Selecting images for a book that covers the remarkable lives of Marguerite Stitt and Ralph E. Church is no easy task. The breadth of their accomplishments and involvement uncovers many possible paths, and as the first biographers of the couple, Master Wings Publishing did a lot of digging.
Twenty images were selected for the final print book, but hundreds were considered and investigated. Here are seven of those hundreds, combined with caption and a brief note on why they were set aside.
This picture can be found in the November 9, 1961, copy of The Arlington Heights Herald, with the caption: “Marguerite Stitt Church, representative of the 13th Congressional District, listens thoughtfully as one of 30 women urging world peace spoke to her Saturday about the present world tension.” The world tension in question, of course, was the rising conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. This image and its representation of Marguerite’s frequent practice of holding these kind of local hearings is a powerful one as it shows how connected Marguerite was with her constituents, women in particular, and draws her policy history into relief as well. But a higher quality version of this picture could not be located, and the pixelation of a newspaper scan does not transfer well across mediums.
Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Harris & Ewing Collection
Ralph Church Jr. stands on stage with Robert Kniffen in this snapshot of an NBC-hosted Congressional Children’s Broadcast event, taken April 16, 1938. This picture is fun, and shows a portion of what was so integral to the Church family’s success – the active social life and ties that Marguerite led in Washington. Neither Ralph nor Marguerite can be seen in the picture, however, and this specific genre of events is not referenced elsewhere in the text. A different picture of the Churches at a social event was selected.
Marguerite Stitt Church and Ralph Edwin Church were buried side by side in Memorial Park Cemetery, in Skokie, Illinois. More research is warranted about the romantic and personal relationship between the two – in that vein, there are few known images of the two together in life, and an image of their grave was considered briefly as a way to supplement that content. Ultimately, however, the picture was judged not compelling enough to include, as the information about their final resting place and its implications could be conveyed just as clearly through text.
Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information Photograph Collection
Vice-President Henry A. Wallace and other members of Congress pose while donating books to the armed forces for the 1942 Victory Book Campaign. Representative Ralph Church of Illinois is on the far left, and is pictured with Sergeant Dale Isley of Fort Myer, Virginia; Mr. Wallace; Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky; and Representative Adolph Sabath of Illinois. The soldier in the center is Corporal Frank York of Fort Myer, Virginia. While an interesting photograph, and a commendable deed from our book’s subject Ralph Church, there’s many people present here, and Ralph is not the star. The picture doesn’t clearly scale smaller, and this was not a significant enough moment for Ralph’s life or career.
Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Bain News Service photograph collection
This stunning photograph is of Josephine Prame, part of Barnard College’s class of 1908, leading her fellow graduating students in a song on Barnard’s Tree Day. Taken around May 22nd of 1908, this is a few years before Marguerite Stitt Church would attend the school. Marguerite also had somewhat of a difficult experience there, leaving her sophomore year to start a successful career at Wellesley College. Although it’s a compelling image, and relevant to a main character of the biography, it’s ultimately not precise enough in its representation to be included in this biography.
Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Harris & Ewing Collection
Here we see Sam Rayburn, House Majority Leader, holding an informal press conference on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on October 19, 1938. Rayburn was a key player not only in Congress, but also in the lives of Ralph E. and Marguerite Stitt Church. He gets quite a few pages listed in his index entry in Politics, Partnerships, and Power, and credit from Marguerite for trusting her with positions of leadership. Accordingly, including an image of him was considered, and this is a particularly impressively framed one, but in the end the limited number of pictures selected meant the focus should stay as closely as possible to the main subjects of the book. He also was significant enough that images of him are readily available.
Photo courtesy of George Grantham Bain Collection
Theodore Roosevelt speaks to supporters in this photograph, taken in Oyster Bay, New York, during his 1916 push for president under the banner of the Bull Moose party. This campaign trip, Roosevelt himself, was formative for a young Ralph Church, and so possible options were investigated. But similar to situations with the previous images, Roosevelt is a known character and neither Ralph nor Marguerite are present (Ralph shook hands with Roosevelt at a different stop), and so it was set aside in favor of another.
Check out the images that we ultimately did select for the book here, and let us know if you think we made the right choices!
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