Margaret Bourke-White, FDR, & the Casual Rituals of Race

In 1938, Margaret Bourke-White went to Warm Springs, Georgia, to shoot the president.  She was on an assignment from Life magazine to cover the Thanksgiving banquet that Franklin Delano Roosevelt [FDR] hosted each year for patients at the Warm Springs Foundation, a treatment center that he had founded for people stricken with polio.  (It's now the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute.)

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Patients draw lots to sit at the President’s table at Thanksgiving dinner.  Seat of honor at President’s left was won by Robert Rosenbaum, 11.  Life, 5 December 1938.  [Photos copyright Time, Inc.  Click on any image to see a much larger version.]

Life's editors undoubtedly hoped that Bourke-White, one of the magazine's star photographers, would produce a feel-good story for the holiday season.  That’s precisely what she delivered.  The photographs in “At Warm Springs President Roosevelt Carves Up a Turkey Instead of a Map” [Life, 5 December 1938] showed a modern medical facility full of patients who demonstrated humor and resiliency in the face of a devastating disease.

But there was more to the photos than this.  Inadvertently, Bourke-White produced photographs that documented the casual rituals of racial subordination in stark, matter-of-fact detail.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  The living room of the Little White House is pine-walled, decorated with ship models and pictures.  By the fireplace stand the President’s little round desk.  Below, at the other end of the room, Maid Lizzie and Cook Daisy at table.  Life, 5 December 1938.  [Note that neither woman is granted the courtesy of being identified by last name.]

Bourke-White certainly didn't intend her photos to be indictments of the racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow South, and Life’s editors and readers, who were overwhelmingly white and middle class, almost certainly wouldn't have seen them that way.  In 1938, few whites would have noticed anything remarkable about photos that depicted African-Americans as servants and whites as those being served.  For most Americans, the racial ideology of the day -- one that assumed black inferiority and white superiority -- was invisible.  But, as the photos demonstrate, it was hidden in plain sight.

 

Margaret Bourke White:  Warm Springs grows festive when the President come to visit.  There are parties every day.  Above are guests at a post-Thanksgiving dinner party in the home of Will Moore (right), well-to-do patient from New York.  Seat on couch is Cissie Lord, the Foundation belle, who was stricken four years ago, made her Manhattan debut in wheelchair.  Life, 5 December 1938. 

Routine inter-racial interactions, such as those that Bourke-White captured, both reflected and reinforced the notion that there was a natural hierarchy of race.  Even whites who didn't ordinarily interact with blacks could take their cue from mass media, such as Life, which was well on its way to becoming one of the most popular magazines in American history.  As the historian Wendy Kozol has shown, with its massive readership, Life played an important role in shaping white Americans ideas about blacks.  In Life and other forms of mass media -- newspapers, movies, radio -- representations of African-Americans typically showed them as servants, entertainers, athletes, and lay-abouts.  Given this media environment, the blacks in Bourke-White's photos would have seemed no more extraordinary than the blue skies or male presidents.

Surprisingly enough, when seen in the context of her time, Bourke-White stands out as a racial liberal.  You Have Seen Their Faces, the book about Southern poverty that she co-authored with the writer Erskine Caldwell, in 1937, makes it clear that she understood the structural elements of black oppression in the South -- job discrimination, disenfranchisement, the inequities of the justice system -- and that she could depict them visually.  There's a also no question that she could portray African-Americans with dignity when she wanted to.  (After World War Two, Life itself generally supported the civil rights movement, and it blazed a trail when it hired the photographer Gordon Parks, the first African-American to join the staff of a major magazine.)

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Unpublished, uncaptioned photo from the Warm Springs series, 1938.  [It was and still is common for magazine photographers to make many more photos while on the assignment than could possibly be published.  The unpublished photos remain in Life's archive.]

The photos that Bourke-White made in Warm Springs, however, showed little awareness of the ways in which the small rituals of race buttressed the structural elements of racial subordination.  Her camera captured things that she herself didn't see.  Nothing in her photos questioned the dominant racial ideology of the day.

At the same time, nothing about them suggests that she was interested in exploring how felt to be at the bottom of the racial totem pole.  Her blacks seem content and, in one case, delighted, in their subordination; her whites seem to take it all for granted. (Ironically, Bourke-White built her career by defying prevailing gender ideologies.  One of the most famous photographers of her era, she had succeeded brilliantly in a male-dominated field.)

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Unpublished, uncaptioned photo from the Warm Springs series, 1938.

Throughout this post, I've been careful to say that, like the photographer herself, "most" Americans wouldn't have been sensitive to the routines of racial subordination that were embedded in these photos.  African-Americans, on the other hand, would certainly have noticed the presence of other blacks in the photos, and they would have responded in a variety of ways.

By 1938, African-American had a long and distinguished history of challenging the American way of race.  At issue in some protests -- such as those that surrounded the release of the film Birth of a Nation, in 1915 -- was the representation of blacks in popular media.  It's likely that Bourke-White's photos provoked a certain amount of resentment  -- aimed not at her, but at the racist social structure -- along with sighs of resignation, because structures can sometimes seem permanent.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Unpublished, uncaptioned photo from the Warm Springs series, 1938.  [This photo was made in a Pullman car, probably on the train that brought Roosevelt to Warm Springs (see photos below).]

On the other hand, there's no doubt that some black viewers took pride in knowing that members of their race were serving the nation's elite, including the President and First Lady.  Perverse as it may seem, a sense of pride can be attached to the servant's role, if those being served carry enough prestige.  The cooks, maids, waiters, and musicians in Bourke-White's published photos occupied this cultural territory.  So did the Pullman Porters in her unpublished photos.  In fact, they were prime examples.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Unpublished, uncaptioned photo from the Warm Springs series, 1938.  [This photo was made in Roosevelt's private Pullman car during his trip to Warm Springs.]

During the early to mid-twentieth century, Pullman Porters occupied a special place within the African-American community.  Although working conditions on the luxurious Pullman sleeping cars was grueling -- most men worked 100 hours a week -- and involved waiting hand and foot on passengers who could afford the high fares, the job paid better than most occupations that were open to blacks.  Porters took pride in their professionalism and were respected members of the community.  It's easy to imagine that, if Life had published these photos of Harry Lucas at work in FDR's private car, many African-Americans would have viewed them with pleasure.

On the other hand, the job was degrading.  Porters worked for tips and were always at the beck and call of the (solely white) passengers, who insisted on calling them all "George," a reference to George Pullman, who founded the company.  The conditions that they faced led them to form the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925, the first black union to receive formal recognition from the American Federation of Labor.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Unpublished but captioned photo from the Warm Springs series.  Portrait of Pullman porter Harry Lucas working in Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's private car on his trip to Warm Springs.  Warm Springs, Georgia, November 1938.

So the question of how blacks responded to the rituals of race and how they would have read the Bourke-White's photos which capture them has a number of different answers.  But Bourke-White wasn't interested in unpacking its mysteries.  She wasn't that kind of photographer.

Connecting with her subjects and seeing the world through their eyes was never something she cared much about.  She was more interested in imposing her understanding of the world on her subjects and her readers, as she comes close to admitting in her autobiography, Portrait of Myself.  She sought, she wrote, the “typical,” not the particular:  “I am always looking for some typical person or face that will tie the picture essay together in a human way.”

Is it possible that I'm underestimating Bourke-White?  Sure.  If I am, perhaps the photo above provides a clue.  It's the only photo in the series in which the African-American subject is identified by both first and last names.  Did Bourke-White sense the dignity with which Pullman Porters carried themselves?  Did she know about their honored place within the black community?  It's certainly possible.

Still, it seems to me that if we want insight how African-Americans reacted to the casual rituals of race, we'll have to look elsewhere.

* * *

I'll let the great African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar have the last word:

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,-
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
       We wear the mask!

--Paul Lawrence Dunbar, 1872-1906

Comments

[Richard Flint]

Great article John. I was just wondering if the accordion player in the third image was Graham Jackson, photographed in 1945 by Ed Clark.

http://www.life.com/gallery/67131/the-75-best-life-photos?iid=life75|editorspicks#index/3

[John]

Thanks for the compliment, Richard.

I don't think that the accordion player is Graham Jackson, who seems to have been more thickly built than the man in Bourke-White's photo. But I can't be sure. It's a great question. I'll try to check it out.

[John]

Richard, I'm beginning to think you may be on to something.

Here's an unpublished photo of the accordion player from the same shoot as the photo above:

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/f?imgurl=06f7fceaad7958c1

Seen from this angle, he does resemble Graham Jackson. And, after all, how many African-American professional accordionists could there have been in Warm Springs.

If it's the same man, it's the sort of ironic coincidence that historians love. The differences in the way he's depicted in photos from 1938 and 1945 are stunning. Wearing the mask of a fool in one; embodying dignified grief (with which Life's white readers would identify) in the other.

As I say, I'll try to nail this down.

[Stan B.]

That poem could serve as caption for so many, many photographs (even to this day)...