Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
On July 16, 1936, photographer Walker Evans (1903-75) took a leave of absence from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to accept a summer assignment with Fortune magazine. Evans, who had begun working as a photographer in 1928, had developed a modest reputation by the time that he was hired in October 1935 by Roy Stryker, then leader of the FSA photographic section. Stryker agreed to grant him leave for the magazine assignment on the condition that his photographs remained government property.
Evans and the writer James Agee spent several weeks among sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama. The article they produced documented in words and images the lives of poor Southern farmers afflicted by the Great Depression; their work, however, did not meet Fortune‘s expectations and was rejected for publication.
Evans’ desire to produce photographs that were “pure record not propaganda” did not harmonize with Stryker’s emphasis on the use of the image to promote social activism. Soon after the Alabama series was completed, Evans returned to New York. There Evans and Agee reworked their material and searched for another publisher. In 1941, the expanded version of their story was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, now recognized as a masterpiece of the art of photojournalism.
Walker Evans went on to exhibit and publish his work (he was a staff photographer at Fortune, 1945-65) and to teach at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture. James Agee became one of America’s most influential film critics as well as a poet, novelist, and screenwriter. James Agee died in 1955; Walker Evans died in 1975.
Learn More
- Read the Prints & Photographs Division Picture This blog post about Walker Evans’ photo albums that document the photographic essence of what later appeared as the landmark book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published first in 1941. Links to the albums are included in the post.
- Search the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives collection on the phrase Hale County, to view photographs taken by Evans in Hale County, Alabama, which furnished material for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Additional essays about the collection, participating photographers and examples of their work are available in the Articles and Essays section of the presentation. See also: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs.
- A complementary collection, Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940 to 1941, documents the everyday life of residents in the FSA’s migrant work camps in central California during 1940 and 1941. Many of the individuals whose stories and songs are gathered in this collection shared both the socioeconomic and historic experience of the individuals documented by James Agee and Walker Evans.
- Search on depression in American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940 for depression-era stories.
A Capital City
On July 16, 1790, the Residence Act, which stipulated that the president select a site on the Potomac River as the permanent capital of the United States following a ten-year temporary residence in Philadelphia, was signed into law. In a proclamation issued on January 24, 1791, President George Washington announced the permanent location of the new capital, an area of land at the confluence of the Potomac and Eastern Branch (Anacostia) rivers that would eventually become the District of Columbia. Soon after, Washington commissioned French engineer Pierre-Charles L’Enfant to create a plan for the city.
L’Enfant arrived in Georgetown on March 9, 1791, and submitted his report and plan to the president in August. It is believed that this plan is the one preserved in the Library of Congress.
L’Enfant’s plan was greatly influenced by the traditions of Baroque landscape architecture and his projections of a future city population of 800,000. Its scheme of broad radiating avenues connecting significant focal points, its open spaces, and its grid pattern of streets oriented north, south, east, and west is still the gold standard against which all modern land use proposals for the Nation’s capital are considered.
The glorious vistas and dramatic landscape of today’s Washington are a result of L’Enfant’s careful planning. From the steps of the U.S. Capitol one can gaze down the mall to the Washington Monument and on to the Lincoln Memorial.
Learn More
- The Library’s online exhibition Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for a New Nation gives a detailed account of the architectural development of the city and the Capitol building.
- For a wealth of images of our Nation’s Capital, visit the Horydczak Collection. Photographer Theodor Horydczak’s collection includes thousands of photographs documenting the architecture and social life of the Washington metropolitan area from the 1920s through the 1950s.
- Among the most prized items on display in the American Treasures of the Library of Congress exhibition are L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for the city of Washington and Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s plan for the transformation of the White House into the symbol of power we know today.
- Search the papers of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson at the Library of Congress to find many documents concerning the selection and creation of Washington, D.C.
- A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875 contains a wide variety of congressional information associated with the early history of Washington, D.C. Search in the 1st Congress using the phrase seat of government to find congressional materials related to the Residence Act.
- Search the Cities and Towns collection to find hundreds of maps of the District of Columbia throughout its history.
- Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, 1600 to 1925 comprises first-person narratives, early histories, historical biographies, promotional brochures, and books of photographs, including twenty-eight books about Washington, D.C.
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