Men at Work, page 26
The Empire State Building was always a part of popular culture, and much of its history takes place in this dimension, where questions of precision and accuracy play little role. The mooring mast may never have been seriously intended for dirigible docking, although the owners were serious enough to commission a study to determine its legality and to inquire with Navy officials about the requirements. (See Charles Pickett, “The Empire State Building Mooring Mast,” Air Law Review [Brattleboro, VT] 2, no. 2 [Apr. 1931]: 130–52. The article was a revision of a memorandum prepared by the office of Messrs. Chadbourne, Stanchfield & Levy in January 1930 for Empire State Inc.) But while no dirigible ever moored there, other zeppelin-like objects did nuzzle the building. “Twenty-two huge, gayly-colored rubber balloons, in the shape of fantastic faces, miniature Zeppelins and comic strip characters set sail from West Thirty-fourth Street yesterday afternoon in a flurry of snow, at the conclusion of Macy’s annual and most resplendent Thanksgiving Day parade. Buffeted by a strong wind, they soared around the towering Empire State Building and headed over the East River toward Brooklyn, Queens and the open sea. The finder of each one will find attached to it an order for $25 worth of merchandise at R. H. Macy & Co.” (“Macy Balloons Head for Sea as Parade Finale,” New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 28, 1930, 36). The balloons represented the entire Katzenjammer family. According to the New York Herald Tribune, they struck the building at the sixtieth floor. The New York Times said the seventieth floor, adding that Santa also arrived in a Zeppelin (“Santa Brings Snow for Macy’s Parade,” Nov. 28, 1930, 4).
Although it never received incoming dirigible passengers, the mooring mast began its career broadcasting outgoing news as soon as steelwork was completed, even before it was clad in its aluminum skin. “Results of the Governorship election, compiled from telegrams received over direct wires to The New York Times, will be flashed on Tuesday night from the world’s highest building. A General Electric Company air beacon with a 34-inch light has been installed on the ninetieth floor of the Empire State Building and its rays may be observed over a wide area,” announced The New York Times. The searchlight would swing up and down to the north if Roosevelt led the count and would shine steadily in the same direction if he were elected. The light would perform the same operation facing south to signal the lead or election of his opponent, Charles H. Tuttle. (See “Election Results Will Be Shown by Times Bulletins and Signals,” New York Times, Nov. 4, 1930, 23. See also “Election Results Flashed by The Times from 90th Floor of Empire State Building 1,150 Feet Above Street,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 1930, sec. N, p. 20.)
But perhaps contemporary sources serve their most significant function, beyond questions of accuracy or factuality, by reminding us that historical writing is a performance and that history struts across a stage.
On a special series of sets designed by Arthur Knorr, coproducer and art director at the Capitol, and assisted by the Chester Hale Girls[,] Vincent Lopez and his orchestra, [sic] will tell the story of the rise of the Empire State Building in music, dance, and pantomime form on the Capitol stage for the week beginning Friday. Beginning with the barren site, working up through the various stages of crucible steel, molten metal and girders, pushing their way upward to form a new skyline for Manhattan, the production will end with a dirigible moving across the stage and tying up to the mooring mast. Lopez will be featured along with George Jessel and Helen Kane.
(“This Week at the Capitol,” News-Record [New York], May 12, 1931 [ESB Scrapbook]; see also, Irene Thirer, “Laemmle Announces Film Lineup,” Daily News [New York], May 11, 1931, 120).
Lewis Wickes Hine
As far as I have been able to determine, only one scholar has recognized that Lewis W. Hine specifically photographed the winners of Certificates of Superior Craftsmanship. See Ezra Shales, “Corporate Craft: Constructing the Empire State Building,” The Journal of Modern Craft 4, no. 2 (2011): 119–45, DOI: 10.2752/174967811X13050332209206. Shales follows a very similar path of research to that conducted here, employing many of the same sources. However, he does not follow his conclusion to a specific identification of individual men beyond those already identified by Hine in his notes on the working prints housed at the Avery Library and those identified in Empire State Inc.’s in-house newsletter, Empire Statements. Shales also seems to believe that the Craftsmanship Awards were sincere appreciations of craftsmanship. For my contrasting interpretation, see chapter 5, “Splendid Ideals.”
A conceptually similar, and often more successful and detailed attempt to trace the subjects of Lewis Hine’s photographs can be found at “The Lewis Hine Project.” Created by Joe Manning, the blog, Mornings on Maple Street, is dedicated to identifying the children in Hine’s child labor photographs from the 1910s.
Regarding the Empire State photographs, most scholars write as if the decision to photograph men of different trades was an expression of Hine’s fascination with the construction process, not his specific assignment to photograph Craftsmanship Award winners. Timothy J. Duerden, in a typical example, contends, “Hine came to understand very quickly that it would not do to just stand on the streets below and take pictures of the building progressing skyward; he had to actually join the Sky Boys and the other workers in their labors as they ascended toward the heavens. Hine, therefore, photographed all aspects of the building’s construction, from the steelworkers and riveters leading the way upward . . . to those other tradesmen, such as the bricklayers and carpenters, following up from below” (Lewis Hine: Photographer and American Progressive [McFarland, 2018], 144).
This highlights one reason critics have failed to notice the pattern in Hine’s Empire State worker portraits: the preference for seeing Hine as an independent artist, not a working photographer who also happened to be a photographer of genius. In retrospect, Hine’s genius overwhelms the facts of his daily work and in this way, strangely, the appreciation of his work distorts the history of its production.
The artistic appreciation of Hine’s work may also conceal another, entirely commercial motivation for him to have suppressed the names of individuals and to stress instead his photographs’ abstract, conceptual content. To survive as a freelance photographer, Hine licensed his images for general use, in essence, as “stock” photography. In this context, a general designation, “worker,” may have been more attractive to potential clients than the specific, “Peter Madden, asbestos worker.” Indeed, Hine arranged his catalogs by these generic descriptions. Under the heading “Men Workers at Work,” Hine’s 1921 catalog of photos for publication included “Bindery, Brewery, Buttons, Candy, Cannery, Cigars, Cotton mill, Furs, Glass, Pottery, Tailoring, Ice-cream, Steel mill: casting. Steel mill: emery wheel. Steel mill: handling hot iron. Steel mill: puddler. Steel mill: rolling steel. Steel mill: wash-up of men. Steel mill: steam hammer.” Under the heading “construction work,” Hine offers: “Derrick. Dump carts. Pick and shovel. Sledge hammer. Steam drill. Steam shovel. Swinging ladder” (Lewis Hine, “Social and Industrial Photographs, Hine Photo Company, 27 Grant Avenue, Yonkers, N.Y.,” New York Public Library, Lewis Hine papers, ca. 1908–ca. 1921 [MssCol 1399]).
The essential contemporary sources about Lewis Hine, his work portraits, and his job at the Empire State Building are “Treating Labor Artistically,” The Literary Digest 67, no. 10 (December 4, 1920): 32–34; “He Photo-Interprets Big Labor: Camera Studies of Men at Work by Lewis W. Hine,” The Mentor, September 1926, 42–43 Hester Donaldson Jenkins, “Man and the Skyscraper,” The Commercial Photographer 6, no. 11 (Aug. 1931): 634–36; Elizabeth McCausland, “Lewis Hine: Portrait of a Photographer (1938),” History of Photography 16, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 102–4; Beaumont Newhall, “Lewis W. Hine,” Magazine of Art 31, no. 11 (Nov. 1938): 637; Robert W. Marks, “Portrait of Lewis Hine: His Name Is Little Known, but His Pictures Are Etched in the Conscience of the Nation,” Coronet, February 1939, 147–57.
Critical sources about Hine are voluminous. Those I engaged with most often included Judith Mara Gutman’s Lewis W. Hine and the American Social Conscience (Walker, 1967), which I believe offers the clearest critical impression of Hine’s personality and practice; America & Lewis Hine: Photographs 1904–1940, forward by Walter Rosenblum, biographical notes by Naomi Rosenblum, essay by Alan Trachtenberg (Aperture, 1977); Kate Sampsell-Willmann, Lewis Hine as Social Critic (University Press of Mississippi, 2009); Timothy J. Duerden, Lewis Hine: Photographer and American Progressive (McFarland, 2018). The critical essays I found most useful, in addition to those cited below, in the section, “Interpretations of Hine and His Photography,” included Melissa Dabakis, “The Individual vs. the Collective: Images of the American Worker in the 1920s,” IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 12, no. 2 (1986): 51–62; Judith Mara Gutman, “The Worker and the Machine,” Afterimage 17, no. 2 (Sept. 1989): 13–15; and C. Zoe Smith, “An Alternative View of the 30s: Hine’s and Bourke-White’s Industrial Photos,” Journalism Quarterly 60, no. 2 (June 1983): 305–10.
For insight into Hine’s personality and his sense of himself as a photographer, no source is better than his letters, collected in Photo Story: Selected Letters and Photographs of Lewis W. Hine, edited by Daile Kaplan (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). Unfortunately, there are numerous errors in the introduction and notes to this volume of Hine’s letters. Archival sources for the same letters can be found in the Lewis Wickes Hine papers at George Eastman Museum, “Lewis Hine. Letters Photocopied from Social History Archives, Univ. of Minn. ALibraries [sic]” and in the Judith Mara Gutman papers (New York Public Library [MssCol 5982]).
Hine’s photographs began appearing in Paul and Arthur Kellogg’s journal—variously named Charities and The Commons (1905–1909); The Survey (1909–1921); and The Survey Graphic (1921–1952)—beginning in 1907. His work studies of workers, craftsmen, and craftswomen, appeared in numerous issues beginning in 1921. See, among others, “The Railroaders: Work Portraits,” Survey Graphic 47 (Oct. 29, 1921): 159–66; “Power Makers: Work Portraits,” Survey Graphic 47 (Dec. 31, 1921): 511–18; “The Man on the Job: Work Portraits,” Survey Graphic 47 (Mar. 25, 1922): 991–96.
Hine’s Empire State photos appeared in the photo story “Up from the City Streets,” Survey Graphic 65 (Jan. 1, 1931): 361–65. Hine published twenty-eight Empire State photos in his 1932 book, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines (Macmillan, 1932). A handy, inexpensive reprint is available, Lewis W. Hine, Men at Work, second edition with a supplement of eighteen related photos (Dover, 1995). For a more extensive collection of Hine’s Empire State images, see Freddy Langer, editor, Lewis W. Hine: The Empire State Building (Prestel-Verlag, 1998). For a representative sample of Hine’s career work from the George Eastman Museum collection, including a facsimile of Men at Work, see Lewis Hine: From the Collections of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film (DAP/Distributed Art Publishers, 2014).
Prints of Hine’s Empire State images not included in the Avery Library and George Eastman Museum collections are scattered among numerous archives, museums, libraries, and in private collections around the world. In this context, the question of “authentic” representations of the workmen’s voices is echoed in the problem of authentic Lewis Hine prints. In the 1990s, a controversy or a scandal erupted in the world of art collectors regarding prints of Hine’s works. A complaint was lodged against Walter Rosenblum, a leading Hine scholar, the first curator of his archive, and Hine’s friend and student in his last years, alleging that photographs sold by Rosenblum, purportedly printed by Hine himself, had in fact been made many years after his death. A settlement was reached in August 2001. (See Ralph Blumenthal, “The F.B.I. Investigates Complaints About Lewis Hine Prints,” New York Times, Aug. 16, 2001, sec. E, p. 1, and Richard B. Woodward, “Too Much of a Good Thing,” The Atlantic, June 2003, 67–76.)
Hine’s only published writing about the Empire State Building project is Lewis Hine, “Up Goes the Skyscraper,” Young Wings, February 1934, 4–5. For a list of Hine’s essays and articles, as well as his photographic publications, and a survey of work about Hine up to 1977, see Naomi Rosenblum, America & Lewis Hine, 138–42. For the history of The Survey Graphic, see Caroline A. Lanza, “‘Truth Plus Publicity’: Paul U. Kellogg and Hybrid Practice, 1902–1937” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2016).
Interpretations of Hine and His Photography
Each of the critical studies about Lewis Hine that I cite, enormously useful in situating him in the currents of early twentieth-century thought and social practice, approaches Hine as a thinker who conveys ideas through photographs. As a result, the critics themselves tend to think about Hine’s images, rather than look carefully at them. Kate Sampsell-Willmann is typical in turning the men in Hine’s photos into symbols of work in the abstract: “Indeed, the skywalkers were visually perfect images of the masculine work ethic, pictured by Hine the imperfect messenger, the product of their labor a Jacob’s ladder. Be he Icarus, the sky boy, or the foundation man, each man at work represented a character in a grand morality play, the denouement of which was the salvation of work and society itself” (Lewis Hine as Social Critic, 208–209). Beyond this preference for conceptualizing Hine’s work, one of my primary contentions is that art historians haven’t really known what to do with Hine as a person, finding him too negligible a character to have authored such powerful, enduring photographs. Thus Alan Trachtenberg, who eliminates the workers from Hine’s photos by considering them representations of “work itself,” pursues this pattern by eliminating Hine from the photographic process: “Hine participates in the making of the tower by serving as its faithful reflection—its self-consciousness, one might say. It is as if the making of the tower, an epitome of the constructive potential of labor, photographs itself” (“Ever—the Human Document,” in Rosenblum, 135).
Much of the “mythological” interpretation of Hine’s images demonstrates this desire to discern a “greater” source of power in the photographs than Lewis Hine himself. Alexander Nemerov, by contrast, attributes godlike powers to Hine in Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine (Princeton University Press, 2016). Nevertheless, he equally avoids looking at the individuals in Hine’s images by presuming that “each of the workmen he [Hine] photographed was a kind of self-portrait as Hine mulled, and invented, what his own heroism had been” (168). Of the interpretive works that fantasize about Hine’s photographs, none is more elaborate than Nemerov’s.
Critiques of Hine as a thinker using photography to convey a social message tend to focus on his alleged failure to uphold an anti-corporate stance. George Dimock is most explicit, asserting that “following the war, Hine’s role changed from social reformer to corporate apologist” (“Children of the Mills: Re-Reading Lewis Hine’s Child-Labour Photographs,” Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 2 [1993]: 37–54). An alternative view of Hine’s shift in the 1920s and 1930s from social reform toward “work portraits” can be found in Domenica M. Barbuto, PhD, and Martha M. Kreisel, “‘To Keep the Present and Future in Touch with the Past’—Lewis Wickes Hine,” Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian 13, no. 1 (1994): 11–38 (published online Oct. 18, 2008). They write, “Unlike the child labor photographs which emphasized the repression of the factory system, Hine’s work portraits seem to celebrate the industrial process and the significant role workers play.” Patricia Pace, while disagreeing with Dimock, nevertheless reasserts his criticism. For her, in the work portraits, Hine had resolved “the difficult anxieties of the industrial age by linking the natural male body with the machine” (“Staging Childhood: Lewis Hine’s Photographs of Child Labor,” The Lion and the Unicorn 26, no. 3 [Sept. 2002]: 324–52). And Peter Seixas, in “Lewis Hine: From ‘Social’ to ‘Interpretive’ Photographer,” American Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 381–409, writes: “Whereas the prewar Hine had been delivering a challenge to the employers of child labor and the managers responsible for the deplorable accident rates in the Pittsburgh mills, he now offered himself for hire to employers.” Seixas leaves it unclear how Hine was supposed to survive as a freelance photographer without employers.
Regarding Hine’s employment at the Empire State Building, I have asserted that Belle Moskowitz is the most likely source. But this remains an open question. Did Hine know his Hastings-on-Hudson neighbor, architect Richmond Shreve? It’s possible that, prior to his employment by Empire State Inc., Hine was aware that some of his neighbors were involved in the project. He would certainly have known after he was hired. (See “Hine’s Photos of ‘Empire’ to Be Shown Here; Shreve, Balcom and Andres Helping in Erection of World’s Tallest Building,” Hastings News, Aug. 15, 1930 [ESB Scrapbook 1.1 (17–35)].) Although I dispute the notion that the commission came through Shreve, it’s not impossible that Hine knew him or others in the architect’s circle socially through his wife, Sara Rich Hine. On March 20, 1930, the same week that steelwork on the Empire State began, The New York Times’ Suburban Social Notes included this item: “Mrs. Lewis Hine of Hastings entertained the Hastings Literature Club at her home” (Mar. 20, 1930, 36). Timothy J. Duerden further notes that Shreve and Hine’s homes were near to each other (143). For the attribution of Belle Moskowitz as the source of Hine’s employment, see Jim Rasenberger, “The ‘Sky Boys,’” (New York Times, Apr. 23, 2006) and Elisabeth Israels Perry, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith (208). Rasenberger’s claim is unsubstantiated. Perry points to Judith Mara Gutman as her source, but no evidence is cited in Gutman’s text (Gutman, 58). See also John Tauranac, who notes Hine’s sociological background, but not his yearslong connections to Belle Moskowitz (282). Duerden remarks on the numerous, progressive connections between Hine and Moskowitz, including their work at settlement houses and at Ethical Culture, but blandly concludes these “would surely have led to their paths crossing once in a while” (143). Ezra Shales identifies Belle Moskowitz’s son, Josef Israels II, as Hine’s employer, citing Tauranac (135). That Moskowitz and Israels employed Hine is well documented and, several years after the fact, Hine referred to “Joe” Israels as “my mentor on [the] Empire State job” (letter to Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, Sept. 30, 1938, in Kaplan, Photo Story, 121). But this still leaves unresolved the question of how Hine came to be employed.
