The New Deal Through the Lens of Arthur Rothstein

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Self Portrait, Arthur Rothstein

Self Portrait, Arthur Rothstein
Courtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.

President Franklin Roosevelt had a remarkable ability to rally the nation using the mass-communication media of his time. He crafted intimate “Fireside Chats” to reach Americans in their homes by radio, but in this pre-television era FDR also needed compelling visual imagery to advance his New Deal agenda, promote national unity and counter the growing political extremism from both left and right.

Photography was central to the administration’s wide-ranging media strategies.

The most influential body of work was produced by a team of photographers in the Resettlement Administration (RA), an agency created by FDR in 1935 that later became the Farm Security Administration (FSA) within the Department of Agriculture.

Rehabilitation client repays loan. Smithfield, North Carolina, 1936

Rehabilitation client repays loan, Smithfield, North Carolina, 1936.
Courtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.

One of the largest and most visible of the New Deal’s initiatives, the FSA assisted struggling rural families and dislocated industrial workers throughout the country.

The President appointed Columbia University professor and key New Deal strategist, Rexford Tugwell, as director of the Resettlement Administration. Tugwell brought a colleague—agricultural economist Roy Stryker—to Washington to create the RA’s publicity arm, referred to as the

Historical Section. Stryker believed the best way to fulfill the Section’s mission was through photography, so he immediately hired his former student and recent Columbia graduate, Arthur Rothstein, as the agency’s photo lab director and first photographer.

"Eighty Acres." Wife and child of agricultural worker.

"Eighty Acres." Wife and child of agricultural worker.
Courtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.

Over the next eight years, Rothstein and a group of more than a dozen photographers working under Stryker gained renown as the FSA Photo Unit.

The primary mission of the Photo Unit was to document the hardships of those struggling through the Great Depression and how the FSA was working to address their problems. These iconic images portray Americans amidst drought, dust storms and failing crops; unemployment lines and communities abandoned by failing industries. But they also evince hope: farms stabilized by the agency’s loans, families resettled to greener pastures and farm hands who found respite in FSA migrant housing.

Children of sharecropper. North Carolina, 1935.

Children of sharecropper, North Carolina, 1935.
Courtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.

A secondary, but crucial role of the FSA’s photographers was to provide images in support of other New Deal programs. At times, Stryker’s photographers were loaned-out for assignments with other agencies, including the Interior Department and the US Public Health Service. These photographs often appeared in government reports and publications describing such New Deal initiatives as reducing child labor, improving international relations and boosting domestic tourism.

The Photo Unit produced more than 175,000 photographs during the 1930s and early 40s. Stryker provided the best of these images to newspapers, magazines and book publishers free of charge. This put a human face on the economic abstractions of the Great Depression and helped justify the need for the New Deal’s far-reaching initiatives.  The FSA Photo Unit later became part of the US Office of War Information (OWI), employed to promote national unity as America mobilized for war.

Explaining the Rural Electrification Administration to farm women at Central Iowa 4-H Club Fair. Marshalltown, Iowa, 1939.

Explaining the Rural Electrification Administration to farm women at Central Iowa 4-H Club Fair, Marshalltown, Iowa, 1939.
Courtesy, Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.

Arthur Rothstein and his contemporaries at the FSA contributed significantly to the nation’s collective memory of the New Deal-era. Rothstein served as a photographer for the US Army Signal Corps during WWll. In the decades after the war, he continued to influence the field of photojournalism as a teacher, writer and mentor to countless photographers. He helped shape the visual culture of post-war America as director of photography at LOOK and Parade, two of the most popular magazines at the time.

Ann Rothstein Segan, Ph.D and her husband, Brodie Hefner, manage the Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project. Together they develop publications, educational programs and exhibitions on the life and career of Ann’s father, documentary photographer Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985). Segan and Hefner are active members and contributors to the work of American Photography Archive Group, The Living New Deal and Archivists Round Table of New York.

Rediscovering Arthur Rothstein’s “Photo Stories”

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Families were displaced by the Dust Bowl

Forced to move by drought, North Dakota, 1936
Families were displaced by the Dust Bowl
Photo Credit: Photo by Arthur Rothstein, Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection

My dad, Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985) was the first photographer hired by the Farm Security Administration, the New Deal agency that pioneered the use of photographs and “photo stories” to build public and political support for federal relief programs.

Starting in 1935, the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration– “FSA,” for short–compiled an unprecedented, nationwide photographic survey of life in Depression-wracked America.

During Dad’s nearly seven years working for the FSA he refined the art of visual storytelling, producing hundreds of in-depth photo essays documenting the need for government assistance and the successful New Deal relief programs created in response.

FSA photos put a human face on problems such as “drought” and “failing farms” targeted by New Deal programs.

Dust threatens to engulf a home. Liberal, Kansas, 1936
FSA photos put a human face on problems such as “drought” and “failing farms” targeted by New Deal programs.
Photo Credit: Arthur Rothstein, Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection

Dad was fiercely patriotic. His parents, Jews displaced from Eastern Europe by pogroms, had found both refuge and opportunity in America. He was drawn to stories of migrants and the dispossessed that, through no fault of their own, needed government help. He brought a powerful sense of purpose to his New Deal assignments.

Dad’s boss at the FSA, Roy Stryker, shared Dad’s sense of purpose. Stryker believed that photography could serve as a tool to advance social justice. He thought that words with pictures provided irrefutable evidence of the need for federal assistance to struggling Americans. More than a dozen FSA photographers would eventually contribute images to Stryker’s extensive visual record of American life during the Depression and the early years of World War II. That collection, preserved at the Library of Congress, includes iconic images my Dad took as a young FSA photographer. His photographs of the devastation wrought by the drought and Dust Bowl remain the most famous of his career.

Photo by Arthur Rothstein for Look magazine

Eddie Mitchell, Birmingham, Alabama
Photo by Arthur Rothstein for Look magazine
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection

The values my father inherited from his immigrant parents, reinforced by his New Deal tenure under Roy Stryker, can be seen in the work Dad created throughout his 50-year career as a photojournalist and documentary photographer.

After serving as a photographer in the US Army Signal Corps during WW II, and as chief photographer for a United Nations relief agency in China after the war, Dad spent 35 years as director of photography at the popular Look and Parade magazines. One of Dad’s first and most memorable stories for Look depicted the daily indignities of a young black man living in the segregated South.

Dad’s New Deal portfolio still stands out as surprisingly relevant. My father’s images from nearly 80 years past remind us that we still live among the dispossessed—those denied justice and made vulnerable by forces beyond their control—and that government has a responsibility to shield and support those who need a leg up.

 
Tenant farmer, Tennessee, 1937

Tenant farmer, Tennessee, 1937
The collapse of the rural economy displaced farmers from their land.
Photo Credit: Arthur Rothstein, Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection

Dr. Ann Segan is the one of Arthur Rothstein’s four children. Her interdisciplinary Ph.D. is in the field of expressive arts for healing and social change. Her work on the value of visual storytelling in oral history projects was celebrated at the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress. She frequently lectures on Rothstein’s legacy and creates photographic exhibits with husband, Brodie Hefner. She is a Research Associate for the Living New Deal in New York City.

New Deal Utopias, by Jason Reblando

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New Deal Utopias CoverOver three years Jason Reblando, a Chicago artist and photographer, trained his camera on three Greenbelt towns — Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin— constructed during the Depression to house poor Americans, many of them displaced from the Dust Bowl.

Rexford Tugwell, a Columbia economics professor tapped to head FDR’s Resettlement Administration (RA), modeled the Greenbelt program on the Garden City movement of early 20th Century England, integrating housing with nature. Tugwell’s dream was to create not only housing for those in need, but also a flourishing community. “My plans are fashioned and practical,” he said. “I shall roll up my sleeves—make America over!”

Jason Reblando, Photographer

Jason Reblando
Author and photographer Jason Reblando

The towns incorporated features designed to encourage neighborly interaction—shared courtyards and lawns, parks and playgrounds, intersecting pathways, public artworks, a swimming pool. Town residents managed schools, shops, and community buildings as cooperatives.

Not surprisingly, conservatives in Congress derided the Greenbelt experiment as both extravagant and “socialist,” and sought to end it.

To win support for the Greenbelt projects, Tugwell called on his former graduate student, Roy Stryker, head of the Information Division of the RA (soon to become the Farm Securities Administration). Stryker famously deployed FSA photographers to document the human desperation that the New Deal agencies were working to address. Photographs by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Walker Evans captured some of the best-known images of the victims of the Great Depression. Lesser known were the RA’s photographs of the Greenbelt towns that conveyed an America on the road to recovery. Nonetheless, under pressure from Congress and wealthy farmers deprived of their tenant work force, the RA was discontinued in 1936.

Gazebo, Greendale, WI

Gazebo
Greendale, WI
Photo Credit: Jason Reblando

Seventy-five years later, author and photographer Jason Reblando has re-captured the founding vision of the Greenbelt towns in his large-format book, New Deal Utopias. His color photographs of the tidy homes and well-tended grounds surrounded by farms and forests recall a kind of everyday orderliness—both ordinary and reassuring. Portraits of the towns’ 21st Century inhabitants depict a sense of small-town pride.

Despite what Reblando’s photos convey, not all is utopian in these New Deal “utopias.” Residents of Ohio’s Greenhills near Cincinnati have struggled for years to defend their historic district from redevelopment. They won National Historic Landmark status for their town, but that doesn’t ensure its preservation. In a recent letter to the citizens of Greenhills, the National Park Service acknowledged the town’s historic significance and the need to preserve it: “Bear in mind that the shared heritage and stewardship of the village should extend throughout the community, and decisions made today will impact current and future generations,” it cautioned.

Published under the fiscal sponsorship of the Living New Deal, New Deal Utopias serves as a reminder that this shared heritage comprises far more than buildings alone.

Pool, Greenbelt, MD

Pool
Greenbelt, MD
Photo Credit: Jason Reblando

Lake, Greenhills, OH

Lake
Greenhills, OH
Photo Credit: Jason Reblando

Daffodil House, Greendale, WI

Daffodil House
Greendale, WI
Photo Credit: Jason Reblando

Susan Ives is communications director for the Living New Deal and editor of the Living New Deal newsletter.