National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

The Death of John James Audubon: January 27, 1851

He killed thousands of birds and cruelly experimented on many animals, including catfish, a bald eagle, and his very own hunting dog. With friends, he buried a rat in a pot, its tail protruding from the dirt, and gave the complete ensemble to another friend, claiming it was a rare flower. He served jail time for bankruptcy and knifed a man in Kentucky over ownership of a steamboat.

Today, his drawings and paintings of American wildlife are respected worldwide, and his name is synonymous with environmental concern and wildlife preservation. A true enigma, John James Audubon was not even his name until he came to America in 1803 to look after his father’s business.

Audubon, born Jean Rabin in Saint-Domingue in 1785, was something of a liar from the beginning; he told others falsely and often that he studied painting with Jacques-Louis David. Artistically and professionally, Audubon struggled to gain acceptance into the strict company of American and British scientific academies.

Although Audubon’s technique of moving nature from the outdoors to the canvas was well within the realm of the acceptable in the early nineteenth century, today his process would be anathema to the society that now bears his name.

According to Audubon biographer William Souder, “At one time or another, Audubon killed specimens of all but a handful of the more than four hundred species of birds he ultimately painted, plus most of the quadrupeds of North America, from squirrels to alligators to moose.”

Simple enough to describe, his process was to kill, clean, position, and paint. One difference, however, between Audubon and his contemporary, Alexander Wilson, is that Audubon portrayed his ornithological subject matter at life size.

A second difference is that Audubon posed his birds in nature, conducting activities that he had either imagined or witnessed. For example, his Black Vulture appears to be eating the flesh of a deer carcass, while his female Great Cormorant is portrayed tending her young through tall grass.

With the exception of the display of birds in the Peale Museum in Philadelphia, wildlife work for the scientific community was usually posed and drawn on a small scale and without the aesthetic benefit of habitat, weather, and fauna in the forms of prey or predator.

By 1823, Audubon was living in Louisiana, drawing and teaching, having amassed great debt but also having assembled a vast portfolio of American wildlife art. When he arrived in Philadelphia in 1824, he hoped his art would receive acclaim, but his work was received poorly by the Academy of Natural Sciences and George Ord, a friend of the late Alexander Wilson. As Souder states, “Against Ord’s energetic opposition to him throughout the city and the orchestrated campaign to prevent his election to the academy, Audubon never had a chance.”

His work was well received throughout Britain, however. The Scots elected him to the elite scientific Wernerian Society in 1827, and he was elected to the Royal Society in London in 1830.

These successes coincided with the publication of Audubon’s most lasting achievement—what he called his “great work,” The Birds of America, containing 435 hand-colored images and distributed in 87 parts. A stunning achievement, also recognized in the United States, the publication of The Birds of America eventually propelled Audubon into the ranks of the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1831, seven years after his initial rejection.

Audubon spent most of his last decade in New York, having succumbed to various illnesses, and died there on January 27, 1851. He is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery at 155^th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.

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

 

Cited:
William Souder, Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of “The Birds of America (New York: North Point Press, 2004).

 

John James Audubon / Unidentified artist /  Oil on canvas, c. 1841 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the National Gallery of Art; gift of the Avalon Foundation through the generosity of Ailsa Mellon Bruce, 1951

 

 

Pearl Harbor: The Seventieth Commemorative Anniversary

The following is from President Franklin Roosevelt’s speech to the Congress of the United States, December 8, 1941.

. . . Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy— the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu…

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

                                                 ********

We recently asked Stanley Weintraub, author of Pearl Harbor Christmas (Boston: Perseus Books, 2011) to give us some thoughts on this commemorative event.

Weintraub will be joining us this evening, December 7, in the “America’s Presidents” gallery on the second floor of the Donald W. Reynolds Center at 6:00 p.m. He will give a short talk in front of NPG’s portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, followed by a book-signing.

Q. Seventy years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, do you see Americans as still appreciating the gravity and resonance of December 7, 1941?

A. No. I think too many catastrophic events have intervened—such as 9/11.

Q. Why did you choose that particular image of FDR for the cover of Pearl Harbor Christmas? Can you tell us a little about that picture? 

A. He appears to be signing the declaration of war against Japan the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The black armband and black tie are in mourning for his mother who had died at age eighty-eight in September 1941.

Q. Are you pleased with the efforts—monumental, written, cinematic, and otherwise—that Americans have made to pay tribute to the men and women who fought and won World War II?

A. Not really. A proliferation of memorials is not as significant as the recognition that peace is harder to make than war.

 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt/Douglas Granville Chandor, 1945/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Woody Allen’s 76th Birthday, December 1, 2011

By the numbers, he is one of the most successful filmmakers and entertainers of all time. Woody Allen has three Oscars and twenty-one nominations; another twenty-one nominations with ten prizes from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA); eleven Golden Globe nominations with one Golden Globe; and nineteen nominations and four awards from the Writers Guild of America. The litany of his honors begins in 1966, and he has nominations and prizes from each decade since that year.

Allen has scores of other accolades from institutions, domestic and foreign, and, interestingly, he couldn’t care less about them. In his 1991 biography of Allen, Eric Lax writes, “As everyone knows, despite however many nominations he has, Woody will not campaign for them, nor will he attend the ceremony—or any awards ceremony.”

Allen is prolific in his directing and writing, and the roll call of his films contains many monuments of the cinematic landscape. Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Deconstructing Harry are among his critically acclaimed works. The box office does not necessarily go the way of the critics, however. His films often play on his obsessions and fears—sex and death are two key themes in his work—and however founded or unfounded his neuroses, they serve his comedy well.

As a rule, Allen’s work is set in New York; a notable exception is his 2011 release, Midnight in Paris. He does not film in New York out of a desire to use a familiar setting, but out of an allegiance to his hometown (he was born and grew up in Brooklyn). Of the gestures made to the city after the attacks of September 11, 2001, perhaps Woody Allen’s was one of the most unusual. “I plead with you, please come make the films there; it [New York] remains a great, great city,” he said to the audience at the 2002 Academy Awards. Although he would not ascend the Oscar stage to accept any of the awards he had previously received, Allen did not hesitate to do the bidding of his hometown in its sad hour.

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

 

Woody Allen / John Kascht / Watercolor, colored ink and graphite on pape, 1997 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, © John Kascht

Cited:
Eric Lax, Woody Allen (New York: Knopf, 1991).

 

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

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).

Steve Jobs, 1955–2011

This 1982 portrait by Diana Walker can be seen on the Portrait Gallery’s first floor. 

The visionary co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs was today’s version of an earlier era’s Thomas Edison: beginning with the MacIntosh computer, his innovations generated a cultural revolution in everyday life.

In 1976 he and Steve Wozniak founded Apple and began producing personal computers. After losing a power struggle in 1985, Jobs left Apple and later acquired Pixar Animation Studios, where he produced a string of films such as Toy Story. He returned to Apple in 1996 and launched an era of extraordinary inventiveness.

With spellbinding showmanship, Jobs set out to “make a dent in the universe,” and over the next several years introduced the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad—products that transformed the consumer electronics industry. His entrepreneurship stressed design, and Apple products are known for their functional elegance.

Jobs once said: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like, . . . Design is how it works.”

 

Diana Walker (born 1942) / Digital inkjet print, 1982 (printed 2011) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Diana Walker; © Diana Walker

Portrait of September 11, 2001

In fact, it is a piece of mangled steel.  In the figurative world, it is so much more.

One of the seminal essays of material culture discourse is Stephen Greenblatt’s “Wonder and Resonance.”  In that essay, Greenblatt states, “By resonance I mean the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which it may be taken by the viewer to stand.”

It is difficult—if not impossible—to look at the piece of wreckage from the World Trade Center site without visualizing the horrors of September 11, 2001. The object is not just a relic of that moment in history, but it also narrates the tragedy of that day and beyond, in the same way that a whole story might be told by a sign or a symbol in a work of art. The WTC steel resonates with the attacks, our memories of those buildings falling, the loss of life, and the sorrow, anguish, and confusion that dwelt within everyone that day.

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

 

This object is on view in our exhibition "Twentieth-Century Americans" on the third floor. It was transferred from The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and is now part of the National Portrait Gallery's collections.

Ford Pardons Nixon: September 8, 1974

On this day, thirty-seven years ago, President Gerald R. Ford granted a pardon to former president Richard Nixon with this proclamation.

By the President of the United States of America a Proclamation

Richard Nixon became the thirty-seventh President of the United States on January 20, 1969 and was reelected in 1972 for a second term by the electors of forty-nine of the fifty states. His term in office continued until his resignation on August 9, 1974.

Pursuant to resolutions of the House of Representatives, its Committee on the Judiciary conducted an inquiry and investigation on the impeachment of the President extending over more than eight months. The hearings of the Committee and its deliberations, which received wide national publicity over television, radio, and in printed media, resulted in votes adverse to Richard Nixon on recommended Articles of Impeachment.

As a result of certain acts or omissions occurring before his resignation from the Office of President, Richard Nixon has become liable to possible indictment and trial for offenses against the United States. Whether or not he shall be so prosecuted depends on findings of the appropriate grand jury and on the discretion of the authorized prosecutor. Should an indictment ensue, the accused shall then be entitled to a fair trial by an impartial jury, as guaranteed to every individual by the Constitution.

It is believed that a trial of Richard Nixon, if it became necessary, could not fairly begin until a year or more has elapsed. In the meantime, the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States. The prospects of such trial will cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.

Now, THEREFORE, I, GERALD R. FORD, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this eighth day of September, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and ninety-ninth.

GERALD R. FORD

 

Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. / Everett Raymond Kinstler / Oil on canvas, 1987 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, © 1987 Everett Raymond Kinstler

Richard Milhous Nixon / Boris Chaliapin / Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper faced illustration board, undated / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. Boris Chaliapin

Cited:
Ford Library: President Gerald R. Ford's Proclamation 4311, Granting a Pardon to Richard Nixon

Taking the Constitution to Task: Pauline Morton Smith Sabin Davis

1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

— The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Ratified January 16, 1919

                                                      ******

“Once during prohibition,” W. C. Fields stated, “I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.” For the thousands like Fields who bemoaned prohibition, proactively operated illegal stills, and drank gin from bathtubs, there were many enforcers, but individuals willing to fight against the new law were few. Pauline Morton Smith Sabin (later Davis) was one of those individuals willing to wage war against prohibition.

Prohibition, ironically, landed in America just as the nation should have been celebrating—at the end of the Great War—and left America as the nation was in the throes of a horrible depression, hardly a time to celebrate with a drink. Pauline Sabin’s fight against prohibition began in the late 1920s, although it was cloaked in support of Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential candidacy. Historian Daniel Okrent, in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, describes the tricky posturing at work in Sabin’s politics:

Pauline Sabin had been among those wet and wealthy Republicans who had stayed loyal to Hoover during the 1928 race. Many of them either had not yet placed Prohibition ahead of other issues at play in the campaign or had chosen to believe that a man as worldly and as educated as Hoover couldn’t possibly be a genuine dry. In June 1928 Sabin had announced her leap to the wet side in a magazine article headlined “I Change My Mind on Prohibition.” Sabin explained the reasoning behind her switch, and went on to criticize dry women blinded by their devotion to this one cause.

Her reasoning and hopes, Okrent goes on to explain, were “shredded” when Hoover demanded compliance to the law. On March 4, 1929, Hoover stated in his inaugural address:

I have been selected by you to execute and enforce the laws of the country. I propose to do so to the extent of my own abilities, but the measure of success that the Government shall attain will depend upon the moral support which you, as citizens, extend. No greater national service can be given by men and women of good will—who, I know, are not unmindful of the responsibilities of citizenship—than that they should, by their example, assist in stamping out crime and outlawry by refusing participation in and condemning all transactions with illegal liquor.

Pauline Sabin’s argument was very simple: alcohol and its consumption was the problem of the consumer or the would-be consumer, and not the government. In a New York Times interview with Samuel Johnson Woolf, she argued, “When prohibition was first enacted, I was in favor of it. . . . I had two sons and felt that for their benefit, at least I should approve it.”

However, Sabin was not a proponent of government interference or big government—she was the president of the Women’s National Republican Club— and she amended her position later, noting, “I began to see that whether my boys drank or not was my responsibility and not the government’s.”

Sabin’s efforts toward prohibition reform were widely recognized. When prohibition was repealed in 1933, Pauline Sabin rechanneled her advocacy in many directions, among them the American Red Cross and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

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

Pauline Morton Smith Sabin Davis by Philip Alexius de Laszlo [from 1926] is on view in the exhibition “Capital Portraits” through Monday, September 5, 2011 at the National Portrait Gallery.

 

Pauline Morton Sabin / Philip Alexius de László / Oil on canvas, 1928 / Sheila Smith Cochran / Photograph by Alex Jamison Photography

 

Cited:
Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner’s, 2010).

S. J. Woolf, “A Woman Crusader for the Wet Cause,” New York Times, May 8, 1932.

Herbert Hoover, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1929

A New Monumental Presence: MLK on the National Mall

 
Photo by Warren Perry

Washington is populated with memorials. Of the highest order are the monuments chosen for sites on the National Mall, the space bound at the east terminus by the United States Capitol, and at the west terminus by the Lincoln Memorial. The works permitted to be placed in that area are thoroughly considered and decided upon by several entities, among them the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission.

One of the recent academic contributions to this discussion is art historian Kirk Savage’s Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape. Savage notes, “The planning authorities in charge of caring for the landscape have an understandable interest in maintaining [the National Mall] as is and preventing it from being overrun by new monuments.”

Every piece of cultural architecture that goes onto the Mall is strictly considered in terms of meaning, design, location, construction—criteria that feed into the final decision of any memorial’s or museum’s potential existence on the most treasured of national spaces.

Obviously, these considerations take time. The Martin Luther King Memorial, to be dedicated on August 28, 2011, is a visual testimony to that process.

The memorial was first envisioned in the mid-1980s by members of Alpha Phi Alpha, a fraternity to which King belonged, and the dream of that group has taken more than a quarter-century to put into place. The date, August 28, was selected because it is the anniversary of King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.

While Martin Luther King Jr.’s presence in Washington is memorialized in the films and photographs of the August 1963 march on Washington, the granite memorial will serve as a permanent presence of the civil rights leader’s time in the nation’s capital.

The sculpture was executed by Chinese artist Lei Yixin and stands thirty feet high; it is a projection from the center of two large pieces collectively called the Mountain of Despair.

Visually, it appears as though King has transcended the Mountain of Despair and stepped forward into the promised land.

Although this monument was discussed on paper and in the studio for years before this day, the location of the MLK memorial—between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials on the Tidal Basin—and its sheer monumentality will provide scholars, art critics, and patrons a subject for discussion for centuries to come. 

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

For additional reading on Martin Luther King Jr., please see this article from our blog.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929-1968)  by Jack Lewis Hiller (b. 1930), Gelatin silver print, 1960, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: gift of Jack Lewis Hiller

Martin Luther King, Jr. / Boris Chaliapin / Watercolor and pencil on board, 1957 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / Gift of Time magazine

Cited:
Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

James Baldwin: The Writer and the Witness

By Marcy Held, intern, National Portrait Gallery, Center for Electronic Research and Outreach Services

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.” Writer James Baldwin remembered this as “the best piece of advice I ever got [though] it’s not advice, it’s an observation.”

Whether one views these words as advice or as observation, it is clear that Baldwin lived by these words as he built his career as a civil rights–era author, orator, and activist that is distinguished by a level of talent and passion that was nothing short of remarkable.

James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, on August 2, 1924. He was raised, along with his eight younger brothers and sisters, by his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, and his stepfather, David Baldwin, a preacher and laborer from New Orleans. Biographer David Leeming describes James Baldwin’s origins and their influence upon his career.

Rising out of Harlem, James Baldwin used the mystery of his parentage and his humble birth, and the ineffectualness of his stepfather, as starting points for a lifelong witnessing of the moral failure of the American nation—and of Western civilization in general—and the power of love to revive it.

While attending De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Baldwin was constantly torn between pursuing his own intellectual development and helping to provide for his family. In high school Baldwin decided that he wanted to become a writer, and he befriended fellow classmates Emile Capouya (a future author) and Richard Avedon (a future photographer). Baldwin’s stepfather wanted him to become a preacher and did not approve of his association with white friends, but Baldwin rejected his stepfather’s views and turned away from the church completely during his adolescence.

After graduating from high school, Baldwin lived in various areas in New York and New Jersey, working odd jobs alongside Capouya and writing at night. During this time, Capouya introduced Baldwin to Richard Wright, author of Native Son. Wright became a mentor to Baldwin and even helped him edit the beginnings of Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain.

Wright was so impressed with Baldwin’s work that he nominated the younger writer for the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Fund, which Baldwin won. However, Baldwin became so overwhelmed by Wright’s support that he began to have difficulty writing.

Baldwin also found it hard to keep a job because of consistent encounters with racism in the workplace, and in 1948 he bought a plane ticket with the remaining money from his trust fund winnings and went to live in Paris.

In the introduction to his later work, The Amen Corner, Baldwin recalls how he first arrived in Paris “with forty dollars and no French.” But despite these hardships, Baldwin was able to finish Go Tell It on the Mountain and to find a publisher in New York.

In order to purchase a plane ticket back to New York, Baldwin had to borrow money from actor Marlon Brando, a friend from Greenwich Village in the early 1940s. After returning home in 1952, Baldwin only stayed for three months before going back to Paris to wait for the publication of his novel.

Baldwin followed the success of Mountain with a nonfiction book, Notes of a Native Son, in 1955 and then his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, in 1956. Author Toni Morrison describes Baldwin’s writing style in her essay “Life in His Language” as published in Quincy Troupe’s James Baldwin: The Legacy:

No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest—genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity. In place of soft plump lies was a lean, targeted power.

Baldwin gained fame as a social activist in addition to being known as an author; he dedicated his life to analyzing the alienation felt by minority groups living in the United States and to the cause of gaining rights particularly for racial minorities and for the gay community.

Of his own social activism Baldwin stated, “The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined. . . . If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.” Baldwin was a prominent member of CORE (Congress On Racial Equality) and advocated reform alongside such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

Despite experiencing periods of intense loneliness and contemplation, Baldwin was also a charismatic figure, with a wide circle of friends, including jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and authors Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer. Baldwin continued to travel and write, and had published seventeen works by the time of his death on December 1, 1987, in St. Paul de Vence, France.

Although Baldwin is consistently labeled as a spokesman for a generation and for minority groups, he always said that he identified more as “a witness to whence I came, where I am. Witness to what I’ve seen and the possibilities that I think I see.”

James Arthur Baldwin / Beauford Delaney / Pastel on paper, 1963 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

James Arthur Baldwin / Boris Chaliapin, 1963  / Watercolor and pencil on board / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

 

Works Cited:
James Baldwin, The Amen Corner (New York: Dial Press, 1968).

David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

Lisa Rosset,  James Baldwin: Author (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989).

Quincy Troupe, ed., James Baldwin: The Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).

W. J. Weatherby,  James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989).

 

Loving Lucy at 100: Lucille Ball, 1911–1989

Tomorrow marks the one hundredth anniversary of Lucille Ball's birth.

One of the characteristics of great comedy is risk. Stepping away from the mannerly comedies of the silver screen, Lucille Ball began to showcase her talents in gutsier venues early in her acting career; being polite and pretty was getting her nowhere fast.

“I took the slapstick parts the other starlets spurned," she notes in her autobiography. "And never whined about the siphon water and pies in my face. I considered myself lucky to be paid while learning a business I adored."

Lucy was responsible for some of the most memorable moments in early television, and even today, sixty years after the premier of I Love Lucy, small-screen aficionados recognize the genius in such moments as the "Vitameatavegamin girl" and Lucy stuffing her cheeks with chocolate as the candies rolled off the factory belt too quickly.

What made Lucille Ball funny was not that Lucy was unladylike in her juice-induced stupor or obnoxious in her attempt to hide the chocolates—it was precisely that she was a lady who found herself in those bizarre situations that made America love her.

This was not by accident. Lucy's partner in the early television experiment was her husband, Desi Arnaz, and they had strong ideas about their characters' motivations: 

As Lucy Ricardo, I played a character very much like Liz Cugat on my radio show [My Favorite Husband]. Lucy was impulsive, inquisitive, and completely feminine. She was never acid or vicious. Even with pie on her face she remained an attractive and desirable female, stirred by real emotions. Lucy Ricardo's nutty predicaments arose from an earnest desire to please. And there was something touching about her stage ambitions. As we were discussing her with our writers, Desi spoke up. "She tries so hard. . . . She can't dance and she can't sing. . . . She's earnest and pathetic. . . . Oh, I love that Lucy!" And so the title of the show was born.

The Ricardos' adventures took them many places and introduced them to scores of people. With their neighbors/best friends/landlords, Fred and Ethel Mertz (played by William Frawley and Vivian Vance), they traveled, fought and made up, and met the industry stars of the day. Both John Wayne and William Holden made famous appearances on the show, as did Harpo Marx in an unforgettable scene in which Lucy mirrors the famous comedian. 

Lucille Ball had some minor successes in television after the run of I Love Lucy, but nothing like the comedic storm that she co-created with Arnaz. I Love Lucy aired for six seasons, from 1951 through 1957, and in those 181 episodes, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo lived in a world in which being a big-band leader played second fiddle to the often frenetic preoccupations of his wife. In syndication, America and the world still live with them.

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

 

Cited:
Lucille Ball with Betty Hannah Hoffman, Love, Lucy (New York: Putnam, 1996). 

 

Lucille Ball / Harry Warnecke / Color carbro print, 1944 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Elsie M. Warnecke / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Gift of Elsie M. Warnecke, © Daily News, LP

Lucille Ball / Philippe Halsman / Gelatin silver print, 1950 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of George R. Rinhart, © Philippe Halsman Archive

 

Betty Ford: A Legacy among First Ladies

The White House is not a residence for the meek or the timid; the White House of Gerald and Betty Ford was no exception. President Ford was a star athlete turned politician, while Mrs. Ford was a gifted dancer turned political support team. The Fords stepped up the Washington political and social ladder more than two and a half decades, beginning with Gerald Ford’s election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1948.

During her husband’s twenty-four years in Congress, Betty Ford tended to family—the Fords had four children—and she also worked on a voluntary basis with many organizations, both in the community and in the capital. Two separate scandals in the Nixon administration were the impetus for Gerald Ford’s relocation from Congress to the White House.

Gerald Ford had served for nearly twenty-five years in the House of Representatives when President Richard M. Nixon asked him—by then Ford was the House minority leader—to serve as vice president upon the resignation of Spiro Agnew in the autumn of 1973. When Nixon resigned in August 1974, Ford became the first man to become president without having been elected either to the presidency or the vice presidency.

As first lady, Betty Ford never felt the constraints of politics when she decided to speak on an issue. Her voice was often antithetical to that of her husband, and she left no room to wonder what she meant.

In an age when a subject like breast cancer was a conversational taboo, Mrs. Ford was forthright in discussing her condition when it was diagnosed and, later, in talking about the need for support in such times of crisis. In November 1975, she spoke to the American Cancer Society in New York:  

Cancer wherever it strikes the body, also strikes the spirit, and the best doctors in the world cannot cure the spirit. Only love and understanding can accomplish this important role. All of us can give love and support to our friends who have cancer. We can open our hearts and our minds to dealing with the fears that the victims have, and also the fears many of us have of the disease itself.

Betty Ford's gift was her honesty. When her family encouraged her to seek treatment for pharmaceutical and alcohol dependencies, she openly brought her struggles into a national conversation. Like her public discussion of breast cancer, her frankness in speaking of alcoholism and addiction saved innumerable lives.

With Ambassador Leonard Firestone, Mrs. Ford established the Betty Ford Center, an addiction treatment and recovery facility, in 1982. For her advocacy, Betty Ford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.

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

 

Elizabeth "Betty" Ford / Everett Raymond Kinstler / Oil on canvas, 1996 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Everett Raymond Kinstler

 

Cited:

“First Lady Betty Ford's Remarks to the American Cancer Society, New York City. Friday, November 7, 1975” 

 

Ronald Wilson Reagan: Humor in the Highest Office

Our new exhibition “One Life: Ronald Reagan” is open through May 28, 2012.

In Changing Places, David Lodge’s 1975 satire of American and British academic life in the late 1960s, Lodge discusses the disparity between the youth culture and the establishment at a fictitious California university:

By the year of 1969, Euphoric State had perhaps reached its peak as a centre of learning, and was already in the process of decline—due partly to the accelerating tempo of disruption by student militants, and partly to the counter-pressure exerted by the right-wing Governor of the State, Ronald Duck, a former movie-actor.

Beginning with his tenure as governor of California (1967–75), Ronald Reagan was hit with a barrage of jokes, most of them weak attempts at discrediting the man whose career had taken him from Hollywood to Sacramento, from the sound stage to the podium. Even as president of the United States, Ronald Reagan would bear the brunt of such humor.

One of the ghosts of Reagan’s acting career—the chimpanzee Bonzo from the 1951 film Bedtime for Bonzo—was a constant theme attached to Reagan’s political career, for better or for worse. In a December 1980 post-election article from People magazine, David Sheff wrote:

The name Bonzo stayed alive in part because Bedtime’s director, Fred De Cordova, went on to produce The Tonight Show—and became the brunt of innumerable Bonzo jokes from Johnny Carson. Bedtime was also a popular ad hominem weapon among Reagan’s critics during his years in the California statehouse and became a favorite at campus "Dump Ron" rallies. For that reason, Brickman charges, Republicans among the Universal Pictures brass tried to tie up all the Bedtime prints when Reagan began his presidential bid.

Reagan, however, could take the jokes and dish them out as well. Actor and director Clint Eastwood shared with Reagan a simian cinematic experience when he starred in the 1978 film Every Which Way But Loose and its 1980 sequel, Any Which Way You Can, in which Eastwood played a rambling, fighting mechanic, Philo Beddoe, whose companion is a chimpanzee, Clyde. When Eastwood ran for mayor of Carmel, California, in 1986, President Reagan asked, “What makes him think a middle-aged actor who’s played with a chimp, could have a future in politics?’”

One of the president’s comments did not tickle the collective funny bone. On August 11, 1984, before his weekly radio talk, President Reagan joked, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” The comment was widely received as irreverent and hostile.

At most other times, Ronald Reagan’s sense of humor and theatricality served him well. In his 1988 State of the Union address, the president emphasized the need for a more understandable and accessible budget. During the speech, Reagan noted, “Last year, of the thirteen appropriations bills due by October 1st, none of them made it. Instead, we had four continuing resolutions lasting forty-one days, then thirty-six days, and two days, and three days, respectively. And then, along came these behemoths.” As he spoke, he began pulling tomes of fiscal legislation from a large pile beside the podium. The president continued:

This is the conference report—1,053 page report weighing fourteen pounds. Then this—a reconciliation bill six months lat, that was 1,186 pages long, weighing fifteen pounds; and the long-term continuing resolution—this one was two months late and it’s 1,057 pages long, weighing fourteen pounds. That was a total of forty-three pounds of paper and ink. You had three hours—yes, three hours—to consider each, and it took three hundred people at my Office of Management and Budget just to read the bill so the government wouldn’t shut down. Congress shouldn’t send another one of these. No, and if you do, I will not sign it.

The effect was both startling and funny, as Reagan set the volumes aside, shaking his right wrist as though the weight of the resolutions was slightly painful to handle. And while the aisle in the chamber clearly marked the political division on the budgetary process, the president had made his point with a humorous efficacy.

Throughout his political career, Ronald Reagan used humor to take the sharp edge off serious messages, and he also used it to alleviate the hurt of detractors. Reagan’s age was the subject of many jokes during his presidency, and in a famous moment during the October 28, 1984, presidential debate with former Vice President Walter Mondale, President Reagan spun the issue in his own favor, deadpanning, “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” In another instance, he noted, “Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.’ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.”

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

 

Ronald Wilson Reagan, / Diana Walker / Chromogenic print, 1986 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Diana Walker

 

Cited:

Lodge, David.  Changing Places.  New York: Penguin Group, 1975.

Sheff, David.  “Two Ex-Screenwriters Turn the 1980 Election into Boomtime for Bonzo and Their Own Bonanza,” People, December 15, 1980.

State of the Union Address, January 25, 1988 (text, video)

The Second 1984 Presidential Debate, October 28, 1984

Who Is That Frenchman on Seventh Street? Part One

Photo by Warren Perry

The intellectual vanity at play in the late nineteenth century was infectious. As the ideas grew and as the periodic table filled in, the Victorians—soon to become the Edwardians—believed that peace was at hand and that libraries and museums would fill the world. Science ruled the day.

Medals were struck in commemoration of academic achievement, portraits were painted, and monuments were built. Scientism, the belief that all good things would arrive as a result of science and its practices, was the prevailing attitude of the progressive academy, and the mental and technological manifestations of science were lauded as previous generations had lauded accomplishments on the battlefield.

The Jonathan Scott Hartley monument to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre at the National Portrait Gallery is a product of the philosophy of scientism.

Hidden in the shadows of the Penn Quarter activity on Seventh Street is the anomalous figure of an angel wrapping a wreath around a globe and a man’s head. The head belongs to one of the many non-Americans enshrined here in Washington, in this case, the French inventor of the photographic process, Louis Daguerre.

As an inventor, Daguerre is perfectly in place outside the walls of the former Patent Office Building, the Robert Mills–designed shrine that now houses the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And although this work might seem at home in its current location, it traveled quite a lot before its arrival.

The journey that brought Hartley’s granite and bronze portrait to its present location is an interesting one, the first part of which is recorded in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the year ending June 30, 1891:

On August 15, 1890, a bronze statue of Daguerre was unveiled in the rotunda of the National Museum building, by the Secretary of the Interior. This monument, in honor of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, was presented by the Photographers Association of America, which was holding its annual meeting in Washington at the time. Daguerre, in cooperation with Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, invented and perfected the daguerreotype, the announcement of which was made at the session of the French Academy of Sciences, in 1839.

From 1890 to 1897, Hartley’s Daguerre was inside the rotunda of the Smithsonian Arts and Industries building, the structure adjacent and immediately to the east of the Smithsonian Castle. Before the end of that century, the monument was to make another move, this one farther to the east. In 1897, the work was moved, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum Inventory of American Sculpture, “to the grounds on the east side of the Arts and Industries Building.”

The monument was to remain in this location until it was taken to storage in 1969, because the ground upon which it had sat for more than seven decades was the future site of the Hirshhorn Museum.

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

Photo by Warren Perry

Next week, Part II: The Monument’s Creator and Its Early History

Is it Washington's or Lincoln's DC?

Photo by Warren Perry.

As the nation moves further into the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War, one name appears more than any other in papers, symposia, and discussions—Abraham Lincoln.

Washington, D.C., is a city of Lincoln echoes. The capital, named for the first president, contains perhaps a greater presence of Lincoln than it does of the Founding Father. Abraham Lincoln is credited with saving the nation and its capital during the most trying days of the Union’s existence, and Lincoln tributes in Washington are as commonplace as half-smoke vendors.

Photo by Warren Perry.

In addition to the obvious—Ford’s Theatre and the Lincoln Memorial (both shown above)—smaller monuments and markers are everywhere in Washington. The National Historic Landmark building that now houses the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum was built as the Old Patent Office Building and played host to Lincoln’s second inaugural ball in 1865. The White House has the Lincoln bedroom. A plaque on E Street Northwest marks John Wilkes Booth’s escape route, while a plaque on H Street Northwest denotes the Surratt House, home of several of the convicted Lincoln conspirators.

Washington is also the final resting place for the two most famous Lincoln photographers, Alexander Gardner (Glenwood Cemetery) and Mathew Brady (Congressional Cemetery), as well as the home of the most famous photograph of Lincoln, Gardner’s “cracked plate” from early 1865, at the National Portrait Gallery (below).

Both ends of the axis that includes the National Mall are capped with Lincoln tributes—the Lincoln Memorial by Daniel Chester French seals off the west end, while East Capitol Street, the extension of the line that bisects the United States Capitol, has as its penultimate monument site the public space of Lincoln Park, within which is contained a statue of Abraham Lincoln emancipating the slaves (below).

Other large monuments to Lincoln in the district may be found at the United States Capitol rotunda, the White House, Fort Stevens, and the National Cathedral.

Photo by Benjamin Bloom.

Of course, one needs to look no further than one’s own pocket to understand America’s love for Lincoln; he has his own penny and five-dollar note. And though Lincoln does not have a cherry tree legend to his attribution, he does have a set of child’s building logs. The case for Lincoln’s endearment to America continues to be made every day in many different forms. After all, Ford did not build a Ford named Washington; Ford built a Ford named Lincoln.

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

 

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Gardner, 1865 / Albumen silver print / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Millard Fillmore: Buffalo’s Good Samaritan

By Jordan Hillman, intern, National Portrait Gallery, Center for Electronic Research and Outreach Services

Buffalo, New York, has ties to several United States presidents: Grover Cleveland, the twenty-second president, resided in the city and served as its mayor from 1882 to 1883; President William McKinley was shot at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exhibition on September 6, 1901, and died in the city a week later; Theodore Roosevelt was then sworn into office on September 14 at the former Ansley Wilcox Mansion on Delaware Avenue in downtown Buffalo.

Through these various connections, Buffalo is filled with presidential namesakes—Grover Cleveland Parkway, McKinley Mall, Theodore Roosevelt Elementary, Millard Fillmore Hospital—yet it is Fillmore who contributed most to Buffalo’s educational, cultural and medical needs.

The thirteenth president of the United States, Millard Fillmore began his professional life as a teacher in East Aurora, about twenty miles outside of Buffalo, in 1822. Before the year was through, however, Fillmore relocated to the city to pursue an education in law. After passing the bar, he returned to East Aurora, where he opened a law office and took an active role in the local political scene. His reputation of fighting for public interests soon landed him a spot in the state assembly; not long after, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until 1843.

Fillmore's political gains continued rapidly: in 1848, he was elected vice president of the United States alongside Whig Party candidate Zachary Taylor. With Taylor’s untimely death in 1850, Millard Fillmore was thrust into the presidency at a time of unrest. The controversial Compromise of 1850, which was passed during his tenure, averted the dissolution of the Union for another decade.

When his presidency ended on March 3, 1853, Fillmore returned to Buffalo, where he became involved with multiple cultural organizations and civic endeavors that continue to influence life there today.

First and foremost, he was responsible for framing the charter that officially made Buffalo a city. In 1846, Fillmore, as a former teacher dedicated to the furthering of educational institutions in Buffalo, worked to establish a medical university. Through his efforts, the University of Buffalo was chartered by the New York legislature on May 11; he became the first chancellor, serving in this honorary position from 1846 until his death in 1874. In conjunction, Fillmore financially assisted the Sisters of Charity in the construction of a new Buffalo General Hospital, which opened officially in 1858. Within the next decade, he became a member of the facility’s board of trustees. This sense of compassion and dedication to humanity carried over to founding and becoming vice president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Yet with all of these accomplishments, his most prized were those in the Buffalo cultural arena. He began by founding and presiding over the Buffalo Club, the city’s first exclusive social group. In 1862 the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, today the governing body of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, was forged with Fillmore’s support as both a financial contributor and board member.

He also helped to lay the groundwork for the Grosvenor Library as an ally and president of the board of trustees, which became one of the nation’s most comprehensive reference collections. Fillmore also spearheaded a campaign to raise money for Buffalo’s Society of the Natural Sciences. Concurrently, Fillmore was actively involved in a project to preserve Buffalo’s historical and cultural property by organizing the Buffalo Historical Society. Not only did he arrange the meeting instrumental to the society’s development, but he served for five years as its first president.

Millard Fillmore’s death on March 8, 1874, was devastating to a city that had long reaped the benefits of his charitable nature. During his residency, Buffalo experienced a period urbanization and growth, much of which was a direct result of his interest and enthusiasm. His influential and generous nature prompted the renaming of the city’s Homeopathic Hospital to Millard Fillmore Hospital in 1923. Fillmore was laid to rest in Buffalo’s own Forest Lawn Cemetery, consecrating his place in the hearts and minds of Buffalonians for the rest of time.

 

Millard Fillmore / Unidentified Artist / Oil on canvas, 1843 /  National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Andrew Young and the New South

Join Andrew Young in conversation, this Saturday at 2pm at the National Portrait Gallery. His portrait will be installed in the exhibition “The Struggle for Justice.”

The 1960s and 1970s were decades in which the American south struggled with problems that had plagued the region from colonial times. First and foremost, the South had never overcome the specter of slavery that haunted it from its beginnings. After the Civil War and emancipation, this problem changed forms and manifested itself as racial intolerance and the denial of basic civil rights to African Americans. However, the second half of the twentieth century was marked by much-needed change. Andrew Young was one of the agents of that change.

Andrew Jackson Young Jr. was born in New Orleans in 1932. Although the country was enduring difficult times in a massive economic depression, Young’s parents were both employed professionals—his mother was a schoolteacher, his father a dentist. Andrew Young completed high school in New Orleans and then received his first college degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C.; he also completed a bachelor’s degree in divinity from Hartford Theological Seminary.

Young worked as a minister for several years before joining the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961 in the throes of the civil rights struggle. He quickly moved into the ranks of its leadership and joined the pantheon of activists whose names are synonymous with the movement. In his autobiography, Martin Luther King Jr. (below) records a resonant moment in the spring of 1963 with Andrew Young and the effort in Birmingham:

Even children too young to march requested and earned a place in our ranks. Once when we sent out a call for volunteers, six tiny youngsters responded. Andy Young told them that they were not old enough to go to jail but that they could go to the library. “You won’t get arrested there,” he said, “but you might learn something” So these six small children marched off to the building in the white district, where, up to two weeks before, they would have been turned away at the door. Shyly but doggedly, they went to the children’s room and sat down, and soon they were lost in their books. In their own way, they had struck a blow for freedom.

Young was with King on April 4, 1968, when King was murdered in Memphis.

As he was needed, Andrew Young continued to serve. He held executive offices for the SCLC—including serving as director—for most of the 1960s. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives, serving the Georgia fifth district for three terms; he resigned his seat in 1977 to serve as United States ambassador to the United Nations, a post he held until 1979.

The American South continued to grow after such painful chapters as King’s death, and many southern cities became centers of industry. Memphis became a distribution and warehousing hub in the mid-1970s, eventually becoming the worldwide headquarters for Federal Express. Cities like Charlotte, Birmingham, and Atlanta, also fractured by segregation and poor black-white relations, became centers of commerce. Atlanta served (and continues to serve) as headquarters for two mighty corporate giants, Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines.

Andrew Young was elected mayor of Atlanta in 1981 and held that office until 1990, guiding the city through a period of tremendous growth and preparing for its bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympics. In 1996, Young co-founded GoodWorks, International, a think tank whose mission is to promote emerging world markets.

On Saturday, April 30, the National Portrait Gallery will unveil and dedicate a portrait of Andrew Young by Ross R. Rossin, a gift to the museum from NPG commission chairman Jack H. Watson Jr.

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

 

Andrew Young / Ross R. Rossin / Oil on canvas, 2009, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Jack Watson, © 2009 Ross R. Rossin

Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929-1968)  by Jack Lewis Hiller (b. 1930), Gelatin silver print, 1960, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: gift of Jack Lewis Hiller

Happy Birthday, John Waters and Jack Nicholson

Two edgy and risk-taking entertainers were born on this day, April 22. 

Jack Nicholson excels in roles that mainstream actors would never touch; typically, he starts from a place that is a mile or two from center and moves outward from there.

Nicholson received Oscars for his performances in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Terms of Endearment (1983), and As Good As It Gets (1997). His twelve total nominations tie him with Katharine Hepburn for the second most in history—Meryl Streep leads the industry with fourteen.

There has never been a better character actor; Nicholson’s rage as The Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman ("Where does he get those wonderful toys?") is only surpassed by the terror he brings to the screen in such roles as Jack Torrance in The Shining (“Here’s Johnny!”). Nicholson was born on this date in 1937.

 

John Waters’s filmmaking is unrivalled in the canon of the bizarre; no subject is taboo and no visual too unseemly. It is precisely his irreverence that brings attention to his work. Hairspray (1988; 2007 musical remake) satirizes American family and teen culture, while Pecker (1998) pokes at the critical mechanism at work in the art world. A native of Baltimore, Waters (above) does not hesitate in his films with respect to subject matter, though his Rabelaisian touches would make even Rabelais blush. Waters was born on this date in 1946.

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

 

Jack Nicholson / Tony Korody / Color photograph on paper, 1974 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

John Waters / Joseph Sheppard, 1995 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Rita St. Clair / © 1995 Joseph Sheppard               

James Cash Penney, 1876–1971

There are two important months in the history of the J. C. Penney stores, the first being April.

James Cash Penney, born in the centennial year, left his childhood home in Missouri when he was in his early twenties and moved to Colorado. He entered the dry goods business and, with partners, opened his first store, the Golden Rule Store, in Kemmerer, Wyoming, on April 14, 1902. Penney was successful for many reasons; chief among them was his work ethic. He placed his name on his chain of stores in 1913, and April 15, 1918, marked the opening of J.C. Penney’s first store in his home state.

In an article from the July 1927 Missouri Historical Review, C. P. Dorsey writes of Penney’s formula for success:

Mr. Penney’s plan was to create volume sales by a maximum of value coupled with painstaking attention to the needs of every customer; to render the greatest possible service rather than secure the greatest possible profit. These two fundamentals of the J. C. Penney Company have never been changed. Throughout all the corporation’s development, clerks have continued to be trained for managers and the principle of maximum service rather than maximum profit stands unaltered.

Although Penney would outlive two of his three wives, he would not outlive his corporation, which thrives to this day. J. C. Penney moved into the twenty-first century with more than eleven hundred stores throughout the United States; it is difficult to spot a mall or a major outlet center not anchored by one of Penney’s department stores.

And what is the other important month for the J. C. Penney Corporation? December—immediately after Christmas—brings Penney’s annual white sale.

Read more about James Cash Penny in this document, from the Missouri Historical Society.  

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

 

James Cash Penney / David Berney / Oil on canvas, c. 1925 – 1930 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of David M. Gwinn

 

The Eve of War: The Moments and Months Leading to the Attack on Fort Sumter

This Tuesday, April 12, marks the 150th anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter.

The date and the hour are pretty certain. On April 12, 1861, close to 4:30 a.m., after months of escalating tension between the North and the South, a shot was fired across the harbor in Charleston, South Carolina, to the federal contingency occupying Fort Sumter.

Again, that was April 12, 1861. But was that the beginning of the war?

Generally, it is accepted that the hostilities commenced on April 12, 1861, and Charleston harbor and Fort Sumter provided the location for the true beginning of the war—in terms of gunfire, anyway. And while it might be difficult to dispute the location, when the war began is a matter of interest; some historians believe it arrived several months earlier. Union soldiers encamped at Fort Sumter over the winter of 1860–61 were in need of supplies, and a ship, Star of the West, was sent to reinforce the fort. On the approach to the fort, Star of the West was fired upon both from land and from the water; it was unable to complete its mission.

That was January 9, 1861. Was that the beginning of the war?

Historian E. B. Long writes:

The first shots had been fired in Charleston Harbor, and many considered them the first serious shots of the war, though there was actually no war yet. The flag on Star of the West was answered by running up the garrison flag at Fort Sumter. The men manned the parapets, ready for action. Some officers at the fort were incensed that Maj. [Robert] Anderson did not let them fire; there was chagrin that the relief ship had turned away so readily. But the officers varied in their opinions. Anderson did protest to Gov. Pickens the firing of two batteries, Morris Island and Fort Moultrie, upon an unarmed vessel bearing the U.S. flag. Pickens replied that the sending of reinforcements would be considered a hostile act as South Carolina was independent now, and that attack must be repelled. Anderson immediately sent messages north. Charleston itself was in an uproar; it seemed for a moment that real war had come and many people welcomed it. But when it was over Fort Sumter was still in Federal hands and the problem remained much as it had been, only more agitated.

Only one day before, as Long records in The Civil War: Day by Day, “Federal troops fired during the night upon about twenty men who had approached Fort Barrancas.”

That was January 8, 1861. Was that the beginning of the war?

Five years earlier, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, in speaking to the Senate on more than one occasion, had passionately and intensely berated the slaveholding South; South Carolina representative Preston Brooks took umbrage. Brooks, using his walking cane, beat Sumner in the United States Senate chamber, putting Sumner out of commission for three years. Years later, General William Emile Doster, a lawyer before the war and later the provost marshal of the District of Columbia military district, wrote of this assault, “Surely the conflict commenced on his [Sumner’s] skull.”

That was May 22, 1856. Was that the beginning of the war?

Who fired the first shot is also disputed.

Union Major Robert Anderson (above) was the officer in charge at Fort Sumter. Having been unable to receive either men or supplies because of the blockade on his fort, Anderson was insufficiently prepared either to withstand a siege any longer or to wage much of a war. Across the harbor from him was General Pierre Gustave Toutant  Beauregard (right), in charge of the southern forces in Charleston. When shots were fired in the early morning of April 12, it would be but a matter of hours before Anderson capitulated.

Civil War historian Shelby Foote writes:

Roger Pryor . . . had spoken from a Charleston balcony just two days ago. “Strike a blow!” he had urged the Carolinians. Now when he was offered the honor of firing the first shot, he shook his head, his long hair swaying. “I could not fire the first gun of the war,” he said, his voice as husky with emotion as Anderson’s had been, back on the wharf at the fort. Another Virginian could and would—white-haired Edmund Ruffin, a farm-paper editor and old-line secessionist, sixty-seven years of age. At [4:30 a.m.] he pulled a lanyard; the first shot of the war drew a red parabola against the sky and burst with a glare, outlining the dark pentagon of Fort Sumter.

E. B. Long, however, tells another tale of those early moments of the war:

At 4:30 a.m. the signal shot was fired from the post of Capt. George S. James at Fort Johnson, with other batteries opening according to previous orders. Capt. James gave the order and, probably, one Henry S. Farley actually fired the signal shot that arched in the night sky over Charleston Harbor. Edmund Ruffin (below), Virginia agriculturalist and fiery Confederate, did not, apparently, fire the first real shot, despite the legend. He did fire the first shell from columbiad No. 1 of the iron battery at Cummings Point on Morris Island. The rotation of fire, which was followed, brought this battery into action late. But it matters little; the signal shot did it and the war guns spoke.

No matter who fired the first shot, what is certain is this: the actions that took place on April 12, 1861, were irreversible. Whatever could have been done before Sumter could not be done after, and the events at Sumter could not be undone. Anderson’s defense, while valiant, was futile: he had too little of everything—men, supplies, munitions. The major was only capable of putting up a reasonable defense for a short time, and after about a day and a half, he gave up the fort. April 14, 1861, would see the property at Fort Sumter turned over to the rebel troops under Beauregard.

Armies would begin to assemble at this moment. Other moments may have had doubt attached to them; this one would not. This was war.

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

 

Edmund Ruffin / Edward Anthony / Albumen silver print, 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Robert A. Anderson / Charles DeForest Fredricks, 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. F.B. Wilde

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard / Unidentified artist / Albumen silver print, c. 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Cited:

E. B. Long, with Barbara Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (New York: Da Capo, 1985).

Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (New York: Random House, 1958).

My Three Moments with Elizabeth Taylor

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

Before I was a wandering teenager, I spent most Saturdays at home watching professional wrestling, Sons of Hercules, baseball (in season), and movies during the winter. One afternoon the feature was National Velvet. It was not my usual flavor, but I was glued to it anyway—I think I’d seen Mickey Rooney in Young Thomas Edison a few weeks before and I thought he was worth watching.

So I watched Mickey Rooney, and I watched the horse, and then I don’t remember much else except rooting for the horse to win. I certainly did not notice the color of Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes, because even though the movie was in Technicolor, I was watching it on a black-and-white television. However, I did notice Elizabeth Taylor. I am certain she entered my life a full year before Farrah Fawcett.

Even as an eleven-year-old, I remember thinking, “Wow. I want to be her boyfriend.” That was in 1974. I asked my mom who she was, and mom said she was a grown woman now, married to Richard Burton, she thought, or maybe Eddie Fisher. Later I understood why that might have been a difficult fact to nail down. “Too bad she’s married,” I thought. So, like all boys my age in the mid-1970s, I respectfully moved on to Charlie’s Angels and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

Half a dozen years later, college brought Elizabeth Taylor back into my life two more times. During an American drama course, I read the play and watched the film version (1966; Warner Brothers) of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Richard Burton was George, and Elizabeth Taylor portrayed Martha, in an odd meeting of allegorical and satirical nomenclature. In its devastating story of marriage-turned-maelstrom, Burton and Taylor were equal to the parts. The dialogue sometimes resembles fencing; at other times it is more like trench warfare as George and Martha battle in front of their guests, Honey and Nick (Sandy Dennis and George Segal).

GEORGE: Martha had her daguerreotype in the paper once . . . oh, ‘bout twenty-five years ago . . . Seems she took second prize in one o’ them seven-day dancin’ contest things . . . biceps all bulging, holding up her partner.

MARTHA: Will you put a record on and shut up?

GEORGE: Certainly, love. How are we going to work this? Mixed doubles?

MARTHA: Well, you certainly don’t think I’m going to dance with you, do you?

During the Albee class, someone mentioned that Elizabeth Taylor had a mighty range and that it was difficult to believe she was the same person who played Velvet just two decades prior to Virginia Woolf.  I had not put the two together, and I think that is when the word versatile entered my lexicon. Someone in class mentioned that she had been married once to one of the Hiltons.

Around the same time, the early 1980s, I had my third, more bizarre encounter with Elizabeth Taylor. Some afternoons I would stop by my grandmother’s house for lunch and catch parts of either One Life to Live or General Hospital. It was actually not possible to go by my grandmother’s house on a weekday and miss either of those soaps; she was especially fond of Luke and Laura on GH, and the early 1980s was their heyday.

At one time in the Luke and Laura odyssey, Helena Cassadine, the widow of Mikkos Cassadine, the wicked warlock of the weather machine, appeared in Port Charles to curse Luke and Laura on the eve of their nuptials—this after Luke, Laura, and Robert Scorpio had saved Port Charles and the rest of humanity from the evil Cassadine family plan to freeze the earth with their advanced atmospheric controlling and altering device. Elizabeth Taylor was Helena Cassadine. “She’s married to a senator from Virginia,” I remember my grandmother saying.

It was always surprising to see where she would show up and with whom. I don’t ever remember her appearing less than stellar, and when she tasked herself with humanitarian causes in her later years, it seems like she became all the more beautiful. There was no role she could not play.

Elizabeth Taylor was among the first iconic celebrities to publicly fight for AIDS research, and she did so in a time when it was a politically unpopular fight. She stayed by her friends during controversy—she was with Michael Jackson through his worst times—and she never gave up an inch of ground.

She was as compassionate and gutsy as she was beautiful. And now she’s married to the heavens. We’ll miss you Liz. And for every boy who had a crush on you after watching National Velvet, I think I can safely say we’ll always be proud to be your men, even though most of us never put a ring on your finger.

For more on Elizabeth Taylor’s work with AIDS and to sign her online memorial page, please visit the website of the Elizabeth Taylor Foundation.

Elizabeth Taylor / Sid Avery / Gelatin silver print, 1955 (printed later) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Ron and Donna Avery, © 1978 Sid Avery

 

Elizabeth Taylor / Boris Chaliapin / Gouache on board, 1949 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. Boris Chaliapin

A Whitman Poem for World Poetry Day

In 1999 UNESCO declared March 21 as World Poetry Day. As such, and also as part of our continued commemoration of the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, today we feature Walt Whitman’s “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night.”  

Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;

When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,

One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,

One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,

Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,

Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,

Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind,

Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,

Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,

But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,

Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,

Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word,

Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,

As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,

Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,

I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)

Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,

My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,

Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,

And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,

Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,

Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,

I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,

And buried him where he fell.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

 

Walt Whitman / Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins / Platinum print, 1891 (printed 1979) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

"Grover the Good" - Grover Cleveland’s Birthday

By Jordan Hillman, intern, National Portrait Gallery, Center for Electronic Research and Outreach Services

When one is asked to name the former presidents of the United States of America, Grover Cleveland is often among the forgotten. Yet the twenty-second president, born Stephen Grover Cleveland on March 18, 1837, in Caldwell, New Jersey, was an interesting character. At the age of eighteen, Cleveland left New Jersey for the West in hopes of striking a fortune; however, a pit-stop in Buffalo, New York, stretched into a nearly thirty-year residency. There, he became the sheriff of Erie County, serving simultaneously as public executioner. As such, he was the only president to personally hang a man, putting to death two murderers.

In 1881 Cleveland got his political start as a reform mayoral candidate for the city of Buffalo, winning by a landslide. He became known as the “veto mayor,” doing away with the corruption in the city government through his rejection of underhanded attempts to pass shady decrees. To this day, a bronze statue of Cleveland stands outside of Buffalo City Hall. His stint as mayor was cut short, however, by his nomination as the Democratic candidate for governor, which he won with the largest majority of any governor up to that point.

Leading up to the national election of 1884, Cleveland, nicknamed “Grover the Good,” was the shoo-in for the Democratic presidential candidate because of his reputation for honesty. Just a week-and-a-half after the Democratic National Convention though, a story was printed in the Buffalo News with the headline “A Terrible Tale,” exposing Cleveland as the father of an illegitimate son. This revelation began one of the most unscrupulous elections in history, creating a war of personal accusations between Cleveland and the Republican candidate James G. Blaine. In the end, however, Cleveland prevailed.

As president, Grover Cleveland was unique. He was the first Democratic president to be elected after the Civil War. He personally answered the White House phone. He was the only president to be married and to have a child born in the White House. The “Baby Ruth” candy bar was named after his daughter Ruth, not Babe Ruth as is often thought. He was also the first president to moonlight as an actor, starring in A Capital Courtship, a photoplay in which he was filmed signing a bill into law. In his first term, Cleveland vetoed more than 400 bills, twice as many as the number vetoed by all previous presidents combined (and earning him the new nickname of “veto president”). He was also the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms in office; he lost the 1888 election, but won in 1892 to become the twenty-fourth—as well as the twenty-second—president.

While Cleveland is not necessarily known for the deeds of his presidency, he is remembered for his honest reputation and his efforts to maintain that reputation, both for himself and the government of the United States. Perhaps this can be best seen in the words of Cleveland in his first inaugural speech:

“Our citizens have the right to protection from the incompetency of public employees who hold their places solely as the reward of partisan service, and from the corrupting influences who promise and the vicious methods of those who expect such rewards; and those who worthily seek public employment have the right to insist that merit and competency shall be recognized instead of party subserviency or the surrender of honest political belief.”

Grover Cleveland / Anders Leonard Zorn / Oil on canvas, 1899 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Reverend Thomas G. Cleveland