Paul Schuster Taylor

As head of a Social Science Research Council project, she was looking for someone to undertake a study of the rapidly increasing Mexican migration into the United States.

From 1927 to 1930 he spent a great deal of time on the road, driving through the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys in California, into Colorado and Texas, and as far east as Pennsylvania.

"[4] His approach integrated the institutional economics advocated by his professor John Commons with cultural and ethnographic matters – for example collecting Mexican corridos (popular ballads).

In 1935 they produced five reports on the conditions of migrant agricultural workers, and Taylor used their data to get state and federal relief funding for housing for farmworkers.

Together Lange and Taylor brought the poverty and exploitation of sharecroppers, tenant farmers and migrant farmworkers to the attention of the American public in their hope that the New Deal would be extended to benefit those who worked on farms.

Taylor risked his colleagues' further disapproval by publishing, with Lange, a popular book of text and photographs on the Dust Bowl, "American Exodus," in 1939.

Taylor's research formed a basis for the 1939 hearings conducted by the La Follette Committee of the U.S. Senate on civil liberties violations against farmworkers.

Taylor's research, combined with the values of his Iowa upbringing, brought him to the conclusion that the power of the big growers in California agriculture was incompatible with democracy.

But this restriction was systematically violated, so the reclamation programs constituted huge subsidies to the biggest growers and enabled them to squeeze out small farmers.