Long
Time
Coming
Photographic Portrait
Of America: 1935-1943
Michael Lesy, Editor
(Norton)
The Farm Security Administration photography division was charged with taking pictures of all of America ... the farms, the cities, the markets, the streets, and most of all, the people. In its eight years, the FSA compiled 145,000 photographs, all in black-and-white, with sixteen full-time artists out on the road, including such worthy visionaries as Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans. The man in charge of this was Roy Stryker --- one who, Lesy tells us, was not much of a connoisseur of photographic art, but a man who was an artist at what was important then and now in Washington --- of maintaining the funding and finding ways of doing what needed to be done without bringing down the wrath of the elected officials on your shoulders.
Included in Long Time Coming are directives, letters, and notes by Stryker to and from those who were working on the FSA project. And a very strange collection of marching orders they are, too. This from 1937 to photographer Arthur Rothstein: "Where are the pictures of the corn town?... Here are special things you ought to watch for now. Raking and burning leaves. Cleaning up the garden. Getting ready for winter." Or this to Russell Lee in Corpus Christi, Texas:
Every so often, I am brought to the realization of the ruthlessness of the camera, particularly the way we have been using it: A lot of those people whose pictures you took do not realize how they are going to look in the eyes of the smug, smart city people when these pictures are reproduced. Of course, we could turn around and put the camera on the smug, smart city people and make them look ridiculous, too.
The thrust of the narrative portion of this book is that most of the people involved --- including Stryker and his immediate superior, Rexford Tugwell --- didn't know what the hell they were supposed to be doing. Were they to show the bright side of American life? Or, as so often happened, were they to present to the world the dismal and depressed, the rootless, the poor, the hurting. We find in the work of Lange and Evans and John Vachon and Russell Lee the most appalling, fly-specked, belly-rumbling, shirt-torn, sad-eyed, bent-backed misery. At the same time, we have here sections with titles like "Amusements and Distractions," "Hometowns," "City Life" which convey the most ordinary of lives and pleasures and normalcy --- people hanging out, kids dancing in the streets, old people at fairs, the obviously well-off at the races, four grannies playing bridge in White River Junction, Vermont, a girl swinging next to the street in Woodbine, Iowa, a boy selling newspapers in Montrose, Colorado.
§ § §
What stands out most of all in this superb volume --- over 400 stunning photographs drawn from the more than 140,000 at the Library of Congress --- is what we have lost. So soon after the close of WWII, this country began to turn strange. The great beast television quickly invaded each and every one of the towns and cities and farms portrayed here.The easy nature of interaction between people that was so much a part of the lives of America went away. Street-life disappeared. Center city was no longer a venue for life, but the home of junkies and viciousness. Roadways were set aside solely for cars, not for foot traffic. People who had once wandered the neighborhood and the downtown were in their living rooms or kitchens, huddled around the pale, gray, brutal light out of New York, Washington, or Hollywood.
Here in this book we have a window on American life from sixty or seventy years ago and one cannot help but yearn for the way we were then, our fine innocence, the willingness to help, the desire ... no, the need to interact with others around us.It was a quiet joy, a trust in our surroundings and the people who made up our town or city life and there was, throughout, the knowledge that things would get better, that the world had life and an intensity of purpose that was America in 1935 or 1941.
We look at photographs of boys on their bicycles or girls jumping rope and know that now they would never be allowed out of the eyesight of their parents for a moment for the streets of America are lined with fear --- every city, town, village has had its wellspring of joy poisoned by the vision of anger and greed that the media dumps, daily, over us all --- the message that one's life is in constant danger, that there is a viciousness in the house next door, down the street, in the alleys, under the shadows that block the sunlight from what used to be the civil world and dreams of America.
Our America continues to be under assault by the mavens of a brute media, one that turns our children afraid in a world that was once civil, trusting, hopeful; makes them enforced paranoiacs who see mayhem and the threat of violence in every corner. It is no longer the American Way of Life, it is The American Way of Terror.
§ § § Viewing these pictures from that time --- even photographs of the most poverty-stricken families --- brings a troubling surety that the forces of darkness have, indeed, taken over this country --- that the simple pleasures, the simple lives, the simple ways of a simpler time have been pushed over the cliffs, into the muck of exploitation and brutal, blatant you-gotta-
buy-this. The cover of this volume shows us a somewhat ratty but well-intentioned hometown parade --- probably Memorial Day in Tulsa, or the Fourth of July in Bakersfield. It's a poignant vision, for now those days have been usurped. We no longer pass such holidays in communality, but going to Wal-Mart for "Holiday Specials," or --- more often --- parked before the television, watching a baseball game, each of us alone in our lonely chamber, away from those who should be part of our lives --- the neighbors, the villagers, our kinsmen --- those who once shared our common world, our common life.
--- R. J. Mosely
For example, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania went into retirement 500,000 years ago, but that still didn't prevent it from inspiring Hemingway to write "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." In the end, as we all remember from the movie, a smirking pilot takes the writer up to the top so he can become a snowman. Hemingway himself followed this story with a long period of silence to everyone's relief. The mountain has done likewise, so far.
In Pompeii, Italy, pyroclastic Somma buried the whole city while the townspeople were sitting down for lunch. This happened in 79 AD, and the Pompeiians have yet to finish their fettucine con frutti di mare, and will probably never get to the pineapple-upside-down cake. The Napolitanos are said to take things easy, but if you ask me this is overdoing it.
There are some volcanoes that are not volcanoes. For example, Mt. Rainier in Washington is included in this book, but it hasn't had a blowoff since 1500, at which time there was what they called "The Electron Mudflow." 
