Stryker’s vision for the Historical Section was
grand. He wanted to attempt to document not
only the work of the RA but also the conditions in
which rural Americans lived. Within the first year
of its founding, the Historical Section of the Reset-
tlement Administration had already employed close
to fifteen American photographers. Although Stry-
ker’s vision was aligned with the government’s goal
of not only documenting conditions, but using the
photographs as a kind of propaganda for Roose-
velt’s programs, to the point of writing ‘‘scripts’’ his
photographers were to follow. With such indepen-
dent photographers as Walker Evans in the RA’s
employ, however, the focus of the branch shifted
from government work to pure documentation of
rural America, or what Stryker would later call,
‘‘introducing America to Americans.’’ One of the
first photographers to be appointed to the His-
torical Section, Arthur Rothstein, an employee of
Stryker’s at Columbia, developed a preliminary
series of principles to guide the work of photogra-
phers. In 1936, Stryker also went after a series of
higher profile photographers whose work he ad-
mired. Carl Mydans, Walker Evans, and Dorothea
Lange were all hired in the first year of the sec-
tion’s existence.
By 1937, a number of changes occurred to the
Resettlement Administration. It had been swal-
lowed by the larger Department of Agriculture,
the head officer Tugwell had resigned, and the
agency was renamed the Farm Security Adminis-
tration by which it is best known. As FSA’s photo-
graphers fanned out over the Midwest, South, and
Southwest to document the conditions of the rural
American poor, they created some of the most me-
morable and famous images of not only the 1930s,
but of the twentieth century. As Arthur Rothstein’s
documentation of the Shenandoah National Park
in Virginia, Carl Mydans’s images of West Virgi-
nia coal miners, or Dorothea Lange’s poignant
photographs of California migrant workers, were
published in various magazines and newspapers,
Americans became fascinated with the plight of
their rural neighbors.
Walker Evans, in 1936, on leave from the RA/
FAS, traveled to Hale County, Alabama, where he
and poet-novelist James Agee collaborated on what
eventually was published, in 1941, asLet Us Now
Praise Famous Men. Walker’s negatives, though
commissioned byFortune magazine, were nego-
tiated to remain in the public domain, as were the
negatives of all the government-employed photo-
graphers, and this project is often thought of as
the epitome of what FSA photographers were able
to accomplish. Evans’s detached and introspective
style contrasted sharply with other FSA photogra-
phers such as Dorothea Lange, whose pictures are
dramatic events that often offer the structure of a
story. Taken in early1936, Lange’sMigrant Mother,
perhaps the most famous of her career, shows a
woman and her two children in Nipomo, Califor-
nia. The mother is seated, eyes focused in the dis-
tance, while her two children stand in contra posto,
each with their backs to the camera. The scene is
striking and dramatic with its dark, charcoally
blacks and brilliant whites, and the positioning of
the figures conveys a clear emotional message.
Evans’s infrequent portrait photographs, such as
those of the Burroughs family in Alabama, offer
none of the straightforward emotion of Lange’s.
In Evans’s works, the story of the subject rests
just beyond the image, with meaning hinted at but
never offered.
Stryker’s bold and sometimes argumentative
personality caused conflicts with many photogra-
phers, most of whom were interested in remaining
on the project to produce authentic social docu-
mentation that also expressed their creativity and
individual viewpoints, not mere propaganda. Inter-
nal instability notwithstanding, as the 1930s drew
to a close, the FSA’s documentation seemed less
imperative. America’s increasing national intro-
spection was shattered by a European war that,
after the attack on Pearl Harbor, turned increas-
ingly threatening. By the time America entered the
Second World War in December 1941, the urgent
program of ‘‘introducing America to Americans’’
was curtailed, along with many of the various New
Deal programs. Stryker’s FSA was subsumed into
the new Office of War Information, a centralized
information agency established in June 1942 as
part of the Office of Emergency Management and
was dissolved a year later. Though accused of sup-
pression and heavy editing, Stryker managed to
protect the catalogue of nearly 270,000 negatives
by placing them in the Library of Congress, Wa-
shington, D.C.
The FSA had not only documented the impact of
government programs on rural America, but had
also produced the very image of the Depression in a
collective American memory. Their images, varying
in style, form, and subject captured the essence of
what the Depression meant for hundreds of thou-
sands of America’s poor. Lange’s photographs of
migrant workers helped to inspire John Steinbeck’s
novelThe Grapes of Wrath, which proved to be an
instrumental text that exposed the corrosion of
American ideals in the face of crippling poverty.
Evans’s detached landscapes and portraits were
the first book of the experimental and influentialFARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION