Same Depression, Different Conclusions

Father and son from Chicago picking strawberries in Berrien County, Michigan.
John Vachon, 1940
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI archive

I've written before about John Vachon's America, Miles Orvell's book on the photographer's life and Depression-era work.

Born in 1914, Vachon was a slightly younger member of the same generation as Ronald Reagan, and the two had rather similar backgrounds.

Both were Midwesteners, from Minnesota (Vachon) and Illinois (Reagan). Vachon's parents were Irish-Catholic, as was Reagan's father. Vachon's traveling salesman father was often absent; Reagan's was an alcoholic who made his son feel ashamed. Both mothers held the family together, and were the most influential parent in the sons' lives.

The New Deal, specifically, the Farm Security Administration (later, Office of War Information), steered the young Vachon into a career. Reagan's family was kept afloat by the federal work his father and brother were able to get.

Reagan was all for the New Deal in those days. His family needed it to get by, though he had started his media career and was already sitting pretty. A young (and non-smoking) sportscaster, poses for a tobacco company ad [1932-33].

Cigarette Advertising Image Gallery

After going on the road as an FSA photographer, Vachon's letters home detail his constant worry and penny pinching. He struggled, on minimal funds, to maintain himself, accomplish his assignments, and send money home to his wife and growing family.

A sensitive observer, Vachon recorded "with unflinching curiousity and empathy, the shocking reality of Depression life at the margins" (Orvell). These were sights like shack dwellings near a city dump, where the homeless foraged for food.

While shooting federal programs in action, as well as everyday life around the country, Vachon made strong portraits of people and settings he encountered.

FSA (Farm Security Administration) borrower. Saint Mary's County, Maryland. 1940

Father and daughter at Tygart Valley Homesteads, West Virginia. 1939

New Orleans, Louisiana. Negro dock worker and son. 1943

Worker at carbon black plant, Sunray, Texas 1942
FSA/OWI color archive

Missing his own family while on the road, his portraits of children suggest great rapport.

Child of homesteader, Tygart Valley Homesteads, West Virginia. 1939

Daughters of a Tygart Valley homesteader. House and factory in background. West Virginia. 1939

Negro boy near Cincinnati, Ohio. [1942 or 1943]

Vachon's letters written during a 1942 trip to Lincoln, Nebraska suggest a point, in Orvell's words

... when Vachon steps back and begins to sense a profound change in American society. He had always reacted negatively to what he called "the fat boys"—the local officials, elected or appointed, who pulled the strings in a given locale. Now he has been asked to photograph a graduation class, and he can see in these seedlings of the future America some of what he most dislikes, where he least expected to see it.

Days before commencement, it was a rush to line up subjects before work could even begin. After college administrators had helped Vachon find different student types, he wrote his wife that, try as he might to like these young men starting their lives in the adult world, he found it impossible with some.

Orvell points to Vachon's estimation of the one he liked least:

... essentially, the industrialist. He comes I gather from a banker family in Sioux Falls. That is his fence side. He will, eventually, aside from the war, end up as chief of personnel for the Nebraska Power Co. or something like that. What I most feel is that he is the kind of guy I would like to like, a lot, but can't. Must actually stay away from. And that makes me sad. Really sad. Because he is so many of the finest young men in the country. the smart boys, the college boys, the boys who will have the chance to run things. And it looks no good for the future when you see their complacency, their willingness for instance, to leave the Negro situation as it is. Nothing about that moves them at all. They are part of the backward pullers, they want to be status quoers. They want to be associated with the "men who made AMERICA."

In this appraisal, Orvell finds "Vachon seems uncannily able to read postwar America in his subjects, a smug America aloof from 'the honest to god world' that Vachon—by now well traveled—has seen about him."

By the 1950s, Vachon had a successful career as one of the main photographers at Look. While appreciating his professional luck, he always questioned the value of his work, which he saw as endorsing a complacent society of dubious values.

In the same period Reagan, who had joined the post-war highest tax bracket, found his views moving in the opposite direction of his early liberalism. Those new views were quite pleasing to the backers who would finance his entry into politics in the '60s.

During Reagan's first run for the Republican presidential nomination, Time published an interview on May 17, 1976. Decrying "federal programs," he attacked

...[Jimmy Carter's] approach to unemployment: he's for the Humphrey-Hawkins [full employment] bill. If ever there was a design for fascism, that's it. Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say, "But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time." The Humphrey-Hawkins bill calls for the same kind of planned economy, and that would mark the end of the free marketplace in this country.

Along with his new ideology, Reagan had mastered right-wing history revision. After all, Roosevelt himself had been accused of "fascism" by wealthy opponents of his administration. Some of these—real admirers of Mussolini and Hitler—thought fascism was just the thing for replacing Roosevelt. And because veterans had served as European shock troops, who better to lead a coup than a Marine general, beloved by servicemen.

Despite some similarities in where they started, the two men couldn't have been more different in sensibility and willingness to remember where they had been.

Reagan would position himself to gain political power, used for championing "the fat boys."

Vachon would be successful, yet would always question his success.

He had seen too much that stayed with him.

Foraging for food, city dump, Dubuque, Iowa. 1940

Reagan: A Life In Pictures

Images: Ronald Reagan: The Movie, Michael Rogin

"Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures "—the title of an essay in the 1988 Gore Vidal collection, At Home.

This was originally a 1983 review of Laurence Leamer's Make-Believe: The Story of Nancy and Ronald Reagan, published in The New York Review of Books [library access or subscription: "The Best Years of Our Lives" 9/29/83].

Of Leamer's book, Vidal observes that

In time all things converge. The campaign biography and the movie star's biography are now interchangeable. The carefully packaged persona of the old-time movie star resembles nothing so much as the carefully packaged persona of today's politician. Was it not inevitable that the two would at last coincide in one person?

...

...Since Mr. Leamer is as little interested in politics and history as his two subjects, he is in some ways an ideal chronicler. He loves the kind of gossip that ordinary folks—his subjects and their friends—love.

Vidal recalls his first sighting of the Reagans as political couple: at the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco.

This was as Barry Goldwater was about to be nominated for president, and the foaming at the mouth right-wing base was just getting warmed up. In a scene reminiscent of our current tea partying droolers over Palin, Vidal describes a scene including Nelson Rockefeller

... being booed not only for his communism but for his indecently uncloseted heterosexuality. Who present that famous day can ever forget those women with blue-rinsed hair and leathery faces and large costume jewelry and pastel-tinted dresses with tasteful matching accessories as they screamed "Lover!" at Nelson? It was like a TV rerun of the Bacchae, with Nelson as Pentheus.

I felt sorry for Nelson. I felt sorry for David Brinkley when a number of seriously overweight Sunbelt Goldwaterites chased him through the kitchens of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. I felt sorry for myself when I, too, had to ward off their righteous wrath: I was there as a television commentator for Westinghouse. I felt sorry for the entire "media" that day as fists were actually shaken at the anchorpersons high up in the eaves of the hall. I felt particularly sorry for the "media" when a former president named Eisenhower, reading a speech with his usual sense of discovery, attacked the press, and the convention hall went mad. At last Ike was giving it to those Commie-wierdo-Jew-fags who did not believe in the real America of humming electric chairs, well-packed prisons, and kitchens filled with every electrical device that a small brown person of extranational provenance might successfully operate at a fraction of the legal minimum wage.

Vidal was seated near the Reagans, who attracted his attention during Eisenhower's speech. Following Leamer's practice of calling his subjects by their first names, Vidal recalls Nancy—

First, there was her furious glare when someone created a diversion during Ike's aria. She turned, lip curled with Bacchantish rage, huge unblinking eyes afire with a passion to kill the enemy so palpably at hand—or so it looked to me. For all I know she might have been trying out new contact lenses. In any case, I had barely heard of Nancy then. Even so, I said to myself: There is a lot of rage in this little lady.

Vidal had worked for years in Hollywood, where

Ronnie was already notorious for his speeches for General Electric, excoriating communists who were, apparently, everywhere. I had never actually spoken to him at a party because I knew—as who did not?—that although he was the soul of amiability when not excoriating the international monolithic menace of atheistic godless communism, he was, far and away, Hollywood's most grinding bore—Chester Chatterbox, in fact. Ronnie never stopped talking, even though he never had anything to say except what he had just read in the Reader's Digest, which he studied the way that Jefferson did Montesquieu. He also told show-biz stories of the sort that overexcites civilians in awe of old movie stars, but causes other toilers in the Industry to stampede.

I had heard that Reagan might be involved in the coming campaign. So I studied him with some care. He was slumped in a folding chair, one hand holding up his chins; he was totally concentrated on Eisenhower... I do remember being struck by the intensity with which Reagan studied Eisenhower. I had seen that sort of concentration a thousand times in half-darkened theaters during rehearsals or Saturday matinees: the understudy examines the star's performance, and tries to figure how it is done. An actor prepares, I said to myself: Mr. Reagan is planning to go into politics. With his crude charm, I was reasonably certain that he could be elected mayor of Beverly Hills.

In the end Vidal finds "Nancy's story is more interesting than Ronnie's because she is more explicable and Mr. Leamer can get a grip on her." Basically, Nancy's is a familiar story of obsession with her appearance, casting couch career boosting at MGM, and lifelong social climbing.

On the other hand, "Ronnie is as mysterious a figure as ever appeared on the American political stage." Back-stage at a Southern California auditorium before a 1982 speech, Vidal spoke with a journalist who had covered Reagan as governor. When Vidal

...said something to the effect how odd it was that a klutz like Reagan should ever have been elected president. He then proceeded to give an analysis of Reagan that was far more interesting than Mr. Leamer's mosaic of Photoplay tidbits. "He's not stupid at all. He's ignorant, which is another thing. He's also lazy, so what he doesn't know by now, which is a lot, he'll never know. That's the way he is. But he's a perfect politician. He knows exactly how to make the thing work for him."

I made some objections, pointed to errors along the way, not to mention the storms now gathering over the republic. "You can't look at it like that. You see, he's not interested in politics as such. He's only interested in himself. Consider this. Here is a fairly handsome ordinary young man with a pleasant speaking voice who first gets to be what he wants to be and everybody else then wanted to be, a radio announcer [equivalent to an anchorperson nowadays]. Then he gets to be a movie star in the Golden Age of the movies. Then he gets credit for being in the Second World War while never leaving LA. Then he gets in at the start of television as an actor and host. Then he picks up a lot of rich friends who underwrite him politically and personally and get him elected governor twice of the biggest state in the union and then they get him elected president, and if he survives he'll be reelected. The point is that here is the only man I've ever heard of who got everything that he ever wanted. That's no accident."

I must say that as I stepped out onto the stage to make my speech, I could not help but think that though there may not be a God there is quite possibly a devil, and we are now trapped in the era of the Dixon, Illinois, Faust.

Cigarette Advertising Image Gallery
Caption: Ronald Reagan as he appeared in a 1932-33 promotion when he worked as a sportscaster for WHO radio in Des Moines, Iowa. Photo is a copy of a postcard which was sent to people who wrote to Reagan at WHO. Reagan, who does not smoke, is pictured with pipe and dog, Peggy, in this advertisement for Kentucky Winner cigarettes and Kentucky Club pipe tobacco. (AP Photo)

June 2011: Our Republican Depression

A couple of images from that previous one, thanks to the Library of Congress FSA/OWI archive:

Eighteen year-old mother from Oklahoma, now a California migrant.
Dorothea Lange, 1937

Child of migrant berry pickers, Berrien County, Mich.
John Vachon, 1940

In the midst of this, they do what Republicans always do: all they can to enrich the elite by making the weakest suffer.

This should make it all better: poor Mitt having to subsist on an apparent worth of $208 million, at minimum.

The reality is the extreme rightward push of conventional bipartisan political wisdom since the last Republican depression. So that the idea that an administration elected with a mandate to tackle unemployment will so much as care about the growing ranks of devastated lives—that's so far in the past, the New Deal may as well be an ancient fable.

A strange tale from another world, when this, too, could have been thought patriotic:

Aberdeen, South Dakota.
John Vachon, 1942

One Order Of Circus; Hold the Bread

Circus wagon, Alger, Sheridan County, Montana
Russell Lee, 1937
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI archive

Circus? More than a week of this.

Forget about bread? With the transfer of wealth ever upward, a pointless urge to appease the punditry is one explanation why the administration has never really exerted itself against policies that make no practical or political sense.

But just give the media:

A dazzling technology [which said media also does not understand];
A Democrat plus sexual context [if only virtual];
A Democrat outspoken enough to be on the takedown list—and stupid enough to provide the means...

Give the media all this and Andrew Breitbart—if not yet crowned King of Investigative Journalists—has at least become feared as the J.J. Hunsecker of our time.

Weiner's real tweeting problem may well have been this; after all, he was seriously involved in pursuing this effort.

As to what the media feasted on: there would have seemed to be no other news, despite our living in a world of meltdown, metaphorical and real.

In the latest sign of climatic meltdown, a tornado destroys much of Joplin, MO, in just the most recent of these epic storms.

Our economy continues melts down for the average person, while the unemployed may as may has vaporized, as far as our bi-partisan establishment is concerned.

Bridges, roads, and anything else once considered necessary public works are melting down.

Another day, another war: we're in number four.

And three months later in Japan: there is official admission of three nuclear plant meltdowns at the start.

Meanwhile, some Americans were rude enough to bring up this.

It's not just an ugly present reality, of workers whose lives are expendable and the mountain landscape of an entire state blasted to rubble. It's also a story that harkens back to some ugly parts of our buried history—

... one of the biggest union busters in American history, Massey Energy, is launching a final assault on the icon of America's union movement, Blair Mountain.

Blair Mountain's storied history dates back to West Virginia in the 1920s, when the entire state was a company town. Big Coal dominated every aspect of economic life. The industry owned the shops, the homes, of course the mines -- and made sure there was virtually no other source of employment in the state. Working conditions were horrendous: men and their sons worked 12 to 16 grueling hours in dark, dangerous mines dying from a notorious plague of subsurface explosions, cave-ins and black lung.

Workers began standing together, supported by local sheriff Sid Hatfield, who would be murdered by coal operatives.

Hatfield's assassination triggered one of the biggest labor demonstrations in American history. Ten thousand miners from the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia marched for six days, converging on Blair Mountain to confront their industry bosses. They were met by King Coal's powerful army of thugs and mowed down by Gatling guns.

President Warren Harding, a so-called "friend of coal," like most of the leading politicians of the Gilded Age, authorized the U.S. army to drop bombs and poison gas on the marching miners -- the only time in American History when our military deliberately bombed U.S. citizens. These military measures broke the demonstration but outraged the public, and gave vital traction to the United Mine Workers and the American labor movement.

Massey's plan to blow up this particular mountain inspired the march.

In a state where people are trying to save "The Last Mountain" from falling next; in a country where it's the same old fight against the same old forces, over and over and over.

June 6, 1984: On Location

In his piece on the 2004 funeral extravaganza, Eric Boehlert called it

...the 1980s redux, with the Reagan communication team again providing the press, and particularly TV, with priceless pictures and sentimental narrative lines while appreciative producers and reporters neglect to acknowledge the wholesale media manipulation that is going on.

June 6, 1984: the classic example of how this worked.

As told by Paul Slansky—

In the PR coup of Michael Deaver's career, President Reagan commemorates the 40th anniversary of D-Day on the site of the Normandy invasion as campaign cameras roll. "These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc," he says of the veterans sitting before him. "These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war."

Slansky adds the part edited out of the pretty pictures:

As he leaves, a veteran shouts out, "Welcome aboard, Ronnie. You're 40 years late."

Another Anniversary

Thirty years ago today the CDC released its first report on the mysterious disease later called AIDS.

As the disease spread, so did public hysteria—and vicious reaction against victims.

Ironic that the date corresponds to the 2004 death of the ex-president during whose administration these events began.

That death was followed by the public spectacle of a week-long funeral.

As to the loss of tens of thousands of other Americans during Reagan's administration, Michael Bronski writes—

Although AIDS was first reported in the medical and popular press in 1981, it was only in October 1987 that Reagan publicly spoke about the epidemic. By the end of that year 59,572 AIDS cases had been reported and 27,909 of those women and men had died.

Bronski's article is a reminder of Reagan's more important allegiances—to the ultra-Right politicians and evangelicals who found it so profitable to demonize gays:

...In the media, men such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell articulated these sentiments that portrayed gay people as diseased sinners and promoted the idea that AIDS was a punishment from God and that the gay rights movement had to be stopped. In the Republican Party, zealous right-wingers such as Rep. William Dannemeyer of California and Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina hammered home this message. In the Reagan White House, people such as Secretary of Education William Bennett and Gary Bauer, Reagan's domestic policy adviser, worked to enact it in the administration's policies.

Bronski goes over the practical results: chronic underfunding of research; denial of federal funds for AIDS education (thanks to Jesse Helms); calls for mandatory HIV testing (by VP George Bush, among others).

As members of his administration political allies worked against reasonable response to a public health crisis—

Throughout all of this Reagan said nothing and did nothing. When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagans, was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out as president. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986, New York Times opinion article, called for mandatory testing for HIV and said that HIV-positive gay men should have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks (and IV-drug users on their arms) Reagan said nothing. In 1986 (after five years of complete silence), when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report calling for AIDS education in schools, Bennett and Bauer did everything possible to undercut and prevent funding for Koop’s too-little-too-late initiative. Reagan, again, said and did nothing. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died.

Of those years, says Bronski

... the most memorable Reagan AIDS moment for me was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to French President Francois Mitterand and his wife, Danielle. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners Hope quipped, "I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS but she doesn't know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy." As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died. .

June 5, 2004: Gone, But Not Really Departed

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

The November 5, 1994 release of his "Alzheimer's Letter" marked his withdrawal from public life, years before he would leave the physical world.

His followers see to it that he never goes away. His wax effigy watching over the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference may seem creepy, but that's the least of it.

Mark Hertsgaard's 1989 On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency makes it clear that Reagan could have been sold only as a personality—because the public hated his policies. And Hertsgaard's interviews with former White House staffers show that a sales job was exactly what they were about.

The job reached a renewed high in June 2004. The operatives couldn't know when the sad day would come, but whenever it did, they would have their grand plan ready. After all, they had worked on it ever since leaving the White House in 1989.

When Reagan died on June 5, 2004, the grieving PR men responded accordingly—as did the media.

From June 2004, here's Eric Boehlert, on how "The 'liberal media's' unprecedented 24/7 gushing over a controversial and divisive president caps a quarter-century of fawning"—

By midweek, a few news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post, had at least addressed some of the more controversial aspects of Reagan's public life. But for the most part, the reports, particularly on the 24-hour news channels, remained uniformly worshipful, as the elaborate funeral cortege, orchestrated after years of planning by Reagan's old image-makers, marched through the entire week, accompanied by rhetorical flourishes.

"Ronald Reagan is a sort of masterpiece of American magic -- apparently one of the simplest, most uncomplicated creatures alive, and yet a character of rich meanings, of complexities that connect him with the myths and powers of his country in an unprecedented way," trumpeted Time magazine. "He is a Prospero of American memories, a magician who carries a bright, ideal America like a holograph in his mind and projects its image in the air."

What's telling is that that passage wasn't published this week. It comes from a cover story dated July 7, 1986, written by Lance Morrow. The 3,700-word essay serves as a critical reminder that, despite conservative charges of its liberal bias, the press has been fawning over Reagan for years. And this week's uncritical treatment of the 40th president is a natural culmination of what has been going on for the past quarter of a century.

The funeralpalooza coverage was just what the planners knew they could count on. Boehlert notes that

In a sense, this week has been the 1980s redux, with the Reagan communication team again providing the press, and particularly TV, with priceless pictures and sentimental narrative lines while appreciative producers and reporters neglect to acknowledge the wholesale media manipulation that is going on. There's been little or no discussion, for example, of the long planning for this funeral by Reagan's old political handlers. It's morning again in America -- on a feedback loop.

The event was perfect for pre-empting any Democratic campaign effort that week. Months before Bush Jr's re-installation, the media was handed tremendous opportunity for reminding the country of how great Republicans are.

Reagan should never be forgotten. The history of his rise to power and two presidential terms—and knowledge of the funders and PR operation behind it all—are full of lessons.

But we reside in Gore Vidal's "United States of Amnesia." On the one hand, the public is fed a bit of carefully crafted "history"; on the other, the word itself is used to silence ["it's history: get over it"].

The financiers of Reagan's agenda have plenty of cash to underwrite their phony presentation of the past—and the most intimate of connections to the mass media that promote the lie.

The rest of us have to live with the political and economic consequences of what Robert Parry calls "Reagan's 30-Year Time Bombs."

The 1980s: One Joke, Separated By An Ocean

Both versions heard around 1982-3.

The setup: an international group of "bionic plastic surgeons" convene to discuss their astounding achievements.

Insert stereotypical accents in appropriate places for the British version—

German surgeon: "You know, there was a terrible accident on the Autobahn last week, and all that was left was a foot. But we operated, and today: that foot is a man, and he is walking around, looking for work!

The French surgeon: "Oh, that is nothing! Last week there was a horrible accident on the Route Nationale, and all that was left was a little toe. But we operated, and today: that little toe is a man, and he is walking around, looking for work!"

The English surgeon: "I say, chaps, that's nothing compared to the dreadful accident on the Motorway. All that was left was an asshole. But we operated, and today: that asshole is in 10 Downing Street—and a million men are walking around, looking for work!"

American version: substitute "White House" for "Downing Street"

Reagan, however, was "popular." So we are told by our media, now as well as then.

The British, at least, had commentary as biting as "Spitting Image"—and on broadcast TV.
"Spitting Image" puppet head chew toys

Although our asshole is sold in perpetuity as the most terrific guy ever, some Brits express "contempt and anger" for "a middle-aged woman with hair like candy floss"—who may look innocuous, but "does some of the most monstrous things."

That Elvis Costello video incidentally reveals the British as capable of intelligent commenting on youtube. tribble97—

A stunning, moving and sincere performance. The suggestion that Thatcher be given a state funeral is ironic given that she was so determined to dismantle so many aspects of 'the state', especially those intended to protect the poor and the powerless from exploitation. Surely, following her doctrine, her funeral should be put out to public tender with the lowest bidder getting the job.

Additional rock'n'roll sentiment: Pete Wylie, on the death of the "Wicked Witch of West...minster".

I don't know where the asshole joke originated, but musicians spread it. I first heard it from a member of a Scottish group (not sure now, but think it was Silly Wizard). Later heard it told by Utah Phillips (long, but very interesting interview with the late great singer/storyteller/activist here).