The Senior Oliver Wendell Holmes Was the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table

 

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Despite his many accomplishments, Oliver Wendell Homes, Sr. is best remembered today as the father of the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., he of the impressive mustachio and beneficiary of a bestselling fictionalized biography and an even more fanciful MGM movie.  The father, who evidently did not engage a good press agent, would probably have been both proud and amused.

                      

                                          The famous son, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The senior Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 29, 1809. Like his nearly exactly contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was the son of a noted liberal minister and a descendent of poet Anne Bradstreet.  Unlike Emerson, he felt no call to the ministry.   

Instead, he studied medicine at Harvard and launched a highly successful practice.  The high regard for his professional abilities was demonstrated when he was appointed Harvard’s chair of anatomy and physiology. 

Holmes’ intellect, however, was broader than the sciences.  He was a revered wit and wide-ranging conversationalist. He pursued literature as a second career.  In 1857 he co-founded The Atlantic Monthly with James Russell Lowell.  His literary output was marked by amazing versatility.  A collection of his humorous essays The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table was published to great success in 1858.  Among his contributions to the American language was using Boston Brahmins to describe the largely Unitarian elite like himself who dominated the Hub City both culturally and politically. 

The first edition of Holmes' hugely popular book of humorous essays, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.

He also wrote novels, which were popular in their day but are now largely forgotten and a scholarly biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1885 that is a classic of the genre. 

Over his long life he frequently contributed poetry to newspapers and journals, which led to his greatest public acclaim.  His work ranged from the whimsical The Deacon’s Masterpiece or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay to transcendental musings like The Chambered Nautilus, and the unabashedly patriotic, Old Ironsides.  The latter poem was credited with saving the famous frigate USS Constitution from the scrap yard.  It floats today in Boston Harbor, a tribute to the power of Holmes’s words. 

Holmes died on October 7, 1894 in Boston at the age 84.

He is best remembered for Old Ironsides, but his wit is best displayed in another poem.  Note that decades before the local color writers supposedly invented it, Holmes was capturing the old New England accent and attitude of Massachusetts villages.

Plates from Holms's Wonderful One-Hoss Shay.

The Deacon’s Masterpiece or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay

Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay,

That was built in such a logical way

It ran a hundred years to a day,

And then of a sudden it — ah, but stay,

I’ll tell you what happened without delay,

Scaring the parson into fits,

Frightening people out of their wits, –

Have you ever heard of that, I say?

 

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.

Georgius Secundus was then alive, –

Snuffy old drone from the German hive.

That was the year when Lisbon-town

Saw the earth open and gulp her down,

And Braddock’s army was done so brown,

Left without a scalp to its crown.

It was on that terrible Earthquake-day

That the Deacon finished the one-hoss shay.

 

Now in building of shaises, I tell you what,

There is always a weakest spot, –

In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,

In pannel or crossbar, or floor, or sill,

In screw, bolt, throughbrace, — lurking still,

Find it somewhere you must and will, –

Above or below, or within or without, –

And that’s the reason, beyond a doubt,

That a chaise breaks down, but doesn’t wear out.

 

But the Deacon swore (as deacons do,

With an “I dew vum,” or an I tell yeou”)

He would build one shay to beat the taown

‘n’ the keounty ‘n’ all the kentry raoun’;

It should be so built that it couldn’ break daown:

“Fer,” said the Deacon, “’t's mighty plain

Thut the weakes’ place mus’ stan’ the strain;

‘n’ the way t’ fix it, uz I maintain, is only jest

‘T’ make that place uz strong uz the rest.”

 

So the Deacon inquired of the village folk

Where he could find the strongest oak,

That couldn’t be split nor bent nor broke, –

That was for spokes and floor and sills;

He sent for lancewood to make the thills;

The crossbars were ash, from the the straightest trees

The pannels of whitewood, that cuts like cheese,

But lasts like iron for things like these;

 

The hubs of logs from the “Settler’s ellum,” –

Last of its timber, — they couldn’t sell ‘em,

Never no axe had seen their chips,

And the wedges flew from between their lips,

Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips;

Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,

Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,

Steel of the finest, bright and blue;

Throughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide;

Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide

Found in the pit when the tanner died.

That was the way he “put her through,”

“There!” said the Deacon, “naow she’ll dew!”

 

Do! I tell you, I rather guess

She was a wonder, and nothing less!

Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,

Deacon and deaconess dropped away,

Children and grandchildren — where were they?

But there stood the stout old one-hoss shay

As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!

 

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED; — it came and found

The Deacon’s masterpiece strong and sound.

Eighteen hindred increased by ten; –

“Hahnsum kerridge” they called it then.

Eighteen hundred and twenty came; –

Running as usual; much the same.

Thirty and forty at last arive,

And then come fifty and FIFTY-FIVE.

 

Little of all we value here

Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year

Without both feeling and looking queer.

In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth,

So far as I know, but a tree and truth.

(This is a moral that runs at large;

Take it. — You’re welcome. — No extra charge.)

 

FIRST OF NOVEMBER, — the Earthquake-day, –

There are traces of age in the one-hoss shay,

A general flavor of mild decay,

But nothing local, as one may say.

There couldn’t be, — for the Deacon’s art

Had made it so like in every part

That there wasn’t a chance for one to start.

 

For the wheels were just as strong as the thills

And the floor was just as strong as the sills,

And the panels just as strong as the floor,

And the whippletree neither less or more,

And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore,

And the spring and axle and hub encore.

And yet, as a whole, it is past a doubt

In another hour it will be worn out!

 

First of November, fifty-five!

This morning the parson takes a drive.

Now, small boys get out of the way!

Here comes the wonderful one-hoss shay,

Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.

 

"Huddup!" said the parson. — Off went they.

The parson was working his Sunday’s text, –

Had got to fifthly, and stopped perplexed

At what the — Moses — was coming next.

All at once the horse stood still,

Close by the meet’n'-house on the hill.

First a shiver, and then a thrill,

Then something decidedly like a spill, –

And the parson was sitting upon a rock,

At half past nine by the meet’n'-house clock, –

Just the hour of the earthquake shock!

 

What do you think the parson found,

When he got up and stared around?

The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,

As if it had been to the mill and ground!

You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce,

How it went to pieces all at once, –

All at once, and nothing first, –

Just as bubbles do when they burst.

 

End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.

Logic is logic. That’s all I say.

 

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Note:  Adapted from the Biographical Notes accompanying my reader’s theater piece Four Hundred Years of Unitarian and Universalist Poetry—From John Milton to Sylvia Plath.

Walking the Walk and Compassion for Campers Update for August 28 2026

Look for new opportunities for action, education, community, and solidarity in and around McHenry County here every week.  

                                                            Walking the Walk 

Umbrellas Up. Cameras Down.  Woodstock Pride and Stop Flock in Woodstock are joining together for a peaceful, visual demonstration against Flock Safety surveillance cameras in Woodstock.

On Saturday, August 29 at 9 am, we’re asking community members to meet on the Woodstock Square with open umbrellas and then go about enjoying the Square and Farmers Market—shop, walk, grab a coffee, visit with friends, and spend as much time as you like.

Why umbrellas? Woodstock Pride has used rainbow umbrellas at PrideFest to shield attendees from unwanted cameras when necessary. Now, we’re turning that same idea around and using them to shield ourselves from the cameras watching our every move.

Stay for 20 minutes. Stay for the morning. Stay for the day. Every person helps make the statement visible.

This is only one step in what may be a long fight. We aren't backing down until the City of Woodstock's Flock contract is cancelled. Future actions may include additional demonstrations, boycotts and other peaceful community actions.

Northern Illinois Indivisible, the McHenry County Rapid Response Team, and other organizations are also supporting the Action. 

               

The League of Women Voters of McHenry County is sponsoring a series of County Board District Candidate Events.  The next two events feature County Board Districts 2 and 4 from 2-4 pm Sunday, August 30 at the Crystal Lake Public Library, 126 Paddock Street, Crystal Lake and District 6 and 8 from 1-3 pm at the Nippersink Library, 5418 Hill Road in Richmond;

The League is a non-partisan organization dedicated to making democracy work through voter education, issue advocacy and citizen participation.  All candidates for each office were invited, but participation is voluntary and not guaranteed.

The fight to preserve threatened democracy is urgent at all levels of government.  Become an informed voter and the vote your conscience and principles.

                                                            Compassion for Campers

 

Compassion for Campers distributions are usually held on the first and third Fridays of the month from 10 am to 2 pm at the new McHenry County Resource Center (MCHC) at the McHenry County Mental Health Board offices, 620 Dakota Street in Crystal Lake.   Our next C4C distribution will be, Friday, September 4 then on Friday, September 18.

With at least a temporary home base, C4C can resume accepting donations of supplies including clean used sleeping bags and tents in their bags or cases, tarps and other basic camping gear, rain gear, and especially mosquito and tick repellents and sunscreen.  Contact Sue Rekenthaler at tomatos@mc.net or Patrick Murfin at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net for more information.

Financial support is critical to fulfilling our mission. The best thing you can do is offer your critically needed financial support. Money donations are always welcome at     https://tinyurl.com/3bz96axe.   Look for updates here.  Email compassionforcampers@treeoflifeuu.org .

Why the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom Was Bigger and Wider than Dr. King

 

Dr. Martin Luther King's ringing I Have a Dream speech was the highlight and climax of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington and helped change America, but the March itself was bigger than any one man.

Like a lot of people back in ’63 I was glued to the television for the beginning-to-end coverage provided by CBS News of the March for Jobs and Freedom on August 28.  I was a 14-year-old in Cheyenne, Wyoming at the time.  I was both thrilled and awestruck.  Listening to Dr. King’s I Have a Dream Speech literally changed my life.

The March was the brainchild of labor and Civil Rights leader A. Phillip Randolph.

The march originally was the brainchild of an elder of both the labor and Civil Rights movements.  A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and of the Negro American Labor Council as well as a Vice President of the AFL-CIO, modeled his call for a march on Washington on a similar event he planned back in 1941 to force President Franklin D. Roosevelt to open employment in the burgeoning defense industry to Blacks.  Just the threat of thousands of Negros descending on the Capital was enough to cause the President to establish the Committee on Fair Employment Practice and bar discriminatory hiring in the defense industry.  Randolph wanted to bring similar pressure on President John F. Kennedy and Congress to move on stalled Civil Rights legislation, but also to bring up new issues of jobs that had been overshadowed by the tumultuous battle for civil rights in the South. 

Randolph brought together the leaders of all of the largest national Civil Rights organizations including James Farmer, President of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); John Lewis, President of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Roy Wilkins, President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Whitney Young, President of the National Urban League; and Dr. King, President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to form a coalition to sponsor the march.  It was no small feat because of turf wars, ideological differences, and egos.

Civil Rights Leaders and major speakers at the March for Jobs and Justice, standing left to right are Director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice Matthew Ahmann, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader John Lewis, Protestant minister Eugene Carson Blake, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) leader Floyd McKissick, and UAW President Walter Reuther; sitting are National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young, chairman of the Demonstration Committee Cleveland Robinson, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters President A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader Roy Wilkins.

In addition, Randolph sought support from the Labor movement, most significantly from Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers (UAW).  The white dominated craft unions of the AFL, however, were notable for their absence. 

Bayard Rustin of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the organizer of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, an early forerunner of the Freedom Rides that was meant to test a Supreme Court ruling that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel, was tapped to coordinate volunteers and logistics, recruit marchers from across the country, and attend to all the other details of the march while Randolph pulled together political, labor and religious support for the march.  

Veteran pacifist and Civil Rights leader Bayard Rustin of the Fellowship of Reconciliation was the Deputy Director of the March and in charge of most of the planning and logistics.  As an openly Gay man his public profile was kept low.  Retail workers labor leader Cleveland Robinson was named Chairman of the Administrative Committee.

Other than being a star speaker that day King was not heavily involved in the planning or management of the event. He even left the details of mobilizing SCLC supporters to his aides.

As word spread, it became apparent that the march was going to turn into the largest event of its kind in history.  The media began to pay attention.  On the day of the march, buses poured into the city from sleepy Mississippi towns and from gritty industrial hubs like Detroit and Chicago.  Trains from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were jammed.  Thousands of local Washington residents swelled the throng. 

Organizers put the crowd at more than 300,000.  The National Park Service, in charge because the speakers’ platform was erected at the Lincoln Memorial, said 200,000.  Whatever was the case, crowds filled the Mall far past the Washington Monument.  About 80% of the marchers were Black. Marchers included many celebrities including actors like Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Charlton Heston—yes that Charlton Heston.  

Charlton Heston, Harry Belafonte, novelist James Baldwin, and Marlon Brando added star power to the March.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, but the three major broadcast networks broke away from their usual programming of afternoon soap operas to cover the swelling crowd and speeches live. 

Marian Anderson, who sang on the same steps at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt after she was denied use of the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in 1939, opened the program with the National Anthem.  Several other performers took to the stage over the course of the program, perhaps most notably Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Mahalia Jackson.  

Peter Paul & Mary were among the notable entertainers who performed.  They led the crowd in Pete Seeger's anthem If I Had a Hammer.

The Catholic Archbishop of Washington, Patrick O’Boyle led the invocation.  Other religious leaders on the program included Dr. Eugene Blake on behalf of the Protestant National Council of Churches and two leading Rabbis. 

After Randolph’s opening remarks each of the major civil rights leaders took the stage in turn. Floyd McKissick had to read the remarks of CORE’s James Farmer, who was in a Louisiana jail. The youngest leader, John Lewis of the militant SNCC, excoriated the Kennedy Administration for not acting to protect Civil Rights workers who were under regular and violent attack across the South.  Randolph and others who were trying to flatter and coax the President into action forced Lewis to strike the most inflammatory portions of his speech, but what was left was still plenty critical.  

Despite their notable contributions to the Civil Rights Movement key figures like Rosa Parks and Dianne Nash were excluded from the speaker's list.  In the end the only woman to address the crowd was singer and dancer Josephine Baker who had spent most of the previous 30 years as an expatriate in Paris.  She wore her World War II uniform as a decorated member of the French Resistance.

Slain NAACP organizer Medgar Evers’s wife Myrlie was on the announced program to lead a Tribute to Negro Women but did not appear.  In fact, several prominent female figures in the Movement were either not invited or had their requests to be added to the program rejected by Randolph.  In the end the only woman to speak was jazz singer and dancer Josephine Baker who wore her World War II Free French uniform emblazoned with her medal, the Légion d’honneur.  

It all led up to the last major address—the highly anticipated speech of Dr. King.  If civil rights veterans knew what to expect from the notoriously eloquent leader, millions of Americans viewing at home were in for an eye-opening experience.  The speech, built to the thundering crescendo:

Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

 

The hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks who showed up for the March for Jobs and Justice were just as important as any of the movement heavies and celebrities.

The nation, or much of it, was awestruck and impressed.  That speech, along with the continued televised violence against Blacks struggling for equal access to public accommodations and the vote, helped set the stage for the major Civil Rights legislation enacted in the next three years. 

Photographer Margret Bourke-White Was Indefatigable but Not Quite Indestructible

                     

                               Margret Bourke-White in her element as an industrial photographer in 1935.

Sean Callahan, an awe struck admirer and author of the book Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer noted, “The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Life staff as “Maggie the Indestructible.”  But the pioneering photographer and war correspondent turned out to be not quite so indestructible.  In 1953 at the height of her creative powers and fame she began to notice alarming symptoms which turned out to be Parkinson’s Disease, then untreatable.  She endured a slow deterioration which forced her into semi-retirement by 1957 and ended all of her work by 1968.  She endured with the disease for 18 years before dying of it in near poverty on August 27, 1971 in Stamford, Connecticut.

Margret White was born in New York City on June 14, 1904.  Her father, Joseph White, an immigrant secularized Polish Jew who was a naturalist, engineer, and inventor.  Her mother was Minnie Bourke, an American-born Irish Catholic.  Both parents, however, rejected their birth faiths and were ardent free thinkers.  The family, including young Maggie and sister and brother, were comfortably middle class, and soon left the city for the leafy small town of Bound Brook, New Jersey, a historic burb on the Raritan River in the north central part of the state.

Maggie, like her brother and older sister, worshiped her brilliant father, a perfectionist with high expectations of his offspring.  Her artistic mother was also a feminist who imbued her with the notion not to allow herself to be limited by customary gender roles.  All the children were inoculated with a mission to serve humanity, even save the world through relentless self-improvement and achievement.

While a student at Plainfield High School, Margaret picked up a passion for photography from her father who was fascinated by cameras and interested in nature photography.  After graduation from high school, she was interested in becoming a professional photographer—a business with few successful women practitioners—but followed her father’s advice to pursue science.

In 1922 White enrolled at Columbia University in New York to study herpetology—the study of snakes and reptiles.  But while at Columbia she took photography classes with Clarence Hudson White, founder of the Photo-Secession movement with Alfred Stieglitz which re-invigorated her interest in the medium.  Her time at Columbia, however, was cut short by the sudden and devastating death of her father after one semester.

White never returned to Columbia.  She restlessly moved from school to school driven by her often impossibly high expectations of the institutions, her own perfectionism, and a bristling refusal to bow to any restrictions placed on her as a woman.  Romance and its failure may also have played a part. White married fellow student Everett Chapman in 1924 and divorced him just two years later. She studied successively at the University of Michigan, Perdue, and Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, before finally settling in comfortably at Cornell, in Ithaca, New York.  Perhaps it helped that Ithaca reminded her of her New Jersey home.  When she graduated, she left a remarkable portfolio of campus photos for the student newspaper which concentrate on buildings and architectural detail.

                                                   

                                                                        Bourke-White as a young photographer.

Despite the odds against her, White was determined to pursue a career as a photographer.  A year after graduating from Cornell in 1927 she established her own commercial photography studio in Cleveland, Ohio where she specialized in architectural and industrial work.  Symbolically, she abandoned her married name and the adopted the hyphenated name Bourke-White to preserve her independence and honor her mother equally with her father.

In her early days Bourke-White struggled to get commissions.  Her breakthrough came when she got a job from the Otis Steel Company to document their production process.  Even though she had been hired by the company, their security agents tried to block her access in the shaky grounds that steel was a defense industry and photos of production could risk the national security and plant superintendents and foremen worried that a mere woman could not stand the intense heat and danger of being close to blast furnaces and molten metal.  She got her way around these objections with flirtatious eyelash batting, and when that didn’t work, terrifying bullying.

                                            Bourke-White endangered assistants and herself to capture the drama of molten steel at the Otis Steel mill in Cleveland.

Once in the plants Bourke-White quickly discovered technical challenges.  She set up what she thought were brilliant, dramatic shots of steel being poured then discovered in the dark room that the black and white film she was using was not sensitive to the glowing red and orange of hot steel—the molten metal came out nearly black in prints.  She solved the problem by lighting her shots by having assistants hold magnesium flares which produced a brilliant white light.  The aids sometimes had to be positioned dangerously close to the flowing steel and showering sparks, but she was heedless of their—and her own—safety.  The results were stunning.  No photographer had ever before captured the dazzling drama of hot steel.  When the shots were published, Bourke-White was recognized as a master of her medium.

That 1928 shoot led directly to a prestigious new job as associate editor and staff photographer for Fortune magazine in 1929.  In 1930 the magazine sent her to the Soviet Union where she became one of the first western photojournalists to document Russian industry under Communism.  That trip would help make her welcome a decade later when she was posted to Moscow as a foreign correspondent.

In 1936 Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Fortune bought the failing old humor magazine Life just for its name.  He wanted to launch a new weekly newsmagazine that would rely mostly on photography to tell its stories—a newsreel on slick paper as he envisioned it.  Bourke-White, already working for him at Fortune and who had the strong support of Luce’s feminist wife Clair Boothe Luce, was his first hire for the new project.  Not only was she a photographer, but she set up the sophisticated photo lab that would be required to process and print the hundreds, often thousands of images that would pour into magazine every week from around the world.  When the new magazine hit the newsstands on November 23, 1936, Bourke-White’s photo of the Fort Peck Dam was on the cover.  The new magazine was an immediate success and almost instantly a national institution.

                    

                                This photo of the Fort Peck Dam was featured on the inaugural issue of Henry Luce's Life Magazine.

Luce was an arch conservative and rabid anti-New Dealer, which was reflected in the editorial content of the magazine.  Hardly anyone, however, read Luce’s ranting editorials.  They turned to the magazine for the dramatic coverage of the world around them, including the stark poverty of the Depression years.  Luce never seemed to learn that the pictures that he printed worked against all his politics.  Pictures by Bourke-White and others evoked sympathy for the plight of workers and celebrated the triumphs of things like CCC camps and WPA public works projects and actually rallied public support for the New Deal.  Luce never learned this lesson and in later years coverage of his photographers of the Civil Rights Movement, the emerging counterculture of the ‘60s, and the experience of grunts on the ground in Vietnam all worked against his personal political agenda.

Bourke-White, who had made her reputation photographing industry, turned more and more to human subjects in her coverage of the Great Depression.  In 1937 she toured the South dramatically documenting conditions there.  The results were iconic photos like the one published on February 15, 1937 of displaced Black flood victims lined up for food in front of a huge billboard of a smiling white family in an automobile with the tag line “World’s Highest Standard of Living—There’s No Way Like the American Way.”  Seldom was there a more deeply subversive photo ever published.

This Bourke-White photo is still used as a dramatic illustration the American class divide.

Besides shooting for Time, Bourke-White took her own photos on her swing through the South then collaborated on a book with Erskine Caldwell, the Georgia-born Southern gothic novelist best known for God’s Little Acre. Caldwell wrote the text and Bourke-White provided the photo illustrations, and both collaborated on the captions.  Caleb Crain described the process in a 2009 New Yorker article:

Bourke-White lay in wait for her subjects with a flash and wrote with pleasure of having them “imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened.” The resulting portraits are by turns sentimental and grotesque, and she and Caldwell printed them with contrived first-person captions.

The resulting book, Have You Seen Their Faces was published by Viking Press, with a paperback version by Modern Age Books following quickly.  It pre-dated the more celebrated collaboration of James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men published in 1941 by four years.

The work with Caldwell also led to romance.  The couple married in 1939 and divorced in 1942 largely due to Bourke-White’s lengthy absences on overseas assignments.

Those assignments came as tensions in Europe were on the rise.  She was dispatched to survey what everyday life was like under the Fascists in Italy, Nazis in Germany, and Soviet Communists.  Despite being under tight surveillance and often escorted by handlers meant to make sure that she only took positive photos, her keen eye was able to pick out many telling moments.  In the Soviet Union, her earlier visit there led to unprecedented access, including to Joseph Stalin himself in an informal and un-posed session which even caught the usually stern dictator laughing.

When War broke out in 1939, Bourke-White applied for credentials as a war correspondent to various governments.  She even gave up her full-time job at Time, which did not want to send her in harm’s way, in 1940 to become a freelance correspondent sending photos and articles to several American newspapers.  She did continue to sell pictures to Time and was eventually rehired by them to be a war correspondent.

In fact, Bourke-White became the first accredited American female war correspondent.  She was back in Moscow when Germany broke the Hitler-Stalin Pact and attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.  In fact, she was the only western photographer in the Capital as the city came under Luftwaffe bombardment which set of firestorms.  She photographed the burning city from the roof of the American Embassy.

       

                 Ready to fly with the boys of the Army Air Force in 1942.

When the United States entered the war, Bourke-White became the first woman correspondent.  She was first attached to the Army Air Force in North Africa and became the first woman to fly on Combat bombing missions.  At desert air bases she had to run for cover from strafing and dive-bombing Stukas.  Later she was assigned to Army infantry and artillery in Italy where the Army was bogged down in a grueling mountain campaigning.   She won the respect of the troops for her courage under frequent fire.

In between, Bourke-White was on board the British troop ship SS Strathallan bound to North Africa from England when it was torpedoed and sunk.  She turned to the experience into the photo essay Women in Lifeboats which appeared in Life on February 22, 1943.  

Buchenwald survivors.  Bourke's photo were some of the first images of Nazi horrors that Americans got to see.   

Toward the end of the war Bourke-White toured recently captured and occupied German territory with General George Patton.  She was with him at Buchenwald short days after the Death Camp was liberated.  The experience shook her to the core:

Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.  The photos she took, and which were published in Time were among the first and most detailed images of the horror that Americans got to see.  After the war she assembled and wrote Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report On The Collapse Of Hitler’s Thousand Years.  It was an eyewitness account of devastated Germany after the war in which she displayed scant sympathy for the German civilians she held responsible for the rise of Hitler and still, in the face of overwhelming mounting evidence of atrocities, remained in denial about national guilt and their own responsibility for the wretched conditions to which they had been lowered.   It was a tough book—and a highly controversial one.  

Among Bourke-Whites most important post-war assignments was the independence of the Indian sub-continent and the bloody partition of India and Pakistan.  She photographed all the key players.  Her photograph of Mohandas Gandhi emaciated from fasting and sitting at his spinning wheel became one of the most recognizable images of him.  There was a stern photo of Pakistani founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah sitting upright in a chair.  But it was the photos of the devastating partition violence that stood out.  Somini Sengupta, a noted Indian journalist working for the New York Times called Bourke-White’s photographs “gut-wrenching, and staring at them, you glimpse the photographer’s undaunted desire to stare down horror…Bourke-White’s photographs seem to scream from the page.” In 1948 she was back in India and again photographed and interviewed Gandhi hours before his assassination.

Bourke-White's iconic photo of Gandhi and his spinning wheel.

These pictures were taken just two years after her experience at Buchenwald.  Bourke-White had seen more than her share of the horrors that humanity was capable of.

She continued to do fine work for Life until her Parkinson’s forced her retirement.  Even then she kept up a limited amount of freelance work.  But the tremors of the disease made it increasingly difficult to hold a camera steady or to do the dark room work that she relished.  Experimental surgeries to her nervous system in 1959 and 1961 reduced the tremors but drastically affected her speech.  And the procedures could not halt the slow march of her body toward paralysis.

Unable to do much with her camera, Bourke-White penned a bestselling memoir, Portrait of Myself published in 1963. 

She spent the rest of the decade in failing health and increasing isolation in her Darien, Connecticut home.  A generous Time-Life pension and royalties from her books and photographs could not keep up with the rapidly mounting cost of her medical expenses and the need for 24 hour a day nursing care.  By the time she finally slipped away, she was broke.

Burke-White’s photos are on display and in the collections of several museums including the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as in the collection of the Library of Congress.

The rise of academic women’s studies almost on the heels of her death helped revive interest in Bourke-White and elevated her to new status as an inspirational role model.  Candice Bergen played her in the Academy Award winning film Gandhi in 1982 and Farrah Fawcett portrayed her in a made-for-TV bio pic, Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White in 1989.