Men at Work, page 8
In 1909, Belle Israels published an article in one of the leading sociological journals of the era, The Survey, until that year known as Charities and The Commons, edited by the brothers Arthur P. and Paul U. Kellogg. Lewis Hine was The Survey’s staff photographer. Belle Israels’s article, “The Way of the Girl,” appeared in The Survey on July 3, 1909, with illustrations by Hine. This is their first documented connection. Three years earlier, however, in 1906, Belle Israels had organized an exhibition on child labor at the New York State Conference of Charities and Correction, an annual forum focused on social work and prison reform. Perhaps instructed by her work with non-English-speaking populations, Israels was an early and savvy adopter of visual, as well as textual, presentation of information. Her exhibit, Perry writes, featured “a hundred photographs, probably taken by Lewis Hine.”
Lewis Wickes Hine had come to the cause of social reform along a different path. A native of Wisconsin, he was born in 1874, three years before Belle Moskowitz, and one year after Al Smith. As a young man, he attended the State Normal School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he met Frank Manny, a progressive pedagogue and student of educational philosopher John Dewey. In 1901, Manny became superintendent of the Felix Adler School of Ethical Culture in Manhattan, and he recruited Lewis Hine to teach there.
The Society for Ethical Culture, founded by Felix Adler in 1876, promoted a vision of social justice and social reform through education and good works. The Society was actively involved in issues of workers’ rights, housing, health, and education on a practical rather than legislative level, and it sponsored clubs, libraries, gymnasiums, job-training programs, employment bureaus, and the first free kindergarten in the United States. Belle Israels and her first husband, Charles Henry Israels, had been involved in the Society for Ethical Culture since the early years of the century. The Society operated another Lower East side Settlement, Madison House, founded in 1898, and located two blocks from the Educational Alliance, where Belle Lindner had worked. By 1907, Belle Lindner Israels was a member of the Ethical Culture Women’s Conference, and she served on its executive committee. It’s possible she had first encountered Louis Hine here, through the Society for Ethical Culture. While the precise origin of their connection cannot be established, Lewis Hine and Belle Lindner both came up in the same small circle of professional social work. In 1914, after the death of her first husband, Belle Israels married Dr. Henry Moskowitz, also a social reformer. Together with Felix Adler, Henry Moskowitz was a cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Eventually, he wrote Al Smith’s 1928 campaign biography, Up from the City Streets.
Lewis Hine taught at the School of Ethical Culture from 1901 to 1908. It was there, as a teacher, that he first took up photography, encouraged by Frank Manny to explore the medium as a pedagogical tool. By 1904, Hine was the school photographer. Beginning in 1906, he published articles and photographs in several journals devoted to pedagogy, as well as in Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman, the magazine of the American Arts and Crafts movement.
As Belle Moskowitz was learning to promote social justice through politics, Hine pursued the Ethical Culture vision as an educator. He received a Master of Pedagogy from New York University in 1905, and he also attended the Columbia School of Social Work, where he met Arthur Kellogg in 1904. Kellogg and his younger brother Paul invited Hine to provide photographs for their journal, and his first great images, documenting immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, were published in Charities and The Commons in June 1908. Belle Lindner Israels’s name appears on the masthead of that issue as a member of the journal’s staff.
Arthur and Paul Kellogg remained Hine’s lifelong friends and supporters. It was under their influence that he became a “sociological photographer,” employing photography to further the cause of social reform. In 1908, Hine left the Ethical Culture School and began to work full-time for the National Child Labor Committee, which Felix Adler had also helped to found. For the next ten years, Hine devoted himself to the cause of ending child labor in the United States, creating his second body of great work, after the Ellis Island immigrant photos of the early 1900s. He traveled around the country, documenting the working and living conditions of the poor, mostly immigrant children employed in mines, textile mills, and factories by unregulated American industry. In Daile Kaplan’s words, “Hine helped redefine the role of photography to encompass social images and reformulate the field of social work, where the emphasis shifted from issues to individuals.” His images were pivotal in helping to create public consensus for the passage of anti-child labor laws.
In 1918, Lewis Hine embarked for Europe with the Red Cross. He spent a year and a half photographing the consequences of World War I on civilian populations in Greece, Serbia, Italy, Belgium, and France. He returned to the US in May 1919. In the immediate postwar period, public attitudes in America toward immigrants, labor, and progressive politics had hardened, and Hine’s previous emphasis seemed incompatible with the new climate. Having spent two decades immersed in the world of social welfare and reform, Hine therefore sought a new direction for his photographic work. In an interview from 1938, he recalled this decision. “In Paris, after the armistice, I thought I had done my share of negative documentation. I wanted to do something positive. So I said to myself, ‘Why not do the worker at work? The man on the job?’”
Hine’s first series of work portraits, “The Railroaders,” featuring engineers and machinists on the Pennsylvania Railroad, was published in Arthur and Paul Kellogg’s journal, by then renamed The Survey Graphic, in October 1921. In his first excitement at discovering work and workers as a subject for his photographic investigation, Hine had written Paul Kellogg, “I have just finished a series of photographs showing the Human Side of The System, (Pennsylvania),—the very best thing I have ever done. The industrial lead I have been following is tremendous and virgin soil.” Paul and Arthur Kellogg were equally enthusiastic. Over the next ten years, The Survey Graphic regularly published these studies of laborers and craftsmen at their jobs in power plants and machine shops, in offices, kitchens, and stores. Like the portraits Hine would later make of Empire State workers, these images feature ordinary men and women and explore the physical relationship between the worker and the work, the exchange between labor and life. Hine emphasizes expressions of concentration. He focuses on arms and hands, on the engagement with tools and machines, and the effect these have on the bodies and faces of those who tend and direct them. The work portraits include some of Hine’s most widely reproduced images and represent his third body of historically significant photographic documentation.
No letter of employment has surfaced to prove it, but the circumstantial evidence is compelling that, in 1930, when she needed a photographer to publicize the construction of the Empire State Building, Belle Moskowitz turned to someone she had known and trusted since her early days as a social reformer. Unlike the building’s architect or its corporate directors, Belle Moskowitz would have known Hine and seen his work portraits, published in The Survey Graphic. She would have known he was ideally suited to the task. Indeed, Hine’s previous work portraits may have served as a model for his images of the Empire State’s construction workers. Five years earlier, in 1925, Hine had photographed a pair of riveters, a lone ironworker walking a beam, and a young ironworker gleefully “riding the ball” for an article in The American Magazine, entitled “It’s a Tough Job, but Somebody’s Got to Swing It,” an early contribution to the heroic depiction of skyscraper workers. In Belle Moskowitz, Hine had a powerful ally and supporter, and the early fame of his Empire State images undoubtedly derives in part from her effectiveness as a publicist. As one newspaper comic joked, “Thanks to its engineering, the Empire State Building has 102 stories in it. And thanks to its press agent, it has had 1,002 stories about it.”
Critics have suggested that the Empire State portraits represent a break in Hine’s social engagement, showing him celebrating corporate power rather than critiquing it. But the portraits themselves show little of this, focused as they are on individual men and their labor. Instead, in the relationship between Hine and Moskowitz, his employer, we see a divergence in the contexts that give meaning to the photographs, a divergence between how Lewis Hine understood his work and how Belle Moskowitz and Publicity Associates made use of it. I believe the deployment of these images to further a corporate message should be attributed to Belle Moskowitz, not confused with Hine’s artistic or sociological goal. While she may have shared Hine’s progressive political orientation, nevertheless, as the Empire State’s director of publicity, Moskowitz had more practical requirements for the photographs. Moskowitz used Hine’s individual portraits extensively, both during construction and after the opening, to create a heroic, Everyman image for the building and its workers—for example, in the souvenir pamphlet mentioned by Earl Sparling in his “dialogue” with an ironworker.
Without documentation, it is impossible to know the precise terms of Hine’s employment. The only surviving source is a letter on the stationary of Empire State Inc. signed by Belle Moskowitz’s son, Josef Israels II, naming Hine the building’s official photographer and granting him unfettered access to the construction site. Yet Hine’s hiring coincided with the selection of Craftsmanship Award winners, who were named in two groups during the summer and fall of 1930. Further, Hine’s photos clearly demonstrate that part of his job was specifically to create portraits of these men. Hine photographed all the men in the first group of Craftsmanship Award winners, who were honored at a ceremony held on the fourth floor of the unfinished building on October 8, 1930. He produced portraits of at least half of the sixteen winners in the second group, who received their awards at a similar ceremony on February 11, 1931. Publicity Associates integrated these photos in its larger campaign to publicize and characterize the Empire State Building as the epitome of American achievement. Whatever Hine may have thought he was photographing, and whatever sociological interest Belle Moskowitz may have had in representing working men, the images—these probing impressions of the men’s faces—were delivered as work for hire, and as such, they were props in the service of Moskowitz’s expansive publicity campaign.
Now, however, almost one hundred years later, the use of the men’s faces for publicity counts as another accident of attention, which helps restore the forgotten connections. During construction, Belle Moskowitz and Publicity Associates published an internal newsletter, circulated among the managers of the project. Called Empire Statements, the newsletter ran for six undated issues. Copies are in the scrapbooks collected by Empire State Inc. and held at the Avery Library archive. A page in volume 1, no. 2, published before October 1930, features six of Hine’s portraits of the Craftsmanship Award winners. This confirms the identities of five more men whose names appear on the commemorative plaque in the building’s lobby. Strangely, one man featured in the newsletter, although named an award winner and photographed by Hine, later disappeared. Thirty-two names are engraved on the plaque. Apparently, however, there were thirty-three award winners.
Steven or Stephen Coons, structural ironworker, presents a mystery. His name and portrait are included in Empire Statements, and he is listed among the award winners in press releases (where his last name, however, is garbled into “Orens”). Additionally, he can be seen standing next to a hat-waving Al Smith in a photo syndicated in numerous newspapers in October 1930 to publicize the first Craftsmanship Award ceremony. However, his name does not appear on the bronze plaque in the Empire State Building’s lobby.
Indeed, quite peculiarly considering the attention paid to ironworkers in the press, the plaque does not recognize any structural ironworkers at all. It is not possible to determine whether Coons in fact received the award, or whether he was excluded for some reason after being chosen. Newspaper accounts fluctuate between announcing sixteen or seventeen names belonging to the first group of award winners in October 1930. The New York Times published both figures: seventeen on October 8, 1930, reflecting the names in the press release and including Coons, and sixteen on October 9, 1930, excluding Coons, listing the men recognized at the ceremony itself.
Empire Statements, volume 1, no. 2.
Steven or Stephen Coons, structural ironworker.
“One of the Boys.” Steven Coons in white hat and shirt stands next to Al Smith, bottom center, October 26, 1930.
In Hine’s 1930 photo, Coons is forty-seven years old. He lived with his wife, Margaret, and two teenage children, Iroquois and Hugh, on Tenth Avenue in Brooklyn. His parents were both born in Pennsylvania. The name of his son indicates Native American ancestry, at least on his wife’s side of the family, as subsequent documents confirm.
Shortly after Steven or Stephen Coons appears and disappears as a winner of an Empire State Craftsmanship Award, tragedy struck the family. On August 19, 1931, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that Margaret Coons, wife of Stephen A. Coons, died suddenly at the home of her brother, Iroquois Irwin, where she had gone “to recuperate from a stroke she suffered recently.” One year later, on September 9, 1932, the older son, Iroquois Coons, would also die. By 1940, Stephen, then fifty-nine, and his son Hugh, twenty-five, are living together in Millville, New Jersey. Stephen is still an ironworker. His 1942 draft registration card shows the same residence. By this time, however, at age sixty-one or sixty-two, Stephen is unemployed. His death certificate gives his birth date as September 12, 1880. He died of carcinoma of the liver on July 26, 1955. He is buried at Oakwood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia.
A similar biographical sketch is possible for Frank A. Moeglin, sheet metal worker, another man featured in Belle Moskowitz’s Empire Statements.
Frank A. Moeglin, sheet metal worker.
He appears at age twenty-one in the 1910 census, living in Canton Township, Stark County, Ohio. He is the middle child of Elizabeth Moeglin, forty-eight, a native of Indiana. The household also includes an older son and a daughter. Frank’s occupation is “catcher” at a rolling mill; his brother is “rougher” at the same mill. Their sister, Effie, is a “watch timer” at the water works.
A notice in The Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, dated June 1, 1916, may give a clue to his activities at the time. The article reads: “All sheet metal workers in Richmond have been invited to attend the meeting of the newly organized Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers’ union at the Socialist Hall tonight.” Charter members of the newly formed union, which would become Local No. 192, included Frank Moeglin.
On July 7, 1919, Frank A. Moeglin, then in the US Navy, married Anna C. Strack. He had enlisted in May 1917 and served as a coppersmith aboard the USS Von Steuben from September 1917 until his discharge two years later. After World War I, the Moeglins settled in Brooklyn, where Frank pursued his profession as a sheet metal worker. In the portrait by Lewis Hine, Frank Moeglin is forty-one years old. He died three years later, on May 24, 1934, though the cause of death is unknown. An article in the November 14, 1934, edition of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle notes a memorial service, held at the VFW Porter Post, to honor “departed Comrades.” Frank Moeglin is buried at Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Of the six men named in Empire Statements, Vladimir Kozloff is the best documented in public sources. His professional history intersects with a number of other strands of American social and labor history, which gives us a more detailed, if still highly filtered, portrait of the man.
Vladimir Kozloff’s naturalization papers, issued in 1926, indicate he was born on July 15, 1893, in Kamen, Russia. He writes that he has resided in the US since 1912, and in New York since April 1, 1919. One peculiarity of his naturalization application concerns his name. In addition to Vladimir Kozloff, he writes, he is “also known as Vladimir Koziol.” It’s possible Kozloff had already visited the US prior to his arrival as an immigrant. At Ellis Island, there is a 1910 ship’s manifest with a “Wladimir Koziol” from “Biensnice, Wolhyn, Russia” that matches details in other documents. Wolhyn means the Volhynia Gubernia district, then part of the Russian Empire, now in the Ukraine. There is no town, “Biensnice.” There is also no Kamen, Russia. But there is a Kamin Kashirsky, part of the Volhynia Gubernia, and about 120 miles away, lies a small town called Berezhnitsa.
Another manifest for the same ship, dated October 31, 1912, two years later, also shows the arrival of “Wladimir Koziol,” age nineteen, from Kamen, Russia. There are discrepancies between the two documents and no way to confirm whether this is the same man.
Kozloff comes into sharper focus briefly on June 15, 1917. A Vladimir Koziol, born in Kamen, Pinsk, Russia on the correct birthdate, registers for the draft. By this time, he is living in Bath, Maine, at 209 Water Street, where he works for the Texas Shipbuilding Co. as a reamer, someone who drills holes in the steel plates. Then he disappears again. I was unable to find other genealogical documents for this man until the 1940 federal census. There, Vladimir Kozloff, now forty-six, is living on Avenue A at the intersection of Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, with Charlson or Charlton Schrechovich. Both men are housewreckers. In 1942, Kozloff again registers for the draft. His employer is Bethlehem Steel, and he works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He’s five feet eleven, with brown hair and brown eyes. By the 1950 census, he had resumed work as a demolition laborer, but by this time he has married. He lived on North Eighth Street, Brooklyn, with his wife Mary, an immigrant from Czechoslovakia. Vladimir Kozloff died on August 10, 1956, age sixty-five, and is buried in Saint Vladimir’s Russian Orthodox Cemetery, Jackson, New Jersey. His grave is viewable online.
