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Test – The Great Depression Era: There's no way like the American Way (1937) [CA v1.2]
"At the Time of the Louisville Flood" (Kentucky), by Margaret Bourke-White February 15, 1937 issue of Life magazine Flood victims lined up to get food and clothing from Red Cross relief station [source] Note : il est évident qu'il n'était pas attendu, même en Devoir Maison, un travail aussi développé. La quasi totalité des informations (1 re et 2ème parties) figurent dans les copies corrigées. La 3 ème partie – non attendue - montre qu'il était possible d'approfondir l'analyse critique.
Introduction This document packs a lot of star power: - it was published in Life, one of the most famous news magazine of the 20th c. with his strong emphasis on photojournalism1. 1
Archibald MacLeish, letter to Henry Luce (29th June, 1936): "The great revolution of journalism are not revolutions in public opinion, but revolutions in the way in which public opinion is formed. The greatest of these, a revolution greater even than of the printing press, is the revolution of the camera. […] Photographs have been used as
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- Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) was one of the first successful woman photojournalists. In 1936, she joined Life staff and her work was featured on its first front-cover. Life sent Bourke-White directly to Louisville when she finished photographing president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second inauguration on January 20, 1937. She came to Louisville on the last plane to land here until the flood waters receded in February. - it's one of the most iconic photography in U.S. history 2 : “that picture has, for generations, been the Great Depression photo, somehow distilling in one frame the anguish that defined the economic cataclysm"3. We are going to show that there is more to this than meets the eye.
1.
Glamorizing the American Dream
1.1. •
A large billboard dominates the scene. The advertisement shows a happy white family, with a proudly patriotic slogan: “there’s no way like the American Way”.
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It's promoting 1930s family values and gender roles: father is driving and mother is happily sitting next to him with makeup decorating her slender face. The children share the back seat of the automobile with their small sized dog who is happily sticking his head out of the window. The family is all smiles and wealthy looking (clothes, new car...).
1.2.
The American Way of Life
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The "pursuit of happiness" (1776) is part of the American Dream.
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The ad wasn't insincere: despite the grueling recession and the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) steep drop, U.S. GDP per capita was still at the world top.
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Even if there was some down pressure on salaries during the Great Depression, prices were falling even quicker. If you still got a job (but millions were on the dole in 1937) your real standard of living had been rising since the stock market crash!
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Given the merry hilly landscape in the background, they may have been heading for a week-end or some holidays.
1.3.
2 3
The Archetypical All-American Family
The First Consumer Society
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During the Roaring Twenties, the U.S. became the first consumer society in human history (in Europe and France, it won't happen until the 1950s).
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Their car is a brand new model (still shining). The car shown may be a Ford Tudor Sedan 1936.
illustrations, but the camera no longer illustrates. The camera tells. The camera shall take its place as the greatest and by all measurements the most convincing reporter of contemporary life". See: There's No Place Like America Today, 1975; Washington D.C. ; Obama driving ; Obama (again) http://life.time.com/behind-the-picture/the-american-way-photos-from-the-great-ohio-river-flood-of-1937/
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•
The U.S.A. became the first "nation on wheels" in the 1920s and 1930s with millions of cars, roads, parkings, drive-ins... thanks to Henry Ford's affordable prices (stemming from the unparalleled efficiency of the assembly line). There was a Ford Factory in West Louisville in 1937.
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Of course, a recent car was still then a big-ticket item: another proof of the sound financial situation of this family during the Great Depression period.
2.
The Dark Side of the American Dream?
2.1.
One of the Worst Natural Disaster in U.S. History
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In late January and February 1937, 19 inches (48 cm) of rain fell during a month of heavy rain. It was the "Great Flood of '37".
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Louisville was the hardest hit city along the Ohio River, where light and water services failed. Therefore most of the people standing in line have a bottle or some kind of vessel to fill.
Illustration 1: Flood Victim Paddling a Boat Made of Washtubs, Louisville, 1937 Artist: Margaret Bourke-White [src] Video: Man Against the River (1937) •
Almost 70 percent of the city was under water, and 175,000 residents were forced to leave their homes. The Weather Bureau reported that total
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flood damage for the entire state of Kentucky was $250 million, which was an incredible sum in 1937. •
On the photography, some of the shoes are quite dirty and the street seems somewhat littered with flood's leftovers.
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Federal and state resources were strained to aid recovery, so the American Red Cross came to the rescue. The ARC was a humanitarian organization that provided emergency assistance, disaster relief and education inside the United States.
2.2. •
It was still the Great Depression era. The financial crash of 1929 at the New York Stock Exchange in Wall Street became an economic crisis of epic proportions: the banking system collapsed, industrial production plummeted and real gross domestic product (GDP) fell 30 percent. Some of the people, here, are probably blue-collar workers (the first three men on the right side or the man in a dirty trouser, for example) and their well-worn clothes don't exude prosperity.
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But beware of over-interpreting the document. By 1936, the main economic indicators had regained the levels of the late 1920s, except for unemployment, which remained high at 17% (although this was considerably lower than the 25% unemployment rate seen in 1933). In the spring of 1937, American industrial production even exceeded 4 that of 1929. We have here some firmly middle-class black Americans: women in fur coats (it's a freezing winter) and at least one man (in the middle) seemingly wearing a three-piece suit with a tie and a wool coat.
2.3.
4 5 6
A Tanked Economy?
Being Black in a Jim Crow Laws State
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In 1860, slaves composed 19.5% of Kentucky's population (concentrated in the city of Louisville). Kentucky was a border state5 in the American Civil War (1861-1865) and stayed in the Union but6, like in the Deep South, Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation were passed later.
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In 1932, Kentucky's residential segregation was renewed. It explain why the flood refugees lining up at 13th & Broadway are probably 100% black Americans (a white boy may be standing on the left side):
Roosevelt's economic policy was going to plunge the nation in recession in 1938. Kentucky was the birthplace of President Abraham Lincoln and his southern counterpart, Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Kentucky did not ratify the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment about slavery until 1976.
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Illustration 2: Computer Colorized [src] •
Discrimination against the black American carried a disproportionate share of the Great Depression burden. By 1932, black unemployment reached approximately 50%.
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3.
Propaganda for the Mass Society
Advertisements and photographies, the modern mass media of the 1930s, struggled for the mind of the common man.
3.1.
Big Business against the New Deal
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In the late 1930s, the National Association of Manufacturers (founded in 1895) used one of the earliest versions of a modern multi-faceted public relations campaign to promote the benefits of capitalism and to combat the policies of president Roosevelt.
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At the time, 60,000 of these billboards were placed all over the country by the NAM as a part of an optimism campaign (on our picture, they are looking forward to a radiant future) to discredit the need for U.S. president Roosevelt’s second New Deal (1935-38) program (the Wagner Act, the Works Progress Administration relief program, the Social Security Act...):
Illustration 3: Birmingham, Alabama, February, 1937 [src] •
3.2. •
Kentucky joined most other southern states in voting almost exclusively Democratic from the Civil War through World War II. At the time of the flood, Louisville's mayor was a democrat. So, it's interesting to see this ad in a mostly black neighborhood. One man is, in fact, looking at the billboard.
Bourke-White: Manipulative Art? A Leftist Bias: with other left-wing artists such as Stuart Davis, Rockwell Kent, and William Gropper, Bourke-White was a member of the American Artists' Congress: it supported state-funding of the arts and fought discrimination against black Americans. Bourke-White also subscribed to the Daily Worker and was a member of several Communist Party front
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organizations. She wasn't shy about her art purpose7.
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A Manipulative Art Work?: the image construction is instantly and clearly meant to be ironic. The family on the billboard is joyful and the colors are light, being of a happier tone. The line of black Americans has a darker and sadder tone of color. The car’s occupants are oblivious to the gathered people, and are about to, figuratively, run them over. The stark contrast has caused the photo to be used repeatedly to “comment on inequality, poverty, and deprivation [and racism]”. It seems to perfectly fit Roosevelt's second inaugural address (1937): ‘I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished’.
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Margaret Bourke-White had, even at the time, a reputation of staging photographs: "She was in charge of everything, manipulating people and telling them where to sit and where to look and what not. She was very adept at being able to direct people. She was almost like a motion picture director"8.
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Life published a half-dozen Bourke-White photos from Louisville in the February 15, 1937 issue (some others are still unpublished). Two photos are depicting nearly the same waiting queue (and billboard): we clearly see people smiling and joking at the camera.
"As the echoes of the old debate - is photography an art? - die away, a new and infinitely more important question arises. To what extent are photographers becoming aware of the social scene and how significantly are their photographs portraying it? The major control is the photographer's point of view. How alive is he? Does he know what is happening in the world? How sensitive has he become during the course of his own photographic development to the world-shaking changes in the social scene about him?" (Margaret Bourke-White, Photographing This World, The Nation, 19th February, 1936). Erskine Caldwell, interviewed by Vicki Goldberg about working with Margaret Bourke-White on You Have Seen Their Faces (12th January, 1982).
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Illustration 4: Louisville Flood, Red Cross Relief Station, 1937 - Artist: Margaret Bourke-White [src]
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Illustration 5: Black Americans in Louisville, Kentucky, seek food and clothing from a relief station in the aftermath of flooding that devastated the city in 1937 – Artist: Margaret Bourke-White [src]
Conclusion To conclude, let's quote a professional photographer about this iconic picture: "I was struck by how fast we read meanings into an image, meanings which are beyond the information actually conveyed by the picture. In the case of the Louisville flood […], we see a queue of black people standing in line for something. We do not know what exactly they are waiting for. […] Because they are standing in line, and because they are black, we come to view them as being "poor". What emerges is an immediate association of those that are privileged (the white people in the car in the billboard) and the poor (the black people standing in line). But look again at the picture, and you will observe that most of those folks are actually very well attired and do not give off the impression of being "poor"9.
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Meyer, Pedro, "There is no Way Like the American Way", Camera Works, December 1999 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/essays/zonezero/14.htm. From the blurb: "Pedro Meyer's photographs are found in the collections of more than 40 major museums throughout the world".
