Men at Work, page 6
Each of these portraits therefore gives a face to a name on the bronze plaque in the Empire State’s lobby. For figures who have been used symbolically for so long, even this moment of identification is significant. At the most basic level, associating a name and a face helps to focus the question of a man’s distinctive life. Simply asking this question opens a new dimension in the history of these photos—new not because it was never there before, but because it was never considered worthy of historical attention. The men in their actual lives are too “ordinary.” And their lives as individuals too often contradict the heroic, mythological depiction of them as gods, as “devil-may-care” cowboys who work for the love of adventure, not because it is their job. Investigating the history of these men as individuals, we find them struggling to make a living, to support their families, to navigate the contentious, sometimes violent relationship between labor and management that marked the building trades in the first half of the twentieth century. We find them confronted by the irresistible transformation of their jobs by machinery, struggling to be craftsmen in the Machine Age. Most decisively, from a historical perspective, we find the men confined by the views of them held by the upper and educated classes, the pen-wielding classes, which saw and defined them, as we have seen, according to racist, classist prejudices and the needs of national boosterism.
But where do we find these men as individuals, and what can we know of them? Construction workers frequently led itinerant lives, in this way escaping the coarse grain of official attention. Employment records from the era are rarely preserved, and the private lives of ordinary people are sparsely documented. The Great Depression induced many families to relocate in search of improved prospects or cheaper housing. Family names change through the generations. With no other starting point, the only way I could locate the men who built the Empire State Building was to follow the ninety-year-old paper trail—the brief appearances dispersed in newspapers, genealogical databases, military and union records, all the official forms and documents, the stray references and random “snapshots,” which momentarily catch ordinary people as they pass through daily life. Yet here I encountered another barrier, the standardization of these forms, their rampant inaccuracies and inherent ambiguities. Even with better access to these sources than has ever been possible before, still, there are many different degrees of “identification.” In rare instances, an identification provides a glimpse sharp enough to lead up to the present day, where a man survives in living memory. In other cases, associating a face and a name will be all I can do. Ordinary people surface only briefly in the public record before sinking back into obscurity. Undoubtedly, someone, somewhere, could once have recognized each of the men in Hine’s portraits, a relative or descendant. But that knowledge is private and seldom survives more than a generation or two. In some cases, the outlines of a man’s life emerge from the documents. Most identifications quickly trail off into mystery.
In each case, however, the paper trail leads us back to Lewis Hine’s portraits, though now seen through a changed lens. No longer abstract or solely artistic impressions, Hine’s photographs are the most explicit and expressive surviving documentation of these workers. Even in the absence of further information, when seen as the portrait of a specific individual, Hine’s images emerge as profound studies of each man’s character.
Let’s begin with the portrait of carpenter Matthew McKean.
Matthew M. McKean’s identity in Hine’s portrait is confirmed by an inscription on the back of a working print. But his identity in the historical record is merely a collection of tantalizing hints. A Matthew McKean, carpenter, submitted a Declaration of Intention to become a US citizen on January 22, 1942. According to this document, he was born on September 8, 1882, in Irvine, North Ayrshire, Scotland, and arrived at Ellis Island from Glasgow aboard the SS Columbia on May 7, 1923. The ship’s manifest, which can be found in the Ellis Island database, corroborates these details. At the time of his arrival, this Matthew McKean had been married for eleven years to a woman named Elizabeth (the Declaration of Intention contains the typo, “Eliabeth”). But Elizabeth and the couple’s two children remained in Scotland and never emigrated. Instead, Matthew traveled with another man, Joseph McKean, likely his brother. Both men were “joiners” or carpenters. They were headed for the home of a cousin, John Raeside, a plasterer, likewise born in Irvine, Scotland, who had emigrated a decade earlier, in 1913. Joseph McKean appears to have returned to Scotland in the 1930s, and he died there in 1958. But Matthew remained in the US. A draft registration card, also from 1942, confirms that Matthew Methieson McKean lived at 11 West 65th Street in Manhattan and specifies that he was employed by Beekman Builders, Inc. A Social Security claim provides his date of death, November 14, 1946. The only other personal details these documents contain is that he had varicose veins and a tattoo on his left forearm.
Matthew M. McKean, carpenter.
If this is the right man—and I could find no one else with this name whose profile seemed to fit—Matthew M. McKean would be forty-eight in Hine’s portrait. His head is cocked slightly to one side. He wears a large, cloth cap that accentuates the delicacy of his features. Hine captures him bent slightly forward. His lips are compressed, and he gazes intently but softly beyond the frame. At the very center of the portrait, Hine emphasizes the sharp crease that runs down Matthew McKean’s cheek to his jawline, care etched into his face. If these few details are all we can learn of the man who received the Empire State Craftsmanship Award for carpentry, they still add a poignant depth to a name on the bronze plaque.
For the rock driller Michael Tierney, instead of tantalizing hints, the public record presents a bewildering abundance of information, none of it specific enough to provide certainty that I’ve found the right man.
A Michael Tierney is listed as a boarder at a rooming house on 184 East Ninety-Sixth Street, Manhattan, in the 1930 US census. He’s thirty-seven years old, an immigrant from the Irish Free State, who arrived in the US in 1909. He is employed as a “laborer” for “construction,” which, while too vague to pinpoint him as the man in Hine’s photo, distinguishes him from the seventy-seven other Michael Tierneys who lived in the New York City area at the time and who appear in the US census. The other Michael Tierneys are policemen, firemen, railroad men; there is an attorney, a supervisor at the Federal Reserve Bank.
According to the records at Ellis Island, only one Michael Tierney immigrated in 1909. On September 22, a twenty-one-year-old, single man arrived from Cootehill, Ireland, aboard the ship Caronia. This would make him forty-two in 1930, not thirty-seven as stated in the census, a discrepancy not unusual in genealogical records, but casting doubt on the identification. More than 140 other Michael Tierneys arrived in the years surrounding 1909. One emigrated in 1907 from Meelish, Ireland, age twenty-two; another on December 8, from Kilmacreeva aboard the Lusitania. In 1908, a twenty-one-year-old Michael Tierney, a laborer from Shinrone, Ireland, arrived with his mother, Annie, and another arrived on the ship Saxonia from Dunmore, Ireland, on May 28, 1908. Any or none of these could be the man in Hine’s photo.
In July 1934, a Michael Tierney, former construction worker, caught the eye of a journalist, and a brief interview with him appeared in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “Mike was a steamfitter before the Big Blow,” the article says, referring to the 1929 stock market crash. Like many men in those first, desperate years, this Michael Tierney took to selling apples on the street. “He has made a real go of the apple business, likes it better than fitting pipes—although it doesn’t pay nearly as well. ‘But,’ he says, ‘it gives you more time to study people—and by the way, you’d be surprised to know the people I sell apples to.’”
Is this the right man? Steam fitting is a construction trade distinct from rock drilling. But construction workers often changed jobs, and journalists have been known to get their details wrong before. Without more specific information, it’s impossible to know if this is the man who appears in Lewis Hine’s photograph and who won an Empire State Craftsmanship Award. With no other definite information to go on, Hine’s portrait of Michael Tierney is the best surviving documentation.
The portrait of Tierney at his job shows him leaning on his drill, excavating the pit, which extended forty feet below street level, in which the foundations for the Empire State Building were laid. In Men at Work, Hine published a work photo almost identical to this one, but showing a different rock driller. Tierney’s portrait and his work portrait are reunited here for the first time. These were probably among the earliest photographs Hine took at the construction site. General excavation commenced on January 22, 1930, and was completed on March 17, the day before erection of the steel frame began. Although their work was extremely hazardous, excavators were among the lowest-paid workers on the site, earning just over one dollar an hour. In the work portraits, they operate without goggles or ear protection and without a mask. Yet Hine’s formal portrait of Michael Tierney shows a man with a surprisingly thoughtful, vulnerable expression gazing pensively past the frame of the photo. Dust cakes his hair and eyelashes.
Michael Tierney, rock driller.
Although I have not been able to identify Michael Tierney further, his identity in Hine’s photo was never really a mystery. Bearing the title Foundation Men, this portrait of Michael Tierney appears on the first page of Hine’s Men at Work. The photographer provides this caption: “Their noisy pneumatic drills break up the bed rock where a new building is to stand. They work in a haze of rock dust which they know will shorten their lives. The man above received an award for craftsmanship.”
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For anyone examining Hine’s 1932 book, the name of the award-winning rock driller should have been easy to deduce. It was engraved on a plaque in the building’s lobby. Yet in reading the images with this caption, critics have instead sought their symbolic content. For Kate Sampsell-Willmann, in her fine study, Lewis Hine as Social Critic, the “nameless, and therefore abstract ‘foundation’ man was not only digging the foundation of a building; his virtue assured the foundation of American society in such uncertain times.” Sampsell-Willmann discerns a larger, thematic message in Hine’s decision to begin his book with this portrait. “These men are the true ‘spirit of industry,’ not the owners, the mortgagors, or the capitalists.” Analyzing the portrait, she concludes, “Hine clearly appealed to the American mystical belief in the inherent worthiness of work as an end in itself.”
James P. Kerr, stone setter.
Because she views the photograph as symbolic, Sampsell-Willmann misses the specific information Hine provided in his caption. Michael Tierney is not nameless or abstract, nor was his work an end in itself. He was a man, most likely an Irish immigrant, who performed a dangerous, life-threatening job to earn a living, one of three hundred excavators who labored in alternating day and night shifts to complete the removal of nine thousand cubic yards of earth and 17,398 cubic yards of rock in less than eight weeks. But here, as elsewhere, the worker’s individual identity has been sacrificed to the needs of a generalized, theoretical narrative. Tierney’s supposed anonymity is the prerequisite for his use as a symbol.
My inability to identify Michael Tierney more precisely in the historical record therefore calls attention to a gap in our knowledge. Highlighting this gap is fundamentally distinct from ignoring it or glossing over it with conceptual analysis or mythology. Again and again, critics will gaze at these “documentary” images and see something abstract, without questioning their own vision, as if it were natural to ignore the photograph’s manifest content, natural to see the representation of an idea, not the likeness of a man. In this way, the tension between the documentary and mythical dimensions in Hine’s photograph collapses, and with it the space within which the worker might appear as an individual. The assumption of anonymity thus reinforces the larger cultural preference for nameless workers and for rendering invisible the personal cost of their labor. In fact, Michael Tierney is not anonymous. We just don’t know much about him.
Sometimes, identifying a man in the public record yields an oblique glance at the circumstances of his life.
Stone setter James Patrick Kerr was twenty-two years old in 1930, when Lewis Hine photographed him. He lived at 583 Tenth Avenue, Manhattan, in a rented apartment he shared with his mother, Mary King, and his sister, also named Mary. Mrs. King, of Irish ancestry, was a homemaker; Mary was an operator for the telephone company. The family paid seventeen dollars a month for their flat. By this standard, James made a good living as long as he had a job. According to the contract for the Contracting Stone Setters Association and the Journeyman Stone Masons and Setters Union, the wage for a stone setter in 1930 was $1.92½ per hour, or $15.40 a day.
Public records allow me to assemble a brief sketch of James Kerr’s family history. In 1910, the family had lived around the corner, on West Fifty-Third Street, Manhattan. The father, Patrick Kerr, then twenty-three years old, had immigrated in 1890. Although the 1910 census gives his birthplace as Scotland, an 1890 ship’s manifest shows Patrick Kerr, age three, departing Londonderry, Northern Ireland, with three other children younger than ten and no apparent adult guardian, aboard the Ethiopia. They arrived in New York on September 30, 1890. In the 1910 census, Patrick J. Kerr’s profession is bricklayer. He was killed in a street accident on February 9, 1911, when his son James was three. By 1920, Patrick’s widow, Mary Kerr, had remarried. Her new husband, Joseph King, was a twenty-eight-year-old dock laborer. With her new husband, Mary and her two children moved to the apartment on Tenth Avenue where they remained through James’s employment at the Empire State Building, ten years later. A 1927 photo in the collection of the New York Public Library shows the back of the five-story brick tenement building in which they lived. Their apartment would have been filled with the sound of building construction. The entire block east of the Kerr’s home was being demolished to make room for the thirty-five-story American Women’s Association Building, a project financed by Anne Morgan, daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan, who devoted much of her inheritance to improving the lives of working-class women. That building opened in 1929, just as demolition work on the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street began, clearing the ground for construction of the Empire State Building.
Lewis Hine made several portraits of James Kerr. In some, he demonstrates an element of his job, using a level to ensure that the limestone blocks that form the Empire State’s facade stand straight. In another, he relaxes on the scaffold suspended outside the building, called a “duck walk,” leaning inward against a steel column. His arm rests on a pressed aluminum spandrel panel, installed below an empty window opening. He holds his cap in his hand and offers the camera a shy smile.
The identification of a worker is itself a window onto the culture beyond, which sometimes elucidates additional pressures that shaped how the men were seen. For some reason, the award of a Certificate of Superior Craftsmanship to bricklayer Charles E. Sexton provoked the ire of Maurice Heaton, a professor of fine arts at Teachers College, Columbia University. In the article “Who Is the Craftsman?” published in the 1938 edition of Art Education Today, Professor Heaton felt moved to question whether a bricklayer deserved the title of “craftsman” at all. According to Heaton, Sexton “did his job well, conscientiously, with an easy and even beautiful swing; just fast enough to please both the boss and his union. He represents labor at its best. He is happy at his work, but nobody can point to his brickwork between the thirty-third and thirty-fourth stories and feel that he has done something fine.” In the professor’s view, within the realm of building construction, the title of craftsman should be reserved solely for architects or builders, not tradesmen. “He is not given a chance to develop his imagination, and there you are. From a creative and artistic point of view carpenters, masons, and mechanics are not craftsmen.” It’s not clear how Heaton happened upon Charles E. Sexton’s name, nor why he selected bricklaying among the professions represented on the Empire State Building plaque to illustrate his opinions regarding craftsmanship.
In contrast to Heaton, Lewis Hine was particularly drawn to Charles E. Sexton. Hine made numerous portraits of him, and the prints frequently have descriptive notes on the back, for example, “Charlie Sexton. Craftsman Bricklayer on the Empire State Building.”
Charles Eugene Sexton was born in Albany, New York, on August 2, 1873, to parents also born in New York. His father, Eugene, was a mason. In 1900, Charles married Emilie Urbach, a German immigrant who had arrived in the US in 1883. Initially the couple lived in the working-class Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, like many of Empire State’s other workers, but by 1920, they and their four daughters had left Manhattan for Bay Ridge Avenue, Brooklyn. Charles was by then a bricklaying foreman. His 1918 draft registration specifies that he is superintendent of building construction for a contractor located on East Forty-Second Street. By 1925, the Sextons had relocated to Putnam Valley, New York, where they remained for the rest of their lives. Charles Sexton built a family compound on Tinker Hill in Adams Corners, about fifty miles north of the Empire State Building. In the 1930 census, taken on April 10, 1930, five months before he received his Craftsmanship Award, Sexton and his wife, Emilie, lived with a married daughter and her husband in a home they owned worth $10,000. Charles Sexton seems to have been a respected neighbor. Alone among the Empire State craftsmen, as far as I have been able to determine, his award received notice in his hometown paper. The Haverstraw-Rockland County Times observed simply that he “received a gold medal and a certificate of excellence for work done on the new Empire State Building.” Charles Sexton was fifty-seven years old when Lewis Hine photographed him at the construction site. He died at age seventy-three on April 4, 1947.
