ABSTRACT

After her work in the Mid-Atlantic states, the RA/FSA’s Stryker sent Lange south. There she witnessed a distinctive agricultural poverty shaped by Reconstruction’s failure. She documented the region’s socio-economic relations of exploitation, and despite her unfamiliarity with the South’s history and culture, her photographs command attention. Over the twentieth century Southern farmers became increasingly impoverished. In 1935, three sociologists determined some eight million Americans subsisted in a semi-feudal state; most were Southerners. White Southerners, particularly the planter class, had passed laws restricting voting rights, which conserved their economic and political control. Grandfather clauses, which denied the franchise to citizens whose grandfathers could not vote, were deemed unconstitutional in 1915, but poll taxes and literacy tests restricted voting for African Americans and poor whites. Playwrights and novelists offered more unblinking views, while still purveying stereotypic views of the South and its large African American population.