Paul Taylor: “Again the Covered Wagon”

About the Author

Paul Schuster Taylor was born on June 9, 1895, in Sioux City, Iowa. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1917, he sought a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was given command of the 4th Platoon, 78th Company, 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines that year and was deployed to France in January 1918. He took part in two major battles, the Battle of Chateau-Thierry and the Battle of Belleau Wood, where he was gassed on June 14, 1918. After his recovery, he mustered out of the Marine Corps in 1919 and resumed his studies at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving a master's degree in 1920 and a PhD in 1922. He joined the Department of Economics at Berkeley and remained there until he retired in 1962.

Throughout his career, Taylor served in a number of capacities as a researcher and consultant. From 1927 to 1929 he was the chief investigator for the Social Science Research Council in its investigations of Mexican labor in the United States. From 1930 to 1931 he was a consultant to the National Commission on law observance and enforcement (the Wickersham Committee), which studied crime within the foreign-born population. He studied in Jalisco, Mexico, under a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1931–1932 and then in 1933 conducted research on self-help cooperatives among the unemployed. In 1935 he was the field director for the Division of Rural Rehabilitation at the California State Emergency Relief Administration. From 1935 to 1943 he served as the president of the California Rural Rehabilitation Corporation, and from 1935 to 1936 he was the regional labor adviser for the U.S. Resettlement Administration.

In the years that followed, he served in numerous capacities for the state of California, the U.S. Senate, the Export-Import Bank, and the Agency for International Development. He conducted field studies on community development in nations around the world, including India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, and others. In addition to his expertise in agricultural economics and Mexican immigration, he took part in a number of initiatives bearing on water law and water allocation.

In 1920, Taylor married Katharine Page Whiteside, and the couple had three children. His name, however, is usually linked with that of famous documentary photographer Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), whom he married in 1935, and the two maintained a working partnership until her death in 1965. Lange is perhaps best known for an iconic Depression-era photograph of Florence Owens Thompson and her children, titled Migrant Mother (1936), that has been reproduced thousands of times. A similar photo of Thompson and her children was printed with “Again the Covered Wagon.” Taylor died on March 13, 1984, in Berkeley, California.