Expanding the Family

    When asked to envision 1950s America, many today would picture a two to three story home, a white mother and father with 2 children, a dog, and a white picket fence. The family is middle class, the father works nine to five, and the mother takes care of the home. This is the vision that many critics forced onto the art gallery The Family Man that opened in 1955, shown in the picture above. While this gallery was accused of burying the truth of the 1950s, with all of its racial inequality, war, and class gaps, the true purpose of artist Edward Steichen was quite the opposite. Steichen’s purpose was to promote the humanity across the world, show people how alike they were no matter where they were from, and to promote a peaceful future without war. Ten years before The Family Man exhibition was opened, its founder Edward Steichen was a combat photographer in World War II. It was in World War II that Steichen witness the destructiveness and terror that wars bring. For over ten years Steichen sought to present anti war ideas to the American Public, finally in 1955 he was successful. Author Fred Turner writes in The Family Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America how Steuchen gathered the photos necessary for the exhibit “With the assistance of Lange and many others, Steichen and Miller ultimately reviewed 2 million images. They winnowed these to 10,000 and then, working in a small loft on Fifty-Second Street, to the 503 photographs that ultimately hung in the museum” (Turner, 60). The United States during the 1950s was a nation of confidence and prosperity, at least outwardly. World War II had been won, the country was experiencing an economic boom, and the US was now one of the top 3 most powerful nations of the UN. Being one of the most powerful nations in the world, it was impossible for other nations to enforce policies, especially social ones, on the US, as author Mark Mazower points out in his article The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950 “And since a universal regime of minority rights must also raise the issue of the domestic racial policies of the USA as well, it is scarcely surprising that none of the Big Three showed the slightest desire for making them the centerpiece of the new rights discourse. Behind the smokescreen of the rights of the individual, in other words, the corpse of the League’s minorities policy could be safely buried ” (Mazower, 389).  It was this undercurrent of American life that critics of Steichen believed he was leaving out.On January 24th 1955, the temperature dropped to 32 degrees in New York, New York, and a crowd quickly stepped in from the cold into the Museum of Modern Art. Inside the museum the visitors walked through halls of enlarged photos showcasing various themes from birth, children, peace, conflict, etc. It is easy to see why in later years, The Family Man exhibition was criticized for sugar coating 1950s America, but author Fred Turner defends Steichen, claiming that Steichen was demonstrating how no matter race, occupation, or nationality, humanity is present throughout the world. By showing how there are mothers and fathers working , children who play and are held, people of all classes everywhere in the globe, Steichen sought to provide a broader view of the world, a world where humanity could see how similar they all were.