AMERICAN EXODUS, AN

In 1939 photographer Dorothea Lange and sociologist Paul Schuster Taylor collaborated to publish a record of their social science observations and conclusions drawn from their experiences in the Great Depression. They had collected the data for that record, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, over the previous five years and while traveling through rural America under the aegis of the Resettlement Administration and, after the agency's name changed on January 1, 1937, the Farm Security Administration (RA-FSA). The book is divided into five sections: Old South, Plantation Under the Machine, Midcontinent, Dust Bowl, and Last West. All but nine of the photographs in the book are Lange's.

Agricultural reform, the agenda of the RA-FSA, shaped American Exodus. Lange and Taylor concluded that the migrants who fled to California from devastated rural areas in the South and Midwest could be compared to Europeans who had fled agricultural disasters to immigrate to America. Lange and Taylor saw a close parallel to one cause of European emigration: a process of agricultural consolidation known as enclosure, which dissolved small family-occupied or family-owned farms into large single-owner tracts. Enclosure in America was exacerbated by secondary hardships: agricultural mechanization and disfranchisement due to the poll tax. In addition, Lange and Taylor set the book in the wider cultural narrative of Frederick Jackson Turner's then-popular frontier thesis.

Many of the captions accompanying the photographs are descriptive of the subject of the photograph or of conditions that Lange and Taylor perceived had created the opportunity for the photograph to be taken; other captions consist of reported statistical data or historical quotes. Still others are quotations recorded by Lange and Taylor from the subjects in the photographs; some of these captions are extracts from longer statements, reproduced out of context.

Lange and Taylor had difficulty persuading a publisher to assume the expensive project. The success of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and widespread attention drawn by Carey McWilliams's Factories in the Field (1939) ultimately convinced Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc., to take the project on. The book's distribution on January 19, 1940, five days before the release of John Ford's highly popular film version of Steinbeck's novel, gave sales a boost. Nonetheless, contemporary critics unfavorably compared Lange and Taylor's self-styled social science reportage/argument to the compelling dramatic narrative of the Joad family, notwithstanding American Exodus's subsequent and enduring critical acclaim.

With national attention turning to World War II, An American Exodus went quickly out of print. It was reissued by Yale University Press in 1969 for the Oakland Museum of California and was published in a facsimile edition in 1999 by Jean-Michel Place.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lange, Dorothea, and Paul Taylor. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. 1939. Reprint, 1999.

Mayer, Henry. "The Making of a Documentary Book." In An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939). 1999.

Sampsell, Kate. "'To Grab a Hunk of Lightning': An Intellectual History of Depression-Era American Photography." Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University. 2002.

Shindo, Charles J. Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination. 1997.

Stourdzé, Sam. "Introduction." In An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939). 1999.