.
Riess
[Reading another quote] "The government preaches against radicalism, but there is nothing more discouraging than hearing your children cry, `Daddy, I'm hungry."'
Taylor
Well, in the year previous I had been studying the self-help cooperatives. But, here in the country they want an acre to settle down.
This morning I had a young man from the College of Agriculture come in to me. He wants to go down among the migratory laborers. He's been a Peace Corpsman in Chile and in Africa, and he wants the migrants to take advantage of the land opened up under the 160-acre limitation, and to see if they don't want to farm it cooperatively. That was this morning, here in Barrows Hall. And here is the Porterville picture of the migrant fruit picker with an acre taken in 1935. So, among the references that I gave him is the story of our Resettlement Administration effort to make it possible for them to have cooperative farms, how they welcomed getting on them in the first place, and then later turned their backs on them, to their own financial detriment.
This cooperative farm in the picture was funded by the State Emergency Relief Administration.
Riess
"Migrants observed building housecars."
Taylor
Yes, these are the very beginnings of mobile housing in California. The very beginnings.
[Reading] "We're getting along as good as us `draggin-around people' can expect, if you call it a living."
That's the power plant up at Sacramento -- you can see it today. And that's the shack town that squatters built around it. The district attorney came and gave them notice he was going to burn everything down they didn't take away with them. So they picked up and moved a couple of miles away and built another shack town there. This shows the kinds of shacks that they had; some of them put a lot of ingenuity and even taste into it.
You can see how after going out for a week, or
This report is Dorothea's. I wanted to build her up in the mind of the bureaucracy, so I told her to sign this one. Instead of me signing that, we just had her sign it.
Riess
Did she write the report?
Taylor
I think I wrote the brief text. But, you see, I didn't do the photographs on the other reports, though I signed them.
I think you can see from looking at these reports how closely we worked together. We travelled together, we were on the ground together, we saw it together, we talked to them together, and then we made the reports together, I doing the text, she the photographs, and she usually reporting what they said to her. You notice right from the beginning, that her ear was as good as her eye, and that what they said was reported just as vividly as how they looked.
Riess
[Looking at report on Cottage Gardens, signed by Dorothea Lange] This place looks like a success.
Taylor
I haven't seen it since. But my guess is that they were at least people who had homes, with a garden, probably living on relief. Otherwise they might have been on places like the Bakersfield Dump, where the toilets were built and screened by "Unsurpassed" advertising sheets of paper.
What I'm showing you here are the steps by which our reporting system was built up, how it grew. Now, this [spiral bound report] might be called the second edition. (The first edition of this report is at the Library of Congress.) It's very like the first report, but amplified with what we did after the first one was turned in. You see Dorothea got this one also spiral bound. Here, first, is my text: "Statement in support of project to establish camps for migrants in California." I summarize it; then I elaborate it.
Riess
I see the name Dr. Carl Taylor. A misprint?
Taylor
No' Carl Taylor was the head of the Rural Rehabilitation Division in Washington.
I'm not exactly sure, as I look through this memorandum, but I guess I must have put it together.
Riess
Did you do it all yourself, or did you have research assistants?
Taylor
Well, I had the assistance of Ed Rowell, and Tom Vasey, both graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley. Yes, they helped.
This newspaper picture and editorial is about the vigilantism at Santa Rosa. The editorial from the Chronicle probably is Chester Rowell's. "Frenzied fascists do not represent true Americanism."
Riess
What happened in Santa Rosa?
Taylor
A mob tarred and feathered these fellows, people they thought were Communists. I don't know exactly what they were trying to do, but we included the item in our report because it was part of the temper of the times, and the administration needed to know the temper of the times, so I included it all. I wanted to show them rather than say, or imply, that I had taken all of that into consideration in recommending that we should have the camps. You see, the more conservative elements didn't want the camps because they were afraid that the pickers would organize. And from the extreme left came, "Are these camps, or cages?" We were caught right in the middle, which was OK with me.
Riess
In the successive reports Dorothea is taking different kinds of pictures.
Taylor
Depending on where we take our trip.
Riess
You feel it reflects that, rather than that it signifies a developing perception on Dorothea's part.
Taylor
I'm not sure that I get what you mean.
Riess
They are more interesting pictures.
Taylor
Well, she saw more, had more experience, yes.
Here, "Transient shelter for single men," and on the facing page, the camp of migrants -- here's how they squatted in the brush. We were trying to say that if the Relief Administration builds shelters for the transient men, why doesn't it do something like that for the migrant families?
This is Imperial Valley, and here is a relatively good camp, and there is a more common variety of ditchbank camp.
You can see in the kind of photographs that she would make how Dorothea saw what it was that we were trying to do administratively, how we were trying to move people. She wasn't photographing for the Museum of Modern Art; she was photographing for the purpose for which the Relief Administration was set up. You see how well she did all that. This is very informational, not what you put up in the museum, and yet it is not inferior in quality.
Riess
Here is a picture of migrant children, with a teacher? I think it's the first time I've seen migrant children pictured when they weren't huddling in front of a leanto.
Taylor
Well, here was a teacher running what we would call today a pre-school kindergarten class. You see, the social agencies could reach the migrants here in a government camp when they couldn't reach them out on the growers' lands. Here the nurses could reach them, the welfare people could reach them. They began to get the services of the community.
Riess
Whose land was the Marysville Camp?
Taylor
It was rented by the Resettlement Administration or, rather, by the Marysville City Council which said, "We will provide the land, and you can use it if you will set up the camp and run it." "You provide the site," we said to the locals, "and we will do the job."
Here's where they leveled off the ground at Marysville for the first camp.
Anyone studying Dorothea's photography would see how she fitted it to the program that we were trying to support. You see, in Washington, they had all kinds of questions, and all kinds of reasons why not to do it, and we had to knock them down one after another. When we showed them a document like this, they couldn't duck it.
Sometimes I was right with Dorothea when she photographed, and sometimes I wasn't. A lot of these I may not have been on the trip at all, or I may have been, but talking to somebody somewhere else.
Riess
You no longer had any protective arrangements for her.
Taylor
No longer necessary. I was solicitous about that the first day, but then I found out how well she was able to take care of herself, and how effectively she established relations with the people that she was photographing, so that was no longer a problem. There was a problem sometimes of carrying the cameras, and a problem of transportation. And of course I didn't want her just out alone by herself, so on a trip either she worked with someone on my staff, or else I was there.
Riess
[Looking at final pictures in report] I'm not sure what these last few pictures are supposed to say, but to me they say that these are good people [men in a circle playing musical instruments, at a camp in the evening] and deserving of something from this country. Then this final caption: "What is the state of the nation; Marysville campers talk politics," seems a warning.
Taylor
Well, yes, it was a very unsettled period in our history. Which way were things going to go?
You speak of the music they are making. You know that Johnny Cash was a boy in a Resettlement Administration farm project at Lake Dick, in Arkansas. So in a way he's a product of the resettlement program there. On television recently I saw him revisiting the project and his own home on it.
That dedication ceremony at Marysville was very effective; it won over Farm Bureau and Chamber of Commerce people who attended. They had been quite skeptical.
Riess
[Reading headline] "State's Gypsy Horde Given New Chance." There is so much ambivalence in this article.
Taylor
Here's an editorial by George West, August 10, 1935, I think it's the first one after that evening at Dorothea's. We showed him this book, and out came that editorial.
An American Exodus
RiessHow did you come to put together An American Exodus?36 Did Reynal and Hitchock ask you to do it?
Taylor
No. We did it and went to them. Dorothea wanted to do it. You see, what you've been looking at in these reports, beginning with Notes From the Field and stepping up to the formal reports proposing that the government embark upon a program of camps for migrants--what you see from her work is how effectively she operated in the field, how she documented what she saw, how effective technically and visually the work was, how she did not, as some photographers might, have foremost in her mind, "How am I going to make a beautiful photograph that will be shown on a museum wall?" She thought of the immediate, specific purpose, and served that purpose. You can see it in her photographs.
Riess
One thing in the photographs is that the people have dignity; it is not a picture of total degradation.
Taylor
Yes, the message was: These people are worth helping! They are down and out, but they are not the dregs of society. They've just hit bottom, that's all. Well, we worked on the book in 1938 and 1939. When we really got into it, we rented a little third floor one-room apartment near the Pacific School of Religion. Then we laid out photographs in pairs, on the floor -- trying out the facing pages, section by section. That is how we did it. Then she made up a dummy to take to New York.
Riess
Did she have them enlarged to the size that they would actually be?
Taylor
Approximately. I wrote the text to accompany. We worked together sorting out the photographs until we
We went to several publishers in New York. We went to Tom Maloney, who puts out U.S. Camera. He couldn't do it, but he supported us very well at other publishers. We got very nice receptions. We showed the photographs, among others, to Covici Fried, to Random House; we took them to Bennett Cerf and got a good response there. But the final response depends not only on whether they like the book, but on the condition of their budget for the year at the time. They allocate their budget, and after they have allocated it, well, they may like what comes on next, but they haven't got any money left for it now.
Then we went to Reynal and Hitchcock. They hadn't allocated it all. Their response was "All right, here's one. Take it on!"
Riess
You wanted it to come out as soon as possible?
Taylor
Oh yes! Yes, while it was timely.
Riess
And yet you didn't see it at that point as a propaganda piece, did you? Was it history? Who did you think would read it?
Taylor
Oh, I don't remember. No, not primarily history -- we were trying to spread the information of the current condition and the need for doing something about it now.
In 1939 Grapes of Wrath had just come out. That was a novel telling the story of the migrants. We wanted a documentation saying "These are the actual conditions." We wanted a national program. I don't remember the exact dating, but it took quite a while to get the national program that then came soon.
I think I told you the last time how we got these two California camps started by the accident of the $20,000 out here, and Lowry Nelson, western representative, from Utah, wiring Washington to ask, "Can we hold these funds and start these camps?" If he hadn't done that, I don't know when we would have gotten our camps, because Washington had the jitters, even administrators representing the transient camp program. All kinds of questions were
Riess
How was this more disturbing to people than any other public programs, like WPA?
Taylor
WPA came later; Civil Works came first. Why would this camp program be more disturbing? Because we were dealing with the labor force of a relatively few powerful agricultural employers who were used to having everything their own way. So we were stepping into a concentrated interest.
If we set up those camps, would the campers organize their laborers? They came into my office and talked to me about it; they didn't want that to happen. They didn't want big camps. If there must be any camps, they wanted them small. "Don't let them get together in big numbers." We were dealing with a powerful, concentrated, economic interest, whereas with the WPA, the CWA and so on, there was no specific employer interest.
Riess
What kind of a response was there to the book?
Taylor
Well, An American Exodus came out late in 1939. The war broke out in Europe in 1939. People began very quickly turning their eyes away from Depression into what we called the Defense Period. Very soon, you see, we were building ships and migrants were beginning to come to the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond. They were beginning to get money with which they could buy groceries at the market down on 6th Street in Oakland. Those photographs of a man and a woman with sacks of groceries in their arms, remember?
Riess
In the Yale Press 1969 edition? [p. 120]
Taylor
Yes. Those were taken not long after An American Exodus was published. So the potential readership faded away, and Reynal and Hitchcock remaindered the book to move it. I bought about a dozen copies of it myself, here in Berkeley, at a dollar a copy. I don't think the publishers lost money on it, but it didn't have its chance at the market for which it was intended.
Riess
The 1939 edition is a very different book from the 1969 Yale Press, Oakland Museum version of it.
Taylor
Well, Yale, of course, wanted to do it their way, and it has its qualities. I like the lengthened perspective, with that new section. I think "End of the Road, The City," is a good addition. So, I feel all right about it. The actual reproduction of the photographs is not as good as in the original.
But this Yale edition has sold very well. By last April it had sold about 3,700 copies, and it is now in a second printing. I have the second printing there on the table. The Oakland Museum keeps selling it, and probably other museums sell it.
Dorothea Lange Taylor
RiessWhen you first met Dorothea, was she what you might have called a "bohemian?"
Taylor
[Pause] That really never entered my head. I remember this -- knowing, of course, that in San Francisco she had lived in what sometimes was called "the art colony," i.e., among artists -- one thing that she was insistent upon was that you were not to excuse a person by saying, "Well, you know, he is an artist." An artist was to be judged personally by the same standards that you would hold up for any other person.
Riess
No artistic license?
Taylor
Because you are an artist, that doesn't give you the right to do anything that isn't right for other people to do.
In fact, I cannot remember her even admitting by implication that she, herself, might be an artist, except in the last months or weeks of her illness, when she admitted she knew she was. She would not have any special consideration because of that.
No, she never in our life showed bohemianism in the sense of license -- never! Never. And you can see her sense of family responsibility in a very complex situation, what she bound together in a personal sense.
We took her young granddaughter, Leslie Dixon, to New York for the opening of Dorothea's posthumus exhibition. Margaret Weiss, of Saturday Review, sat next to the child, Leslie, at table. At the conclusion of the banquet, Margaret Weiss came over to me and said, "Your granddaughter, sitting next to me, said, `I didn't know Grandma was famous!' "
You see, nothing, nothing did she do to convey the impression "Now, I am an artist, now you've got to excuse me and let me go my way. Now don't expect me to... "[avoid my responsibilities, or anything else]. Never, never, never anything of that kind!
You can see the family she built. [Referring to June 10, 1965 photograph.] I am going to frame that photograph with the whole family gathered around because it shows family relationship so well.
Riess
Yes. I am thinking that there was no time off ever for her then, if she was going to do things in such a disciplined way as she did.
Taylor
Well, disciplined in one way, but wholly self-disciplined -- meeting responsibilities. Yes. Disciplined in only the right sense.
She would take time off for the work, you see. Summers we would go. We would see to it first that the children were suitably placed. And she continued her work during a good deal of the winter time, too, and would go out, often, without me. When she went off without me, she usually would travel with some woman of the government service, so that she didn't go out alone.
But no, in the sense of bohemianism, of taking license and avoiding responsibilities, going just her own merry way, in that sense, not a trace of it!
She was centered right here, on her family and on her work, on what she was trying to do.
Riess
When you met her was she interested in politics or in any kind of political activities?
Taylor
I have no recollection of that. The answer is no. She went to photograph where street orators were. I am sure that that man whom she photographed, who was used as the frontispiece in the Survey Graphic, I am sure that he was a Communist orator. But that was not the reason she photographed him. Incidentally, I think he was the brother of one of my colleagues at the University.
Riess
She didn't belong to groups?
Taylor
No, no, not political or otherwise. [Smiling] No, she didn't belong to any, she didn't even belong to the f/64 photographers club, which we discussed before. She didn't belong to anything.
No, Dorothea was... [pause]... she was all here, all the time. Her thoughts were not wandering around somewhere. When she was present, it was that magical presence that Homer Page speaks about, in his posthumous article in Infinity.37 When she would come down that stairs, and go by there, her presence was simply marvelous. But she didn't command it, she didn't demand it. You just felt it. Never "Look at me!" No, no! She was just right in the situation, in the finest sense.
Oh, it was marvelous to live with her, morning, noon and night. She was so... vital. Never petty, always thoughtful of others. Always thinking ahead. Thoughtful of me, thoughtful of the children -- my children, her children -- thoughtful of everything. Planning to make things work out right, making them work out right. Her son, Daniel Dixon, in his memorial, speaks of this extraordinary woman, in this situation.
Nothing was too ordinary or common -- shopping for the groceries, coming down the walk with her arms filled with the paper sacks of groceries, like the one that she photographed at the 6th Street Market.
One of the most vivid people, in the finest sense. Not a strain to live with her but, well, like the music of a viola and of the fine quality.
Her uncle, John Lange, was a player of the viola, the leader of the musicians under Flo Ziegfeld, in Ziegfeld's Follies. Hope Lange is John Lange's daughter. Dorothea never played the viola, but she loved the instrument. And the quality of living with her was like that; it would go through you all the time. It just elevated the quality of living -- with no demanding on her part whatsoever. She just enriched the quality of life, just by being here.
Nothing was too small for her to do. Under a plate of glass -- photographers always have plates of glass around -- she would just arrange leaves.
She loved gardening, not formal gardening, but she'd go out and work in the garden because she liked to do it. You can see what she left behind. I brought the rocks. I put the rocks in place. She put in the flowers and the plants and the bushes, and all the rest.
She held one's attention, one's thoughts, one's feelings just almost as a magnet.
But never, never did she make you feel, "I am a photographer, I am an artist, I am an extraordinary person." Never. But she was all of these.
Riess
When we talked, at one point she said she felt that she had been tired all her life. I wonder what you think she might really have been saying?
Taylor
Did I tell you that?
Riess
No, she did.
Taylor
She told you. Well, I am not surprised.
Why did she say it? What did she mean?
Riess
What she meant and how seriously she meant this, and what it was that she was really trying to describe, whether it was a physical tiredness or a tiredness of really trying to pull all of this together?
Taylor
Well, I don't know that I can do more than suggest. Of course, the polio that struck her as a child was a terrific blow to her. Then, what happened in her family, her father and mother, the separation and divorce. She couldn't bear to speak to me about it in any detail. It was almost more than she could mention. She could barely tell me a little bit, but then not tell me any more. So I couldn't pry into it. She could not bear to speak of it. The weight of it was apparently too much, so that's only a glimpse that I have.
After the separation of her parents, her mother went from Hoboken to New York to work in the Public Library at $50 a month. Of course, $50 was money in those days. It wouldn't get you anywhere now, but it was money then. In New York Dorothea was the only Gentile child in her school of Jewish children, Public School 96 I believe was the number.
She said she knew what it was to be a social outsider.
Riess
Then, it was really reflecting this early experience?
Taylor
That is most of the detail I can put my finger on. That family experience, I know, hit her so hard that she could scarcely speak to me of it. Yet she did speak, apparently under a feeling that she ought to say something. But I never did, nor wished to, pursue it farther. It was too painful to her, and I saw no point in pressing.
If she felt tired through our thirty years together, well, she concealed it awfully well, because she lived so fully and so vividly. Remember, that except for the polio, she had had good health until 1945. From 1945 to 1965, twenty years, she had very rough times with her ulcers and then, finally, with cancer.
She didn't tell me til afterwards, but when I took her to Asia in 1958 -- I was provided with a berth by the government on the plane from Honolulu to Wake Island, and of course I didn't take the berth but put her up in it -- she didn't tell me until some time afterwards, that in that upper berth she was afraid that she was going to have to tell me she couldn't make it any farther. She'd have to go back. But the next day we flew from Wake into Tokyo and she pulled herself together.
Her courage was immense, immense. What she struggled through, against her physical disabilities! In Moscow, for example, she would stay in bed at our hotel, not every day. We were there a week, and she stayed in bed several days, and then would go to the Bolshoi Theatre or to another theatre with me at night. Well, that takes quite a lot out of a person, to have to be fighting against that. But never, never, was any of that burden loaded on me. She always rose to the occasion. When she went, all that had kept her in bed for the day was put aside. She was wholeheartedly there, with me, at the Bolshoi, or wherever we went.
She never, never dragged because of her illness. Never -- I mean spiritually -- was she a drag. Of course, her condition required a lot of care and attention on the part of both of us. But on the human side, never did she show any sign of despair or anything of that sort. Even when her life was in the balance, never did she put any weight on me. It was always a wonderful thing to see her, always. Just to come into the room where she was.
As Homer Page said, "When she comes into the room, she comes with a magic presence." When I would go into her room that presence was a magic presence.
Riess
Did you know her mother?
Taylor
Yes, I did.
Riess
Did you think maybe that when Dorothea needed her mother, during the polio, and things like that, maybe she just didn't find her there and able to offer her much? Maybe she valued self-reliance.
Taylor
Yes. Her relations with her mother -- she was loyal to her mohter, but she had difficulties. Daughters and mothers do have difficulties, I gather, not infrequently.
You speak of the polio, there's one little incident she told me. Her mother would kind of like to have Dorothea conceal her withered leg -- the right leg, below the knee -- so that people wouldn't see it. So Dorothea got the impression as a child that her mother was ashamed of her. Dorothea herself told me thirty or forty years after, that she had blamed her mother for that. She learned only decades later that this was a common, a "normal" reaction of a mother. So she shouldn't really blame her mother.
As a young girl, still grammar school age, she had to help support her mother's morale under stress of the family situation. She felt her mother was leaning on her at a state when a child normally leans on a mother. So there was a reversal of roles because of the stresses in that family. From Dorothea I got only little glimpses of that.
So Dorothea did not have an easy life at all, you see, in childhood. Then there were difficulties when she married Maynard Dixon, difficulties created by Maynard's first wife. Apparently she was an alcoholic, and made things difficult for him, in what ways I don't know. So Dorothea didn't live in a peaceful environment.
Well, of course when she and I were married, in one sense it was peaceful, in another, it was a very intense life that we were both living, trying to create a healthful situation involving children from two families. We were trying to weld them together and give them the feeling of assurance and stability to the best of our ability.
We were building in a human relations sense. And I know that she found it rewarding, as of course I did. It was the greatest thing in my life, in my personal life. To live thirty years with a woman like that is a gift that isn't given often to people.
I had it. I still have it. What more could you ask from life?
Dorothea's Work During the War
RiessWhen the war broke out, and the OWI [Office of War Information] and War Relocation work came to her, did she have to do that, or did she want to do it, at that point? Was she getting ready to go off in other directions, and this was assigned to her?
Taylor
Well, she had the Guggenheim Fellowship. Then Jess Gorkin, who had been a magazine picture editor, came here to ask her to photograph for OWI.
But wait a minute! Before that was the War Relocation Authority, the Japanese Evacuation. The OWI came later.
Did she have to do it? She had to do it internally, she had to do it, yes. She didn't have to do it to make a living, but that was the way she lived. That was the way one did live, by participating in what was happening at the time. She wanted to do it. She wanted to photograph the Japanese Evacuation. I went out with her quite a little, not all the time, but frequently.
Riess
Her plans for the Guggenheim were to photograph Utopian...
Taylor
Yes, the Amana Society in Iowa. We had stopped there in 1940 and we liked the people, and she thought, well, she had to make her application to the Guggenheim Foundation for something special, and Amana Society was something she thought she'd like to photograph.
Actually, she made some photographs there. We did go back in 1941 and spent about two weeks at Amana. Later, in the Philadelphia exhibition of the work of Guggenheim Fellowship photographers, they showed a lot of her photographs. So her Amana Society work was exhibited.
Riess
How did she get into War Relocation? Who asked her to do that?
Taylor
I had done work for the Social Security Board. We knew the regional director very well. He had on his staff an information man, who shifted over and became
Riess
Why did they want photographs of this? It was considered to be, even then, a scandal, wasn't it?
Taylor
It depended on whom you were, whether you thought it was a scandal or not. No, they wanted it documented.
The man at the head of WRA at first was Milton Eisenhower, Ike's brother, and later president of Johns Hopkins. He couldn't take the heat of it, and left WRA after a comparatively short time. Remember this was wartime. You couldn't challenge the government decision to evacuate Japanese once it was made.
Riess
But why did they want to record it, for their own files or for public relations purposes, to show how nicely it was being handled?
Taylor
I suppose the reasons were not perfectly clearly worked out. But to have a photographer in a government agency was becoming a little more acceptable than it had been only a few years earlier. Probably there were some who said, "We want to show that we are handling these people all right." There were possibly some others who saw it another way; but anyway, WRA started to document it, and Dorothea went right to work.
Did I tell you some incidents in doing her work?
Well, I'll tell you two that show the touchiness of the situation.
There is at the U.C. law school now, Professor Caleb Foote, a pacifist. In 1942, before he became a U.C. law professor, he came to the house here as a Quaker, working with conscientious objectors.
He wanted to get out a little pamphlet on the evacuation, and asked Dorothea for a photograph of an evacuee, which she allowed him to use. (I assume she did get the permission from the military Wartime Civil Control Agency which shortly moved in beside, or above, the civilian WRA.)
That photograph shows the inspector putting his hand on a Japanese businessman type wearing a tag. The inspector is stopping the evacuee while he checks him over to see that his papers are all in order.
Well, Major Beasley, who had been taken out of civilian life and assigned to the WCCA, didn't like to have this Quaker's pamphlet showing the Japanese stopped as he was going down the line. So Dorothea was called before him and the WRA. What really stopped Beasley from doing anything about it was that Congressman John Tolan in his House Committee hearings reproduced the same photograph that Dorothea had allowed the Quaker to use. [laughter]
Then there was another and related incident. (Whether it involved the same photograph or not, I do not recall.) They called Dorothea over to the San Francisco WRA office (I was not present, but she told me about it afterwards), and Major Beasley and the information man who had employed her on WRA were there. They gave her an apparently empty negative envelope and asked her, "Where was the negative?" The implication, in other words, was "Miss Lange, what have you done with this government negative?"
She took the envelope, she put her fingers in, brought out the negative, and said, "Here it is." They'd muffed it; and were they embarrassed! [laughs heartily] They thought they had caught her red-handed that time, but she completely discomfitted them.
So, in the National Archives now, you can go to her negatives, to the War Relocation Authority files where they are, and you ccan tell from the record which of her negatives were impounded -- i.e., not to be shown publicly, you see.
Riess
Were they impounded later?
Taylor
No, no, for wartime only.
She made one photograph of gardeners, or nurserymen, working in the latticed sheds commonly used to break the force of the sunlight. Well, the major didn't like that photograph because the streaks of sunlight and shadow made it look as though the evacuees were behind bars or dressed in stripes.
Of course they knew her own opinion of the evacuation, all right.
Riess
I suppose she stuck with it because she felt...
Taylor
Well, she felt that she was doing something for those people -- and she was.
Riess
Were there any other times when her photographs were actually used publicly?
Taylor
The War Relocation Authority photographs? In Congressional Tolan Committee hearings. Some of them have been used in exhibitions and publications since.38
Riess
The ones that weren't impounded then, she was free to use?
Taylor
Those that were impounded can be used now. Now anybody getting the proper authorization can use them. But at the time they expected her to get authorization to allow use of her photographs, and after the Caleb Foote incident, she did.
I think no Christmas passes that I don't get a card from the daughter of one of the families around Sunnyvale that she photographed. The mother died, and Dorothea got permission to give the family a photograph. The daughter remembers Dorothea, as I say, and I still get a Christmas card from her regularly.
Riess
What was the response of the Japanese as a group to this being photographed?
Taylor
A very fine response. Some of them were grateful and quickly became friends. We went miles and miles in Utah to visit some she had photographed in California. When they got out of the relocation center, one of them
One of the evacuees, Dave Tatsuno, had been my student in the 1920s. With his father he was a small merchant in San Francisco. He is a merchant in San Jose now with a store also in San Francisco. Of their gratitude -- in 1967, the 25th Anniversary of the evacuation, the Japanese American Citizens League gave a banquet and honorary plaques to a dozen or so people. Well, they gave me one. That was for Dorothea, probably more than for me, although perhaps I had earned it in my own way as member of the Committee on American Principles and Fair Play.
When the Tatsunos came back from the camps, they came to our home here, with their children. They played under the oak tree, and Dave filmed it. Dave gave me the film, and I gave it to the Oakland Museum. It is a hand-movie film of Dorothea and me with his children climbing around in that oak.
Riess
They were grateful that she was there to witness this?
Taylor
Oh, yes! They knew that in Dorothea they had a friend, and they came naturally to her upon their release from the centers.
How was Dorothea received, camera in hand? The answer to that question came long before the Japanese evacuation (looking at a framed photograph and handwritten letter on the desk). This photograph was made in 1938 in Carey, a tiny village in West Texas. When An American Exodus came out, we sent a copy addressed to the father, containing photographs of the dramatic displacement of tenants by machines that he had shown us. The father gave us the phrase "tractored out" that the New York Times picked up because it expressed the displacement of farmers so succintly. The response to our gift of the book came from his son; his father had died. The son's letter reveals his attitude toward Dorothea's photographs. The book, the son felt, was "a tribute" to his father's memory.39
We spent the last evening before the evaucation of the first contingent in Chinatown. We went to the store of a Japanese merchant -- now his tansu is right here. There were the bankrupt-sales people ready to buy everything that wasn't sold by the closing hour. I saw them, talked with them.
Well, we picked up that beautiful tansu for $25. The Japanese merchant carried it out and put it in our station-wagon himself. Nothing was said between us, but we both knew. Here he was, under the gun; the next morning he was going to camp. Dorothea didn't photograph then because it was nighttime. But we went over because we wanted to see what was going on -- and that forced sale was what was going on.
The Japanese, of course, took it all marvellously! That is the one race problem that we have solved. I should say, the Japanese solved it. You don't find anymore when a young European-American goes with a Japanese-American girl, or vice versa, that people blink their eyes in surprise or disapproval, do you?
Riess
No.
Taylor
All right. That didn't used to be. I mean, the Japanese were Asians, like the Chinese, and you just didn't mix socially. But the behavior of the Japanese was such, under the pressures of the evacuation, and in their participation in the war, that the popular attitude toward them is profoundly altered. In war-time they had to decide whether they were to be Japanese or Americans. The American-born Japanese were just in their twenties and teens and younger. Their parents were sure that they were Japanese. But the young generation had to decide which they were, and they decided that, despite everything, they were going to be Americans. Those that decided otherwise were returned to Japan by ship after the war. They were relatively few in number. They could ask for return to Japan and be returned. That is the domestic side of the coin.
The foreign side is that our troops occupying Japan found that they liked the Japanese ladies, and
Riess
Did Dorothea experience any kind of investigation, or persectuion, because of pictures which she took in that period?
Taylor
I know of nothing. The only thing might be when a man, an American who said he belonged to the Japan Society, asked if he could call, came over and spent an hour talking with Dorothea in this living room. I wasn't here, but Dorothea told me about it. He just talked and talked along.
She thought that he had been sent over to see if he found anything improperly pro-Japanese about her. In other words, did she give "aid and comfort to the enemy."
Riess
What was the Japan Society?
Taylor
That was a recognized pre-war society to promote good American-Japanese relations. So that's the way he introduced himself. I suspect that his patriotism was not under question. They may have said, "Well, here is this woman taking these photographs," and sent him over to sound her out. So far as I know that was the end of it.
Riess
Then she worked for the Office of War Information?
Taylor
I told you Jess Gorkin came here, talked to her, asked her to do it, and she said, "OK," she would. The tragedy of that is, those negatives have been lost. Between the closing of the New York office and the next step, nobody has been able to find out where those negatives went! Jess Gorkin couldn't find them, so we have omly a handful of the photographs which she made at that time.
Her photographs were used in the magazine called America. It was broadcast all over neutral Europe. It was dropped by airplane over Italy and Yugoslavia and probably other places ahead of our troops.
Remember the Four Freedoms? Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear. The OWI used her photographs to illustrate The Four Freedoms.
Dorothea photographed a good deal among the immigrant groups. She photographed the Yugoslavs, around San Pedro, so that those photographs could be dropped from airplanes over Yugoslavia to show the Yugoslavs at home the lives of their own people here in the United States. Italians, ditto. She went up around Vacaville and there photographed the Spanish people.
It is a crime that those negatives have been lost. I don't know whether they are actually destroyed because somebody put them in an incinerator, or whether they are in crates somewhere in some warehouse, God knows! But Jess Gorkin couldn't trace them after they were shipped from New York. He tried. She did a lot of fine work for the OWI and as I say, we have only a very few prints here. She kept a handful.
You can see from this what her relations were with the people whom she photographed, everywhere, whether they were blacks in the South, whites in the South, people from the Middle West, from California, evacuees, whatever they were.
"Documentary Photography" and Post-War Work
RiessWhen did the phrase "documentary photograph" enter into Dorothea's work?
Taylor
Let's see, we have that little booklet, it's around here somewhere. I know that I bound a copy in...
-- [Loud report or explosive noise] --
What? [Calmly] In the morning paper we shall read about what was bombed. You heard that?
Riess
Do you think it was a bomb?
Taylor
Well, did you hear that?
Riess
[Puzzled] I heard that, yes.
Taylor
Is this because the 4th is coming on? Out of my boyhood days, I'd say, "Well, they are getting ready, tuning up for the 4th," but nowadays I am not so sure.
Riess
What gaping hole will be on campus, you mean?
Taylor
A while back I'm sure I heard those two bombs as I lay in my bed, about seven or eight minutes apart, at the Bank of America -- I am sure I heard that. And then-- one time they bombed the gateman's little house at the west entrace of the campus. I heard that, it was a big one.
Riess
That sounded not like a big one to me.
Taylor
It wasn't as big as the gateman's bombing, no, but ah...
Riess
It is crazy!
Taylor
Of course it is crazy! Well, am I giving you the impression that one of the capacities of Dorothea, one of the great capacities of Dorothea, was her relationship with people? She was supreme at that. Whether it was her relationship with people in her family or the people whom she photographed on the road, she was marvelous and you can see the evidences of it. As a human being, she was superb!
And all the time you were never under the impression that she was making any effort to do what she did. You knew that she was busy, but never making any effort to create the impression of the importance of herself, never! Only a sympathetic relation between herself and everyone else, including the people she was photographing, that she was concerned about, but seeking no position for herself. Never!
Riess
That is an amazing quality.
Taylor
Well, it was extraordinary. I've never seen anything to compare with it.
Riess
Before that bomb went off, we were talking about "documentary photography" as a phrase.
Taylor
Ansel Adams was editor of "A Pageant of Photography." In 1940 he invited Dorothea to write a definition of "Documentary Photography." Dorothea asked me to help write the definition. So, if she were here, she would say that I wrote the definition. We did it together, but I did have a hand in it, of course. [Illustrated]
Did I tell you about the address by the geologist, Van Hise, on observation, a geologist's observation? Well, in the early months when I met Dorothea I brought her a reprint of the address of Charles R. Van Hise, who was president of the University of Wisconsin when I was a student there, and who was one of the leading geologists of this country. In his vice-presidential address at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he spoke on the "Training and Work of a Geologist."40 He spoke very acutely about
DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
Dorothea Lange
Documentary photography records the social scene of our time. It mirrors the present and documents for the future \s?\ Its focus is man in his relation to mankind. It records his customs at work, at war, at play, or his round of activities through twenty-four hours of the day, the cycle of the seasons, or the span of a life. It portrays his institutions — family, church, government, political organizations, social clubs, labor unions. It shows not merely their facades, but seeks to reveal the manner in which they function, absorb the life, hold the loyalty, and influence the behavior of human beings. It is concerned with methods of work and the dependence of workmen on each other and on their employers.It is pre-eminently suited to build a record of change. Advancing technology raises standards of living, creates unemployment, changes the face of cities and of the agricultural landscape. The evidence of these trends — the simultaneous existence of past, present, and portent of the future — is conspicuous in old and new forms, old and new customs, on every hand.Documentary photography stands on its own merits and has validity by itself. A single photographic print may be "news," a "portrait," "art," or "documentary" — any of these, all of them, or none. Among the tools of social science — graphs, statistics, maps, and text — documentation by photograph now is assuming place.Documentary photography invites and needs participation by amateurs as well as by professionals. Only through the interested work of amateurs who choose themes and follow them can documentation by the camera of our age and our complex society be intimate, pervasive, and adequate.
I showed the address to Dorothea, and asked, "Does this have any meaning for you? After reading it she said, "Yes," it did. Later she used copious excerpts when she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. You could just take out the word "geologist" from the text and write in photographer or sociologist on anything that you wanted. It was universal in application: Its theme was the importance of observation, especially the importance of observing little details.
Van Hise criticised his geological colleagues. When he wrote to some of them to ask for the details of a certain geological information in their part of the world, they replied that they thought the details he asked for were too minute and too inconsequential to justify giving them their attention. Van Hise, on the contrary, felt that if they would give him the details he sought, then he would really know all about the geological formation.
Well, Dorothea was universal, you see. She wasn't just a photographer, she was a human being. She was an artist. She was a photographer and her ear was as good as her eye. Her whole being was in her work and her relations with me, and her relations with her family. She lived so intensely. All the time.41
Riess
I have a quotation of Beaumont Newhall from 1938, and it seemed a little bit off the mark. I'll read it. [From Parnassus magazine, March 1938.]
"First and foremost, he [the documentary photographer] "is a visualizer. He puts into pictures what he knows about, and what he thinks of, the subject before his camera."
Now, that I want to question. The FSA photographs are not so much what the photographers know about.
Taylor
You go, and you're finding out. It's a learning process all the time.
Riess
Then he says, "Before going out on an assignment, he carefully studies the situation which he is to visualize?
Taylor
That is what Beaumont says?
Riess
Yes.
"He reads history and related subjects; he examines existing pictorial material for its negative and positive value -- to determine what must be re-visualized in terms of his approach to the assignment, and what has not been visualized."
Taylor
Well, that wouldn't fit Dorothea's work very well. It could fit some kinds of work. But she went right out and faced it, you see.
Riess
This sounds more like a progandist.
Taylor
Well, Otto Hagel, who is a very fine photographer, living in Santa Rosa, and a good friend of ours -- his way of photographing for Fortune Magazine was something like what Beaumont described. He made up his mind in advance just about what three or four or six things he wanted to show. He knew what Fortune was doing, you see, and he had a pretty good idea of what would serve to illustrate the text.
That is the way Otto Hagel worked and he is a very good one at it. His wife Hansel didn't work that way, and Dorothea didn't work that way. I think Dorothea spoke or has written about what she says she learned from me. Well, I was interested in the history of a situation, you see. I did some of those things Beaumont talked about. Some were helpful to Dorothea. I could bring to her attention aspects of things that might not have occured to her. But as for that being her method of work, no. No. I am sure that she took many photographs when I said, "Dorothea, you see this?" and it was interpreted through me. Many times she'd do that. Also there were times when she would say, "Now you let me do this." [laughter] And then I would remain silent and let her do it.
Riess
Any comments on her assignment for Life Magazine? How did she like working for editors?
Taylor
Well, she went to Ireland.42 She took Dan along. For background she read anthropologist Conrad Arensberg's "Irish Countryman" (1937). They had a wonderful experience, a wonderful time.
Riess
She worked happily enough with the picture editors at Life?
Taylor
I don't remember any friction.
Riess
It is very different from working for the government, I should think.
Taylor
There were no issues raised. They gave her entire freedom.
In Utah (that was a Life assignment), she and Ansel went, you remember.43 Dan and I were also there with them. We had a little blow-up from that [chuckles], one of the women, whose picture was in Life, was photographed with her crossed arms sitting right up against the wall of her home... Did I tell you about that?
Riess
No.
Taylor
Oh, let me start back.
Knowing that Dorothea wanted to go into Southern Utah, I thought it would be a good idea to go first to the head of the Mormon Church, to the Twelve Apostles, to let them know what we're doing so there wouldn't be any question raised, "What are you doing?" I went intending to see John A. Widtsoe, who had been President of the University of Utah. Everything I know about him is very fine. However, he had died about three or four months before we arrived in Salt Lake City, so we saw another apostle, Reuben Clark, who has been U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. (In fact, I had met him in Mexico City in the early 1930s.) Well, he listened, and we seemed to get along all right, but when Dorothea and I got down to St. George, the message had come down to local church authorities by telephone (we encountered it two or three places): "There is a party coming down to make photographs. The party is `unauthorized."'
Well, the summer before, we had been at the little town of Gunlock near St. George. Ed Banfield, now a Harvard professor, lived for a time with his family in Gunlock doing research on that Mormon community, and we had met some of the residents. On that first occasion, I had gone up onto the plateau overlooking
Now, the following summer, here we were before the local three-man church committee in "unauthorized" status. They asked, "Why were we there?" We explained. "What did we want to do?" They questioned us and questioned us and questioned us. We met them about 8:00 in the evening and we went along for an hour and three-quarters.
Finally I said, "What are you worried about, from our photographing? We were here last summer. You saw us. You met us, and in your church you have in a mural the photograph that I made of your valley." At that point the tension broke, as one of the three came out emphatically with, "Yes! And we just love it!" That was the end of it for the evening. We could photograph. [Chuckles] They, themselves, got tired of questioning us.
Well, on Sunday, when Dorothea and Ansel came to the church to photograph the people of the village, they soon appeared. But even after clearing with the bishop's committee we were in for a fresh shock. An elderly couple sauntered up to the church, suddenly looked around, saw all this photographing going on, and indignantly turned around, went back home, and wouldn't come to church! Then some other people got disturbed over what was going on.
Dorothea said to me, "Go into the church and sit down." So I went into the church and sat down in a rear seat. The atmosphere changed immediately! Instead of being an interloper, now I was in their church, not a member, of course, but a potential convert. In no time they were preaching to me of the virtues of Mormonism. Outside the church the bishop and his committee stood fast by their decision of the
In Hurricane, the bishop was uneasy and called Salt Lake City on the telephone seeking counsel on what attitude to take toward our party. At Toquerville, on the contrary, the bishop raised no questions at all and received us with open arms.
After Life Magazine published the article on "Three Mormon towns," Dorothea suddenly got a letter from a woman demanding $1,000 for having photographed her, and having printed it in Life Magazine. Life Magazine forwarded it to us, because the demand for money was on them, too. I assembled a lot of background material, and the woman couldn't make her claim stick. About the same time the friendly Toquerville bishop called on us in our Berkeley home. He made his living as a Pacific Intermountain Express truck driver. Sitting right in this room, I showed him that woman's letter demanding $1,000. Of course he knew her. He was horrified!
He was the exact contrast to the people who had been told to be careful about us, to treat us as "unauthorized" strangers. The lowest local officer of the church, he had practically embraced us when first we came into his little town. Right from the first, open arms; anything he could do, he would, and did. Photographs were made inside the church during the service, with no problem.
So we had just a whole series of contrasts as we went from locality to locality. We never knew whether we were going to have a bucket of cold water thrown in our faces, or whether we were going to be embraced like long-lost cousins and potential converts to Mormonism. That was a bit hard on Dorothea to have this strain and criticism of her motives.
I remember another time of strain upon her when, as I said earlier, she learned that we could surely keep her only for a month at the Division of Rural Rehabilitation of the State Emergency Relief Administration. She, of course, wanted to stay on my staff. One of my classmates from Wisconsin was with me. We
Riess
When the war ended I know that there were many years of physical problems, but was there a sense then of Dorothea getting going on the things that she really wanted to do? Or am I misguided when I keep thinking that there are things that she wanted to do and wasn't doing?
Taylor
Yes, of course. She had to put up her camera a good deal because of illness when, of course, she wanted very much to use it.
Her ulcer sickness began in 1945 and recurred over several years. I can hardly remember the details and chronology exactly, but it was serious.
Riess
And through these years was she able to define what she wanted to do?
Taylor
What she would be able to do. She would get out with her camera on a narrow tether once in a while, go down into Oakland or a little farther out, for a day maybe. She was on short tether. But what she did was enough to enable me to add the section to the 1969 edition of An American Exodus entitled "End of the Road -- the City."
I've forgotten the dating of when she worked with Pirkle Jones on "Death of a Valley."44 I talked with Pirkle about four or five days ago, by phone. He'd like to build that into a book; there are a lot of photographs they made and did not use.
III And Around the World
Around the World for A.I.D.
TaylorLast time you asked one question which we didn't follow through and I don't know whether I understood what was in the back of your mind, or the front. You spoke of Dorothea and her bohemian life in San Francisco.
Riess
Yes, I was asking if that is how one would describe it.
Taylor
Well, I had a little difficulty with that because I knew her for such a short time while she was married to Maynard. So I know it only remotely. She did mention a time or two at the very beginning of our life together that perhaps we might some time live in San Francisco. But I am sure that thought faded fast, as she came to know and love the family life that Berkeley made possible for us. It's fair to say that over the long pull she never gave the slightest impression that she regretted withdrawal from her previous life, or wanted to go back to it.
We were entertained by some of her San Francisco friends of that earlier era, and some of them came to our home here. But I have not the slightest impression, never have had at any time from her, that she wished or felt, oh, if she could just be back there again! Not in any degree. I don't mean to imply that it wasn't a happy and rich life there before I knew her. Some of them I came to know well, like Imogen Cunningham, and a number of others. I don't know whether I am answering you or not.
Riess
Her interests had changed.
Taylor
It is true that here in Berkeley were absorbing personal interests. There was the building of a family from numerous and varied units -- putting the pieces together. That and her work, or shall I say our work and our life together, seemed to be wholly absorbing.
Perhaps that answers?
Riess
I was also interested in what you thought "bohemian" implied.
Taylor
Well, I am sure that she never wanted privileges of behavior that were not open to someone else, that would be open to her and forgiven because she was an artist.
I am not saying in detail what her life was because, well, I know it only second-hand and never inquired into it. Although it was not as though there were ever any secrets about it. So I am sure it was a change of era, in many ways. Her marriage to me, the work that she took on, the family that she took on, those were pretty absorbing, all of them together, each of them individually.
Riess
Well, let's go on to some of the work that she did take on, and talk about some of your trips.
What was it that you told me last time, when the tape was off, that Dorothea said about being dragged around the world?
Taylor
She at one time would say to me, "You dragged me around the world." And then months, or was it years later, she announced very proudly to all and sundry here, "I am a woman who has been around the world." [laughing]
Our first overseas trip together was in 1958, when we went to Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Viet Nam, Thailand, Indonesia, Burma for a day, India, Nepal, Pakistan, out through Afghanistan and the U.S.S.R. We were in Moscow a week, then Berlin, then picked up a Volkswagon in Stuttgart, from where Dorothea's ancestors had come, drove to Rotterdam through Germany, France, and Belgium, and shipped the VW back to San Francisco. We flew to London; then to New York, then home to California. That took seven months.
Riess
And how was her health on that trip?
Taylor
Well, she always protected me, on that subject. She told me that she went to the doctor to ask, could she go? The doctor said, "Well, the worst thing that could happen to you would be that you'd die in Asia." She said that she was willing to take that chance. Then, as I told you earlier, on the plane from Honolulu to Wake Island, I put her up in my upper berth, because I had one allotted to me, you see, as consultant to A.I.D. She told me later that she had been in considerable distress, and was afraid that she would have to tell me in the morning that she couldn't make it, that she'd have to go back. But by afternoon we were in Tokyo, she never raised the question, and I didn't know that she had had so bad a night until long, long after.
For one who had such physical distresses, prolonged over so many years, she never laid it on anybody else's doorstep. You'd never know it. You'd know when she needed care, all right, when she had to go to the hospital. You'd know how it was, how serious it was, occasionally what close calls she had, and the distresses. But it never dampened her spirits, and she never loaded it on to anybody else. She was always, at any and all times during those illnesses -- it was a treat to see her, to be with her, always.
Riess
On that trip did she have a program of photographing that she...
Taylor
[laughing] No. She had no program. She just got on the plane with her cameras. I had an assignment in Korea with a two-weeks stop-over in Japan. No, she just went along with her cameras, catch-as-catch-can. But always she was absorbingly interested in everything that went on. Oh, if she couldn't do anything else, when we were sitting with Japanese or Koreans or whoever in conference around a table, she would photograph us.
She would come to these things. I took her right with me; I just kept her right with me all the time. The times when she wasn't with me, I can't remember when they were. I am speaking only of Japan.
Riess
But rather than her going out on the street and photographing while you were at the meetings?
Taylor
Well, there were lots of times when she would do that too, especially in Korea and Indonesia. Occasionally when I was free I would go with her, as companion, and protecter in a sense. In Korea, I didn't have a car available to me except on Saturdays and Sundays. So on Sundays I would go out with Dorothea; they gave us a driver and we would go out into the country all day. We'd stop at any village where we wanted to stop. Sometimes the driver knew only a few words of English. But we would go, and usually we would find somebody who knew some English, but whether we did or not she would photograph. So our interests dovetailed; I think I should say that they dovetailed very nearly perfectly.
When she didn't have a car during the week -- as in Korea -- she'd have other ways of getting around, usually with U.S. transportation, even if not exactly at her beck and call. But there were those Saturdays and Sundays, so that we could go to a market and onto the streets. She would scout around.
You remember those Korean jars in the dining room that came out of the tombs? Well, while I was in the offices she would go to the shops, where she located them. Then she would tell me and take me back to the shop on a Saturday when I could have a car. Then we would buy the jars, take them to the Army Post Office, have them boxed and sent back here parcel post. The parcel post rate begins in San Francisco, so we paid the rate from San Francisco to Berkeley.
And then there was that wonderful Korean chest. I don't have it here now because I gave it to my daughter, Margot. But that wonderful chest -- she would go and talk with the man and bargain with him, and he would say so much and she'd say so much, and then well, wait till I came. It had accumulated a lot of dirt. I remember how he would say, to attract her, "Washee, washee." Well, he washee, washeed it, but there was still a lot of dirt when it got here. But that's a priceless thing.
Those jars, they're priceless! In those days, one could get them if one nosed around over the town, as she did. And she, of course, had a very keen, sensitive eye for the things of real worth and beauty in any civilization. Korean potters don't make jars like
Riess
Were they all gotten on that trip?
Taylor
No, they were not. We got quite a few on that first trip and distributed most of them through the various branches of the family. When I returned briefly to Korea in 1961, I went back to those shops and rounded up more. Every time I could get a car between the morning and the afternoon sessions of the convention, I'd go right back to the shops and pick up one or two more, take them to the APO, get them crated, into the Post Office and bound for Berkeley.
Riess
You both sound very good at the practical things of life, the management end of things.
Taylor
Well, we both wanted to get close to the people at ground level -- you see, our interests dovetailed well -- when we could get right down to the bottom level, in the market, whether it was the vegetable market or the textile market or the pottery market.
If you go to a foreign country, go to the market where the people go. There you will learn what they make, what they have to live with. And so, we'd both of us head for the markets. Then we'd head out into the countryside, because the countryside would tell you how things were among the common people. If you want to look back in time, the countryside is the place to do it. There are some exceptions, but change comes faster to the city than to the countryside. So if you want to know how people have been living for a long, long time, go out into the country.
Their tembples, of course, like the European Gothic cathedrals, are located in cities. But if you want to know how the American people lived 100 years ago, don't go to the center of New York. Go out into the country, and there you can see it.
Well, we would be taken out in Korea on a Sunday, by a driver who might know hardly a word of
Riess
No.
Taylor
Do you want to see it right now?
[Interruption to see the statue]
Taylor
Well, you can see how Dorothea has surrounded our home with all of these fascinating associations from all over the world. Any way you look there is something from a part of the world -- from people, individuals far and near.
On the wall there is the photograph of the woman with the pies from right next door who kept our family going during some of Dorothea's long episodes in the hospital. Her name was Lyde Wall (I suppose it was Lydia but they called her Lyde [pronounced Lid] Wall), a California born woman originally from the foothills.
And that staring face. That was one of the organizers of the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union. As we were sitting in their office -- there were two of them -- I was talking at that moment to the other one (H. L. Mitchell) and you can see how Dorothea caught this one. That was in Memphis, Tennessee. Up above there is Tom Mooney. You remember Tom Mooney? I am quite certain that Dorothea also took the photograph of Tom with his two fists on the prison bars, the photograph that went all over the world.
So she photographed all the time. As much as I could, I would be with her.
Riess
On that trip there wasn't something in particular that she was after? She was just going very open?
Taylor
Yes, she was just photographing with no theme, as when photographing the Japanese evacuation, as for the Farm Security Administration.
Riess
There was nothing tied in with your A.I.D.?
Taylor
No, they didn't ask or care officially about the photographs, although they facilitated her work through me. No. She was traveling with me. Insofar as I could, Saturdays and Sundays I would go with her because frequently, in the Asian cities she could hardly work because people were numerous and would crowd so closely around her to see what she was doing. Often when she started to photograph a person at a distance of ten feet, crowds of children and women would pile around, the ones behind pushing in to see what was going on, so that finally she didn't even have a clear line of sight between the camera and the person she wanted to photograph. If I was present, you see, I could be helpful by inconspicuously being a distraction, letting her work around the fringes.
Riess
Was she a novelty in most of these places, a woman photographer?
Taylor
Oh, yes. The Korean women would come and put their hands on her head, to feel her head, to feel her short-cut hair.
In Japan we didn't have so much opportunity out in the field. That's when she'd take her camera and, as sometimes in Korea, photograph us sitting at the table talking. I've never seen those photographs displayed anywhere, but of course I don't suppose more than two or three percent of her photographs ever have been displayed anywhere. Her sources were so numerous and so rich.
Riess
Are all her negatives at the Oakland Museum, then?
Taylor
Yes, the negatives that are her own. The government negatives are in the Library of Congress and in National Archives. The ones that she made for the Office of War Information -- nobody seems to have been able to track them down and to know where they are after they were shipped from New York at the end of the war.
Riess
And the Asian trip?
Taylor
The Asian trip, those negatives we have at the Oakland Museum.
Well, after Korea and a few days in Hong Kong we went to the Philippines. In Hong Kong, we were with friends, a photographer for Life Magazine, who had married a close family friend of Dorothea's from way back. So we had a wonderful time in Hong Kong.
Every once in a while on that trip she would take a photograph of me, in a nice way making fun of me. One of them, I have it around here somewhere, it's of my back, when I was on the Chinese junk in Hong Kong Bay, looking through field glasses. Well, it's one of those photographs that you would never put out on display -- you can't do anything except laugh at it -- which was her intention.
She did the same thing in my study on the third floor of South Hall. My habit is to litter my desk with papers and general disorder. You've noticed that already, I am sure. One day to let me know she had been there photographing, she left a flashbulb on top of my papers.
In Seoul, Korea, with Woolite we did the laundry including my shirts. Well, you can see what my shirt looked like drying after I "Woolited" it. The range of what she saw was very wide, and it included those closest to her, as well as those farthest away, in every sense.
In Viet Nam we had the only resistance from anyone on an A.I.D. staff that we experienced anywhere, a man whom I did not like at all. He was the only one in all my service with the A.I.D. with whom I experienced anything like that. When we would get out of the car to photograph, as when Dorothea wanted to photograph a man working with an elephant -- the elephat was his "team," providing the power to draw logs -- he would call, "Time to come back and go on," and do unneccessary and inconsiderate things like that. We didn't like that at all.
Riess
Was this the American, who was over there?
Taylor
The American, oh yes.
Riess
An "ugly American."
Taylor
Well, no. "The Ugly American" was the good one, you remember, in the book. He was ugly, but he was good. He made a hit with the foreign people. This fellow was ugly in the other sense, and I always hoped that our Vietnamese interpreter could not understand the stream of English talk that this fellow would let loose, as we drove along, disparaging the Vietnamese, whom he called "Vitnamese."
But in Saigon, and out around except for this one travelling companion, well, you can see [referring to a picture on the wall], that youth walking on his hands. She took that in Saigon. It had been raining. There he was, walking down the center of an empty street on his hands and nobody even watching him! The people are sitting there under the veranda roof: nobody is paying any attention and he is not doing it for an audience. He's just doing it because he wants to.
She did a lot of work in Viet Nam, out in the countryside, or in the market. She would find so many ways of making contact with people. While I was doing my business in Saigon, she would locate a dressmaker in a little hole-in-the-wall dress shop, so to speak, and get Vietnamese dresses made for our daughters-in-law, or daughters, or grand-daughters.
One of the best things to do, if you want to know what a country is like, is to start out with a question, some simple kind of question, or errand. It doesn't make too much difference what it is. And where that will take you, you haven't any idea. But you are sent from place to place to place. You go all around the town, and what turns up in the process is that you see people in all kinds of conditions. If you want a piece of pottery crated, well, you find they have "no cartons." We throw cartons in the fireplace or in the garbage, but (in 1958) just try to find a carton in Viet Nam to ship some pottery home. (Now, of course, with the American troops there, you can. But then we had to hunt all over to find somebody who could crate it.)
All the problems that you would run into! You would get it crated and then find out it would be one
She would go into the market in Saigon. She got the first two of the brass candlesticks there. I got the others on later trips. I brought these big ones back in 1967, shipping back as many as I had time on weekends to get.
We learned a whole lot. She had a little leather purse on her belt and one day in the market a pickpocket just opened it. So, she had no money. Well, you learn that way, too. I lost $200 in a similar situation in Djakarta. I lost it I am sure through housemaids in an American professor's home, where we were staying. I left my purse in my room in my little handgrip, and went out for an evening. When I returned it wasn't there and I never got it back. But it was no use to weep over those things. What of it? What you learned was that somebody, right in your household, would do that to you. It told you the economic pressures, it told you the moral codes. Somebody got a full year's income out of that $200.
So that is why I say, you can learn a lot by going out and stumbling into situations, letting unplanned things happen. Go out with almost any kind of a purpose, asking almost any kind of a question, and you will learn much more than in advance you had any possibility of knowing how to inquire about.
Riess
Yes, somewhat as you were saying that you would inquire of the field workers in Southern California, "How do I get to such-and-such?"
Taylor
That method I used largely to introduce myself with a natural question. So that they wouldn't say, "Gee, here's a stranger here, I wonder what he's here for," I gave them opportunity for a quick and easy answer. I wanted to know how to get to the next place, which was a natural question, perfectly safe and polite. Then after that I could ask them almost anything. It would be only after quite a few questions that they might become uneasy, wondering why I was asking so many questions. Then I'd have to clear up my presence again.
Riess
You had to work through translaters all the time in Asia, didn't you?
Taylor
Yes, practically all the time. They were all Asians because Americans didn't know the languages.
After Vietnam we went on to Thailand. In Thailand, we had a Thai friend. Some years before the war, my sister had been on an American Express Tour and Sakul Samsen had been sent by the Thai tourist agency to meet her at the ship. He could speak English. Later he went into the automobile parts business. Under later war conditions he wrote to her to help him get automobile parts to sell in Bangkok, and she helped him procure them. In gratitude he now will do anything for my sister. She's gone there twice since, staying there for three months a couple of years ago, is going back in about 30 or 60 days for a month, and they'll take her again for as long as she wants to stay.
When their sons or daughters come here, they stay with her. When I go there, she writes and says that I'm coming. He comes to my hotel; he gives us a full sight-seeing Sunday, takes us all around the town. He took us to the "Thieves' Market," where we got this beautiful bronze drum, which I wouldn't give up for anything! And we got other things, like the bronze hand that came out of the temple that Dorothea found. Well, these are things ordinarily utterly unobtainable that came from deep, deep down in the culture. That's the way you find out about a people, and a country. Just go out and start doing it.
Then we went up into the northern part of Thailand,
He said, "Well, get on my Jeep and come in." After we exchanged a few words identifying ourselves, he said, "Won't you come and stay at the consulate with me?" So we stayed with him and he gave us a car and driver. We just went all around, anywhere -- to the little communities, the markets. A marvellous experience!
Riess
You were just touring then?
Taylor
I was not on duty in Thailand. I had a week there between Vietnam and Indonesia, but not on duty. So Dorothea and I just were there together all of the time.
Traveling with Dorothea was an incomparable experience. Our interests dovetailed so beautifully, so that there was never any, "Oh, I wish that we could do something else." [laughs] The only times that I can now recall when she might fuss at me a little bit was towards the end of my 1958 session in Viet Nam. She wanted me to go out and help her pick up some of the things she wanted to take home, but I had to put on the pressure to write my report at our hotel. So that was kind of a nuisance. [laughs] But I stuck it out, and she put up with me, and made the best of it, even though she wished that I would have a little more free time. That was the only sort of a situation in which there was any pull at all. "Why didn't I have more free time in these interesting places, instead of having to do all that work?"
Riess
That was a good, wifely response.
Taylor
Yes, I didn't blame her. I had a mild sense of guilt, but not too great -- just a little bit. [laughing]
We were in Indonesia at a period when the Indonesians were treading on the toes of the remaining Dutch, and making it very uncomfortable for them to
So Dorothea pretty soon found her way around to these people who had antiques.
I was in Indonesia for the University of California. It was the University of California Economics Faculty Project, financed by the Ford Foundation, which I had helped initiate by reconnoitering and reporting on it in 1955. So I was back inspecting it, you might say, visiting it for a month in 1958. As I say, Dorothea found places where the Dutch had sold off antiques in order to get some money to get out of the country. So we picked up quite a few Indonesian things. In the kitchen, you know that canvas painting over the sink? That is from Bali.
Riess
She sounds like a canny shopper. The two of you sound like most practical people.
Taylor
Well, yes. We did almost nothing in tourist shops. We went into their markets, to their people. Oh, the prices would be way up now.
These drums... one of the secretaries in Barrows Hall came here and I showed them; they were going to Thailand and wanted drums. I paid, I think, for the first of these, about $65. She said that on her trip to Bangkok they asked $500 and came down to $350. That's five or six times what I paid. But if I could have only one drum, would I stop today at $350? No, I don't think I would. I mean those things are literally priceless! They have a price, but that has no relation to anything except what it took to get it in the first place.
In Indonesia we went from Djakarta to Bali. You remember Dorothea's photograph of those women descending the steps of a temple? In the entry, you saw that wedding headpiece?
[Interviewer tries it on.]
The woman who is going to be married puts it on like that, you see, using a wad of cloth to cushion and stabilize it on her head. She puts the food in the lower bowl -- a cylindrical column of moist rice, bananas and fruits, and what not. Then she puts this top on to hold the food in place, puts the whole piece on her head, balances it there, and with her hands at her sides walks along for a mile or two to the temple.
Well, some Dutchman unloaded that, and Dorothea saw it and got it.
Bali was very interesting. Those people came originally from India, I believe, in about the 14th Century. They were pushed out by one of the migrations. The Bali settlers had been the entourages of the royal courts. So they were the most skilled handicraftsmen and artists, and their descendants have carried those skills forward. That is the life they live to this day. It is one round of feasts, with maybe two or three days in between. After one is over, then you are getting ready for the next. You go to these temples, up the steps, and the priest takes his cut of the food, and blesses it, and you go back with the rest.
Riess
The Balinese were happy enough to have somebody taking pictures of them?
Taylor
In Bali, it was as though they did not see you. Almost as though theyjust looked through you, as though you weren't there. I never saw anything in my life quite like that.
Riess
What do you suppose it meant to them?
Taylor
Well, you just were out of their culture and they weren't curious about you. You didn't belong there. They were not hostile. They were not that. We could go right up the steps, into the temple where the priests were putting water on to bless the food. You could just stand there, right up in the middle of it, and they'd just stand or move around you. Nobody got up and looked at you, looked at your clothes, which were different from theirs, or stood around and gaped at you -- none of that whatsoever. It was as though we weren't there!
Riess
Did you go into the marketplaces in Bali?
Taylor
Oh, yes.
Riess
And then you met a response?
Taylor
Well, yes. If you'd get to the capital at Denpasar, where tourists come, then it was different. You had tourist shops and they gave you the kind of a reception you expect, with recognition of your presence by people trying to sell you something. But in the little town of Ubud, or the village immediately adjacent, two or three miles away we were the only Americans. The Gamelan Orchestra that toured the United States about 1956 came from near Ubud. We had heard them in the San Francisco Opera House. In Bali we were taken of an evening to listen to them practice in their home village. There the head of the orchestra received us as people. There it was personal, but in Ubud and vicinity, most everybody just went about their business as though we weren't there.
Riess
Does that make it easier to photograph them, and to observe them? Or did it make it more awkward?
Taylor
It made it easier. Dorothea photographed the legs and feet of a lot of the people. Our little 12-year-old boy guide who spoke English turned to me and said, "Does she have a special camera for photographing legs?" [laughter]
Those wooden carvings in the kitchen and in the dining room are from Bali. So there we were back centuries, and in a very different culture. In Ubud we stayed where Eleanor Roosevelt had stayed before us, in a small one-room house belonging to Prince Agung, who was our host, and who provided us with car, guide, etc.
Do you remember the catalog from the Museum of Modern Art Exhibition? You know, the dancer's hand on the back cover?
Riess
Yes.
Taylor
That was taken on a Sunday morning not far from Djakarta.
Well, who would have said, "Oh, let's go out and see if we can get a dancer's hand, it would be wonderful to have that shown at the Museum of Modern Art. It would make a wonderful photograph for the cover, and to advertise my post-mortem exhibition."
I am telling you what a catch-as-catch-can operation so much of her photographing was. She herself said she never knew what uses were going to be made of her photographs, or which ones. Once in later years she remarked that very often she had been in a mood to discard some negative as not particularly good, and then would come back later to find that in a portion of that very negative was exactly what she wanted. So this question of relevance is really -- relevant to what? How do you know? At one time it is not relevant to what you are interested in at that time; at another time it is relevant. (I feel much the same. It is the reason I refused to compress the text of source documents for my "Georgia Plan: 1732-1752" as the price of getting it printed in type, choosing instead an offset printed book.)
Riess
When she went on this expedition, did she ever muse about putting together a show from this?
Taylor
No, she was just making photographs. Oh, I don't doubt that she thought that some of this will be useful in an exhibit or something. But she didn't plan that way. She went out and saw and got what she had the impulse to record on film. That is the way she worked; then she used it, selecting afterwards.
After leaving Indonesia we had one day in Burma, at Rangoon. We spent the day in the market and at the most interesting Buddhist temple I saw anywhere, just fascinating. Of course, I didn't see Angkor Wat. You've heard of prayer wheels?
Riess
Yes.
Taylor
They are bronze cylinders with beautiful designs cast upon them. You can walk around in a circle, like on the rim of a fountain, and you give each wheel a whirl as you pass, and they say your prayers for you.
You just walk into things like this. Well, who would know enough to say, "I wonder where I can find some prayer wheels?" We didn't find any that we could buy to bring home. But who would think of saying, "I just wonder if we could see some." You just stumble into them. Every minute as you walk around, your eyes are filled with what you had no background for knowing about before, but you could associate many things when you saw them with what you had heard or read about.
A tremendous experience. You came in touch with an old civilization, one extremely varied, rich, and with which we have had minimum contact. We are literally worlds apart. I don't recall that Dorothea photographed very much in Rangoon.
Then we went on to Calcutta in India.
Riess
Then you were back on assignment.
Taylor
That's right. We were always met at the airport when we came, whether I was on assignment or not. The A.I.D. people were very good about that. They'd arrange to meet us, do the courtesies, have a hotel room ready.
Calcutta is a city with about the worst slums that I know anywhere on the face of the globe. There are a very few places that might compete with it, but not in magnitude. In the '20s or 30s, the British in India had one of the earliest of the city planners -- Patrick Geddes, a Scotchman. What he did was build a new city beside the old one, leaving the old one there because he couldn't do anything with it. So he built a new one alongside and did it on very fine lines. Our hotel room, of course, was in the newer city.
Dorothea said to me, "You said that Calcutta was so poor, and the conditions so bad. I haven't seen anything so bad."
I replied, "Do you really want to see the slum conditions in Calcutta?"
"Yes."
Riess
And when she says "see," she means with a camera in hand?
Taylor
She always had a camera with her. So, with the help of an A.I.D. man, who, incidentally, had married an Indian woman, I said, "Dorothea says that she wants to see the slums."
Well, he took us to a place that I had seen before in 1955, and in moments Dorothea said, "I can't stand it any longer. I have to get out."
He had taken us to a temple where they were slaughtering lambs, and where there were cripples you could not stand to look at, crawling around the streets, and crawling around your car. She couldn't stand it any longer and said, "I've had enough. I must get out." That was just too much for her, and almost too much for any of us.
So she saw it. Photographed it? No. She didn't photograph that.
In New Delhi, she photographed for the Bank of America. You know their ads on their world-wide banking connections -- the back of a man standing with his briefcase at a notable spot in a foreign setting. Well, she did the one in New Delhi, with the Parliament Building as background. Before she left Berkeley the bank had asked her, would she do it? So she did it.
Riess
Now that seems like an odd little thing...
Taylor
It was just so totally different. Well, they had the problem of finding a photographer who could make a photograph in New Delhi that they could use in their USA ad.
Riess
And they just heard that she was going?
Taylor
One of her friends from her old San Francisco days,
In New Delhi, on a broad grass parking strip in front of one of the hotels, we saw many objects laid out for sale to travellers, including things that had come out of temples. You remember the bronze Buddha head upstairs in her dressing room? We picked that up. When I've shown the head to Buddhists I notice they raise their hands and bow heads in prayerful gesture. And the little ivory musician with his arms broken, well, that's another piece from New Delhi.
We went to Agra. You remember her photograph of the woman with the shawl around her head, and behind her the Taj Mahal? Well, you can see how she worked, catch-as-catch-can. Not, "Oh, let's go out to the Taj Mahal and see if we can photograph it!" She just went along and when she saw something, she just did it, quickly and inconspicuously.
Riess
That's interesting. You both sound very in touch with whatever you get into, and able to see what's important and what's beautiful in a place.
Taylor
Well, she, especially, had the eye for that. You can see the richness of what she has made of this home, and what she left here.
When you say "what is important," I come back again to answer, "Yes," in one sense. Important to have the contact with the people, and the way they live, and what they value, and what they do. In another sense, you don't know, until long after, what is important. Something, some aspect, which was not unimportant at the time, she photographed it, or we'd see it or acquire it, but you never know what at the time is going to be really important in later perspective.
If you go with the intent to see how the people live, and what they are like, and what their culture is, don't worry, you'll harvest the important things, even though you may not know just at the moment what is and what isn't.
Riess
In your assignment for AID -- they didn't really send you as a social scientist, did they?
Taylor
For A.I.D. I was a consultant in what they call "community development." That means the involvement of people in development of their communities. So this that I have been describing was all in harmony with my assignment. But nobody told me what to do. The area of my inquiry was to look especially into the human side, the human problems and the human ways of developing the human community. I was not there as an economist to estimate the size of the inputs in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to start them on the road to development. A.I.D. made it possible for me to get out where I would see what the people were like. But nobody told me what to do.
They would ask me what I wanted to do, and they would help, suggest within the time limits what it would be possible to see. And at the end of my tour of duty I would leave, always, my report summarizing what I had seen and done, what were my thoughts about it, and my recommendations.
Dorothea photographed in West Pakistan. Those are a sturdy people, big, husky. You know, the British never did lick the Khyber Pass people! They ended up making treaties with them and by the terms of the treaty charged them with keeping order [laughs] in their own country. Everybody we saw there was going around with a rifle slung over his shoulder.
It was a tremendous experience. You know the Khyber Pass Restaurant in Oakland, on Telegraph? The owner is a relative of a young Kabul man who got on the plane with us at Kabul. We met him on the plane; he sat across the aisle. He turned to me when he saw a plume of smoke as we went over the Hindukush Mountains, and said, "Is that a railroad?" I said, "Yes, it is." You see, he'd never seen a railroad in his life until he flew over Southern Russia.
His relative has the Khyber Pass Restaurant on Telegraph. Personally, I like it very much. They have a lot of those beautiful jackets that you begin to see the young women wearing around the campus.
To South America, and Cuba
TaylorOur next travels were to Ecuador and Venezuela. I went there in 1960 for the United Nations, a month in each country.
Riess
That time did she say, "I'd rather stay home and get something done?"
Taylor
[laughing] No, oh no. No question as to whether I was dragging her, or whether she was a world traveller, no. I assumed that she was going, and she assumed that she was and I don't think any thought to the contrary ever crossed the mind of either one of us. She did a lot of photographing in both countries. We got out into the country a great deal.
Riess
What were you doing for the United Nations?
Taylor
Studying community development. In Ecuador, the International Labor Office had in operation the feeble beginnings of a community development program. (In Venezuela, there were stronger beginnings under the auspices of their own government. In Ecuador, an Englishman was in charge. Somehow a Belgian in the Geneva Headquarters of the International Labor Office had gone to Ecuador, and thought the ILO ought to do something there. So the ILO sent an Englishman over on a shoestring, to begin with minimum financial support. He begged in France and got somebody to give him six small automobiles. He scrounged around to get whatever equipment he needed. When I got down there I remember how startled I was at his home of an evening. He was very nice to me as a UN consultant, but when he handed the drinks around as he handed mine to me he suddenly came out with this: he understood that Julia Henderson, the head of the UN Social Welfare Division, who had sent me to Ecuador, had sent me to take over the ILO program for the UN.
To this I replied, "Well, thank you very much. I am very glad to know what my instructions are. I have never met Julia Henderson and she has given me no instructions at all." [laughing]
That gives you a glimpse of the bureaucratic jealousy between the International Labor Office and the United Nations, of which the ILO, of course, is a part.
Riess
He was probably sitting there stewing about what was coming.
Taylor
Yes. Wondering whether I was going to take his program over. Well, we had a wonderful time in Ecuador. The UN man there was a Jamaican, and very, very fine to us. We had a chance to drive over a lot of the country. When we flew down to Guayaquil, the chief port of Ecuador, the American consul met us on the plane and put us up in an apartment house that he had at his disposal.
Oh my, the experiences you have as you go around the world. I tell you you can't plan it because you don't know enough to plan it. So you just go and try to get down on the ground, not just where the tourists go, but get down on the ground where the people are and then see what happens.
Riess
You don't just go and check out what the officials are doing.
Taylor
Oh, that is the last way to learn. It has a little value, a little. What you are likely to get from the officials who are there is the impressions they have formed, largely from being in offices and dealing with officials of the country where they are. It is largely an office arrangement. Those who really get down onto the ground are the exceptions, although fortunately there are some who do. They are too busy going down in the morning to their office, staying all day, passing papers around, having meetings, preparing reports, preparing programs to send to Washington to ask for money, all that kind of bureaucratic business! To really get out and see what the country is like is a tremendous experience. Dorothea and I shared that in so many countries.
Riess
It seems odd that the A.I.D. and the UN would have to bring somebody all the way from Berkeley to have the clear eye to see what was going on, whereas their own people really have lost the ability to do so.
Taylor
The UN had down there a staff of perhaps three or four people, and then the ILO man was there, too. But the UN staff, except for the Jamaican, weren't specialists in community development. The top UN man, in a way, was like an ambassador. He was also there to serve the people who were specialists in one phase or another of the UN concerns. I was a specialist, you see, to look into a particular problem. So when I came down, he met me at the airport. He just got a cable saying that I was to arrive on such and such a flight, at such and such a time. That's all that he really knew of the purpose of my coming. So he wanted to talk with me to learn what did I want to do?
Then, with the Jamaican, we planned how to use my time in Ecuador. That's the way we did that.
Riess
Were there murmurings about the CIA, that you recall?
Taylor
Never heard anything of that. No, never heard anything about the CIA at any time until I went to Viet Nam in 1967. In 1967 we knew the CIA was there.
Well, after Ecuador we went to Venezuela for the second month. An extraordinary woman, Carola Ravel, was in charge of community development; we called her the "Doctora." If you graduate from college, you are a "Doctora" (feminine for Doctor). She was the sister of one of the principal friends and main reliances of President Bettencourt, who had come in to office just following Dictator Perez Jimenez.
Bettencourt came to the Presidency as what we would call a "liberal Democrat." Since the Doctora was head of the Community Development Program, we travelled out into the country sometimes with her, and sometimes without her.
She is still in the program -- a very remarkable woman. I could talk about these countries indefinitely, but I'll just drop one comment now. In Venezuela during the 19th century, those in power got discouraged with the prospects for the native people -- the Indian and the mestizo people. They didn't think they had much capacity. So they set up colonies -- "colonias" -- and to those colonies, they brought Europeans. The
But the country eventually was taken over by the native population.
So you saw these little islands of planned progress. At one of them we got this modern mortar and pestle that is right behind you. We stopped at a little allotment of perhaps two or three acres for native labor. I got out of the car, and walked fifty yards to the fellow's house to talk with him. Having already talked with some of the immigrant farmers, I wanted to talk with a native laborer.
As I got back into the car, Dorothea said, "You see that lying on the ground?"
"Yes, I see that."
"Do you suppose we could get that?"
"Well, I'll see."
So I went back to him.
Riess
[laughing] She never said, "Where will we put it?" or anything like that? [The mortar is about 3 feet high, and the pestle 30 inches long.]
Taylor
You will hear that story. That will unfold.
So I asked the man how long it would take him to make another one of those for himself. He told me a day. I asked him what would be good, going wages for a day. He told me about five dollars. He may have put the price up a little bit, told me top wages. But that is all right.
I said, "Would you be willing to put that in the back of my car so that I could take it with me, if I will give you five dollars?" Yes, he was entirely
You see how topsy-turvy everything was? Is that worth $65? Well, to me it is worth infinitely more. I think it is perfectly beautiful; that's one of the things that I would keep long.
Riess
It makes me feel Lilliputian next to it! It is like something that comes from a world of giants.
Taylor
It reminds me of baptismal fonts, the holy water fonts I have seen in European cathedrals. There it would be made of stone, but the shapes are similar. The holy water would be there. As you come into the church you'd dip your fingers into it, cross yourself and so on. It is like that. But here, this is a mortar and pestle for grinding corn.
There was no Army Post Office in Venezuela, so I couldn't send it home that way; it would be too big for the parcel post anyway. So we shipped it home by air. Well, that was Venezuela in 1960. In 1959 I went to Cuba for a month. That time Dorothea did not go with me. That was a tremendous experience.
Riess
What was your assignment in Cuba?
Taylor
You remember the dictator Bautista, who felt the growing pressures against him? Fidel Castro had landed a couple of years before in Oriente Province (that means the Eastern province), and in that mountainous country he was able to hole up and use it as a base of operations against the dictator. Finally, on New Years Eve, 1958, Bautista, with his entourage, boarded an airplane and flew to some other country, leaving Castro in charge of Cuba.
Well, our mission wanted someone to come down for consultation with the Cubans on community development. So they asked me would I go for three months? I'll take you through a little of the bureaucracy now.
Riess
You say "our mission?"
Taylor
Well, the embassy. Strictly, the mission is the Agency for International Development. In 1958 it was called the International Cooperation Administration (ICA). The mission is under the ambassador. Its special purpose is to assist in international development.
So, the head of community development in Washington, who had sent me to Asia in 1955, and again in 1958, asked would I go to Cuba for three months? I said I would, but when I went for my medical examination at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, they told me I had a tumor, and was medically unfit to go.
I telephoned my Washington chief, told him, and said, "I have no more symptoms of cancer than you have!" Well, we lost two months of the projected three, because they were applying to me, going down for a three months assignment, the same health standards as though I were going for two years. After my experience, they changed their standard.
At the time, I didn't know what to do, but finally went back to Oak Knoll, got my x-ray plates, and took them to the Kaiser Hospital. The Kaiser doctor looked at them, then said, "Yes, I see just what he says. Here are our negatives of you taken about 1956 and 1949, and they show exactly the same thing. So you have had this for at least ten years -- and have had nothing coming from it."
So then A.I.D. said they'd pay my way to Washington on the chance that I would be accepted. On arrival they took me immediately to the Health Service unit that serves the State Department; I gave all these negatives to the doctor.
He asked me a few questions, then said, "Yes, I can see that you've had it for a long time, and you'll probably have it for the next twenty years. So go on." So I went to Cuba.
That was a tremendous experience in Cuba. My! The cordiality with which I was received! Here were
Incidentally, I found interesting historical connections when speaking with the original Cuban minister who had asked for a community development consultant, then resigned before my arrival. She had studied years before at Hull House in Chicago. Hull House was a home-grown variety of community development begun long ago before those words were used to describe it.
What Jane Addams was doing at Hull House was indeed community development. She had plunked herself down in this old farmhouse on the South Side of Chicago where the European immigrants were pouring in all around. She said she didn't know just what to do, but she thought if she would go there and live among them she'd probably find out. And of course she did.
The things that flowered out of that were immense! A lot of them have been taken over by the government of Illinois and the government of the United States. The visiting nurse program, for example, grew that way. The private legal aid was there for the immigrants, and so it was with one thing after another. Now we have the OEO (Office of Economic Opportunity); well, Jane Addams just did it privately on a shoestring. People gave her money because they believed in what she was doing. A wonderful example of community development!
Well, that was a little departure, except it seems relevant that this woman who, as original minister had asked for a community development consultant, had been at Hull House years before. Knowing this background helped me to understand my assignment.
I found also that she had given up the ministry to a younger succession. All she would say was, she had a disagreement with Castro, so she decided to withdraw, and a young woman was put in her place.
The women of Cuba -- I am talking now of the middle-class and upper-class women -- they told me they used to collect money in the churches on Sunday, where people would be gathered, and they would not be exposed to Bautista's agents, and then send the money to Oriente Province to support Castro's activities. I was told by people of that kind that at the end over 90 percent of all Cubans were anti-Bautista. I kept hearing this repeatedly, and they gave me accounts of incidents that showed him as simply a butcher. He butchered their young sons on the streets -- the descriptions were horrible! So practically the whole country at the time Bautista left was pro-Castro. One of a top banker's sons served as a lieutenant under Castro; I met him at his home. A physician had become an army major under Castro. He drove me around Oriente Province.
So you see what Castro did. First he got the full support of 90 percent of the Cuban population. Then gradually he swung farther and farther to the left. And one of the reasons, I think, is what I regard as a mishandling of the situation by our own ambassador to Cuba under Bautista. Stories that I heard about him from young members of the Embassy staff were not at all flattering to our ambassador, just not at all!
For example, one of the young fellows I worked with closely at the Embassy, said, "We told our ambassador at our staff meetings -- and brought photographs to him showing it -- that Bautista was using to defend his dictatorship against Castro the munitions that the U.S. was supplying to him under the OAS program to protect the Western Hemisphere against the communists. And when I'd give the ambassador the photographs he tore them and paid no attention." When Bautista left, our ambassador, instead of being in Cuba at that critical time, was having a high time of his own in New York.
The Embassy staff and Philip Bonsal, the new ambassador, were fine and helpful. But our preparation for the coming to power of Castro, I think, was very, very poor. In longer perspective, nothing had been done to modify the dominant sugar cane production pattern -- large estates, largely foreigh-owned, and severly fluctuating seasonal employment and unemployment.
The young Cuban woman who was made Minister of Social Welfare shortly before I arrived, had come down from New York with her husband after Castro's accession to power. The husband had received training as an aviator, I believe, from the U.S. Army. So you see how friendly to the U.S.A. they were. The minister's brother-in-law was first minister of agriculture under Castro. He had been one of the famous original "80," who had used Mexico as the base to prepare for Castro's first uncussessful attempt to seize power. Castro repaid him by making him secretary of agriculture.
He repaid the women who had collected money for him in church by setting up a ministry of Bienstar Social. Then, about a year after I left, the minister of agriculture was assasinated, the one who had supported Castro as member of the original "80." I don't know what happened to his sister-in-law, Ministro Raquel Perez Gonzalez de Miret.
I didn't hear for a long time from one of the young men, Eduardo Menendez, who the Minister had assigned to travel around Oriente Province with me. Upon my return to California I sent him a book to acknowledge his courtesy. I had no reply from him for about a year and a half. Then I got a letter from Miami saying he had just landed there, that he had stayed in Cuba as long as he could. He had stayed, he said, "to keep the Communists out of my job." But when agents began to patrol around his residence, he decided it was time to leave. So he got out to Miami. I ran onto him on the street in Washington,
When I think of personally experiencing the absence of race tensions, I think of that week that I spent in a Jeep, with her and Eduardo Menendez, who's as white as I am, and with subsecretary Elena Moure, who is as white as you are. No questions were raised at all, and apparently none crossed anyone's mind. At Guantanamo the supervisora invited us to supper in her parents' apartment. The room was narrower than this living room but a little deeper. The parents were black as black can be. They served us beautifully. We went out and walked together, parading around the little square. We could associate with Lucia Calderin, in a group, without a thought of race difference. In she'd come to the Havana Hilton, and there in the evening, there we'd gather around and talk. Nobody appeared to think anything of the color difference. It was a beautiful lesson to me of what can be. It isn't in the climate here. Well, there it was, and she felt just as easy with us as we felt with her.
When Menendez said to me in Colombia that he couldn't pay for any more persons to leave Cuba, and that to come out the Supervisora had to have the air fare, well, I gave it. She got out. Last I knew she was at the Henry Street Settlement in New York.
So the people that I had gone about Cuba with, who were middle-class, anti-Bautista, public-spirited, they were pushed to the wall.
About three or four days before I left Cuba in 1959 I saw a newspaper report of a speech by Castro's brother. It was the first indication that I saw or heard of attack on the United States, including the A.I.D. mission. When I reached Washington, I took the news report to Ambassador Bonsal. The text of what Castro's brother said is in my Cuba report. I said, "Here is a new note."
Before leaving Cuba I had shown the speech to my Cuban friends. They wanted to dismiss it as unimportant; plainly they didn't like it because it was very unflattering to the A.I.D. mission, of which temporarily I was a part. So, it turned out that I was in Cuba just as the turn came. Looking back, I had an unforgettable month in Cuba. The Cubans I met were wonderful people, spirited as can be!
I have told you already about 1960 in Ecuador and Venezuela for the U.N.
In 1961 I went to Jamaica for two weeks again for U.S. A.I.D., community development. Dorothea was not with me. When I arrived, the Jamaican whom I had known on the United Nations tour in Ecuador had returned to Kingston, Jamaica, so I saw him again. Our team participated in a wonderful weekend seminar, or you might call it a symposium with people of cabinet, and near-cabinet rank, on a hilltop over-looking the ocean. The subject was community development, and we had a fine session with them.
I was pleased that one of the ministers asked, would I call on him at his office? At first I thought that he was just going to thank me for coming, to do courtesies, but he wanted to talk. We talked for an hour and a half, really talked about Jamaican problems. It made me feel very good, that he took our coming seriously enough to want to spend that much time with me, going into them. After leaving Jamaica, I spent a week in Bogota, and three days in Mexico City.
Trip to Egypt, 1962
TaylorThen came 1962 and retirement from the University. Dorothea had not been with me in Cuba nor in Jamaica. In 1962 she was in ill-health, and during the summer in bed most of the time. So I didn't know till the end whether I was actually going to make it to Egypt or not. I had agreed to go on a Ford-financed project as visiting professor at the University of Alexandria. Ford had financed an Institute of Land Settlement with an Arab at the head. He was Mustafa Elgabaly, a U.C. Ph.D. in soil science, a very able man who later under Nasser became head of land settlement for the entire country, and under Sadat became the secretary of agriculture. (I saw him here in Berkeley about six weeks ago. He was then with the United Nations in Bucharest, Rumania.)
In 1962 Elgabaly was just setting up his institute, and he (I suppose as a return courtesy for a year's fellowship my Institute of International Studies had given him) invited me to join his faculty to teach community development and land reform, for the winter of 1962-63.
Dorothea told me she didn't really want to go to Egypt. She was getting back in shape and wanted to photograph in this country. She wanted to go back over our old trails. But I had committed myself to go to Egypt, and of course I wanted her to come with me. So she came, about three weeks behind me. When she got there she reminded me again that Egypt was not her choice, [laughing] but mine. She did it in the nicest way, you understand; there was such frankness between us. She meant what she said: left to her, photographing in the United States was what she wanted to do. But of course I had agreed that this was what I was going to do, and I guess I had the main leverage and she had to come in tow.
So, when she arrived in Cairo I was at the airport, met her and took her to the hotel. Whom should we meet at the airport but the Indian official, whom we had known in 1955 and 1958 as the Calcutta regional
Riess
"This was what you brought me out for!"
Taylor
That's right. "Brought me out and when I came you weren't even looking for me!" Yes.
We stayed a day or so in Cairo. Then we started in a chauffer-driven institute car down the Nile Delta toward Alexandria. Immediately, Dorothea was looking at this new world and seeing it. As we drove it unrolled before us just like a movie scene. Then she began to see... it is the only time I can now recall that I can say, "yes" to your earlier question, "Did she program what she would photograph?" She programmed right on the ground; she began to see what she could do as this panorama unrolled beside us as we moved along the Nile Delta. Pretty soon she stopped telling me that I'd dragged her to Egypt, and that what she wanted to do was to photograph in the United States. Egypt was absorbing her attention.
But photographing in Egypt was a hard experience for her in some ways, and it became harder as time went on. The difficulties were greatest closer to the Mediterranean Coast; it was not hard to work when later we went southward into what is called the "Upper Nile." You know some of her exhibition photographs made there. The trouble she encountered sprang from the deep phobia of the Arabs against the Israelis. Even at my academic level colleagues explained it, and to a degree justified the resistance Dorothea encountered. The "justification" was that the Israelis, in their publicity around the world showed photographs of the poverty of the Egyptians and compared these with other photographs made in Israel, implying, "See the progres in Israel, compared to no progress in the U.A.R.?"
Dorothea experienced her difficulties, not at first, but toward the latter part of our stay in
At first things went well. When Dorothea saw something she wanted to photograph, she would say, "Stop." He would stop. She would get out and photograph what she wanted to. But as the months went by it became more difficult. I was with her one day at Rosetta (where the Rosetta stone was found) and some of the women and children she was photographing began snarling at her, and then hitting at her camera to knock it out of her hands! Her reception became like that, occasionally.
One day in the main central plaza of Alexandria, she wanted -- seated in our car -- to photograph the facade of four, five or six story buildings facing the plaza. At that moment a man in western dress, with a brief case, looking like a lawyer, walked by, saw her with camera in the back of the car, then pointed out to the Mediterranean beach, saying angrily, "Why don't you photograph something beautiful?" and walked on. The little children standing around then picked up little pebbles and threw them at our car.
When we spoke of this to my chief at the institute, he explained what was behind it. In the eyes of protesting people, we were agents of the Israelis. That is what the people were fearful of. He didn't think we were, but that was the explanation.
Then, as time passed our driver became less and less cooperative, so that when Dorothea would say, as before, "Stop here," he would drive on another hundred yards or so, and then stop. That way she couldn't photograph what she wanted to photograph. One day in May or June I saw him writing what I am morally certain was a report to the authorities on what she did. Tensions increased around Alexandria, but when we went
Riess
Where was the problem of the "evil eye?"
Taylor
[laughs] Oh, the evil eye! That was another thing. They would pass the hand, with five fingers, or anything numbering five, between themselves and Dorothea. She'd photograph them and they would pass the hand with open palm back and forth before their face in the line of sight of the camera. For a long time she didn't know what that meant. Repeatedly she ran into that when she tried to photograph. Finally, someone explained to her, "Well, they think you have the evil eye."
Riess
It wasn't that they were trying to obscure their face, they were just trying to do the magic thing.
Taylor
So on the one hand there was "serving the Israelis against the Arabs," on the other, their defense against "the evil eye."
Nevertheless, Dorothea did some beautiful things in Egypt. [Emphatically] I mean some stunning things! There is one section on Egypt in the "Dorothea Lange" book of the Museum of Modern Art.45
Well, look at that one up there [on the wall]. Isn't that something? And there are a lot of others. I think she did tremendous things there!
Yet there were days when she would just break down in tears!
Riess
Because it would become more fearful each day?
Taylor
Yes, because she felt these restrictions, and with the driver furnished by the institute and paid by the Ford Foundation! I would go out with her all that I could as a sort of support and protection, but toward the end things began getting tougher and tougher.
Well, at other times, as in 1967 when war broke out, they just pushed all the Americans out of the UAR, you remember, took them down to the wharves and shoved them aboard ships and shipped them out. That is what would have happened to us had we been there at that time, so we were fortunate to be in Egypt when we were.
We made a ten-day side trip from Egypt to the Sudan. Maybe you remember the photograph of the long line of men in their turbans and long robes that was in the Museum of Modern Art catalogue and show. That was made on the famous Gezira Scheme, which was an 800,000-acre irrigation project the British had developed. Arthur Gaitskell, then retired as manager of the project and later knighted as Sir Arthur, we had met in Berkeley. He gave us his introduction to his successors and we stoped at what had been his home at project headquarters. Dorothea did famously with her camera there, too.
Those experiences were fascinating. Both of us were intent throughout. I didn't carry a camera, but I did everything to be supportive. Whenever I could help I would do so, as by diversion of the subject's attention, or by whatever would leave her a little freer to work. Instead of making her the center of attention I helped Dorothea with what she used to call her "imaginary cloak of invisibility," with which she tried to surround herself. It helped her to think of it that way, and in whatever part of the world, as at home, I tried to contribute to her invisibility.
Departure, Under a Cloud of Malaria
TaylorThen, in June 1963, we went to Iran. We flew by way of Beirut, went to Damascus, returning the same day.
Then we stopped for a day in Baghdad. That is where this blanket came from, Baghdad in Iraq, where Sinbad the Sailor lived. (I had always thought he came from the Persian Gulf; but he sailed on a broad river, on a riverboat. I'd never known that.)
Then, having arrived in Iran, we went quickly from Teheran up to Tabriz in East A\d?\zerbaijan. That was, in a personal way, a terrible experience. It turned out to be phase two. Previously Dorothea had had a trouble with fever in Luxor, enough so that I had brought her back to Alexandria, even before we could cross the River Nile to see the Valley of the Kings. The doctor who tended her gave antibiotics which controlled the fever, but we thought, "Well, we'd better get out of this," and left. (Later on we returned and had a good visit in and around Luxor.) At Tabriz, we were in the Komer Hotel -- you saw the notice on our kitchen door -- "We ask our respectable guests to have food in the hotel saloon." The first night, at 2:30 in the morning, I awoke to hear Dorothea babbling unintelligibly. I took her temperature. It was 103 degrees. Fortunately I had the telephone number of a man on the local American mission staff. (You see, in each important city we had somebody on duty.) So I called him on the telephone, and he came quickly by car.
There was a Presbyterian Missionary Hospital that had been in Tabriz for at least a couple of generations. A San Francisco doctor happened to be in charge. So within a half hour, with help, I had Dorothea in the hospital, with the doctor in attendance. All week she was in that hospital while I went around, out in the country where I needed to go. But I knew she was in good hands. Again, antibiotics.
At the end of the week I got her back to Teheran. There the same temperature came way up again. I took
Marvellous! Marvellous.
She always gave me a feeling of confidence that I could leave her. "She was in good hands, it would be all right." I could go on with my work; she'd be there when I came back, which she was.
The last morning at Tabriz, she had not seen anything of the place. So I got a U.S. jeep and a driver and took her out in the country so she had at least three hours to see what the country was like. But she didn't see so much of Teheran. Still, as always, she got down to the markets. You know the pottery that we've got out in the pantry? She didn't miss those things.
The Iranian doctor said, "You're going back home now. You're going to Europe. Just take care." So we flew Pan Am from Teheran about 3:30 in the morning. Got over to Stuttgart about 3:30 in the afternoon. We picked up our Volkswagon, took our time around there, drove up into Switzerland, to Saint Moritz, famous for winter skiiing. There that darned fever came up again, just a little bit. At the hotel a doctor gave her antibiotics, which again brought the fever under control. She stayed abed for a couple of days. Then we started down the mountain.
It was all right till noon, but along about 12:30 or 1:30, that temperature started coming up, up, up. I laid her in the back seat of the V.W. while I drove. I'd asked the doctor in St. Moritz, "Where do I go for medical assistance if this fever comes up?" He said, "In any cantonal capitol there will be hospitals with the whole array of medical talent available." Swiss doctors are very good, you know.
Well, I sweat blood on the way down as the temperature continued to go up, up, up, with Dorothea in the back seat and me driving through Switzerland on those mountainous roads.
Finally I got to Interlaken, a provincial capital. I stopped at an oil station on the near edge of town, asked where was the hospital. They told me, so I made my way across the bridge, then to the right. Here was the traffic control officer. I asked him where was the "spittal." He told me just a half mile away, cleared the traffic for me, and I dashed up to the office. I said, "Does anyone here speak English? My wife is very sick. She has a fever of 103 degrees F., and that is very, very high."
One woman in the office did speak English. In no time flat, they had a doctor at our car with a gurney, i.e., a bed on wheels. They took her out from the car, put her onto it, took her to a room.
They had wonderful nurses, members of a Protestant nursing sisterhood. They devote their lives to nursing. You might think of that as coming out of the middle ages, but the nurses were up to date in their skills, techniques; they were A-1, and with the devotion of a saint! Well, they took care of her.
The first thing I said to the doctors was, "You're going to give her antibiotics to bring the fever down? It has always worked before." They said, "No."
Surprised, I said, "You aren't? Why not?"
"Because if we give her the antibiotics we can't tell what causes her sickness."
"But," I said, "she's got a fever, way up!"
"Yes, we'll bring that down by other means."
Well, the nurses worked with her, and the doctor as needed, all night. I don't know what all they did, but among the things, they wrapped towels and gauze soaked with vinegar around her legs. They knew what to do, believe you me!
And there I was at the end of the day, in a strange town and with no accomodations. So the hospital telephoned and they arranged for me a room at the Rugenpark family hotel. And someone who was driving over that way said, to me, "Just follow our car, and you'll come to the hotel." So I had a room for the night. I was pretty uneasy, as you can imagine. All I knew was, well, she's in good hands, but this is getting pretty wearing. This is the fourth time around.
In the morning I went back to the hospital, and to Dorothea's nurse. "How is she?"
"Everything normal. Temperature perfecctly normal. Smiling, `Good morning.' Everything all right. Fever all gone." It was almost unbelievable, but there was Dorothea, in bed, of course, but normal and at ease.
Well, in about three days the fever came up again. So we went through it again, but more under control. The next morning I came in and the Swiss doctor (P. Cottier) came into the room after I'd arrived, very excited. He wanted to take me down to the laboratory right away. I followed him.
There a young woman technician had the microscope ready and a slide. She said, "We've got it, we've got it. It's malaria!" So I looked through the microscope. Well, how did I know that these little red and blue things that I saw, circles and whatnot, proved it was malaria? But they knew.
Dr. Cottier said, "Now that I know what it is, I know exactly what to do for it which is quinine treatment." The treatment for malaria is standardized all over the world. The doctor said, "It will take three weeks, and we'll cure her." Which he did.
I asked, "Have you had other cases of malaria here in Switzerland?"
He said, "Yes, this is the second."
I said, "What was the other case?"
He said, "It was a Russian, who picked it up in China."
Dr. Cottier had been eight years at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and was a wonderful doctor.
Well, once we knew what it was, and treatment was started, that greatly relieved our feelings. Look at what we had been going through! That was really terrific.
Once we knew that in just three weeks she would be all right, our experience at the Interlaken hospital was perfectly idyllic. The whole side of her room on the second floor of the hospital was glass. There was a balcony, and when you looked out, if the day was clear, there was the Jungfrau! Perfectly beautiful, perfectly beautiful!
I stayed at the hotel. Tourists were pouring through Interlaken so they couldn't let me stay in the same room. They said, "Would you be willing to stay in the room of a zimmermadchen, a chambermaid?" I said, "Yes, I would." So I stayed in this little bit of a room with a narrow single bed and a little dresser, up on the fourth floor, with window opening out onto an evergreen tree. I had everything I needed, and could stay as long as I needed to stay.
Riess
Those three weeks sound like a tremendous contrast with all that had gone on before.
Taylor
Oh yes. I had nothing making demands on me. She was there in bed, couldn't get out. But she was headed out, headed for recovery. She got a paperback book for me to read, Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann. I would sit out on the balcony while she took her nap, read Buddenbrooks, look at the Jungfrau, and look out over the beautifully-tended orchard, vegetable garden, a little farm, and on beyond the trees to the channel connecting the two lakes.
I would come over to the hospital each morning. At first I would leave at noon to find a restaurant for lunch. Then later, with the understanding cooperation of those lovely krankenschwesters (nurses) I need not leave for lunch. They would load Dorothea's plate, she would eat all she wanted or could, and I would eat all the rest off the edge of the plate. Were they nice to us!
So I'd be at Dorothea's, you see, from before 9 in the morning, and stay there until after supper, until it was time for her to turn in. They would prepare her for the night and she would go to sleep; then I'd go back that three-quarters of a mile in the car to the hotel, to my little "zimmermadchen's zimmer." It was perfectly lovely! It was literally idyllic. Dorothea asked the doctor, "If I know when my last illness is, may I come to Interlaken to spend it here?" He appreciated that tribute, and said, "Yes, you may."
Indeed, when we got the cancer diagnosis late in August of 1964, the question was, "What do we do, do we go back to that idyllic place, waiting for the end there, with the Jungfrau?" I wrote to him. He said, "Yes, you may come. I recommend that you find a solution where you are; but you may come."
Retrospection Begins for Dorothea
TaylorBy that time we had decided what the solution would be, it would be to remain here. Dorothea had thought of the need to have someone to take care of her, perhaps a relative to come from New York, to prepare the meals, take care of the household, to see her through. But very quickly we decided against that. I wanted help only if she needed it.
I said, "If you can get by with what I can prepare for you..." You see, she could swallow only soft foods, liquids, because the cancer was in the esophagus, and there was a constriction of the passage. That made it possible for me to prepare her soups, and jellos and milkshakes, things of that sort, that would go down. For the household cleaning, our Japanese woman, Fami Onogama, came a day a week.
So we decided that I would take care of things right here, because I wanted to be with her, and she wanted to be with me. Besides, KQED was doing those two half-hour programs on Dorothea, which they made of her here, at work on what was to be her posthumous exhibition. She offered them the choice to stop, because she didn't know how long she'd last. They said, "No, we would like to continue." As Robert Katz said to her, "There is such a thing as an unfinished symphony, but it is still a symphony." So they went through with it.
Dorothea saw the first half hour program right in this room -- "Under the trees." They brought it; she saw it, and she liked it. She never saw the second half hour.
Riess
It is good that she liked what she saw.
The times that I was in and out of the house then, there was such a feeling of things happening, and things underway, and activity. It was phenomenal.
Taylor
Nobody was sitting down, waiting for the end! Oh, nobody was doing that! Everyone was living up every minute.
She worked all she could, every day. Then at the end of the day, when she had to, she'd go up to bed. And in a little while I would bring her supper to her. I'd bring her breakfast in the morning. She'd get out of bed after I'd brought breakfast on those two beautiful copper trays we brought from India. One for her and one for me. That room up there, it is all white you know. It opens out onto the balcony, looking into the trees.
Riess
If she had gone someplace else, she wouldn't have done the big show, the Retrospective.
Taylor
No. She had to decide, what was she going to do?
Riess
It seems inconceivable now, that she would have gone away at that point.
Taylor
That show, and KQED, I think, were decisive. There might have been other things that would have been decisive, too. But you can see why the quality of the experience in Interlaken made her think of that even before she had had her final diagnosis.
No, those last fourteen months, that was a tremendous experience. Of course, the thirty years -- that was true of the whole thirty years with her. That was a tremendous experience. Think of being able to share that life for thirty years! What more does a man want in this life? Very few are given anything like that.
Riess
How was the decision to do the big show arrived at?
Taylor
Well, the Museum of Modern Art had been after her, Steichen had been after her to do it for about six or eight years. Always she put it off. There was always some reason why not to do it now.
Riess
There were plenty of reasons, like trips, for one.
Taylor
Oh, yes [unconvinced], but if she had really been ready... think of being asked to have a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art! You can find ways of doing it. She could have done it earlier.
There were good reasons why she didn't. But what she came to at the end, when she had to face her cancer diagnosis, as she said to me, was, "Well, I guess it is now or never." I said, "Yes, I guess
Riess
Did putting together the show seem as if it had all been in her mind already? As if it was obvious to her what had to be done?
Taylor
No. It grew as she worked. For one thing the Museum said it was to be retroactive, which means, covering your whole professional life. That one [Mexican child] which was used at Los Angeles County Art Museum, as their advertisement, was made, I think in 1928. The Indonesian dancer and the Korean child were used for the poster advertisements at the Museum of Modern Art. A part of the exhibition was to draw upon her early work. That section was of photographs made before I knew her. Then, the photographs began to fall in place by subjects.
Speaking of how she came to believe that photographs should be grouped by subjects, seen in groups, photographers, by and large, generally had done what painters by and large do: let the painting stand by itself. You don't put anything else by it. You have one painting. If you have another to place beside it, it need have nothing to do with the first.
Dorothea came to want to group her photographs by subjects. I think that is evident in the American Country Woman, I think that they have a facsimile statement of hers there.46 That is the way
One little problem I had in New York: Dorothea did the kitchen table and the shelves, do you remember that? The cookbook, the marbletop table, the wooden figure carved in Bali, and so on? Well, that was printed and prepared to go up in New York, but they got short of space and that was a discard. I wanted that up in the Home section. The answer by the time I got to the Museum was, it was too late and crowded to get it in. They had ruled it out. I noticed later, when they sent the exhibition to Oakland, that this photograph was not among them. There were others, perhaps a dozen, not used in New York at the Museum of Modern Art that were not sent out to Oakland.
Well, you should have seen the tortured letter that I got back. I've got it around here somewhere. It nearly turned him inside out, trying to explain to me why those unused photographs should not be sent out, and that he hoped I wouldn't ask him to do it. But he did indicate that the one I had specified of the kitchen table, if I really insisted on that, he'd send it.
I wrote him back to say, "Please send that one out." You could tell that for whatever reason this photographer was just being torn to pieces inside by my request. So there is one of the differences between Dorothea and other photographers. [laughter] That's part of "home," the kitchen table, and the tree, and the child's head, my hands on the briefcase. So you see how independent she was in her own judgment. She was not encased or restricted by the views and practices of any other artists with camera.
Riess
This was always, not just lately?
Taylor
That was always. Before I knew her, the f/64 Club was organized around the Bay. Did we mention that before? [laughs] She was not elected to membership in the f/64 Club. They knew her, would see her, and they liked her, but she didn't insist that she had to stop down to f/64 like Edward Weston did, or Ansel Adams, to the smallest stop in order to get the most perfect definition. She was not opposed to stopping down to f/64, but other criteria were more important for the kind of work with people that she wanted to do. The criteria were her own, serving the kind of work she wanted to do.
Riess
In the oral history interview she talks about being sort of a channel for other people all her life. Do you think that she felt this in the sense that what she photographed was communicated through her photograph to the people who see it? 47
Taylor
The answer unquestionably is yes. There was response in government to the situations revealed in her photographs. And the people photographed often saw them as a means of communication with their government. You remember the photograph of that Texan with the letter from his son after we sent our book to his deceased father. I mean the man who gave us the phrase, and showed us the meaning of "tractored out?" We spoke of that earlier.
Those people that we really reached, those people, I assure you, felt that through her work they had a channel to the government.
Riess
Also in this quote is there a sort of poignancy about being a channel, the channel being a passive role?
Taylor
Oh, not in that sense. It's a very sensitive channel.
You remember my answer to my chief in the Division of Rural Rehabilitation of the State Emergency Relief Administration when he asked me why I wanted a photographer? I didn't use the word "channel." What I said was that I wanted the people who would make the decisions in the offices to see, as nearly visually as possible, what the field conditions were that they were making decisions about. A channel in that sense.
Riess
I think that in asking this question of you I implied that it was said in our interview. I meant in my interview with Dorothea. She talked about herself as a channel. So I was wondering...
Taylor
In what sense did she mean it?
Riess
What I felt at the time (I want you to comment on it, and to correct me if you feel I am wrong): it was a role in which she was somewhat passive, in which things happened on one end of the camera, and things happened on the other end as people saw the photographs. But she hadn't really been able to determine what was happening; it was only at the end that she really was getting her message, that she was saying that she, in fact, had something to communicate.
Taylor
Do you remember this little incident, when you asked me to go over her manuscript and where she said there wasn't much use made of the FSA pictures, and I said, "Gee Whiz!" Remember?
I don't know if that throws any light on that. The use made of her photographs was tremendous, and it showed just all over the place. I don't say that more use couldn't have been made but, by the standards of the day, she was breaking plenty of ice! That Farm Security Project, well, we started doing the same thing here before they got underway. We were doing it right here in California.
Riess
You are saying that to take this phrase and apply it to the kind of work she was doing for Farm Security, that she was really not just a channel, with everything flowing past...
Taylor:... merely a pipe. She surely was not! Oh, heavens, no! She was a channel in the most active sense. She selected what she photographed, and look at the results!
Riess
I was thinking the contrast might have been between some definition of being a documentary photographer, and some definition of being an artist, or something like that, in so far as the artist has the right to decide what is important and what is not.
Taylor
Compare her with other photographers, who regard themselves as artists, and are. She never felt those restrictions; she never felt the necessity of deciding whether a certain photograph was art, or whether it wasn't. She let that judgment come out of the photographs themselves. If the final product was art, that was fine. But she surely, on the migrant mother, wasn't saying, as she made the photograph, "Now I am doing a Madonna." I say it is a Madonna, but I assure you that wasn't what she was saying when she went and did it. She was down there, going back to that Nipomo pea-pickers camp where the year before she had worked her first day in the field on a new assignment. She had the impulse to return and see again what sort of conditions she might find there.
When she photographed that one woman and her children, she was emotionally finished when she got through. But as for art, she took the photographs over to the San Francisco News -- either she didn't take the one print which is now recognized as the Madonna, or the editor
Her standards of photography were her own. Of course, I am on her side, very much prejudiced. But she wasn't restricted by anything of that sort. In our book, An American Exodus, she was entirely willing that we should use any photographs. It was not a book of photographs. It was a photographic and textual representation of a subject; and if the subject dictated that a certain photograph should be there, one that wouldn't meet the same artistic standard as some of the others that were there, that didn't bother her at all; there was no issue at all! The criterion for selection of photographs was: What were we trying to say and do in that book?
Riess
Then, do you think that those attitudes were still there, to the same degree, and as strongly felt, when she was putting the Retrospective together?
Taylor
No. Not to the same degree. No, I think there was a more rigid, a higher standard applied to the photograph itself, as a photograph, to get into that exhibition. No photograph got in there -- well, am I entirely right? What, by the standard of art, is the photograph of my hands on the briefcase, with an umbrella? Do you call that art? Or did she want me in here? "Home," so there I am. The photograph is all right, but.... I can imagine that Ansel Adams would dismiss that photograph. It would never go up in his exhibition. His standards of excellence are very high; I think they don't include something of that sort. But even Ansel may be more flexible and broader in his vision than his earlier exhibitions have led people to believe. Dorothea wanted a section on "Home" there. The photograph is a good photograph. A great photograph? Well, no, I don't suppose it is a great photograph. But that had to be there.
Riess
When I was interviewing her, it seems as if she had come to a point where she had heard herself called an artist, and that she had been denying it for a long time, because she didn't like having this title attached to her, and whatever the implications were, but she was finally going to give in.
Taylor
I told you that, too.
Riess
And she talked a little bit about that.
Taylor
Maybe she did with you. I remember when that came up between Dorothea and me once. It happened as we passed in the hall upstairs. She just passed, as she walked by, we just exchanged a few words. That is the only time that she accepted the designation of artist for herself, or called herself an artist. The only time in thirty years.
Riess
What was the exchange?
Taylor
She didn't say, "I am an artist," but she included herself. I don't know as I can say it exactly right in her words, but the idea was that the standards are those of the artist himself. He is the one who sets the standard; he knows what is Art. Not that he has been instructed. From inside, he knows, and that's what makes the artist.
I haven't said that very well.
Riess
She was talking about that in the abstract, but she was referring to herself.
Taylor
She included herself as though that was a conclusion she had come to. Yes.
No, she didn't say, "Now I am an artist." No,
She was a tremendous human being, you see. Look at her human relations! All her love to her grandchildren, to my grandchildren -- just see the range of her human contacts. That tells you what a wonderful human being she had to be; otherwise, she wouldn't have had relationships like that. And her art, her photography, included all in the same way. It was an integral part of her life, not separate from it.
Riess
I'll quote another thing which is relevent. She said that, "There are not many first-class women producers, that is, producers of outside things. They produce in other ways. Where they can do both, it's a conflict."
Taylor
Just what does that mean? Producers of outside things?
Riess
Things outside the home.
Taylor
Oh, most women produce only within the home?
Riess
Right.
Taylor
OK. Now read it over to me.
Riess
"There are not many first-class woman producers, That is, producers of outside things. They produce in other ways. Where they can do both, it's a conflict."48
Taylor
Yes. She said to me more than once that, in a way, she felt pulled apart all her life. That I think is what she meant. Here she was living so vital a role at home so important, so essential a part of the family, at the center of it. Then, here she was at the same time trying to do something which required her to be out
You are trying to maintain a home, and you are trying to do something else, and it pulls you.
I suppose she meant that the man just takes things for granted, and figures that the woman has the first responsibility of being the center of the home, while he has the first responsibility of bringing in the support by doing his job outside. I suspect that is the difference that she felt -- for her there was a first responsibility in the home, as well as a first responsibility to her photography. And that pulled her apart. That, I think, is what she meant. I think one can understand that. But being pulled apart didn't seem to impede her high accomplishment in either the home or in her work outside of it.
Riess
I think it was one of those times, when she said it, when she was accepting herself as being a first-class woman producer. She was allowing herself the title.
Taylor
Well, she knew it. She knew that she was.
Riess
It seems like so much of her life she would back away from calling herself one.
Taylor
That's right. But in her last years, when she reviewed her life, she evaluated herself properly. Not flaunting it, not in any sense; simply evaluating herself truly, and she was right.
Riess
Also in 1960 she said, quoting Durer, that now, "drawing from the secrets of her heart, she could do her best work," as if one had to age, and live through things.49
Taylor
Well, I would interpret it that way. I never heard her say it that way, but I am getting old enough to feel a greater depth in my own understanding now than was there ten, twenty years ago. Some things I was just as good at then as I am now; in some other things, you feel that you get a depth of understanding with time. Maybe that is what she meant.
What is it that builds up in a person as the years go on? Something does, or can. You don't live life for nothing, or at least, I hope not. I don't feel that I've lived a lot of my experiences for nothing. I think I am enriched by them, and that the years of experience behind me have left me with more human understanding.
Riess
So, with this kind of emphasis or with this kind of feeling, she could put together a Retrospective.
Taylor
She could see her whole life behind her, professional, personal, it all was there. It is all there!
She was a great woman, in the finest sense.
[Pause]
I never thought of making quite this comparison before, but I think "great" in the same sense greatness is true of Jane Addams. I remember Jane Addams personally under two sets of circumstances. First I met her when I was a child; she stayed at our home overnight. She came out from Chicago to Sioux City to give a public lecture. Then in the summer of 1929 I stayed at Hull House. Jane Addams, as everyone knows, was a great woman, a Quaker. Did she do anything to impress herself upon people, "Now I am the lady of this house. I am a great woman"? No, no, no. She was just the simplest, plainest, but not empty, human being, and very direct in her personal contacts. A wonderful human being.
Dorothea, humanly speaking, was on that level.
Riess
Yes. And yet you can't operate unless you hold yourself in high esteem.
Letter to Ramona Javitz, head of the Photography Department of the New York Public Library.
Taylor
Oh yes. She valued her life. One thing, I don't know whether you have it there, whether she said it to you, when she was saying, "What to photograph?"
One time she said to me, or maybe I heard her say to her students, "Try to photograph something that you love or hate, not that you are indifferent to." In other words, the intensity of feeling is important. She lived so vividly all the time.
You remember that article in Infinity, that came out after her death.50 Homer Page spoke of the magnetism of her presence. Well, that is it. She'd come into the room -- here, there, anywhere, it electrified the room! Not because she sailed in with pomp and circumstance, but just the presence of this small woman made everybody immediately know she was there. She commanded nothing by command. But in another sense, she commanded everything -- and demanded nothing!
Riess
And do you associate this quality also with your memories of Jane Addams?
Taylor
Yes. They were not identical in manner, of course. But yes, when Jane Addams was present, you knew somebody was there, indeed.
It is a little hard to say just what. I don't want to say you deferred to her, or were in awe. The words are a little hard to find. But you knew that you were in the presence of a fine human being. Their personalities were not the same, but both had the same fine human quality of just being human.
Riess
Being all there.
Taylor
Being all there, Oh, my yes!
The Loyalty Oath, and Other Investigations
RiessWhat was your experience with the loyalty oath issue? When did you first learn about it?
Taylor
I knew about it, I'm sure, about as soon as everybody did. I went quite regularly to the Faculty Club meetings, where it was discussed by those who were overwhelmingly against it.
Riess
Was this the group that was lead by Tolman?
Taylor
Tolman was in the last small group of about eighteen that held out and signed nothing. They took the case to the State Supreme Court, and were out of their jobs in the process, which was considerable, participation in the conflict, you see. They lost a year, or two years, whatever it was. I was not prepared to go to that extreme, although in principle I was opposed to the oath.
Whether I hid behind this as a screen, I don't know, it certainly was in my mind that the issue arose during a period when Dorothea was going through some of her very difficult months and years in and out of the hospital, because of the ulcer. I think that that was one factor explaining why I signed a revised oath! I would have been out on the street, looking for a job somewhere else, at a time when certainly from that family point of view it would have been untoward to have to go through with it.
Whether I am just hiding behind a woman's skirts -- well, you can put it anyway you like, but that was a factor in explaining why I wasn't one of the last eighteen hold-outs. I did not sign the first oath, and I was one of the couple of hundred who held out until the intermediate, somewhat less objectionable oath was presented to us. The third group of eighteen did not sign anything.
Riess
By that time there was a fund that had been got together in anticipation of the eventuality that people would be dismissed and need financial support.
Taylor
You mean that that would be relevant to what I said?
Riess
Yes, that you could have in some way been supported. I guess the thing is whether one wished to make that his battle or not.
Taylor
Well, I was not prepared to make that my battle, not to the bitter, bitter end. There were those who took it to the end and won the case. I was for them. I contributed financially. How much I contributed I haven't any idea now.
Riess
Did you work behind the scenes at all on it, or in the community?
Taylor
I was not on the inner group although as I say I was always with the group that was considering it in its most serious aspects.
That could be a characteristic of it. That it was just not my battle. I choose my battles. I never, to put it my way, "scattered" my efforts and my energies for all the causes that I believed in, nor any large fraction of them. I've concentrated on one or two at a time. They have been, in general, lone battles. They have been my causes. The program of camps and other improvements for the migratory laborers, the water issue, those issues, I thought, were very fundamental, and closely inter-related. I still believe that to be true, and I still am interested in both.
I made a telephone call to Washington yesterday, on the migrants, going back to my first cause, if you will, talking to the head of the staff of Senator Mondale's committee on migratory labor, and raising with him the question of land ownership and its relation to the low position, economically and politically, of the migratory laborers. And beyond that, the effort of the large landowners to perpetuate, to consolidate their power by acquiring ownership of the public water as well as of the land. So you see, I see in them a unity.
While, of course, I am not the only person who has made these his causes, I have, in a sense, made them mine from the 1920s to the 1970s. And I have been unwilling to take on other causes, in part for
You didn't bring up at all, did you, the McCarthy era?
Riess
No, I didn't. I hadn't thought of it in any other way than the McCarthy era on campus.
Taylor
On campus? How about in my study?
[Pause]
Riess
I don't know.
Taylor
Maybe you don't know anything about it?
Riess
No, I don't.
Taylor
I hadn't thought about it until this very moment and I wondered why you were building up the oath fight, in which I took the position I described, held it until the finals -- I stayed through the semi-finals.
How would you like, in your study, in South Hall, to walk in after lunch on a Saturday, to find a man standing there, with his hat on his head, looking around, you don't know doing what? When you ask him to sit down and tell you what it is he wants, he wriggles, and wriggles and wriggles, and wriggles, and goes out. Makes all sorts of crazy apologies, and goes off and is never heard of again. I have a whole series of experiences -- didn't you know that I had a full field investigation?
Riess
No. I really didn't know that.
Taylor
I've been investigated from stem to stern, sure.
Riess
Would you give a whole history of that? When did it all start?
Taylor
I have the final documents only. Oh, that investigation went on for, I don't remember off-hand, but I would say off and on for maybe a couple of years.
A political friend of mine -- the Director of the California State Department of Agriculture when I was a member of the advisory board -- told me that FBI agents came to him about me when he was on a vacation or other trip in Minnesota. How many others they asked about me, I don't know. But you can see how they prowled around.
Riess
Were they suspecting you of being a Communist? [Incredulously]
Taylor
Why, of course! Of course.
Riess
Or was it some sort of harassment to get you out of your other kinds of investigations? Was this an attempt to "get" you? Was this what you were talking about, an attempt to get you on their ground?
Taylor
You are asking broad questions. There is one phase of the investigation where I suspect that the FBI was being used to try to "get" me. That the FBI as an institution allowed itself to be used, I am not prepared to say. I have only inferences from what was said to me orally or on paper.
Riess
Were the others similar?
Taylor
Oh, they would call me up by telephone of an evening and ask could they see me the next morning at ten-thirty or whatever. They would come always in pairs. (This other man whom I encountered in my study, came alone. He didn't tell me that he was an FBI man, but I am morally certain that he was. He was very embarrassed when I caught him in my study.)
Riess
When they came to you, in pairs, were they forthright in their questions?
Taylor
By and large, they were. Yes, they were.
Riess
Why did they have to keep coming back?
Taylor
You'll have to ask them that. They'd pick up something, I suppose, somewhere, that somebody would say about me, then they'd come and ask about it.
But they only put two tangible things on paper. I have the papers, their letter and my response, on campus. After the investigations, you see, the next step in procedure was to give the results of the investigation to the agency of the government to which I was consultant, that is, to the Department of the Interior.
I got the letter, delivered by the postman at home as I sat in the garden. The mailman came down, "special delivery, return receipt requested." The letter ran something like this: "You are given the opportunity herewith, should you so desire, to reply to the following questions, under oath, at any time within the next fourteen days."
Well, question number one was substantially this: "Is it true that you wrote a letter of recommendation to a government position for Gregory Silvermaster?" Silvermaster had been a graduate student -- not my graduate student -- in the Department of Economics, from which he received his doctorate. Thereafter he had become head of research in the State Emergency Relief Administration. That is the only time that I had anything like a working relationship with him, not intimate even then. He wasn't over me, but was the head of research in general, while I was doing the research work in preparation for a program in the Rural Rehabiliation Division of the State Emergency Relief Administration. So I recall that I went to him to see what he had available of work already done, and to coordinate with him. I suppose I exchanged thoughts and perhaps notes with him, sketching what I intended to do. I suppose I asked him if he had anything to throw light on my migrant problem, or any thoughts about it that would help my work. We met on a purely professional basis.
He became a very famous case. (In the long view of things, I think he probably was a Communist.) They hounded him out of government employment everywhere. After leaving the Relief Administration he became an official on the Farm Security Administration. I think he finally found refuge from attack, or shield or whatever, working as a contractor building housing in New Jersey. As I recall, I saw that in Time magazine. Because his was a famous case, he was hounded out of the government, and everybody who had been really close to him apparently was hounded.
Well, what brought me into it was the accident that one day I entered the economics office while we both were on the staff of the State Emergency Relief Administration, although in different divisions. As I came into the economics office, Mary Drew, the department secretary, said, "Would you write a letter of recommendation for Gregory Silvermaster? His secretary in San Francisco called me and said that they wanted a letter of recommendation from the Economics Department, and in a hurry, because the people in Washington want him to come, and they are in a hurry to have all the documents that will make it possible to get him." It was on a Saturday morning and none of my colleagues with whom Silvermaster had worked were on campus that day.
Well, he wasn't my student, but after all, he had received a Ph.D. from my department, which told me what my colleagues must have thought of him. So I wrote a letter of recommendation. That was in 1935.
So, here, years later, I get this special delivery letter, return receipt requested, saying, "You are hereby given the opportunity, if you so desire, to answer in writing, under oath or affirmation, the following interrogatories based upon a full field investigation conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in your case, which is before the Interior Loyalty Review Board for consideration."
The first interrogatory was, "Do you have any information concerning or explanation of a report that you recommended that the Farm Security Administration employ Nathan Gregory Silvermaster," who allegedly was "involved in a Soviet espionage conspiracy in
The answer was, "Yes, I did." I had to tell them the story of the circumstances, circumstances antedating the "early 1940s" by five years or so. If I hadn't walked into the economics office that particular morning, I would not have been even asked to write a letter, I suppose.
Riess
When was this that they wrote to you?
Taylor
That letter offering me opportunity to answer two questions was dated March 28, 1949, about fourteen years after Mary Drew asked me to write the Silvermaster letter of recommendation.
The second question that I had the opportunity to answer under oath was, "Do you have any information concerning or explanation of a report that you have contributed to the Joint Anti-Facist Refugee Committee, which has been designated by the attorney general as being within the purview of paragraph `f', section2, part V, of Executive Order 9835?"
The answer was "yes." Dorothea and I had attended a banquet at the Claremont Hotel, tickets about $5 apiece, sponsored locally by the Provost of the University of California and one or two of the Regents among many others. In reply I sent excerpts from the Berkeley Gazette. I photocopied the Gazette account and sent it to Interior with the long list of sponsors. The event occurred during the organization of the United Nations in San Francisco as the war was drawing to a close.
I said, "Yes, for a long time we had had very few social or public occasions where there was discussion of public questions, and I thought I would like to go, and did."
Well, four years thereafter came this letter from the Secretary of Interior, who said that "the interrogatories do not constitute charges of possible disloyalty under Executive Order 9835." But, periodically I had FBI people coming and talking with me.
Riess
And the only thing to do was to be cool about it? You couldn't have used any pressure from the Department of the Interior to call these people off?
Taylor
No, of course not. They were authorized by President Harry Truman to make these investigations. He issued that Executive Order under the pressures of Joe McCarthy, et al.
Riess
When they asked you those questions, what would have happened if you had just said, "Yes," without documenting it and explaining why?
Taylor
Well, since they asked the questions, I undertook very carefully to document the answer. I read the draft of my answer to the Silvermaster question to Mary Drew, the department secretary who had asked me to write the letter of recommendation for Silvermaster in the first place, and stated in my reply that I had shown this answer to Mary Drew, and she assures me that according to her recollections what I have said is substantially correct.
I went in Sacramento to the regional solicitor of the Bureau of Reclamation to which I was a consultant and showed him my answer. He went over it with me and was helpful, suggesting that I strengthen it in a point or two, here or there. Then I sent it in. The Loyalty Board cleared me.
To have that sort of inquiry going on was not pleasant, you may be sure.
Riess
Was it happening to other people that you knew?
Taylor
Oh, I don't know to how many other people. It happened all over the country. Remember the devastating attack on the China branch of our State Department? Isn't it only fairly recently that John Service was finally cleared and allowed to go back to China?
Now, to give the example where I suspect that somebody tipped the FBI off to question me, some one who didn't like what I was doing on the Central Valley water and power issue. I just suspect the tip off;
That meeting was preceded by the visit of a young FBI fellow. As I recall, he said he was an accountant, the only time as I recall that they didn't come in pairs. I do not recall the details of his questions or our conversations, but I do remember my impression that he appeared to be a very suspicious person. I cannot remember anything specific, but our conversations gave me no indication that they would relate to what I am going to tell you now. I am saying only that I had the impression that this was a particularly suspicious guy. Maybe he was on the make, thought maybe that I would be a find helpful to him to go up the FBI ladder. I don't know, you see, but I can suspect.
Following the young man's visit, after a time interval, there came this "accountant" and an older man, I presume a lawyer. (They'd always come in pairs with the exception of the accountant's first visit). Let's see if I can recreate that next, and last, FBI interview.
They asked me some exploratory questions, which apparently had nothing to do with where they were going to put the knife in. I couldn't figure out just what it was they were probing for. Then the lawyer said, "Well, have you ever been in Chico or Eureka?"
I said, "Yes, I've been in Chico and Eureka. Let's answer Eureka first."
I said I was there; I gave him the year, probably 1939 or 1940. I was there on a government assignment as a consultant to the Social Security Board. I arrived shortly before noon, had lunch there, was travelling with Dorothea. We talked with the waitress where we had our lunch. After lunch I bought gasoline, and so I talked with the attendent at the gas station. I spent perhaps twenty minutes slowly driving around the community to become familiar with it, as it was the first time I had ever been there. Then I went on. That's Eureka.
Then Chico. "Yes." I said. "I've been in Chico, twice." The first occasion I described was going through Chico when I was consultant either to
"Who asked me to go there? On whose invitation did I go there?" came the question.
I said, "I don't really know on whose invitation I went there. A man attached to one of the foundation-supported agencies of the University of California, like an institute -- he asked me would I go to Chico and speak at the inauguration of President Kimble of Chico State.
"I said I would, if asked by someone at Chico State. So a little while later I got a letter from someone at Chico State inviting me to speak."
I guess the FBI lawyer asked me, "Did I go for the University?"
I said, "I don't know. I was furnished a University car to drive up and back. I don't know whether Chico State paid for it, or the University paid for it; I never was asked to pay, and I never asked who did. I stayed at the local hotel, and I don't know who paid my bill. I know only that when I came to pay the bill at the time of departure, the clerk said it had been taken care of for me. I don't know who did it. I suppose Chico State did it."
And then I said, "I spoke on the college program." Then I turned to the older agent and aaid, "Do you want to know what I said? It is over there in a drawer of the steel filing cabinet. If you want to know, there it is. I'll show it to you."
At that point the older man got up and said, "No, no, no. We've no more interest in this. It is a University matter. That's all." They got up and left and that is the last time FBI agents ever came.
You see, the older man took over all the questioning from the younger one. Pretty clearly I satisfied him, because he left at that point.
Now, why do I suspect? Why should the FBI be concerned in the first place with an address that I gave at Chico State? I'll tell you what it was about. It was about the Central Valley Project. There were the issues of water and power -- the 160-acre limitation and public power preference provisions of the law. Along with other parts of the inauguration ceremony, my address was carried, so I was told by students, over the local student radio broadcasting station.
It crosses my mind that somebody opposed to my views and to these laws may have thought, "Well, we'll sic the FBI onto him." I think somebody did. I cannot think of any other reason for questioning me about my presence in Chico. And that older man of the FBI, you see how he tried to trap me, as though my presence in Chico was questionable. He asked his leading questions so skillfully. Then he left when he was completely satisfied -- "No, no interest in what I said." It was a University matter and he had no interest in it." They never came again.
Riess
Once it had been established that you had been asked, and that you hadn't put yourself forward, that made the difference?
Taylor
He didn't say what made the difference, except that it was a University matter. But you can guess; he must have been satisifed with my answers. I don't know what he said to the young fellow as they drove back to the city. But he might have said something to him.
That was the most acute, personally-experienced situation, which bears out, shall I say justifies, to me, my traditional position that when I have a cause I regard as important I don't pick up a whole slew of other causes, which might make it easier to throw stones at me without going into my cause at all, i.e., knocking me out on totally other grounds.
There were plenty of people around then -- perhaps even now -- who would like to have seen me out of the way. I am prepared to believe that. Who did this, of course, I don't know, but if my suspicion
Remember, in those same years the regional director of the Central Valley Project, Richard L. Boke, was made to experience similar difficulties through the FBI, causing him all kinds of trouble, but never really getting to him. In addition to that, Sheridan Downey, the Democratic U.S. Senator, manipulated Congress to the point where he was able to out Dick Boke off of the federal payroll on the pretext that he was not an engineer, and therefore not competent to be Regional Director of Reclamation. Boke was off the payroll for seven months not knowing whether he would ever get back on. Only the re-election of Harry Truman in 1948 got him back on. On these issues the boys sometimes play rough.
Riess
What would the University have done if these boys had managed to put together some kind of a case?
Taylor
It was not my connection with the University, but my connection with the government that gave the ground initially for making the investigation under broad presidential order.
You see, here was this propaganda of McCarthy. What was it, he had a "list of 257 Communists?" Well, it didn't turn out to be 257 or 57 or whatever. But the McCarthyites made trouble throughout the government, and all over the world.
Riess
And your office in South Hall wasn't sacrosanct.
Taylor
No, it would seem not. I found that man standing, hat on, in my study. I tried to get him to sit down, to tell me what it was he wanted to know. Finally, as he went down the steps, I said, "What is your name?"
He said, "Everett Brown."
Whether that was his name, I haven't the foggiest notion! But I don't think it was.
When I found him in my study, he was very anxious to get out.
"Oh, you are busy now."
"No," I said, "I've just finished my lunch at the Faculty Club and here I am, right ready. We can sit down. What is it that you want to know?"
Well, it was not a happy experience to have your patriotism called into question, and to have those inquiries. There were no charges made, just had I ever been in Chico, Eureka, etc., etc.?
Riess
You talked about picking your own battles. Can you think of any other battles that people have wished you to engage yourself in, that you have chosen not to?
Taylor
Oh, not particularly. Except there are all sorts of causes that one could join. I joined almost no organizations, just a very few.
Riess
Was it after you experienced these investigations that you felt...
Taylor
No. That was my habit before, also. It must have been in 1945 that I was asked to become the head of the Berkeley Democratic Club. I learned there, watching the operations, enough to raise my suspicions that among them there were a handful of probable Communists. It wasn't the Communist Club, it was the Democratic Club, but there were some whose behavior there convinced me that they were Communists, or near-Communists. Just as today, on the campuses, there are those whom I am prepared fully to believe hold that point of view.
Riess
You call them Communists, rather than Marxists, or something like that....
Taylor
I don't know how to distinguish the meaning of those various phrases.
Riess
I guess by one I mean a party member, and by the other I mean a more....
Taylor
Philosophical?
Well, I talk about "activists," what today they call "activists," which means I think that they were party members, or near party members -- the old phrase was "fellow travellers."
I watched their behavior in the Berkeley Democratic Club, and it crossed my mind, "Well, it looks to me as though..." Of course they didn't run the Club, or dominate it. With Dorothea's illness and all, I gave up that position with the Democratic Club.
You can see what in the McCarthy era they were doing. Anybody who associated with anybody of that ilk was himself suspect. And what does "associating" mean? Well, I was Club president; they were members. Does that mean that I was "associating" with them? You just didn't know. No open charges, just innuendos.
One of my own Rural Rehabilitation staff, in 1935, working under my orders, I found had gone around to others on the staff -- whether to my superiors or not I don't know -- and had said he suspected I was "common-ist" [sic]. That was the way he phrased it. I was told of it by those who rejected his suspicion. But that was the atmosphere in which we worked. Any charge of "communism" was a deadly weapon; proof was hardly necessary.
The question, at that time, was not, "Is he standing for something that is good, right and proper?" but, "Is he a `commoon-ist?"' You see, guilt by association. That was ballooned up in the McCarthy era. Except possibly for that one man who apparently was sent in my absence into my study, when identified FBI men came to see me, they behaved all right, especially that last fellow who ended the interviews when satisfied with my answers.
Riess
It sounds very wise, that you stayed out of groups. That is what people attack today, isn't it? The group that one associates with?
Taylor
Yes. They'd rather talk about association with the unpopular group, and pin that on you, discuss that, than discuss the fundamental questions that you or
I, in my lifetime, have had a couple of issues to which I have really devoted myself, that I put years into. I didn't want to scatter my shots, or expose myself unnecessarily, when it was so easy to throw brickbats and raise clouds of suspicion and so to make proof of anything unnecessary.
Riess
You probably had to explain your position many, many times.
Taylor
As to why I would not join on a particular thing?
Riess
Yes.
Taylor
Oh, once in a while. I did it with one of the young students who came to me three months ago seeking my signature on a petition.
Riess
Signing petitions is what I was thinking about.
Taylor
I don't sign no petitions, but I sign very, very few. You see, one of the things that in those days they would do was to collect your name from whatever petitions you might have signed. If they could find your name on two or three of them, well, that was supposed to be like perfect triangulation!
I remember saying to one of the FBI men referring to the battle over the 160-acre limitation, "And I am not going to stop fighting for what I believe in on that issue. That is a gigantic scandal to capture hundreds of millions of dollars, contrary to law. I don't care what, I am not going to stop the fight on that issue!" I do not recall any comment by the FBI man. But you can imagine the type of questions that prodded me to come out and say that! He must have been inquiring my position on various things.
The FBI questioners, with the one exception, behaved all right in my presence. That is, they did their business, well, like a prosecutor questioning a witness, skillfully and prepared to trap me, but cleanly, and by courtroom standards.
Riess
The walls weren't bugged and your wires weren't tapped back in those days?
Taylor
No, I don't think so, although one of my friends warned me that they might be, but I don't think they were.
Riess
Warned you that that was a possibility?
Taylor
Yes. He said, "You be careful, because they'll bug your office."
Riess
That was in 1952? In South Hall?
Taylor
Yes. I don't think they did. But that tells you the suspicions that went around in those days.
Riess
And that the University couldn't stand in the way of it, and couldn't protect anybody from any of this?
Taylor
Couldn't prevent them from coming and questioning us there, or coming when we weren't there.
Riess
And how did the man acquire a key to get in your office?
Taylor
I don't think he had to acquire a key, although probably he had a pass key. I think when I went to lunch at the Faculty Club on a Saturday that I had left the study door latched, but unlocked. That isn't to say that he didn't have a key, but I don't think he needed it to get in at that particular time. Ordinarily I did lock my door.
I had a lot of photographs, 8 x 10s, probably Dorothea's photographs, out on the floor. He was standing right in the middle of them.
Riess
[laughing] I assume that if it were the second floor he might have gone out the window, but on the third floor, he couldn't get out so quickly.
Taylor
He was embarassed and glad to slide out, professing that his departure was out of consideration for me, but I wouldn't allow him to leave out of "consideration" for me. I told him to sit right down and tell me what it was he was interested in, and what he wanted to know.
Well, this will give you another example of the atmosphere. Back in the '20s, for 90¢ or a dollar, I had bought a paperback, The ABC of Communism But as the atmosphere heated up from the Dies Committee era into the McCarthy era, I remember thinking, "Should I take that book off my shelves? If they come in here and see that, will that cause any trouble?" But I did not take it off my shelf.
As a matter of fact, I never read The ABC of Communism (and that was an official Communist manual), until 1967, when for the second time I went over to Viet Nam to study land tenure on an SRI contract. It struck me then that the situation I saw there fit in well to Communist doctrine, with respect to tenants on the land. So for the first time I really read parts of The ABC of Communism. I found in it exactly what I needed to determine official doctrine with respect to land tenure. It was the authoritative source; it was like going to the Bible!
Then it turned out that what I wrote for Stanford Research Institute, the Agency for International Development, AID, did not want to see printed, including quotes from The ABC of Communism. I called my essay the "Lineage of the employment of peasant dissatis-faction for revolutionary ends," and I traced Communist tactics, with help from The ABC of Communism, from the USSR, through Mao-Tse Tung, to Ho-Chi Min and Viet Nam.
AID people told the Stanford Research Institute people for whom I made the study that they didn't wish SRI to print it. Isn't that something? In 1970 the House Committee on Government Operations printed my study under the title "Communist strategy and tactics of employing peasant dissatisfaction over conditions of land tenure for revolutionary ends in Vietnam."
I had told the House Committee staff "You know, the Agency for International Development didn't want that printed."
"Yes," they said, "but the United States Information Office wants it printed." One of the House staff men told me that he thought it ought to be required reading.
But you see how prevailing atmosphere can touch
Riess
I should think that you would have taken it away and burned it up. That would be in line with what you are saying, in a way.
Taylor
Well I didn't! At some point, you draw the line. Even I draw the line somewhere... not at the final U.C. oath, but I wasn't going to take that source book off my shelf.
Now, whether the man with his hat on was in there to look through and see just what I had on my shelves, go through my files, whether he would have spotted the ABC of Communism. I do not know if he did see it. I don't think he was in there long enough to find it. At any rate I never was asked about it.
But these apparently insubstantial things give you a clue to what the McCarthy era could do to freedom of teaching, freedom of speech, freedom of learning. Freedom just shrivels, you see, with hardly a touch. Just a whiff.
Riess
Do you think that the University ever needed to get into the oath thing in the first place?
Taylor
I think Sproul regretted terribly that he had got into that situation and soon realized that he got into it unwisely, tactlessly, that he had stumbled into it under the prodding of James Corley, his public relations man at the legislature. I think that Corley came out and said that he was really responsible. Sproul just went along with Corley's recommendation and then couldn't lose face by backing down, except that he did change the language of the oath -- the draft that I finally signed. The 18 who took the case to the Supreme Court would not sign any oath. The Court upheld them.
On the subject of academic freedom, personally I found Sproul always fine.
Riess
Do you think that allowing themselves to be drawn into that battle in 1950 weakened the University in its relations with the Legislature ever since?
Taylor
I do not know. We came off pretty well with the Regents; both sides had their heads bloodied. But they didn't lick the faculty, you see. We didn't exactly lick the Regents, but they surely did not lick the faculty.
What I am telling you, when I speak of little incidents that cross my mind, is the impact of tactics like those of the McCarthy era on sensitive people who have causes that in the daylight are perfectly respectable causes. The McCarthy tactics are the tactics of throwing dust and dirt.
Riess
What you are describing can cause a kind of paranoia about government.
Taylor
Not for myself. I won't say that everyone should adopt my same tactic, by any manner of means. But I have a couple of causes about which I felt very strongly, very deeply, and I wasn't going to have them jeopardized by anything else, if I could help it. I wanted to deal with those issues on my ground, and not on their ground. That is one of the first things that you learn in minor military tactics. As platoon comma in World War I, what did I learn?
Riess
Not to be led out of your circle, for one thing.
Taylor
To make the enemy fight you on your ground, not fight him on his. The issues are mine, and I want the fight to be on the issue.
Of the 160-acre limitation issue, what is their ground? Their ground is that 1902 is a long time ago; the law is archaic, belongs to a past era, and it is time to modernize it in the interest of operating efficiency. That is their ground. They spread that view all over. Since they largely control the means of public communication you can't readily answer it to the general public. Most people swallow the argument, since they don't hear the other side.
Riess
Most people don't know what they want until they've lost the chance to get it.
Taylor
Until they've been taken for a ride! Take the state water project. People are slowly beginning to wake up. But most of them still don't know that the state is paying for a state water project primarily to enable big landowners to escape the federal law intended to distribute reclamation benefits according to the "Greatest good to the greatest numbers," as the Supreme Court describes it.
The night before last, Tuesday night on KPIX, at 10:30, when the head of the state department of water resources, William Gianelli, and Frank M. Stead, the conservationist, were on TV, did either of them say why there is a state, rather than a federal water project? No, no.
Except for the incentive of private, speculative interests, with tens of hundreds of thousands of acres, and the prospect of enormous subsidies, and enormous unearned increment, we wouldn't be having to pay for this state project, and having this peripheral canal fight now. We wouldn't be having this threat to the Bay, and be wondering whether we are too late.
Frank Stead just touched on it, so that hardly anybody could hear it. He didn't say what it really was. He said it all comes down to a question of trust. In other words, can you trust the Department of Water Resources to preserve the Northern Bay given that its project was backed by huge speculating interests that want to move southward all the northern water they can.
The Department of Water Resources has that project because these large landowners and speculators didn't want the 160-acre limitation provisions of federal law to be applied to them. The big landowners, like Kern County Land Company and others, wanted a state project as means of escape for the federal acreage limitation, in order to capture unlimited, unearned increment from public development of public water.
Can you tell people that? Well, it takes quite a while to get around to tell anybody that. But if you can get on the same platform with them, then you can tell the audiences, and then you can expose them!
So now they don't want to get on the platform with you as they used to. They avoid that. They want no public debate on the issues.
Transcriber: Arlene Weber
Typist: Gloria Dolan
Appendices
A. "Migrant Mother: 1936" by Paul Taylor, American West, May 1970, Vol. VII, No. 3.
B. "The Assignment I'll Never Forget," by Dorothea Lange, Popular Photography, Feb. 1960, Vol. 46, No. 2.
C. "With the Marines at Chateau Thierry," by Paul Taylor, written in the Convalescent Hospital at Biarritz, France, Sept. 22, 1918, with an Editorial Note by Paul Taylor, written July 1973.
D. Photographs
Appendix A. Migrant Mother: 1936 By Paul Taylor
American West, May 1970, Volume VII, Number 3
"Ragged, ill, emaciated by hunger, 2,500 men, women and children are rescued after weeks of suffering by the chance visit of a Government photographer."
San Francisco News, March 10, 1936
The photographer had made her way to the News office with hardly-dry prints in hand. The editor lost no time notifying the United Press. The UP immediately contacted relief authorities, who sent a representative to the peapickers' camp at Nipomo to tell the faintly cheering pickers that food was on its way from Los Angeles.
Then the News published the story, with two poignant photographs of a starving mother and her children beside a lean-to tent shelter. Their car had been stripped of tires, which were sold to buy food. Beside the photographs was a column detailing the story, with a cross-reference to the lead editorial, "Starving Pea Pickers."
With the news in print, the editor acknowledged the photographer's effectiveness in a sincerely appreciative letter accompanied by clippings of photographs, news, and editorial columns. Nowhere in the newspaper did the name of the photographer appear; in those days photographers were anonymous.
The above occurred during the Great Depression, when unemployment was at its historic peak. Drought across the Great Plains added its scourge, driving families from their dry homesteads to western irrigated lands which opened no door to homesteading again. The Ozark hills, too, were dry; farmers' sons who left earlier for northern industry were forced back when the factories closed, and others were "tractored out" as machines began to replace men across the farmlands of Texas and Oklahoma. All joined the tide flowing westward. Anyone could do farm work in the irrigated valleys of the West; skill was not required. Employment was brief, intermittent, and shifting in location. Pay was meager, but the labor force was reshuffled at each location and at each seasonal peak, so everybody had a fresh chance in the lottery of the glutted labor market — first come first served. In the virtual absence of furnished housing, the migrants squatted by roadside, creek bank, in the brush, or on the town dump, until work was finished and they moved on to the next crop.
The New Deal was not supine. FDR assured the nation there was nothing to fear but fear itself, and the government assumed leadership. As Regional Labor Advisor of the newly-organized Resettlement Administration, I was invited by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco to address its Friday luncheon in August, 1935. In the speech, I tried to capture the temper of the times:
A new common refrain has appeared in the headlines of our newspapers. We are told that California is meanced by an "influx of indigents," of "paupers," of "jobless." A Los Angeles columnist cries in alarm: "That 5000 indigents are coming into southern California... leaves one appalled.
This is the greatest problem before the United States... these tattered migrations." Lamenting our good roads he adds: "The Chinese, wiser than we, have delayed building a great system of highways for that very reason — to head off these dangerous migrations — indigent people stampeding from the farms into cities to live on charity." In June an aroused state assembly passed a bill to debar from California "indigents and persons likely to become public charges," but cooler counsel prevailed in the Senate and the bill failed to become law.
In closing I proposed a program of public camps for migrants, to accord minimum decencies to the workers and access to health and other public agencies of the time:
The prompt elimination of squatter camp conditions is vital to the interests of all. Squatters' camps are a menace to public health, to social health, and to good labor relations in agriculture. They are a fertile source of discontent, breeders of grievances and feeders of unrest. Their existence is a challenge to our society. They can be abolished.
The camp program was initiated first in California, then expanded across the nation. The polarization of the time was revealed in its popular reception. An editorial in the San Francisco News on February 13, 1936 —barely a month before the photograph of "Migrant Mother" appeared — pointed critically to one extreme:
When Washington comes forward with funds to build needed camps the Resettlement Administration is greeted with hostility and distrust instead of cooperation by some of the richest and most influential groups in the State. Their attitude disgraces California.... Will not the conscience and intelligence of California find some way to express themselves in rebuke of those who would leave the farm labor problem to vigilantes and the brutality of blind economic forces?
Another extreme was represented in a letter to the editor of the Redding, California, Independent of November 27, 1935; after making some most unflattering references to me as promoter for the program, the author proceeded to outline what he saw as an insidious plot against the workers:
Now, Dear Editor, where did this notion that these camps were "for the pickers" originate? Did it originate where that old American ideal of "comfortable quarters" for the slaves originated? That is, in the minds of those who owned the slaves, the quarters and the jobs?... And can you tell me how a man can get a doctor's degree in economics and make statements so far from the economic facts and their inescapable conclusions as this bunk of Doctor so-and-so: that these camps are going to do anything but reduce the wages of the pickers and make possible the segregation of the meek, the humble, and the willing workers from the independent pickers who see through these false claims of benefit to the workers, who do not own or control their jobs or the rate of wages any more than did the men who occupied "quarters" in 1850?
Was it mere "chance" that Dorothea Lange, a government photographer, brought about the rescue of starving pea-pickers at Nipomo? Can the answer be so simple?
First, there was the photographer herself. She was not just a woman with a camera. From youth she had always known that she would be a photographer. The impulse came from the depths. In retrospect she explained that she was "compelled to photograph as a direct response to what was around" her. To the question, "What are you going to do with photographs?" she recommended the answer, "Don't let that question stop you, because ways often open that are unpredictable, if you pursue it far enough." Artists, she generalized, "are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats in on the shore. They're almost pursued." All this comes through in Dorothea's own account of "Migrant Mother" on page 46. Having convinced herself while driving twenty miles beyond the pea-pickers' camp that she could continue on, she turned about "like a homing pigeon," drove back to the camp, and parked her car by the tent of the "hungry and desperate mother." As intimate, intense, and vital as it is, Dorothea's account leaves open, as much as it closes, the answer to the question, Was it "chance"?
Dorothea Lange was a "government photographer," as the News editorial said. How did that happen? Was that "chance"? There was the New Deal, and the New Deal had purpose. In January, 1935, the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the California State Emergency Relief Administration asked me, as field director, to conduct research to recommend a suitable program.
"What staff would you need?" they asked.
"Well, about three or four assistants and a photographer."
"Why do you need a photographer? Would social scientists generally ask for a photographer?"
"No," I acknowledged, "they would not." I explained that I wanted to bring from the field itself visual evidence of the nature of the problem to accompany my textual reports made to those unable to go into the field but responsible for decision.
The office manager suspended further discussion of the usefulness of a photographer when he put Dorothea Lange on the payroll as a typist. In the budget no provision had been made for a photographer. The matter was not closed;
Dorothea was allowed to remain on the payroll, but on a trial basis for a month.
Before the probationary month expired, the rural rehabilitation director, Harry E. Drobish (later a state senator), met with the California State Emergency Relief Commission to discuss the program. In his hand Drobish held a report recommending construction of camps for migratory laborers, documented with photographs. After these photographs were passed around the table, the commission voted $200,000 to initiate the program. The question was not raised again, Why a photographer?
Paul S. Taylor, who married Dorothea Lange in 1935, was then regional labor advisor of the resettlement administration and helped formulate legislation for the relief of migrant laborers. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, an agrarian historian, and a nationally recognized authority on reclamation law, farm labor history, and the uses of irrigation. His more recent consulting service for the federal government has taken him to such diverse regions as Viet Nam and Peru, and he is the author (with Dorothea Lange) of American Exodus: A Study in Human Erosion (1942), which —like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Carey McWilliams's Factories in the Fields —has become a literary and historical landmark from the years of depression in the West. American Exodus has recently been republished in a revised edition by the Yale University Press and the Oakland Museum.
Dorothea Lange learned her art from and with some of the greatest names in American photography, including Arnold Genthe, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, and Walker Evans. Through more than thirty years of government and private photography, she produced a body of work that placed her — with them — among the handful of truly great artists with the camera. "Photographs," she once said, "seem to have a life-span. By this I mean that only a few survive and go on functioning as images in their own right and on their own." "Migrant Mother" is only one of hundreds of living images she left as her legacy by the time of her death in 1965.
Appendix B.
The Assignment I'll Never Forget BY DOROTHEA LANGE
WHEN I BEGAN thinking of my most memorable assignments, instantly there flashed to mind the experience surrounding "Migrant Mother," an experience so vivid and well remembered that I will attempt to pass it on to you.
As you look at the photograph of the migrant mother, you may well say to yourself, "How many times have I seen this one?" It is used and published over and over, all around the world, year after year, somewhat to my embarrassment, for I am not a "one-picture photographer."
Once when I was complaining of the continual use and reuse of this photograph to the neglect of others I have produced in the course of a long career, an astute friend reproved me. "Time is the greatest of editors," he said, "and the most reliable. When a photograph stands this test, recognize and celebrate it."
"Migrant Mother" was made twenty-three years ago, in March, 1936, when I was on the team of Farm Security Administration photographers (called "Resettlement Administration" in the early days).... It was the end of a cold, miserable winter. I had been traveling in the field alone for a month, photographing the migratory farm labor of California —the ways of life and the conditions of these people who serve and produce our great crops. My work was done, time was up, and I was worked out.
It was raining, the camera bags were packed, and I had on the seat beside me in the car the results of my long trip, the box containing all those rolls and packs of exposed film ready to mail back to Washington. It was a time of relief. Sixty-five miles an hour for seven hours would get me home to my family that night, and my eyes were glued to the wet and gleaming highway that stretched out ahead. I felt freed, for I could lift my mind off my job and think of home.
I was on my way and barely saw a crude sign with pointing arrow which flashed by me at the side of the road, saying PEA-PICKERS CAMP. But out of the corner of my eye I did see it.
I didn't want to stop, and didn't. I didn't want to remember that I had seen it, so I drove on and ignored the summons. Then, accompanied by the rhythmic hum of the windshield wipers, arose an inner argument:
Dorothea, how about that camp back there?
What is the situation back there?
Are you going back?
Nobody could ask this of you, now could they?
To turn back certainly is not necessary. Haven't you plenty of negatives already on the subject? Isn't this just one more of the same? Besides, if you take a camera out in this rain, you're just asking for trouble. Now be reasonable, etc., etc.
Having well convinced myself for twenty miles that I could continue on, I did the opposite. Almost without realizing what I was doing, I made a U-turn on the empty highway. I went back those twenty miles and turned off the highway at that sign, PEA-PICKERS CAMP.
I was following instinct, not reason; I drove into that wet and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon.
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. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. 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 killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.
The pea crop at Nipomo had frozen and there was no work for anybody. But I did not approach the tents and shelters of other stranded pea-pickers. It was not necessary; I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment.
This, then, is the "Migrant Mother" photograph with which you are so familiar. It has, in a sense, lived a life of its own through these years; it goes on and on. The negative now belongs to the Library of Congress, which controls its use and prints it. Whenever I see this photograph reproduced, I give it a salute as to an old friend. I did not create it, but I was behind that big, old Graflex, using it as an instrument for recording something of importance. The woman in this picture has become a symbol to many people; until now it is her picture, not mine.
What I am trying to tell other photographers is that had I not been deeply involved in my undertaking on that field trip, I would not have had to turn back. What I am trying to say is that I believe this inner compulsion to be the vital ingredient in our work; that if our work is to carry force and meaning to our view we must be willing to go all-out.
"Migrant Mother" always reminds me of this, although I was in that camp for only ten minutes. Then I closed my camera and did go straight home.
From Popular Photography, February, 1960,
Volume 46, Number 2.
Appendix C. With the Marines at Chateau Thierry
Written in the Convalescent Hospital at Diarritz, France, Sept. 22, 1918
I'm going to try to do tonight what I couldn't bring myself to do before - tell you about my experiences during our last trip to the front. Of course, things are a bit vague because of necessary omissions to keep within the censorship. Also of course I can't say much about casualties, for that's a forbidden subject. Don't think that the things I say in regard to the conditions are in a spirit of complaint, for of course they aren't. Suppose that I adopt a diary form; it may help me to get the details in the right places.
June 5. Leave Paris and go to Meaux by train, - from there to the Regimental Headquarters by truck. The woods behind the front are full of batteries. A Boche plane comes over and sends one of our observation balloons down in flames. We reach Herman's regiment first. He (Lt. Zischke) gets off there. I go on to mine. Sleep all night in the open under the stars. Our batteries are firing heavily- probably preparing for an attack. Our last night to be spent in comfort for some time. Slept in my bedding roll and didn't lose any sleep over the noise either.
June 6. The Colonel gives us guides to take to our battalions. At Battalion Headquarters in a woods I find runners from my company which is in the front line. I get one of them to take me forward. We go across open fields and finally reach a farm (Triangle) about 150 yds. behind my company. The way beyond this is exposed to snipers and machine-gun fire. I send the runner back as there's no use going out while all is quiet in the middle of the day. A machine-gun Lieutenant is at the farm and gives me some bread, some honey the men found, and a cup of milk from one of the cows left by the refugees in their hurried flight. The machine-gun Lieutenant gets orders to prepare for a Marine attack. I decide it's time to join my company, so I go out, partly crawling, and find my men in little rifle pits, dug in a hay field on the military crest (exposed slope) of the field. The Captain comes back from a conference at Battalion Headquarters at about half past three in the afternoon. My battalion is to advance and take Bouresches. My company is to hold and to advance under certain circumstances (which do not arise.)
The Boches start to shell us. Lieutenant Sellers comes in from our first platoon to report that his platoon is being gassed. A sniper shoots him on the way but he gets to the hole where the Captain and I are. Stretcher-bearers and the Hospital man take him to the dressing station at La Cense Farm. Later on comes more shelling from the Boches. I look westward out of my hole and over in the valley opposite Bouresches I can see the Marines attacking - running at top speed through a hail of machine gun bullets. I can see the bullets spray the dirt, but
June 7. Lie in a hole 5'\m\3'\m\6' with the Captain. We can't both lie full length at the same time or flat on our backs at the same time. Of course helmets are never removed, even during sleep. One man takes his off and is killed by a fragment of a shell hitting him in the head. I now have been given charge of Sellers' platoon. The gas that he has reported was sneezing gas, and was not deadly. We eat a few chunks of a loaf of old and dirty bread and at night an orderly brings a cup of milk. That's all there is; the third day in which no rations have come up. But no one complains. When we tell them, "No rations tonight," the men laugh and say, "Well, we've almost learned to live without food and water. We don't need them any more." Every morning I used to see the men, short as was our meagre supply of water and cramped as we were, shaving and cleaning their teeth - which last is characteristically the act of the soldier of the U.S.A. We can't go out of the holes 19 hours of the day - only during the five hours of darkness can we do any moving about. The shelling has been going on intermittently, a sort of harassing fire. I visit my old 4th platoon at night and they tell me how they sniped 14 Boches before we took the town.
At night the Boches attempt to retake the town (Bouresches); machine guns play across our line, enfilading us. They fail when they try to come through us.
June 8. Spent the day as usual, lying in the hole for about 19 hours. The Boches note where the runners come and go, and decide we must be a headquarters, so they give us a few extra remembrances. Intermittent harassing shelling has been going on continuously day and night. It is not the most pleasant sensation in the world to just lie there and not be able to stir or stretch one's tired muscles. The Captain and I have talked over all the conceivable news and probabilities and opinions, and have run out of anything to say to divert our minds. More shelling and more attempts at sniping. I had stuffed some writing paper into my pocket, so I write two letters. It affords something to concentrate my mind upon and helps to pass the day. If we could only move about a little. But we have to live like moles and can't stir. In the evening I go out to find the lost rations. My runner and I are half famished and very weak. We luckily run onto
June 9. My birthday... more shelling. I recollect other birthdays. It affords me an odd sort of amusement to think that probably some friend will write and wish me"many happy returns of the day." I'm not hoping for too many returns of that sort of a day. There's nothing to talk about. I wonder, half laughingly, whether "it" will hit me in the head or the feet. I hope it will be the foot and not the head...We sleep or doze most of the time. The shelling is only in our outer consciousnesses. We are becoming weaker as much from inability to exercise as from lack of food and water.
The days are very hot. The nights are really quite cold, but we put our blankets together and get on quite comfortably, considering.
In the evening I notice the beautiful pink of the sky left by the setting sun. I see the same stars as always... A good many shells are bursting over in Belleau Wood. I wonder if they looked that way to Francis Scott Key when he wrote the Star Spangled Banner. It is beautiful - except when you think what those shells are doing. Herman is over there, too. I often think of him and wonder if he's all right still. Some snipers are active. The bullets sing prettily. They have a nice buzzing sort of whine - except the machine guns when they shoot just over your head. They just pop. pop. pop.
June 10. I'm under the weather - sick in fact from food, water (or lack of them). There's nothing doing in the day time so the Captain sends me back to the dressing station about 500 yards behind at La Cense farm. The doctor fixes me up but I can eat nothing all day. It adds nothing to my strength of course. One of the doctors I find is a Psi U from Wisconsin, Dr. H. Bye. I feel almost as if I'd found an old friend and we celebrate my birthday a day late by talking over mutual friends. We also talk over some things that haven't gone so pleasantly. This part must be censored, and I guess it is just as well. It's the part you didn't see anything about in the papers. (I've laughed many times lately about a line in the clipping you sent me describing my own organization as "whistling Yankee Doodle as they advanced in the attack." I couldn't laugh over it when it first came as it didn't amuse then, but it does now. It really would be just plain laughable if it weren't too quickly believed and entirely misleading. I guess the newspaper correspondents and I didn't see the same war.)
Towards evening I return to my company. We are to be relieved.
June 11. We have a quiet day. Shelling goes on continually all about us, but they don't get us. The Y.M.C.A. distributes a lot of hot stuff through the company. Believe me, nothing in a long time has tasted so good as that bar of chocolate. I also received a registered letter which came over from Regimental Head-quarters. I don't know when anything was more welcome. Sleep most of the day. Neither the Boche shells nor our guns, which roar deafeningly all about us, disturb us. Find a mattress and sleep on that. It's a relief from just the ground. Another hot meal. Of course there's only one meal a day.
June 12. March back at night to some woods further in the rear, though not out of range by any means. We can't see our hands in front of our faces, so we just lie down anywhere. What a blessing to be able to move about a little, even if only a little, and not to have to stay in a little hole.
June 13. Two hot meals. Three of us Lieutenants find a little rivulet near by and take a bath. First time we've had clothes or even shoes off.
June 14. At 1:30 a.m. we are suddenly aroused, roll our packs and march forward, almost at double time. The Boches are trying to break our line and we must be ready to meet them if they come through. Moving forward, we go through a gas and shrapnel barrage. There are some pretty sad sights of wounded men. We move up into a wood and wait. No food of course and we are very, very hungry. Soon we are sent a kilometer across open fields in broad daylight and into another wood opposite Bouresches. Why the Boche observation balloons aren't up, I don't know. Every other day at this time I could count 7 or 8 of them. Had they been there we would have been blown to bits by the Boche artillery.
When we reach the wood we are well forward. The shelling is extremely heavy. Some huge gun is shelling a point close by at the edge of Belleau Wood at monotonously regular intervals. Fragments from each burst come spinning into us. Our batteries are silent. The Boches send over more and more. One can anticipate the fall of those big shells with such accuracy that it is almost nerve-wracking. We are getting shelled along the line. I bury a Marine, Harvey Dial, killed in the June 6 attack. As we stand at the open grave, an Austrian 88 shell clips by just over our heads and bursts a few yards beyond. The concussion is like a fierce slap in the face. Another and another follow. We finish our task hastily and leave that particular spot.
I get my men completely out of the woods once, but under orders take them back in. A long delay in the midst of the gas and bursting shells. The line of men is broken, the Captain gone, so I gather my men and take them back the only way I know. I find a doctor who cares for those who need attention and evacuates them. Pretty soon I begin to feel the effects of the gas. My eyes begin to smart and some other unpleasant (vomiting) symptoms assert themselves. I get into an ambulance and am carried to the field hospital. By that time I am completely blind and see no more to relate.
I've met two officers since, who saw the wood next day, and am more thankful than ever that so many of us are still alive. My eyes are as good as ever now.
It was terrible, but not so hard to endure then as after it was all over - and even reliving it now, almost.
Lt. P.S. Taylor 78th Company 6th Regiment Marines.
Editorial note by PST, July 1973
The site of the battle described in the preceeding account is a few miles northwest of Chateau Thierry. It was the point of the German drive toward Paris that late in May 1918 broke through the French-British front along the Chemin-des-dames between Soissons and Rheims. The Marine Brigade was thrown across the point of the German drive, and the disorganized, retreating French troops streamed through the Marines' support lines. This left the Marines holding the front line, from Lucy-le-Bocage opposite Belleau Wood on the extreme left, to Triangle Farm on the extreme right. On the left of the Marines were French troops; on their right was the 23rd Infantry Regiment of the Second U.S. Division.
Headquarters of the Sixth Marines was in Lucy-le-Bocage, south of Belleau Wood. Today, immediately north of Belleau Wood, is one of the largest American World War I cemetaries in France. Initially, my 78th Company of Marines was in a field just north of Triangle Farm. Behind Triangle Farm is La Cense Farm, where the wine cellar was used as a First Aid Station. In front of Triangle Farm, below and to the left, is Bouresches, the town taken on June 6, 1918 by the Second Battalion of the Sixth Marines.
During my last night on that front during the shelling, Lieutenants from the 96th Company of Marines and "M" Company of the 23rd Infantry came to me asking, because they themselves were already gassed and obliged to seek first aid, that I take charge of their men along with my own. This I did. Later in Paris, after the Armistice, an Army doctor identified me at a hotel entrance, saying he had evacuated me from the front. He added that following the evacuation he had gathered up 167 rifles at his first aid station on hill 201.
During the Bouresches-Belleau Wood action Marine casualties, on a brigade strength of 7,200, were 5,711. They may have been more; my own gassing was not reported to my family until January 1919 because not earlier reported to the Marine Corps. My own estimate of the casualties of the 78th Marine Company during a single night was around 90 percent, overwhelmingly from gas, mostly "mustard" with some phosgene.
In June 1918 I was a Second Lieutenant, United States Marine Corps, in charge of a platoon of the 78th Company, Second Battalion, Sixth Regiment. The Fifth and Sixth Regiments, together with a Marine Machine Gun Battalion, constituted the Fourth Brigade of the Second U.S. Division, American Expeditionary Forces, France. Commander of the 78th Company was Captain Robert E. Messersmith, whose brother later was U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. Commanding the Second Battalion was Major Thomas Holcomb, later to be Commandant of the U.S. Marine
I revisited Chateau Thierry sector battlefield three times. The first was one week after Armistice Day, 1918, when German prisoners were clearing up the battle debris. The second was in 1959, and the third in 1972.
Photograph Album
The Paul Taylor family at home.
Identification picture, taken in September, 1918 at St. Aignam, for reassignment.
Convalescing in Biarritz, France, August, 1918.
Paul Taylor's boyhood home in Sioux City, Iowa, 1711 Douglas Street (taken five years after the family left).
Paul Taylor: "Going down the street, doing my business," probably a Valley town in the late thirties.
Photo by Dorothea Lange
Conducting a seminar in labor economics.
Photo by Otto Hagel
Paul Taylor's study, 301 South Hall.
Photo by Dorothea Lange
Footnotes
1. Peter Schuster's Life Account, Original Translation from the German, by Edith Emma Schuster, 1962.
2. They will become available in The Bancroft Library, UCB.
3. Congressional Record 9499-9500.
"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field til there be no place that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth." [Isaiah 5, 8]
Later, in Edward VI; Book of Common Prayer, appeared the Prayer for Landlords, using the words of Isaiah as follows:
"give them grace to consider... that they remembering the short continuance of their life, may be content with that that is sufficient, and not join house to house, nor couple land to land, to the impoverishment of other, but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements, lands, and pastures that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places: through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
5. See An American Exodus, Yale University Press, 1969.
6. There Was Light, edited by Irving Stone, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 33-42.
7. Walter J. Hickel, Secretary of the Interior, 1968-1970.
8. In 1972 I revisited Mont-sous-les-Cotes and adjacent villages in the Verdun sector that were occupied by my company and Marine Brigade in the spring of 1918. At what had been my platoon headquarters in a destroyed house where German shells fell while I was there, all had been restored, flower boxes were in the windows, small automobiles were parked on the sloping lawns, and a television set was in operation. At adjoining Villers-sous-Bonchamp I met a man who had been evacuated as a boy, was at Gondrecourt, Meuse, on the original Armistice Day, the same as I, and who had been taken as forced labor during the second World War.
9. "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible."
10. Additional war material will be found in the Appendices.
11. Married May 15, 1920, to Katharine Page Whiteside, in Berkeley.
12. One was later convicted of criminal syndicalism. The other, who later became an avowed Communist, was not convicted.
13. I have mentioned the professors with whom I worked most, and would add the name of Stuart Daggett. I have not mentioned the others whose interests were on the side of commerce. The personnel of economics and the College of Commerce overlapped. Many years later the College of Commerce seperated, and became the School of Business Administration. P.S.T.
14. Both the U.C. press series on "Mexican Labor in the United States" and the North Carolina Press study on "An American-Mexican Frontier" have been reprinted very recently by commerical publishers -- and, I could add, so has my study of the Sailor's Union of the Pacific. P.S.T.
15. Dorothea Lange, The Making of a Documentary Photographer, The Regional Oral History Office, UC Berkeley, 1968.
16. Paul S. Taylor and Norman Leon Gold, "San Francisco and the general strike." Survey Graphic, Vol. XXIII, No. 9, September 1934.
17. See An American Exodus, Yale University Press, 1969.
18. Dorothea was married to Maynard Dixon 1920 to 1935.
19. "Mexicans North of the Rio Grande," Survey-Graphic, May 1931.
20. Ansel Adams' retrospective exhibition at San Francisco Museum showed a good deal more breadth than he is generally known for. He included six informal, beautiful photographs of Dorothea Lange made in our home during the last weeks of her life in 1965. P.S.T.
21. Willard Van Dyke, "The photographs of Dorothea Lange -- a critical analysis," Camera Craft, Vol. XLI, No. 9, September 1934. Oakland Museum.
22. Albert Croutch, Housing migratory agricultural workers in California, 1913-1948. U.C. master's thesis, 1948.
23. Hearings before Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Work Relief and Public Works, 76 Congress, 1 sess., on H. Res. 326, Vol. 6, pp. 179, 180.
24. Paul Taylor, "Migrant Mother: 1936," American West, Vol. VII, No. 3, p. 45. May 1970.
25. See Dorothea Lange Memorial Service in Lange interview, Regional Oral History Office, UCB.
26. In 1972, under auspices of the California Historical Society, an exhibition entitled "Executive Order 9066" was prepared by Richard Conrat, Dorothea's photographic assistant, and by his wife, Maisie. That has been shown in San Francisco, Berkeley, and New York. In September 1972, NBC gave an hour to a program "Guilty by reason of race" founded largely upon the exhibition, and using much of Dorothea's work. See New York Times, September 16 and 24, 1972.
27. In the Spring of 1972 Goldschmidt was called to Washington to testify before Senator Gaylord Nelson, of Wisconsin, on the usefulness of repeating his 1946 California study in the seventies and in other regions of the United States.
28. Dress manufacturer who has placed large ads on conservation in the San Francisco Chronicle. 1970.
29. Rapidity of revival of interest in the reclamation issue, so commonly dormant, is illustrated by developments since the original interview. Two judges from the same San Diego Federal District Court have rendered opposed decisions on current applicability of acreage limitation on water deliveries to individuals, and of the requirement of residency by the water receiver. These are imposed within the same sentence of Section 5 of the Reclamation Act of 1902 (43 U.S.C. 439). One judge held acreage limitation inapplicable; the other held residency applicable. Enforcement of the former requirement has been sporadic, and of the latter nonexistent for at least 55 years. The implications of both for the structure of U.S. agriculture are tremendous, favoring the family farmer over agribusiness. Other cases are in other district courts, and appeal of both issues is certain. Seven Congressmen and four Senators sponsored a bill, not acted upon by the 92nd Congress, to establish a Reclamation Lands Authority (118 Cong. Rec. March 2, 1972, H2856, daily ed). It charges the Authority with administering "excess" lands purchased by the government at pre-water prices to facilitate land-use planning, recapture incremental land values for the public treasury, and distribute a share of these as "water grants" for education, in the tradition of land grants. A citizens National Coalition for Land Reform has organized to support this and related programs. November 14, 1972. P.S.T.
30. Senate irrigation and reclamation subcommittee hearings on S. Res. 295, 78 Cong. 2 sess., p. 225)
31. On March 1, 1971, Congressman Robert W. Kastenmeir, of Wisconsin, introduced the Reclamation Lands Authority Bill, and was joined by California Congressmen Ron Dellums, Don Edwards, Jerome Waldie, George Danielson, Edward Raybal, John J. McFall. See Cong. Rec., April 21, 1971, insert by Cong. Kastenmeir. The same bill was introduced by Senators Fred R. Harris, Birch Bayh, Alan Cranston, Philip Hart.
32. It is a note of historical interest that John Wesley Powell, navigator of the Colorado River and founder of the Cosmos Club, forecast the necessity for legislation to prevent monopoly of the source waters of the West in his landmark report at the end of the 1870's on the arid region of the West.
33. Cohelan was defeated by Ron Dellums in April 1970 primary elections.
34. The reports are in Oakland Museum. Others in the same series are in the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
35. Speech before the Commonwealth Club, September 13, 1935: "Migrants and California's Future."
36. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, 1939, republished by Yale University Press 1969.
37. Infinity Magazine, November 1965, pp. 26, 27.
38. Museum of Modern Art, "Dorothea Lange," pp. 54, 55. (1966) Maisie and Richard Conrat, "Executive Order 9066." 1972.
39. See An American Exodus, page 73.
40. Science, Vol. 16, p. 321 (1902) "Suppose a man to be standing before some complex geological phenomenon. The whole intricate interlocking story is engraved upon the retina of his eye with more than photographic accuracy. The image on the retina is absolutely the same in the eye of this experienced geologist and that of a child. Yet if the child be asked to state what he sees, his statements will be of the most general kind and may be largely erroneous. The experienced geologist with a knowledge of the principles of physics and chemistry and biology interprets the phenomena imaged in terms of these subjects. The engraving on his retina is the same as that of the child, but his brain perceives the special parts of the picture of interest to him in their true proportions. He understands what is important, what is unimportant; he must select and record the things which are important. If he attempted to record all that is imaged in his eye, a notebook would be filled with the phenomena to be described at a single exposure; and yet half the story would not be told. Good descriptive work is discriminative. Good descriptive work picks out certain of the facts as of great value; others of subordinate value; and others of no value for the purposes under consideration. How then can this discrimination be made? How can the facts be selected which are of service? Only by an insight into the causes which may have produced the phenomena. Without this insight to some extent at least a description is absolutely valueless. So far as the geologist has such insight, his description is valuable.
41. Since the original interview, Hope Stoddard's book appeared, entitled "Famous American Women," and including an essay entitled "Dorothea Lange," (1970). P.S.T.
42. Irish Country People, Life Magazine, v. 38, No. 12, March 21, 1955.
43. Three Mormon Towns, Life Magazine, v. 37, Sept. 6, 1954.
44. Death of a Valley, Aperture, v. 8, no. 3: 1960. (photos made 1956-57).
45. Dorothea Lange, Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., 1966, pp. 97-102.
46.
"I find that it has become instinctive, habitual, necessary, to group photographs. I used to think in terms of single photographs, the Bulls-eye technique. No More.
A photographic statement is more what I now reach for. Therefore these pairs, like a sentence of 2 words.
Here we can express the relationships, equivalents, progressions, contradictions, positives and negatives, etc. etc. Our medium is peculiarly geared for this. (I am just beginning to understand it.)" From “Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman” . Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, 1967, p. 70.
47. Lange interview, p. 214.
48. Lange interview p. 219, 229.
49. Lange interview p. 216.
50. Infinity Magazine, Vol. 14, no. 11, November 1965, p. 26.
Suzanne Bassett Riess
Grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Graduated from Goucher College, B.A. in English, 1957.
Post-graduate work, University of London and the University of California, Berkeley, in English and history of art.
Feature writing and assistant woman's page editor, Globe-Times, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Free-lance writing and editing in Berkeley. Volunteer work on starting a new Berkeley newspaper.
Natural science docent at the Oakland Museum.
Editor in the Regional Oral History Office since 1960, interviewing in the fields of art, cultural history, environmental design, photography, Berkeley and University history.
Index - Vol. I
- Abbott, Edith, 98,160
- Adams, Ansel, 119-121,238,242,243,292,295
- Addams, Jame, 93,107,272,299
- AFL, 184
- A.I.D. (Agency for International Development), assignments, 265,271,317; travels for, 246-265,270-276 [also see entries for countries]
- Alexander, Will, 143
- Allen, Ethel Richardson, 107
- Alsberg, Carl, 168
- Altmeyer, Arthur, 47,65
- Amana Society, 228
- An American Exodus, 113,117,135,217-220,233, 245,291,295
- Armstrong, Barbara Nachtrieb, 51,95
- Baker, Jacob, 181
- Baldwin, Roger, 61,68
- Banfield, Ed, 118,242,243
- Berger, Victor, 68
- Berkeley Democratic Club, 313,314
- Berkeley fire, 84,85
- Blaisdell, Tom, 148,149
- Bloch, Louis, 48
- Blum, Solomon, 44,82-88,91
- Bogardus, Emory S., 107
- Boke, Richard, 172,312
- Bolton, Herbert Eugene, 93,94
- Brady, Robert, 95
- Breckinridge, Sophonisba, 98
- Bureau of Reclamation, 182,183
- California, agriculture in, 57-59 [also see reclamation legislation]
- California Farm Bureau Federation, 143,216
- California Labor Federation, 45,46
- California State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA), 126-149,207-216,305,306
- Campbell, William Wallace, 100-106,109,199,200
- Carver, Thomas Nixon, 119
- Catholics, Sioux City, 33,34,38,39
- Chickering, Martha, 92
- Clawson, Marion, 197
- Cohelan, Jeffrey, 205,206
- Cohen, Wilbur, 65
- Cole, Carlos M., 32
- Commons, John R., 42,44,45,48-50,55,65,66,87,88,97,98,105,108,115,169
- Commonwealth Club, 146,208-210
- Coney, Donald, 173
- Corley, James, 318
- Cottier, P., 285-287
- Cox, LaWanda, 175
- Crocheron, B.H. 199,200
- Cross, Ira, 77,87,91
- Croutch, Albert, 140
- Cuba, 270-276
- Cunningham, Imogen, 119,122,125,246
- Daggett, Stuart, 91
- Darling, J. "Ding", 36
- Davis, Kingsley, 161
- Davisson, Malcolm, 163,164
- Dixon, Dan, 150,151,157,223,241,242
- Dixon, John, 150,151,153
- Dixon, Leslie, 221
- Dixon, Maynard, 119,134,138,148,149,246
- Douglas, Paul, 190,204,205
- Downey, Sheridan, 14,186-189,197,312
- Drew, Mary, 306,307
- Drobish, Harry, 126,128,139,141,143,145
- Duskin, Alvin, 176,188
- Ecuador, 266,267
- Edwards, Mary Jeanette, 119,122
- Egypt, Institute of Land Settlement, 277-281
- Eisenhower, Milton, 229
- Elgabaly, Mustafa, 277
- Elliott, Alfred J., 186
- Ellis, Howard, 163-165
- Ely, Richard T., 42,50,86,105
- f/64, 119,125,222,292,297
- Fanger, Katherine, 153
- Farm Security Administration (F.S.A.) [see Resettlement Administration]
- Farmer's Union, 184
- F.B.I. [see McCarthy era]
- Finney, Ruth, 188
- Foote, Caleb, 229-231
- Fortas, Abe, 191
- Fortune Magazine, 241
- Fowler, Henry, 13
- French, Will J., 48,108
- Furuseth, Andrew, 89
- Gamio, Manuel, 107
- Getts, Clark, 68
- Gold, Norman Leon, 111
- Goldschmidt, Arthur, 181, 182, 191
- Goldschmidt, Walter, 175
- Gorkin, Jess, 228,235,236
- Graham, Wells, 75, 76
- Grange, 184,185,189,197
- Grapes of Wrath, 218
- Grether, Ewald, 95
- Gulick, Charles, 95,108
- Haake, Alfred P., 47,48
- Hagel, Hansel, 241
- Hagel, Otto, 241
- Haggerty, C.J., 184
- Hall, A.B., 49,50
- Hamilton, Maxwell, 35,37
- Hart, Walter Morris, 100
- Heilbron, Louis, 142
- Hessler, Carl, 61,67
- Herman, M.C. "Sam," 190,191
- Hewes, Laurence, 128,129
- Hickel, Walter J., 53
- Hine, Lewis, 113,114,127
- Holder, Preston, 119,122
- Homan, Paul, 95
- Hopkins, Harry, 36,142
- Huttman, Elizabeth, 176
- Huttman, John, 176
- I.C.A. (International Cooperation Administration), 271 [see A.I.D.]
- Ickes, Harold L., 14
- India, 262-264
- Indonesia, 258-260
- Infinity Magazine, 223,226,300
- I.L.O. (International Labor Organization), 266-268
- Iowa, politics, 56
- Jamieson, Stuart, 176
- Japanese evacuation, west coast, 228
- Johnson, Albert, 200
- Jones, Pirkle, 152, 245
- Kanaga, Consuelo, 119
- Kellogg, Paul, 55,111-116, 120
- Kern County Land Company, 141,320
- Kerr, Clark, 104,163,174
- Korea, 249-252
- Kuczyinski, Robert P., 155-157
- LaFollette, Committee Hearings, California, 1939, 13,14,203
- LaFollette, Robert M., Jr., 12-15
- LaFollette, Robert M., Sr., 15,49,56,68,89
- Lamb, Robert, 184
- Lange, Dorothea, 14,18,50,55,77,111,112; government-related work, 116-154,207-245; travels and photographing, 246-266, 269,270,277-287; marriage and relationships, 149-153,221-227, 288-300; books, exhibitions: "American Country Woman," 290,291; "An American Exodus," 113,117,135,217-220,233,245,291,295; "Death of a Valley," 245; "Irish Country People," 241; "Migrant Mother," 145,179,294,295; "Notes from the Field," 207-216; "Retrospective Exhibition," 288-292; "Three Mormon Towns," 242
- Lange, Joanna, 225,226
- Lange, Hope, 223
- Lange, John, 223
- Leuschner, Armin O., 108
- Life Magazine, 241,242,244
- Lorenz, James, 176-178,193,194
- Loyalty Oath, 301,302,318
- Lynch, Marie, 32
- Madison, Marshall, 81
- Marine Corps, 60-62, discipline in, 70-73; in battle, 74-78
- Marysville migrant labor camp, 141,142,210,215,216
- McCarthy era, investigations, 301-319
- McCarthy, Joseph, 15
- McDonald, Grace, 188
- McKinley, William, 18
- Menendez, Eduardo, 274,275
- Merriam, Frank F., 202
- Mexican Migration studies, 97-110,120,180,199-202
- Mitchell, Wesley Clair, 86
- Munro, Dana Carlton, 50
- Nader's Raiders, 193,194,206
- Nelson, Lowry, 140,218
- New Deal, 42,158,169,219
- Noble, Emily, 92
- Norman Waite Harris Memorial Conference, Chicago, 1929, 155-158
- Oakland Museum, 220,252,291,292
- Office of War Information (O.W.I.), 228,235,236
- Olson, Culbert, 173
- 160-acre limitation, 171,182,191,195,196,198,319
- Packard, Walter, 182,198
- Page, Homer, 223,226,300
- Partridge, Roi, 119
- Patton, James G., 184
- Paxson, Frederick Logan, 161
- Peisotto, Jessica, 91-93,98
- Phillips, Charles, 183,189,195
- Pittsburg Survey, 55,113
- Plehn, Carl, 91,92,98,103
- Pontius, Robert W., 185
- Population studies, 155-158
- Priestley, Herbert I., 93,94
- Ravel, Carola, 268
- Reagan, Ronald, 192
- Reclamation Lands Authority Bill, 1971, 194
- Reclamation legislation, 59,97,171,178-199,204-206,319-321 [also see Downey, Sheridan; and 160-acre limitation]
- Resettlement Administration, 142-147,151,207
- Reynal & Hitchcock, Publishers, 217-219
- Riis, Jacob, 116
- Roosevelt, F.D., 141,142
- Ross, Arthur M., 174
- Ross, E.A., 42-45,50,65,92,105,155,157
- Rowell, Edward, 130,134,213
- Sailors' Union of the Pacific, 89,94,103,104
- Samsen, Sakul, 256
- San Francisco Chronicle, 188,196,213
- San Francisco News, 187,188,209,216
- Schuster, Bertha, 6
- Schuster, Mary, 8
- Schuster, Otto, 7
- Schuster, Peter, 2-10
- Sehlmeyer, George, 185
- Silvermaster, Nathan Gregory, 305-307
- Simpson, Leslie, 111
- Sioux City, Iowa, 7,8,16,20-24,33-38,41,46,72
- Social Security Board, 148,149
- Sproul, Robert Gordon, 102-104,146,163,164,172,197,198,318
- Steffans, Lincoln, 13
- Struble, Helen, 32
- Stryker, Roy, 148,149
- Stuart, David W., 29
- Survey Graphic, 55,111-116,118,120
- Switzerland, 284-287
- Szarkowski, John, 292,297
- Tangri, Beverly, 176
- Taylor, Ethel, 8
- Taylor, Henry James, 6-7,11,12,16-19,21,25,29
- Taylor, Katherine Whiteside, 82,83
- Taylor, Margot, 152,153
- Taylor, Paul Schuster: family history, 2-10; and LaFollettes, 11-15; father, 16-19; Sioux City, 20-24,33-38; religion, 25-28; high school, 29-37, 46; summers, 36,37,40,55-57; at University of Wisconsin, 41-52; fraternity life, 47,48; in World War I, 60-64, 67-78; career decision, 65,66; at University of California, 79-97; first marriage, 82,83; second marriage, 149-153, 221-227; children, 2 50-153, 221; students, 174-176; traveling, 246-287; investigated, 303-319 [also see Table of Contents]
- Taylor, Rose Schuster, 4-9,14,18,19,21,25,30,31,39
- Taylor, Ross, 151,152
- Taylor, Thomas, 3,5-6,9,10
- Teague, C.C., 199
- Teggart, Frederick J., 92
- Thailand, 256,257
- There Was Light, 42,85,93,101,103,108
- Thomas, Elbert, 13
- Thompson, Charles, 107
- Tolan, John, 230
- Tolman, Edward Chase, 301
- Truman, Harry S., 197,308,312
- Tugwell, Rexford Guy, 139,142,143,148
- Tuma, Elias, 176
- Ullmer, Charlie, 74
- Unemployed Exchange Association (U.X.A.), 118-125
- University of California: academic freedom, 100-106,109, [also see Loyalty Oath]; agricultural extension service, 199; economics department, 1919-1922, 85-96,108, curriculum, 155-162,167-174, chairmanship, 163-166, students 174-176; faculty senate, 173; post World War I, 79-81; sociology studies, 92,93
- University of Wisconsin, 1913-1917, 41-52,55,60,66,160,169,172
- VanDyke, Willard, 111,118,119,122,123
- VanHise, Charles R., 42,48,51,105,238,239
- Vasey, Tom, 213
- Venezuela, 268-270
- Veterans of Foreign Wars (V.F.W.), 184,190,191
- Vietnam, 253-255
- Vizzard, James L., 195
- Voorhis, Jerry, 183
- Water [see reclamation legislation]
- Webb, Walter R., 47
- Weiss, Margaret, 221
- West, George P., 36,138,187,188,209,216
- Weston, Edward, 119,125
- Wilson, Woodrow, 60,61,68
- Wisconsin, agriculture, 57,58; politics, 56
- Wood, Irving, 80,81,129,141,147
- Wood, Samuel E., 175
- World War One, 60-78; conscientious objectors in, 61,67,68; anti-Germanism in, 68,69; military training, 69,70
- W.R.A. (War Relocation Administration), 228,229
- Wurster, Catherine Bauer, 186
- Zischke, Herman A., 60
Courtesy of Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft5q2nb29x&brand=oac4
Title: Paul Schuster Taylor
By: Suzanne B. Riess
Date: 1973
Contributing Institution: Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley
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