This dissertation examines the complex portrait of American labor that emerged in news photography of the 1930s and 1940s. It suggests that renegotiations of workers' place in American society took place in front of Detroit factory gates and in Washington D.C. corridors, but also in the pages of an ever more national, standardized, and photographic mass media. The analysis explores the nexus between mass culture and political and labor history. It shows how unions and corporations waged symbolic battles about who workers were, what unions could bring them, and how workers should flex their newfound political and economic might with news imagery. In the 1930s, technological innovations in cameras and in photographic transmission, the embracing of the photograph by government agencies, unions, and corporations, and the consolidation of mass audiences for news magazines meant that the news was brought to millions of Americans with visual immediacy. The dissertation offers five case studies of the use of news photography to advance, or retard, union drives and unionism. Three case studies examine media venues: one looks at LIFE, the pre-eminent innovator of the use of the photograph in the U.S.; and two others explore union newspapers, New Voices, of New York's Local 65 warehouse workers' union and Steel Labor of the United Steelworkers of America. Two additional case studies explore strikes during the CIO's rise in 1937, a strike at the Hershey Chocolate Corporation, and a strike at Chicago's Republic Steel, which led to the Memorial Day Massacre. Using case studies permits a concrete exploration through archival records of how photographs were used to shape conceptions of organized labor. In union newspapers, national magazines, and corporate public relations campaigns, news photographs increasingly visualized workers as participants in the American Dream. However, powerful messages in news photographs constricted the political and economic terrain workers and unions could fight on, ultimately helping to contain workers' possibilities within that Dream.
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