Our Short-Term National Memory

To illustrate the topic of this entry, only about a month ago the worry was the end of the financial world as Congress was playing political brinkmanship with the National Debt ceiling.  After circling the wagon train, preparing for the worst, hark, the sound of the cavalry bugles at the last minute, Congress agreeing to raise debt levels, extending the issue “all the way” to December 3.  Meanwhile, the financial markets resumed its steady march to the heavens, particularly as the Federal Reserve is between a rock and a hard place, not wanting to raise rates. Clearly, the Treasury cannot afford to pay more interest on the steadily mounting debt.  Short term memory: everyone has conveniently forgotten December 3.  Soon it will be headline material again, a hot potato political issue.

Meanwhile, the Trumpublicans are pleased about the recent elections, demonstrating that their lord and master showman’s prestidigitatorial gas lighting can still opiate the American mind.  Simple formula, tar all Democratic candidates as “socialists” or associate them with the big bad wolf (Critical Race Theory, something most Trumpublicans cannot explain), and equate any reasonable COVID policy with a “loss of freedom.” Nice little sound bites for somnambulistic sheep.  However, no doubt their obedience has been nurtured by the intransigence of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

The most serious reminder of our short-term national memory, however, is the upcoming (only two more months) one year anniversary of the most serious domestic attack on our native soil since the Civil War, the January 6^th insurrection.

We all watched it.  Our elected representatives experienced it.  We have the evidence how it was masterminded, what the end game plan was, and several Senators and Congress people who decried it during the immediate following days, now have all conveniently whitewashed it and have allowed the architects of that horrible day, unfettered by consequences, to do it again, perhaps now more “legally” given voting law changes in Republican states, redistricting, appointments of State Election Commissioners who will do what they are told as well as conservative judges at the local levels of Government.

Imagine if this attack was orchestrated by the Duchey of Grand Fenwick – we’d be bombing the hell out of them.

Why our Justice Department cannot swiftly act on this matter defies understanding.  Are our political system and the American psyche so poisoned?  Even our 4^th Estate seems to have left the scene of the crime.  The montage of headlines the day after this egregious breach of democracy was filled with outrage.  Where is it now? 

 

Hagelstein Brothers; 122 years of Photography in New York City

This entry consolidates (and amplifies) the information collected in this space on the history of Hagelstein Brothers, Photographers, a firm that flourished for 122 years after being established a year after the Civil War.  They were pioneers in so many areas that the Eastman Kodak Photography Museum eagerly accepted some of their work I was able to collect over the years.  As the last generation in line to inherit the business (which I declined) I felt an obligation to document their contributions to commercial photography in New York.  Through this blog, researchers, former employees, even former customers offered further information on the firm. 

My hope was to publish one definitive history on Wikipedia.  I have previously submitted pieces for the “people’s encyclopedia” before but that was when it was relatively new, and although I know how important it has become as a central repository of knowledge, it has also acquired the trappings of a government onto itself, with its own rules and volunteers to patrol its pages.  This is understandable as otherwise people could publish fabrications and self serving articles.  Their technical requirements are now more demanding as well (beyond my patience to learn).

Wikipedia cautions that articles about “family…or anything else you're closely affiliated with” are not acceptable.  It says the topic must be "notable... [and] it must itself have been addressed in outside reliable sources….[T]his means the topic must have been written about in newspapers or magazines or books. Not blogs….Not self-published websites.”  Well that pretty much eliminates all the research and good faith publishing I’ve done and as someone who is “family” in this submission, my work might immediately be suspect to Wikipedia’s volunteer editors.  The possible result as they put it is to summarily delete it. 

Bypassing Wikipedia also enables me to personalize it to some degree, injecting the perspective of my own experience.  When I do so, it is with objectivity, mostly my remembrances having worked there summers as a teenager.  I thank the people who noted my early articles and sent information to supplement them, including Hagelstein Brothers prints they had from the 19^th century and forwarded digitally.  Also, one photographer, Jim Cummins who began his career at Hagelstein Brothers, contacted me with his recollections.  As he is from a long line of professional photographers who worked at Hagelstein Brothers, I incorporate his comments here:

Hagelstein Brothers was a commercial photography studio at 100 5th Avenue in Manhattan. They started as a portrait studio on the lower East side in 1866, just after the Civil War. Through the years they transformed into a commercial photography studio photographing everything from jewelry to large setups and events. They could photograph everything. At the helm of this studio were the brothers Bob and Phil Hagelstein. They were not just good Photographers but were innovators who had cut the template on how commercial photography was done in New York and elsewhere. They closed in 1988 after 122 years in the business. What made Hagelstein Brothers unique was not just the fact that both brothers were good Photographers but Phillip was good at marketing. They were the first in using color film when their competitors were still using black and white.

I was fortunate to have worked there from 1959 through 1960. Although I was an art student, I always had an interest in photography and this was the perfect place to learn the craft. From setting up sets to lighting to matting and stripping of negatives. (There was no Photoshop back then). I learned how to light an entire room with one light and how to use an 11X14 view camera. This is an education that I could not have gotten going to a school. This was on the job training. The knowledge I got working at Hagelstein Brothers has stuck with me to this day. I've been a Photographer for 54 years.

Some of the many things I learned from Bob and Phil were quality and the ability to be able to photograph any and everything. 

So, I publish this originally “Wikipedia-intended” article here and will reference this link in my prior entries on the topic.  Thus, anyone searching for information on the company will ultimately be led here.

 

Hagelstein Brothers, Photographers 

 

 The cofounders of Hagelstein Brothers, Carl (Carl Philipp Wilhelm) and Philip (Anton Philipp Wilhelm), immigrated to the United States in the mid-19^th century.  Gertrude Wilhelmine Kirschbaum Hagelstein who, as the widow of Wilhelm Hagelstein (born Dec. 10, 1794 and died sometime in 1842), embarked to America on March 20, 1856 from Prussia, Port of Cologne, at the age of 48, giving up her Prussian citizenship and those of her children.  Gertrude was the daughter of Philipp Kirschbaum, a factory overseer in Bergenhausen, Germany.  Perhaps, as a widow, with seven children, she saw better opportunities for them all in America.  She brought with her six of her children among whom were Carl Philipp Wilhelm (26 years old) and William (Adolf Theodor Wilhelm, 16 years old).  Philip (Anton Philipp Wilhelm, born March 12, 1833) arrived sometime before his mother and siblings.

What happened between the family’s arrival at Ellis Island to the end of the Civil War is relatively unknown; although it appears they settled in Brooklyn.  William was drafted into the Union Army and he survived the war, returning to Brooklyn and went into the metal fabrication business.  Carl went to California to make his fortune but came back after the war. 

Philip Hagelstein (Great-Grandfather)

At the end of the Civil War brothers Carl and Philip were ready to start or buy a business.  On June 7, 1866 they paid $1,450 for the “lease, goodwill, stock, and fixtures for entire and contents of the Photographic Gallery and business carried on in the upper part of the premises of 142 and 142 ½ Bowery in the City of New York, “or about $25,000 in today’s dollars.  Perhaps Carl did make his fortune but Philip (my great-grandfather) was the driving force behind the business.  Presumably he knew or studied the business of photography.  Jeremy Rowe who has been “researching photographic studios and operations in New York City from the birth of photography to ca 1880” published a valuable article on the importance of New York City photographers to the development of photography in the Daguerreotype Journal (follow the prompts to Page 16)

In his Bowery studio Philip originally specialized in fine Daguerreotypes and portraits made on wet plates, working with the limited materials available at that time. Examples of his Daguerreotypes dating from 1860 to 1870 were included in the Eastman Kodak exhibit during the 1939 New York World's Fair.  About 1880 he began to pioneer in commercial work for manufacturers and gradually developed this specialty.  In 1900 portrait work began to be discontinued and attention was focused on two special fields, one dealing with the manufacturer's merchandising needs, and the other consisting of reproductions of paintings for artists and publishers.

Philip’s son Harry Philip (born 1/26/1885 and died 1/3/1953 – my grandfather) entered the business around 1905; and around 1915 he moved the business from the Bowery to 100 Fifth Avenue where it flourished (completing its transition to a commercial photographic firm from portrait and arts photography) through the depression and two major wars.  HB made a major coop by being named the official photographer of the famous 1913 Armory Show which brought Modern Art to America.

Perhaps if photographic technology stayed the same the firm would have pursued arts photography as its major business.  When arts photography was flourishing the firm made direct negatives from 11 x14 to 24x30, and reproductions in black-and-white, sepia, and hand colored prints on platinum paper which were sold to publishers and art dealers.  They made exquisite reproductions of noted paintings which were done on platinum papers.  This part of the business was discontinued due to the entry of mechanical printing processes, such as photogravure and color printing.

Harry P. Hagelstein (Grandfather)

Harry P. had a sister Kate who was given part of the stock in the business when their father, Philip, died in 1919.  Kate eventually gave her stock to two of her sons, William and Harry McClelland, and when Harry P. died in 1953 he left his stock to his sons, my father Harry R. (who went by the name of Robert, born April 17, 1916 and died on March 19, 1984) and my Uncle Philip (born 06/27/1911 and died 05/14/1999).  Other equal shares of Harry P.’s stock were left to his daughters, my aunts Marion, Lillian, and Ruth.   

Eventually the sisters’ shares were sold to my father, Robert who began to run the business after my grandfather’s death.  His photographic skills were acquired first on the job and from being a signal corps photographer in WW II.  He was active in the closing years of the war in Germany and was part of the occupying force, returning home in January 1946.  Although it was said that Jack M. Warner, the son of the legendary movie mogul, invited him to join him in Hollywood after they collaborated on some WW II training films, Robert decided to return to the family business.  

Robert (Father) and Philip (Uncle)

By the 1950s Hagelstein Brothers had become one of the leading commercial photographers in New York City.  His cousin, William McClelland, was the lead photographer outside the studio, travelling to customers’ showrooms or to the Furniture Exchange building, while his other cousin, Harry, ran the photo printing departments.  My father was the leading studio photographer.  His brother, my Uncle Philip, a graduate of Columbia University (who perhaps gave up a more lucrative career in finance to be loyal to the family business), focused on marketing and bookkeeping.

Robert Hagelstein (Father) in 100 5th Studio

A decade of business success followed in the 1950s as the studio was able to print huge quantities of glossy photos which were used as salesmens' samples for their customers, the majority of which were furniture and lamp manufacturers.  By the 1960s the firm was making its transition to color photography and color prints. 

Business strategy, succession planning, and personality clashes gradually led to the firm’s demise.  Robert had been grooming me, his son, Robert Philip, for succession by employing me as a student from the age of 13 during the summers, (first working as a delivery boy, then in the black and white printing department, and then as a studio photographer’s assistant, and finally in the color processing lab), with plans to send me into the Signal Corps upon my graduation from high school.   Instead I chose to go to college and eventually became a publisher. 

Robert Philip Hagelstein

 

Sometime after I decided not to participate in the business, my father bought out his cousins’ share in the business and he and his brother Philip continued on their own, still employing the old business model of producing prints (now mostly color) for salesmen.  Gradually the business declined and finely they lost their lease (or couldn’t afford it) on their penthouse studio at 100 fifth Avenue, a gothic architecturally designed building built in 1906 which was being repurposed for high end businesses with “new, modern lobbies that create an edgy, innovative look designed to appeal to a new generation of corporate entrepreneurs.”   

This ultimately forced them to move to 46-02-37th Avenue in Long Island City, only to oversee the company’s total demise a few years later.  142 Bowery, the birthplace of the photography studio, was sold with four other attached buildings, for $47 million dollars in 2015. These were among the few remaining Federal period buildings in the area.

All in all, it’s a remarkable history of a studio which was established a year after the end of the Civil War and the three generations of Hagelstein men who ran the business until it finally folded on June 9, 1988, 122 years and 2 days after it was established.  The records of Hagelstein Brothers and, more importantly, hundreds and hundreds of Daguerreotypes and glass plate negatives were destroyed in the early 1990's when my Uncle Philip's home (where they were stored) had to be sold and he went into a nursing home suffering from dementia.  Regrettably no interest at the time was expressed either by libraries or museums and there was no place to store them.  Today, they would have all been digitized.

Some of the original Daguerreotypes from the firm as well as two trade catalogues of Hagelstein Brothers are now housed in the George Eastman museum, so some of their early work can be seen there.

‘The Splendid and the Vile’ – A Masterful and Idiosyncratic History

This superb work by Erik Larson portrays the opening year of Britain’s fight for its very survival at the beginning of WW II.  Larson cleverly and suspensefully weaves the war details along with the saga of the Churchill family, friends, and Churchill’s colleagues while documenting the indisputable:  Churchill was a man for the moment, giving credence to the argument that this man made the times as much as the times made the man.  He rose to the occasion, leavened by his uncanny and eloquent oratory skills. As Larson points out, and documents on many occasions in the book, he had the ability “to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted.”  Through the darkness of those days he buoyed the spirits of the British people.

Larson makes use of many types of primary source documents including Mary Churchill’s diary. His youngest daughter’s insights cast not only details on the Churchill’s family life, but a feeling of what it must have been to live through those times. He also makes use of the network of “Mass-Observation” diarists, “an organization launched in Britain two years before the war that recruited hundreds of volunteers to keep daily diaries with a goal of helping sociologists better understand ordinary British life. One volunteer wrote ‘if I had to spend my whole life with a man I choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr. Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.’“  These sources give Larson’s work as special kind insight and personalization, often lacking in historical works.

The writing is exquisite, such as when Larson describes Hermann Göring who became, among many titled positions, the Chief of the Luftwaffe, who had promised Hitler that his air force could single-handedly destroy Britain. Larson says Göring was “large, buoyant, ruthless, cruel [and] had used his close connection to Hitler to win this commission, deploying the sheer strength of his ebullient and joyously corrupt personality to overcome Hitler’s misgivings.” He gleefully went about the task of introducing hell on earth first in London, and then in smaller UK towns to break the will of the British people. Massive incendiary bombings preceded the heavy bombings to light the way for the German bombers.

The Luftwaffe had developed a guidance system which a young Dr. Reginald Jones discovered, and he was unexpectedly whisked into a Churchill Cabinet meeting to present his evidence. Here Larson writes a suspenseful narrative:  “Churchill listened, wrapped, his fascination for secret technologies in full flare but he also realized the bleak significance of Jones‘s discovery. It was bad enough that the Luftwaffe was establishing itself at bases in captured territory just minutes from the English coast. But now he understood that the aircraft at those bases will be able to bomb accurately even a moonless night and in overcast weather. To Churchill, this was dark news indeed ‘one of the blackest moments of the war.’…Until this point he had been confident that the RAF could hold its own, despite being, as air intelligence believed vastly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe….If the German planes could bomb accurately even in heavy overcast and on the darkest nights, they would no longer need their swarms of fighter escorts and no longer be restrained by the fighters’ fuel limits and they could traverse the British Isles without restriction, a tremendous advantage and laying the groundwork for invasion.”

London was always one of my favorite places to visit, and I did so frequently either on my way to the Frankfurt Bookfairs or attending the London Bookfairs and seeing our selling partners there and arrange for co-publishing projects with several British publishers.  So many personal landmarks are conjured up by this work and in my mind’s eye I can see them and imagine how they would have been then, Piccadilly, the British Museum, Hyde Park, the financial district, the River Thames, Covent Garden, and London’s wonderful underground system, which was used as bomb shelters, not always successfully.  Frequently, Londoners would have to choose whether they might potentially be buried alive or allow it to fate to stay in their homes.

The first time we stayed in London was the early 1970’s at the Dorchester. Larson reveals the Dorchester was highly sought after by ambassadors during the war because it was a poured concrete building and billed as “bombproof,“ although people evacuated the top floor during the heaviest bombings.  He describes a debutante party at Grosvenor hotel, also facing Hyde Park, the Dorchester only blocks away to the south. The ball -- where Mary Churchill had been “presented“ the year before -- took place in May 1940 on a night when there was one of the heaviest bombings and Larson spares no detail regarding the horror of that night, even decapitations, people fleeing for the safety of the Dorchester. I just had no idea until reading this work that where I stayed only thirty years later that this was part of its history..

Churchill knew that Britain was at the end of a tenuous string, that it was imperative on the one hand he impress FDR with his people’s resiliency, but on the other hand signal their need for massive help from the U.S.  FDR’s hands were tied by the election, the cry for isolationism at home, and Larson amusingly paints a picture of Churchill’s puzzlement:  if he is the President of the US, why can’t he just do it?  Ultimately, Pearl Harbor, which occurs after the purview of this book, resolves the issue of the USA’s involvement, a great relief to Churchill, but in the interim it was the Lend Lease Act which helped to fortify Britain’s resolve.

The role of Churchill’s deliberations at Chequers, the country house of the Prime Minister, about 40 miles NW of London, on most weekends except when there was a full moon leaving it vulnerable to night bombing, the locale then shifting to Ditchley Park, owned by a friend, and located in Oxfordshire, a home that was more difficult to see from the air, cannot be understated.  In these places Churchill would “hold court” with his entire staff, generals, ambassadors, anyone involved in the war effort, to talk openly and until late at night frequently his family also residing there.

It was there that Churchill befriended and impressed FDR’s personal emissary, Harry Hopkins who in turn became an important intermediary to persuade FDR.  One night Hopkins stayed up till 4:30 in the morning and writing FDR “the people here are amazing from Churchill down and if courage alone can win – the result will be inevitable. But they need our help desperately and I’m sure you will permit nothing to stand in his way.” Hopkins continues: “Churchill held sway over the entire British government and understood every aspect of the war….I cannot emphasize too strongly that he is the one and only person with whom you need to have a full meeting of the minds. This island needs our help now Mr. President with everything we can give them.“  This ultimately led to the Lend Lease Act.

A leitmotif in the work is the personal letters of so many of Churchill’s associates such as those of John Colville, one of Churchill’s secretaries, who expresses throughout the period his endless unrequited love towards Gay Margesson, a student at Oxford.  Or the unusual relationship Churchill had with a “longtime friend and occasional antagonist Max Aitken –Lord Beaverbrook – a man who drew controversy the way steeples draw lightning.”  He had made his fortune in newspapers, but Churchill recognized a special kind of genius, appointing him as Minister of Aircraft Production, a new position to get around the red tape of the military.  Churchill knew that building the RAF was the key to defending Britain and production had lagged.  He needed a trusted mover-and-shaker and Beaverbrook was it.  His friend made enemies, circumventing traditional channels, but he significantly increased fighter production.  On a number of occasions, he tried to resign but Churchill was able to inveigle him back to the yoke and gave him more and more responsibility for a number of projects.

Throughout it all his wife Clementine was a steadying keel and did not hesitate to be outspoken with guests, be they ambassadors or the military, and of course with her husband.  She too did not suffer fools lightly and managed the family life (not tolerating their son Randolph’s drunkenness and gambling).

There are so many “players” in this history that reads like a novel, too many to mention.  Larson answers one of the questions that came to my mind before reading this work.  Why?  There are so many books about the period and Churchill.  9/11 had something do to with Larson’s motivation.  He got to wonder how Londoners could endure the never-ending shock of the war.  He endeavored to rely on more than the standard histories: “I set out to hunt for the stories that often get left out of the massive biographies of Churchill, either because there’s no time to tell them or because they seem too frivolous.  But it is the frivolity that Churchill revealed himself, the little moments which endeared him to his staff, despite the demands he placed on all.”  Larson captures those moments along with the grand and frightening story.  He also thanks, by name, the entire publishing staff of Random House and Crown who brought this insightful book to life.  It was wonderful reading the hardcover edition, so handsomely designed, a treasure to keep.