Clarissa J. Ceglio Department of American Studies Brown University Clarissa_Ceglio@brown.

edu

The Material Rhetoric of Sensory Persuasion in MoMAs Wartime Housing (1942) To see an exhibition as ugly as Sin, as shocking as a Coney Island horror house, smalltown mayors, housing officials, clubwomen and school kids trooped into Manhattans Museum of Modern Art last week, reported Time magazine in May 1942.1 The show that inspired this flamboyant prose went by the staid title Wartime Housing. The museum had, according to Time, caged and displayed the Housing Crime. The crime in question concerned the shortage of housing for workers and their families who had flocked to centers of wartime production in search of employment only to find themselves living in overpriced, substandard accommodations or, worse, railroad cars, tents and grain bins.2 The all-too-common situation of being without sanitation facilities or located far from the job site only added insult to injury. Concern for the migrants welfare and fears of social chaos motivated housing reform advocates, but these interests ran second to meeting production quotas for munitions, ships, planes and other implements of war. Simply put, insufficient housing posed a grave problem; it limited the available labor pool, reduced worker efficiency, sapped morale and led to high turnover rates factors that the government feared could cost the nation the war. Despite the need to address these issues, many communities balked at providing wartime housing. They still remembered the problems witnessed after World War I when factories closed, workers left and wartime housing projects became ghost towns or slums. Additionally, established residents frequently viewed outsiders from differing racial, regional and class

1 2

75,000 Tanks, 414,000 Houses, Time, May 11, 1942, 42 and 44. Kristin M. Szylvian, The Federal Housing Program during World War II, in From Tenements to Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, ed. Roger Biles, John F. Bauman and Kristin M. Szylvian (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 121.

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backgrounds with skepticism if not outright prejudice. Makeshift solutions held appeal, as these might prevent outsiders, particularly the poor and nonwhite, from settling down for the long term. Thus, at the start of the war, housing emerged as a critical defense, economic and social problem. And, that problem was sizeable. Scholars estimate that more than 15 million civilians crossed county lines, including, by some accounts, 8 to 12 million whose move brought them to a new state.3 The over 16 million individuals who entered the service were on the move as well. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which by 1942 had already mounted nearly a dozen exhibitions related to the fast-expanding war, participated in efforts to educate and influence decision-makers at the national and local levels about the need to quickly implement well-planned emergency housing. MoMA, merely a decade old in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, had, despite its youth, national reach and a reputation as a vanguard institution. During the 1940s, the necessity of developing alternate revenue streams and the political connections of Nelson A. Rockefeller led the museum to, in its own words, work for the war government in many ways both officially and unofficially by preparing, showing, and circulating exhibitions and films and in an administrative or advisory capacity.4 In fact, by the end of combat, MoMA would produce some 30 exhibitions related to the war, a great many of which, including Wartime Housing, debuted in New York and then circulated in traveling versions. Described as an exhibition in 10 scenes, Wartime Housing presents an interesting case study not only for the ways in which it recast earlier messages of social reform into the rhetoric of patriotic duty but also for its explicit manipulations of space, texture, light, text and sound in conjunction with news media images and social documentary photography produced by the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI). I argue that in order to fuse visitors impulses for social reform with patriotic duty MoMA conceived of a persuasive
3

Data on population movement during the war can be found in John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: I.R. Dee, 1996), 69. See also Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 119. 4 The Museum and the War, The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art X, no, 1 (1942): 4.

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visuality rooted in material and affective experience but struggled to balance pathos with the more traditional strategies of logos and ethos. Additionally, this calculated appeal to the visceral imagination revealed the conflicting interests of the exhibitions various external and internal stakeholders.

Political Context Wartime Housing appeared at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from April 22 through June 21, 1942.5 MoMA and its chief collaborator, the National Committee on the Housing Emergency (NCHE), sought to achieve three aims: wiser planning, better designing, and more immediate as well as more lasting benefits to the nation .6 Behind this simply stated agenda lay more complicated aspirations and a tangled web of government, corporate and private interests. The NCHE, an ad hoc citizens group dedicated to studying and promoting action on the housing needs of defense workers, hoped that stalled agendas for low-income and collective housing could ride the coattails of the nations push to provide public housing in support of wartime production.7 For its part, MoMA meant to showcase modern architecture as the socially and aesthetically progressive means to these ends. The museum also hoped to solidify its value to the public, government and industry. And, to be sure, many staff members saw such efforts as fulfilling their patriotic duty to serve the country. Scholar Kristin Szylvian categorized the federal governments policy responses to the wartime housing problem into three stages. The first (mid-1940 to January 1942) saw government stimulation of the private home-building industry and investment in public housing to ensure workers an adequate supply of lower cost homes and rentals. Still, wariness of public housing, which many associated with images of the undesirable poor, ran high. For example, the
Wartime Housing, The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 9, no. 4 (1942): 2. War Emergency Housing (Undated memorandum). Registrar Exhibition Files, Exh. #178. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Files hereafter cited as REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY. 7 For more information about the group, see H. Peter Oberlander, Eva Newbrun and Martin Meyerson, Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 203.
6 5

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Lanham Act of 1940, which authorized the Federal Works Agency to erect public housing for war industry workers, also restricted competition against the private sector, conscripted funds designated for low-income housing and prohibited the conversion of wartime units to lowincome housing without Congressional approval.8 Nonetheless, many interested in advancing New Deal-style, socially progressive visions of cooperative community housing saw an opportunity to, quite literally, the lay the foundations for post-war urban revitalization. Government agencies, including the FSA, engaged leading International Style and modernist architects, including Walter Gropius, Eero Saarinen, Richard Neutra, Louis Kahn and Vernon DeMars, to work on projects around the countryprojects that, in various stages of completion, would be featured in the MoMA exhibition. In fact, the agenda advanced by the Wartime Housing exhibit fell squarely within the social reform goals embraced, however tentatively by some, during this first phase of housing policy. Historical hindsight shows, however, that a shift had already begun by the time MoMAs show debuted. Rather than view housing as a tool of economic and social reform, this second chapter in government housing policy emphasized expediency and temporary housing solutions, such as trailers and easily dismantled structures.9 (These, too, perhaps under pressure from the National Housing Agency, would feature in the exhibition.) The emphasis on disposable housing found favor with private industry, banking and other sectors that believed public housing would suppress long-term real estate values by creating an oversupply of lower-cost units. An Alliance Forged: MoMA and the NCHE Formed in March 1941, the NCHE approached MoMA just months later about organizing an exhibition with the tentative title No More Ghost Towns.10 Although not a government
8 9

Szylvian, 124. Ibid., 130. Szylvians third phase, disposition, deals with post-war handling of structures erected during the war. 10 Committee Forms for Cooperation in Defense Housing, Washington Post, March 24, 1941, 13. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

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agency, the group carried political clout. Its co-founder, noted reformer Catherine Bauer, had published a well-regarded tome on architecture for social change, co-authored the Housing Act of 1937 (which encouraged government subsidies for local public housing agencies) and had served as director of the United States Housing Authority.11 The equally passionate NCHE chair, Dorothy Rosenman, worked directly with groups in impacted areas and used her considerable connections to rally supporters. Additionally, her husband, New York Supreme Court Judge Samuel Rosenman, served as an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt.12 The NCHE likely sought MoMAs assistance because of its past promotion of architecture as tool for social reform through such efforts as the Housing Exhibition of the City of New York (1934). In fact, Bauer not only contributed an essay to that exhibitions catalogue, she also continued to serve on MoMAs Architecture Committee. The museum also connected the NCHE to politically useful allies. The museums staff, board of trustees and circle of supporters included prominent architects and influential citizens. Some in the museum had misgivings about the NCHE proposal. In June 1941 Alfred Barr, MoMAs director, informed trustee and Architecture Committee chair Philip L. Goodwin that, while he agreed it might be advisable to do a show that would have direct bearing on the defense effort, he remained skeptical as to its architectural merits. Barr concluded, I do think we should try to keep in mind the fact that the Museum is an art museum and that shows which have to do purely or principally with technology should be avoided or passed on to the Museum of Science and Industry.13 Sentiments such as these, along with a recent re-organization that left the Department of Architecture slimly staffed, helps explain why the new Department of

11 12

Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934). Judge Rosenman would propose the reorganization of the governments defense housing programs that led to the National Housing Agencys formation in February 1942. Szylvian, 129. 13 Alfred Barr, letter to Philip L. Goodwin, Esq., June 30, 1941. REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY.

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Industrial Design, under Eliot Noyes, directed the show.14 After further discussion of the proposals merits, MoMAs executive vice president John Abbott indicated receptiveness on the museums partif financing could be found.15 Ernest planning began in October as the two groups sent out funding appeals to governmental agencies, philanthropists and others for what they estimated would be a $10,000 endeavor consisting of three identical travelling exhibitions (one of which would be installed at MoMA before going on the road) and an accompanying 32-page catalogue.16 Internal pessimism lingered in some corners, however. Janet Henrich, the acting curator of architecture whose input the exhibitions committee sought, lamented the dearth of completed war housing projects built in interesting form.17 The subject matter, too, struck her as less than inspired. It seems to me , she noted, a very ticklish question as to how well it can be done to rouse the rabble. Likewise, she doubted even the museums best effort would have any startling effect either on Congress or on individual housing authorities.18 Still, planning proceeded.

Negotiating Content, Form and Forum In positioning architectural design as an essential tool for social reform, MoMAs curators and the exhibitions advisory board, had several well-known precedents to consult. These included the previously mentioned Housing Exhibition of the City of New York, which had been sponsored by the New York City Housing Authority.19 Both exhibitions utilized the wellworn tactic of contrasting photographs of undesirable living conditions (and the resulting human
14

For information on staffing and a summary of Wartime Housing, see Suzanne Spencer, Housing on Trial: The Museum of Modern Art and the Campaign for Modern Housing in the United States, 1932-1952, (PhD, Emory University, 2004), 189-206. 15 John E. Abbott, letter to I. Edwin Goldwasser, October 31, 1941. REG, Exh. #178, Corres. Nat. Comm. on the Housing Emergency. MoMA Archives, NY. 16 War Emergency Housing, (Undated memorandum). REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY. As was typical of MoMA during this era, a dedicated issue of the museums members bulletin served as the catalogue. 17 Janet Henrich, letter to Mary [last name not given], October 3, 1941. REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY. 18 Janet Henrich, letter to Mary [last name not given], October 6, 1941. REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY. 19 This exhibition is sometimes called America Cant Have Housing, after an accompanying volume edited by Carol Aronovici, America Cant Have Housing (1934).

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debasement that reformers sought to correct) with images of desirable environments (reflecting the social uplift that they argued sound design would promote). However, there is a key difference in the affective tone that each exhibitions material rhetoric conveyed. The space dictates of a conference paper preclude a detailed comparison. So, to summarize, the 1934 effort, which featured photographs, statistical charts and re-created physical spaces, emphasized empirical evidence.20 For the most part, the subject, or museum visitor, regarded the object, the slum-dwelling poor, at a remove, aided by the exhibits visual and physical focus upon the built environment rather than its inhabitants. As one reviewer commented, The horror of our slum conditions is set forth most vividly, yet without ever, in the presentation, a suggestion of melodrama. The whole drama is there, based resolutely upon fact, not cluttered with romancing or sentimentality.21 This perceived rational detachment stands in contrast to descriptions of the 1942 effort as a Coney Island horror house and a sequence of dramatized essays.22 Exhibition scripts show that, from the outset, the curators conceived of the wartime show as a visual narrative told through photographs that would emphasize not the bad piece of architecture but the bad effect of it on the individual.23 The team first envisioned the provisionally titled No More Ghost Towns as having three sections. The first would present the failures of World War I. The second portion would delineate the needs of the present war along with the good and bad solutions being fielded. And, the final section would highlight designs

20

For more on this exhibition, see Edward Alden Jewell, Housing Exhibition Has Opening Today. Preview of Display at Museum of Modern Art Discloses Anti-Slums Crusade, New York Times, October 16 1934, 21. 21 Ibid. 22 Edward Alden Jewell, A Mlange of New York Activities, April 26, 1942, X5. Other aesthetic models that influenced Wartime Housing include exhibition craft practiced by the European avant-gardes in the 1920s and 30s and Life magazines photo essays. Mary Anne Staniszewski ably covers international influences on MoMAs installation design in The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 23 Outline (exhibition script, January 12, 1942), 6. REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY. An exhibition script outlines exhibition intent, content and narrative. As planning progresses revisions generally become more detailed.

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by the most progressive contemporary architectsthe modernists championed by MoMA.24 It is planned, the exhibition committee noted, to keep the presentation extremely simple so that the intelligent layman who is in a position to use his influence toward better emergency housing can quickly grasp the possibilities.25 Seeking broad appeal and applicability, the exhibition planners purposefully favored an impressionistic approach. They avoided the quantitative specificity of statistics and charts. Likewise, with the exception of the modernist housing projects selected as exemplars, the curators presented the exhibitions images as general indicators of the housing emergency rather than as markers of location-specific conditions. Early script drafts described the primary didactic focus of each scene and sketched out the sorts of images that would communicate it. For example, the message of the section that ultimately became Scene Three was stated as, How workers move to new industrial areas, find bad living conditions for themselves and their families, and then move on again.26 The photos needed included, Rows of workers migrating on foot, in cars. Shanty towns. Scenes outside real estate offices with signs showing no vacancies, high prices, etc. Scenes showing effect of bad housing on families. Interior views of congested and unhealthy conditions. Staff culled the desired images from the files of the photographic section of the FSA/OWI, Life magazine, the United States Navy, university collections, the United States Housing Administration and others. At the outset, the museum and NCHE wrangled over whether the intelligent layman or policy-makers constituted the more important audience for the exhibition. Debate then followed about the effectiveness of holding the exhibit in New York City, since it was not a defense community. MoMAs Architecture Committee noted that an exhibition held only in New York would be not only incomplete in its effect, but hardly worthwhile unless transportation for
24 25

War Emergency Housing. Ibid. 26 Photographs-Wartime Housing Exhibition, (Undated exhibition script). REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY.

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groups from defense communities to the show could be arranged.27 As the exhibition grew more technologically elaborate and, thus, impossible to send on the road economically, Noyes voted to abandon the travelling versions rather than siphon funds from the New York installation. The advisory committee continued to reiterate the necessity of travelling exhibitions, which could be supplemented with material pertinent to each host community. Furthermore, the committee suggested, if the intent was to sway persons directly responsible for housing (Congressmen, government housing officials and the building industry) an exhibition held in Washington, DC would be more direct. The final recommendation called for a high power show in New York that would also be shown in the nations capital and immediate preparation of circulating exhibitions. The Washington, DC show never materialized but a scaled-down, circulating version of Wartime Housing did travel to eight states. This incarnation, stripped of its carefully planned sensory cues, took form as a conventional presentation of captioned graphics but was, in several locations, supplemented by scenes of local housing projects as well as lectures and public forums for discussion. Scripting Mood, Cueing Affect Although the team had reached accord on didactic focus and basic content by January, disagreement about presentation of the material emerged. One member of the Architecture Committee, Don Hatch, complained that the exhibitions formulation lacked urgency in its chin up, carry on, everythings going to be alright attitude.28 The exhibition needed, in his opinion, to shock its viewers out of their complacency. I believe that the show should be as grim as hell, he argued, I think each guy going through it should come out sweating. I am positive he should have damn near the last drop of emotion rung out of him. Hatch envisioned the exhibition as

27

Report of Discussion of Wartime Housing Exhibition by the Architecture Committee of the Museum of Modern Art, (Internal report, February 17, 1942). REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY. 28 Don E. Hatch, Notes on Meeting at Coffee House; Modern Museum of Art Show on Housing, January 19, 1942. REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY.

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a series of impressions gained by an emotional experience. Evidently, others agreed as the first six scenes of the final production focused on achieving a pre-designated affective response through multisensory stimuli. Indeed, they provided an experiential immersion into the tribulations defense workers faced and the potentially deadly outcome of citizen inaction. Subsequent scripts, including the final draft, designated the mood to be established for each section of the exhibition. Scene Three, for instance, with its dramatization of ill-housed laborers would, the curators hoped, impart a grim, hot, exhausting, dirty, damp, smelly sensation through its use of visual, auditory and environmental cues.29 As the material rhetoric of presentation shifted from the comfortable terrain of logos and ethos to that of pathos, other committee members raised objections. Catherine Bauer, for example, disapproved of what she saw as an imbalanced emphasis on vivid portrayal of the problem in its wartime context at the expense of providing models and instruction for would-be community planners. She cautioned: But I do feel more strongly than ever while it is obviously necessary to dramatize the immediate social-political-patriotic aspects of war housing need (as is suggested in scenes 1-8 of your outline), the Museums natural and real response is to encourage better quality in defense housing production. And I seriously hope that a much larger proportion of the exhibit will be devoted to ABC-labeled examples of good architectural design & community planning, and worthwhile technical experiment.30 Clearly, the newly planned sensory emphasis on housing reform as patriotic duty, while emotionally rousing and potentially persuasive, had in Bauers mind overshadowed the exhibitions primary educational mission. Noyes soon assured Bauer that, following her suggestions, adjustments had been made. I think we have kept the valuable part of our dramatics, he wrote, and eliminated the purple patches.31 Further, Scenes Seven through Nine now placed greater emphasis on community planning and emulation-worthy architecture. But, he reminded her, there had been great

29 30

Wartime Housing Show: Final Script #1 (undated). REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY. Catherine Bauer, letter to Eliot Noyes, March 11, 1942. REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY. 31 Eliot Noyes, letter to Catherine Bauer, March 16, 1942. REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY

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difficulty in obtaining compelling photographs of the best modernist projects since many were still under construction and the quality of available war agency photographs proved poor.32 And, indeed, despite these late adjustments, modernist solutions to the defense housing emergency received little wall space compared to the explication of the problem or, even, to the mass production building technics that increased the speed with which housing could be erected (but, as Barr had feared, had no intrinsic ties to aesthetically superior design).33

An Exhibition in 10 Scenes When the exhibition opened in April 1942, its opening scene brought visitors face-to-face with war laborers marching off to workand, not coincidentally, into the exhibition. A movie screen installed next to a faux-brick faade created the illusion that visitors entering the exhibit strode alongside the workers, as members of the rank and file. Through this unified moment of purposive movement, the installation invited spectators to feel like one of the workers (Figure 1).34 Rear-projection of the film onto a screen set near ground level enhanced the correspondence in physical scale between viewers and the celluloid workers.35 To further solidify viewer-worker unity, a recording of excerpts from President Roosevelts 1942 State of the Union Address, in which he called for a rapid increase in production in all sectors vital to the war effort, played endlessly.36 Through this stagecraft, curators wove the first strands of the hoped-for emotional bond between museum visitors and defense workers whose housing needs they would be asked to address.
32

Due to budget constraints, primarily, and access restrictions, MoMA relied heavily on existing photo caches for exhibition images. In the end, however, it did engage photographers so as to include projects Bauer suggested, including work by William Wurster, her husband. 33 This is not to say MoMA eschewed mass-produced design. The museum championed the notion that good design need not be expensiveor exclusive. However, the de-mountable housing highlighted in Scene 6 bore slight relation to the modernist projects of Scene Nine. 34 Installation View of Wartime Housing, Scene One (1942). ID number IN178.8. Photographic Archive, MoMA. Quote from undated script (with 11 scenes), 2. REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives, NY. 35 MoMA composed the brief film from Office of Emergency Management material and included scenes of housing, factory work and the culminating march of workers. 36 A transcript of the speech is available here: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1355 And, it can be viewed in four parts, starting with clip one here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFpRc6Hw0x0

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Swept up in this Serious, determined, confident mood, visitors entered Scene Two, where the emotional tenor darkened, literally. Here, standing in gloom, they beheld a spot-lit timeline of events related to war production, from the declaration of war in Europe (1939) and lend-lease bill (1941) on up to present-day delaysall set against a backdrop of help-wanted ads (Figure 2).37 As one reviewer described it, The [Presidents] voice from the loudspeaker pursues them down a corridor where newspaper headlines blazon the depressing progress of the war.38 Next, exhibition goers emerge[d] into a still uglier room with blown-up photographs of men sleeping on benches, in cars.39 In the interests of time, I shall concentrate my analysis of the exhibitions material rhetoric on this section, Scene Three. Here, curators strove to make the squalor and discomfort of inadequate defense housing palpable. Painted black and lowered to seven feet, the false ceiling in this small and visually cluttered room simulated the bodyencroaching physical confinement of workers makeshift quarters (Figures 3 and 4).40 Rough carpeting, distinct in its texture and feel underfoot from the smoothed, polished floors elsewhere in the museum, changed visitors tread and muffled the sound of their movements. An encompassing photomontage fully consumed the rooms walls with no breathing space inserted between the FSA/OWI images of tired women, forlorn children and unkempt men.41 The curators intended the varied sizes of the crammed-together photographs to build up [the] feeling of something dislocated.42 Plans included touching up the photographs with fluorescent paint and using bluish light from a single bare bulb to heighten the sense of dis-ease. The team even entertained introducing an olfactory component to enhance the previously described mood of a dirty, damp, smelly environment. It is unclear whether the museum indeed implemented this
37 38

Installation View of Wartime Housing, Scene Two (1942). ID number IN178.7. Photographic Archive, MoMA. 75,000 Tanks, 414,000 Houses, 42. 39 Ibid. 40 Installation View of Wartime Housing, Scene Three (1942). ID number IN178.6. Photographic Archive, MoMA. 41 Images visible in Figure 4 include work by FSA/OWI photographers Robert Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Peter Sekaer and John Vachon. Present research indicates that most were taken in 1940 in or near boomtown communities such as San Diego, CA; Corpus Christi, TX; Alexandria, LA; and Fort Bragg, NC. 42 Wartime Housing Show: Final Script #1, 1.

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last measure, but the use of such effects, not typically associated with art museum installations, likely inspired the comparison to a Coney Island horror. Scene Threes sensory assault also included an audio track, in the form of a radio drama complete with sound effects, a commentator and actors giving voice to the depicted men and women. Thus, museum visitors heard as well as saw and felt a simulacrum of what it was like to live in substandard housing. Home is a place where you hang your hat, where you eat, where you sleep, intoned the commentator matter-of-factly.43 Its the place your wife washes your socks and the children do their homework. Its bed, breakfast, parlor, clothes closet, dinner, radiator, rug, washstand, stove, chair, cedarchest, mirrors, kitchen. This catalog of physical comforts called viewers attention to their absence in the rooms photographs.44 Likewise, the spoken image of home as a place of wife and children situated the images of male-only flophouses and make-do accommodations as socially aberrant. In similar fashion, the image of two unwashed, unattended children in ragged garb peering forth from a tent stood in contrast to the invocation of home as a place to take a bath and do homework, presumably under a parents watchful eyes.45 As noted, the audio also gave voice, albeit fictive ones constructed on their behalf and without their input, to the adults depicted in the photomontage. Further, by mimicking the popular and prevalent radio drama format, this particular auditory passage engaged visitors in a familiar form of imaginative spatial cognition and empathetic identification. As Susan Douglas has argued of radio, The fact that we hear not only with our ears but also with our entire bodiesour bones, our innards, means that the active listening invited by certain radio

43

Script-Wartime Housing Exhibition, Scene III, April 6, 1942. REG, Exh. #178. MoMA Archives. NB: Small deviations exist between this recording script and the final audio production. 44 Notably, the showcased images preserved the gendered domestic behaviors of female work and male rest! 45 Library of Congress FSA files describe the tent in this photograph by Marion Post Wolcott is described as home to Ten men, two women, and two children. Online at: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8c14466

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formats (as opposed to passive hearing) often imparts a sense of emotion stronger than that imparted by looking. 46 The following provides an example of such an engagement. Delivered in a cadence timed to the progressively louder, relentless drip of a leaking faucet, a mans terse voice declared, The kitchens in the bedroom and the parlors in the bedroom and the laundrys in the bedroom and the hallways in the bedroom . His diatribe ended abruptly with, in the words of the recording script, scraping of furniture, the clang of a dropped pot. One could imagine the scene: the man, reaching his boiling point, had suddenly pushed away from the table where he sat while his wife, caught off-guard by his outburst, dropped her cooking utensils in shock or fear. This and other audio cues hinted at the breakdown of proper family decorum that reformers feared such environments would provoke. So, the scene not only sought to create a visceral connection between museum visitors and workers, it also carried an undercurrent of menacea warning of moral degradation that would shock the presumably more genteel class of folk frequenting MoMA. The class distinctions conveyed in the scripts wording and the actors accented delivery become even more pronounced when compared to a recording of remarks delivered by MoMA president John Hay Whitney, NCHE chair Dorothy Rosenman and other dignitaries during the nationally broadcast, invitation-only opening gala. Their patrician elocution contrasts sharply with the contrived dialect that, through cadence, word choice and repeating phrases, intended to convey the plain spoken poetry of the hard-pressed but defiant everyman. In fact one hears and in the exhibitions written sound script seessimilarities between the photomontage with audio and such photo-text productions as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and Land of the Free (1938).47 The latter being a poem the author called as a soundtrack for the volumes
46 47

Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York, NY: Times Books, 1999), 29-30. James Agee and Walker Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1941); Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938); and Erskine Caldwell and Margaret

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photographs. The concluding note of Scene Three bears out this influence: Youve got to put a roof over your machines. Youve got to put a roof over the men who run them. If you havent got a place to live, you cant work. Thats all. Conclusion Edward A. Jewell, New York Times art critic, said of the exhibitions overall effect: The exhibition was imaginatively conceived and has been carried out with great effectiveness. Sometimes it may remind one of the tactics of high-pressure salesmanship, but most of the time a visitor is likely to be too awed or scared orin the final scenescheered, to think about anything except the pith of the drama itself.48 Indeed, after enduring the emotionally wrenching experiences offered in Scenes Four and Five, which linked the lost production caused by inadequate housing to military and civilian disasters, the remaining scenes introduced an entirely different mood.49 The curators achieved this, in part, through a gradual rhetorical shift from pathos back to ethos and logos. Observed one reviewer of the shift, Then the lights brighten, the ceiling lifts, the cheerful noise of hammer and saw is heard.50 With these changes in the sensory environment, new vistas came into view: wartime housing in the pattern of the world of tomorrowwell-planned communities of airy houses, parks, playgrounds, schools. The laymens reactions to this 10-scene feat of sensory persuasion are harder to come by. One, at least, pronounced Wartime Housing, magnificent. Calling the exhibition a welcome harbinger of museum service to the community in our struggle toward victory, he further lauded it as an altogether unique experience and the most effective presentation of a social problem in the museum setting.51

Bourke-White. You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Modern Age Books, Inc., 1937). The museum had, in fact, envisioned that James Agee would author the exhibition scripts and that Hollywood actor Paul Muni would narrate. 48 Jewell, A Mlange of New York Activities. 49 Sensory cues in Scene Four, for example, included a blast of hot air and sounds bombing juxtaposed with great, blood-red pictures of the U.S.S. Arizona and a Polish girl wringing her hands over her bullet-riddled sister. 50 75,000 Tanks, 414,000 Houses, 44. 51 Question box comment from John J. Horowitz quoted in letter from Mrs. Samuel I. Rosenman to Charles [sic] Noyes, April 29, 1942. Department of Circulating Exhibitions Record, II.1.118.4.2. MoMA Archives, New York.

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In publicizing the import of Wartime Housing, MoMA asserted that its beholders would grasp this central message: The people of a community can do much in planning the future growth of their town; if they fail to do so, they fail in their responsibility as American citizens.52 This assertion calls to mind Walter Nashs argument that affective rhetoric seeks the entrapment of the audience, the enforced complicity in a ritual act.53 Indeed, several scholars have theorized the museum as a space of civic ritual in which ideology is inscribed in the very architecture of the building and presentation of its contents.54 Among those exploring rhetorics materiality, Carole Blair usefully suggests that attending to the physical, affective elements of environmentally situated artifacts (e.g., museum exhibitions) requires consideration of enactments as well as representations.55 Or, as others have phrased it, not only must we ask what a purposive material assemblage like an exhibition means to its creators and audiences we must also explore how it acts upon the sensing bodyand how, in turn, it produces effects, consequences and subjects.56 Given that my analysis of this exhibition is still a work in progress, it is premature to end this presentation with firm conclusions about the cultural work performed or the extent to which the affective dimensions of the exhibitions material rhetoric succeeded in producing citizen advocates for defense housing. It occurs to me, however, that the contrasting appeals Wartime Housing made to the publics instinctual and intellectual faculties speaks to tensions inherent in

52

Museum of Modern Art Opens Exhibition of Wartime Housing, (press release 42420-28, c. April 1942). Online at: http://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/790/releases/MOMA_1942_0032_1942-04-20_42420-28.pdf?2010 (accessed June 2011) 53 Walter Nash, Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion, Language Library (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989), 37. 54 See, for example, Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis, Marxist perspectives 4 (1978): 28-51; Carol Duncan, Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 88-103; and Alan Wallach, The Museum of Modern Art: The Pasts Future, Journal of Design History 5, no. 3 (1992): 207-15. 55 Carole Blair, Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetorics Materiality, in Rhetorical Bodies, eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press), 16-57. 56 Kenneth S. Zagacki and Victoria J. Gallagher, Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 2 (2009): 171-191.

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its complex and conflicted aims. By draping a progressive agenda for social reform in the cloak of patriotism, the exhibition sought, in essence, to transfer the emotionality of one cause (winning the war) to another (considered, long-range planning of low-income housing options). Despite the convenience and, perhaps, even the necessity of leveraging museum goers sense of national duty in order to motivate action on the housing issue, the political aims of the two causes did not, as discussed, align as the war progressed. Wartime Housing, even with its dual appeal to viewers heads and hearts, did notcould notresolve these tensions. Its manipulations of the visual, aural and physical environment do, however, remind us of the necessity to treat museum exhibitions not merely as visual experiences or as texts to be read but as multisensory, material phenomena that demand interdisciplinary analytical tools if we are to parse their conveyance of meaning through embodied ways of knowing.