Putting a Face to the Name

Eastman Kodak is unique in the American vocabulary. No other term widely familiar throughout the entire century combines the name of an American with a word invented by the named person. Bell Telephone does not count because the word telephone predates Alexander Graham Bell, nor does Model T Ford, which is post-1900. The man who lives on through the given and devised names that he made famous, George Eastman (1854–1932), would seem a good candidate for admission to the national pantheon. His credentials include contributions to lasting changes in everyday life, rise from modest beginnings to great wealth, and abundant good works. Yet, if my students are representative, few know anything about Eastman unless they have studied the history of photography or lived in upstate New York.

Why is Eastman so little known today? The limits of his accomplishments are one reason; Thomas Edison and Henry Ford are far better known partly because they were involved with industries more central to the economy, and in Edison’s case because he immensely surpassed Eastman as an inventor. During his life Eastman discouraged personal publicity and made some of his largest gifts anonymously. For decades after his death company policies kept important sources of information away from potential biographers. He had no wife or children to write memoirs or otherwise build on his legend posthumously. Finally, the difficulties that his suicide in 1932 presented to celebratory stories about him might be the primary reason why he is remembered mainly through a name without a face; the earliest children’s books that Brayer lists in her bibliography date from nearly three decades after his death, the first in 1958 written in Japanese and the second from 1959, significantly entitled George Eastman: Young Photographer.

Despite its many virtues, Brayer’s George Eastman: A Biography will not earn Eastman a place in the nation’s school curricula. Few instructors will assign a book that requires 529 pages of text, supplemented by extensive notes, to provide a minutely detailed accounting of Eastman’s professional, personal, and public life. The detail is sometimes excessive, as when the author, describing a 1927 event that Eastman hosted to announce a new full-color process for amateur movies, names twenty-eight guests who attended, and identifies the man, not mentioned elsewhere in the book, who met the Thomas Edison party at the train station. Repetitions lengthen the text, and on occasion clichés take over. More often, Brayer displays a gift for concise, revealing characterization, as in this description of the most important person in Eastman’s life: “Maria would continue to scold her son and complain of her ailments, but delight in her flower garden, wait upon George’s every need, charm his colleagues, run his social life, become his sounding board in business matters, and remain the center of his emotional world” (p. 23).

Such compressed offerings of information and insight appear frequently, making this an essential resource for those seeking knowledge of Eastman or of the technical and organizational history of the photographic materials industry, the institutional history of music and medicine, changing patterns of American philanthropy, and the city of Rochester. Readers of this book also have the pleasure of encountering dozens of brief discussions of unexpected but pertinent subjects such as one on the origins of the Martha Graham dance company and another on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of a physical therapy facility he sponsored at Warm Springs, Georgia. Eastman gave a Ciné Kodak and projector in response to FDR’s 1927 request for a movie camera that could be used to help the patients “see just how they are walking” and “correct faults” (pp. 476–77). Reese Jenkins’s Images and Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry, 1839 to 1925 (1975), highly praised by Brayer, remains the first place to go for a concise and thematically focused account of the early decades of Eastman Kodak, placed in the context of...