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