Barbara Orbach Natanson

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Barbara Orbach Natanson | Worth a Billion Words? Library of Congress Pictures Online | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Worth a Billion Words? Library of Congress Pictures Online

Early in the 1911 baseball season, the Washington Senators played a series of games against the New York Highlanders (then increasingly being dubbed the "Yankees"). After two games in Washington, D.C., the Senators journeyed to New York City to play the Yankees' season opener on their home field, Hilltop Park. Patriotic decorations decked the stadium, and a band was scheduled to play. The New York–based Bain News Service was on hand to capture the scene, making photographs that could be offered to subscribing publications all over the country. The Washington Senators' infielder Herman A. "Germany" Schaefer obliged by posing simultaneously in front of and behind the camera, playfully assuming the role of photographer for the Bain News Service's coverage of the event. (See figure 1.)¹

Schaefer was known for antics that entertained fans and buoyed up his teammates, so it is not surprising that the news photographer focused on him to depict the high spirits that accompanied the start of the season. Although Schaefer could not have known that he was about to launch the best hitting year of his career, both players and fans were likely already in a mood to celebrate that April. The unseasonably bad weather that had marred preseason play was starting to break. Moreover, the Yankees and the New York Giants had just agreed to share Hilltop Park for the season in the wake of a disastrous fire that swept through the Polo Grounds, the home field of the Giants. An even more tragic fire had swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory downtown less than a month before. The Bain News Service carried grim pictures of the aftermath, and the New York Times was still regularly covering the Triangle factory story. The pleasures of the game and attendant hoopla could certainly have offered welcome distraction from the horrifying realities of the fire and the exploitive labor practices it highlighted.²

Figure 1. This photograph of Herman A. "Germany" Schaefer, taken in 1911, was the millionth image scanned from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division collections and made available online. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection, LC-B2–2189–6,http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.09131.

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