Muckrakers
- "The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events." -- William James
- McClure's - respectable, use experts, get facts, personal experience "confession" stories
- Josiah Flynt - True Stories from the Underworld 1900, World of Graft (NYC) 1901
- Ray S. Baker - labor racketeering - "Right to Work" 1903
- L. Steffens - Shame of the Cities 1904 - politicians & police took graft - system flawed
- Ida Tarbell - History of Standard Oil Company
- Ed. Bok's Ladies Home Journal - largest - 1m made it 1st mass readership magazine - crusade against patent medicines since 1892 - Mark Sullivan investigated Lydia Pinkham who had died 1883 - Sullivan found Pinkham's tombstone in Lynn, Mass.
- Norman Hapgood's Collier's - Samuel Hopkins Adams series on "The Great American Fraud" - "Death's Lab" cartoon about laudanum as opium, catarrh as cocaine, June 3, 1905
- USDA "poison squad" of Dr. Harvey Wiley 1902 - special act of Congress - 12 volunteers - 5 yrs - 7 chemicals - preservative dyes, Borax caused kidney failure
- Pure Food & Drug Act - into by Wiley Dec. 5, 1905 - Upton Sinclair's Jungle Jan. 25, 1906 - Senate passed Feb. 15, 1906
- Jacob Riis
- "Long ago it was said that one-half of the world does not know how the other half lives -- It did not know because it did not care." from the 1890 introduction to How the Other Half Lives
- immigrant from Denmark 1870 - NY Tribune 1877
- view camera with magnesium powder flash on Lower East Side - Mulberry St.
- gave 1st illustrated slide lecture 1888
- poor shown direct, realistic - not as quaint, romatic, picturesque
- everyday lives of people in photos - not abstract statistics
- new view of poor as victims, not as creators of poverty
- tenement - 5 families in 12 x 12 room - hogs in basement - used fire escape as porch
- dumbbell tenement designed by architect James E. Ware 1879 in NYC
- alleys - rear tenements - "street arabs"
- sweatshops - $1 per day for piece-work - 45 cents per dozen knee pants
- Italian rag-picker - lived in cellar 4 years
- Lodging house - 7 cents per night - 14,000 homeless in NYC
- beer dives - 2 cents per can to sit all night
- Bohemian cigarmakers - entire family - child labor
- House of Industry - private charity for 400 per week our of 60,000 "waifs" in NYC
- "What Are You Going to Do About It?"
- Lewis Hine
- born 1874 in Wisconsin, attended Normal School, Prof. Frank Manny
- Manny in 1901 took Hine to NYC while he taught at the progressive Ethical Cultural School for industrial education fusing learning and work, suggested Hine learn to use a camera to help Manny teach
- Manny suggested in 1904 the Ellis Island project, were later sold a s numbered sets dated through 1909, made about 200 plates with 5x7 view camera, discovered that immigrants and children would be exploited as cheap labor, sought to show "sweat and service" to remove the mystery of how things were made
- He finished in 1905 his degree in education at NYU, had met Florence Kelley and John Spargo, decided to become a profession sociological photographer selling prints for $2 each to Arthur Kellogg, editor of Charities and the Commons, and freelancing for the National Child Labor Committee and National Consumers League
- Hine regarded photography as communication, not art like Steiglitz and the photo-secessionists, made direct frontal posed images, not avoiding eye contact as recommended by the photo-secessionists
- He began in 1907 graduate study in sociology at Columbia
- Paul Kellogg assigned Hine to photograph the Pittsburgh Survey starting in 1907
- The "survey" was a key progressive reform strategy that assumed the world was comprehensible to rational understanding, subject to investigation and resolved by social action. If the facts were presented clearly, change would follow: "to see was to know, and to know was to act."
- Hine developed the survey method by contrasting the popular image of steel work (its glamor and power and majesty) with the unseen reality
- His photos did not shock or condemn but presented contradictory evidence to show that something was wrong, to support the text that was meant to educate the reader about the reality of industrial labor
- Hine presented the workplace as central to human experience, work as noble and worthy
- Hine thought his greatest images were the work portraits from the Pittsburgh Survey, but reformers believed his greatest work was the child labor photography for the NCLC 1908-1918, revealing the hidden reality of 2 million working children under 16, a "parade of detail"
- His child labor pictures included the oyster shucker made at 3 am in the oyster cannery with its pile of shells produced by the patient toil of little fingers, the newsboys smoking on the streets, cotton mill workers in the South, breaker boys in the Pennsylvania coal mines
- Hine discovered that the work site was a powerful subject for the camera, the setting of the Indiana Glassworks
- He worked 1918-20 for the Red Cross in Europe, showing street beggars and refugees in Serbia, the Red Cross teaching mothers in Turkey how to care for babies
- In the 1920s Hine joined with the Photo League of New York in a joint project called "Men at Work" that affirmed the nobility of human labor at a time when the public was obsessed with the machine; he gave great attention to textures of metal and cloth and flesh, and to lighting, such as "Heart of the Turbine" of a metal worker more important than his machine; won a prize in 1920 for "The Painter" not because of its reality but because of its artistic value; won prize in 1924 from advertisers association for "The Engineer" and "The Brakeman"
- In 1930 he photographed the building of the Empire State Building
- He died impoverished in 1940 just as his work began to be rediscovered, was featured in an exhibition at the Riverside Museum in New York
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