Paul S. Taylor, courtesy of Richard Steven Street
As Paul Taylor and I topped Strawberry Canyon and turned west, a pastel sunset spread across the sky. Below us was the San Francisco Bay, with a clear view through the silhouetted Golden Gate Bridge. In the soft, oblique light, Taylor's face was bathed in that warm glow that I was seeking.
I had been photographing Taylor for many years. As we strolled arm and arm through the campus he stopped every few seconds to clear his lungs of mucus and spit—an insidious legacy from the mustard gas barrage he had suffered as a Marine Corps second lieutenant and platoon leader in the trenches of France during World War I.
Pausing for pictures at favorite sites, Taylor recalled episodes from his life with Dorothea Lange, the great social documentary photographer who had died 17 years earlier. At the old hollowed-out oak beside Strawberry Creek in the Faculty Glade (now gone), Taylor pointed to the cables holding the withered limbs in place and offered his sympathies. The old tree and he had a lot in common. Finally we reached the Bancroft Library. The entire staff paused from its duties and snapped to attention. Researchers put down their pencils. "Is that Taylor?" one whispered. "I thought he was dead."
Taylor was one of the towering figures in California intellectual life. You cannot write the history of agriculture and farm labor without referring to him. You cannot comprehend the full meaning of academic freedom and persistent scholarship without reflecting on his career. And, as I would later learn, you cannot consider the story of documentary photography in California without acknowledging the role that he played, not only as mentor, but as a photographer whose work preceded Lange's by a decade.
Paul Schuster Taylor was the type of intellectual whom University of California President Clark Kerr later recalled as "a very unusual breed of what might be called economic anthropologists with an interest in labor problems." Although trained as an economist, Taylor never allowed the academy to divert him from his primary goal—linking social science with public policy to improve the quality of human life. He broke down the artificial barrier to knowledge separating Ivory Tower from Real Life, while injecting a strong humanistic perspective into a discipline mired in cold, hard facts.
Beginning with his study of the West Coast Seaman's Union, Taylor filtered archival discoveries through the lens of first-hand experiences accumulated working on the docks in San Francisco. When Mexican immigration reached flood tide in the late 1920s, he traveled from Mexico to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to complete a multivolume record of mass migration as it was happening. During the 1930s, he moved into the thick of farm labor battles, taking his student, Clark Kerr, into the San Joaquin Valley in October of 1933 to compile a documentary history of the strike by cotton pickers—still the largest and bloodiest strike in agricultural history.
When the mass exodus of tenant farmers and sharecroppers from the Midwest brought hundreds of thousands of "Okies" and "Arkies" west to California, Taylor again moved into the field, distilling his research into popular articles that communicated with a wide audience. As field research director for the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the California State Relief Administration, he began producing reports designed to bring action as well as convey information. To accomplish this, he assembled a modest staff and hired Dorothea Lange as photographer, concealing her position on the payroll as a typist—in effect launching the career of one of America's preeminent documentary photographers.
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