Taylor, Paul S. "What Shall We Do With Them?" Address before the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco, April 15, 1938. 11"x 8", 7 lvs, single-spaced typewritten sheets, mimeographed. $450
Paul S. Taylor is the Paul S. Taylor as in Mr. Dorothea Lange, partner to the great photographer and co-author of one of the greatest illustrated works of the 20th century, The American Exodus, a Record of Human Erosion. Taylor provided a lyrical and insightful text and Lange contributed her incredible photographs, producing one of the leading documents of life in the Great Depression era of the USA. This was one of the great documentarian centerpieces of the 1930's, and it was published in the same year as The Grapes of Wrath and the release of the Wizard of Oz. (Two years later—1941--came the superb James Agee (text) and Walker Evans (photographs) finally saw their long-developing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men come to life.)
The document offered here is an interesting and well-written appraisal of the great American exodus of the 1930s. The "Them" in the title refers being the Dust Bowler, the migrant workers, the dispossessed, people eaten away by the weather, and banks, and ill wind. Paul Taylor was at this time three years into his marriage with Lange—he was a progressive thinker and a FSA operative who helped Lange land her job and was a part of an extraordinary team of very expansive ability that documented a pivotal period in American life. He was also co-creator with Lange of their great
In this pamphlet Taylor gave testimony on migrant workers and nearly the height of the Depression—he was an expert, having traveled and lived among them and written academic papers on what he found. He outlined possible answers to the question, which had mainly to do with stability, which of course was the primary concern for the many of thousands of individuals and families who were once-stable but now very mobile, not having place to live or places to go. Taylor thought that opening dams and supplying irrigation and affordable government-owned houses would be the first of many steps to take to relieve the widespread suffering. In all of the alphabet-soup programs undertaken by the Roosevelt administration, none were nearly as "successful" in ending the national social erosion as the events that were to unfold less than a year later.
This document is an interesting read, particularly when you consider what he and Lange published just a year later.
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