The Press: Fargo Fakery

Last week when Franklin Roosevelt’s special train rolled into Bismarck, N. Dak. in the course of its travels through the drought area, it also rolled into a story which brought nationwide attention to a smalltown newspaper. Aboard the Presidential Pullmans were placed scores of copies of the Fargo (N. Dak.) Forum, whose front page displayed a strange yarn. Because a corps of the nation’s nimblest newshawks were also on the train, Republican editors throughout the land were soon rubbing their hands over a dispatch which, on quick reading, seemed to convict the New Deal’s cherished Resettlement Administration of photographic fakery and bad faith.

Warning the President and his advisers not to be fooled by “funny facts and figures,” the Forum printed a Resettlement Administration publicity photograph of parched and cracking soil, a dusty skyline, a steer’s skull lying in the foreground. The picture was taken by the RA’s able Cameraman Arthur Rothstein and had been widely used by the U. S. Press as a sample of the drought in the Dakotas. Of this “gem among phony pictures,” the Fargo Forum declared: “There never was a year that this scene couldn’t be produced in North Dakota, even in years when rain-fall levels were far above normal. What we see here is a typical alkali flat, left when melting snow water and spring rains had passed. . . . Without difficulty one can find these in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Indiana wherever one chooses. The skull? Oh, that’s a movable ‘prop’ which comes in handy for photographers who want to touch up their pictures with a bit of the grisly.”

Printing a Wide World photograph of a herd of cattle grazing in the shadow of the North Dakota Capitol, the Forum explained: “Where those cows are presumably grazing is a graveled parking lot. The picture, fake, is a result of a photographic trick of superimposing a picture of a herd of cattle on a picture of the North Dakota State Capitol Building.”

Promptly the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune swung into action on the story, ordered its Washington Bureau to dig in the RA publicity files for confirmation. Next day the Herald Tribune frontpaged an article about three other Rothstein “drought pictures,” in at least two of which the same steer’s skull had apparently been used for dramatic effect. One print was labeled “Drought Victim,” giving the distinct impression that the steer had just been laid low by the weather. Another was located in “the Bad Lands” which no farmer in his right mind would attempt to cultivate.

Confronted with such publicity, RA’s Photographic Chief Edwin Locke quickly admitted that “one view of the skull was taken on alkali ground and then moved about ten feet onto grassy ground that shows in the first picture and rephotographed there. I can’t see how that can be called a fake.” Chief Locke added that the pictures were made in Pennington County, S. Dak. last May.

Retorted the doughty little Fargo Forum: “Especially revealing! . . . Last May we did not have a drought either in Pennington County, in South Dakota or elsewhere in this area.”