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.45
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 bl
urred 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.”51
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.52
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
Life’s portrayal of women, and the uncertain appeal of Life to women, was of some concern to the editors themselves, who diligently gathered data on their audience that showed that more men than women read Life. “I do not feel that women and womanhood are well represented in Life,” Luce complained in 1944. He later delegated the most senior woman on the research staff, Mary Fraser, to answer the question “Why are women losing interest in Life?” Perhaps, she concluded, it was “all those girls on the cover—women readers resent the constant parade of debutantes and publicity seeking starlets.” Her solution to the problem was to move away from sex and toward domesticity. “What about a piece on Diet?” she proposed. “I’d like to see a story on Kitchens, with floor plans…. The kitchen is first in importance to women.”54
This prescription for attracting women was entirely consistent with what Life was already doing. The occasional prurient images of women in Life were always far outweighed by efforts to celebrate their distinctive contributions to family and community (and only rarely to such male domains as work or government). When women in Life were not fashion models or actresses, they were most often wives, mothers, daughters, girlfriends, socialites, college girls, and consumers. Stories about prominent men almost always contained photographs and descriptions of the loyal women who supported them—Albert Einstein’s stepdaughter cuddling a kitten; the composer Jean Sibelius’s wife entertaining visiting singers from Yale; U.S. senator Arthur Vandenberg’s wife pasting newspaper clippings into a scrapbook for her husband; Henry Ford’s matronly wife (who “shares her husband’s interests in antiques”) accompanying him to a social event. In one Picture of the Week, Eleanor Roosevelt sits in a movie theater talking earnestly with the producer Samuel Goldwyn about how pleased she was that her son Jimmy “is getting along so nicely in Hollywood.” College women were usually portrayed not as students but as fresh-faced sorority girls who (as in a feature on Kansas University) “cook and clean to save expenses,” attend classes that teach them how to dress a baby, and “hope to find a husband on ‘the Hill,’” as the main campus was known.55
Little changed in the magazine’s first decade. “I’d like to see a round-up on the subject of GIRLS,” Luce pr
oposed in the last months of World War II, “the girls who are the sisters, wives, sweethearts and potential sweethearts of our soldiers and sailors.” Perhaps the most famous picture in the history of Life—and one consistent with Life’s prevailing attitudes toward women—was the Eisentaedt photograph of VJ Day in Times Square showing a uniformed sailor embracing a passing young woman whom he did not know and passionately kissing her—as if to symbolize how returning men were preparing to seize back the women they loved, or at least wanted.56
In Life, the Depression was only occasionally visible—and usually through affirmative stories about the New Deal’s or the private sector’s ameliorative projects. Instead the magazine fixed its eyes squarely on the future. Like Fortune, it was in love with modernity, and with the idea of progress that modernity represented. Rockefeller Center—the dramatic complex of bold modern structures that arose in midtown Manhattan during, and despite, the Great Depression—was a favorite of the magazine, as reflected in Luce’s decision to move his company into one of its buildings shortly after they were completed. Like Fortune, Life also celebrated technological progress: steam turbines that delivered power more efficiently; dams and hydroelectric plants that transformed landscapes and economies; technological innovations such as Polaroid (“the new wonder”), consumer innovations that improved, or at least changed, the lives of individuals. And Life conducted as well a long love affair with the way in which middle-class American families lived and the homes they inhabited—always emphasizing progress and improvement. In 1937 Life celebrated the “$5,000 Dream House” that the New Deal was helping middle-class families to buy through favorable lending policies. “Four out of five middle-class Americans would like to have homes of their own,” Life noted, and then illustrated a range of suburban houses of various, but familiarly suburban, designs that were now within reach of many American families. The magazine itself in fact became a participant in the wheels of domestic progress a year later when Life commissioned “famous American architects” to design eight new homes for families earning two thousand to ten thousand dollars a year—incomes that encompassed a large part of the middle class. (The company also hired a Swedish designer to create simple, attractive furniture to complete Life’s vision of middle-class comfort.) Life helped facilitate the construction of examples of each of the home designs—one a starkly modern structure by Edward Durell Stone but most of them traditional colonials and capes. The plans and models for the “Life Houses” were distributed at modest cost to thousands of families, and within months nineteen houses based on them were under construction. “In homes throughout the U.S.,” Life reported, “youngsters and oldsters are using the models to help them project their dream house.”57
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