Whiting Williams Collection
Description
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A Note on the CollectionWhiting Williams, a well-respected, widely published American authority on labor-management relations, visited Ukraine in his professional capacity in August, 1933 – a follow-up to his visit to Ukraine’s Donetsk mining region in 1928. Upon arrival in 1933, he was so stunned by the disastrous conditions he encountered that he resolved to inform the American public immediately upon his return home. While newspapers and magazines back home had displayed photos of notable visitors at new Soviet factories and model collective farms and featured Margaret Bourke-White’s photo essays of mammoth Soviet structures and muscular workers [1][2], no one had published photographs that documented the suffering that Williams witnessed.
Williams' travel within Ukraine was closely managed by the official Soviet tourist agency; however, he attempted to elude his minders to snap at least a few quick shots that might capture a hint of the human catastrophe surrounding him. Whenever possible, he also tried to catch a few words with local residents – hotel workers, train conductors, miners – to get beyond the propaganda and offer a balancing perspective to the succession of model sites on the itinerary designed to impress visitors. Yet as shocked as he was by the conditions of death and despair he encountered off the tour, he also wanted to present to his readers back home not simply a picture of misery but of a common humanity desperate to survive. Moreover, he sought to convey his own underlying hope and respect for the people he documented.
Williams edited his journal pages, filled with factual observations and laced with anguish, and sent out the manuscript with photographs to US magazine editors who had previously published his work. To his dismay, however, he found that no one was willing to run this story. (See “Whiting Williams: a Biographical Essay” in this Directory for further details). Eventually, Williams was connected with the editor of a weekly London newspaper, Answers, who took his manuscript and several photographs, reworked them into a tabloid style and format, then published them in a two-part series in early 1934.
The Williams photos in Answers are quite likely the first published photographs to appear in the Western press that provide a glimpse of the suffering and genocidal policy in Ukraine that brought about the Holodomor.
The collection presented here contains the complete articles published in Answers on February 24, 1934, and March 3, 1934, along with the ten illustrations. Two are portraits of Williams – one formal, and one in laborer guise – and eight are photographs from his 1933 visit to Ukraine. Significantly, this collection also presents digitized copies of the original photographs from which the published illustrations came. These originals are archived in the WRHS Photograph and Print Collection, which supplements the Whiting Williams Papers, an extensive collection of Williams’ publications and correspondence housed in the Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS) Library, Cleveland, Ohio. https://www.wrhs.org/research/library/ By contractual agreement, WRHS has provided high quality scans of the photographs for display in this Directory, for which we are most grateful.
The original photographs – essentially Williams’ snapshots as a non-professional photographer – offer not only technically more distinct images but in some cases important visual context that was cropped away in the published versions. Also worth noting is that the original photographs have Williams’ own captions written on the backs, sometimes rather different from the captions that appeared in the newspaper. Unfortunately, one of the closely cropped newspaper illustrations is missing its original in the Williams archives, which would undoubtedly have added valuable context and caption information.
As indicated in “Whiting Williams: a Biographical Essay,” Williams’ correspondence with publishers mentions an unspecified number of photographs from 1933, but it may never be confirmed whether those that appeared in Answers comprise the extent of his 1933 photos. The Whiting Williams Papers at WRHS include additional photographs from his visits to Ukraine. Most are undated but appear to match directly or by style and subject the photographs he took in 1928 and subsequently published with articles published 1928-1932. A few are harder to place and will require further research, although at least two or three are quite certainly from 1933. One of them is included in this Directory.
Footnotes- Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia.
- Bourke-White, Margaret Bourke-White’s Photographs of U.S.S.R.
Sources Cited Bourke-White, Margaret. Eyes on Russia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931. ———Margaret Bourke-White’s Photographs of U.S.S.R. Albany, NY: Argus Press, 1934.
