Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography by James R. Swensen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography by James R. Swensen David D. Vail Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography. By James R. Swensen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. xi + 196 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth. The 1930s is often considered through a historical lens as a decade of drought and depression. Most immediately think of Dorothea Lange’s 1936 “Migrant Mother” photograph, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, or Pare Lorentz’s film The Plow that Broke the Plains. But why? In Picturing Migrants, James R. Swensen insists the answer increasingly “depends less on personal experiences and more on the symbols and icons that have come to define this important period in American history” (3). Picturing Migrants highlights how, as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) assisted drought refugees from Oklahoma and other Great Plains states, photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Russell Lee captured despondent Americans trying to escape dangerous dust storms, drought, and depression. Swensen, though, broadens the scope to include other, lesser-known figures. “Authors and activists like Carey McWilliams, Sanora Babb, and Edwin Lanham also played a role, as did the photographer Horace Bristol” (6). Other FSA officials, such as a migrant camp director and regional bureaucrats, “were instrumental behind the scenes in shaping how the migrants were presented” (6). As Picturing Migrants presents these dynamic relationships through a powerful collection of images, new revelations emerge about the host of migrants, New Deal policymakers, and photographers of the decade. The ability to capture despondency and ecological disaster powerfully shaped American cultural responses and New Deal policies. However, the FSA also deeply informed John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In subsequent chapters, Swensen traces how Roy Stryker (chief of the FSA’s historical section), various migrant accounts, and Resettlement Administration camp programs all represented “verbal pictures” for Steinbeck to understand a “common experience” of drought and depression refugees leaving the Great Plains for the West (38). Swensen is also clear that both Steinbeck’s book and the FSA photographs did not sit well with those Great Plains residents traveling along Highway 99—the so-called Dirty Plate Trail (21). Moreover, Picturing Migrants reveals how interwoven influences of FSA photography, personal accounts, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath crystallized to create a potent avatar of the 1930s. Swensen offers an engaging book mixed with an array of compelling historical photographs and well-researched prose that powerfully illustrate how New Deal FSA photographs “have shaped the national memory and have come to represent a defining period of American history. … [T]hey are, simply put, the image that come to mind when we think of the Great Depression” (196). [End Page 237] David D. Vail Department of History, University of Nebraska at Kearney Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln