The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age

The two kindred spirits had been linked by temperament and circumstance since the early part of the twentieth century. Steichen’s sister, Lilian, married Sandburg in 1908, after the two had met through the social democratic politics that they shared. Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg had achieved fame early in their careers – Steichen as a photographer and Sandburg as a poet – and by the 1920s both had become comfortable with their own celebrity: the most famous photographer in America and the nation’s bard. Steichen had produced a photomontage of Sandburg that echoed the celebrity shots and advertising spreads that had made him the decade’s most highly paid photographer. Steichen’s use of dramatic lighting and sequence of gestures emphasized not only Sandburg’s genius but his ability to project his character to an audience. Sandburg, in his turn, contributed to Steichen the Photographer (1929), a long, loving biography that drew his brother-in-law back through now famous episodes in his career, such as the portrait sitting of irascible J. Pierpont Morgan, to the self-manufacture and then recognition of Steichen’s genius as a youth in Catholic school:

In a drawing class at the Pio Nono [Pius IX] school Destiny connected him up with art. He brought in sketches he had made through using transparent paper (which was cheating) and on which he had received help from older persons (which was also cheating). He roughed up some of the firm clear lines made through transparent paper (which was not merely cheating, but was cheating ‘with felonious intent’). Now the priest gave high praise to his sketches. So did others of the elders. His mother declared, ‘He must be an artist, he shall be a g-r-e-a-t artist!’ From then on he was in for it.²

By 1955 both famous men were accustomed to promoting their works with their own celebrity, mugging for the camera as they worked. This connection with The Family of Man persisted to what was for Steichen the culminating moment, the appearance of the photographs at the American Exhibition in Moscow in August 1959. The two men fought travel difficulties – Sandburg lost his passport, Steichen had to accommodate a broken arm – to appear in this American space in the capital of the nation’s Cold War adversary. Upon their return the pair was interviewed by the American news programme Meet the Press about their impressions of the other side of the Iron Curtain. The four inquisitors treated them as grand old men of American arts and letters; the National Broadcasting Company devoted 30 minutes of Sunday morning air time to two people it assumed that a mass audience would want to see and hear. And Steichen and Sandburg, true to form, assumed that this was correct: that their observations would have currency among a wide range of listeners.

This chapter brings Carl Sandburg to the Family of Man project in the 1950s (see illustration 47). In his time during the interwar years he was not a man accustomed to playing second fiddle. Sandburg’s influence on American culture was every bit as great as Steichen’s. He had received the Pulitzer Prize, twice in poetry and once in history, and had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature seven times. His American Songbag (1928) contributed to the discovery of folk music. The six-volume set of books chronicling the life of Abraham Lincoln – The Prairie Years (1926) and The War Years (1939) – had been bestsellers that made him the most popular Lincoln biographer and most sought after voice in commemorative celebrations.³ He had been a troubadour for years, touring the college circuit, appearing on the radio, and providing the raw material for dramatizations of Lincoln’s life.

Sandburg and Steichen were kindred spirits. Both men were voracious collectors, using their own celebrity and a network of sympathetic colleagues to amass material for compelling projects of cultural importance. Both were showmen who expressed the success of their ventures through numbers. Both trusted that their ambitious work would be understood by a general audience that would see common purpose in a simple message. Like Steichen, Sandburg projected a particular persona – dramatic, even histrionic, and demanding command of the stage. As was the case with Steichen’s photographic collections, Sandburg’s work rose with public interest and fell with critical tastes. Except for the efflorescence of The Family of Man, the cultural moment for Sandburg, as for Steichen, was during the interwar years.

Sandburg’s three major projects during the interwar years – the two massive biographies of Abraham Lincoln and the anthology of American folk songs – made him into a very conspicuous collector of Americana. During the period immediately after World War I, when he was assembling the material for Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a significant portion of the papers of the 16th President remained with the Lincoln family or lay in private hands. Sandburg culled available resources, scoured used bookshops and conducted interviews with the few remaining people who could have remembered Lincoln. The project of writing Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, more than a decade later, was an even more intense endeavour. The reception of the first books and the constantly burgeoning scholarship on Lincoln meant that Sandburg had to employ two secretaries to transcribe excerpts that were to be included. These were arranged and inserted into envelopes by theme. The production of the typescripts remained the same in both cases: in a secluded home, Sandburg composed the text on a typewriter set on a table consisting of packing crates.⁴

Not only was the act of collecting kept in the public eye but the product was measured by quantity as well as quality. Sandburg had composed more words about Lincoln – 1.25 million – than the subject himself had written. The Prairie Years had been a bestseller in 1926. More than 14,000 two-volume sets were immediately distributed to eager readers; 48,000 sets were sold in the first year.⁵ The Book-of-the-Month Club issued a special edition, on cheaper paper with fewer illustrations, in time for the 1928 Christmas trade.⁶ The War Years, likewise, sold well, despite the massive 3,400 pages of typescript that Sandburg produced: 29,000 sets were purchased in the first few months at $20 each.⁷ Because of the success of the earlier two-volume set, ‘[t]he publication of The War Years […] was a public event’,⁸ the product of unstinting labour by one of America’s writer-celebrities.

During the 1920s, Sandburg toured the country as ‘the self-appointed emissary of the American past’.⁹ His celebrity allowed him to collect entries for his American Songbag project as he toured ‘two-thirds of the state universities of the country, audiences ranging from 3,000 people at the University of California to 30 at the Garret Club in Buffalo, New York, and organizations as diverse as the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the Knife and Fork Club of South Bend, Indiana’. Along the way, he picked up regional tunes, such as ‘I Ride an Old Paint’, ‘The Boll Weevil Song’ and ‘Blow the Man Down’, the last contributed by fellow poet Robert Frost.¹⁰ By the time that the full Songbag was published, Sandburg had winnowed these potential entries down to 280 songs under 24 headings, representing American regional and occupational cultures. In his Introduction to a recent reissue of the Songbag, Garrison Keillor, himself a purveyor of American folk traditions, drolly remarked that Sandburg’s ‘steady rise to fame as a poet-troubadour and near-mythic status as Voice of the Common Man was accomplished with considerable campaigning on his part’.¹¹

Sandburg was comfortable performing himself – the poet, the vagabond, the troubadour, the newspaper man and reviewer of movies, the man of letters and Pulitzer Prize winner who was also a man of the people. A reading turned into a concert when he broke out his ever-present guitar. He played imperfectly, but presented in his baritone voice vaguely familiar songs that were intended to unite a people. H. L. Mencken, a Sandburg friend but ever the curmudgeon of Baltimore, quipped, ‘Do you want the words and music of “I am a Hundred Percent American”? I have them if you do’.¹² The quality of Sandburg’s voice and his theatrical delivery drew listeners to him, whether he was singing ‘Foggy, Foggy Dew’ or reading from his Lincoln manuscript. Friend and collector of Lincoln photographs, Frederick Meserve, recalls:

I can hear him now reading from the manuscript to show the kind of thing he was doing on Lincoln’s early life – something never before done, poetry and history together, a marvelous blending of his own. I can hear the extraordinary voice, now whispering soft, now booming loud, slowed down almost to stopping one moment, words mouthed and rolled on the tongue and lingered over, then suddenly rippling and tripping forth in a heart-jumping change of pace.¹³

Sandburg, in turn, was confident of his ability to be the representative American, the jack-of-all-trades: ‘Among biographers, I am a first-rate poet. And among the poets, a good biographer; among singers, I’m a good collector of songs and among song collectors a good judge of pipes’.¹⁴

In Mystic Chords of Memory, the cultural historian Michael Kammen charts two paths for establishing American cultural nationalism in the interwar years. Carl Sandburg’s work contributes to both these paths. American culture could be seen as a weaving together of diverse folk traditions that emanated from distinct, richly layered, local landscapes. This conception of culture was democratic and, especially in the midst of the profound social change of the 1930s, richly nostalgic. It valued tall tales, ballads, myths and non-literary materials, such as local craft traditions. Both of Sandburg’s major productions of the 1920s, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and American Songbag, reflect this view of American culture and draw on his experience as a newspaper reporter in Chicago and his established reputation as the poet of the working man. Sandburg readily embraced the notion that the left would see its own version of a romantic American past in working-class struggle.¹⁵ Another view of American culture emphasized nationwide characteristics that knit together a heterogeneous nation into one unique, mature entity. Such a culture insistently demonstrated national greatness.¹⁶ This was Sandburg’s work of The War Years, depicting Lincoln as the unifier of the nation during the moment of its deepest division. Sandburg joined those who believed that ‘high culture and popular culture really could be bridged, and perhaps even, with sufficient extension, mass culture as well’.¹⁷ Michael Kammen asserts that ‘Abe Lincoln had unquestionably emerged as the populist hero of the depression era’, and Sandburg was key to this enshrinement.¹⁸

The regionalism that Sandburg expressed reverberated throughout the culture. In 1923, while wrestling with the young Lincoln, he conferred with Walter Prescott Webb, whose own ideas of regional culture would result in The Great Plains, a seminal work of cultural geography.¹⁹ The flowering of Midwestern cultural study during this period included small literary magazines such as Midland magazine and regional painters like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Michael Kammen traces the founding of many folklore societies to this period. Already by 1934 Malcolm Cowley, a chronicler of American writers who had become expatriots or ‘exiles’, acknowledged that the United States ‘possessed a folklore, and traditions, and the songs that embodied them’.²⁰ During this decade, large, collective writing projects, some of them sponsored by New Deal programmes such as the Federal Writers Project, produced guide books and descriptions of such emblematic American landscapes as river valleys in order to create a sense of place by ‘infusing the landscape with emotional and symbolic content’. These connections would, in turn, root the reader in the symbolic landscape of the nation through local attachments. Fixed in place by economic circumstances and rudimentary transportation options, Americans viewed the expanse of the continental nation vicariously, through reading these expansive projects or listening to a peripatetic troubadour like Sandburg. State guide books enticed the traveller, at the present moment through their imaginations but, eventually, through the grounded intricacies of American landscapes: ‘Travelers were to know who they were by knowing where they were.’²¹

Sandburg was one of those who also allowed Americans to hear who they were. While he was assembling the contents of his American Songbag, John Lomax began his ambitious effort, later continued by his son, Alan, to collect folk songs springing from ‘the isolated life of rural communities’ that, he feared, were losing their distinctiveness to encroaching modernity. Sandburg was more eclectic in his selection of materials to collect and more optimistic about the ability of folk traditions to coexist with modern modes of industrial production and musical reproduction. Through categories such as ‘Hobo Songs’ and ‘The Big Brutal City’ he acknowledged the realities of modern urban life.²² He selected songs composed by known individuals, thereby breaking with an academic definition of ‘folk’ by including commercially generated music. His ‘recognition of pluralism as a critical feature of American identity would continue among every succeeding generation of folk revivalists’. More than that, Sandburg ‘became an advocate for the people whose music he collected. For him, folk music was a way to champion economically, socially, and politically marginalized citizens.’²³ This combination of attributes – voicing the needs and values of overlooked groups of people and using class as a collecting category – links Sandburg with the social justice and protest music of succeeding generations.²⁴

The vigour of Sandburg’s efforts as a collector and a performer is evidenced by the breadth of his influence. His celebrity as an American troubadour led to popularizers such as Burl Ives – a fellow Illinoisan born a generation later 400 kilometres southeast of Sandburg’s home in Galesburg – who fashioned his own songbag, Song in America,²⁵ and purveyors of the folk revival in popular culture, of whom the Kingston Trio was the most successful example from the early 1960s. He was also a forbear of ‘the singing left’,²⁶ beginning with his fellow wanderer Woody Guthrie and extending to Pete Seeger and the Weavers, who brought politics to folk performance in the charged atmosphere of the 1950s. Like Sandburg, who caused many fans to pick up the guitar in the 1920s and 1930s, the genial Seeger authored a pamphlet – later a book – on how to play the banjo that brought a folk instrument into the mainstream in time for the post-war folk revival.²⁷ While Sandburg, playing the role of the ancient sage, was holding forth about the accomplishments of The Family of Man at the 1959 American Exhibition in Moscow, in the midtown New York studio of the National Broadcasting Company’s Meet the Press show, barely two miles to the south the folk revival scene in Greenwich Village was coming into full bloom. Bob Dylan and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott drew from a lineage of music that included Sandburg.

During the interwar years, Carl Sandburg was one of the most notable contributors to the project of assembling a national history and an American mythology. This effort was undertaken by groups of culturally important figures who moved with ease over a wide range of venues both popular and academic. Some writers were national celebrities then but are as seldom studied now, like Sandburg himself: Stephen Vincent Benet, author of John Brown’s Body, an epic poem ‘that commenced almost where Sandburg’s Lincoln biography concluded’ and sold over 100,000 copies as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection;²⁸ Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology brought Midwest culture to national attention; and Archibald MacLeish, who became an arbiter of the American past through his position as the Librarian of Congress. Some projects relied on individual anthologizers, like Alan Lomax. Other efforts were collaborative, the product of Federal efforts, such as the photographic explorations of the Farm Security Administration or the many productions of the Federal Writers Project.

Moving from collection to critique, cultural commentators reflected on the significance of these efforts to establish an American tradition. While this was a subject of some conversation at universities, much of this discussion was held in the public realm by critics who, in future generations, would hold academic positions. Van Wyck Brooks, for example, had already established himself as an interpreter of literature and had coined terms – ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ and ‘the search for a usable past’ – that had become common parlance. Constance Rourke made her living as a writer of articles for publications like The New Republic and as an author of books that explored what she and others called the American character. Brooks and Rourke disagreed about how this character would be described and national traditions established. Brooks focused on the national scene and Rourke on the harmonizing of distinct folk culture and local traditions. Sandburg spoke to the same public audience as Brooks and Rourke, also from a position outside the university. His version of this cultural project combined both traditions: his Lincoln constructed a national history and his American Songbag explored the local roots of American culture, to borrow a phrase from the title of the posthumous book of Rourke’s for which Brooks wrote the Preface.²⁹ These sorts of concerns would help name a university location for future debates about American culture – American Studies.

In his recent study, Lincoln’s Body, Richard Wightman Fox constructively reassesses the accomplishment of Sandburg’s portrayal of the prairie years of Abraham Lincoln. As many critics from the beginning had noted, there were no footnotes, but, Fox comments, ‘there could be no footnotes’ for this composition of ‘lyrical riffs’ that ‘produced something vaster than a “life”’.³⁰ This was Sandburg the collector, even Sandburg the oracle at work, weaving together a communal Lincoln: ‘The more legendary folklore about Lincoln that was thrown into the mix, the better, since the lore had bubbled up from the purest source: the people.’ Lincoln was more than an historical figure. He was ‘the historical emanation of a people’s habits, longings, and fantasies’.³¹ This approach would give Sandburg licence to enter Lincoln’s brain for the creative meditations that drew the ire of historians. It also gave him the power to link with the folkloric traditions that Constance Rourke was tracing at the same time that Sandburg was writing. She pointed out that Mike Fink, the riverboat legend, was alive during Lincoln’s time and was obviously matched by Sandburg’s accounts of his subject’s exploits on the Sangamon and the Mississippi. Davey Crockett lore was developing during Lincoln’s youth, mythologizing familiar terrain. ‘The Hunters of Kentucky’, a poem of immense influence in constructing one myth of American character, was first promulgated when Lincoln was 13.³² The power of The Prairie Years to exist between history and folklore – between Lincoln the ordinary man and the anointed Lincoln that was more than human – was matched by Sandburg’s intent to address through The War Years contemporary domestic issues such as racism and rural–urban difference and to prepare a united nation for the international crises to come: ‘Without ever trying to impersonate him, Sandburg managed to evoke Lincoln’s presence, and to let him speak for the people – a unified people that in the mid-1930s, a time of dissipating radical hopes, could stand up to the fascists.’³³

Sandburg’s Lincoln reverberated through popular culture. Scripts for Hollywood movies such as Abraham Lincoln and Young Mr. Lincoln relied on The Prairie Years.³⁴ Abe Lincoln in Illinois shows how Sandburg’s image of Lincoln dominated what Americans saw. The playwright Robert Sherwood drew from Sandburg’s work for his 1938 Broadway play, the 1940 film of the same name and the 1940 radio version of Abe Lincoln in Illinois. This was more than an awarding-winning project for Sherwood, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a play that ran for more than 400 performances, and a career boost for Raymond Massey, who portrayed Lincoln in all three productions and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1940. It also established Lincoln’s character in the public eye. The play opens with the young Lincoln learning the five moods of the English language – ‘The Indicative, Imperative, Potential, Subjunctive and Infinitive.’ ‘Every one of us has many moods,’ his mentor lectures. ‘You yourself have more than your share of them, Abe. They express the various aspects of your character.’ ³⁵ Lincoln dutifully constructs examples of the five moods, in textbook fashion, thereby giving the audience an insight into his developing persona. Sherwood, and through him Sandburg, organized Depression-era sentiment, ‘made it conceivable, intelligible, communicable, and public’.³⁶ Fox summarizes the importance of Sandburg’s Lincoln to American culture of the interwar period: ‘there are two great monuments to Lincoln constructed during these years. One was the Lincoln Memorial, constructed at the west end of the national mall in Washington, D. C.; the other was Sandburg’s Lincoln.’³⁷

Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds both summarizes Sandburg’s accomplishment and gestures at how Sandburg’s project of making Lincoln into both man and hero was viewed askance after World War II. Writing in 1942, Kazin includes a lengthy summary of Sandburg’s Lincoln in his magisterial interpretation of American literary traditions. Sandburg articulated ‘a new historical consciousness […] [T]he very effort of Sandburg’s imagination was subtly transformed into a supreme historical sensitiveness, a capacity for embracing the whole stupendous past.’ If facts were ‘poetized’ in Sandburg’s massive work, the stature of Lincoln became ‘the measure of that whole American civilization that would find its apotheosis in him’. The figure of Lincoln arose ‘like a massive shadow […] a stupendous aggregation of all those American traits that were to find so ambiguous and moving an expression in him’. Lincoln lived because of what he symbolized, because of the democratic principles and anxieties he embodied. In Sandburg’s hands, Lincoln became ‘a great symphonic poem’, ‘the greatest of all American works of art’.³⁸ This paragraph, Kazin’s paean to Sandburg’s poetic construction of a national symbol, was omitted from the 1956 abridged edition of On Native Grounds and replaced with a statement that the search for ‘a usable tradition’ – a significant alteration of Brooks’s usable past – is over. In place of Sandburg, Kazin inserts Edmund Wilson as the interpreter of Lincoln’s significance: Wilson’s Lincoln is ‘the great mind of American history rather than its sad saint’.³⁹

This shift is significant and is indicative of the seismic gulf that separated pre- and post-war American critical traditions. Sandburg, and, for that matter, his brother-in-law Steichen, operated in the new terrain of the post-war world, but their sensibilities, their assumptions about their relationships to their audiences, and their warm embrace of patriotism and national myth-making remained in the pre-World War II culture that Michael Kammen and the original version of Alfred Kazin’s work describe.

Edmund Wilson did to Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln what Mark Twain did to James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. A critique of a particular text was the launching pad for a much broader dismantlement of another, presumably outmoded, form of literary expression. Twain applied the realist’s microscope to a romantic figure painted in broad brushstrokes that were oblivious to detail. Wilson demanded rigour, depicting Lincoln as a figure of intellectual depth, and judged Sandburg’s approach as folkloric rather than historically useful: ‘the corn is getting high, indeed’.⁴⁰ According to Wilson, the complexity of Lincoln took Sandburg out of his depth. In fact, Wilson summarizes in the most often quoted line of his critique, ‘the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg’.⁴¹

Wilson’s Lincoln serves as one of the major portraits in his study of Civil War literature, Patriotic Gore. Lewis Dabney, Wilson’s biographer, describes the inundation of voices that one meets in this thick volume: ‘Reading this book is a little like being set down in a room packed with people, each of whom wants your ear for however long it takes to tell of himself or of others, of private struggles or of great events.’⁴² But Patriotic Gore is more than what Alfred Kazin described as a modern version of Plutarch’s Lives.⁴³ In his Introduction, Wilson makes it clear that his purpose is to put the Civil War into the context of the recently-completed World War II and to compare Lincoln to two world leaders who had brought their countries through periods of conflict and national consolidation – Bismarck and Lenin.⁴⁴ This Lincoln was a free thinker,⁴⁵ an ambitious man who saw himself in a heroic light.⁴⁶ Wilson rejects the folksy Lincoln, the teller of tails and the splitter of rails. There is very little humour in this Lincoln. He is cold, aloof, even intellectually arrogant, ‘a man of intent, self-controlled, strong in intellect, tenacious of purpose’.⁴⁷ ‘His own style was cunning in its cadences, exact in its choice of words, and yet also instinctive and natural; and it was inseparable from his personality in all of its manifestations.’⁴⁸ This was not a populist Lincoln but a tortured man of high intellect who knew how to mould his image and manipulate the people to conform to his will. Sandburg would not have recognized this man or appreciated the dispassion of this critical approach.

On 13 September 1959, Carl Sandburg and Edward Steichen appeared on the National Broadcasting Company’s Meet the Press, a weekly programme where newsworthy individuals were interviewed by four reporters. The brothers-in-law had just returned from a sojourn to Moscow to attend the American Exhibition in Sokolniki Park, the American half of the first bilateral exchange of exhibitions between the United States and the Soviet Union, and to visit, once again, The Family of Man exhibition, one of the highlights of this immensely successful, six-week episode in cultural diplomacy. Lawrence E. Spivak, the producer of the programme, and his colleagues were well aware that Steichen and Sandburg had been sent as emissaries of American culture: Steichen had been designated an American Specialist by the State Department. Sandburg had declined this special treatment and his tourist passport, expedited by the State Department to replace the one he had lost, gave him more freedom to roam through Moscow, speaking with writers in addition to attending to the business of supporting the American Exhibition. Freshly returned, the two octogenarians faced questioning that was, on the one hand, deferential and appreciative and, on the other, sharpened by Cold War suspicions.

This appearance is remarkable for several reasons. First of all, it was natural for all concerned that such an interview would take place in the context of a news programme: the four interviewers probed for observations about the Soviet Union and the subjects of their curiosity displayed by their demeanour that they expected to be asked questions that quickly turned from art to politics. Secondly, the position that Steichen and Sandburg assumed drew not only from their recent experience but from an immense body of work that established a relationship between them and what they considered to be the common citizens of a democratic culture. Finally, despite pointed invitations to make invidious comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union, both Steichen and Sandburg repeated their faith in the common emotions and aspirations of humankind, the epitome of which was expressed through The Family of Man.

The colloquy reveals a politics that comes with this faith in humanity. Sandburg and Steichen spoke through works of art to Soviet citizens who were subjected to the narrow interests of the state and defended this approach to Meet the Press viewers who had their own ideological predispositions. The Family of Man, the two insisted, drew the two sides of the Iron Curtain together in a common humanity. This form of humanism, developed over long careers, clearly went unappreciated by their bemused interrogators. Stuck between the feeling of national purpose that welcomed Sandburg’s interwar work and the Vietnam generation who dismissed him after his death, Sandburg appeared as an earnest anachronism, offering observations that he knew would be misinterpreted by those wanting affirmation of a particular ideology rather than mere observation. Steichen, labelled ‘probably the greatest photographer of all time’ and tied to the production of The Family of Man, ‘the greatest epic poem of mankind, that mankind everywhere can read and feel’, hampered by a hacking cough, let his brother-in-law lead the way.⁴⁹ To some contemporary observers, their pronouncements seemed, at best, banal, but, from the start, it was apparent that they were confidently defending a world-view that the commentators were not prepared to hear.

The first question was innocent enough: what did the two feel that The Family of Man accomplished by being exhibited in Moscow? The second, however, set the tone for the rest of the interview. Lawrence E. Spivak inquired, ‘You also said, all the world, all humanity is alike. There is no iron curtain, no real curtain between people. Now did you find that true in the Soviet Union despite some forty years of suppression?’ Then, ‘Did you have any feeling at all that the absence of liberty among the Russian people for forty years has had an effect upon human beings as human beings?’ And so the interviewer continued. Yes, Russian people were subjected to a great deal more regimentation than their American contemporaries. No, no one was starving. ‘Tell him about the lady from Waterloo, Iowa,’ Sandburg prompted Steichen. She had been appalled by the poverty in the Soviet Union. ‘Where did you see it?’ Steichen inquired. ‘She said, “all over”.’ ‘Well,’ Steichen recalled, ‘I didn’t see any sign of any poverty.’ Were the Russians happy people, as you would find happy people in a free country, Spivak wanted to know. Steichen replied:

Happiness, real happiness is an inner thing. It’s a very difficult thing to see. I found in their daily behavior that they were just like everybody else. They were very lovable people. [As] human beings, I would rate them as very close. As a matter of fact, I think they are almost more like us in many ways than any other people I’ve met.

Earlier in 1959 Sandburg had addressed a joint session of Congress on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. The Meet the Press panel turned to him in the familiar role as interpreter of the 16th president. Russians had been asked to vote for their favourite American statesman and Lincoln had come out on top, surpassing the ‘revolutionary’ Washington and F. D. Roosevelt, ‘who had given them eleven billion bucks’. Why was there such fascination with Lincoln? ‘Well,’ Sandburg began,

because he had a partner [the Civil War] […] He had a career of violence that surpassed any of the Bolsheviks. He was not afraid of a civil war […] The Union was first with him. But secondarily […] he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, [freeing three million] slaves who were on the tax books as property. That was something that appealed to them. The violence and the break from the past appeals to them so that Lincoln has a certain fascination for them not parallel to that that Lenin has, but it’s there.

Sandburg was about to make another observation when he was cut off in mid-sentence by the moderator, who brought the interview to a quick conclusion.

The interview was convened by the newsworthy appearance of The Family of Man in the heart of Moscow. Sandburg and Steichen remained true to the message of the exhibition – that mankind is one – but the questions assumed difference. Throughout his long career, Sandburg had knit American culture together through the national purpose of Abraham Lincoln’s vision and the many regional voices of folk performance, singing in harmony the collective stories of the people of the United States. He was a worthy companion, a truly kindred spirit to Edward Steichen, whose effort as the impresario of The Family of Man dominates critical understanding of the project. Sandburg deserves attention, not so much as a collaborator in the making of this photographic exhibition, but as a person who strengthened the philosophical underpinnings of this effort and understood full well the importance of labouring over projects that would draw vast amounts of material together in an effort to help people see themselves. This protean era of collecting had passed; the culture to which the two old men spoke had been hardened by two wars, one hot and the other cold. Bringing Sandburg to his position, looking over Steichen’s shoulder as the photographer prepared The Family of Man in the loft above 52nd Street, helps explain both the gravity of this effort and also the historically bounded vocabulary in which it spoke.

Notes

2 Carl Sandburg, ‘Steichen the Photographer’, in The Sandburg Range (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953), 306.

3 Carl Sandburg, compiler, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927); Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 2 vols (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926); Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4 vols (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939).

4 Benjamin Thomas, Portrait for Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1947), 295.

5 Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991), 432.

7 North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), 151.

8 Alfred Jones, Roosevelt’s Image Brokers: Poets, Playwrights, and the Use of the Lincoln Symbol (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974), 52.

11 Garrison Keillor, ‘An Introduction to the 1990 Edition’, in The American Songbag, Carl Sandburg, compiler (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), x.

13 Frederick Meserve, ‘Thoughts on a Friend’, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 45 (1952): 337.

15 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 411.

21 Jarrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 39.

22 Rachel Donaldson, ‘I Hear America Singing’: Folk Music and National Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 17.

25 Burl Ives, compiler, Song in America: Our Musical Heritage (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1962).

26 Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 42.

29 Constance Rourke, The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays, ed. and Preface Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942).

30 Richard Wightman Fox, Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), 230.

32 Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 153.

35 Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 271.

38 Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), 507–8.

39 Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature from 1890 to the Present, abridged edn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 408.

40 Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), 115.

42 Lewis Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 432.