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White-Collar Excavations: Fortune Magazine and the Invention of the Industrial Folk
- American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism
- The Ohio State University Press
- Volume 13, 2003
- pp. 84-104
- 10.1353/amp.2004.0006
- Article
- Additional Information
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American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 13 (2003) 84-104
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White-Collar Excavations:
Fortune Magazine and the Invention of the Industrial Folk
James S. Miller
University of Wisconsin-Whitewate
The camera should explore every corner of Industry, showing everything. . . from the steam shovel to the board of directors. The camera should act as interpreter, recording what modern industrial civilization is, how it looks, how it meshes.
—Margaret Bourke-White
Business is our life. It is the life of the artist, the clergyman, the photographer, the doctor because it determines the conditions and problems with which either artist or philosopher, let alone ordinary mortals, have to deal.
—Henry Luce
Modern Industrialism is the undiscovered continent of our time. We are sure it exists for its woods are thick around us. But of its geography we are at least as ignorant as were the Teton Sioux of the geography of the Missouri in the year 1804.
—Fortune, 1936
The past is a foreign country.
—David Lowenthal
I
In the spring of 1929, almost exactly six months before the collapse of the stock market, Henry Luce sent a questionnaire to one hundred "leading corporate executives" around [End Page 84] the eastern seaboard, seeking to gauge their interest in a monthly journal that would both dissect and celebrate what he breathlessly termed America's new "business civilization." Filled with detailed profiles of individual industries, companies and financiers, replete with densely descriptive analyses of technical and manufacturing processes, larded with lavish, artful photographs of production lines and heavy machinery, Fortune magazine, Luce promised his would-be subscribers, aimed at nothing less than to revolutionize the field of business journalism. 1 Its goal, he declared, was to replace the dry, statistical recitations typically found "in the financial pages of newspapers and the cheapest least distinguished of magazines" with a "medium of expression" capable of capturing "the dignity and beauty, the smartness and excitement of modern industry":
Business takes Fortune to the tip of the wing of the airplane and through the depths of the ocean along the bebarnacled cables. It forces Fortune to peer into dazzling furnaces and into the faces of bankers. Fortune must follow the chemist to the brink of worlds newer than Columbus found and it must jog with freight cars across Nevada's desert. Fortune is involved in the fashions of flappers and in glass made from sand. It is packed in millions of cans and saluted by Boards of Directors on the pinnacles of skyscrapers. . . . Into all these matters Fortune will inquire with unbridled curiosity. 2
What lay beneath such ecstatic claims was the highly unorthodox idea that America's commercial-corporate order is best understood not as an aggregate of economic statistics, but as a vital, humanly habitable culture. For Luce, to examine the world of capitalist enterprise was to journey into America itself: to traverse its landscape, inhabit its spaces, imbibe its energy and frenetic pace. Invoking the idiom of exploration and conquest, he promoted his new publication as a kind of ethnographic adventure, one that approached Industry less as an abstract system than as a physical terrain to be discovered, mapped, and colonized.
To focus on such vivid imagery is to underscore an aspect of the magazine that has gone almost entirely unexamined: namely, the congruence between its boosterist ideology and a burgeoning, contemporaneous enthusiasm for exploring America's preindustrial past. To a striking degree, in fact, Luce's promotions rehearse the same kind of thinking that within a few years would come to underwrite a wide-ranging and intense effort among writers, intellectuals, and academics to recuperate the nation's "folk" history—an effort which included such signature 1930's enterprises as the Federal Writers Series, the photographs of the Farm Security Administration, "local color" fiction, and such regionalist manifestoes as the Southern Agrarians' "I'll Take [End Page 85] My Stand." 3 Infused with what Warren Susman has called a "documentary impulse" to recover and record America's vanishing ways of life, this larger...