Seventy years ago, in July 1956, Catholic Book Club subscribers received a copy of A Report on the American Jesuits for their monthly reading. The book resulted from a partnership between John La Farge, S.J.—the celebrated Jesuit intellectual, racial justice champion and America editor—and Margaret Bourke-White, a longtime staff photographer for Life magazine.
Father La Farge and Ms. Bourke-White had met a few years earlier when she was on assignment for what she lovingly called “the Jesuit story,” an 11-page spread in the October 11, 1954, issue of Life. When the Report was published two years later, bearing the imprimatur of the archbishop of New York, Bourke-White’s photographs became visual evidence of a new American Catholicism. But few people familiar with American Catholic history know her name or how her camerawork popularized American Jesuits in the atomic age.
Margaret Bourke-White—a twice-married, twice-divorced woman whose biographer surmised that her work was the only religion she ever had—was perhaps a peculiar choice for the Life assignment that started it all. But Maggie, as she was called by those who knew her well, was one of the most famous—and most prolific—photographers in the United States. Between 1936 and 1957, Ms. Bourke-White went on no fewer than 283 assignments for Life, producing oceans of negatives, only a fraction of which made their way into publication.
Before that she worked for Fortune as one of the magazine’s earliest staff photographers and freelanced as a commercial photographer for American corporations like Goodyear Tires and Buick. By 1950, it was a good bet that most American magazine readers had seen a picture she had taken. Each assignment could claim anywhere from a week to several months of her time and labor. She was on assignment for the Jesuit story for six months in late 1953 and early 1954, travelling from coast to coast and to British Honduras, not only taking pictures but building relationships with Jesuits at every stage of formation, from novices to priests.
The original Life story, “The Jesuits in America,” was one of the first popular media portrayals of Jesuits as ideal Americans, uniquely positioned to confront the perils of the atomic age. The seeds of the story were planted when a young staffer at Life, Michael Arlen, found himself on Henry Luce’s private elevator in early 1953. As luck would have it, the flustered Arlen found himself a captive audience of a curious and bemused Luce, the founder of Life and a host of other 20th-century magazines. When Luce asked the young man where he was assigned, Arlen’s reply—the religion department—immediately piqued Luce’s interest. Religion departments were fairly standard in mid-century American journalism. But Luce, the son of missionaries to China and a life-long Presbyterian, was perhaps more personally invested in the subject than other magnates. So he probed Arlen. What was the department working on?
In a moment of panic, as Arlen later described it, he blurted out “the Jesuits” after remembering something he had read over the weekend. Clare Booth Luce, Henry’s wife and a Congresswoman from Connecticut, had famously converted to Catholicism just a few years earlier. A Jesuit priest had guided her to seek counsel with Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen, perhaps then the most famous Catholic in America. Whether it was this personal connection or something else that stuck with Luce, Arlen’s supervisors received a call from the top floor demanding to know where they were in the project and why they hadn’t shared it before. The big boss wanted updates.
To meet the compressed project deadlines, Arlen went on a frenzy drafting the story. He made connections to various Jesuit colleges and universities and to Jesuit researchers and other professionals around the country. The Jesuits who answered Arlen’s calls and responded to his telegrams and letters worked in nearly every industry advancing American interests in the 1950s. This was going to be no erudite litany of stiff collars in smokey rooms. Arlen soon sketched the outlines that became the shooting script and travel itinerary, but the story that went to press in October 1954 was one that emerged in the field, in individual relationships and through Bourke-White’s cameras. Arlen went on the assignment, too, but had to cut out early when he was conscripted into the Korean War.
War was something Bourke-White knew all too well. She had served as a war correspondent in World War II, where she had to prove her mettle to gain the access to combat life that her male colleagues were granted from the start. Between 1942 and 1945 she was embedded in multiple campaigns in European and North African theaters. She shot air raids from the belly of bombers over North Africa and in the ground war in Italy where “rifle bullets come singing your name.” At one point her convoy was torpedoed. She escaped with her life but lost most of her cameras and any film she had yet to send in. Her last assignment was with Patton’s Third Army in Germany, where she documented the horrors of Buchenwald.
Then in 1952 she went to Korea. She spent three months embedded with anti-guerilla fighters in remote, war-torn villages. It was an assignment she had requested in order to get at “the Korea Ike won’t see,” the Life story promised when her pictures were published in December 1952. Without the benefit of a shooting script and short on basic provisions, she became an eyewitness to the human toll of the war and told a story that no other American photographers had tried to tell. Of all the Life photographers assigned to Korea, she was the only woman.
She didn’t quit on the story, but she paid a price when she returned back to glitzy New York and was expected to seamlessly resume stateside life. War traumas were dramatically misunderstood at the time, even for the most hardened combat troops. A lady photographer never had a prayer of a fitting diagnosis. She broke. Whether due to the mental and physical toll of the Korea assignment, or the earliest symptoms of Parkinson’s that she would battle the rest of her life, she pulled herself out of the grind to find treatment. Luce called with a new assignment while she was convalescing. “When Life assigned me to do a photographic essay on the American Jesuits,” she wrote in her note in the Report, “all I knew about the Society of Jesus was that it existed.” By the time the story wrapped, she had lifelong friendships and connections with Jesuits across the country.
Bourke-White’s work with the Jesuits rhymed with her earlier wartime assignments. Used to being the only woman in the room, she was adept at finding a place to make meaningful photographs within the hierarchy of a male religious order. She was adamant about not being converted, but she understood the men she was assigned to photograph not only as Jesuits but as humans. Her field notes from the assignments move back and forth from technical information—camera specifications, film speed, lighting needs—to snippets of conversations she had with “the fathers,” her term of endearment for all Jesuits, regardless of their “rank.” Her notebooks and unpublished typescripts and later publications record conversations that ranged from the finality of hell—one priest repeatedly began conversations hinting that “if you gave the Lord the zeal which you give to the camera, that would be a fine thing”—to the wonders of the natural world, the evils of poverty and war, to decisions to prioritize something bigger than self in decisions around love and marriage. “I know with you its for a higher reason,” she confided to a Jesuit while changing her film in 1953, “but in the same way…this is why I can’t get married either…. I feel too, the work must come first.”
The Jesuit story was a success. A memo from the letters department at Life—copied to “Maggy—F.Y.I.” —provided an internal report on reader responses to the October 11 issue. A third of all responses received within a week of its publication were about the Jesuit story. The responses included harsh criticisms of both the Society of Jesus and the magazine’s publication of Catholic content. But most were positive, even gushing. Among them was a note from America’s John La Farge, S.J.: “All American Jesuits and their friends are deeply grateful to LIFE for the generous, resourceful and artistic story,” he wrote. A few months later, the pair were collaborating on the Report.
Original plans for A Report on the American Jesuits called for “between 75 and 80 absolutely first-rate photographs by MBW with short caps [captions].” An internal memo circulated to Bourke-White’s closest colleagues in March 1955 described the anticipated production process. “Basic research, tentative dummy layouts, etc.” would be followed by completion and delivery of La Farge’s text. “Against this typescript and with the initial photographic layout MBW will work with [her associate] on the actual putting of the book to bed.” The book’s coordinated use of images and text was hardly innovative in 1955, when the work plan was drafted, but the editorial team was confident the book would “be a hell of a lot better looking both in the reproduction of the photographs and the overall design” because of the crackerjack team working on it.
When it went to press in late spring 1956 the book was a little over 200 pages and included 78 photographs and a 21-page “Note” by Bourke-White on what she described as her “photographic mission.” The text of the Report reads as an affable and informative introduction to the Society of Jesus in the United States, with chapters on present-day (1950s) Jesuits and overviews of various stages of Jesuit formation. Bourke-White’s photographs anchor the Society of Jesus as a modern American religious order, despite its pre-modern European origins and centuries-long presence in the Americas.
Almost immediately, letters flooded in full of enthusiasm about the book and praising Bourke-White’s pictures for how they captured American Jesuit life. The book was reviewed in everything from The New York Times to The Christian Herald, whose subscriber base was almost entirely Protestant. In July 1956, the editor of the Herald begged readers “please, please don’t miss this one.” The editor praised La Farge as “the most American of all the Jesuits” and failed to credit Bourke-White for the photographs.
But it wasn’t just “outsiders” who benefited from the book. Jesuits from Maryland to California wrote to request permission to use Bourke-White’s photographs in their own promotional and devotional materials. John F. Connolly, S.J., wrote to Bourke-White on October 29, 1956, from the Manresa retreat house in Azusa, Calif., expressing gratitude for “allowing us to use your magnificent photograph of the Rosary Group at Manresa” in promotional materials. Robert L. Kraus, S.J., on behalf of The Jesuit Bulletin out of St. Louis, Missouri, congratulated her on the Report and enclosed a copy of the most recent Bulletin, which included two photographs she had taken. The New York Province of the Society of Jesus wanted to use her pictures in a brochure that would be distributed to “benefactors, actual and potential,” with the hope of boosting coffers to support “over six hundred Scholastics preparing for the priesthood in our Seminaries and some four hundred and fifty Jesuits in the Missions dependent on us.”
When the Report was published, American Catholicism was reinventing itself as a truly American religion. John Kennedy was still the junior senator from Massachusetts, and the Second Vatican Council would not be convened for another six years. But as the atomic age advanced, religion in all forms came to be seen as a bulwark against Communism—even Catholicism, which previous generations of Americans had cast as a threat to the nation.
Margaret Bourke-White was not religious herself, and she had a complicated relationship with the federal government. She learned in the early 1950s that J. Edgar Hoover had been keeping tabs on her for more than a decade after a syndicated columnist had “outed” her—with no evidence—as a Communist. She may have taken on the Jesuit assignment as a response to these attacks on her patriotism, or maybe it was just the next assignment that came her way. Either way, the experience changed her even as it created a new framework for seeing the humanity, and the Americanness, of American Jesuits.
When Bourke-White appeared on a segment of the popular CBS broadcast “Person to Person” in 1955, just before the publication of the Report, the celebrated newsman Edward R. Murrow asked, “Maggie, what’s the thing you look for when you start on a story with a camera?” Her answer was one that had taken her a career in camerawork to find. “I think the truth, Ed,” she replied. “I think the first thing you look for is the truth and a way to tell it…because so many millions of people see our pictures and the interpretation that we make is very important and goes a long way, and I think it is awfully important to study the subject and try to understand it so that you can really portray it in a forceful and truthful light.”
Margaret Bourke-White was not Catholic. She was not a religious person. But she was an interpreter of religious life to millions of Americans. As one Jesuit wrote to her after reading the Report, “I am sure that I but re-echo the thoughts of all the Jesuits of the United States when I tell you how much we were impressed by your wonderful work and insight into the Society of Jesus.” Her camera distilled the complexity of tradition into a single frame, a single moment in time. Her pictures were moral documents, attempting to link truth to the everyday labors of being human, being Catholic, in a world constantly in flux.
Still, her role in bringing these Jesuits to life, has, like the Christian Herald’s review, been overlooked if not blotted out from history. Perhaps, 70 years after A Report on the American Jesuits was published, we can remember not only “the most American of all Jesuits” but also the secular lady behind the lens. In so doing, we can recognize photographs as meaningful records of American Catholic life and photographers, with their varied life histories and experiences, as both makers and interpreters of the worlds we encounter through their pictures.
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