In 1942, Roy Stryker penned an urgent memo to his Farm Security Administration photographers. He was upset at the relative age of the people he saw in the FSA pictures, saying “too many in our file paint the US as an old people’s home.” Instead, he wrote: “We must have at once: pictures of men, women, and children who appear as if they really believed in the USA. Get people with a little spirit.”

It was a task easier said than done. Stryker had been leading the FSA’s photo division since 1935. The FSA, a New Deal program, was created to assist the rural poor; it doled out loans, operated camps for displaced farmers, and set up subsistence farming communities, among other relief efforts. Stryker’s fleet of photographers were charged with documenting not just the work of the relief agency, but also the daily lives and struggles of the poor. But by 1942, the United States was at war. Pearl Harbor had been bombed the previous year, and the government was turning its attention to bolstering home-front pride—a theme that didn’t exactly square with images of poverty-stricken farmers.

A worker at the Vultee Aircraft plant in Nashville, Tennessee, 1943. Courtesy of the Library of Congress A worker at the North American Aviation Company plant in Inglewood, California, 1942. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

The same year that Stryker penned his memo urging cheerier photos, the federal government created the Office of War Information, tasked with creating and disseminating wartime propaganda—including triumphant, patriotic images of Americans back at work, particularly in factory jobs where workers were busy assembling what Roosevelt termed an “Arsenal of Democracy.” As wartime efforts ramped up, the work of the FSA was curtailed; its budget was eliminated in 1943. Stryker and his photographic unit were transferred to the Office of War Information.

“The move was in the cards,” Stryker told an interviewer in 1963. “Farm Security was coming to an end ... We were not going to be allowed to do that broad, general coverage of the American scene and there was no justification for it.”

Riveters at the North American Aviation Company plant, 1942. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Alfred T. Palmer, a globe-trotting photographer from California who had worked as an assistant to Ansel Adams in his youth, was hired as the lead photographer for the OWI. With a background in commercial photography, he was hired in part as an antidote to Stryker’s unit’s documentation of the poor. He turned his camera on the factory workers who were energetically churning out materials for the war effort. In his photos, no one sat idle: men shaped torpedoes, forged massive guns, and operated formidable machinery. Palmer also photographed the women who went to work in factories, taking the place of men serving in the military. Women in dresses smiled for him as they polished sights for guns, or wore pants and bright lipstick as they built aircraft, like real-life versions of Rosie the Riveter.

A worker assembles part of the cowling for a B-52 bomber motor at the North American Aviation plant, 1942. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Within a year of its transfer to the OWI, the photographic unit of the FSA was fully subsumed by the organization. Stryker departed to take a public relations job with Standard Oil. During his seven years running the FSA photo unit, he had kickstarted the careers of photographers who would go on to define documentary photography in the United States, including Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Walker Evans.

The OWI’s life span was even briefer than that of the FSA photo unit; it was dissolved in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II. With no war effort to support overseas, taking pictures of happy factory workers was no longer a federal mandate.