[First Days of Unemployment Compensation in California: Waiting to File Claims]

In the Farm Security Administration (FSA) file (now in the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress), the series of pictures from which this image comes is captioned "Unemployment benefits aid begins. Line of men inside a division office of the State Employment Service office at San Francisco, California, waiting to register for benefits on one of the first days the office was open. They will receive from six to fifteen dollars per week for up to sixteen weeks. Coincidental with the announcement that the federal unemployment census showed close to ten million persons out of work, twenty-two states begin paying unemployment compensation."

Dorothea Lange's documentation of the beginnings of New Deal unemployment insurance in California was available through the FSA for use in picture magazines, newspaper articles, and government reports. Survey Graphic, the progressive journal to which she and the economist Paul Taylor (whom she married in 1935), contributed, reproduced a similar image from this session to introduce an article on the status of the new system about a year later. Explaining why some states had trouble keeping up with claims from the millions of unemployed, the March 1939 piece reminded readers: "As was to be expected the machinery creaks. To start than the normal weight was heavier at the start than the normal weight the machinery will have to carry."

Between 1935 and 1939 Lange's beat for the RA/FSA was often San Francisco. When not traveling to cover dust bowl farmers or Southern sharecroppers, being "in the field" meant photographing the unemployed in flophouses in the Mission District, in hockshops on skid row, or at Salvation Army meetings, listening to the band and the preacher.

Judith Keller, Dorothea Lange, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 38. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.