Men at Work, page 3
Like so many facts, the number and names of the dead become less distinct upon closer inspection. Like the question of who built the building, the simple question, How many men died during construction of the Empire State Building?, is neither simple nor precise enough to account for the complexity of what happened.
At least one innocent passerby died during the construction, a woman named Elizabeth Eager. On July 11, 1930, the forty-five-year-old schoolteacher crossed Thirty-Fourth Street, west of Fifth Avenue, at the wrong moment. According to the Starrett’s account, Eager “was struck on the ankle by a piece of broken ironworker’s plank. She sustained a fractured ankle and it was reported to us that blood poisoning resulted in her death.”
What information, whose life or death, is considered important? The answer depends on your perspective, on how you frame the question. Elizabeth Eager was not a man, and her death does not register in any official accounting of those who died during construction. Nevertheless, additional particulars surrounding her death can be found in a 1936 book, Men of Danger, by Lowell Thomas. As his title indicates, Thomas was interested in painting a romantic portrait of construction workers. Consequently, he does not mention Elizabeth Eager’s name, and the circumstances of her death only serve to enhance the perilous nature of the male workers’ job.
One of the few casualties which occurred during the building of the Empire State was caused by the wind. A workman was carrying a plank along the edge of one of the upper floors. The wind struck the plank and it began to “get away” from him. To save himself he let go of the plank and fell flat on his stomach. The plank went bounding down toward the street. It crashed on the extension at the twenty-first floor and was partially splintered. One of the big twisted splinters flew across Thirty-fourth Street and struck a woman, breaking her leg. The wound became infected, and she died. But of course that was an exceptional kind of accident.
It is only by accident that an ordinary person’s name becomes visible in the public record. History at the scale of the individual is composed of these accidents and exceptional moments—a death, an award, a chance encounter with a journalist or photographer—the ordinary person’s fifteen minutes of fame. Only through these accidents can we begin to populate the roster of workers who built the Empire State.
Construction of the world’s tallest skyscraper was a sensational event, extensively reported in the press. Workers were frequent subjects of human-interest stories, especially when their jobs were highly dangerous. Ironworkers were the particular favorites with journalists of the early twentieth century, and they remain our figureheads for that era. These men were portrayed as dashing characters, profiled in books and articles like Thomas’s Men of Danger and John Cushman Fistere’s “No Timid Man Could Hold This Job.” From these accidents of a journalist’s attention, we glean the names of seven additional ironworkers who helped to build the Empire State Building, including Sam Lowman, Slim Cooper, Dave Ricketts, and Paul Masey. Two more ironworkers, Carl Russell and Neil Doherty, were identified by name in photos published to illustrate their daring escapades in the high steel a quarter mile above New York City’s streets. The ironworker Victor Gosselin, interviewed in John Cushman Fistere’s article, appears in both text and photos. Captured in some of Lewis Hine’s most exhilarating images, Gosselin is by far the best-known worker who contributed to the Empire State Building.
These brief glimpses of ordinary people were not meant as biographical sketches, as we might expect from the profile of a prominent man. Instead, they were published to offer a representative moment, a snapshot or slice of life. In a few rare cases, as we shall see, these snapshots may expand to become a window, providing clues we can follow to create a fuller picture of an individual worker, as through a combination of multiple exposures. Present in a variety of sources, as the prime example, the ironworker Victor Gosselin comes into much sharper focus. In conventional histories, therefore, he is frequently the only worker identified by name, where his charismatic personality provides a welcome human touch.
For the most part, however, men in journalists’ reports and in photos of the construction remain anonymous. And even when a worker is mentioned by name in these glancing appearances, something odd almost always happens that again occludes his individual identity. In the passage into public visibility, the ordinary individual is transformed from a man into a symbol, his identity subsumed in a larger, more urgent cultural narrative. The ironworkers so celebrated then as now for their prowess on the high steel, even when named, were not lauded primarily as individuals performing a job but as romantic heroes, symbols of the mammoth enterprise, its audacity and modernity, archetypes of virility, daring, skill, and pride, the essential characteristics of the triumphant, modern American spirit.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Lewis Wickes Hine’s iconic photographs of the Empire State’s workers. Hired by Empire State Inc. in 1930 to publicize the building during its construction, the pioneering documentary photographer took almost a thousand photos of the workmen. There are dozens of formal portraits of individual workers, and hundreds of photos of the men performing their jobs: drilling the foundations, wrestling with pipes and cables, laying brick, walking the narrow steel beams. Some of these images, like The Sky Boy, count among the most influential photos in the history of American photography. Hine’s original prints now routinely sell for tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Lewis Hine was an inspired choice to document the men who performed the construction. By the time he was hired by Empire State Inc. he had been publishing photographic studies of workers and artisans, so-called work portraits, for a decade. Born in 1874 and trained as a teacher and sociological researcher, Hine began his photographic career in the early 1900s, recording immigrants at Ellis Island. He made his name as the staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee in the 1910s, talking his way into factories, mines, and workers’ homes to document the extensive use of children in unregulated industrial production. A lifelong believer in the democratic ideals championed by the early twentieth-century Progressive movement, Hine had a deep, personal sympathy for laborers and for the members of the working classes, many of them immigrants. His work studies in the 1920s included railroad engineers, workers at power plants, machine shops, harbor workers, truck drivers, men and women in print shops, candy stores, operating a telegraph or typewriter. Hine’s Mechanic at Steam Pump in Electric Power House, sometimes called Man with Wrench, shows a young man taut with effort, haloed by a gear, his wrench apparently tightening a bolt. Reproduced widely in textbooks, this image has become synonymous with America in the Machine Age.
On the job at the Empire State, Hine was enthralled by the construction workers he encountered. He photographed men in many trades—carpenters, bricklayers, stone setters, plumbers. But like his contemporaries, Hine was particularly drawn to ironworkers. Hine included twenty-eight photographs from the Empire State job in his 1932 book, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines. Through these spectacular images, workers like the Sky Boy became the iconic figures we know, men “like spiders spinning a fabric of steel against the sky,” as the photographer writes in a caption.
In Hine’s engaged and sympathetic portraits, something revealing and ineffable of the workers’ personalities emerges. Yet while Hine is rightly celebrated as a defender of the individual in the face of industrialization and an overbearing mass culture, his attitudes toward the subjects of his photographs were also complex. In his published images, if the men are identified at all, it is by profession: foundation man, ironworker, pipefitter, hoist engineer. Like journalists of his time, Hine suppresses the identities of his subjects, using these anonymous individuals to illustrate a larger, abstract story—“The Spirit of Industry,” as he writes in the preface to Men at Work, or “the Human Side of The System,” as he calls it elsewhere. Although known as a father of American documentary photography, instead of straightforwardly documenting individuals, in his accompanying texts, Hine self-consciously transformed the workers into symbols.
Since that time, Hine’s photos have given human faces to the grand story of American ascent. His images secured the Empire State Building as the era’s defining symbol of the nation and established the daredevil ironworker as the embodiment of the American character. Taking their cues from him, art historians have viewed his images through this thematic lens. “The hundreds of photographs he took during the construction of the Empire State Building in 1932 [sic] must rank as an American epic,” wrote Beaumont Newhall, curator of photography for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in a 1938 article credited with establishing Hine’s place in the history of American photography. Newhall’s vivid account of Hine at the site describes him, like the workers and the building project itself, in the heroic language still conventional today.
Day by day, floor by floor, he followed the steel work upwards. With the workmen he toasted sandwiches over the forges that heat the rivets; he walked the girders at dizzying heights, carrying over his shoulder not a pocket-size miniature camera, but a five by seven inch view camera complete with tripod, or a four by five Graflex. When he reached, with the workmen, the very pinnacle of the world’s tallest building, he had them swing him out over the microcosm of New York from a crane, so that he might photograph in midair the moment they had all been striving for—the driving of the final rivet at the very top of the so-called mooring mast on the skyscraper.
In subsequent decades, Hine’s Empire State images have been understood as touchstone representations, not only of the structure, or of the workers seen building it, but by extension of American culture as a whole in the years before World War II. In this view, as Kate Sampsell-Willmann writes, “the images are not of men at work; rather they are of Hine’s version of American virtue manifested in the faces of American workers.”
For almost a century, then, Hine’s photographs—and the workers pictured—have been understood in mythic terms. Introducing his 1998 collection of Hine’s Empire State images, Freddy Langer pushes this tendency to its extreme, setting these images in their most dazzling and grandiose rhetorical frame. “Hine shows men in heroic poses, often stripped of their shirts, recalling the heroes depicted in Classical Greek statues,” he begins. “Some stand with steel cables in hand, pulling them taut, as though they were holding the globe in place. Others grapple with wrenches so large that they look as though they could set the clockwork of the earth’s orbit in motion. Those wielding spirit levels look as though they were working to put life straight, while engineers using surveying equipment peer into the future.” On this scale, not only the men, but their labor is rendered mythical. “Men holding welds, whose gas flames splinter into a thousand sparks, repelled by the iron they seek to master, create a veritable fireworks display as though rejoicing in work, the greatest of all celebrations.”
Like Newhall, like almost every other writer on Hine before and since—perhaps even like Lewis Hine himself—Langer views the images in abstract, conceptual terms. Art history, like history in general, has its grand and its personal scales. Writers define their subject with their attention, and peering at Hine’s images, historians have universally seen a myth. Reaching so extravagantly for the largest possible frame of reference—the globe, the Earth’s orbit, life itself—these promoters of the mythic view aim to convey in their prose the millennial achievement of American ascendance, for which the skyscraper is the dominant symbol. But approaching Hine’s images on the mythical scale distorts the content of the images. We do not see what is in the photograph, but instead what the writer imagines the photographs represent.
To illustrate his flamboyant text, Langer reproduces Hine’s photo of the bronze plaque that hangs in the Empire State Building’s lobby. He comments, “This, perhaps more than any other photograph taken by Hine, clearly demonstrates the photographer’s attitude toward the workers.” But Langer’s perspective blinds him to what Hine photographed. He understands “work” and “workers” purely as tokens. His myth-infused language raises the men in these photos above any distasteful individuality and into the realm of metaphysics. Only on this scale is their labor considered significant. Far from a peculiarity of Langer’s, this approach is the common thread in almost all descriptions of Hine’s Empire State photographs. Just as the building itself seems to transcend its commercial function to become symbolic of the American spirit, these men, as well, are understood as ideals incarnated. Seen on the grand scale of American myth, therefore, the images’ very content evaporates. In the eyes of these historians, individual men are replaced by concepts, and Hine’s photographs are not documentation, but conceptual illustration. Thus, noted historian and Yale professor Alan Trachtenberg may conclude, “These are not ‘portraits.’ They are pictures of the work itself.”
Lewis Hine’s handwritten note, “See also photos of men.”
This mythical perspective falsifies Hine’s photographs. It falsifies the men, and it falsifies the history of the Empire State Building. It imagines greatness only in grandeur and so skews both the historical record and the cultural imagination, directing the narrative of American achievement toward concepts and capital and away from labor and lived experience. To understand what Hine photographed beyond the mythic scale, we must look at his work more closely, with greater attentiveness to what we see. Viewed instead on the scale of the individual, rather than as examples of American mythology, Hine’s evocative images are also “snapshots” as I have described, exceptional moments in which an individual appears in the public record. They are portraits of particular workers, unique documents, offering a momentary glimpse into the lives of otherwise invisible people. Indeed, on the back of a working print of Hine’s photo of the Empire State Craftsmanship Awards plaque, now housed at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, we can read Hine’s own handwritten directive: “See also photos of men.”
This is an extraordinary clue, missed until now because its information fell below the threshold of attention for historians interested primarily in concepts, symbols, and myths. Its preservation is one of those accidents that allows individuals to rise to visibility.
While it has been noted that several of Hine’s images identify their subject as a “superior craftsman,” it seems no one has fully appreciated the significance of this description. Hine’s world-renowned images are not abstract portraits of “workers.” They are portraits of specific men. In fact, most of Hine’s portraits show the winners of Certificates of Superior Craftsmanship, the same men whose names appear on the overlooked bronze plaque in the Empire State Building’s lobby.
This remarkable, unnoticed convergence makes it possible to view the Empire State Building from a new perspective, shifting from the grand scale of myth to that of the ordinary worker. Hine’s perceptive portraits put faces to the names on the bronze plaque. And the inconspicuous plaque in the lobby helps to restore names and in some instances personal details to the previously unknown men in Hine’s acclaimed photographs, men who, until now, have been used solely as the embodiments of generalities and abstract ideals.
Seen from this perspective, Hine’s images, the building’s history, and the Empire State Building itself become something different than they are in the grand, symbolic narrative.
As famous as Hine’s Empire State images have become, they have never been seen in this context. Understood now for the first time as the documentation of specific men, the images’ content—what they show—changes. From the mythological perspective, the men’s identities are inconsequential. What matters is what they represent. The grand story achieves its inspiring grandeur at the cost of the reality of the people pictured. The workers’ individuality and the gritty details of their lives and work are sacrificed to the needs of a larger, conceptual narrative. This in part explains why the men’s faces were separated from their names in the first place, leaving them to float anonymously through almost a century of fanciful interpretation.
From the individual perspective, by contrast, who the men are is the essential question, and every attempt to make them represent something else forces us to look away from the reality of their lives toward some airy abstraction. The story of the Empire State Building on the scale of the individual may sacrifice the “grandeur” and rhetorical consistency of the mythological narrative, but it makes visible a previously hidden dimension of lived experience, exposed in accidents and exceptional moments, easily overlooked or dismissed. Yet these fleeting, tentative clues have the power to transform what we see.
There are no archives dedicated to the workers. Information about these ordinary men resides solely in public sources, with all their sprawl, gaps, mistakes, and inconsistencies, or in private collections buried in a descendant’s closet or passed down informally through family lore. For these reasons, I have not been able to identify some men at all. For others, traces of a life emerge piecemeal, in scattered flashes. For a few workers, an isolated recollection or stray reference in a newspaper provides just enough to glimpse the personality of an otherwise unknown man.
