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Reviews
Hope in Hard Times: New Deal Photographs of Montana, 1936–1942
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By Mary Murphy
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Montana Historical Society Press, Helena, 2003. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 256 pages. $22.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by Carroll Van West
Center for Historic Preservation, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro
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| The New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt reshaped many American lives and much of the country's landscape from 1933 to 1942. To publicize the need for New Deal programs and to document the quiet dignity of average Americans in the midst of the Great Depression, the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) sent out waves of experienced, dedicated photographers to record the national experience in thousands of images. Over the past fifteen years, several students of photography and many historians have availed themselves of the magnificent FSA collection to produce books about the New Deal. One of the most impressive efforts on a state level is Mary Murphy's new volume on the FSA photography of Montana. |
1
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Murphy neatly divides her topic into two sections. The first, titled "Hard Times," is a very useful and insightful history of the Depression and New Deal in Montana. Although several writers have taken stabs at this important story and others have told pieces of it, Murphy's concise summary of the New Deal years in Montana will become the standard account. She balances her narrative between eastern and western Montana and gives significant attention to the state's rural communities, which had been depressed since the homesteading bust of the 1920s. Throughout her account, Murphy intersperses photographs of people, places, and landscapes, giving invaluable visual documentation to her narrative. She notes that the FSA photographers failed to document the worst years of the Depression since they did not start their work in the state until 1936. Yet, their images of homesteader housing in Sheridan County, cowhands in Rosebud County, and miners in Silver Bow County convey the impact of hard years of poverty and uncertainty on many Montana workers. |
2
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The second section of the book, "On the Road," is a close look at the four FSA photographers — Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, and John Vachon — who worked in the state. Murphy takes a biographical approach to the individual photographers and their bodies of work rather than offering a close cultural analysis of their work and what it tells us about the time and place as well as about the artists themselves. She allows the photographers to be complete individuals, frustrated with their sponsoring agency, the rigors of western travel, and their too-curious reception in many communities. Section 2, thus, is a refreshing departure from several previous books about FSA photography, where authors have written as if the local context or the photographers' own personal demons were immaterial to the fine art produced by the project. |
3
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I do have a few quibbles with this fine book. I wish that Kinsey Flats, an FSA resettlement project in Custer County, had received some attention. Like Benchland Farms, which Murphy covers well, Kinsey is still a distinctive place within the landscape. Murphy does little with the profound impact of the Civilian Conservation Corps on the state and national parks and the national forests of Montana. In addition, the subtitle of the book, "New Deal Photographs of Montana, 1936–1942," is misleading. The photography is from the FSA project; we see nothing from the work of the Historic American Building Survey and from other New Deal agencies such as the Public Works Administration (PWA). The PWA project, for example, included photographs of Gallatin County Courthouse, Helena High School, and a Glacier National Park bridge and three breathtaking images of the Fort Peck Dam and spillway in its volume Public Buildings (1940). |
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These criticisms aside, Hope in Hard Times is one of the most evocative books on Montana and the northern plains that I have encountered in some time. Its blending of photography, analysis, and testimonies from those who lived those years themselves make for compelling reading. |
5
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