The Family of Man [book review]
Citation
Stanley, John. [Review of The Family of Man, prologue by Carl Sandburg, introduction by Edward Steichen.] Commonweal 62 (April 8 – September 30, 1955): [page 528 — see Notes]. Commonweal Foundation. ISSN 0010-3330.
Tier justification
Tier 3: a signed named-author book review in Commonweal, a major US Catholic literary-intellectual weekly with national distribution, strong editorial standards, and a consistent tradition of cultural criticism. Commonweal was (and remains) the leading US lay Catholic magazine reviewing arts, literature, and public affairs. A review in Commonweal documents the exhibition’s reception by the Catholic intellectual community — a significant audience given the exhibition’s humanist thematic (family, birth, death, love, faith) which overlapped substantially with Catholic social teaching.
Relevance
The John Stanley review of the Family of Man catalog in Commonweal is the only confirmed review of the show by the Catholic press identified in this session. It reviews the book-form catalog (‘Prologue by Carl Sandburg, Intro. by Edward Steichen’) rather than specifically the MoMA installation, though the catalog was the primary means by which most Americans outside New York engaged with the exhibition. The review documents how the Catholic intellectual press read the exhibition’s claims about universal human experience — a question of particular interest given the Catholic Church’s own strong humanist tradition and its historical tension with Steichen’s secular humanist framework. The review appears in volume 62 (April–September 1955), meaning it was published after the MoMA run’s close (May 8, 1955) during the period of the catalog’s mass commercial distribution.
Key excerpts / pages
- Index entry confirmed verbatim (fetched 2026-04-30 from
https://archive.org/stream/sim_commonweal_1955_62_index/sim_commonweal_1955_62_index_djvu.txt): ‘Family of Man, The: Prologue by Carl Sandburg, Intro. by Edward Steichen ………….- [J]ohn Stanley’ with page number ‘528’ (the leading ‘J’ of ‘John’ is partially obscured in the OCR as ‘ohn’; the full name John Stanley is inferred from context and the page entry format). - Volume coverage confirmed: ‘INDEX TO VOLUME LXII April 8, 1955 to September 30, 1955’ (fetched 2026-04-30).
- Full text of the review NOT read this session. The individual Commonweal issues in archive.org are access-restricted (print disabled), and the stream URL returned only the archive interface header.
Notes
- Index entry confirmed from open-access OCR of the Commonweal Vol. 62 index (identifier
sim_commonweal_1955_62_index, 5 pages, freely accessible viaarchive.org/stream/path, fetched 2026-04-30). - Flagged
verified: falsebecause the actual review text was not read in this session. - Page number: the OCR text shows ‘528’ as the page number. The first character of ‘John’ Stanley’s first name appears to be partially obscured in the OCR (‘ohn Stanley’). The name is transcribed as ‘John Stanley’ based on reasonable inference from the OCR pattern but should be confirmed against the physical issue.
- Page 528 in Commonweal Vol. 62 (April 8 – September 30, 1955): the volume starts at page 1 for April 8, 1955 and runs continuously. Page 528 would fall approximately in the late summer / early fall 1955 issues (July–September). The exact issue date must be confirmed against the physical issues or a library database.
- Archive.org individual issue metadata confirmed: individual 1955 Commonweal issues exist with identifiers in the format
sim_commonweal_1955-[MM-DD]_61_[NN]for Vol. 61 (early 1955) and likelysim_commonweal_1955-[MM-DD]_62_[NN]for Vol. 62 (April–September 1955). All are access-restricted. - To verify: access the Commonweal archive for July–September 1955 issues via ProQuest, library microfilm, or the Commonweal Foundation. Find page 528 in Vol. 62. Read the John Stanley review and extract verbatim quotations before setting
verified: true. - Note: Commonweal was a lay Catholic publication (not published by the hierarchy), giving its reviews greater critical independence than official diocesan press. Stanley’s review represents an intellectual Catholic engagement with the exhibition’s humanist claims.