"Your Neighbors Make News..." LIFE, May 24, 1948, pp. 121
"Our Way of Living Together in America is a Strong but Delicate Fabric" TIME, November 18, 1957, pp. 65The first page I scanned is a Life magazine advertisement titled “Your Neighbors Make News…” In the top and lower right pictures of the page, we see Americans being represented as good neighbors. In both, there is an implicit call for each American to aide one another and in particular, women and children who were typically represented as in need and weak. These images to the right portray an ideal American as a citizen who helps his or her neighbor. These images characterize the ideal of American society around gestures of humanity and tolerance of the weak and destitute. The success of the country depends on the mutual aide between citizens and specifically, between white communities that qualify as “Americans.” In the picture at bottom right, Miss M. taught her blind neighbor how to cook. Despite her inability to see, the blind woman is lifted by her benevolent neighbor. At top right, the two men in the picture have rescued the two little girls from carbon monoxide. American lives are precious and it is the responsibility of all white Americans to protect each other from anything that could threaten their lives. The democratic concept of a mutually aiding society is very explicitly designed to bring together mainstream America under one ideology: that America is a land composed of a citizenry united under the cause of a shared responsibility to each other. However, this solidarity, if you will, is isolated within the white American community. This page shows little social divisions. There is no representation of racial conflict or anything that divides the nation with the exception of clearly cut gender roles and orientations.
The second of the two pages that I analyzed is titled “Our Way of Living Together in America is a Strong by Delicate Fabric.” This image is from TIME, November 18, 1957. Here, we get a completely different representation of American ideology. The change is startling. First off, there is an acknowledgement of divisions between poor and rich, black and white, Jew and Gentile and even foreign and native born. Americans are no longer the typical face portrayed in the other scanned images I analyzed. There is no context in this advertisement. There appear many groups of people not of actually bodies, but of human shapes filled with many colors. It acknowledges that divisions in American society must be recognized but that the differences among Americans are something to reflect on and reconcile for the greater good of the country. American society at this time is in the thick of the Civil Rights Movement and most recently, the desegregation of schools has just been started. In contrast to the first images which applauded American society’s values, this advertisement admits a flawed society. The final line of the quote from Wendell L. Willkie goes: “For no man knows, once it is destroyed where or when man will find its protective warmth again.” The advertisement is a call at all costs to lift the tensions within American society and recognize how far not only American society has excelled, but also the how close it could come to being destroyed by the tensions within its fabric.
1 comment:
The second of the images I posted, in retrospect, is also calling for the social divisions that at the time were becoming more visible were good or bad. Instead they were a reality and that changes that the Civil Rights Movement called for needed to be gradual and not at the speed that the movement was gaining. I don't think it's a call for unity or that it is for equal rights. I think it just acknowledges the American reality. I was unable to find other advertisements that would seem to be as controversial.
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