Abandoned Farm in Mechanized Wheat Fields, Oklahoma

"The houses were left vacant on the land, and the land was vacant because of this." Thus John Steinbeck begins his description in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) of the scene left by the Joads and other Oklahoma families as they departed for California. He goes on to detail the damage that will be done to the empty houses by the sun, the wind, the animals, the boys from town, and even the weeds, now that the residents are gone: "The weeds sprang up in front of the doorstep, where they had not been allowed, and grass grew up through the porch boards. The houses were vacant and a vacant house falls quickly apart. Splits started up the sheathing from the rusted nails. A dust settled on the floors, and only mouse and weasel and cat tracks disturbed it." The novelist also addressed the impact and attributes of the tractor, now the sole inhabitant of many farms: "When a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left. . . . There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from."

Writing in An American Exodus that same year, Paul Shuster Taylor, Dorothea Lange's collaborator and second husband, employed a more matter-of-fact voice in outlining the reasons for the Oklahoma crisis: "For a generation the labor agents for the cotton growers of Arizona and California have known that Oklahoma farm folk are among the most footloose in the country. . . . By a curiously symbolic coincidence Oklahoma is the most windblown state in the country, its newly-broken red plains are among the least rooted to the soil. Adding to its traditional unsettlement, Oklahoma shares with neighboring states the effects of protracted agricultural depression, drought, depletion of mineral resources, destruction of silos, displacement of farm workers by mechanization, and accumulation in its poorest rural sections of populations rebuffed by industrial centers of the North." Lange expressed the words of both novelist and economist in this wide view of a wheat field, empty house, and quiet windmill.

Judith Keller, Dorothea Lange, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 46. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.