During the hottest summer on record, Forum editors accused the government of dishing out fake news

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

A striking photograph, accompanied by a dramatic headline and caption depicting a bleak and apocalyptic scene, appeared in hundreds of newspapers nationwide.

“Drought cattle invade capitol grounds,” the headline read.

BISMARCK, N.D. — Hungry cattle whose rangelands are now barren dust-covered plains, finally invaded the North Dakota capitol grounds here last week, nibbling at such spares grasses as had survived the scorching heat with gripped the state this week.

Readers had reason to be worried. The summer of 1936 was a scorcher. It is still the hottest summer on record in North Dakota with an average temperature of 74°F from June to August. On July 6, 1936, Steele, North Dakota, recorded a temperature of 121°F, the highest temperature ever recorded in the state.

The photo of the cows invading the capitol provided ample evidence that the Great Depression, combined with serious drought conditions, made life tough for many on the Great Plains.

However, a couple of weeks after the photo was published, the public learned that they shouldn’t believe everything they see.

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

“It’s a fake! But scores of newspapers bit on this N.D. picture.”

So the cows weren’t grazing at the Capitol or were they? Was it a hoax?

The answer isn’t that simple: creating a figurative dust-up between the U.S. government and The Fargo Forum. But how did it all begin?

After the 1929 stock market crash, America dove headfirst into the Great Depression, which caused widespread economic hardship for Americans everywhere, from the biggest cities to the smallest towns.

Prairie states, including North Dakota, were particularly hard hit, not just by financial troubles but by Mother Nature herself. Years of low rainfall and poor farming practices led to severe dust storms, which eroded topsoil, ruined crops, and led to widespread farm failures.

Many families chose to leave their farms in search of a better life. This exodus contributed to a sense of despair and instability in the region.

It became known as “The Dirty ‘30s” across the Great Plains.

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

Former Columbia economics professor and Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford Guy Tugwell was chosen to lead the new agency.

In a report written by late University of North Dakota history professor D. Jerome Tweton for the State Historical Society of North Dakota, Tweton said the agency was charged with long-range planning that emphasized rural rehabilitation.

“The RA and Tugwell focused on the ‘little farmer’ – those who were deeply in debt, who worked submarginal land, who were destitute. The RA was the social planner’s delight, for it meant advising people where and how to live,” Tweton wrote.

The RA’s resettlement concept, which emphasized relocating farmers away from the Great Plains, became highly controversial. According to Tweton, Tugwell knew the agency’s ideas and hardships from the Great Depression/Dirty ‘30s had to be translated into terms that a regular person could understand.

“The problems that confronted ‘the little farmer’ had to be documented in such a way as to create a sympathetic public,” Tweton wrote.

Therefore, Tugwell prioritized public information. RA writers began producing creatively written newspaper stories, radio scripts, speeches, and magazine articles. In addition to hiring writers, the agency hired some of the nation’s top photographers to take photos of “real life” in parts of rural America.

Tweton said more than 272,000 of their slice-of-life photographs were taken from 1935 through 1942. (In 1937, the Resettlement Administration became the Farm Security Administration, which continued the public information campaign).

Six photographers shot photos in North Dakota, including scenes of dusty fields, life on the farm and in one-room schoolhouses.

This is where the ‘cows at the capitol’ photo comes in.

It all began 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 wasn’t clear that the photo had been taken by a government agency that had a stake in the message conveyed in it. Critics said it was a propaganda photo distributed to sway people toward the RA message about hardship on the plains.

There was no way a paper in New York, California or Texas would suspect the photo wasn’t wholly what it seemed. The photo was a misrepresentation, according to The Forum, which wrote on August 19, 1936:

 “If those cows could only read–they’d think they’d been eating loco weed. (The photo) gave an indication that they were practically breaking down the doors. “

In fact, cows from a nearby farm had been known to cross the border of the capitol grounds, and guards simply shooed them away.

The Forum wrote: “That this picture, innocent in itself,  should go out of Washington with descriptive matter distorting its whole significance was, the Fargo Forum believes, a definite and damaging fake.”

The Forum was ready for a fight. The editors pointed out that the cows at the Capitol photo wasn’t the first time the agency pulled the wool over the eyes of the reading public.

Another photo taken in Pennington County, South Dakota, of a bleached-out old steer skull resting on the cracked and parched ground became famous for its powerful portrayal of the desolate farmland on the prairie.

After taking the initial photo, the photographer admitted to moving the skull to other locations, including a grassy field, to get a different angles.

When the photos were released to newspapers, The Forum cried “foul” accusing the photographer of staging the photos — a big no-no in photojournalism.

The photos were also used in a government-produced documentary called “The Plow that Broke the Plains.”

The fight hit extra close to home when Roosevelt and Tugwell flew to North Dakota on Aug. 27 to assess the drought damage in the state. Tweton said issues of The Forum greeted them on the train with a front-page story featuring the skull photo with the caption “A Wooden Nickel” (an expression used to convey something worthless.)

The photographer, Arthur Rothstein, later countered by saying, “The paper was strongly anti-administration and local pride had been wounded.”

The Forum fought back by warning members of the president’s party not to be taken in by “unreliable stories” of the drought in North Dakota.

The dust-up seemed to be over by September 12 when Forum editors wrote: “With the thought that its essential purpose has been accomplished, the Fargo Forum today folds the book on its exposé of faked stories and phony pictures of the drought.”

Tugwell and his photographers were ready to move on as well. By 1938, Rothstein, who took the infamous ‘skull’ photo, for some reason, convinced the agency that he should return to the area to take “positive pictures.”

One such photo was taken by him at the Great Northern Depot in Fargo in 1939. The image, which shows a man smiling as he pushes a cart, was meant to convey America’s progress in transportation and a vibrant Fargo community.

It seems The Forum and the government had made nice.

This period in history taught lessons. In the coming years, photo syndicators created more stringent standards for identifying the source of photos, and credits were required upon publication.