Abstract
In Eyes on Labor, Carol Quirke documents the powerful role that photojournalism played in shaping public perceptions of workers and unions during the New Deal and the post–World War II period. The book consists of a series of case studies. Quirke devotes considerable attention to LIFE, one of the nation’s most popular magazines, and discusses how this influential publication depicted the 1930s union movement and working class. She reviews photographic depictions of two epic industrial union conflicts, the Memorial Day Massacre and a sit-down strike in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Her analysis concludes by comparing the use of photos in two union newspapers: Steel Labor and Local 65’s (Distributive Workers) New Voices.
The strength of the book lies in Quirke’s thoughtful analysis of the rich cache of photos she has amassed. In assessing LIFE’s treatment of workers and unions during the 1930s, Quirke finds mixed portrayals of workers. On the one hand, LIFE photos depicted working-class activists as heroic figures struggling against injustice and portrayed “labor as a full participant in American life” (p. 58). At the same time, LIFE’s visuals trivialized women’s activism, made strikes appear threatening to the existing social order, and celebrated workers as consumers rather than agents of social change.
In the Hershey strike, the National Association of Manufacturers used visual images to portray the CIO as an alien force bent on subverting the harmonious utopia Milton Hershey had purportedly created for his workers. Quirke argues that these images, along with similar photos in LIFE and other outlets, helped “to create a public that rejected union tactics” (p. 148). In contrast, the La Follette Committee successfully used photos as “star witnesses” to debunk corporate and police accounts of the Memorial Day Massacre. Quirke observes that these images gained credence only because labor and its allies aggressively used them in multiple forums to shape public perception.
In Steel Labor, the national organ of the Steel Workers Union, photographs served different purposes than in New Voices, Local 65’s newspaper in New York. With its tightly structured and standardized photos that exemplified a “culture of constraint,” Steel Labor’s portrayals of workers demonstrated “passivity more than mobilization or collective strength” (p. 212). Local 65, however, featured extensive use of photographs taken by members that celebrated activism, agency, and inclusiveness by showing picket lines, interracial groups of workers, and recreational activities conducted under the union’s aegis. These differences reflected distinctive union cultures, one rooted in hierarchical leadership, the other more committed to rank-and-file involvement.
Curiously, Quirke pays limited attention to one of the most iconic pictures of the 1930s: the bloodied faces of UAW leaders after the infamous incident later known as the “Battle of the Overpass.” One wishes she had applied her considerable interpretive skills to this seminal photograph. Also, Quirke’s attraction to a unionism based on “activism, solidarity, and agency” occasionally limits her analysis. She criticizes a Steel Labor story describing how Republic Steel was “forced” to pay workers a half million dollars in withheld vacation money as “lacking the suggestion of utopian possibilities, the heroic worker creating a new future, or a collectivity of workers asserting their demands” (p. 218). However, for workers with less messianic hopes, photos of steel workers holding checks that a company had been “forced” to pay did reflect the exercise of working-class power, albeit in a less participatory or heroic form than Quirke might prefer. At times, this tendency to veer from analysis to lament, especially in her assessment of union newspapers and in the conclusion, undercuts the nuanced arguments that characterize other sections of the book.
Labor educators could use Eyes on Labor in a variety of classes, including labor history, internal organizing, and presenting labor’s message to both members and the public. As Quirke notes, photojournalism is an understudied phenomenon. She has performed a valuable service in explaining the power of visual imagery to shape public opinion about labor and, indeed, to influence how workers and unions perceive themselves.