The Gray Flannel World (February/March 2000 | Volume: 51, Issue: 1)

The Gray Flannel World

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Authors: Benjamin Cheever

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February/March 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 1

 

 

I know a man who came home from work one evening tired and dispirited. His wife met him at the door and thrust a pair of women’s panties in his face. These she had discovered while changing the matrimonial bed. She’d never seen them before. Had he?

 

To gaze or even to glance at Dan Weiner’s photographs of corporate America in the 1950s is to face a crisis similar to that of my old friend. It is to stumble on one’s own intimate, carnal, and willfully forgotten past.

Our first position has to be a firm and unequivocating denial. Who are these men in ridiculous hats and suits? Are the glasses the women wear designed to frighten off evil spirits? And why do the children look so old? But just as my friend knew all about those panties, we know all about these pictures.

It has become routine to speak of the fifties as if they were a limited entity, a static interval easily dismissed on the basis of tasteless clothing and a foolish national pride. The values were antiques, the contentment was risible.

When Harry N. Abrams published a handsome volume of these pictures more than a decade ago, the very title of the book had its tongue in cheek: America Worked. The opening photo was of C. Wayne Brownell, vice president and industrial relations director at Packard Motors, Detroit, and was taken in 1952. Mr. Brownell (and I bet you a coonskin cap that he had a nickname) gestures welcomingly with his cigar, showing prospective employees the way to jobs. The optimism is absurd. Look closely at the vice president’s face, though, and you can’t avoid the realization that if the joke’s on Brownell, Brownell is also in on the joke.

Certainly America worked hard back then, but also America made some whoopee. There was life beneath the flannel.
 
 

As we look back over half a century, distance has set these men and women in aspic with stupid sauce. What did they know about child rearing then, if Spock was a revelation? As for health, they all smoked, and many still thought that the cure for pulmonary difficulties was to relocate to Denver. No man was an alcoholic until he had sold a child for a pint of Listerine and then downed the Listerine. A fitness buff was a man, inclined to stoutness, who slept with the windows opened and started each day with an icy bath and a breakfast of steak and eggs.

Dan Weiner died in 1959; he never had our distance on the decade, and yet his judgment is both harsher and more forgiving than my own. An admirer of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weiner did not freeze his subjects before he photographed them. Even though much of his work must have come from scheduled photo sessions, these people are surprised in life.

Influenced by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, Weiner once said,