Newspaper Vendor, San Francisco, 1937
Vintage gelatin silver print (printed c. 1940s)
9 1/16 x 7 1/8 inches
Lange's Euclid Ave stamp on verso
August 1, 2022
Dorothea Lange always sought to advance social justice through her photography, and she would have recognized that the Supreme Court ruling announced in the headline—handed down by the court on April 12, 1937—represented a major victory for labor rights. The newspaper vendor in this vintage photograph is selling editions of the San Francisco News, a daily newspaper that advertised itself as the "friend of the working man" and was distributed in working class districts. A year prior the paper had published twenty-two of Lange's Farm Security Administration photographs documenting the harsh lives of migrant workers in California's Central Valley—the accompanying articles were written by John Steinbeck and he used the workers’ stories to argue that unionization was necessary and inevitable .
The right of workers to organize was a contentious issue during the Depression years, and President Roosevelt’s efforts to enshrine it in law had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Senator Robert Wagner introduced his namesake labor act in an effort to re-establish a right to collective bargaining but it too was challenged on constitutional grounds. In 1936, emboldened by his landslide reelection, Roosevelt threatened to reshape the Supreme Court. Lange’s photograph documents the breaking news that Roosevelt’s gambit has paid off: the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Wagner Act, finally securing the right to organize for workers across the nation.
