Medicine show, Huntingdon, TN, Oct. 1935

This was taken by Ben Shahn (1898-1969) when he was working for the photography group of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), along with Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and many others. Thousands of images from this project can be viewed and downloaded from the Library of Congress web site. I suppose they were mostly commies, but one can't look through this marvelous archive without seeing it as evidence that the government is in fact capable of making excellent use of our tax dollars...