During the hottest summer on record, forum editors accused the government of spreading false information – InForum

BISMARCK – In early August 1936, Americans must have been worried about North Dakota.

A striking photograph with a dramatic headline and caption depicting a grim and apocalyptic scene appeared in hundreds of newspapers across the country.

The Marlow Review via Newspapers.com

“Drought-induced cattle invade Capitol,” read the headline.

BISMARCK, N.D. — Hungry cattle, whose pastures are now barren, dust-covered plains, finally invaded the grounds of the North Dakota Capitol last week, gnawing away at the last scraps of grass that had survived the scorching heat that has gripped the state this week.

Readers had reason to worry. The summer of 1936 was a scorching summer. It is still the hottest summer ever recorded in North Dakota, with an average temperature of 73°F (23°C) from June to August. On July 6, 1936, a temperature of 120°F (49°C) was recorded in Steele, North Dakota, the highest temperature ever recorded in the state.

The photo of the cows invading the capital provided ample evidence that the Great Depression, combined with severe droughts, was making life difficult for many people on the Great Plains.

Forum Archives

However, a few weeks after the photo was published, the public realized that they should not believe everything they see.

This time the newspapers published the cow photo again, but with a new headline.

“It's a fake! But dozens of newspapers have taken this ND picture to heart.”

So the cows weren't grazing at the Capitol after all, were they? Was that a hoax?

The answer is not so simple: it was a graphic confrontation between the US government and the Fargo Forum. But how did it all start?

After the stock market crash of 1929, America plunged headlong into the Great Depression, which brought great economic hardship to Americans all over the world, from the largest cities to the smallest towns.

Prairie states like North Dakota were hit particularly hard, not only because of their financial problems, but because of Mother Nature herself. Years of low rainfall and poor farming practices led to severe dust storms that eroded the topsoil, destroyed crops and caused widespread agricultural failure.

Many families left their farms in search of a better life, and this exodus contributed to a sense of desperation and instability in the region.

Article/Library of Congress

In the Great Plains, these years became known as “The Dirty '30s.”

President Franklin Roosevelt attempted to help struggling farmers and rural communities by establishing the Resettlement Administration (RA) as part of his New Deal on April 30, 1935.

Rexford Guy Tugwell, a former Columbia University economics professor and Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, was chosen to head the new agency.

Contributed/NDSU Archives

In a report by the late University of North Dakota history professor D. Jerome Tweton for the State Historical Society of North Dakota, Tweton explained that the agency was tasked with long-term planning that emphasized rural redevelopment.

“The RA and Tugwell focused on the 'small farmers' – those who were heavily in debt, who worked substandard land, who were destitute. The RA was the social planner's delight, for it advised people where and how to live,” Tweton wrote.

The RA's resettlement plan, which called for the relocation of farmers from the Great Plains, became highly controversial. According to Tweton, Tugwell knew that the agency's ideas and needs from the Great Depression and the “dirty '30s” era needed to be translated into terms that a normal person could understand.

“The problems facing 'the little farmer' needed to be documented in a way that created a sympathetic audience,” Tweton wrote.

Article/Library of Congress

Therefore, Tugwell placed great emphasis on informing the public. The RA's writers began to produce creatively written newspaper stories, radio scripts, speeches, and magazine articles. In addition to the writers, the agency also hired some of the country's best photographers to take pictures of “real life” in parts of rural America.

Tweton said that between 1935 and 1942, over 272,000 of her clips of residents' lives were recorded. (In 1937, the Resettlement Administration became the Farm Security Administration, which continued its educational campaign.)

Six photographers shot photos in North Dakota, including scenes of dusty fields, farm life and one-class schools.

This is where the photo “Cows in front of the Capitol” comes into play.

It all started in late July or early August when someone from the RA took a photo of the cows at the Capitol. Times Wide World Photos then sold the photo to the syndication service Publishers Autocaster Service.

The problem was that it was not clear whether the photo had been taken by a government agency with an interest in the message it conveyed. Critics said it was a propaganda photo distributed to win people over to the RA message about the plight of the plains.

There is no way a newspaper in New York, California or Texas would have suspected that the photo was not quite what it seemed. The photo was a misrepresentation, according to The Forum, which wrote on August 19, 1936:

“If only these cows could read, they'd think they ate Loco Weed. (The photo) suggests they practically kicked the doors in.”

In fact, there were instances where cows from a nearby farm crossed the border of the Capitol grounds and the guards simply chased them away.

The forum wrote: “The fact that this otherwise innocuous image should leave Washington with a description that distorts its entire meaning was, in the view of the Fargo Forum, clearly a harmful fabrication.”

Contributed/Still from “The Plow That Broke the Plains.”

The forum was ready for battle. The editors pointed out that the photo of the cows in the Capitol was not the first time the agency had pulled the wool over the eyes of its readers.

Another photograph from Pennington County, South Dakota, showing a bleached old ox skull resting on the cracked and parched ground, became famous for its striking depiction of the barren farmland of the prairie.

The photographer admitted that after taking the first photo, he moved the skull to other locations, including a meadow, to get different angles.

When the photos appeared in the newspapers, The Forum cried foul and accused the photographer of staging the photos – a major taboo in photojournalism.

The photographs were also used in a government-produced documentary called “The Plough That Broke the Plains.”

The fight hit especially close to home for Roosevelt and Tugwell when they flew to North Dakota on August 27 to survey drought damage in the state. Tweton said they were greeted on the train by copies of the Forum with a cover story showing the skull photo with the caption “A wooden nickel” (a phrase used to express something worthless).

Photographer Arthur Rothstein later responded: “The newspaper was strongly anti-government and local pride was hurt.”

The forum hit back by warning members of the president's party not to be fooled by “unreliable stories” about the drought in North Dakota.

Article/Library of Congress

On September 12, the dispute seemed to be over, as the forum’s editors wrote: “Convinced that its original purpose has been achieved, the Fargo Forum today abandons its revelations about the drought with fabricated stories and false images.”

Tugwell and his photographers were also ready to move on. In 1938, Rothstein, who had taken the infamous “death's head” photograph, somehow convinced the agency that he should return to the area to take “positive pictures.”

He took one of these photos in 1939 at the Great Northern Depot in Fargo. The image, which shows a smiling man pushing a cart, was intended to convey America's progress in transportation and Fargo's vibrant community.

Article/Library of Congress

It seems that the forum and the government have reconciled.

We learned a lot from this period in history. In the years that followed, photo syndicators created stricter standards for identifying the source of photos and required attribution when publishing.

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The Forum

Hi, I'm Tracy Briggs. Thanks for reading my column! I love reading “Back in the Day” every week, with stories about interesting people, places and things from our past. Check out a few of them below. If you have a story idea, email me at [email protected].