A Racial Divide Is Bridged by Recession - NYTimes.com

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By SHAILA DEWAN

McDONOUGH, Ga. — During the housing boom, Henry County, a suburb of Atlanta, had its share of racial tension as more and more blacks joined the tens of thousands of others pouring in, creating a standoffish gap between the newcomers and the county’s oldtimers.

But the recession has begun to erase those differences.

Blacks and whites have encountered one another in increasing numbers recently in the crowded waiting rooms of the welfare office and at the food pantry, where many of both races have ventured for the first time. Struggling black-owned businesses are attracting the attention of white patrons. Neighbors are commiserating across racial lines.

At the Division of Family and Children Services, Keasha Taylor, 36 and black, helped explain the system recently to a white mother. Ms. Taylor, who was there because her family had been evicted, told the mother, who was in line for food stamps, that a child with acute asthma might be eligible for Social Security.

“Right now, a lot of white people are in this situation,” Ms. Taylor said, recalling the conversation later. “We’re already used to poverty; they’re really not.”

Denese Rodgers, the county director of social services, who is white, has held several lunch meetings at A J’s Turkey Grill, owned by Diane Walker, a black woman, in hopes of helping business.

“It was in one of our abandoned strip malls, a forlorn looking kind of place, but when you walk in, it’s just pristine,” Ms. Rodgers said. “She’s doing everything right, it’s just not full.”

Peggy Allgood, a 54-year-old black woman who lost her job and four-bedroom house and is now living in a trailer park, said she had noticed the recession obliterating racial differences up and down the economic scale.

“It’s gotten to the point where everyone I talk to, their hours have been cut, their jobs have been cut,” Ms. Allgood said. “My neighbor, she’s white, she’s trying to find a job. She hasn’t had any luck.”

The recession hit Henry County, for years one of the nation’s fastest growing areas, at a time when it was already struggling to come to terms with startling demographic change. In 1990, the county was almost 90 percent white. Now, as its population has more than tripled to 192,000, according to 2008 census estimates, the white percentage of the population has shrunk to 60 percent.

The county’s elected government is still all white and Republican, and some leaders and newcomers alike have tried in various ways to make local board and governments more diverse. But nothing else has worked to remove barriers as quickly as economic hardship.

“There used to be a lot of racial tension here, but everybody knows that we need each other to survive this recession,” said Eugene Edwards, the president of the Henry County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “People now, they seem to be starting to care for one another.”

Once fueled by construction, the county has been left by the recession with a blighted crop of abandoned white utility hookups, meant for new subdivisions, sprouted in the woods.

Last year, the Chamber of Commerce took a multiracial group of leaders to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, but such officially sponsored efforts at bonding have slowed.

“The recession has pretty much tied folks down to survival mode,” said Steve Cash, the executive director of the Henry Council for Quality Growth, who is white. “A lot of things that were happening before aren’t happening now.”

And a lot of things that were unheard of before are happening now. Women in Jaguars pull up to the local food pantry, and former millionaires hunker down in grand, unsellable homes.

One reason blacks have not gained more political power is that they are not heavily concentrated in any single area in the county — the cul-de-sacs carved out of farmland and pastures in the last decade became racially mixed enclaves for the upwardly mobile. Now, the foreclosure notices and uncut lawns in those same subdivisions reinforce the notion that everyone is in the same sinking boat.

Statistics also suggest that the recession’s burden is falling with similar force on both races. In June 2006, 55 percent of the families receiving food stamps were black, and 44 percent were white. Those percentages remain the same today, although the size of each group has increased by about 50 percent.

Unemployment claims follow that pattern: in January 2008, 49 percent of those who filed for unemployment were white, and 45 percent were black. In August 2009, 49 percent were white, and 48 percent were black.

Across the country, there have been many reports about the recession’s racial divide, as blacks have lost their jobs and houses at far higher rates than whites. But Henry County, about a 30-minute drive south of downtown Atlanta, has a very different profile from the rest of the nation. In Henry, the median income of black families, $56,715 in 2008, approaches that of whites, $69,728 (nationally, the average income gap was $20,000). Blacks in Henry County, many of whom are retirees from the North or professionals who work in Atlanta, are more likely than whites to have a college degree.

That does not mean that Henry County is a perfect laboratory of equality. Blacks made up a disproportionately high number of those seeking government assistance both before and after the slowdown. Since 2006, the number of blacks on Medicaid has more than tripled, outpacing the increase among whites.

And as in the rest of the country, blacks in Henry were more than twice as likely as whites to take out risky sub-prime mortgages, meaning more black families than white are struggling to keep their homes.

Keith and Kenya Rucker, who are black, recently declared bankruptcy in an effort to keep the home they bought for $155,000 with an adjustable-rate mortgage when they had two incomes, before Mr. Rucker lost his job as a restaurant manager. Both said they could not rely on family members for help with their ballooning payments.

“I’m not racist, but it’s harder for black men,” Mr. Rucker said, as his wife huddled with their 8-year-old daughter, KéUnica. Mr. Rucker, who is from Orlando, Fla., echoed many experts who say that middle-class blacks have fewer resources, either financial or social, to fall back on if they get into trouble. “Where I’m from,” he said, “every friend that I had is a drug dealer, locked up, on drugs or dead.”

But Dennis and Jenny Duncan, a white couple who once owned millions of dollars in real estate assets as former developers, felt equally stymied. Interviewed in the lavish home they built for themselves, they said the sheriff had just come to call and told them their belongings would soon be seized to satisfy debts. Unlike Ms. Rucker, neither has a college degree, making work difficult to find.

The idea that the recession is an equalizer has become accepted in Henry County. Both black and white residents were hesitant to say that either race had taken a greater hit. But Ms. Taylor, the black woman who dispensed advice at the county food stamp office, said there were some notable distinctions between blacks and whites.

“They’re a little weaker than we are at handling things like this,” she said, adding without rancor, “but I know they get more sympathy than we do.”

American Pastoral - The New York Review of Books

By Jonathan Raban

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

by Linda Gordon

Norton, 536 pp., $35.00

Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field

by Anne Whiston Spirn

University of Chicago Press, 359 pp., $30.00 (paper)

Published in 1935 in the middle of the Depression, William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral casts a hard modern light on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems about shepherds and shepherdesses with classical names like Corydon and Phyllida. Pastoral, Empson wrote, was a "puzzling form" and a "queer business" in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land. It implied "a beautiful relation between the rich and poor" by making "simple people express strong feelings...in learned and fashionable language." From 1935 onward, no one would read Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar or follow Shakespeare's complicated double plots without being aware of the class tensions and ambiguities between the cultivated author and his low-born subjects.

'Migrant Mother,' Nipomo, California, 1936; photograph by Dorothea Lange. Her original caption for this photograph was 'Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936.' (Library of Congress)

Although shepherds and shepherdesses have been in short supply in the United States, versions of pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, "The Fenimore Cooper Indian" (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson's sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen.

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Empson noted the connection between traditional pastoral and Soviet propaganda, with its elevation of the worker to a "mythical cult-figure," and something similar was going on during the New Deal when the Resettlement Administration (which later morphed into the Farm Security Administration) dispatched such figures from Manhattan's Upper Bohemia as Walker Evans and Marion Post to photograph rural poverty in the southern states. Like a Tudor court poet contemplating a shepherd, the owner of the camera was rich beyond the dreams of the people in the viewfinder, whose images were used by the government both to justify its Keynesian economic policy and to raise private funds for the relief of dispossessed flood victims, sharecroppers, and migrant farm workers. Some, though not all, of the photographers were, like Evans, conscious artists; their federal patrons, like Roy Stryker, head of the information division of the FSA, were unabashed propagandists who judged each picture by its immediate affective power and took a severely practical approach to human tragedy.

Of all the many thousands of photographs that came out of this government-sponsored enterprise, none was more instantly affecting or has remained more famous than Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. Taken in February 1936 at a pea pickers' camp near Nipomo, seventy miles northwest of Santa Barbara, it was published in the San Francisco News the following month, when it resulted in $200,000 in donations from appalled readers. In 1998, it became a 32¢ stamp in the Celebrate the Century series, with the caption "America Survives the Depression." For a long while now, I've tried to observe a self-imposed veto on the overworked words "icon" and "iconic," but in the exceptional case of Migrant Mother it's sorely tempting to lift it.

The picture defines the form of pastoral as Empson meant it, and the closer one studies it, the more one's made aware of just what a queer and puzzling business it is. A woman from the abyssal depths of the lower classes is plucked from obscurity by a female artist from the upper classes and endowed by her with extraordinary nobility and eloquence. It's not the woman's plight one sees at first so much as her arresting handsomeness: her prominent, rather patrician nose; her full lips, firmly set; the long and slender fingers of her right hand; the enigmatic depth of feeling in her eyes.

Even after many viewings, it takes several moments for the rest of the picture to sink in: the pervasive dirt, the clothing gone to shreds and holes, the seams and furrows of worry on the woman's face and forehead, the skin eruptions around her lips and chin, the swaddled, filthy baby on her lap. As one can see from the other five pictures in the six-shot series, Lange posed two elder children, making them avert their faces from the camera and bury them in the shadows behind their mother, at once focusing our undistracted attention on her face and imprisoning her in her own maternity. It's a portrait in which squalor and dignity are in fierce contention, but both one's first and last impressions are of the woman's resilience, pride, and damaged beauty.

Against all odds, she's less a figure of pathos than of survival, as the inscription on the postage stamp accurately described her. In 1960, Lange said of the woman that she "seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it"—a nice instance of Empson's "beautiful relation between the rich and poor"—which was not at all how her subject remembered the occasion.

In 1958 the hitherto nameless woman surfaced as Florence Thompson, author of an angry letter, written in amateur legalese, to the magazine U.S. Camera, which had recently republished Migrant Mother:

...It was called to My attention...request you Recall all the un-Sold Magazines...should the picture appear in Any magazine again I and my Three Daughters shall be Forced to Protect our rights...Remove the magazine from Circulation Without Due Permission...

Years later, Thompson's grandson, Roger Sprague, who maintains a Web site called migrantgrandson.com, described what he believed to be her version of the encounter with Lange:

Then a shiny new car (it was only two years old) pulled into the entrance, stopped some twenty yards in front of Florence and a well-dressed woman got out with a large camera. She started taking Florence's picture. With each picture the woman would step closer. Florence thought to herself, "Pay no mind. The woman thinks I'm quaint, and wants to take my picture." The woman took the last picture not four feet away then spoke to Florence: "Hello, I'm Dorothea Lange, I work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the plight of the migrant worker. The photos will never be published, I promise."

Some of these details ring false, and Sprague has his own interest in promoting a counternarrative, but the essence of the passage, with its insistence on the gulf of class and wealth between photographer and subject, sounds broadly right. "The woman thinks I'm quaint" might be the resentful observation of every goatherd, shepherd, and leech-gatherer faced with a well-heeled poet or documentarian on his or her turf.

It also emerged that Florence Thompson was not just a representative "Okie," as Lange had thought, but a Cherokee Indian, born on an Oklahoma reservation. So, in retrospect, Migrant Mother can be read as intertwining two "mythical cult-figures": that of the refugee sharecropper from the Dust Bowl (though Thompson had originally come to California with her first husband, a millworker, in 1924) and that of the Noble Red Man. There is a strikingly visible connection, however unnoticed by Lange, between her picture of Florence Thompson and Edward S. Curtis's elaborately staged sepia portraits of dignified Native American women in tribal regalia in his extensive collection The North American Indian (1900–1930), perhaps the single most ambitious—and contentious—work of American pastoral ever created by a visual artist.

Gordonton, Person County, North Carolina, July 9, 1939. Lange wrote in her caption for this photograph, 'Country store on dirt road. Sunday afternoon....Note the kerosene pump on the right and gasoline pump on the left. Brother of store owner stands in the doorway.' (Library of Congress)

Both Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange and Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look hew to the line that Lange suddenly became a documentary photographer in 1932, when she stepped out of her portrait studio at 540 Sutter Street in San Francisco's fashionable Union Square and took her Rolleiflex out onto the streets of the Mission District, three miles away, where she began to photograph men on the ever-lengthening breadlines in the last year of Hoover's presidency. But this is to underplay the importance of the pictures she took from 1920 onward when she accompanied her first husband, Maynard Dixon, on his months-long painting trips to Arizona and New Mexico.

Lange was twenty-four when they married in March 1920, Dixon twenty years older. She was still a relative newcomer to San Francisco, having arrived there from New York in 1918; marrying Dixon, she also embraced his nostalgic and curmudgeonly vision of the Old West. A born westerner, from Fresno, California, he stubbornly portrayed the region as it had been before it was "ruined" by railroads, highways, cities, Hollywood, and tourism. In his paintings, the horse was still the primary means of power and transportation in a land of sunbleached rock and sand, enormous skies, cholla, and saguaro cacti, with adobe as its only architecture and Indians and cowboys its only rightful inhabitants. Although Lange had already established herself as an up-and-coming portrait photographer in San Francisco, her pictures on these trips to the desert were so faithful to her husband's vision of the West that one might easily mistake many of them for Maynard Dixon paintings in black-and-white.

So she caught a group of Indian horsemen, seen from behind, riding close together across a sweep of empty tableland; a line of Hopi women and a boy, clad in traditional blankets, climbing a rough-hewn staircase trail through the pale rock of the mesa; a man teaching his son how to shoot a bow and arrow; families outside their adobe huts; and somber, unsmiling portraits of Indians whose faces show the same weary resignation to their fate as the faces that Lange would later photograph on the breadlines and in migrant labor camps. It was among the Hopi and the Navajo that she picked up the basic grammar of documentary, with its romantic alliance between the artist and the wretched of the earth.

One photograph stands out from her travels in the Southwest: a radically cropped print of the face of a Hopi man, in which much darkroom cookery clearly went into achieving Lange's desired effect. At first sight, it looks like a grotesque ebony mask, its features splashed with silver as if by moonlight. Its skin is deeply creased, its eyes inscrutable black sockets. In its sculptural immobility, it appears as likely to be the face of a corpse as of a living being.

Seeing the finished picture, no one would guess the raw material from which Lange made the image as she focused her enlarger in the dark. There's an uncropped photo of the same man, obviously shot within a minute or two of this one, to be seen in the Oakland Museum of California's vast online archive of Lange's work, in which he's wearing a striped shirt and a bead necklace strung with Christian crosses, and has his hair tied with a knotted scarf around his forehead. His face looks humorous and easygoing; he seems amused to be having his picture taken.

This is not the negative that Lange used for her print, but it's so close as to be very nearly identical. For the mask-like portrait, she moved her camera a few inches to her right, so that the razor-edged triangular shadow of the man's nose exactly meets the cleft of his upper lip, and lowered it to make him loom above the viewer. What is remarkable is how she transformed the merry fellow in high sunshine into the unsettling and deathly face of the print. It might be titled The Last of His Race, or, as Edward S. Curtis called one of his best-known photographs, The Vanishing Race. There is, alas, no record of what the subject thought of his metamorphosis into a gaunt symbol of extinction.

Linda Gordon's substantial, cradle-to-grave biography of Lange is usefully complemented by Anne Whiston Spirn's careful documentation of one year—1939—in Lange's working life. Both books have their flaws, but between them they add up to a satisfyingly binocular portrait of the photographer as she traveled the ambiguous and shifting frontier between art, journalism, social science, and propaganda. Lange's work is much harder to place than that of, say, Walker Evans, and so is her personality. If neither Gordon nor Spirn quite succeeds in bringing her to life on the page, they do convey her complex and mercurial elusiveness. Roy Stryker of the FSA, who worked closely with Lange from 1935 through 1939, repeatedly sacking then rehiring her, vastly admired her photographs but found her maddening to deal with, and readers of Gordon and Spirn are likely to find themselves similarly conflicted.

Gordon, a social historian at NYU, whose faculty bio says that she specializes in "gender and family issues," is best at placing her subject within the context of the various milieus in which she moved. She is good on the artistic and photographic scene in New York in the Teens of the last century, where the young Lange discovered Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz, and the luminaries of the Pleiades Club, and excellent on the rowdier bohemian coterie that she joined in San Francisco in the Twenties, where she met Dixon (in his customary urban uniform of Stetson and spurred cowboy boots), Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. Gordon is reliably lucid on the aesthetic and political movements of the time, though Lange herself too often remains more cipher than character in an otherwise vivid picture of her place and period.

It's in the gender and family issues department, her academic specialty, that Gordon is simultaneously confident and not entirely persuasive. Much is made of Lange's childhood polio, which left her with a crippled right foot and permanent limp. Gordon calls her "a polio"—a grating phrase, which, according to Google, is rare but not without precedent. Further hurt was inflicted on Lange when her father moved out of the Hoboken house when she was twelve; and in writing of her as a wife and mother, prone to "hubris," "irascibility," "rages," and "obsessive control," Gordon portrays her as a damaged woman.

Lange acquired a stepdaughter, Consie, when she married Dixon, with whom she had two children of her own, Dan and John. In her second marriage, to the Berkeley economist Paul Taylor, she added three more stepchildren to her brood, in an age when women were expected to do all the work of parenting. Like so many people of their class and generation, the Dixons and the Taylors were in the habit of boarding out their kids whenever they threatened to interfere with their demanding work schedules. Not surprisingly, the children came to remember Lange as a domestic tyrant who neglected their needs and scarred them for life.

Autres temps, autres moeurs. Artists and writers were especially culpable in this regard, taking the line that their unique talents entitled them to days of concentrated silence and bibulous, grown-up, social evenings, undistracted by the barbaric yawps of the nursery. (Chief among Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise was "the pram in the hall.") Lange's treatment of the children in her life was not egregiously different from that of others in her set in San Francisco and Taos, and Gordon's nagging concern over her deficiencies as a parent tends to unbalance her book.

Although Gordon speculates freely about Lange's thoughts and feelings, and surrounds her with an impressive mass of contingent details, one waits in vain to catch the pitch of her voice in conversation, her wit (did she have wit?), her personal demeanor and manners when at ease among friends. She emerges from the book more as a stack of interesting attributes than as a fully realized character in her own right.

Napa Valley, California, December 1938. Lange's caption: 'More than 25 years as a bindlestiff. Walks from the mines to the lumber camps to the farms. The type that formed the backbone of the IWW in California, before the war. Subject of Carleton Parker's studies on IWW.' (Library of Congress)

Where Gordon's Dorothea Lange and Spirn's Daring to Look coincide to happiest effect is on Lange's marriage to Paul Schuster Taylor and her on-again-off-again work for Stryker at the FSA. Taylor, described by Gordon as "a stiff and slightly ponderous suit-and-tie professor" (she's often sharper on her secondary characters than she is on her primary one), met Lange in 1934, shortly after her separation from Maynard Dixon, at an exhibition of her pictures of the San Francisco poor at a gallery in Oakland. Later that year, he hired her, at a typist's salary, as the official photographer for the California Division of Rural Rehabilitation, of which he'd just been appointed field director. From January 1935, they were traveling together across California, visiting enormous, featureless agribusiness farms, worked by mostly Mexican migrant laborers. Taylor, who'd learned Spanish for the purpose, conducted interviews while she took photos. She took to calling him Pablo, he called her mi chaparrito ("my little shorty"). They were married in December.

Much as she'd learned to see the uncultivated West through Maynard Dixon's eyes, and to frame her pictures like Dixon paintings, in Taylor's company she acquired the mental habits of a painstaking social anthropologist. Taylor taught economics at Berkeley, but his avidity for human data took him far outside the usual confines of his discipline and into the "field," where he transcribed the life stories of migrants. Lange copied him. A shy man, Taylor would introduce himself to groups of Mexicans by saying that he was lost and needed directions, a technique quickly adopted as her own by Lange. Soon after they'd met, she began to accompany her photographs with what she called "captions"—crisply detailed accounts, some running to essay length, of the circumstances that had led each subject to his or her present situation.

For Stryker at the FSA, the picture was the thing, and he spiked all, or nearly all, of her writing; in Daring to Look, Spirn reunites Lange's 1939 photos with their original texts in a long-overdue act of restoration. The captions are rich in themselves, full of the dollars and cents of anguished household accounting, stories of escape from starved-out Dustbowl farms in rattletrap Fords, and snatches of talk, for which Lange had a fine ear; as a North Carolina woman told her, "All the white folks think a heap of me. Mr. Blank wouldn't think about killing hogs unless I was there to help. You ought to see me killing hogs at Mr. Blank's!" She was a patient listener, and relentlessly inquisitive. Photographing tobacco farmers, for instance, she became expert on how the plant was cultivated, harvested, cured, and sold, and her captions describe with great precision what was meant by such terms as "topping," "worming," "sliding," "priming," "saving," "putting in," "yellowing," "killing out."

Gathering this sort of information from her subjects changed the way she photographed them. Before 1935 and her collaboration with Taylor, she was a fly-on-the-wall observer in her pictures of Native Americans and the unemployed. After 1935, her photographs reflect an increasingly intimate relationship between the woman behind the camera and the person in front of it. One sees a new candor and engagement in her subjects' faces, as if each shutter-click has momentarily interrupted an absorbing conversation. In this respect, Migrant Mother is quite atypical of Lange's FSA work: she spent only a few minutes with Florence Thompson, and her caption is unusually brief (according to Thompson's grandson, it was also riddled with errors of fact).

The deepening involvement in her subjects' lives seems all the more impressive when one follows the hectic itinerary of her own life in Daring to Look. Between January and October 1939 she traveled far and wide through the states of California, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, spending weeks at a time in her car, documenting the trudging "bindlestiffs" and homeless families on Highway 99, the labor camps and mile-wide fields of factory farms in the California valleys, tobacco in North Carolina, "stump farms" on logged-over forest in the Pacific Northwest, the newly irrigated orchards and farms of the Columbia basin. Wherever she went, she attached individual faces and stories to the desolate social geography of American agriculture from coast to coast. Spirn's book is redolent of the hot and dusty unpaved roads on which Lange drove by day, and of inadequately lit rooms in cheap motels, where she wrote up her captions in the evenings.

Bad as her relations with Stryker were, she made her best pictures for the FSA. The current of indignant political feeling that flows through her work was in tune with the agency's propagandist mission, and—more than Evans, Ben Shahn, Marion Post, and other FSA photographers—Lange had an increasingly deep knowledge and understanding of what she was seeing, as a result both of her own searching interviews with her subjects and of her husband's work on the inequities of the agricultural economy.^[*] Time and again, she struck a perfect balance between photographing a mass plight and honoring the dignity of each singular life—a balance she never quite recaptured again. Her 1942–1943 series on Japanese internment, for instance, has ample indignation, but lacks the active and visible rapport that she made with the farmworkers.

In 1954, Lange snagged a commission from Life magazine to do a photo-essay on Ireland, and around 2,500 negatives survive from this trip, which she made with her son Dan, then twenty-nine and an aspiring writer. Daniel Dixon was assigned the job of interviewing subjects and composing captions, leaving her free to concentrate entirely on photography. The results of this unwise division of labor are revealing.

County Clare, Ireland, 1954; photograph by Dorothea Lange (Oakland Museum of California)

In County Clare, Lange was an enchanted tourist. After the barbed wire and vast flat landscapes of Californian agribusiness, she reveled in the small, irregular, hillocky Irish fields, their rainwashed drystone walls and ancient hedges. Instead of improvised shack-towns and government-built camps, she focused on stone bothies overhung with thatch and streets of single-storey terraced cottages with rickety horse-drawn traps parked at their doors. She stopped to take shots of ruined churches; placid, grazing cows; horses and haywains; old men with scythes; shepherds tending their flocks in the fields and driving them down narrow lanes. In Lange's Ireland, almost everybody's smiling, and her photographs form an archive of 1950s toothless, gap-toothed, and prosthetic Irish grins. Yet there's little hint of two-way rapport in the faces of these people, who appear to be saying "Cheese" to deferentially oblige the lady-visitor from America, as she roamed the countryside picturing its happy peasantry.

She hardly seemed to notice that the clothes of her Irish subjects were as tattered and patched as those of the poorest Okies. If she questioned why the farms and fields were so small, or why there were so many horses and so few machines, it doesn't show in her photographs. She was here to discover Arcadia—a land of simple folk, content with their lot, going about their time-hallowed rustic occupations, equipped with the same rudimentary technology that had served them for centuries. In Ireland, Lange reverted to pastoral in its most naive and sentimental form. It's tantalizing to wonder how she would have handled this assignment had the commission come from a social activist like Stryker instead of Henry Luce's Life. Her photos were in perfect harmony with the conservative politics of the magazine: they extol the tranquillity of a society under the law of Nature, and of God.

The magazine savagely cut Lange's essay, rejected Daniel Dixon's captions, and supplied its own, including "serenely they live in age old patterns" and "THE QUIET LIFE RICH IN FAITH AND A BIT OF FUN."

In the last chapter of Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn drives along the routes taken by Lange in 1939. By 2005 the roads were generally improved but the housing and social conditions of agricultural workers on industrial farms were little changed, and Spirn found new rural slums on the sites of the old New Deal labor camps. A caption written by Lange in 1939 still holds broadly true:

The richer the district in agricultural production, the more it has drawn the distressed who build its shacktowns. From the Salt River valley of Arizona to the Yakima valley of Washington, the richest valleys are dotted with the biggest slums.

This is painfully evident in Washington state, where I live. Were Lange to return here with her camera seventy years on, it would not be a Rip Van Winkle experience so much as a numbing sense of déjà vu. The cities and suburbs would be unrecognizable to her, but the poverty in the countryside created by the corporate agricultural system would yield material for photographs identical to those she took in 1939. There are small, Spanish-speaking farm towns on the Columbia plateau where the average per capita income is still in the middling four figures.

In summer, migrant fruit pickers pile into the Columbia and Yakima valleys, living in camps little different, and hardly more affluent, than the one where Lange found Florence Thompson. And inventive new ways of being poor continue to emerge. In Forks, at the foot of the Olympic National Park, there are run-down trailer parks on the edges of the town, inhabited by "brushpickers," mostly Guatemalan, who make a tenuous living by scavenging in the woods for the moss, ferns, beargrass, and salal used by florists around the world to add greenery to bouquets.

Migrant Mother has become the symbol of a now-remote decade, to which the passage of years has lent a period glow. Yet across the rural West the Great Depression is less a historical event than a permanent condition, which existed before the 1930s and is still there now, though it shifts from place to place and fluctuates in its severity. The warning in the rearview mirror applies here: the lives in Lange's photographs for the FSA are closer than they may appear.

Notes

^[*]Taylor and Lange merged their talents in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, published in 1939. The couple assembled her photographs, his text, and their captions, working together, as they wrote, "in every aspect of the form as a whole to the least detail of arrangement or phrase."

Indigent Burials Are on the Rise - NYTimes.com

Image by wallyg via Flickr

By KATIE ZEZIMA

Coroners and medical examiners across the country are reporting spikes in the number of unclaimed bodies and indigent burials, with states, counties and private funeral homes having to foot the bill when families cannot.

The increase comes as governments short on cash are cutting other social service programs, with some municipalities dipping into emergency and reserve funds to help cover the costs of burials or cremations.

Oregon, for example, has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of unclaimed bodies over the past few years, the majority left by families who say they cannot afford services. “There are more people in our cooler for a longer period of time,” said Dr. Karen Gunson, the state’s medical examiner. “It’s not that we’re not finding families, but that the families are having a harder time coming up with funds to cover burial or cremation costs.”

About a dozen states now subsidize the burial or cremation of unclaimed bodies, including Illinois, Massachusetts, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Most of the state programs provide disposition services to people on Medicaid, a cost that has grown along with Medicaid rolls.

Financing in Oregon comes from fees paid to register the deaths with the state. The state legislature in June voted to raise the filing fee for death certificates to $20 from $7, to help offset the increased costs of state cremations, which cost $450.

“I’ve been here for 24 years, and I can’t remember something like this happening before,” Dr. Gunson said.

Already in 2009, Wisconsin has paid for 15 percent more cremations than it did last year, as the number of Medicaid recipients grew by more than 95,000 people since the end of January, said Stephanie Smiley, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

In Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn tried to end the state’s indigent burial program this year, shifting the financing to counties and funeral homes, but the state eventually found $12 million to continue the program when funeral directors balked.

The majority of burials and cremations, however, are handled on the city, county, town or township level, an added economic stress as many places face down wide budget gaps.

Boone County, Mo., hit its $3,000 burial budget cap last month, and took $1,500 out of a reserve fund to cover the rest of the year. While the sum is relatively low, it comes as the county is facing a $2 million budget shortfall, tax collections are down 5 percent and the number of residents needing help is expected to grow.

“We’ve had a significant increase in unemployment, wages are dropping, industrial manufacturing jobs go away and companies scaled back or even closed their doors,” said Skip Elkin, the county commissioner. “But we feel an obligation to help families who don’t have any assets.”

The medical examiner of Wayne County, Mich., Dr. Carl Schmidt, bought a refrigerated truck after the morgue ran out of space. The truck, which holds 35 bodies, is currently full, Dr. Schmidt said. “We’ll buy another truck if we have to,” he said.

Many places are turning to cremation, which averages a third to half the price of a burial. However, they will accommodate families’ requests for burial.

Clyde Gibbs, the chief medical examiner in Chapel Hill, N.C., said the office typically averaged 25 to 30 unclaimed bodies each year. At the end of the 2008 fiscal year there were at least 60, Dr. Gibbs said. The office cremates about three-quarters of the remains, and scatters the ashes at sea every few years.

In Tennessee, medical examiner and coroners’ offices donate unclaimed remains to the Forensic Anthropological Research Center, known as the “Body Farm,” where students study decomposition at the University of Tennessee. The facility had to briefly halt donations because it had received so many this year, said its spokesman, Jay Mayfield.

The increase in indigent burials and cremations is also taking a toll on funeral homes, which are losing money as more people choose cremation over burial. In 2003, 29.5 percent of remains were cremated; by 2008 the number had grown to 36 percent, according to the Cremation Association of North America, and it is expected to soar to 46 percent by 2015, according to the association’s projection of current trends.

Don Catchen, owner of Don Catchen & Son Funeral Homes in Elsmere, Ky., who handles cremations of the poor in Kenton County, said the $831 county reimbursement for cremations was “just enough to cover the cost of what I do — I donate my time.”

In Florida, where counties switched to cremation a few years ago to save on costs, Prudencio Vallejo, general manager of the Unclaimed Bodies Unit of the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner’s Office, said cremations were $425, compared with $1,500 for a burial. They have risen about 10 percent this year, Mr. Vallejo said.

“Most people, the first thing that they say is ‘We wouldn’t be coming to you if we could afford to do it ourselves,’ ” he said.

Broward County, Fla., paid for the cremation of Renata Richardson’s daughter, Jazmyn Rose, who was born stillborn on Sept. 25, 2008. Ms. Richardson, 26, lost her job at an advertising agency in July and could not afford to pay.

The county spent about $1,000 on a cremation and pink urn, engraved with the baby’s birth and death date, and a Bible passage. It now sits in the bassinette where she was to sleep.

“I was strapped for cash, I was in mourning, and I didn’t know what they were going to do with her,” Ms. Richardson, of Davie, Fla., said. “I was honored that they went that far to help me.”

Usury country: Welcome to the birthplace of payday lending—By Daniel Brook (Harper's Magazine)

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On a whitewashed church pew in Johnson City, I sat alone as James Eaton stood over me delivering a sermon. It was a Monday, and this was Eaton’s office. One of the inventors of payday lending—the business of making small, short-term loans from retail locations at steep rates—Eaton operates out of a converted service station, with a tarp sign in red and white: here’s where it all started. east tennes see’s first, oldest & finest. He had suggested we conduct our interview in his reception area, on the pew he brought up years ago from his wife’s childhood church in Alabama. I balanced my coffee cup perilously on the green-felt pew pad as I listened to him enumerate his own good works—his donations to a Bible college, his support for a rural congregation of evangelical Harley-Davidson enthusiasts. Eaton’s homily was heartfelt, if meandering and peppered with such biblical malapropisms as Jesus having “healed those leopards.” As he preached, customers kept trudging in past us to the counter, where they wrote postdated bad checks and walked away with twenties at several hundred percent interest, all transacted above a vast American flag dangling from the countertop.

“Good to see y’all!” Eaton greeted each customer, his chirpy voice cracking with enthusiasm. “Good to see you too,” generally came the more muted reply.

In his sermon, Eaton recounted a real-life Christmas Carol.“We opened up just before Christmas,” he said. “A grandmother brought a little girl in here, holding her hand. And I cashed her a hundred-dollar check, and I looked down at the little girl. I said, ‘Now what’s Santa Claus going to bring you for Christmas? What’s he going to put under your tree?’ And the grandmother looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Eaton, we had to decide whether we would put up a tree this year or the little girl would get a present.’ And I said, ‘I understand, I grew up that way.’ But I felt sorry. I took money out of my pocket and I said, ‘Go get that little girl a Christmas tree. Every little girl deserves a Christmas tree.’ They go off. The very next day here’s the woman pulling up with a Christmas tree sticking out of the back end of her car. The funniest thing, she comes in here, ‘Mr. Eaton, I don’t have anything to decorate the Christmas tree.’ So back in my pocket, handed her some more money, she goes on her way. That little granddaughter is cashing checks with me today.”

“She manages one of your stores?” I asked.

“She comes in and cashes checks,” he clarified.

It was to be a two-hour oration. As I sat on the pew, sipping my coffee and taking notes halfheartedly, my eyes wandered from the American flag behind Eaton to the poster over his left shoulder: Martin Luther King, preaching to the masses at the March on Washington. The best-known trope of King’s address that day was, of course, his famous “dream.” But King began his speech with a very different metaphor. “In a sense,” he said,

we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. . . . A bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

In King’s broader vision, the creditors were not simply the descendants of slaves but all Americans living in poverty, whose nation had made them promises long past due. Months before his death in 1968, King began planning a second march on Washington that would serve as culmination of a Poor People’s Campaign, an inter racial movement of blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, as well as Appalachian whites. “When we come to Washington in this campaign,” King declared, “we are coming to get our check.” Rallying striking sanitation workers in Memphis just a few days before his assassination, King declared that “it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.” But in the decades since King’s speech, working full time for a part-time income has become the fate of greater and greater numbers of Americans. In fact, the U.S. minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has never regained its 1968 value. The average income of a full-time worker at Walmart, today the nation’s largest private employer, is only slightly more than $17,000 a year. Fully 47 percent of Americans now report living paycheck to paycheck.

During the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, the race-based legal oppression of slavery was replaced with the economic bondage of sharecropping—a race-neutral system that ensnared blacks and whites alike. In his short lifetime, King helped lay waste to more legal barriers, those of racial segregation, but in the past twenty years a new, race-neutral form of economic exploitation has arisen in their place. This twenty-first-century sharecropping is called payday lending; and each indentureship under it begins, fittingly enough, with a bad check.

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Like many payday-lending pioneers, Eaton came out of the credit-bureau business, back when credit bureaus would keep tabs with the local department store on who had fallen behind on bills. When that industry was consolidated nationally, Eaton began looking for another line of work. He settled on short-term loans—cash today to tide a worker over until payday, offered at triple-digit annual interest rates. Eaton took out a second mortgage on his house and opened up Check Cashing, Inc. on December 2, 1991.

“I ran a little bitty ad in the paper in the personals section,” he told me. “We will hold your check till payday.”

A few weeks later, the son of an old colleague from the credit-bureau business flew into town to offer him a job. “He flew up here on that little private plane right then to try and hire me,” Eaton explained. Between customers he chatted with the well-heeled visitor, but Eaton, with his promising new business venture, wasn’t looking for work.

“Three or four weeks later he called. ‘James, I want to come up there and find out what you were doing again. I have been thinking about that and I’m interested in it.’ I said, ‘Allan, you come on up.’ So he flew back in. And we was opening up our office in Kingsport. He spent the day with us up there.”

W. Allan Jones, the jet-setting visitor, went on to found Check Into Cash, the first of the national payday-lending chains. With a knack for marketing, Jones rechristened the transaction Eaton called “check cashing” as “the payday advance.” It was Jones who saw the potential to expand someone else’s business concept into a coast-to-coast empire. Jones saw how payday lending could be to finance what McDonald’s is to food.

In the early 1990s, there were fewer than 200 payday lending stores in America; today, there are over 22,000, serving 10 million households each year—a $40 billion industry with more U.S. locations, in fact, than McDonald’s. Today, Jones’s company, based in his hometown of Cleveland, Tennessee, is the second or third largest of its kind. With 1,200 stores in thirty-two states, it is roughly equal in size to Virginia-based Check ’n Go but smaller than South Carolina’s Advance America, founded by the director of scheduling and advance in the Clinton Administration, William Webster.

Getting a payday loan is, in Check Into Cash’s trademarked phrase, “Quick, Easy, and Confidential.” The only paperwork required is a two-sided form with blanks soliciting contact information about the customer, her spouse, her landlord or mortgage holder, and three acquaintances in the area. An applicant need only fill out the sheet, show proof of employment and a bank account, and then write a bad check, dated her next payday, for the loan amount plus the fee. (In Tennessee, typical advances range from $50 in cash for a $58.82 check, to $200 for a $230 check.) On that next payday, the customer cashes her paycheck and buys back the check in cash for its face value.

Such is the process in principle, but seldom does it work out that way. When the next payday arrives, most borrowers can’t afford to repay, so they extend the loan until the following payday by paying another finance charge. (In Tennessee and many other states, a borrower technically cannot “extend” the transaction, but lenders make it a trivial process to pay back the loan and immediately take out a new one, adding another finance charge on top.) Like a sharecropping contract, a payday loan essentially becomes a lien against your life, entitling the creditor to a share of your future earnings indefinitely. Even the industry- sponsored research cited on the Check Into Cash website shows that only 25.1 percent of customers use their loans as intended, paying each one off at the end of their next pay period for an entire year. Government studies show even lower rates of customer payoff. North Carolina regulators found that 87 percent of borrowers roll over their loans; Indiana found that approximately 77 percent of its payday loans were rollovers. This is hardly surprising, of course: if your finances are so busted that a doctor visit or car repair puts you in the red, chances are slim that you’ll be able to pay back an entire loan plus interest a few days after taking it out. “On average,” Jeremy Tobacman, a Wharton professor who studies the industry, drily put it, “payday borrowers seem to be over-optimistic about the future.”

Once caught in the cycle, the borrower faces a choice each payday—pay Check Into Cash $30 or pay Check Into Cash $230. Unlike conventional loans, in which the creditor issues the debtor a lump sum to be repaid with interest in installments over time, the largest single transfer in a payday loan goes from debtor to creditor. With payday lending, the “debt trap” is not a figure of speech: the loan is actually structured as a trap.

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In 1997, Tennessee became the nineteenth state in the union to explicitly legalize payday lending, which before then had operated in a legal gray area. Allan Jones and his family donated more than $29,000 to state legislators during the run-up to the vote. As in other states, the industry used a clever rhetorical strategy to cast interest-rate caps, or usury laws, as a form of government paternalism. Legislators, they argued, should grant their constituents the autonomy to make their own financial decisions. The idea that certain constituents needed their representatives to take care of them for their own good so clearly echoed themes from the state’s past that no one had to explicitly connect the dots. Industry representatives highlighted the race-neutrality of payday lending to corral votes. “They hired a Noah’s Ark of lobbyists,” Steve Cohen, a state senator, memorably remarked to the Associated Press. “They hired a black lobbyist to get black votes. If we’d have had a transsexual, they would have hired a transsexual lobbyist.” By creating the appearance of a multiracial coalition against government overreach, they presented the deregulation of usury as a latter-day civil rights issue.

In the peroration of the “I Have a Dream” speech, King lists a series of improbable places where freedom one day will ring, among them “the Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.” Today, under Chattanooga’s Lookout Mountain sits a strip mall whose tenants include a Check Into Cash. On Friday, October 31, 2008—the ultimate payday, the end of both a week and a month—I loitered in the parking lot and watched customers file in on their lunch hours to extend their loans. Since payments are due on the customer’s actual payday, and branches are rarely open before 9:00 a.m. or after 6:00 p.m., there is inevitably a crush at lunchtime. A mix of black and white, young and old, the customers drove everything from a dented sedan with a Chattanooga Housing Authority parking permit to a spotless Nissan SUV. When I asked the African-American woman in the SUV about her loan, she politely brushed me off: “I don’t want to talk about that. It’s personal.” Jack Atkins, a pockmarked white man driving a minivan, told me he’d been a customer for about a month. “It’s been working out for me,” he said.

Susan Jolliff was on her lunch break from her $8.96-an-hour job in quality control at Intersign, which manufactures vinyl signs for motel-room doors. As she left Check Into Cash, she stuffed a stack of twenties into her wallet, rattled off her phone number to me, and rushed into the supermarket. We spoke the following week. Jolliff had taken out her $175 loan three months earlier, after her wallet was stolen with the remainder of her stimulus-package tax-rebate cash in it. The company by now had more than recouped its principal in finance fees, but still she was unable to pay it off. “I figured it would take maybe a month,” she said. “Maybe rewrite it once and then pay it back. But no. We get a bonus at work every month, and the last couple of months it’s been kind of low, but hopefully next month . . .”

But she harbored no malice toward Check Into Cash’s employees. “As far as the people who work in there, they’re nice as can be,” she said. So nice, in fact, that a few weeks ago when an employee accidentally re-loaned Jolliff the full $205 instead of the $175 principal, Jolliff courteously corrected her. “‘Oh no, I’m supposed to get one seventy-five and you’re supposed to get thirty,’ I said. ‘You better watch that or you’re going to be in trouble.’”

Steven Winslow, who worked for a year as a store manager for Check ’n Go after dropping out of a clinical-psychology graduate program, explained that these chummy customer relationships are carefully cultivated by the payday-lending chains. We met at a Check Into Cash store near the Knoxville private school where he teaches, appropriately, drama and personal finance. At store-manager training, he told me, the mantra was “Your repeat customer is your lifeblood.” Managers were encouraged to be on a first-name basis with their customers, to ask after their families.

The first few times a customer came in, Winslow said, he’d make small talk about their kids. Soon they wouldn’t even look him in the eye. “It’s a person in desperation crossing their fingers that they can pretend this will work,” Winslow said. And when it invariably doesn’t, the borrower feels tremendous shame and guilt. But the store manager feels anger, too. “It was my money. You take it personally in that you’re responsible for taking this company’s money and giving it to somebody, [and then] your job is on the line on the basis of Joe Blow’s pay history—their habits, their character, their integrity, their decision, their choice, their difficulty, their crisis, their tragedy.”

What Winslow described was lives disintegrating in time-lapse, with a new shot snapped every two weeks. Maybe the customer started bringing in a family member or a friend, who would spot the cash to pay the loan and then get it back after the re-loan transaction. If a customer fell behind on payments, Winslow’s staff would start making up to twenty collection calls a day to the debtor’s home and workplace, as well as to her friends, landlord, boss—anyone who got listed on that first innocuous form. Other customers, to save face, would take out a loan from another payday lender to pay the first. “Once you’re borrowing from Check Into Cash to pay Advance America to pay Check ’n Go, it’s just a matter of time,” he said. “You go to the second lender, it’s game over. It’s game over.”

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Like just about everything in Cleveland, Tennessee—a city of 40,000 that is either in the middle of nowhere or, as the locals say, “halfway to everywhere”—the Bald Headed Bistro is owned by Allan Jones. And as with his other holdings, the Bistro is not an anonymous line on some enormous balance sheet but aspires to be a projection of the man’s very essence. Its decor purports to channel the rustic ambience of Jones’s ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and its name pays homage to Jones’s hairless pate. The men’s room walls are decorated with framed photos of the regulation-sized football field he built in his back yard. I climbed atop an itchy cowhide barstool and asked the bartender, a student at a local evangelical college, if this was the nicest place in town. By far, he told me. “The next closest place is Outback.” The restaurant is so nice, in fact, that members of the Cleveland City Council come over for dinner each Monday after their weekly session. The restaurant, he said, caters to “people of that area.”

The local gentry did, in fact, seem well represented at the tables, but there were also patrons who looked far less affluent, perhaps out celebrating special occasions. The weathered gentleman in one couple, who looked to be out for a night away from the kids, sported a giant USMC forearm tattoo. At another table, an older woman was dressed for dinner in an orange University of Tennessee T-shirt.

Whether or not they are Check Into Cash employees—or customers—everyone in Cleveland, Tennessee, is indebted to Jones. Anyone who patronizes the library, which resides in a converted Victorian that Jones donated to the city, has him to thank. Jones paid to renovate the bandstand on the courthouse square, and he also owns and maintains Cleveland’s most historic building, Craigmiles Hall, a Gilded Age opera house where, Clevelanders will proudly tell you, John Philip Sousa played once. Even Ron Haynes—a local legal-aid lawyer who refuses to eat at the Bistro and swears he would sue Jones, if Jones hadn’t gotten Tennessee’s legislature to write the payday-lending law in such a way that made it impossible to do so—cuts him a check at the end of each month; like the rest of downtown, his legal-aid office is a Jones-owned property.

Jones himself resides on a 400-acre horse farm on Anatole Lane, out at the northern edge of town. For decades Cleveland’s elite lived on Centenary Avenue, a block of stately homes quite close to downtown, but after Jones began building his estate in 1993, Cleveland’s entire executive class relocated to Anatole, ideally situated between the airstrip for private planes and the Cleveland Country Club. I drove up to Anatole hoping to get a glimpse of the Jones mansion and football field, but little of the compound was visible from the road. The entrance to Jones’s property is monitored by a gatehouse whose pointed metal dome suggests a king’s palace in the Brothers Grimm. Many surrounding homes are built in a style one might call Plantation Revival—columned white monstrosities like something out of Gone With The Wind.

Such Deep South style is almost as ahistorical as the Mitteleuropean guard tower: on the eve of the Civil War, Bradley County, of which Cleveland is the county seat, was 90 percent white (as it remains today). Tennessee’s plantations and slaves were largely elsewhere, spread out in the flat, cotton-producing region near Memphis. When secession came, Bradley County voted to remain in the Union, and it was dragged out only by the western, slave-holding part of the state. Cleveland had very little to do with the old inequality; Allan Jones has ensured that it will have everything to do with the new inequality.

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The Check Into Cash headquarters are near downtown, in a former shopping mall that Jones bought out of bankruptcy in 1998. When I walked into the corporate reception area, the first thing I saw was a photo montage, shaped like a United States map, from which Allan Jones’s face stares out amid piles of cash. From there I was taken in to meet the company’s president, Steve Scoggins. A compact man in a brown sweater-vest, Scoggins gave me a tour of the vast cubicle farm as he laid out the demographic logic of the company’s store siting. The marketing company Nielsen Claritas breaks down American consumers into dozens of niche markets, he said, and Check Into Cash’s targets are in demographic #44: “Homespun Families,” which forms a subset of the larger “Mass Middle Class” category. Forty-fours have a median household income of $40,351; they eat at Shoney’s, enjoy NASCAR, and watch The 700 Club. “Financially, they’re a strong credit market,” a Claritas poster in the offices declared. Alongside this poster hung two maps of metropolitan Phoenix, coded to show where high concentrations of 44s live. “We locate almost exclusively in retail strip centers,” Scoggins explained. It’s just a matter of identifying the 44s, finding their local strip mall, and setting up shop.

I tried to push Scoggins to discuss the distressing predicament in which his customers invariably end up. His own industry research, I pointed out, showed that only one-quarter of payday-lending customers are consistently able to pay off their loans when they come due. Why, I asked, do customers think they can pay back the loan when the vast majority of the time they can’t?

“I don’t know,” Scoggins said. “I don’t try to pretend to understand how our customers think.”

As the Community Financial Services Association, the payday-lending industry’s trade and lobbying group in Washington, puts it, “payday advance customers represent the heart of America’s middle class”—a terrifyingly accurate statement that testifies to the financial instability of all but the most affluent Americans. Unlike with check cashing, the market for payday loans isn’t the underclass. The 28 million Americans who have no bank account (a number that includes 20 percent of African Americans and Latinos) don’t have the checkbook with which to write the necessary bad check. Millions more are ineligible for payday loans because they’re unemployed or are paid off the books.

Most of the 10 million households with payday loans are young families headed by adults who graduated from high school but not college; one of the few surveys of payday-lending customers showed that roughly two-thirds of them are under forty-five, and a similar proportion have children living at home. In the Cleveland headquarters, Lynn DeVault, who sits on Check Into Cash’s board of directors, gave me an admirably clear-eyed assessment of the typical borrower. “The customer is early thirties,” she said. “They make thirty thousand, thirty-two thousand dollars of income—and they have no savings. And they’re at a very critical point in their life: they may have just bought a house or maybe they just have their first child entering school [and they] really need money for things like a band instrument.” It’s an enormous market, as Judy Powers, another executive, told me: “Nationwide the savings rate now is like zero percent. And it’s because expenses have just gone up and up and up, wages have not kept pace, and people don’t have anything extra to put away.”

A disproportionate number of Claritas’s 44s work in manufacturing, construction, or transportation—jobs like factory worker, auto mechanic, and truck driver—and are concentrated in the Deep South, across the Midwest heartland, and along the Appalachian spine. The traditional American dream of family and of home ownership surely has great resonance. These are many of the same people who, despite flat or flagging incomes, kept buying bigger houses through the infamous “liar loans.” The payday loan, too, is a liar loan of sorts, though the relevant lie is told not to the banker or mortgage broker but to yourself: that you’re still making it, you’ve hit a brief rough patch, everything will work itself out soon. You end up at the payday-lending office only if you have caught at least a glimpse of prosperity, and are desperately trying to keep this mirage in view.

From customers in such straits, Allan Jones has amassed a fortune, which in 2005 was valued at half a billion dollars. The profit margins are similar to those in conventional banking, but as with fast food, payday lending derives those profits from innumerable small-value transactions taking place at thousands of outlets. The business works according to the classic logic of deregulation. Profits on loans of a few hundred dollars can be significant only in a regulatory environment in which anything goes. If customers weren’t trapped—if they really paid off their $20 or $30 finance fees at the end of one pay period—payday lending wouldn’t be profitable at all.

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When I finally had the opportunity to sit down with Allan Jones in his office, he immediately sized me up. “Did you wrestle?” he asked. I did not, as it happens, despite my low center of gravity—my height and weight are (I would later learn) almost precisely those of Jones himself during his high school glory days on the mat. Today, he is rotund and neckless, like a snowman. His office resembles somewhat the dark and sumptuous lair of a railroad baron circa 1889, channeling that bygone era when every square inch of a proper room needed urgently to be adorned with something, anything. A palm-in-chinoiserie urn stood along one wall; in a corner sat a coffee table with a photograph of Jones and President George W. Bush. Behind Jones’s desk sat a scale model of one of his jets, a Cessna Citation II, alongside two faux Frederick Remington equestrian statuettes and an oil painting of a fox hunt. Magnetic in his television ads, Jones was fidgety and disheveled in person. His open-collar white shirt with monogrammed waj cuffs was splashed with a reddish-brown stain somewhere along the coffee-to-barbecue-sauce spectrum. The downturn in the economy was weighing on him. “I’ve laid off my horse trainer,” he said. “I’ve really had to cut back.”

Jones needed to swap his son’s Audi for his own Ford F-150 pickup truck, and he offered to bring me along. As we drove through Cleveland, Jones mumbled a stream-of-consciousness narration—rattling off his acts of munificence as if they spoke for themselves. Jones knew I wrote frequently about architecture, so he was particularly keen to show off his works of historic preservation. The bandstand on the courthouse square, he told me, was renovated from the original blueprints at a cost of $75,000. He bragged, of Craigmiles Hall, “I own one of the most photographed buildings in Tennessee.” A self-described “Cleveland State dropout,” Jones didn’t consider himself anything so lofty as an architect; but Jones as architect—as the hidden hand that designs the spaces in which people live—was everywhere evident on Cleveland’s streets. Jones pointed out all the trees he’d donated, often just a few years beyond spindly saplings, which lined many of the roads. “I donated all these trees. I hope they remember me when I’m gone,” he said.

The intended highlight of my tour, I soon discovered, was to be the Jones Wrestling Center at Cleveland High School. Inside this vast hangar of a building, two dozen boys sparred on mats, learning to master a new takedown. “Move your leg like a windshield wiper,” their coach instructed. Jones gave me a brief tour, beginning at the Wall of Fame, where his own exploits—1972, second in state in the 155-pound weight class—were immortalized along those of others, including his son. We continued on as he showed off the other choice features of the million-dollar facility: in the visitors’ locker room, for instance, a flat-screen TV broadcasts a live feed of the Cleveland team warming up. “We’re gonna make you watch us warm up,” Jones said. “We’re gonna intimidate the hell out of them.”

For someone who lives in a gated 400-acre compound, Jones remains extremely accessible to the people of Cleveland. He attends all the wrestling tournaments, the Friday night football games, and the annual Halloween block party. Never, he says, has an irate customer confronted him—not once. He called information in front of me, on speaker phone, to demonstrate that his home number was listed. Jones and his family are so unaccustomed to criticism that when the Ohio state legislature recently cracked down on payday lending, delivering sharply worded speeches against the industry, his eldest son, age twenty, was deeply shaken. “It’s still affecting him,” Jones said. Being the son of Cleveland’s richest citizen and leading philanthropist—the kid with the regulation-sized football field in his back yard—he had never seen anyone come out swinging at his father. “He grew up here in the epicenter of it, and everybody is fine with it,” Jones assured me.

Up in Ohio, Jones said, industry critics tarred him as a predatory lender who targets minorities, as if this were some kind of civil rights issue. But Jones knows better. “Black or white is immaterial. Credit is green. Capital is green.”

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During my afternoon with Allan Jones, one of the only times he betrayed any emotion was when he asked if I knew about Tall Betsy, the Halloween character he invented. He began to recite a poem:

Your bones, she’ll throw in that ole well
at Arnold School, and no one will tell
your parents. They’ll worry and fret.
They’ll search all over for you, I’ll bet.

So go home early on Halloween night
and November 1st, you’ll be all right.

“Who wrote that?” I asked when he was finished.

“I did,” he said, and then clarified: “I made it up. I just had somebody put it to a rhyme.” Jones said his mother had told him about Tall Betsy when he was a child to teach him about the importance of punctuality, but he had embellished the tale. He created a Betsy costume and wore it at his daughter’s birthday party in first grade, and it was such a hit he began to dress up—in drag, on stilts—each Halloween in front of his Centenary Avenue home. One year, a local news reporter asked him the story of Tall Betsy. “I was a young guy, a single dad,” he told me, “and this girl was good-looking, so I started trying to keep her there, and I started making this shit up as I went.”

Jones recently decided he’s too old to dress up, so at dusk on October 31 each year, his Tall Betsy getup is displayed in the foyer of Cleveland’s history museum, in front of the conference room he endowed. I joined the townspeople’s pilgrimage to view the relic. A grandmotherly, red-headed docent told the tale of Tall Betsy at fifteen-minute intervals—first to a fidgety first-grader in a Hawaiian shirt and then to two angelic blonde sisters whose bearded father sported a camouflage hat. Between shifts, I asked the docent the origins of the tale. Betsy was a real woman, she insisted. She only mentioned Jones as “the man who brought back Tall Betsy,” as if he were reviving a town tradition, not making one up out of whole cloth.

From the history museum, I paraded with the crowds to Cleveland’s downtown for the annual block party, another creation of Jones’s. With thousands of children mobbing Centenary Avenue each Halloween to see him in character, Jones, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, saw no choice but to create a second town tradition as a distraction from the first. “This thing got so big that all my neighbors got mad,” Jones told me. “So I created the block party . . . to try to get them the hell off my street.”

Downtown, I found the streets packed with trick-or-treaters and their parents walking down “Treat Street” to gorge at the M&M Snackfoods tent. Independent vendors along the periphery hawked two- dollar barbecue sandwiches and deep-fried Oreos. A country act and a classic-rock cover band performed on the live-music stage set up in front of the courthouse, whose roof was patrolled by armed police. Jones had told me to look for him downtown—“I’ll walk around in a Tall Betsy sweatshirt, just kind of blend with the crowd”—but he must have blended in well, because I never saw him.

It was a poor people’s march of sorts, though not of the sort that Martin Luther King envisioned. Most locals were grateful that their economy is as bountiful as it is—Cleveland has two Walmarts, after all, in a rural South full of one-Walmart towns. Unlike in the rest of America, brutal inequality has been a permanent feature of the local landscape. On the eve of the Civil War, the North was three times wealthier than the South and yet the South had two-thirds of the nation’s richest men. In a 1929 edition of the daily Cleveland Banner, there ran a full-page ad that could almost be republished today: to “Northern and Eastern manufacturers contemplating locating in the South” the city promised a ten-year tax exemption and the “best of labor conditions.”

Each year, the rest of the country looks a little more like Cleveland. In 1949, Tennessee’s poverty rate was twice that of California. Today, they are equal. During the civil rights era, when middle-class Californians from Berkeley came to the South for sit-ins and voter-registration drives, they were shocked—and rightly so—by the poverty they saw. But today Berkeley, a capital of our laissez-faire tech and finance economy, was as of the most recent census the second most unequal city in America, right below Atlanta. The South, with its “right-to-work” laws and consequently meager rates of unionization, is no longer a region apart; once an aberration, its low-regulation, high-inequality economy has become a model for the nation.

One can laugh at Allan Jones’s petty acts of charity—the $75,000 bandstand, the saplings by the interstate entrance ramp, the high-tech wrestling gym—but as a nation we have come to rely on private acts of generosity to meet our basic needs. Rather than tax Bill Gates enough to stock our school libraries, we tax him at a lower rate than his secretary and hope he finds it in his heart to donate some books. Increasingly, the schools in our wealthier districts set up “local educational foundations,” funded by parents and local businesses, so that when a student in the district takes up the tuba, the instrument is purchased by the fund; whereas for a student in a poor district to do the same, her parent has to buy it—perhaps by taking out a payday loan. During one of his fits of hometown boosting (“Cleveland’s a great little town!”), Jones even suggested that I move there myself. Only later did I realize that, in a sense, I already had.

Eager Students Fall Prey to Apartheid’s Legacy - NYTimes.com

Image by JP-Flanigan via Flickr

By CELIA W. DUGGER

KHAYELITSHA, South Africa — Seniors here at Kwamfundo high school sang freedom songs and protested outside the staff room last year because their accounting teacher chronically failed to show up for class. With looming national examinations that would determine whether they were bound for a university or joblessness, they demanded a replacement.

“We kept waiting, and there was no action,” said Masixole Mabetshe, who failed the exams and who now, out of work, passes the days watching TV.

The principal of the school, Mongezeleli Bonani, said in an interview that there was little he could do beyond giving the teacher a warning. Finally the students’ frustration turned riotous. They threw bricks, punched two teachers and stabbed one in the head with scissors, witnesses said.

The traumatized school’s passing rate on the national exams known as the matric — already in virtual free fall — tumbled to just 44 percent.

Thousands of schools across South Africa are bursting with students who dream of being the accountants, engineers and doctors this country desperately needs, but the education system is often failing the very children depending on it most to escape poverty.

Post-apartheid South Africa is at grave risk of producing what one veteran commentator has called another lost generation, entrenching the racial and class divide rather than bridging it. Half the students never make it to 12th grade. Many who finish at rural and township schools are so ill educated that they qualify for little but menial labor or the ranks of the jobless, fueling the nation’s daunting rates of unemployment and crime.

“If you are in a township school, you don’t have much chance,” said Graeme Bloch, an education researcher at the Development Bank of Southern Africa. “That’s the hidden curriculum — that inequality continues, that white kids do reasonably and black kids don’t really stand a chance unless they can get into a formerly white school or the small number of black schools that work.”

South Africa’s new president, Jacob Zuma, bluntly stated that the “wonderful policies” of the government led by his party, the African National Congress, since the end of apartheid 15 years ago, “have not essentially led to the delivery of quality education for the poorest of the poor.”

Scoring at Bottom

Despite sharp increases in education spending since apartheid ended, South African children consistently score at or near rock bottom on international achievement tests, even measured against far poorer African countries. This bodes ill for South Africa’s ability to compete in a globalized economy, or to fill its yawning demand for skilled workers.

And the wrenching achievement gap between black and white students persists. Here in the Western Cape, only 2 out of 1,000 sixth graders in predominantly black schools passed a mathematics test at grade level in 2005, compared with almost 2 out of 3 children in schools once reserved for whites that are now integrated, but generally in more affluent neighborhoods.

“If you say 3 times 3, they will say 6,” said Patrine Makhele, a math teacher at Kwamfundo here in this overwhelmingly black township, echoing the complaint of colleagues who say children get to high school not knowing their multiplication tables.

South Africa’s schools are still struggling with the legacy of the apartheid era, when the government established a separate “Bantu” education system that deliberately sought to make blacks subservient laborers. Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister who was the architect of apartheid, said “Bantu” must not be subjected to an education that shows him “the green pastures of European society in which he was not allowed to graze.”

The struggle against apartheid dismantled the discredited structures of authority in education that Mr. Zuma’s government is now seeking to replace with a new approach to accountability. In those years, the African National Congress sought to make the nation — and its schools — ungovernable. Supervisors — part of an “inspectorate” that enforced a repressive order — were chased out of the schools, as were many principals.

Mary Metcalfe, who was the A.N.C.’s first post-apartheid education minister in the province that includes Johannesburg, recalled principals in Soweto being forcibly marched out of the township. After apartheid ended, Ms. Metcalfe, recently appointed director general in the country’s Higher Education Ministry, said there was a grab for “power and jobs and money.”

Most teachers in South Africa’s schools today got inferior educations under the Bantu system, and this has seriously impaired their ability to teach the next generation, analysts say. Teachers are not tested on subject knowledge, but one study of third-grade teachers’ literacy, for example, found that the majority of them scored less than 50 percent on a test for sixth graders.

But South Africa’s schools also have problems for which history cannot be blamed, including teacher absenteeism, researchers say. And then when teachers are in school, they spend too little time on instruction. A survey found that they taught for a little over three hours a day, rather than the five expected, with paperwork consuming too many hours. Mr. Zuma noted that this deficiency was worse in poor and working-class communities.

“We must ask ourselves to what extent teachers in many historically disadvantaged schools unwittingly perpetuate the wishes of Hendrik Verwoerd,” he recently told a gathering of principals, implicitly challenging the powerful South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, which is part of the governing alliance.

As South Africa has invested heavily in making the system fairer, the governing party made some serious mistakes, experts say. The new curriculum was overly sophisticated and complex. Teacher colleges were closed down, without adequate alternatives. The teachers’ union too often protected its members at the expense of pupils, critics say.

“We have the highest level of teacher unionization in the world, but their focus is on rights, not responsibilities,” Mamphela Ramphele, former vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said in a recent speech.

South Africa’s new education minister, Angie Motshekga, said in an interview that a lack of accountability had weakened the whole system.

“There’s a complete breakdown,” said Ms. Motshekga, a former high school history teacher.

Teacher vacancies commonly go unfilled for months, she said. Principals cannot select the teachers in their schools or discipline them for absenteeism.

Ms. Motshekga said she had Mr. Zuma’s strong backing to give principals greater authority, and would also seek to change the law so the education department could pick principals directly — and hold them accountable.

“The president said to me, ‘Minister, immediately look at the powers of principals,’ ” she said.

Here in the Western Cape, where the opposition Democratic Alliance recently came to power, the province is considering monitoring teachers’ attendance by having them send text messages or e-mail messages — in response to an electronic query — to confirm they are present.

“We’ve got to get discipline back in schools,” said Donald Grant, the provincial education minister.

Discipline for Teachers

Kwamfundo Secondary School illustrates just how critical an effective principal and disciplined teachers are to student achievement — and how quickly a school’s success can crumble if they are lacking.

For much of this decade, Kwamfundo was led by Luvuyo Ngubelanga, a commanding man admired by students and teachers alike for his strict insistence on punctuality, his work ethic and his faith in them. He prowled the corridors of the yellow brick school, poking his head in classrooms and collaring misbehaving students, making them pick up litter, sweep the halls or clean the bathrooms.

Mr. Ngubelanga, who now runs a vocational college, said most teachers are dedicated, but some could “be naughty like kids.” He recalled finding a classroom packed with students and tracking down its AWOL teacher loafing at the back of another class.

In his years as principal, 75 to 82 percent of students passed the matric, a set of examinations given to seniors that shape their life chances. But the school has struggled since he was succeeded by his deputy, Mr. Bonani. The matric passing rate plunged to 65 percent in 2007 and 44 percent last year.

Teachers and students describe Mr. Bonani as a far less forceful presence, though he says he is engaged and active. Teacher absenteeism has been a major problem.

“There’s a lot of teachers who take sick leave,” said one teacher, who asked not to be named, as it would jeopardize his ability to work with colleagues. “They are not punctual in the morning. How do we expect learners to behave if we do not behave?”

Hungry for Knowledge

Despite last year’s violent episode, students seem to feel genuine affection for their school and speak of their hunger for knowledge and their faith in education to bring a better life.

The classroom itself, No. 12A, seemed shaken awake one recent first period as 52 seniors lifted their voices in harmony. Tall, lanky young men at the back of the room pounded out a driving beat on their backpacks in a morning ritual of song and rhythm.

Even when they realized the science teacher was absent, the student body president and his sidekick, a radiantly optimistic AIDS orphan, rose to lead a review session on evolution. And when the second-period English teacher was late, they just kept on talking about Darwin’s finches and genetic mutations.

“Quiet!” exclaimed Olwethu Thwalintini, 18, the student leader. “Can I have your attention, please. Exercise 2.1.”

Murmuring voices and shuffling papers fell silent.

“List two environmental factors which make it possible for the vertebrates to move onto land,” said Blondie Mangco, 17, the sidekick, whose mother died during final exams last year.

Blondie has barely passing grades in physical science, but she believes she will somehow raise them to A’s or B’s, win entrance to the university of her dreams and become an environmentalist, a doctor or a biomedical scientist. Now that her parents and big sister are dead of AIDS, she feels a duty to be a role model to her little brother.

“He’s looking up to me now,” she said.

Later that day, Arthur Mgqweto, a math teacher, strode into the classroom, jauntily wearing a township take on the fedora called a square. He teaches more than 200 students each day for a salary of $15,000 a year. His students describe him as a friend, a mother, a father, a guide.

“He comes early every, every, every day,” Blondie said. “He comes here early at 7 o’clock and he’s the last one to leave. He’s given himself to us.”

Mr. Mgqweto grew up in the countryside during the apartheid years, ashamed to go to school because he had no shoes. He finished high school in his 30s, sitting in class with children half his age. His only son was stabbed to death at age 21 in a nearby township.

“I always explain to them, life is very hard,” he said. “They must get educated so they can take care of their families when they grow old.”

His students bake chocolate cakes with him on their birthdays. Dozens come an hour early on weekdays and for Saturday morning sessions with him. He is paid nothing for those extra hours, except in their gratitude.

“I love that teacher,” said Olwethu, the student leader. “I love him.”

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