Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine

201 Pages·2016·48.549 MB·English

by  Alexander Nemerov

alexander nemerov
soulmaker The Times of Lewis Hine
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
In memory of Brock Brower (1931–2014)
Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nemerov, Alexander.
Published by Princeton University Press Soulmaker : the times of Lewis Hine / Alexander Nemerov.
41 William Street pages cm
Princeton, New Jersey 08540 Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-17017-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
In the United Kingdom: 1. Hine, Lewis Wickes, 1874–1940. 2. Working class—
Princeton University Press United States—Pictorial works. 3. United States—Social
6 Oxford Street conditions—Pictorial works. I. Title.
Woodstock, Oxfordshire ox20 1tw TR681.W65N46 2016
770.973—dc23
press.princeton.edu 2015022259
Jacket illustrations: (front) One of the spinners in Whitnel Cotton British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Mfg. Co. N.C. December 1908. Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division. (back) Whitnel Cotton Mfg. Co., Whitnel, Designed by Jeff Wincapaw
N.C. Running at night. Out of 50 employees there, 10 were about Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Jeff Wincapaw
12 years old, and some surely under that. December 1908. Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in China
All Rights Reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments vii
chapter 1 Soulmaker 1
chapter 2 The Man from Oshkosh 33
Contents chapter 3 The Ceremonial Architecture of Time 61
chapter 4 Put the Headlines to Bed 103
chapter 5 Haunted 129
chapter 6 We Work in the Dark 159
Bibliographic Notes 179
Index 185
Photo Credits 191
Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth
in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality
to them than to all other experiences.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
My long-standing attraction to Lewis Hine’s photographs
finally got a strong push forward when I met Connie
Wolf, who encouraged me to pursue an exhibition at the
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University — an exhibi-
tion (and book) I decided would be on Hine. From there
I went to meet with Tom Beck, curator of special collec-
tions at the University of Maryland–Baltimore County,
repository of one set of Hine’s child labor photographs.
Beck, deeply knowledgeable about Hine, gave me further
encouragement and practical help to continue this project.
aCknowledgments Then I went to Oshkosh, spending delightful September
days working with Deb Daubert of the Oshkosh Public
Museum. Working up my courage, I next contacted Joe
Manning, the person who knows more about the people
Hine photographed than anyone else, and to my delight,
found Joe to be a kind and generous person and an ideal
colleague. Then I spoke with Jason Francisco, the accom-
plished photographer and writer, contacting him because
he wrote a great essay on photography —“The Prismatic
Fragment,” on Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage (in The Steerage
and Alfred Stieglitz [Berkeley: University of California Press,
2012]). I sensed that Hine was Jason’s kind of person, and I
was right. Jason drove thousands of miles to photograph in
the places Hine had been, and some of the photographs he
took at those sites are included in this book.
vii

1 soulmaker
The look on the girl’s face is difficult to know (fig. 1). She stares at us as if the
directness of her gaze would reveal all there is to see, but the longer we look, the less
we feel certain of. Drawn down the middle, her pretty face is shaded on the left and
lit on the right, the light side brought out by the stiff braided ribboned tail of hair
that hangs to one side in the brightness . . . the pursed lips, the dirty paired frills
on the front of her pinstriped dress, the missing button between those frills . . . the
buttonhole winking as her eyes do not.
The hands, both dirty, the left one resting on the coarse stone ledge of the
window — fingers extended, the forearm lit to a porcelain smoothness — the right
one bent so that middle and index fingers and thumb gather in an escutcheon
shape, as if the girl were holding some knob-topped cane, the filigree of an invisible
lineage. No cane but a long row of bobbins supports her, keeping her aright, folded
in the narrow flow of a day’s work.
Lewis Hine, a socialist working for the National Child Labor Committee,
made the photograph in December 1908. That year Hine’s acquaintance and
friend, the tireless socialist writer John Spargo, wrote that “the liberation of the
soul” is the highest aim of socialism. “To free the wage-worker from economic
exploitation is indeed the primary object, the immediate aim, of socialism,” Spargo
said, “but it is not the sole object. It is not the end, but the means to an end that
is higher, the liberation of the soul.” This was The Spiritual Significance of Modern
Socialism, the title of Spargo’s book. Hine probably heard Spargo’s lectures on the
topic in the winter of 1907/8 at Cooper Union in New York. He knew Spargo’s
detailed and passionate condemnation of child labor practices, The Bitter Cry of the
Children, published in 1906. It seems he portrays the little North Carolina spinner
in a moment of spiritual awakening.
1