Good evening and welcome to the National Archives. I'm Chris Naylor, executive for research services here at the National Archives. And I'm really pleased that you all could join us for tonight's program, whether you're here in person or joining us virtually. Tonight's program is the first public event related to our new exhibit, Power and Light, Russell Lee's Coal Survey, which opened last week. The exhibit includes more than 200 photographs of renowned documentary photographer Russell Lee. It is free and open to the public in the Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery of the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., and runs through July 6, 2025. Tonight, we are hosting authors Mary Jane Apple and Douglas Brinkley, who will discuss their new book, American Coal, Russell Lee Portraits, which draws from several thousand photographs that Lee made for the survey. Alice Camps, curator of the Power and Light exhibit, will moderate the discussion and a book signing will follow the program. In 1946, the Truman administration made a promise to striking coal miners that if they resumed work, the federal government would sponsor a nationwide survey of health and labor conditions in mining camps. One instrumental member of the survey team was photographer Russell Lee. Lee was known for documenting agrarian life for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. For the 1946 survey, he used his camera to document medical, health, and housing conditions in coal mining communities. Located in remote areas, these communities were not normally accessible to outsiders. Lee's photographs, with his detailed captioning, demonstrate both the difficult circumstances in which the miners and their families lived, but also show us the strength and resilience of these mining communities. The National Archives has the complete series of over 4,000 survey images, the bulk of which were taken by Lee himself, and these photographs are a rich resource to anyone researching social and labor history in post-World War II America. The book, American Coal, features over 100 of Lee's photographs, his original detailed captions, and essays placing Lee's work into historical context. I would now like to introduce our two authors and our moderator. Mary Jane Apple is a historian of American social documentary photography and the author of Russell Lee, a photographer's life and legacy. Douglas Brinkley is the Catherine Sanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, a trustee of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Silent Spring Revolution. Finally, Alice Camps is a curator here at the National Archives. In addition to power and light, she has curated numerous exhibits and featured document exhibitions over her 15 years at this agency. And it is now my pleasure to welcome Mary Jane Apple and Douglas Brinkley. Over to you, Alice. Thank you, Chris. It's wonderful to be here tonight in the beautiful Archivist Reception Room at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. I want to welcome all of you here and online, and especially Mary Jane and Doug. Thank you so much for being here. And thank you so much for this beautiful book. We are thrilled to have it as a companion piece to the exhibit. So I'd like to start off by going back to the beginning of your interest in Russell Lee. But just let me mention quick that we will take questions after the talk, so if you could please hold them. But Mary Jane, why don't you tell us how that all started, and then the two of you could tell us how you came to team up to write this book. Sure. Well, my interest in Russell Lee started right out of graduate school. When I took a job at the Library of Congress and I was part of a team there to digitize the FSA collection for online access. So the website, you can see all of it now. But that project really gave me the opportunity to see all of the photographs by all of the photographers printed and unprinted work roughly in the order that they shot it. And of the about 20 photographers who worked for the FSA, it was really Russell Lee's work that stood out to me. And there were two things about his work that really caught my eye. And one of them was his use of flash and the other one was the way he photographed people. He just had a real gift for connecting with people. And do we have photographs anywhere? Let me go to the next one. Yes. So Alice chose an excellent portrait. So this is the kind of, you know, he just built a rapport with people immediately. You can tell they're just so comfortable with him. And I was really curious that no one had really ever done an in-depth study of his work. And so that's what I set out to do. That's what I decided to do. And I did. And just for the audience who may not be familiar with the FSA. Sure. The FSA was an agency, it was a federal agency during the New Deal. It started off as the resettlement administration and changed names and agencies in 1937. And it was called the Farm Security Administration. And the Farm Security Administration had a documentary photography project led by a man named Roy Stryker. And in 1942 then that the FSA went into the office of war information. So sometimes you'll hear RA, sometimes you'll hear FSA, sometimes you'll hear FSA-OWI. But it's all the same project, 1935 to 1943. And Russell Lee worked, he was the longest tenured of that project. He worked from the October of 1936 to October of 1942. Doug, tell us how you got it. Hi guys, thank you all for coming tonight. I live, and my wife is here with me. We live and raised our kids in Austin, even though I'm a professor at Rice. And after these cold portraits, he went Russell Lee and moved to Austin in 1947. And he became the first professor of photography at University of Texas Austin. And I vaguely knew about Russell Lee because I'd written on FDR and the New Deal.  But Russell Lee, I've known, I heard the name, but he didn't have one image that just jumped up my mind. But lo and behold, at the time of the shooting in Charleston, famously when President Barack Obama went down to Charleston and sang Amazing Grace. That was a moment that we were starting to reconsider Confederate memorials and getting names off of buildings. And in Austin, there was a school called Robert E. Lee, and it has now been changed to Russell Lee. And the University of Texas has a lot of his photos, National Archives a lot. And so I, with that going on politically, Robert E. Lee, Russell Lee, read Mary Jane's book, A Portrait. Obviously this book, and I loved it because she wrote with such eloquence and she had such a feel for New Deal era photography. And so after I read it, I just felt, I never reached out, but I was like, great, now I understand Russell Lee. Well, I'm a member of the National Archives Foundation. I'm a board member. And I came to a board meeting, and lo and behold, we had our board meeting and later I was told about the Russell Lee mining collection of 1946. And I thought they were incredible photos and a story I didn't know and won that due to limitations she didn't fully explore in her incredible book. So we decided to get together, working with, I should say Alice, but we, Mary Jane and I just started in a quick mode, went at this. And I do a lot of presidential history, and I do labor history quite a bit. So I was fascinated that I think a key thing to keep in mind as we proceed this evening is in World War II, you couldn't, industries like coal. I mean coal was our energy source. I mean, it went from wood in 1890 to coal all the way to about 1950 when oil came in. So you can't do American history without coal. And I got interested in labor history. I along was interested in the United Mine Workers and John Lewis, but I was intrigued that Russell Lee was born in 1903 in Ottawa, Illinois, because I'd learned that Illinois more than people think was a big deal for coal because they would get mine coal and the coal would go into Chicago. And many of the big labor battles, Battle of Verdun as they call it, or Mother Jones, who's a great American figure, all came out of these Illinois coal fights. She's buried in Mount Olive, Illinois and all of this. And interestingly, Lee was born in Illinois in Indiana and what is coal in America? Today we have open pit coal mining in Wyoming, which is still active. Kentucky and, you know, in West Virginia are other big coal states, but there's a feeling that coal in America at least, if not China, is in a kind of decline. But I realize probably it gets short-shifted in American studies because people like to do other topics than coal or understanding the role that that played. And so we've had a happy collaboration, you know, where she knows more about how she's worked in this realm of archiving and photography. Alice knows a lot, so it's just been a joy to get to write and do this with you. Thank you. And that was one of the reasons why I was excited to do an exhibit of these photographs is because I felt like this is, you know, one, it's a photographer that, like you said, has been under-recognized and under-appreciated, I think. But it's also a group of people that has been under-recognized and under-appreciated.  And I want to just add here, we talked about this before. I mean, I, exactly what you're saying, people have come to me and said the same thing. I had a librarian in Southern Virginia reach out to me and she said, thank goodness, finally the coal miner.  She said, my father, coal gave us life. My father, you know, spent 30 years in the coal mine and it took his life.  So I think that this really, you know, the exhibit, the talk, it just really touches people. Coal runs deep. Coal runs deep and because Russell Lee, he had a credible portfolio. He went all low. I mean, he, you know, did cowboys and did, and people in Oklahoma and Japanese internment camps or, you know, it was in Europe during the war. I mean, he was a intrepid person, but, you know, coal got kind of the, in the 1940s during World War II, FDR forbid striking for the national cause. We're all in it together and you're not allowed to strike and there is no war effort without coal. So it kind of stopped striking and protest. But the soonest we won World War II, all of these different 1946, it pops like popcorn. So many strikes are going on everywhere that you look and it became a, in some ways, a bit of a national crisis. I'll have to put it mildly, railroad strikes, General Electric went on strike. I mean, it's really a long list. But there, and Harry Truman tried to figure out a way to mediate it and somehow through what we can get into it if we want. But it led to the idea that let's show coal, the coal communities as real people because John L. Lewis and angered a lot of people. He was defiant to FDR during a war that unions are, you know, coal mining union and FDR. So they weren't getting great publicity coal miners during World War II, working in the home front. But in 1946 with the sensitivity of Russell Lee, he would go and show their life. It's just not showing somebody with lung disease, but was trying to document, social document, turn what the life is like for people living in mining camps. And they varied. Right? I mean, there isn't like one standard. Some camps people had a pretty good life, pretty good community. Others were horrendous. It varied from place to place, mine owner to mine owner. But the Russell Lee paid a key role in that strike and the settlement of it and these photos were met. We own them. They belong in the American people. They're at the National Archives. Well, maybe you could talk a little bit more about what made Russell Lee such a great choice for this project and what kind of photographs did we get because he was the photographer and not, you know, maybe your everyday Navy photographer. The survey was run by a Navy medical personnel who also photographed the survey. So if you could build a photographer specifically for this assignment, you couldn't have imagined Russell Lee. You know, he was the perfect combination of skills and temperament. He was perfect in many ways. He was trained as a chemical engineer in the early 1920s and he had worked in industry including in mining. And he took his methodical engineering approach with him when he became a photographer. And we can see a lot of that in a lot of his work, in his series work particularly. He left chemical engineering and decided to become an artist. So he was trained as a painter. He went to the Art Students League and studied with John Sloan who taught Lee lighting, composition and design. And he illustrated his lectures with his favorite artists. So Sloan introduced Russell Lee to a French artist named Henri Domier who Russell Lee just really connected with. And Domier was someone who depicted working class people with decency and respect. And Russell Lee just really connected with that. And you can see that in photographs like this, like the miners here that are, I think they're on their way to the lamp house. And you can see Russell Lee's monumentalized them in a way. He's taken it from a bit lower position so that they're, you know, he's kind of looking up at them. And you can see that John Sloan, you know, design and lighting and the lunch pails and everything. But Russell Lee, as Doug said, was also intrepid. He would go wherever he needed to go to get a shot. He would climb a mountain, he would go down into the bottom of a mine. And he did for this assignment, he did both of those things. But he also had experience of photographing health and safety and medical issues. And that was the purpose of this. John L. Lewis demanded this as part of the crowd Lewis was to look at the health care that these miners were getting. And Russell Lee had photographed numerous assignments while he was an FSA photographer. He photographed for the Public Health Service. So this was all, you know, very, very familiar. He was just, you know, check, check, check, check, all of the things that just made him perfect for this job. And when all the film came in at the end, Admiral Boone saw that he was the perfect photographer because they didn't really use hardly any of the other photographers who were Navy doctors. They used mostly Russell Lee's photographs for the report, the survey report. And he was deeply unintrusive. He could go into a community, coal mine community, not be like in your face. He kind of had a great ability to blend in and just be there, nothing dramatic in any personal way. So he could get people like Settima Verte or something at its best. People were relaxed around him. They weren't posing. They were a unit they were. It would just be the way he did it. So his body of work is intense. And this gives us the best, these photos are the best of what it was like in the early Cold War years. Truman years, what happened. The big change when the restrictions of World War II were being lifted. Obviously, automobile bills he couldn't buy in World War II. And you couldn't get tires or rations, gas rations. But the opening up of the Cold War did lead to a consumer frenzy. And the automobile and Route 66 and people heading west and all of this. But it also led to these strikes. And it's kind of a hangover effect this book of the New Deal. He's actually being set now by Department of Interior for this. Not a defunct New Deal agency. But they kind of pulled him out of retirement. He was fishing in Colorado. And they were saying, you're the guy. They're getting a call from the White House. We need you as a national service to humanize what's going on. And let us have a fair look at what's going on in cold country in America. Let's talk about his commitment to photography as an agent of social change. He was very, very committed to that. And as you were saying, Doug, people were pretty down on miners at the time because they were depriving them of light and heat in their homes and the cars they wanted to buy and the houses they wanted to build. And also because they had broken the strike pledge during World War II. So people, the public had a pretty negative view of miners. But his photographs, I think, changed that, would you say? Yes. And, you know, we think of that term, hillbilly.  It wasn't something people were aspiring to. I'm going to grow up and be a coal miner. But as you all know, we had coal towns where it went from generation to generation and they had created a culture of their own. And I think the mention of healthcare is key as we're looking at photos, the demand that, you know, we have to take care of it. You can't just put the amount of collapse mines, deaths, health risks, horrors that miners had to endure. It's one of the more ghastly stories in American history. And so to be able to humanize the situation at least give us a peek. Today you could have a documentary film crew come in like. In those days you had a talented photographer, as you said, who understood printing, who could stand on top of a truck or a clip or, you know, not to connect it at all because it's completely different. But when I studied Ansel Adams, the great nature photographer, just carrying equipment or in the heat and going on roads and back. These commitments photographers made, you know, are really remarkable. We under appreciate, we look at their images and not seeing all the sweat equity. And I would say Russell Lee probably had as much sweat equity as any photographer, you know, of his time. And one of my favorite quotes of his people, one of the things that's impressive about him is that everybody who knew him spoke so glowingly of him and talked about this warm smile that he had. And especially his students at the University of Texas adored him and they talked about him saying to them, if you want to go into this line of work you have to respect people. Even if they're people you don't like because that is what they deserve. And I think you really see that in his photographs. I agree. And you know, it also interested me that we're in a time of renewables and people are looking at, what's the future of coal? And as historians we're thinking, well, what was the past history of coal? You know, how has this played out in America? And it's a very large story coal mining in the United States that you hear and folk music and country songs and all these sort of cultural, you know, Amore's and images we have of coal miners, daughters, or the shafts collapsing and all this. But it really is what fueled the 20th century. And you know, before the real explosion of the automobile after World War II it was American coal and we're lucky that we had somebody within eye and that the government was clever enough and incorrect to get somebody to for history document this as well as just as a social surface of the moment. Well, let's talk a little bit about race as are reflected in these photos. You mentioned in the book that his, Russell Lee's interest in racial relations in the United States goes back to the Great Depression era photos. Can you tell us a little bit about that interest and how it's reflected in his photos? Sure. So when Russell Lee worked for the FSA, the Foreign Security Administration, his official mandate was not race related but he later recalled that one of his personal objectives even though it was not his mandate was to photograph the injustice of segregation. And so throughout his FSA tenure as he traveled the country he photographed disparate treatment, he photographed discrimination, he photographed segregation, probably the most well-known body of work that he made for the FSA on this topic is for what the photographs that he shot for 12 million black voices. I don't know if you know that book, the wonderful book by Richard Wright and Edwin Roscombe. Russell Lee spent two weeks in Chicago photographing the segregated city, the south side, with Horace Caten, the sociologist and with Richard Wright and Edwin Roscombe. And I want to add also that it was not just, for Russell Lee it was not just black and white, he also included other people of color in his documentation for the FSA. He photographed Mexican and Mexican American workers in Minnesota and a lot in Texas. He photographed indigenous peoples along the Columbia River in fishing communities and as Doug mentioned he photographed the Japanese interment and then relocation to Oregon. So by the time he got to the coal mines administration he brought that same interest and just kind of determination to show that as well and he photographed the complexities of race and ethnicity in the coal mines. And it was pretty complex and this photograph that's on the screen kind of shows the, up here as well, shows the complexity. So this is an integrated company store in, I think it's in West Virginia and so the company stores and the medical facilities were integrated but everything else black and white families lived separately. They went to separate churches, they went to separate schools and they used separate recreation facilities. And it varied by state, by region and by mine but generally it was a complex situation that Russell Lee even though the focus of the medical survey was not on race at all and they said so in the report Russell Lee took it upon himself to photograph this aspect of the mining communities. And that's some of the only documentation we have of the race relations. And his interest in justice and his compassion is fascinating to me especially because he was born into some wealth, wasn't he? Can you tell us a little bit about his childhood and what maybe helped him grow the big heart that he had? I think that his, he grew up in a, I suspect they were progressive Republicans. I can't say that for certain but his great uncle was a philanthropist but a very large landowner. He owned farms across the Midwest but he believed in giving back and he taught Russell Lee that. There's a, Doug mentioned the Russell Lee School. Russell Lee's great uncle has a school named for him in Illinois because he gave back to the community. He gave to the hospital, he created just a lot of different philanthropic and he just gave back to the community and he taught Russell Lee that. And he also experienced some tragedy. His father died when he was quite young. I mean he didn't have the, he made his way to Lehigh University and so he was a college kind of person but when she mentioned Richard Wright that's the Richard Wright of the great novelist. And here he is in Chicago contributing to document Bronzeville or Chicago Southside and Chicago wasn't just Richard Wright and later people like Gwendolyn Brooks the poet and all the great jazz players coming out of Chicago and all that. But some of his photography on looking at black America in extraordinary but also is really showing Jim Crow as it was. He's not, doesn't have to like show up a clan rally to show racism. He could just do it in an honest, with an honest lens. And yeah, I mean he was, he had a big heart, cared about people in need. We were working through the Great Depression. There was plenty of starvation, unemployment, dislocation but even amongst all of that what gets documented in novels or films were cultural pockets of America. The great novelist Thomas Wolf used to say there are a billion forms of America but if you live in D.C. or New York or Austin we kind of think our local scene is it. He had an understanding that we are a nation of all these different subcultures and people and ways to go but what unites his work by and large commitment to our country and to service but it's his belief in equality of people. And in that right way it's moving to see Robert E. Lee School as I said change to Russell Lee. Now it's something odd about oh we can keep the R in the L. He went on to change as much. And so you know that's why I read your book because I was like wait a minute I'm getting the oki-yoki here or something. But no he's a sustainable great American photographer whose art and body of work is indisputable. So it's kind of fun and an honor to just get to spend a little time with them and she spent a lot more time within than I have enough. Well I have to say when I was one of my many research trips my husband and I went to the Roy Stryker papers in Louisville Kentucky and I was going through documents and there was a questionnaire there that I'm not sure why it was not in Russell Lee's papers it was in Roy Stryker's papers his boss at the FSA and it was a document that was a survey of you know to be a standard oil New Jersey photographer which was a whole other project after this and it was you know filled out Russell Lee's favorite subject matter and in Russell Lee's handwriting it just said work in the public interest that was it. So I mean that pretty much tells you. Love that. It's very characteristic. Well someone who knows the entire span of his work so well did you see any progression in his style or changes in these coal images from his earlier work? Well there's a lot of a lot of his his coal mining photographs are similar to his FSA. There are some similarities there you know people who are you know they're poverty stricken or they're captive in exploitative labor practices like the FSA but a lot of these photographs for the coal mines administration they're grittier. The people are working in more dangerous situations and they're living and working in more toxic environments than the people that Russell Lee photographed. And I have to say that Russell Lee was of a different frame of mind when he did this coal series from his FSA. When he took the job with the FSA it was a new deal agency there was this optimism this a spree to core we're all in this together we're going to photograph for social change. You know and he saw that change he saw that change in the country from 1936 to 1942 if you look at his photographs you will see that arc of the nation's recovery. And then Lee went to war he photographed for the air transport command for a few years and came back and when he had left for the war the nation in his mind had recovered and he came back and he saw this group of workers who had not recovered they did not enjoy the post-war prosperity they were still struggling and they were having to fight for you know proper health care and fight for clean water and all of this and this photograph that you've chosen. I like that you've chosen this photograph because this really is a window into Russell Lee's mindset of the coal his coal series. So this is a miner Charlie Linger Charles Linger and I think this is in Kentucky there was a mine explosion and Mr. Linger was injured in the mine and he was not able to work and the mine left town just stranded all of these minors there just picked up and left and so they had no money to leave and they were stuck there. There's no electricity so you see the kerosene lamp no running water no clean water and Russell Lee photographed them at night showing you you know this in a very deliberate this is very stylistically uncharacteristic of Russell Lee's work and I think that he was really adopting some of the film noir design elements from that period and he's showing you you know just how dark this is but right in the middle he's giving you that sense of hope you know because this is really as you and I were talking about this is really a family portrait this is a father and his son listening to the radio which by necessity was battery powered because the house had no electricity because the coal company just up and left so I mean this is Russell Lee's frame of mind for these coal images and I think by the end he was really really dispirited and I think he was angry by what he was seeing that this group of people even 20 years later he talked about the coal industry as an economically sick industry and he was just so dispirited that you know these people needed help and he wasn't able to help them. But he did help them. My understanding is that the photographs really did help change public attitudes about the minors and help them appreciate that the true you know real problems absolutely they did and they were part of the report that Admiral Boone the Boone report but Russell Lee was not I think he was in a different mind frame because he was not you know like with the FSA he was we're here to help you you know he was supposed to be for this a very neutral party and this was a neutral survey that the medical doctors and the Navy was conducting and I think he was just dispirited to see this this segment of America had not benefited from post-war prosperity. And in 1946 this is pre-regulatory America I mean this is pre you know everything and it was so hurry up to win World War II whether it was any kind of chemical whether it was DDT whether it was work hours. There wasn't but in the post-war period you start after these photos getting the drumbeat of you know getting a clean air act after small kills people in Donor of Pennsylvania or getting healthcare for minors you know and in the Kennedy Johnson Nixon years. So it's kind of he caught the this transition point between the the old world of mining communities and a modernity a little better conditions coming in of course in integration with civil rights getting you know that's the same year same time period that you're getting Jackie Robinson integrating baseball that you're getting the armed forces by Truman integrated I mean it's just a new order but he's capturing this culture so we didn't have him you know a late historian named Stephen Ambrose I knew once used to say God he was always interviewing D-Day veterans and he would say wouldn't have been amazing to have a tape recorder at Antietam or Shiloh. Well we had cameras in this period but nobody else took the time to get engaged with the coal community like Russell Lee would if we didn't have these and we only have a hundred in the book because there are many to choose from but the you know or you know type of thing but the the his overall body of work and this is just an outstanding way to kind of think look study for students and in history and not just photo history but just of history to what that looks like back then and this is the photo and she so eloquently displayed just tells you a lot of stories in that one one photo. I should add that these most of the photos are digitized and are in our online catalog and we are working towards digitizing the entire series of four thousand some photos almost three thousand of which are Russell Lee's and then they will all be online soon thanks to Nick and his team. Thank you Nick and then we're talking about you know thousands of these so when I'm saying getting a portrait it's when you look at you go through thousands and you're going to feel more than you can by showing a singular slide in an event like this. Well Nick deserves the credit for helping me choose this subject matter for the exhibit so thank you. So anything you want to add before we take questions. Just that if you don't know about Russell Lee's worth investigating his life I hope you have a chance to look at the book and certainly make sure that you look at our I think incredible job that you've done with your National Archives and it's just I guess to my mind it's just another incredible archive service to our country looking at all different aspects and trying to bring it into the public sphere so thank you because you've been you've been you're on the case on this in a big time way. Thank you. So if you have a question someone will come with a microphone too so everybody can hear you. We've got one up here Tom. A couple up here. They're coming around. I wanted to ask you further about Ray's John L. Lewis was president for me 1920 1960 and the exhibit shows clearly black life and then it shows white life that is working together living separately and of course African-Americans were initially used as scabs in Madawan and I just wanted to I could not find when the United Mine Workers was actually integrated and when I talked to at the opening one of the black hole worker father was a black hole worker. He said oh we were integrated although we went to segregated schools and Skip Gates talks about that too. Great question. Take first step. Okay. No you know you make a great point and as I mentioned earlier I think each location is slightly different than another on the segregation map depending community but by and large you would have a situation where you could work in the in the mines together but not in things like school. There was still a racial divide in any town whether it's the railroad tracks or the forest trail or you know so segregation is going on but your notion of scab labor of black Southerners is just is a large part of mining history. You know pick your place but sometimes when you have the great migration of of blacks from Alabama Mississippi and all going up to Illinois or going into look for new jobs if they ever went on strike in the early years they would bring in black labor and it would create race riots. The meaning the mining companies enjoyed pitting the workers against each other black and white and they fed it and fueled it over and over again. I would say that in 46 there was a kind of euphoria whether you were black or white that the war was over. I mean a million African-Americans served in World War II and the idea that you know the United States one in a beat fascist Germany and beat Imperial Japan. We did it. It brought pride to black and white America in equal ways. I would say though that I think out of that segregated you know in southern places in the Midwest too but you know if you were black and you would hear you are fighting against fascism. I'll give you an example. I wrote Rosa Parks's biography and she had a brother Sylvester and Mrs. Parks was so proud of Sylvester from Montgomery, Alabama who went and served in Sylvester McCauley. This is his name, it's her brother and served in Normandy D-Day. It was a stretcher carrier of dead bodies and then later got sent also to the Pacific. Both came back to Montgomery, Alabama and was beat. Her brother because he had a uniform. You're uppity. You're wearing your uniform. Who do you think you are? Eventually that will simmer into as we know by 1955 Montgomery boycott but he couldn't stand the racism after World War II because they felt he served as did mega-evers, served in uniforms, served my country fighting against fascism only be treated as a third class citizen in the south. You go to cities like Huntsville, Alabama. We brought 137 Nazi rocketeers from Germany that worked for Hitler and they were given parades in Huntsville.  So you know the race and all of this is just a large issue but to isolate it we didn't detect in Russell Lee anything but a craftsperson trying to show you what he's seen in an honest way as an artist and craftsperson and his sympathy was for equality and whatever he did. And so it's you know in a time of cancelling artists not cancelling I find Russell Lee's body of work very sustainable because his motivations were pure and honest as a visual artist. Many artists are pure and honest but Lee I believe is one of them. I wanted to speak to the question you brought of was he able to help the people the minors or not? Did it do any good? And you said yes it did do good. And there may be, is there someone here from the UMWA who can speak to this better than I know? Because the crew glues agreement resulted and brought healthcare to the minors and was really precedent setting in American labor. Great point. It was very big. We should have mentioned that. The promise of 1946. Yeah that's a big turning point I think. To try to understand there's still rely on those funds health and welfare funds. Yeah. There's a question over here. So to what degree were the mining companies required or expected to cooperate with survey and Lee and how cooperative or disruptive were they? I believe it was mandatory. Yes. It's not mandatory and I don't think they were, I think they were begrudgingly cooperative, some of them. They didn't like the idea of a camera spy coming around doing documentarian work, but it was an order, I mean they didn't have a choice. This was set by the Truman administration. And if you look at some of his photographs, you can see mine officials off to the side standing in a doorway. You can see them looking on, watching him. Good question too. The question is not so much his motivation, but what was actually the purpose that the government sent. And I've kind of heard two things and maybe it's both, but it seems to some extent it was documenting the conditions so that they could document it and figure out what type of health was needed. But on the other side was kind of a propaganda and policy, creating a change in the American people's viewpoint. Two point, was it both or was it one or the other? And maybe it was one for the government and another for him. Well, the way that I see it and Doug would may explain this better, the government was not advocating for the minors. The government, as I understand it, was kind of facilitating the survey that the mine workers demanded before they would go back to work. And they trusted the Navy medical doctors. They believed that the Navy medical officers would be the most impartial, that they're not working for the mining companies, they're not working for anyone. So Russell Lee was, there were I think five teams, five survey teams that were going out simultaneously. So this was a huge, huge survey endeavor and they needed to do it quickly because of the agreement and they needed to compile all of these statistics. So Russell Lee was not attached to any one survey team. You'll see in some of the photographs, he'll photograph a Navy medical officer. He may be coming and going, drifting. He will be with Admiral Boone on some PR events that kind of publicizing the survey. But Russell Lee was kind of his own, he was on his own photographing as part of the survey, sometimes with one of the survey teams and sometimes not with one of the survey teams. I'm getting a nod from Nick so I don't know. So the government's role was really to dispatch the Navy, to really try to get an impartial view. Unlike, and that's kind of what I was going towards the difference between this and the FSA, Russell Lee was representing the FSA when he was photographing and these were FSA programs and these were, it was very different and that's what I was trying, I guess I didn't really distinguish that as well but Russell Lee was not representing the UMWA. He was not representing the US government. He was employed to be one of the impartial survey teams because the mine workers' charges were they were getting substandard health care and that's what the survey actually showed that they, the mine workers were correct, they were getting substandard health care.  Just imagine it's 1946 and railroads are going on strike, coal is going on strike. We didn't know in 46 we weren't going back to the Great Depression just because World War II ended. On the other hand, the new deal with and then turning into, you know, he hadn't been a president a year, Truman, now that the war is over, the miners are, there's complaints coming and a strike that we have abysmal health. We don't have any services. We don't have, that's the miners. The mine workers are saying we've been giving, giving, giving to Uncle Sam when the war effort, we need to go make some money and get back into things.  It's April 1, 1946 or not, you know, this period, what do I do? You've got to choose a side and what are the health care conditions?  And Boone knew the quality of the work of, of Russell Lee and he knew that basically he was an honest person. He would be able to with his camera, tell us what is going on in these communities and do the miners have a real, is it as bad as they said? And the nut of it is it was as bad as the miners were saying it was, the conditions with a couple of exceptions here and there where one mine was run a little differently, you know, but overall it was horrendous. And it's why we still hear stories of black lung disease and no health care and communities wiped out and I mean the toxicity around any cold community and it's, it's real. And so I think Truman did the right thing in that regard, but then you have a heart, a tapped heartly coming and lay, and no more, the terror becomes, yeah, with Truman it becomes, these guys can shut down, strikes can shut America down. And in that way I don't want to build Truman into a huge hero if you're a labor person because Truman is a post sending him out here and not worried about the health care but the union movement, the fear of massive widespread strikes shutting down America stayed with us for a long time. All the miners and over any of the strikes. Yes. It's fairly shocking. And so he wasn't a referee on this, but Lee's photos are what they are, you know, that he wasn't on his side. He's not spinning this to show one thing or another with the exception of his social justice, New Deal kind of, you know, swagger or whatever. But beyond that, Truman is not a great friend of the labor at all. It's the opposite. He's a Cold War security driven president who started just like anything he did was about Cold War National Security State and his epic, he's no TR. He's no FDR. He's much more involved with the business communities, Steel and others among them who went on strike in 462 Steel. And so, yeah, it's a moment in time when we were really looking at the documentation of these communities. That's what's going on here. I'm looking forward to seeing these photographs and I'm interested in what you said about his documenting segregation. And I wonder if among those communities he has any particular focus on immigrant communities. So I've just finished being steeped in mining 30 years earlier and written a novel about my family based on my family story who are brought here by the mining companies to be miners in Southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia. And, you know, Teddy Roosevelt comes and says, this is the safest mine we've ever built. And three days later it blows up. This is in Mariana, Pennsylvania. And there's no unions yet. And so, and Louis Heine is trying to document photographs of child labor. And so I'm just interested in the immigrant community in his time. Well, a couple of things. One with theater was, well, not that we want to dwell on that here, but the, you know, Mother Jones organized out of New Jersey and marched children from mills that were having working still bad conditions in these communities. And she organized a children's march all the way to Oyster Bay to Theodore Roosevelt's house and he wouldn't meet with her. She then was imprisoned in West Virginia for protesting health care conditions and put in jail where she got pneumonia and nearly died. But there was just enough media clamor and she was a little folklorist and they got her out and she healed here in Maryland and then she would go out to Colorado for the great strikes out there and rest it again. And in this case, Rockefeller, who owned the mines, requested a meeting with her and she had told Rockefeller, go. If you would visit, you will see what I'm saying. You're living in, and I'm not saying she was rude to him, it's me being rude here, but you're living in gilded offices and mansions and all. You haven't been to these places. Go, you go, you see, you tell me whether their health care is good. You tell me and Rockefeller capitulated that she was right. It was shockingly enough that it was undeniable if you actually went to see, you know, what was going on. But the immigrant stories are just thick in labor history. I mean, depending on place and state, you know, you could either place this on some of these coal strikes where, you know, in Pennsylvania people were gunned down and killed in mining strikes and in Illinois people were beaten and lynched and the police were often owned by the mining companies and they often tried to get recent immigrants, meaning recent back then, slobs, poles, you know, maybe Italians, all organized instead of hating each other, disliking the black workers that unify over our whiteness and or maybe shared Catholicism or shared, you know, but to put us on, we're the, you know, so race and mining becomes a very large phenomenon in a lot of places and then again not in some. I'm wondering about the actual role or participation or not of the mining companies. They must not have been thrilled to have this portrayed in crisp black and white. Did they try to interfere? Was it taken out of their hands? What role did they play? The coal lobby did. When the report was going to be published, I forget what day, the coal lobby had this big event in Washington discounting everything that was in the report that hadn't yet been released so they were trying to get ahead of all of what they considered, they were certain that it was going to be bad publicity and they put together their own kind of report of the state of the coal companies and Admiral Boone, I was reading a correspondence at the Library of Congress in the Boone Papers and he had sent it, it was a cover letter that he sent to someone else and he just wrote, he said, I can't, you know, something about this piece of propaganda, you know, and he just like tossed it aside. He said, you know, before our report is even out, so they were trying to do a PR campaign. They couldn't stop the survey teams from coming in and I didn't read anything about any coal companies successfully blocking them. But your assumption is correct. Yes. But if they could have, they would have, so they tried it on a PR front. They were under federal control at the time, so they couldn't really, right? That's correct. Because in World War II, due to John Lewis, coal miners were renegades, one of the only groups trying to orchestrate strikes during the war, everybody else did a peace pact and no striking while the war was going on, but not Lewis. So the public image of who were the miners, the miner union, you know, was dicey. On the other hand, if your, you know, Boo was hired as a military, I mean like Admiral McRaven of today being put on a commissioning board and called, you know, and I think we found that he was an honest broker, Boo, and the main rub here is on healthcare, health conditions in these camps, not teaching, segregation, all but health, is it? Mm-hmm. Can we take maybe one last question? I have a real short question. We can take a few. Can I, can I please just, just in this image that we're looking at, what is that thing that's either sitting on the radio or above the, is it a rooster? I think that's a chalkware, I think it's a carnival prize. Okay. And it is a rooster or chicken, right? Yes. Okay, thank you. This is fascinating and fascinating to me. 30 years after the Boone Report, the Boone Report was part of the longest, the longest strike in the history of coal. The second longest strike in the history of coal, 111 days, was in 1977-78. And as Truman also needed to get the minors back to work, so did President Carter. He turned to Governor Rockefeller of West Virginia, so Rockefeller's back in the story, different Rockefeller. And the question was, we've got to get the minors back. So a presidential commission was created to look into the coal industry. And it wasn't clear what we were to do, but we discovered this Boone Report from 30 years earlier and we decided to recreate it. And we found Russell Lee. And he agreed to be an advisor to the project.  And I said, can we find him? And we did. But he was now an old man with black lung. We didn't have Russell Lee behind the camera, so I'm not sure of the quality of the photographs or anything like this. But it was quite an effort and something I thought might be interesting. Are you Mr. Wathen? Are you Ted Wathen? No. Did you work with Ted Wathen? Thank you for coming. The photographs that you're speaking of are in the exhibit. Yeah, you saw them. Wow, that's amazing. Thank you. It's cool. Yeah, thanks. Oh, sorry, it was only for video. I usually have a big mouth, so I'm using this. Did he associate with Eugene Smith or Walker Evans and their styles? I see this photograph. The reason I'm asking this question, I see this photograph. This is a very Eugene Smith-type photograph. And it's different from the other stuff that's in the book. Any of his records, did he ever talk, because most of the photographers back then knew we'd want another, at least tangentially, did he ever have any interaction with names like that and did his style change that you saw over the course of his taking photographs? Well, Russell Lee's style, in my view, didn't change because of another photographer. It changed because of the world of Walker Evans. Actually, I was just on the phone a few weeks ago with someone who, at the University of Texas, when Gary Winogrand was teaching there and in walked Walker Evans and in walked Russell Lee and then they talked to the class and then they went and had lunch together. So they were colleagues in the Farm Security Administration, Development Administration. I don't know that Russell Lee knew W. Jean Smith. He worked for Life and Russell Lee did not work for Life Magazine. I don't know, was Smith a magnum photographer then after that? Yeah, briefly, but that was in the, I guess late 50s, 60s. Yeah, and Russell Lee was a, he was an adjunct or honorary member of Magnum, so he may have come in contact with Smith at that time. Not that I know of. No, he was more Texas focused. He worked for Standard Oil New Jersey because Roy Stryker had headed up that documentary project, but he just, he took jobs that interested him. He worked for Fortune, project by project, basis, and Texas Observer, but mostly assignments that interested him. And your point's a good one in the regard, though, that I think of an era due to the black and white nature, due to the new, there's something about the New Deal era photography in this period that you can feel like a halo effect on some of that work that you don't quite see. As Americans, shortly after, and you're getting broke, you know, I just think there's something that's special, period, and she knows so much more, but a documentary photography with a whole group of talented, Esther Bubly is incredible. Esther Bubly got, was told to photograph Greyhound buses because Greyhound came from Hibbing, Minnesota and but then they moved to Chicago and during the war, when you're not allowed to use cars, not allowed to use gasoline, it's the boom day for Greyhound. So she would go and document people coming and going on a Greyhound and it folds right in, you know, you can feel a kind of, you know, it's a project that's got this focus and I admire it greatly and you know in the 70s, not Carter, but William Ruckel's house was a protection agency and a lot of it was their color, but he did set groups out to show industrial America and color which had a big impact on environmentalism because of the color nature of it. This, not with environment so much, it feels public health driven. I'm going to stand up because I can't see you without me. Very tall gentleman here. I'm glad you brought back to photography because those are the questions one is I'm assuming that because it was a Truman project or that that's the reason why all the photographs are here at the archives and I'm really looking forward to seeing the exhibition and reading the book because I know it's spectacular but Mary Jane, hi. Why did he photograph this work in using 35 millimeter or did he use a viewfinder? Nick and I corresponded about this. There are no 35 millimeter negatives, is that correct? No, it's all sheet film. It's not what there would be but having gone through the negatives all by one down in a helpful where they're well cared for it's basically four down almost 98% four by five scattering the five by seven you know it's a larger more traditional format.  I mean color was beginning to come in but it you know Well he had already shot in color and he shot with 35 millimeter in the 30s and his techniques were quite advanced I will tell you that I was one of his students not one of his great students I knew that there was a photo archivist but he was an extraordinary person at the University of Texas when I knew him and it was his humanity that was the most important thing and he demanded and by the way we had four by five viewfinders and we had to haul them everywhere underneath the tent this is in 1968 this is not the early times but I learned more about color shooting in black and white than ever at any rate one of the side things that I'll say is that it was very hard to get into his class and when I did I called my father immediately because my father was a photographer and also a chemical engineer and he said say hello to Russell for me and I said what and he said Charlotte all those enormous color photographs in the Dow chemical company building in Freeport, Texas came from they were all done by Russell I was his I think people knew that my father was a photographer so they sent him around with Russell and he photographed the entire plant they were all in color it's because of the pipes and everything else and one of the things as painter and his aesthetics never failed him and this painting heralds back to that I mean this photograph heralds back to that I mean that was always in him he was a fine teacher it was a great experience thank you for that so much we appreciate that here's why we do come to love the National Archives I'm curious Mary Jane will all of you the selection of photos just a selection just a couple hundred of Russell Lee's photos and a few by some of the Navy photographers appeared in the final report just a selection what do you make of the final report I mean does it do justice to Russell Lee's work in the survey I have my own ideas but I'm kind of curious about your thoughts on that well I think they serve multiple purposes they're serving the purpose of because as you know in the report they didn't use the names of the people they were a bit selective they didn't really show anyone who was seriously injured so they and I think it achieved that goal but I don't know and Russell Lee did the layout on the report so I can't really you know say that he would be dissatisfied because he did it but I think it served its purpose but I don't know that it did the photographs justice because it doesn't really show the depth of his documentation that's fine they weren't doing it as art photos it was a functionality to them it's only later we pull back and look at the body of work of Lee and say wow how extraordinary and talking about Russell Lee I was just ten days ago with Ed Rusche out in a studio in California I don't know if you know Ed just had a show at the American Museum of Museum of Modern Art in New York and he got well known by all the musicians just photographs of all these black and white gas stations and I told him about this he said oh yeah it's not just Russell Lee that I mentioned that's why I mentioned Bubbly that that idea of photographing one like the Greyhound experience the mining community I think that was generational and approach and for historians it's really great like that Rusche then started on his own Sunset Boulevard where he showed every photo of every building on Sunset Boulevard and so more when you look at Lee now I'm not sure even 20 years ago I would have had the appreciation for the breadth of his work so when you do pipes these are key bits of documentation of our country thinking about black and white flat photographs how would you compare the experience with today's world where everything is moving and everything is video does it tell the does contemporary storytelling with iPhones do a better job of telling these things or do black and white photographs well documented do that it's very different but they are all storytellers anyway what a great question I never really thought about that I think it's I think they're just different I don't know that you can that you can compare them some of Russell Lee's colleagues worked in film they chose to go and Jack Delano, Gordon Parks adopted the moving picture and that was never something that Russell Lee wanted to do I think they're just different I wouldn't say one is better than the other yeah depends on people's aesthetic sense still now I still love black and white photography but I know a lot of people don't I don't know if you saw John Stewart's comedy show a couple weeks ago there was somebody in the audience said to John Stewart you're back on TV don't you know it's a dead industry and he pulled out his iPhone he said this is TV your iPhone what do you think it's all visual it's all you know it's tiny it's television you're watching kids he went on and kind of ripped about it and I find black and white still incredibly powerful you know I can understand why you go color if you're going to art world you go black and white more but I think most magazines would like to have their color we forget photographers have to live and earn a living and we live in the age of technicolor but the black and white it's funny though your question because I still see the 50s in black and white in the 60s in color and here I always thought well how strange and then I realized on the inauguration of John F. Kennedy his inaugural speech was covered in black and white but that whole parade NBC did in color and we start seeing Kennedy in color in that era was in black and white industrial military complex famous ones black and white footage Kennedy's inaugural parade in color it was changing just like that so your mind gets set with 30s, 40s, 50s black and white even if people were doing great color work this is the historian me not the photo not you and in film maybe Walt Disney when we started doing animation Fantasia and all once color hit animation it's like but that's what makes Wizard of Oz so interesting right I mean why we all love it it's like black and white then color it's a great question and I think it could stimulate lots more conversation but I have to go with the time so we need to close there's a book signing to follow so I hope you'll all stay for that thank you get you to sign this too do you want to do one now for me I want to have one for my collection well you have to sign it too alright we'll both sign it we'll do it in a little bit let me say hi thank you for being here excuse me hi oh you're welcome I wanted to ask where is your family from


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