Paul Taylor: “Again the Covered Wagon”

Impact

It would be difficult to specify a particular impact that “Again the Covered Wagon” had. Taylor was a prominent agricultural economist, and Survey Graphic was a respected publication. Taylor held a number of positions as a consultant to government, at both the federal and state levels, on matters of immigration, water and land allocation, and similar topics, so it is likely that his views, along with those of other academics, researchers, and reformers, would have had some influence on the views of policy makers. In fact, the U.S. government took steps to alleviate the problems Taylor highlighted. For example, in 1935 the federal government formed the Drought Relief Service to coordinate relief activities for those affected by the Dust Bowl. As an example of the steps the service took, the agency bought cattle in counties affected by the emergency. Those regarded as unfit for human consumption were slaughtered; the others were assigned to the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation to be used for nationwide food distribution. The program enabled many Midwestern farmers to avoid bankruptcy.

Further, the Civilian Conservation Corps was ordered to plant two hundred million trees from Canada to Texas as a way of abating the wind and reducing soil erosion. Beginning in 1937, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt launched an aggressive program to educate farmers about ways to avoid soil erosion, including crop rotation, strip farming, contour plowing, and terracing. The California State Relief Administration was created in 1935 as a successor to the State Emergency Relief Administration, which had been formed in 1933. Both of these agencies were responsible for distributing state and federal funds to those in need and for administering unemployment relief.

Taylor's research and article had an indirect impact. In 1935 he recommended that Dorothea Lange, the woman who later that year would become his second wife, begin working for the California State Relief Administration—an agency that soon transferred to the federal Resettlement Administration (which was absorbed into the Farm Security Administration in 1937). The RA had recently begun a photodocumentary project with the aim of drawing attention to the conditions of the rural poor. Lange worked for the project on and off from 1935 to 1939, primarily in California, the Southwest, and the South, to document the struggles of migrant farmers and sharecroppers suffering through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. On March 10, 1936, two of her photos, taken at a “pea-picker” camp near Nipomo, California, were published in the San Francisco News. One of these photos, an iconic image that came to be titled Migrant Mother, was published the next day in the Los Angeles Times accompanying an editorial titled “What Does the ‘New Deal' Mean to This Mother and Her Children?” That day, the Times reported that the State Relief Administration planned to deliver food rations to two thousand itinerant fruit pickers in Nipomo. Lange's photo survives as emblematic of the hardships suffered by the Dust Bowl migrants.