National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Presidential Birthdays for Thanksgiving Week

Not only do we celebrate our national holiday of Thanksgiving this week, but also we mark the birthdays of two American presidents—Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce.

Zachary Taylor, a career soldier, was the seventh American president from Virginia; he was born on November 24, 1784. Taylor's victories in the Mexican American War made him popular back east, and as former NPG historian Frederick Voss notes, "Not only was Taylor a national hero; his homespun appearance and well-known indifference to rules of military protocol were assets that were certain to play well among the voters."

Although Taylor was not a politician, he nonetheless was elected twelfth president of the United States in 1848. He only lived to serve sixteen months of his term, however; he died in office in the summer of 1850.

Franklin Pierce was quite the opposite of Taylor. While Taylor was "homespun" and disinterested in politics, Pierce was educated and politically astute. Pierce graduated from Bowdoin College and later served in the Mexican War.

Pierce was elected the fourteenth president of the United States in 1852 and served one term; he has the sad distinction of being rejected by his own Democratic Party in a bid for a second term in the White House. Pierce was born on November 23, 1804.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Cited:
Voss, Frederick.  Portraits of the Presidents: The National Portrait Gallery.  New York: Rizzoli, 2000.

 

Zachary Taylor /  James Reid Lambdin / Oil on canvas, 1848 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Barry Bingham, Sr.

Franklin Pierce. / Franklin Pierce / George Peter Alexander Healy / Oil on canvas, 1853 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Living People on Stamps & Portraits: Two Museums & the “Dead Enough” Rule

US stamp images © US Postal Service. All rights reserved

Part 1
Erin Marie Blasco, Public Programs Coordinator, Smithsonian National Postal Museum

This month, the U.S. Postal Service announced that living figures would be considered for commemoration on postage stamps. Its invitation to suggest names of living individuals in sports, entertainment, and other professions to the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee elicited all-caps cries for a stamp portraying Lady Gaga, or perhaps Bruce Springsteen.

As an educator at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum, it’s exciting to see people energized about postage stamps. People online and in the museum debate the merit of honoring one American figure over another and discuss what it actually means to have one’s face on a stamp. I’ll have to un-memorize my answer to frequently asked questions such as, “Why isn’t President Obama on a stamp yet?” and “When will there be a George Lucas stamp?”

In the past, I’d answer these questions by explaining that figures on U.S. stamps have to be deceased for at least five years. U.S. presidents are the only exception; they only need to be dead for a year before appearing on a stamp. Fictional figures like Mickey Mouse, Bart Simpson, and Miss Piggy stand outside the rule, of course. Now that the policy has changed, we have the opportunity to reflect on what it means to be on a stamp and which names are coming up most frequently for consideration.

This isn’t the first time the living/dead discussion has occurred. In 1945, for example a stamp (above) was issued honoring American achievements during World War II. A large group of soldiers is depicted with the Arc de Triomphe in the background. In the stamp, which is drawn from a black-and-white photograph, some of the soldiers in the front row are recognizable as individuals. But the stamp doesn’t break the “dead for five years” rule because it commemorates an event using a group, not individuals.

A number of countries don’t hesitate to issue stamps featuring living figures. Some do this to turn a profit from collectors, while others routinely put their living leaders on postage. Interested in who has already been commemorated on U.S. postage? Browse the Postal Museum’s virtual vault to see high-resolution images of stamps celebrating figures from George Washington (the first face on a U.S. postage stamp) to Zasu Pitts.

US stamp images © US Postal Service. All rights reserved

Part 2
Geri Provost Lyons, Youth & Family Program Coordinator, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The conversation about living figures on stamps is somewhat familiar for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which for many years collected only portraits of Americans who had been dead at least ten years, with the exception of U.S. presidents.

In 2001, the museum’s board of Commissioners agreed to change the bylaws to eliminate the “ten-year” rule. Since that time, the Portrait Gallery has actively collected portraits of living sitters in all mediums—photographs, time-based media, drawings, prints, paintings, sculpture, and mixed media.

The rule change also allowed for the commissioning and acquisition of contemporary portraits of living sitters, from many backgrounds and disciplines. For example, the first commission of a living sitter was of Eunice Kennedy Shriver by artist David Lenz; the second was of Bill and Melinda Gates by Jon Friedman. NPG has also collected portraits of such well-known Americans such as Martha Stewart, Yo Yo Ma, Norman Mineta, and Michelle Obama, to just name a few.

As an educator for the Portrait Gallery, I am thrilled when visitors can make a connection with a portrait of a living sitter. As of October 2011, 361 living Americans are represented in the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection, according to a recent database search. Use our online database to view portraits of living Americans in our permanent collection. Some of the living sitters may have more than one portrait in our collection, but only one has been selected. We hope you enjoy looking at these images!

US stamp images © US Postal Service. All rights reserved

Lincoln and McClellan: An Army Ready for War

The Grand Review of the Troops, November 20, 1861

The Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac in November 1861 was the culmination of months of recruitment, training, and effort.  Recently, we spoke with National Portrait Gallery historian James Barber concerning the massive parade of troops.

Q: What was the significance of the Grand Review of the Troops on November 20, 1861?

A: In an effort to rebuilt the shattered Union army after its demoralizing defeat and chaotic retreat during the First Bull Run campaign, President Abraham Lincoln in the late summer and fall of 1861 appointed General George B. McClellan general and chief of all Federal armies, replacing the venerable Winfield Scott.

Energetic and supremely self-confident, McClellan, 34, set to work, and after nearly four months he was ready to show the president and the nation the fruits of his organizational prowess. On the afternoon of November 20, McClellan presided over a Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac in the northern Virginia countryside near Bailey’s Crossroads.

For three hours some 70,000 polished troops marched passed the reviewing stand, where the president, members of his cabinet, and Washington dignitaries were in attendance. It was the largest military assemblage up to that time in North America.  “The Grand Review went off splendidly,” wrote McClellan that night in a letter to his wife, “not a mistake was made, not a hitch. I never saw so large a Review in Europe so well done—I was completely satisfied & delighted beyond expression.”

Q: How does Julia Ward Howe tie into this event?

A: Among the 20,000 spectators to witness the Grand Review was the poet and social activist Julia Ward Howe of Boston, Massachusetts, who was visiting the Washington area with her husband, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe.

After leaving the review, during the carriage ride back to Washington, she heard troops singing the song “John Brown’s Body.” A companion suggested that she should write new lyrics to the song, the melody of which lingered in her mind that night in her room at Willard’s Hotel in Washington. She awoke “in the gray of the morning twilight” with the song still in her head and “the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind.” She arose quickly and in the dimness of the early hour she began scribbling the verses on stationery “almost without looking at the paper.”

Her poem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was first published in The Atlantic Monthly on February 1862; the magazine paid her five dollars. Soon thereafter her verse was set to music and her inspirational song became a wartime favorite, and is still popular today.

Julia Ward Howe / Sarah Choate Sears / Photogravure, 1907 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Champions of the Union / Currier & Ives Lithography Company / Lithograph with tintstone on paper, 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Joe Frazier, 1944–2011

As much as any man might be defined by a day, Joe Frazier’s day was March 8, 1971.

Frazier was a fighter, and if ever a man met and equaled a profession, it was on the day that Joe Frazier met boxing. Frazier was built for the fight and could take punishment. Muhammad Ali—another individual more than equal to his work—was a fighter too. Ali was Cassius Clay before he was Ali, but no matter what he called himself, he had not fought since 1967. He had refused to participate in the draft for Vietnam and was stripped of the heavyweight title he had won from Sonny Liston in 1964. Both men were undefeated entering Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971.

Their particular dynamics made them an interesting pair in the ring. Ali was taller and faster, while Frazier was thorough and strong—and hauled around a left hook that could loosen the earth from its axis. Ali was chatty and fun when he wanted to be; Frazier was to the point. Each man’s career would have been lesser without the other.

It was one of the most-hyped events in athletic history; three hundred million people were thought to have viewed it through closed-circuit television. Even Frank Sinatra was down on the floor—taking photographs for Life magazine.

The fight began with the energy that had ushered it in but quickly fell into a brutal cadence. Ali had the reach, certainly, but Frazier kept coming at him and coming at him. Those who paid $150 for a ringside seat that evening can forever claim they squeezed their ticket for every nickel they could get.

By the twelfth round, each man was leaning on the other, dragging around the ring, punctuated by moments of activity—an uppercut, a hook. Mainly, though, it descended into a sloppy brawl, with each man pouring out everything he had. Forty years removed, some of the punches are still difficult to see and hear, except for the most callous fight fan. Blood appeared on Ali’s shoulder in the thirteenth round (probably Frazier’s), and Ali stumbled a bit in the same round.

By the fifteenth round, the fight had further descended into a slow dance with the occasional punch. However, at the two-minute, thirty-three second mark, Frazier claimed the day. As Ali lowered his right arm, possibly preparing to come under Frazier’s jaw, Frazier landed a left hook that parked Ali on the mat. Though he was only there for a few moments, it was a place Ali had not spent a lot of time.

Frazier would park another magnificent left hook on Ali at the one-minute, thirty-two second mark, and of the thousands of punches the great Ali took over his long and amazing career, he might still feel that second left hook from the fifteenth round. It was a solid, unprotected, squarely landed punch that would have ended the career of a lesser fighter. Frazier won the day.

They would meet two more times, with Ali claiming victories in both fights, but this—the first match between them—would be Frazier’s greatest win. In it, he answered all the questions that had been asked in Ali’s absence from boxing about who the world’s greatest fighter was . . . for the moment.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali / LeRoy Neiman / Color halftone poster, 1975 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

November 4, 1948: What’s That, Now?

Perhaps it is the most famous election-day photo of them all, though it was actually taken two days after the election, with President Harry S. Truman holding up a copy of the November 3, 1948, Chicago Daily Tribune.

As he noted in his memoir, Truman had a ham sandwich, a glass of milk, and went to bed early on election night, November 2, 1948. Although he had expressed confidence in a victory in the preceding days, the presidential election of 1948 was anything but predictable. The polls taken weeks before had indicated that New York governor Thomas Dewey would sweep the election and move into the White House on Inauguration Day 1949.

Biographer William Hillman notes that the president did not take much stock in the polls, however. After the summer 1948 Republican convention, Truman said, “The nomination of Dewey last night I think will make the campaign easier—all he can do is to make a ‘warmed-over’ approach to the situation with which the country is faced and I don’t think the country is going to take a ‘warmed-over’ approach.”.

Taking his campaign to the people, Truman ignored the predictions and went about to win the election. Biographer Bert Cochran writes:

Here were all the polls predicting an overwhelming Republican victory, their results repeated as gospel by all the pressmen and broadcasters, bookies giving odds of 15 and 20 to 1, some of his own Cabinet members negotiating surreptitiously for new jobs after the election—and through it all he moved unruffled, self-confident, assured, his cheerfulness intact, his nerve unimpaired, a sixty-four-year-old man with the steady energy of a commission salesman, the aplomb and brashness of a riverboat gambler. No one knew whether he was the supreme actor or mad enough to think that he could win

The hubris attached to press predictions and to the Dewey camp was given its reward as the election night results rolled in, with the president taking an early lead and never relinquishing it. Many still thought—and said as much on the evening’s broadcasts—that the night would turn itself over in the direction of the Dewey camp. It never happened. While false predictions over the radio waves were soon forgotten, the moment captured in the photograph of President Truman smiling and raising the spurious headline has served election cycles for more than sixty years–a reminder to all parties not to count their political chickens prematurely.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Cited:

Harry Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2: Years of Trial and Hope (New York: Doubleday, 1956).

William Hillman, Harry S. Truman: In His Own Words (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1952).

Bert Cochran, Harry Truman and the Crisis Presidency (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Press, 1973).