December 7, 2009
Editors Beware Posted by John F. Ross at 07:00 AM EST The vast and recent accumulation of historic images by stock agencies has proved a boon to editors of history magazines—simply jump online and thousands of images appear on your screen. But there's a caveat. The information that comes with the image is not always very good or accurate. Seems that the most important job of the agency is to procure the photo, not nail down details of venue, date, and etc. We picked up a fabulous photo of women on an outside assembly line building Ford cars around 1910 (or so said the caption material). Perfect picture to illustrate the piece we were running on Henry Ford’s remarkable decision to raise assembly line worker salaries to $5 a day in 1914. (He was tired of the turnover of workers who were bored and disaffected by the repetitive work. The raise helped retain workers but led to industrial unionism. See p. 70 of the Winter 2010 American Heritage.) So it got into the layout. But it didn’t check out with our researchers when it came to write captions. So we queried Bob Casey, the curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum, and author of the piece. Bob is a great guy and no one knows more than he does about the history of Ford. Problem was, he had never seen the photo before. And then we started piecing information together. The shape of the radiator, noted Bob, was only made in 1917 and thereafter. "I would bet," wrote Bob, "that the cars arrived partially assembled in crates ("knocked down" or "KD" in Ford parlance) and are being put back together near where they were removed from the crates."
Click on the image to enlargeAlso, women did work at Ford factories but not on the final assembly line early in the 20th century. That and the disheveled appearance of the assembly line and the uniforms of the men at the right suggest that the image was probably taken in Europe late in World War I or after. "The fact that women are doing the assembling suggests that the menfolk were off doing something else, like shooting at other menfolk." Definitely not a Ford factory. Definitely not 1910. What else can the picture tell us? Bob (and I) are open to more interpretation. We ended up not using the image because it no longer fit the story, but it proved an interesting mystery to unravel nonetheless.
December 1, 2009
A Teaser from the Upcoming 60th Anniversary Issue Posted by John F. Ross at 07:00 AM EST Just received a piece of artwork that we commissioned for our upcoming 60th Anniversary issue of American Heritage. It took everybody’s breath away! We’ve hired a wonderful artist to colorize certain parts of a number of iconic black and white photographs. This one is of a dozen suffragists (“suffragettes” in Britain) picketing in front of the White House in 1917. Led by the indomitable Alice Paul, these women stood outside the White House gates for months in rain, snow, and blistering sun, raising their signs and voices whenever President Woodrow Wilson left the grounds. Nobody had taken such a bold approach before. What had really infuriated Alice Paul was when Wilson announced that we were going to dive into WWI to “make the world safe for democracy.” She rightly pointed out that half the U.S. didn’t have the vote—and what kind of democracy was that? The story’s incredible: Wilson eventually had them arrested—and Alice Paul went on a hunger strike and they forced a tube up her nose and fed her. But the resulting negative publicity forced a reluctant Wilson to lobby congress for passing the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the vote. I know Hilary Swank starred in a movie about this recently, but it’s another thing to look at the real women, lined up in their coats and boots in front of the White House. When we colorized the women, they seem to come alive—the blue of their coats and brown of their furs. Our Assistant Editor Jenni Rodibaugh researched the color of the banners they carried (purple, white, and gold). (She found the black and white image boring and had lobbied for using an image of British feminist Emily Pankhurst. Then she saw the colorized version . . . )
What’s funny about looking at this image is that you can’t ignore the women because they don’t have the distance that black and white gives them. You look into their faces and see someone next door or in your family. It makes you look at history with new eyes. John F. Ross
Executive Editor, American Heritage
Author of War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier (Random House 2009)
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