Books
REVIEWED BY JAMES BOYLAN
PICTURING POVERTY: PRINT CULTURE
AND FSA PHOTOGRAPHS
By Cara A. Finnegan
Smithsonian Books
260 pp. $36.95
The
FSA photographs — the images of rural poverty in the Great
Depression produced by the photographers of the “Historical
Section” of the federal Farm Security Administration —
Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others — have
been anthologized and exhibited for decades and have become part
of the national heritage. Now Cara A. Finnegan, a specialist in
the history of images at the University of Illinois, goes back
to the beginning, to ask how these now-familiar photographs were
seen and understood in their own time. She examines their publication
in three periodicals: First, in Survey Graphic, an earnest publication
with a long history of examining social conditions and recommending
solutions; it offered the photographs thematically, to illustrate
talking points. Second, in U.S. Camera, a glossy annual compiled
primarily by Edward Steichen, full-page reproductions offered
the photographs primarily as documentary art, usually with no
caption beyond the name of the photographer. Third, in the then-new
picture magazine, Look, the photographs were mangled and squeezed
into quasi-news layouts — for example, in an extended story
using them to illustrate excerpts from John Steinbeck’s saga
of rural migration, The Grapes of Wrath. Finnegan discusses each
of these uses intelligently, always making the point that the
individuality of the destitute Americans portrayed shone through,
regardless of format.
FRONT-PAGE WOMEN JOURNALISTS,
1920-1950
By Kathleen A. Cairns
University of Nebraska Press
182 pp. $45
Front-Page
Women Journalists contains brief, dense biographies of three journalists,
prefaced by an introduction chronicling women’s gradual entry
into general (as opposed to “women’s”) news work
between the World Wars. Ruth Finney (1898-1979), a tenacious Washington
correspondent for the Scripps Howard News Alliance, may have been
the first woman nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (1931), for her
coverage of utilities scandals. The progress of her career is
illuminated by candid excerpts from her diary. For example, when
Scripps Howard cooled on the New Deal and she did not, she wrote:
“My services are less and less in demand since everyone understands
I won’t do jobs I don’t believe in.” The second
biography is that of Charlotta Bass (1880?-1969), whose newspaper,
the California Eagle, of Los Angeles, agitated over four decades
for racial equality. Outspoken and increasingly radical, she fought
lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, wartime employment discrimination,
and restrictive covenants; in 1952, she earned a footnote in political
history as vice-presidential candidate for the left-wing Progressive
Party. The third, Agness Underwood (1902-1984) of the Los Angeles
Evening Herald and Express, was cut in the classic mold of the
hard-nosed crime reporter. She often outdid men, partly because
as a woman she got extraordinary access to newsworthy women on
trial for spectacular murders. Promoted to city editor in 1947,
during the (still unsolved) Black Dahlia case, she earned the
loyalty of her staff, which she repaid by resigning in 1968 rather
than cross their picket line.
ORANGE JOURNALISM: VOICES FROM
FLORIDA NEWSPAPERS
By Julian M. Pleasants
University Press of Florida
342 pp. $27.95
Oral
history as reading matter, as opposed to source material, can
be cumbersome, and this collection is no exception. But it has
its rewards. The project was a joint effort of the Florida Press
Association and the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the
University of Florida, of which Julian M. Pleasants is the director.
The fifteen interviews here offer a cross-section of recent Florida
journalism. The subjects range in eminence from Al Neuharth, quizzed
on the Florida origins of USA Today, to the weekly publisher,
Tommy Greene, known among other things for always dressing in
green. The interviews with entrepreneurs and editors are best
when they concentrate on individual careers, but too much space
is used in answers to routine questions, such as what the interviewee
happens to think of USA Today. Among the most stimulating are
the dialogues with writers — Carl Hiassen, iconoclastic columnist
for The Miami Herald (and novelist); Lucy Morgan, Pulitzer Prize-winning
capital bureau chief for the St. Petersburg Times; and Rick Bragg
of The New York Times, whose account of how he came to the Times
casts at least a little light on his recent departure.
BROADWAY BOOGIE WOOGIE:
DAMON RUNYON AND THE MAKING
OF NEW YORK CITYCULTURE
By Daniel R. Schwarz
Palgrave Macmillan
346 pp. $35
Damon
Runyon (1880-1946) survives, not because he is much read any more
but because his name and its spin-off, the argot called “Runyonese,”
evoke a perhaps mythical Manhattan occupied by amusing, sometimes
violent or greedy perps. Daniel R. Schwarz, a professor of English
at Cornell University, reexamines the whole of Runyon’s flood
of writing, from his first newspaper days in Pueblo, Colorado,
to his death after long years as a productive and dutiful Hearstling.
Schwarz is most effective in, for example, his handling of such
topics as “A. Mugg,” the name Runyon offered as the
putative author of his column when he was developing the arch,
pseudo-formal voice that became Runyonese. Schwarz also tries
to place Runyon in a broader canvas of “New York city culture,”
but here the discussion seems slightly off-key, much like the
title, which is derived from a 1942-1943 Mondrian painting. Runyon
may have been ragtime or jazz, but definitely not boogie-woogie.
