In August of 1959, a blackout hit New York City. Power was out for 13 hours—not that long when viewed in retrospect. Though if you were in the middle of that blackout, and especially if you were operating a store that sold whipped cream and custard, (see photo gallery) you might have looked at it differently.
For its part, LIFE described the blackout in its Aug. 31, 1959, issue this way:
In the heart of glittering Manhattan island, a 500-block area lay swathed in darkness. Street lamps were out and no light shone from the many-windowed apartment houses. In their blacked-out homes, a half million new Yorkers made do without radio or TV. Those who ventured out found cafeterias taking on the candlelit airs of tea shoppes and taverns offering unrefrigerated beer without the usual juke-box blare. In the streets, people enjoyed watching police trying to unsnarl the minor traffic jams that resulted from the lack of traffic lights. Or they simply gathered in little groups to savor the strange aura of a seemingly lifeless city.
A massive failure had cut off almost all electricity in the section that bounded Central Park and for almost 13 hours the area was without power. The huge use of air conditioners and refrigerators brought on by a heat wave might have been the basic cause of the failure. When the lights went on, the city congratulated itself that there had been no panic and little misbehavior. In an area where crime incidence is fairly high, police reported only a few misdemeanors and a couple of picked pockets.
As a rule, photographers need good lighting to make their pictures, but in this case, a blackout created a notable exception.
New York City Blackout, 1959.
Joe Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
New York City Blackout, 1959.
Joe Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Candlelit automat provides dinner with a touch of old world atmosphere. Local storekeepers ran out of candles and flashlights in a couple of hours.”
“A national political campaign,” H.L. Mencken once observed, “is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.”
Baptisms and hangings aside, Mencken’s characterization of a campaign as a circus-like affair alternately thrilling, entertaining, silly and (occasionally) a matter of life and death still strikes a chord. Just like at the circus, during any hard-fought, high-profile campaign we watch, shake our heads and hold our breath, stunned by the spectacle and wondering how on earth the performers can keep going day after day, night after night.
But it’s also worth pointing out that, in some very elemental ways, pretty much all American political campaigns are very much alike, and (like circuses) they have looked and felt the same for as long as Democrats and Republicans have been vying for the House, the Senate, governors’ mansions and, of course, the Oval Office.
Here, LIFE.com presents photos of American politicians on the campaign trail: famous leaders and largely forgotten pols shaking hands, kissing babies, eating everything put in front of them, traveling in planes, trains and automobiles in search of one more vote. It’s not pretty but then, while it might be highly entertaining, no one ever said that politics was an especially attractive endeavor.
Republican presidential candidate Robert Taft, a U.S. Senator from Ohio, appears dismayed as he holds a rooster during his 1952 primary campaign.
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
President Franklin D. Roosevelt talks to a young mother while sitting in his car during a trip to the West in 1936.
Thomas D. McAvoy Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Vice Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace throws a boomerang in a field in January 1940. Wallace, who was vice president during FDR’ second term and served as the secretary of both Commerce and Agriculture, was relatively famous for his prowess with the boomerang, and could occasionally be seen in the early morning near the Lincoln Memorial in the 1940s, hurling the curved, lethal-looking pieces of wood and catching them as they returned.
Thomas D. Mcavoy Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Republican candidate for Congress Raymond Leslie Buell gives a campaign speech on a platform surrounded by townspeople in a small Massachusetts park in August 1942.
Herbert Gehr Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hamilton Fish, a Republican Congressman from New York who served 25 years in the House, stands before his likeness in the midst of a campaign.
Marie Hansen Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gubernatorial candidate Gomer Smith talks to small gathering from the bed of a feed truck, Wagoner, Oklahoma, in June 1942.
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A car caravan takes GOP presidential candidate Thomas Dewey into the countryside in September 1948.
Ed Clark Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Thomas E. Dewey accepts the Republican nomination for President at the Republican Natlonal Convention in June 1948.
Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Claude Pepper naps with his wife in the back seat of a chartered plane as they fly home after his last campaign speech in May 1950. Pepper, a Democrat, represented Florida in the Senate for 15 years (1936-1951), and the Miami area in the House for another 26 (from 1963 until his death in 1989).
Thomas D. Mcavoy Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower stands at a lectern delivering a speech during a “whistle stop tour” of the Midwest in September 1952. He would go on to defeat Democrat Adlai Stevenson in November of that year and serve two terms in the White House.
Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower accepts a pumpkin from an admirer during his whistle stop tour in September 1952.
Joseph Scherschel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt adjusts Richard Nixon’s tie prior to photo shoot during the 1960 presidential campaign.
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John F. Kennedy gives a speech while standing on a kitchen chair in Logan County, West Virginia
Hank Walker Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock images
Senator Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Texas) talks with staff and reporters while on a plane in April 1960, before accepting John Kennedy’s offer to be his running mate.
Thomas D. Mcavoy Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hubert Humphrey shakes hands with a voter while campaigning prior to the West Virginia primary in April 1960.
Paul Schutzer Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’ supporters in January 1964.
Alfred Eisenstaedt Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
America lacks the couture history of European nations, and, as a result, its fashion output has often been seen as more casual and less decadent, compared to collections from French and Italian design houses. That distinction was challenged in the fall of 1950, though, when designers unveiled clothing that had “taken on a quality of unmistakable elegance” which was also “unmistakably American,” according to the Sept. 11, 1950 issue of LIFE. In a photo essay that featured mink-trimmed satin coats, tweed suits and rhinestone buttons, Nina Leen‘s photographs captured American fashion at its finest and most fabulous.
Original caption: “Ermine Collar, rhinestone buttons add formal note to tweed suit (Capri, $135). White plush hat (Sally Victor, $50) goes with street or theater suits.”
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Velveteen and fleece are combine in a bright red greatcoat with woolly lining that can worn inside out (Raelson, $110). Velvet in high shades is popular streetwear fabric.”
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: ” Expensive Elegance is acheived by combining a tailored tweed town suit (Omar Kiam, $235) with soft black fox circle ($125), pearl broach (Trifari, $20).”
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Elegance, 1950
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Elegance, 1950.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Elegance, 1950
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Inexpensive elegance is achieved by dressing up gray flannel sheath (Carolyn Schnurer, $20) with mink scarf (Annis, $30), velvet hat (Madcaps, $5).”
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Original caption: “Taffeta and wool costume has dress in plaid to match coat. (Herbert Sondheim, $235). Usually custom-made, evening ensembles like this are now made in all price ranges.”
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Elegance, 1950.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
American Elegance, 1950.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
As a boy, Allan Grant dreamed of becoming an aeronautical engineer. When his career path took a different route, the flying industry’s loss became the photography world’s and, specifically, LIFE magazine’s gain.
If any photographer ever captured the lighter side of show business, it was the confident New York native who, as a teen, traded a model airplane that he’d built for a pocket Kodak camera, and never looked back.
A LIFE staffer from 1947 until the late 1960s, Grant covered the entertainment world from the inside. His unique blend of cool appraisal and obvious affection for (most) of his subjects went a long way toward making the stars seem just as quirky and approachable as the rest of us mortals.
But he was hardly a sycophantic “celebrity photographer,” and Grant (1919 – 2008) was perfectly aware of his own skills as a photographer, and a newsman. When asked in an early 1990s interview by another long-time LIFE staffer, John Loengard, what kind of photographer he thought he was, Grant replied with a refreshing directness: “I would say a good one, for starters. I stayed [at LIFE] for a long time. I was very versatile; I did everything.”
That he did. While particularly known for his winning portraits of showbiz royalty as the pictures in this gallery demonstrate when called upon Grant was a perfectly adept chronicler of harder news. His portraits of Marina Oswald made shortly after her husband shot President Kennedy, for example, captured a personal side of that epic, era-defining story that few other media outlets could touch. His pictures of atomic tests and, especially, their aftermath in the early 1950s managed to add a human dimension to an issue that frequently felt, by turns, too clinical and too terrifying for the average citizen to grasp.
But it was, in the end, Grant’s portraits of the stars of the Fifties’ and Sixties’ that showed his real ability to get close to people, and capture something genuine, if fleeting, about the rich and famous in their unguarded moments. Shortly after Grant died in 2008, Dick Stolley, who was LIFE’s Los Angeles bureau chief in the early ’60s and later served as the magazine’s managing editor, pointed out in a statement that Allan Grant was “very handsome and glamorous, two virtues that made him popular in Hollywood.”
Handsome, glamorous and supremely talented. Some guys have all the luck.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly waited backstage at the RKO Pantages Theatre during the 28th Annual Academy Awards, 1956.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Audrey Hepburn, 1956.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin read lines with Shirley MacLaine, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dean Martin relaxed with his sons at home, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Angie Dickinson on set of Rio Bravo, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Kirk Douglas, 1949.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Groucho Marx in rehearsal, 1960.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Chico and Harpo Marx, 1959.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Harpo Marx, 1948.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Paul Newman had make-up removed on the set of The Battler (TV play), 1955.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Buster Keaton and Donald O’Connor rehearsed for a movie based on Keaton’s life, 1956.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cecil B. DeMille, Billy Wilder and Gloria Swanson during the filming of Sunset Boulevard, 1949.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
James Dean on location for the movie Giant, 1956.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bob Hope, 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Elizabeth Taylor at a party after winning the Oscar for her performance in BUtterfield 8, 1961.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty at the Academy Awards, 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly backstage at the RKO Pantages Theatre during the 28th Annual Academy Awards, 1956.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dorothy Dandridge at home, 1954
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dizzy Gillespie during a jam session, 1948
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bob Hope (right) and Frank Sinatra rehearsing for The Bob Hope Show, 1962.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Sammy Davis Sr., Sammy Davis Jr. and Will Mastin on stage at Ciro’s in West Hollywood, 1955.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bobby Darin in his dressing room, 1959.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ella Fitzgerald, 1958.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Actress-model Suzy Parker, 1957.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Edith Piaf was caught in a montage of expressions and gestures while singing during her performance at New York’s Versailles nightclub, 1952.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Shelley Winters in a booth with mirrors, 1949.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marcel Duchamp with Dada artwork, 1953.
Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
On August 16, 1960, 32-year-old U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger ascended in a helium-balloon-tethered gondola to 102,800 feet (roughly 19 miles) above the Earth … and jumped. His free-fall lasted 4 minutes and 36 seconds. He experienced temperatures approaching minus-100 degrees Fahrenheit. As he fell, Kittinger neared the speed of sound, his pressure-suit-encased body traveling at more than 600 mph before he opened his parachute at around 14,000 feet. To this day, incredibly, he still holds records for highest parachute jump and longest-ever free-fall.
Captain Kittinger’s adventure was chronicled, at the time, in the pages of LIFE. But it was the image that graced the cover of the August 29, 1960, issue of the magazine of a green-clad Kittinger tumbling through the ether above a clean, white blanket of clouds that immediately and forever brought home the sheer audacity of his leapfrom the edge of space.
Today, it’s striking to look back and realize just how powerful a single, still photograph can be, and how many emotions it can stir, so many years after the event.
For Kittinger himself, the memory of his jump, and of his appearance on the cover of LIFE, remains startlingly fresh.
“I was eight years old when LIFE magazine was first published,” Col. Kittinger (Ret. USAF), now 84 years old, told LIFE.com. “I remember, so clearly, that my folks received a copy of LIFE every week. I religiously thumbed through every issue, keeping up with happenings all around the world. The photos were always so remarkable. But I could never have dreamed that one day, I would be on the cover. What an honor that was! To this day, I still get requests from people around the globe, asking for my autograph on that very cover.”
But beyond Kittinger’s recollections, there is the sense of wonder that anyone with even a modicum of imagination can embrace, looking at that picture of a human form hurtling toward the planet’s cloud cover miles below. The one image, snapped by an automatic camera perched in the gondola out of which Kittinger had just stepped, captures so many aspects of human endeavor that it bears repeat viewings. One might even say, repeat encounters.
The jump, after all, undertaken in the name of science, is an emblem of our pursuit of knowledge not as something dry and purely academic, but as adrenalized thrill-ride.
It’s also a snapshot of a life at the moment of supreme fulfillment. Joseph Kittinger dreamed of flying ever since he was a young boy in Florida. That he was the one human in a position to make that leap and that he wanted to make the leap speaks to a confidence and a faith in one’s team (scientists, engineers, fellow pilots) that verges on the awesome. Most of us have trouble falling back into the arms of friends and colleagues during “trust exercises” here on the ground; Kittinger’s trust was absolute and unwavering. His life, literally, depended on that trust being warranted. And it was.
Finally, and simply, the image on the cover of LIFE is just a breathtaking picture. One thinks, inevitably, of Icarus’ fall through an ancient sky while celebrating Kittinger’s far happier fate. That a man had the will to step from that gondola, so many miles above the Earth, with a hope, but absolutely no promise, of having it all end well suggests that as a species we’re perhaps braver than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. Or some of us are, anyway. And as long as some of us are, then the sky is no limit.
Nothing has illuminated America’s failings as harshly as the nation’s handling of racial strife; nothing has more clearly shown us at our best and our bravest as the victories won by the men and women in the great struggles of the Civil Rights Movement.
For generations who have grown up in a country where blatant segregation is (technically, at least) illegal, it’s bizarre to think that well within out nation’s collective living memory Black children once needed armed soldiers to escort them safely to school. But just six decades ago, the president of the United States was compelled to call on combat troops to ensure that nine teenagers in Little Rock, Ark., were protected from the enmity of their classmates and neighbors.
The Little Rock Nine, as the teens came to be known, were Black students who sought to attend Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957. The Supreme Court had ruled segregated schools unconstitutional in its landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Three years later, states in the South finally began to face the reality of federally mandated integration. It was historic, and dramatic and for weeks on end, it was profoundly ugly.
Reporters and photographers from across the country traveled to Little Rock, expecting to chronicle the cultural poison unleashed in the South each time strides were made toward full desegregation. In Little Rock, on Sept. 4, 1957 on the first day of school the media recorded the scene as 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, the first of the nine to arrive, was sent off of school grounds by Arkansas National Guardsmen, their rifles raised.
Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had ordered this armed intervention by guardsmen under the pretense of preventing bloodshed—a scenario, LIFE noted at the time, that many Arkansans felt was unlikely to come to pass. Still, Faubus’s actions proved a successful, if temporary, roadblock.
A profile of Faubus published in the next week’s issue of LIFE noted that the governor spent several days holed up in his Little Rock mansion. Photographer Grey Villet and correspondent Paul Welch were with Faubus during his “self-imposed confinement,” noting in words and photos the man’s routines, which included answering letters from hundreds of segregationists sending cash and letters of support for his anti-integration resolve.
“The governor gulped tranquilizers and ate bland food to appease a troublesome stomach,” Welch wrote, noting that Faubus really seemed to believe that he was acting only with the best intentions for everyone involved in the standoff.
“A man without a great deal of courage would have taken the easy way out and said to the Negroes, ‘Go in there and get hurt,'” Faubus said. “But I’d rather take the criticism than face the prospect that I’d been negligent and caused someone’s death in this integration thing.”
The federal government, meanwhile, didn’t quite buy the governor’s justification for his actions in “this integration thing.” Interrupting his own vacation, President Dwight Eisenhower met with Faubus; shortly afterward, the Arkansas National Guard was removed from the school grounds.
On the heels of that decision came what LIFE deemed “a historic week of civil strife.”
On Sept. 23, the nine students entered Little Rock Central High School for the first time, ignoring verbal abuse and threats from the crowd outside. When the mob realized the students had successfully entered the school, violence erupted, and seven journalists were attacked including two reporting for LIFE. As the situation deteriorated, school officials, fearing for the students’ safety, dismissed the Little Rock Nine at lunchtime.
The next day, President Eisenhower ordered paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to the school, escorting students to the building and singling out troublemakers bent on disrupting the federal mandate. Over the following days, these troops and members of the Arkansas National Guard Eisenhower had federalized 10,000 guardsman, effectively taking them out from under Faubus’s control kept the situation in hand, their (armed) presence serving to pacify the more belligerent and strident elements in town.
Here, LIFE.com presents the work, much of which never ran in LIFE, of no less than six of the magazine’s photographers from Arkansas: Ed Clark, Francis Miller, Grey Villet, George Silk, Thomas McAvoy and Stan Wayman. Each brought his skills to bear on the events in Little Rock and, later, in Van Buren, Ark., in 1957 and ’58, and thus helped keep the desegregation struggle squarely in the public eye.
Although the Little Rock Nine were finally able to attend classes by late September 1957, the fight wasn’t over: throughout the rest of the school year, they faced ongoing abuse, threats, discrimination and acts of hazing from their white peers and, disgracefully, from equally vicious adults. But when spring 1958 came around, eight of the nine had successfully completed the school year. In an elemental way, they had won.
Vaughn Wallace is a photo editor and historian. Follow him @vaughnwallace.
Arkansas National Guardsmen prevented African-American students from entering Little Rock Central High School, September 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A convoy of Jeeps from the 101st Airborne headed to Little Rock.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Members of the Arkansas National Guard stood on duty during the integration of Little Rock Central High School, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Members of the Little Rock Nine arrived at school, only to be turned away by Arkansas National Guardsmen, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hazel Bryant followed and jeered at Elizabeth Eckford as Eckford walked from Little Rock’s Central High after Arkansas National Guardsmen barred Eckford from school.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
African American students, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, was waved off school grounds by Arkansas National Guardsmen, September, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Elizabeth Eckford and family watched TV, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Members of the Little Rock Nine during legal hearings on their attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, September 1957.
Grey Villet/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Segregationists picketed in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A group of jeering anti-integrationists trailed two black students down a street in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Troops raced to break up a crowd protesting school integration, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Segregationists rousted from an anti-integration protest, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Segregationists rousted from an anti-integration protest, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
African-American students arrived at Little Rock Central High under heavy guard by troops from the 101st Airborne, 1957.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Paratroopers from the 101st Airborne stood guard outside Little Rock Central High School, September 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Scene in Little Rock, Arkansas, during anti-integration protests in September 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Troops from the 101st Airborne squared off against anti-integrationists, Little Rock, Arkansas, September 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Scene in Little Rock, Arkansas, during anti-integration protests in September 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
African-American students escorted by federal troops, Little Rock Central High School, 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Troops from the 101st Airborne patrolled the streets of Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Civil Rights leader Daisy Bates gazed through her front window, watching the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division escort the Little Rock Nine from her home to begin their first full day of classes at the formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Thomas McAvoy/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Daisy Bates, an NAACP leader, met with African-American students who had been denied admittance to public schools, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
African-American students were refused admission to their high school’s football game, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.
Stan Wayman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At a school in Van Buren, Arkansas, African-American students arrived in front of a crowd of journalists and other onlookers, 1957.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
African-American students arrived at school in Van Buren, Arkansas, the year after the Little Rock Nine integrated Little Rock’s public schools, September 1958.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Students entered a previously segregated school, Arkansas, 1958.
