Arch Capitalist

It’s harder to penetrate the photos of the News in the 1910s collection, than the colour photos from the WWII period.  Every one of them, probably due to their extreme distance from my experience of the world, seems meaningful, but at the same time, due to that distance.  Also, the photographer’s art seems so much more casual, less developed, probably owing not only to the still-newness of the media itself, but more to the bulky equipment of the era.  Many of these photos also seem unusually at home on Flickr – they resemble the easy amateur photography that I look at every day, more than the carefully composed images of the FSA photographers of the 30’s and 40’s.

Photography has made it possible for us to have real evidence of the mythology of an era.  I cannot look at this photo without thinking of George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four, specifically this passage, in itself a quote from a fictional children’s history textbook within text itself -

    In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as ‘Sir’. The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and —

Although Nineteen Eighty-Four’s fictional children’s history textbook mythologizes and distorts the reality of the “capitalist class” for the purpose of propaganda, it is an apt and powerful reference for the sheer distance in class between the vast bulk of humanity and the elites which have existed at the top of nearly every human society.

O.G. Jennings, pictured above, with his wife, served on the boards of Bethlehem Steel, United States Industrial Alcohol
Company, McKesson & Robbins, Inc., Kingsport Press, Signature
Company, National Fuel Gas Company, and Grocery Store Products, Inc., was related to the Rockefellers by marriage, and the inheritor of a huge fortune thanks to his family’s role as partners in the Standard Oil Trust. He seems to be an almost ridiculously stereotypical example of the kind of entitlement and privilege enjoyed during America’s robber baron era.  Almost comically (from today’s perspective) uniformed in his top hat, wearing a long coat and carrying a cane (for battering away pesky photographers, perhaps?), Oliver Gould Jennings appears simultaneously harmless and terrifying.

At Top: O.G. Jennings & wife, Bain News Service, between 1910 & 1915, glass plate negative

Technorati Tags: Oliver Gould Jennings, Oliver Jennings, Library of Congress, The Commons, Flickr, photography, capitalism, capitalist, Bain News Service, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1984, George Orwell, top hat, robber baron, News in the 1910s, black and white, photograph