The Publisher (45 page)

Instead
Life
used the techniques of documentary photography for a very different purpose. It rejected the critical view of social reality that characterized FSA photography and aspired instead to be “likable,” affirming, enjoyable. “I think
Life
, like the United States, was not … chauvinistic,” Longwell said. “It liked people, it liked the United States…. [I]f it was against something it was against it in a forthright manner. But it was a huge and amiable magazine. It—well, we liked dogs, we liked mountains, we liked scenery, we liked history, … we liked education, we thought art was fine.” To
Life
, as to Luce, the United
States was not a nation dominated by difference, division, and exclusion. It was a single society that, however diverse, constituted a distinctively American community of shared values and hopes. That image was visible both in the tone and the look of the magazine, and in the topics it chose to explore. In the post–World War II era
Life
became, among other things, the celebratory face of the great middle class and its new suburban civilization. In its first years, however, the magazine focused more often on the extremes of society—the rich and powerful on the one hand, and some of the same people of modest means that the FSA photographers recorded. It did so, however, not to suggest difference but to affirm the essential cultural unity of the American people.
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The power of
Life’s
affirmative, inclusive vision could be seen in the magazine’s very first issue—in its cover story about workers on the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. Its subjects were people so poor that they could not even afford the modest rents in the tidy new settlement that the government had built to accommodate them. Many workers had moved instead into a series of makeshift shantytowns, which filled up quickly, MacLeish wrote, with “barkeeps, quack doctors, hash dispensers, radio mechanics, filling station operators, and light-roving ladies”—an army of the unemployed moving to the empty plains for New Deal jobs. The men and women who lived there were, of course, more prosperous than the truly down-and-out denizens of much documentary photography. They had jobs, places to live (however crude and temporary), and at least some money to spend. But they were fragile in their security—employed on a public-works program of limited duration, living far from their homes and often separated from families that many of them were struggling to support from afar. Nevertheless the
Life
portrait of this rough-and-tumble community of the marginal was entirely friendly and lighthearted. “Franklin Roosevelt Has a Wild West,” the peppy title to the feature announced. The opening photograph of a shantytown was taken from the air, blurring the shabbiness and squalor that a closer look would provide. Residents were photographed in restaurants and bars, laughing, drinking, flirting. Workers were presented amid the massive technological wonders of the dam, beginning with the tiny human figures at the bottom of the monumental cover picture. “Life in Montana’s No. 1 relief project is one long jamboree slightly joggled by pay day,” MacLeish cheerfully wrote. “College boys mingle with bums in the crowd.” One, a University of Texas student working as a bouncer in a bar, “hopes to be a football coach when he graduates but he is studying history just in case.” The
Life
story was, to be sure, a tribute to the New
Deal, but it was also a celebration of the survival of the “American dream.”
⁴⁶

Life’s
determined amiability was visible as well in a 1937 photo essay on Muncie, Indiana—the small Midwestern city made mildly famous by the sociologists Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd in their classic 1929 work,
Middletown
, which compared the culture of Muncie in the 1920s with what it had been thirty years earlier. Despite the dispassionate, academic tone of their book, it was, in fact, a lament for a community they believed was being slowly transformed and debased by the corrosive impact of the modern consumer culture.
Life
’s interest in Muncie in the late 1930s was a result of the Lynds’ return to the city to examine the impact of the Depression on the city’s culture. Muncie, they wrote in their 1937 study,
Middletown in Transition
, “had been shaken for nearly six years by a catastrophe involving not only people’s values but, in the case of many, their very existence,” while its residents simultaneously struggled (often unsuccessfully) to retain their pre-Depression hopes.
Life
’s essay on Muncie referred to the
Middletown
volumes, and even timed the story’s appearance to coincide roughly with the publication of the Lynds’ new book. But the magazine’s portrait of Muncie was considerably brighter than the Lynds’. It portrayed something close to a small-town idyll—a smiling barber shaving a customer, a tidy neighborhood of middle-class homes, a leafy boulevard showing the elegant houses of the “generous” Ball family, who controlled the principal industry (Ball’s canning jars) as well as the city’s banks, newspapers, and politicians.
Life
’s Middletown was a place of stable nuclear families living in comfortable middle- and upper-class homes, surrounded by books, glass collections, pets, and children. Even a photograph of a family at “the bottom” presented a picturesque elderly couple stroking their dog and tending to the chickens “fer eatin’” they were raising in their shabby kitchen. Muncie “at play” was the site of foxhunting, costumed lodge members gathering for meetings, community dinners, and a women’s “conversation club” that had been active for forty years. Despite the Depression,
Life
wrote, “these earnest midland folk still steer their customary middle course, still cling to their old American dream.”
⁴⁷

The range of
Life
’s efforts to portray American life and culture was vast and varied, but the great majority reflected the hearty, affirmative, inclusive tone that characterized the Fort Peck and Muncie stories. In
Life
rich people were not very different from everyone else, just more comfortable. But also in
Life
poor people, minorities, and even freaks and misfits were very much like other Americans—goodhearted, sharing
a common dream, and doing the best they could. This made the magazine seem at times complacent: a friend of, rather than a prod to, the existing social order. But it also helped make
Life
a mostly generous and tolerant publication (at least in its portrayal of Americans) that at times gently challenged class and racial prejudice.

The popular feature Life Goes to a Party, which appeared in most issues, was notable for its broad and cheerful view of how Americans entertained themselves. Many of the parties it portrayed were events for social elites—an “Oilmen’s Banquet” given by the American Petroleum Institute; a debutante ball in Philadelphia for some of the most eminent families of the city’s Main Line; a lavish costume ball in the country house of the Earl of Jersey and his American-born wife; a luncheon for a deer hunt in the “oldest and best preserved” plantation in South Carolina; a Hollywood costume party given by Basil Rathbone and Marlene Dietrich. But
Life
’s parties ranged widely across the social and geographical landscape and offered an inclusive and affirmative vision of Americans “at play,” a vision that tried to obscure the differences between the ways in which the wealthy and famous entertained themselves and the way more ordinary people did.
Life
’s parties included a high-school prom in the small town of Antigo, Wisconsin; a picnic in Los Angeles for forty thousand men and women, mostly working class, who had migrated to California from Iowa; a night at New York’s Roseland, a dance hall where single men could buy dances with female employees for ten cents; an evening at the Savoy, a dance hall for “the boys and girls of Harlem … scorned by the black elite … home of the happy feet;” even a Ku Klux Klan rally on Stone Mountain in Georgia, which presented the Klansmen nonjudgmentally as people “who sometimes behave destructively but usually are not up to much more than a primitive form of transvestitism.” Among the most unusual “social events” included in the series was a sit-down strike in a Woolworth’s in Detroit staged by female employees demanding higher wages. To
Life
the political and economic meaning of the event was far less interesting than the quirky fun the “girls” were having.
Life
portrayed them sliding down banisters, curling their hair, “feeding the store’s canaries cheerfully and efficiently,” and enjoying the sorority-like atmosphere of this “newest type of camping excursion.”
⁴⁸

The magazine was particularly interested in parties that themselves blurred class lines—people of modest means dressing in formal clothes, gathering in lodge halls or high-school gyms and mimicking the lavish balls of the wealthy; and similarly people of great wealth attending parties
in which slumming guests dressed up as farmers or domestic servants.
Life
boasted of the range of the parties it portrayed: “college houseparties, quilting bees, military balls, church suppers, fashion shows, football rallies, Indian festivals … a brewers’ convention, a meeting of Negro masons … a science fiction fans’ jamboree.” But this diversity was consistent with
Life
’s more important mission: portraying the essential unity and the shared values of the American people. The parties
Life
“attended,” no matter where they were or who participated, were all “great good fun,” “great entertainment,” “plenty of fun,” “a wonderful frolic.” According to
Life
all Americans, no matter what their circumstances or background, knew how to have “a jolly good time.”
⁴⁹

Life
was hardly a pioneer in promoting tolerance and diversity. It was most comfortable crossing class boundaries but less comfortable with racial and gender differences. In the 1930s
Life
paid virtually no attention to Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and other minorities. Its relatively infrequent portrayals of African Americans were never hostile or openly racist, but the editors accepted many of the existing stereotypes of their time. Black subjects were often exotic entertainers (the musician “Lead Belly”—described in a story titled “Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel”—who had been convicted of murder twice as a young man; Harlem dancers demonstrating the newly popular “Lindy Hop” with “a native gusto and grace that no white couple can hope to duplicate”); or they were servants, visible in the backgrounds of social and official events in which affluent white people were the prime attraction.
⁵⁰

Life
’s most ambitious portrait of African American life was a major 1938 feature: “Negroes: The U.S. Also Has a Minority Problem,” with powerful photographs by, among others, Alfred Eisenstaedt. It conveyed the real dismay with which Luce and his editors viewed racial prejudice, and at the same time revealed how different, and even foreign, the black community still appeared to them despite their claims of American universality. Racial prejudice,
Life
proclaimed, was the “most glaring refutation of the American fetish that all men are created free and equal.” But the material accompanying these lofty sentiments often contradicted them. Photography of burly black men working on the Mississippi River were captioned “Tote dat barge. Lift dat bale.” “Baby needs new shoes” was the label accompanying a picture of men shooting dice. “It must be remembered,” the editors noted cheerfully and condescendingly, “that the Negro is probably the most social and gregarious person in America.
Nothing delights him more than a big lodge, with many a gold-braided official and many a high-sounding title.”
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Images of women, of course, were omnipresent in
Life
, and on occasion they represented power, achievement, and talent. But except for actresses and other artists,
Life
rarely portrayed women at work. The magazine’s interest in powerful women was largely restricted to royalty.
Life’s
first issues coincided with the death of King George V, the abdication of Edward VIII (and his marriage to Wallis Simpson), and the accession to the throne of George VI.
Time
and
Life
covered the succession and coronation intensively. (Both magazines had considerable circulation in England, and were in fact among the principal sources of news in Britain about Edward VIII’s romance—a subject the British papers were forbidden to report.) But throughout its extensive coverage,
Life
paid relatively little attention to the three kings who reigned during the magazine’s first two years. At first Queen Mary, the widow of George V, was the principal subject of attention and adulation as she led the nation in mourning her husband and guiding the royal family through the abdication crisis. Gradually attention shifted to Queen Elizabeth, the consort of George VI, who was on two
Life
covers in the first year after Edward’s abdication. (Not only did the king not appear on these covers, but he barely appeared in
Life’s
pictures of his own coronation.
Life
gave virtually all its attention to the new queen.) Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was another
Life
favorite.
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The most common images of women in the early years of
Life
, however, were connected to society, fashion, and sex.
Life
was very deliberately not a “girly magazine,” and its editors looked with disdain on what they considered their lower-class rivals, such as
Photoplay
and even
Look
, which relied heavily on “cheesecake” to market themselves. But
Life
itself rarely missed an opportunity to display mildly erotic photographs when they could be presented as part of a supposedly more serious feature. “Camisoles Are Back,” a 1938 cover announced, when the fashion industry introduced new lacy undergarments and gave
Life
an excuse to photograph “full-bosomed young women” wearing them. In a preview of the future
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issues,
Life
offered a special feature on women’s bathing suits to launch the 1941 “beach season” in Florida—a parade of attractive models displaying what were, for their time, provocative two-piece outfits. The Gilbert School for Undressing, whose principal clients were burlesque houses, became a pretext for what became a widely discussed story on how a woman should and should not undress. The decidedly unacademic-looking “Professor”
Connie Fonzlau demonstrated the “wrong” way to undress, while another member of the “faculty” demonstrated “attractive undressing technique.” (A later feature offered similar advice for men.) A lesson in correct posture, a demonstration of how Hollywood taught actors to kiss, and frequent demonstrations of revealing new fashions all provided additional opportunities to portray women’s bodies in the service of supposed news or instruction. (Men’s bodies made occasional appearances as well, notably in a full-page photograph of the backfield of the University of Washington football team frolicking naked together in the shower.)
⁵³