ABSTRACT
As Dorothea Lange photographed California agriculture, Charlie Chaplin, as the internationally known Tramp, fought for the “little man” in his Depression-era classic, Modern Times. The twentieth-century comedian and movie-maker’s dream sequence of California showcased the Golden State’s earthly abundance. In American Exodus, California was the “Last West,” in Lange and her husband Paul Taylor’s words; where the “distressed, dislodged, determined Americans” hit “hard against the waters of the Pacific.” Lange’s photographs invited Americans to reconsider the Promised Land’s premise, the American Dream of individual mobility and potential in a land of plenty. Peppers were grown as seedlings in a greenhouse, and workers then transplanted them into the fields. Lange showed one man carrying his wooden box full of seedlings, nestling them into the ground, and then covering them with “sticks, palm leaves and paper for protection against wind and cold.”.
