it's crazy to train in the same way somebody who is doing routine divorces in a andl town in the midwest somebody who is doing mergers and acquisitions on wall street. this one-size-fits-all model of education which is expensive. the average debt level for a law student is $100,000. and that assumes that you can t rain everybody to do everything in the same way. i'm license to practice in two states, and i would not trust myself to do a routine divorce. >> tonight at 8:00 eastern and pacific on c-span's q&a. >> in 1939, eastman kodak company gave newly released kodachrome color film to photographers working for the u.s. government. american history tv visited the library of congress and beverly brannan to learn about the collection of color images documenting agricultural life during the great depression and

world war ii. 1930's, thethe united states experienced an economic depression and an agricultural disaster. the great drought. people were not able to make a living on their farms. moving other places, looking for a new lands to live on. straits.re in dire one of the worst hit areas in the economy with agriculture. a program began under tugwell who was on ee of the advisers to president franklin roosevelt to document the conditions under which people reliving. this is backing we did not have television. we had radio, but a lot of places did not have electricity. so they could not listen to the radio podcast of find out what was going on in other parts of the country.

they sent off photographers to take pictures of what was happening and put these pictures into newspapers whenever they could and into magazines, journals, things like that. it was difficult to get newspapers to accept these photographs, because nobody really wanted to face up to what was happening. striker, an economist from columbia university, was persistent. he was the head of this project. he went to newspaper offices, contacted newspaper people, magazine people, just really pushed and pushed and pushed to get these pictures published and out to the reading public so they could see what was happening. his projects employ photographers who travel to the worst hit areas where they were planning to have government intervention programs. wasof the things they did

to relocate people off of land that was expired, that had been depleted.l it was and other part -- another project was to move people from urban locations from ghettos into better housing, hoping that they would be healthier and more productive economically. so, photographers went to these arious locations to do before and after pictures to show the need for these government projects and the benefits of them once they had been implemented. oft photographer worked out the washington, d.c., office, working directly for roy strike r. but dorothea lange was in california. her husband worked for the same agency that roy striker did. produceder husband

reports of what was happening in california. these written reports with photographs were sent to the washington office, made their way to striker's office. when he saw these pictures, he took them around to the different offices in the resettlement administration and people were astounded. one of the best-known photographers for the resettlement was ben shawn, who was an already established fine art artist. when he saw them, he said if that is what you want your photographers to produce, i want to come work for you. so he got a detail to go work for a while, but these pictures set the tone for how the agency was going to publicize its mission and mig rant mother picture is probably the most famous of the ones that dorothea lange produced. she was out in california documenting pea picking in

march, 1936. the crops had frozen. people were not able to pick the damaged goods, so they were living on what littlmoney they had saved. they were living in outdoor camps. she drove by one of these camps and stopped and made some pictures. got back and her car and was partway home and thought, i did not do what i was supposed to do. i did not get "the" picture. so, she turned around, went back. the story that we got from migrant mother's grandson, migrant mother is the name that that picture that's so famous usually goes by. the story was that his grandmothewas camped near the edge of the road. her husband and older son had they neednd whatever

to keep the car going. apparently they had poked a hole nd neededdiator something to patch it up to make it to the next farm, next place to pick crops. so florence thompson was back at the camp with the children, no cell phones. how are they going to find each other when the husband and son came walking up the road? so, she was near the edge of the road which was a very dangerous place to be. these migrant laborers were extremely unpopular in california. pickinglready a arrangement for the crops out there. they did not need these dust bowl okies who were coming in from the drought areas of the united states. the farmers did not want these new people coming in.

the townspeople did not want them camped on the side of the road, did not want to have to pay for their children to go to school. they were extremely unpopular. police were hired to clear these people out, make the move on to another part othe state or the county. the edge of the road, florence thompson was in a vulnerable situation. that's who dorothea lange photographed. she saw this woman with several small children, teenage daughter and some younger children, and began working her way up to her. apparently, dorothea lange was very good at engaging people in conversation and then just sort of disappearing into the atmosphere. she talked about herself as becoming invisible as she worked. she would very slowly talk to people about what was happening, how straits they were in,

they fed themselves, that kind of thing, and then they woul sort of forget about her, and she would begin making pictures. that is what she did with florence thompson. there is a series of pictures showing the teenage girl out in front of their tent sitting on a chair. the mother on the younger children behind her. then gradually, she gets closer and closer and makes the famous photograph. she made it,sooner that that is what she needed to accomplish andd went back home. strikergram that roy headed began as part of the resettlement administration, but resettlement administration did not sit well with the public. americans have always wanted to have their own property, their

own houses, their own piece of ground. and they do not want to be moved. they want to decide what to do for themselves. this resettlement administration was intended to help people who were in dire straits, but it was politically unpopular. accused of being socialist, communist, moving people around. that was not part of the american dream. so, they had to change direction. they had to stop moving people around. they needed to change the name of the organization and they went from resettlement, which i mplies certain things, to farm security administration, wchihih implies the opposite. that you are not going to be moved, you will stay in a secure situation. took off in a new direction. there was more documentation of farms. more documentation of the

american way of life, of small o town america and less emphasis on changing things around. rex tugwell was sort of a lightning rod. he was a free thinker. he came up with this resettlement administration program. roosevelt cannot live with the political fallout from it. took him away from the program and had him go do other things. and that's when it became the farm security administration. so, the agenda was slightly different, and different people were put in charge. being thethe began farm security administration, they were well-established. newspapers, magazines were glad to have their photographs, because they had seen the quality of the work was becoming an established, reliable picture source. the pictures were free.

so, they were appealing to newspapers, magazines, book publishers, that kind of thing. and as a well-established organization, 1939 when kodak introduced color film, they sent riker to have his photographers try out. kodak was trying to establish a new market, new product, and they wanted people who would know how to use it effectively to try it out and publicize it. the photographers produced over 6000 photographs. you can see when you go online, you can see they were bracketing. they were underexposed in some. overexposing others. not knowing just where that the best meters to get the picture, but they got quite a lot of really, really affect the pictures. beautiful pictures.

and some sort of duds. few double exposures, but the film was being developed elsewhere. they could not see the products that they had produced. so, they were just learning how to use it. the kodachrome slides are kept in an off-site storage location that has the right temperature and humidity condition to make them last as long as possible. imagesthe digital exclusively at this point. we had them at as high resolution as technology can produce at this point. we don't bother the originals, because taking them in and out their conditions will make them deteriorate more quickly, and we want these to last in perpetuity. wolcott was trained

as a newspaper photographer assigned to the women's page.o she was very confined in what she could make photographs of. she worked with paul strand and arth steiner who were photographers in the late 1930's to she was also self-taught. but they gave her private instruction. they would comment on her work. she even photographed for their frontier films, people of the cumberland. know her and her work fairly well, recommended who set hertriker to work in the most difficult part of the resettlement fsa territory. the southern united states were the most agricultural,he most conservative, and the most racially troubled. marian was the ambassador.

she -- went into almost any situation, people like her. she could calm people's nerves. she could make photographs that did not upset them, that would agency's agenda for documenting the need for change. so, she traveled for most of her the farmrs for security administration, she traveled in the south. she was one of the people who was given the color film. she was one of the first two got the color film. see the bracketing in her work. of made photographs american flags, people celebrating fourth of july, these flag photographs get used heavily. she made photographs of juke joints, which are dance halls.

out in the sticks, usually. very simple music, no application, just people playing as they would in their own homes. but dancing went on there. made photographs of a lot of former plantations where there were tenant farmers working for plantation owners. and she could relate well to both of them. some of her more interesting picture show kids out fishing in the bayou. people lounging around waiting for work in florida, picking crops there, having to wait until the crop is ready or if the crop is spoiled, waiting around for the next crop to come to fruition. so her picture show a way of life that sometimes is butidered to have dennis,

vecasionally someone -- to ha vanished, some people will say that if you go to that same location you will see that life is very much the same. started putting images online, the library was approached to see if there was any way we could use flickr to disseminate our photographs. we thought about it for a while and realized it was a way we cou about better information the pictures. that it was not just a one-way street of the library giving also a way out, but of capturing what people knew about these places. so, we had many of these pictures we had fairly minimal captions, just the name of a the pictures when online, people would write and saying, that is such and such an intersection and the building

behind that street sign is such and such a business. my family owned it. we went there for dinner every friday nht. that kind of thing. we got a lot of information from people. which we would never have had fortime to go out and find ourselves. so it has been a very good, cooperative arrangement. a largerst wolcott had area to cover than the other photographers in that there were more resettlement projects, there were more farm security projects. it was a much tenser area that she had to cover. was pulling her out of one job, sending her off to the other. for the whole time she worked for him, except when she went to eastern kentucky. met people who, introduced her to the

superintendent of schools who took her up creek beds to show her where the children lived who went tschools in that area. she had entrees to people in small towns. in this town she is photographing jackie street. they had mule trading day. it was usually the first monday of each month. people would bring in their imals that they waed to trade, either sell them or trade them for other amals, but they had a very old tradition back to fromarket days in england, medieval times. this is one of the few breakunities she took to loose. she wanted to come back and documentore, but the opportunity never arose. she got to do as extensive a coverage as she did.

russell lee was an engineer before he came to the farm security administration. he operated the factory. he became an artist. his first wife was an artist. and he decided, he thought that would be more interesting way of life then continuing to operate factories. colony witho an art her. they gradually corrupted apart. he stayed with his art. but he was not all that good at it. he realized he was a much better photographer that he was an artist. he began making pictures. ker aboutched roy stri doing a project of a trial to see how it went. rikerecame the son roy st never had. began as an engineering

student but gave it up because of poor eyesight, because he could not pay his school fees and him went off to world onwar i. came back a different person with a broader outlook, but he respected the engineering mindset. way russellt in the lee went about making pictures. processes, beginning, middle and end. if he got interrupted in that sequence, he made the little what had happened, and went back to the process. so in his pictures, you have down.ed where he inches a sideshow, if there is something interesting that was not in his agenda, he covers it, but when he leaves town, he remembers to take the picture of leaving whatever the town name is. he is very thorough and methodical.

lee's most famous n, newes are of pie tow mexico. he went there because he thought it was an intriguing name. founde got there, he people who had and many of them ended up in new mexico in this little squatters community. pie town. texas,re usually from oklahoma, the southern states. as was russell lee himself. he felt very very comfortable with them. collecting their stories, making pictures of their lifestyles. they lived in ways that were very similar to early pioneers

in this country. they built houses using materials at hand. many of them dug holes in the ground and had dug outs. there was very little lumber, so they used that for roofing, but the house itself was med wall -- mud walls. they lived a very colorful lifestyle. they made their clothes our t of sea sacks. they worked the land. they lived a very hand to mouth subsistence existence and it was a lot of appeal in documenting that because, at the time, most people in this country were de hadded from people who arrived as farmers and taken up land gradually farther west. so it was a story people could relate to readily. russell lee from his experience as a painter would get

photographs that were just little gems. this particular house, a plain house, but the people who lived there had done what they can to make it beautiful. the textures of the sidewalk. the different brush strokes in the stucco are there to be seen. plain woodwork, but they'v painted red in places to make it pop out. there are lace curtains at the door, plant in the door. it just is very inviting, and very humble. you can see edge notching at the top of the picture. it is part of the film, part of a sheet of film. and you can read eastman kodak across the top. those words and that edging would not appear in the print, whole's there to show the

picture is on the screen. john dashon came to the resettlement administration as a clerk delivery boy. he had been in graduate school at catholic university, but got kicked out for bad bavior. he was studying to be a poet. but when he started working with the pictures in the files, putting them back in the file cabinets after people had done research, he began to see there was poetry in visual images. took up a camera. some of the photographers would work with him, when they came in from the field and give him a few pointers here or there. but he was largely a self taught photographer. he became quite the lyricist. justde pictures that were

beautiful to look at. he was not very steady. he didn't want to keep track of where he went, what he did. he was known to go off and leave his rented car and take the train back to washington. so, he was quite difficult for butstriker to live with, everybody loved the pictures he produced. he traveled around the united states. wrote wonderful letters back home, describing what he had seen. wrote there a few of them to roy striker. so, he was not very well known to photography until relatively recently when his family gave the letters to the library of congress. and now you can match his letters to his wife and his mother with the pictures he made. at wherever he went, he had

sense of humor. he would make pictures of cigarette butts because he thought it was funny. he would make pictures of hotels with funny signs. but many of his images are just pure poetry to be eyes. this is one of john vachon's pictures from texas when he was sent to document preparations for world war ii. or so.cture, 1943 and these boys looked so serious. i keep thinking, did they have to go fight in the war? did they not? the other pictures made in this series show war bond posters, show children looking at globes and maps, trying to figure out where these countries are that are suddenly in the news. the seriousness of these boys and the strength of character

that i read in their faces makes me think they would have been good soldiers. hasprobably everyoneh encountered the inoculation situation. everybody hates it. this little girl looks like she is beginning to tense up, that this doctor is preparing to give her her shot. e of the ways that the united states tried to get out of the great depression was to create jobs for people. ey did a lot of major construction projects. dam building to provide electricity to remote parts of the country. employedis a huge dam, lots and lots of people. these dams for the most part are still in use, but now we're seeing the flip side of building these dams. they have diverted water from

some groups, who relied on the water to other people who now rely on the water, and this has been an issue throughout u.s. history, but you will see many of the workers have no protection from the chemicals and when they were doing very dirty work. we did not know it at the time but a lot of health problems arose because of these working conditions. we now have,ake efforts to keep people safe while working in similar situations, but this was the beginning of the major industrial push in the united states. we went from being probably 2/3 agricultural and before the world war ii to 2/3 industrial and urban after that period.

so it was a time of major change. i hope that people will find out the color photographs are just part of a larger view of the country at that time. i hope they will go to our website. there they can see the 14 million pictures, references, discussions of the pictures that are digitized images. online, and weon have discussions of the others. so, many of those are in the public domain at a high enough resolution they can be downloaded and used for reproduction in books. is the first of a two-part look at the farm security administration and office of war information color photographs. during