Men at Work, page 20
Hine’s photos on display in the Empire State Building, May 1931.
Hine expected the success of his Empire State images to lead to more opportunities, and he requested advance copies of The Survey Graphic’s photo story to present to Josef Israels, Belle Moskowitz’s son and partner at Publicity Associates. Israels responded enthusiastically, promising “to circulate it among the directors of Empire State.”
But despite the powerful men who had employed him, no further work came from Empire State Inc. Belle Moskowitz, who might have continued to promote Hine’s work, died suddenly on January 2, 1933, from complications following a fall. Her death marked the end of Hine’s support from Publicity Associates, and it marked the end of an era for Al Smith, as well, whose outlook turned increasingly embittered and politically conservative.
Economic conditions continued to worsen, and the success Hine hoped for failed to materialize. Some magazine work came his way, and the Red Cross hired him to document the plight of flood victims in Mississippi. But soon the commissions died down. The Survey Graphic was unable to provide sufficient work to sustain him. And while he was briefly successful in obtaining a position documenting the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, differences with management led to Hine’s early departure. He never again had a major photographic project.
By 1936, he was writing to Paul Kellogg, “I certainly appreciate your many efforts to keep the Work Portraits idea alive,—I often feel the results do not justify all the bloodshed.” In 1938, Hine applied for a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, and then in 1939 from the Guggenheim Foundation. The project he proposed was entitled, “Photographic Interpretation of Some Phases of American Craftsmanship.” Writing to Henry W. Kent, secretary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to ask whether Kent would serve on the new project’s advisory committee, Hine described it as “an interpretive photographic survey of our American craftspeople and the adaptation of their crafts to present-day needs.” Using terms familiar from his previous statements of intention, he added, “This is not a personal matter but is one that could have a deep, social significance as a means of education for the present and future generations.” He was turned down for both grants.
In a June 21, 1938, letter to Roy Stryker, Hine complained of his impoverishment. “The Hine fortunes are at an all-time low and if they do not change in the near future, or at least show some evidence of real prospects, the Home Owners Loan Corp. will have to foreclose on the place and we will wander forth to cheaper pastures.” The letter of foreclosure arrived at Hine’s home in Hastings on September 1, 1939. Hine concluded an arrangement with the bank to rent the house on a month-by-month basis. But the Federal Home Loan Bank Board repossessed the formal deed on December 19, 1939. Just a few days later, on Christmas morning, Sara Rich Hine, Hine’s wife of thirty-four years, died.
In October 1940, Hine conceived a new project, for which he again sought foundation funding. “I propose making a series of photo-studies dealing with the life of representative individuals of foreign extraction to show their reactions to and influence upon our American democracy.” His “Plan for Work” shows Hine remaining faithful to his pedagogical language and to the ideals of Ethical Culture. “If ‘Our strength is our people,’ this project should give us light on the kinds of strength we have to build upon as a nation. Much emphasis is being put upon the dangers inherent in our alien groups, our unassimilated or even partly Americanized citizens—criticism based upon insufficient knowledge. A corrective for this would be better facilities for seeing, and so understanding, what the facts are, both in possible dangers and real assets.”
Hine did not live to fulfill the project. He died a month later on November 4, 1940.
“Hine was a pure ‘primitive.’” He was “a naïve, untaught, determined little man . . . quiet, incorruptible.” “Kindly, trustful, wistful, amazingly innocent. He looks like an unworldly schoolteacher, needing protection from the rigors of the everyday world.”
It was left to journalists and art historians to define Hine as a man and as an artist. Elizabeth McCausland, a prominent art critic, who, along with her partner, photographer Berenice Abbott, met Hine in his last years and helped to mount a retrospective of his work in 1938, commended his “genuinely simple and sturdy soul.” As a subject of critical attention, Hine thus suffered a fate similar to the Empire State Building workers he had photographed. Like the workmen, he was defined by others’ ideas about him, fashioned into a one-dimensional symbol of American virtue. In an essay from 1938, “Portrait of a Photographer,” written to accompany the retrospective, McCausland wrote: “To understand the character, both of the man and of the period, we cannot turn to literature. The nineteenth-century American writers furnish no prototype for men like Hine. Yet Hine is as American as the ‘Oshkosh B’Gosh’ from which he hails.” In McCausland’s rendering, Hine was an example of “Yankee genius,” a man of ingenuity, cunning, and a tough moral clarity. “Certainly, if ever a man spoke the American vernacular it is Lew Hine. He looks like a wheat farmer. Despite his Pd.M. from New York University in 1905, he talks like one.” The image stuck and seventy-five years later, it still defined him. Instead of a man of grand vision, instead of an artist of deep insight or empathy, he was portrayed as a kind of folk hero, with “a naivete both lovable and sad.” Daile Kaplan, who discovered a large cache of photographs Hine made for the Red Cross during World War I, writes, “Hine remained the perennial innocent whose personal values were rooted in a traditional Midwestern upbringing—independent, moral, and at times perhaps a bit corny.”
Almost as soon as they became public, Hine’s Empire State photographs drifted away from the circumstances of their creation and became instead free-floating symbols, subsumed in the grander narrative of American progress. The interpersonal qualities that made Hine’s portraits so affecting did not translate well into the conceptual language of art history. Unable to discern in Hine himself the bearing suited to the importance of his achievement, critics reached for larger concepts by which to lend the images the desired stature. Daile Kaplan argues that “the Empire State Building series . . . mirrored the socialist-realist ‘heroic worker’ portraits produced by the Soviet photographer Alexandr Rodchenko.” Art historian Freddy Langer believed the photographs express “faith in technology and the ideal of a new, progressive urbanism.” Kate Sampsell-Willmann, who recognizes the sympathy Hine felt for the men he photographed, interprets this as evidence that Hine identified with them. In her reading, Hine saw himself, too, as a craftsman, and his portraits of workers are really self-portraits. “From the sky boy to the watchmaker, Hine’s workers were competent, confident, and happy. Hine obviously found joy in his own craft and saw the same emotion in others.”
The Certificates of Superior Craftsmanship, which had honored the Empire State workmen by name, also dissociated from their historical context. Over time, the history of the awards and the identities of the men themselves—everything but their names—were forgotten. The bronze plaque that Al Smith proudly placed in the lobby became a bypassed curiosity, lost in the building’s physical grandeur and the lobby’s commercial busyness. Many of the men’s faces, by contrast, became world famous, preserving their concentration as they worked and perhaps something of what we might call their humanity. But because Empire State Inc. emphasized their abstract value as publicity photos, and because critics seized on them as decontextualized symbols, the images ceased to honor individual men. This process was endorsed and accelerated by Hine’s own quest to turn the men into representatives of the human spirit. Ironically, therefore, like the Craftsmanship Awards themselves, Hine’s supremely personal photos of the men who built the Empire State Building finally obscured the individuals they documented in the same moment they preserved them. Hine deprived the men of their names. As a result, as individuals, they were rendered mute by the expressiveness of the photographs as art.
But the loss of context and connection was inherent in how Empire State Inc. had understood the project and made use of Hine’s photographs. It was not a gradual effect of art history, nor the result of Hine’s sociological ideals. “We all feel sure that your contribution to Empire State has been a most important one and that your pictures will be a reminder for many years to come of the fine human elements which went into the construction of Empire State,” wrote Al Smith in a note of acknowledgment to Lewis Hine on June 19, 1931, six weeks after the grand opening and while Hine’s images were on display in the building’s windows. Smith thanked the photographer for his thoughtful work. “These interesting studies of the spectacular steel workers and more especially the fine portraits of ordinary working men do a great deal to humanize and popularize this monumental structure.” Despite more than a year relentlessly touting the significance of the Craftsmanship Awards, former Governor Smith failed to recognize that the “ordinary workers” in the photographs were the same “superior” men whose hands he had shaken just months earlier, when he lauded them as “leaders in their particular line of trade” at two public ceremonies.
So quickly was the connection between names and faces severed.
Instead of the award winners, whose contributions to the building the commemorative plaque was supposed to immortalize, other men, other faces, became briefly famous in images that more neatly served the story of the “omnipotent workman” as “a source of hope and a role model.” These, too, were often disconnected from names and always from the actual lives the men led. But like the Craftsmanship Awards plaque, the significance of these images has been inverted by time, and rather than perpetuating an idealized cultural narrative, they may now become a form of individual memorial.
Carl Percy Russell, “daring bird.”
During the week of September 30, 1930, as steelwork on the eighty-sixth floor came to an end, a syndicated photo ran in papers around the country showing an ironworker sitting on top of a lone, jutting column. In one paper, the image ran with the title “Daring Bird Perches ‘Mid Forest of Steel.”
“A ‘top-o’-the-morning’ greeting is being waved to you by Carl Russell, one of the steel-nerved workers on the 102-story Empire State Building, at 5th Ave. and 34th St. He’s at 1,048 altitude, with steel fastnesses all around him.” Here again, a particular man is used as an example of a worker, and as a result he is both identified and generalized. The caption plays on the common misconception that all ironworkers were Irish, which Russell was not. It is a small instance, but still instructive for how in almost every case involving a worker, the needs of cultural mythology overwhelm accuracy and respect for the individual.
Carl Percy Russell was born on April 2, 1903, in Rainy River, Ontario, Canada, and died at age eighty-eight on November 29, 1991, at his home in Charlotte, Florida. His parents were Canadian of Scotch ancestry. The Canadian census of 1911 shows Russell, age eight, here called “Percy,” living with his parents and five siblings in Algoma West, Ontario. In 1930, when this photo appeared in papers around the country, Russell was twenty-seven years old. He’d been in the United States since 1923 and had been married for five years to a woman named Lucille. The couple had a 2½-year-old daughter and lived in Leonia, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. It’s possible to find a few other snapshots of Carl Percy Russell. The record of his border crossing at Niagara Falls on June 23, 1923, exists. Then twenty years old, he is identified as an “elec. Helper.” He was “seeking employment,” headed to Globe, Arizona, where an uncle lived. Three years later, in his naturalization document from February 26, 1926, Russell had become an ironworker and lived at 96 Park Place, Brooklyn. He was 5 feet, 7½ inches tall, weighed 160 pounds, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Four years after that, he appeared in the newspapers, sitting on a steel column high over Manhattan and waving at the camera.
Other publicly accessible genealogical databases make it possible to follow Russell’s daughter through her subsequent marriage up to the present time with the names of Russell’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, another way in which this immigrant helped to build America.
“My grandfather Carl Russell was an adventurer who was born on a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada,” wrote Gail Lincoln, Carl Russell’s granddaughter, in an email. “He left home at age 15 or 16 & worked his way across the country doing everything from logging to singing to make a living. He wound up in NY around 1910 & joined the iron workers union. He became part of a small group daring enough to work atop the skyscrapers with barely a net. He was completely fearless.”
As is often the case, family memory and official documents tell different stories. According to Russell’s naturalization papers, he did not arrive in the US until 1923, not 1910, as Gail believed; and according to his death certificate, Russell’s birthplace was not Saskatchewan but Ontario. In contrast to cultural myths, the history of an individual, even recalled by a member of his own family, leads to questions and discrepancies. There is no way to determine whether the documents or the family lore are accurate. But when Gail searched for other mementoes of her grandfather’s life, she rediscovered a brief biography, written as a family keepsake by Carl’s brother, known as Jack. From this, a few personal details about Carl Russell came to light. He had worked on Rockefeller Center and the Golden Gate Bridge. During World War II, he helped to build the Alaska Highway. Following the war, he took jobs in South America. Professionally, he chose to go by his unused first name, Carl, although his family knew him as Percy. On the job, according to his brother, he grew “tired of being called a ‘Limey’—the name Percy is very British.”
Ninety years after he worked on the Empire State Building, Carl Percy Russell’s identity is preserved in an anecdote. Reflecting on these details in her great-uncle’s memoir, Gail Lincoln felt closer to her grandfather, whom she had known only as a child.
“It was nice to have the opportunity to see the book again. I first saw it as a teen & didn’t appreciate at the time what a remarkable life he led.”
In November and early December 1930, another isolated ironworker on the Empire State Building became momentarily famous in a syndicated photograph, which shows him clambering halfway up a steel column. Papers captioned the image with a variety of blurbs: “Daring iron worker Niel [sic] Doherty, perched on the summit of the new Empire State Building, 1048 feet above the street. Pedestrians seem like bees and autos like toys to him.” “It isn’t everybody who can look down upon the Chrysler Building, which may be seen in the background, rearing aloft its silvered spire.” In one instance, a paper provided not only Doherty’s name, but also his home address, 1755 Jarvis Avenue, in the Bronx. Beneath the heading, “He Knows How. He Is Not Afraid,” the caption reads: “Here is Neil Doherty, one of the unsung heroes of the air.”
Neil Doherty, “unsung hero of the air.”
Neil Doherty was comparatively well documented at the time. He was among the small group of Empire State ironworkers who followed the construction all the way up, from its foundations through the topping out of the main structure on the eighty-sixth floor, and then went on to build the building’s mooring mast. He appears in numerous photographs by Lewis Hine. One of these illustrates Margaret Norris and Brenda Ueland’s article “Riding the Girders,” published in The Saturday Evening Post on April 11, 1931, and was subsequently included in Norris’s book, Heroes and Hazards. In this image, Doherty stands on a beam holding a heavy rope. He is not identified.
But Hine knew his name. On the back of a print of this photograph located at the George Eastman Museum, Hine had jotted it down, along with an address, and the note, “release,” indicating his intention to publish the photo.
Doherty was also among the very few ordinary workers allowed to have his own voice. “It’s just like anything else,” he is quoted as saying about his job in an interview published in the New York Home News on November 9, 1930. “A person on solid ground never has any fear of falling. That’s just the way you become up on the girders after a while, and you have to watch yourself as soon as you find yourself taking that attitude. Usually the two days off at the end of the week are enough to take away this carelessness. Going up to the top on Monday mornings, you are always inclined to be more careful for some reason or other.”
Alone among all the surviving profiles of ironworkers, Doherty is granted a moment to reflect on his job, beyond its dangers and the thrills that excited journalists. “It’s beautiful up there,” he says, “and often I get a couple of minutes to watch the clouds down below us. They stretch out about 50 feet below us at times, and hide the whole city from view, but they’re nice to look at. We can look over into Jersey or up into Westchester, and on a clear day we can see as far as the Pocantico mountains, way up in North Westchester. The beam when the sun shines through the clouds is a pretty sight, too, and looks just like a long gold shaft of metal.”
Neil Doherty, ironworker.
