Shooting Back: The Daily Worker Photographs Collection

Abstract

During Mike Nash's tenure as Director of the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive a great deal of documentation about the American Communist Party (CPUSA), its fronts, its members, and the various individuals involved in its operations flowed into the holdings he was expanding. Typically, this documentation did not always deal directly with the BIG issues but certainly helped to illuminate them and other aspects of their impact and influence. Among the most important acquisitions was the Daily Worker's photograph collection. The curator handling it, Erika Gottfried, in explaining in detail its contents, which should prove a great boon to those interested in the history the CPUSA, pays tribute to Mike for his key role in acquiring the collection as well as the funds necessary for making it useful to those who wish to make use of it. Ms. Gottfried's essay is a splendid introduction to the collection's diverse contents and a very utilitarian guide. She has done an excellent job of laying out what's there and how to gain access. And it seems to me that her essay is very much in keeping with Mike's notion about easy unfettered access. Like any good archivist he took delight in acquisition of materials and collections, especially in achieving that goal as in this instance without what he considered petty restrictions. Mike brought many restriction-free collections to Tamiment. He was a scholar's best friend. It seems to me that Mike would have been very pleased at the speed with which this collection has become available, would have been pleased by the ease of access, would have been delighted to confer with students, scholars, and researchers about what they might find, and would have appreciated Ms. Gottfried's essay as an excellent tutorial.DJL In 2004, an exhibit devoted to the “Coops”—the cooperative apartments in the Bronx built by labor unions and Left organizations in the 1920s—was opened at the Museum of the City of New York. A visit to this exhibit caused this writer to suffer a bad bout of photo envy. Throughout the exhibit were exactly the kinds of images that researchers would expect the Tamiment Library to have in its collections, but often did not find there. As Tamiment's photograph curator I knew that the Library should have images that documented Communist Party rallies, International Workers Order events, housing conditions and evictions in the 1930s, antiwar marches from the early 1940s, and hunger marches. These impressive images in the Coops exhibit had a common origin: they came from the files of the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). I could only dream of Tamiment possessing all the riches of that collection. Then, less than two years later, Michael Nash, Tamiment's director, made this dream come true. Mike was instrumental in bringing the photo files of the Daily Worker (and its successor publications) to Tamiment. And it was Mike who wrote the grant proposal that secured funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for processing the collection, to make it fully accessible. For that I will always be grateful and generations of researchers will be the beneficiaries of Mike's efforts. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Hillel Arnold, the Daily Worker/Daily World Photograph Collection's Project Archivist, for his meticulous arrangement and description of the collection, and Tamiment's endlessly patient student assistants for their work on the collection (a labor archives should credit all of its laborers!).