National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

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

March 4, 1861: Abraham Lincoln’s Inauguration

James Buchanan, among the lamest of lame ducks, presided over the White House in the last few days before Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office. Buchanan’s presidency had been marked by ineffectual progress toward keeping the nation together. While Lincoln was traveling to Washington from Springfield, Illinois, Buchanan was packing his bags and hoping that no further dissolution of the Union occurred on his watch. Buchanan would be marked until the day he died as a feckless and hollow president.

Lincoln’s train trip to the capital was an event-filled foreshadowing of his impending reign as head of state. He made speech after speech as he journeyed. Close to the eve of his arrival in Washington, rumors circulated that he might be in danger if he spent any public time in Baltimore, so he quietly entered the District of Columbia on February 23 and began preparing to take the seat of power. During this same period, Jefferson Davis had been building a government of the Confederacy in Montgomery, and he had seven states in his hip-pocket by the time Lincoln took his oath on March 4. Squaring off against those who would divide the nation, Lincoln stated in his inaugural speech:

Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

Lincoln closed his speech dramatically by placing the burden of keeping the nation together in the hands of all Americans, but specifically at those in dissent:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Though Lincoln implored those “better angels” of the collective American spirit to work through the crisis of secession and division, he would be in office less than six weeks before his summons would be torched by southern fire.

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

For more on Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, please visit the Library of Congress website at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trt039.html.

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Gardner / Albumen silver print, 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The Scottsboro Boys

In the long struggle for civil rights and racial equality in America, few episodes had the impact of the infamous Scottsboro Boys case. When nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two women on a freight train were tried in Scottsboro, Alabama,in 1931, white juries found eight of the nine guilty, and they were sentenced to death.

The widely condemned verdicts and the subsequent reversals, retrials, and hearings—including two successful appeals to the United States Supreme Court—mobilized protests across the country and the world. The International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal arm of the Communist Party, hoping to recruit black workers to their cause, led the defense instead of the more deliberate NAACP. Their involvement rallied protests from whites and minorities alike around the world.

As the nine youths languished in the brutal Alabama prison system, their lives were largely destroyed; together, they spent 130 years in jail, despite the recantation of one of the alleged victims. Clarence Norris (1912–1989) and Haywood Patterson (1913–1952), the subjects portrayed in NPG’s pastel by African American artist Aaron Douglas, were prominent figures in the case. Norris was paroled in 1944 and pardoned by Governor George C. Wallace in 1976; Patterson spent sixteen years in prison and escaped to Michigan in 1948, where the governor refused to extradite him.

Aaron Douglas’s moving portrait (above) provides the opportunity to pair a critical historical story with a powerful work of art. The Kansas-born artist, armed with a BFA from the University of Nebraska, settled in New York City in 1925 and became the leading visual artist for the Harlem Renaissance. After publishing his drawings in Alain Locke’s The New Negro and in national magazines, Douglas illustrated thirteen books by such acclaimed authors as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. In his illustrations and painted murals, Douglas created new, modernist prototypes to express the African American experience, incorporating influences from Egyptian art, West African sculpture, cubist painting, and Art Deco design.

Ultimately, he became an influential professor at Fisk University. Douglas made this portrait in a more realist manner, avoiding any hint of modernist stylization. His mentor, German artist Winold Reiss, had drawn imposing pastel portraits of Harlem authors. Like Reiss, Douglas focused on the essential humanity and dignity of his subjects.

This drawing was probably made around 1935, when the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the convictions in the Norris and Patterson cases because of Alabama’s exclusion of blacks from the jury rolls. By this time, a one-year fellowship had exposed Douglas to the modern European and African art collected by Albert C. Barnes, and he had spent another year studying in Paris. He was also newly politicized. He had joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s, and as head of the Harlem Artists Guild, he was demanding more black participation in the WPA’s art program.

Douglas was undoubtedly moved by the cover of an ILD pamphlet that featured photographs of Norris and Patterson surrounded by the phrases “save our lives,” “they must not burn,” and “join the fight to free them.” Even more powerful is Douglas’s wordless copy of the two likenesses. The stark, isolated faces, drawn in beautifully blended pastels, mutely confront their audience. The picture speaks to the profound response to this soul-chilling miscarriage of justice and the seriousness of racial prejudice in America.

—Wendy Wick Reaves, Curator or Prints and Drawings, National Portrait Gallery

Further reading: James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Vintage, 1994); Amy Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), and Jim Miller, Moments of Scottsboro: The Scottsboro Case and American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Clarence Norris and Haywood Patterson / Aaron Douglas  / Pastel on paper, c. 1935 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Presidents’ Day Math: The Case for an October Presidents’ Month

February is an excellent month to host President's Day because it is the month in which George Washington (February 22, 1732) and Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809) were born. February also claims William Henry Harrison on the ninth day (1773) and Ronald Reagan on the sixth (1911).

However, October could easily call itself “Presidents’ Month.” Six presidents were born in October—John Adams, Rutherford Hayes, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jimmy Carter. November is second on the list of presidents born within its days, with a total of five. Like February, the months of January, March, April, July, and August each host the birthdays of four presidents.

Seasonally, the distribution of presidential births is as follows: winter, thirteen; spring, eight; summer, ten; autumn, twelve. Why does the total number of that seasonal birthday distribution only come to forty-three when there have been forty-four presidents? Grover Cleveland was president twice, but he was not born twice. The last three presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—were all summer babies. The only other time three consecutive presidents were born in the same season was in the string of Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester Arthur who all arrived in the autumn.

Coincidences and anomalies: Andrew Johnson and Woodrow Wilson share the same birthday (December 29) as do James K. Polk and Warren G. Harding (November 2). Jimmy Carter is the only president born of the first day of the month (October). George H. W. Bush is the only president born in June, while William Howard Taft was the only president born in September.

As the crow flies, George Washington, the first president, was born closer (Pope's Creek, Virginia) to Washington, D.C., than any other president; Barack Obama, was born farthest away (Hawaii). The irony is that Washington never lived in Washington, D.C. It is also interesting to note that the birthplaces of the presidents have marked American expansion westward since the nation's birth, and that the current president was born in both the westernmost state and the most recently admitted state.

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

Special thanks to Nadia Mahmassani for her assistance in preparing this article.

Abraham Lincoln / George Peter Alexander Healy/ Oil on canvas, 1887 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the National Gallery of Art; gift of the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, 1942

George Washington / Rembrandt Peale / Oil on canvas, 1853 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of an anonymous donor

Michael Jordan: Driving Force in the Paint and in the Marketplace

Few individuals have had such effect on their sport as Michael Jordan did his.  Mark Spitz brought about a renewed interest in swimming after his seven-gold medal performance in the 1972 Munich Olympics, and Tiger Woods, the first African American to win a major tournament in golf, introduced that sport to an entire generation of kids worldwide. Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds each revitalized baseball with their towering numbers of home runs in the 1990s, only to succumb to steroid-use allegations in the early 2000s.

Michael Jordan, however, increased the fan base and the viewership of the National Basketball Association. Sure, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson’s classic Celtics-versus-Lakers confrontations preceded the Jordan era and dovetailed into the great period of the Chicago Bulls’ dominance of the game. But Michael Jordan put basketball into the forefront of American athletic culture. It was the hang-time. It was the ball-handling. It was Jordan’s sheer athleticism that captivated the world. One of the iconic moments of his game was the drive toward the basket, bursting past whatever futile defense was thrown at him—maneuvering the ball left to right, right to left—all the while having his tongue flicking out from his mouth as if he were caught in the act of thinking through his penetration strategy.

Beyond the court, though, Jordan rode the vehicle of basketball to the heights of early globalization. Walter La Feber discusses the phenomenon in his book Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism:

The magic words were “packaging” and “synergy” (that is, the cooperative working together of many more goods to make much larger profits than the goods could make alone). Michael Jordan stood apart as a global symbol of synergy’s magic. He and his agent, David Falk, had begun in the 1990s to use a global communications company for selling not just one of the products Jordan endorsed, but a bundle of them linked together. Thus Jordan could suggest that his fans watch the ‘Space Jam’ film while sitting in their Hanes underwear, eating Big Macs, washing those down with Gatorade, and preparing to buy Jordan’s videos over their Jordan-endorsed cell phone.

Michael Jordan in the 1990s, it seems, was capitalism’s greatest voice. Jordan’s performance in world trade was only outdistanced by his performance on the basketball court, though, and he is widely regarded as the greatest player of all time. With an NCAA championship (with the North Carolina Tar Heels in 1982), as well as multiple NBA and Olympic championships under his belt, Jordan also has the distinction of holding the NBA regular season scoring average (30.1) among his many, many other superlatives.
 - Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Cited: Walter La Feber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999)

On Thursday, February 10, NPG historian David Ward will discuss Michael Jordan’s career during a Face-to-Face Gallery Talk at 6:00 p.m. Admission is free; meet in the F Street lobby of the Donald W. Reynolds Center a few minutes before the talk begins.


Michael Jordan / Annie Leibovitz / Cibachrome print, 1991 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; © Annie Leibovitz

Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., 1915–2011

One of the last pillars of the greatest Kennedy generation is gone. R. Sargent Shriver passed away on January 18, 2011, at the age of ninety-five. Shriver was a man driven to serve, and his public service was extensive. During the Second World War, he volunteered and served in the United States Navy although he had spent years protesting American intervention in Europe. He was wounded at Guadalcanal and received a Purple Heart.

Shriver was born in Maryland in 1915 and graduated from Yale and Yale Law School. He married Eunice Kennedy in 1953 and went on to become the founding director of the Peace Corps in the presidential administration of Mrs. Shriver’s brother, John F. Kennedy. In An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, biographer Robert Dallek notes, “Shriver later joked that JFK chose him because no one thought it could succeed, ‘and it would be easier to fire a relative than a political friend.’”

Shriver also served as President Johnson’s chief adviser on the elimination of poverty and closed out the 1960s as United States ambassador to France. He was the vice-presidential candidate on the unsuccessful 1972 Democratic Party ticket headed by George McGovern. Sargent and Eunice Shriver devoted their later years working with the International Special Olympics, for which Sargent Shriver served as chairman; Eunice Kennedy Shriver (her portrait below) died in 2009.

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

Eunice Kennedy Shriver / David Lenz, 2009 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Commissioned as part of the First Prize, Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2006

Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr / Boris Chaliapin /  Tempera, pencil and ink on board, 1963 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time Magazine


50th Anniversary of JFK’s Inauguration: 1961 – 2011

John F. Kennedy was inaugurated to the presidency 50 years ago today, January 20, 1961. 

Near the end of one of our greatest Western films, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, we learn that the heroic story of the central character, played magnificently by James Stewart, is a myth—a myth that propelled him all the way to a Senate seat. When he is traveling to the real hero’s funeral, Stewart’s character tells a group of reporters the true story and then asks one if he’s going to print it. The reporter answers, “No sir, this is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The Camelot aura of the Kennedy administration was palpable to those of us who were around fifty years ago for the inauguration of this strikingly handsome young man and his beautiful wife and family. We had begun to tire of the previous president, Dwight Eisenhower, an older man from a different era. Notwithstanding his infectious smile and decisive role during World War II, he seemed to have lost touch, to be a passive president. We yearned for the young man—the first president born in the twentieth century, the youngest man elected to that office, and the second-youngest to serve—who would once again bring a sense of vigor to the presidency.

John Kennedy told us during the campaign that the Soviet Union was gaining ground on us militarily, that there was a “missile gap,” and that the country needed to get “moving again.” After he became president there seemed to be a flurry of activity: the dazzling Jacqueline Kennedy presided over glittering cultural events at the White House and younger men of sterling academic credentials took the place of older businessmen in the cabinet. Charm and sophistication had taken their place in the capital.

After the young president’s untimely death, only one thousand days into his first term, Kennedy’s men and a sympathetic media told us of his accomplishments: a restored economy and defense and, although not passed into law, administration bills on civil rights and poverty that, when passed under President Lyndon Johnson, changed the direction of the country.

We were told that, had he lived for a second term, Kennedy would have withdrawn our troops from Vietnam. Historians are not supposed to deal with counterfactual reality, so I won’t guess what Kennedy would have done. I will point out, however, that early in his presidency he had a disastrous summit meeting with Soviet Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. Kennedy acknowledged that he had been unprepared for the meeting and intimidated by the Soviet leader. Then came Khrushchev’s construction of the Berlin Wall. Kennedy made a point of saying to his advisers that America would have to take a strong stand somewhere in the world against Communist aggression, specifically referring to Vietnam (where Ike had refused to send troops to support the French). Kennedy duly placed thousands of “advisers” in that land.

I will also point out that Kennedy’s bills on civil rights and government entitlement programs were hopelessly stalled in Congress while he was president. The “missile gap” was a myth—the older guy, Ike, knew that the Soviets had very few operational missiles (and had told Kennedy this in briefings). Eisenhower knew this because of the American U-2 spy plane flights over the Soviet Union, which he had personally directed and supervised; so much for a passive president!

One of the major reasons for the economic upturn in the Kennedy years was a large tax cut with big reductions for the upper brackets, angering many in the left wing of the Democratic Party, who began to view the president as his father’s son. (His father, Joseph Kennedy was a very successful businessman.) And finally, both John Kennedy and his brother Robert, who was appointed attorney general by the president, tried to discourage Martin Luther King’s March on Washington because they feared that it would make the United States susceptible to Soviet propaganda about America’s treatment of its “Negroes.”

This is a part of the “true story.” But then John Kennedy did inspire us to be better, to “bear any burden,” to “meet any hardship”: he created the Peace Corps and kindled excitement and pride in Kennedy’s space program, with its goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Kennedy’s dazzling performances in his televised press conferences showed his sense of humor and quick, nimble mind.

My vivid memories recall an undeniable sense of renewal and pride in our young, intelligent president. Can we discount the sense of progress and well-being that Kennedy instilled in so many of us? And don’t nations and civilizations, like people, need that feeling of confidence? Those of us who are old enough to remember Kennedy will swear that Camelot was real, that if the young man had lived, America would have undergone a great renaissance. We do know now that Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, was the real start of the 1960s, a time of anguish, remorse, and great pangs of conscience for Americans. Ironically, it would be America’s oldest president, in the 1980s, who would restore America’s optimism and confidence lost on that sunny day in Dallas in 1963.

For me, when the question arises about which was the real Camelot, I say, “print the legend.”

- Sidney Hart, senior historian, National Portrait Gallery

John Fitzgerald Kennedy/ Elaine de Kooning,1963 / Oil on canvas / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / © Elaine de Kooning Trust

Mississippi Joins South Carolina in Secession, January 9, 1861

"The people of the State of Mississippi, in convention assembled, do ordain and declare, and it is hereby ordained and declared, as follows. . . .That all the laws, and ordinations, by which the said State of Mississippi became a member of the Federal Union of the United States of America, be and the same are hereby repealed; and that all obligations on the part of the said State, or the people thereof, to observe the same, be withdrawn; and that the said State doth hereby resume all the rights, functions, and powers which, by any of said laws or ordinances, were conveyed to the Government of the said United States, and is absolved from all the obligations, restraints and duties, incurred in the said Federal Union; and shall from henceforth be a free, sovereign, and independent State."

— from "An Ordinance to Dissolve the Union between the State of Mississippi, and . . . the United States of America"  [signed 15 January 1861, below]     

The Union continued its dissolution on this date in 1861 with the secession of the state of Mississippi. As the nation moved toward war, one Mississippian in particular would be advanced to the highest echelon of the confederacy that would form over the next weeks. Previously a soldier, senator, and secretary of war, Jefferson Davis (above) believed that each state had the right to withdraw from the Union. When the Mississippi legislature voted to do so, Davis resigned from his United States Senate seat. He returned to his plantation in late January, only to be summoned to Montgomery to serve as president of the newly formed alliance of seceded states. Of this journey to meet his new office, Civil War historian Shelby Foote writes:

The train made many stops along the line and the people were out to meet him, in sunlight and by the glare of torches. They wanted a look at his face, the thin lips and determined jaw, the hollow cheeks with their jutting bones, the long skull behind the aquiline nose. . . . He brought forth cheers with confident words, but he had something else to say as well—something no one had told them before. He advised them to prepare for the long war that lay ahead. They did not believe him, apparently. Or if they did, they went on cheering anyhow.

At the war’s conclusion, Davis would spend time in jail while the United States government delved into the issue of what to do with him—was his crime treason, this leadership of open rebellion against the United States? Davis would eventually be released, return to Mississippi, and conclude his years writing memoirs of the war.

Although slavery was at the heart of the conflict, Mississippians like Davis also took the issue of states' rights seriously and mustered up rapidly for their cause. The war was waged most heavily in Virginia and Tennessee, but Mississippi hosted the siege of Vicksburg and many fights for control of the mighty river that runs the length of the state. Like every state on either side of the struggle, Mississippi also sent soldiers into battle, perhaps the most famous of whom were the University Greys, Company A of the Eleventh Mississippi Infantry. The Greys were made up entirely of young men from the student body of the University of Mississippi, and those who survived the war long enough to fight at Gettysburg were all either killed or severely wounded in Pickett's famous charge.

William Faulkner (above) alludes to the ill-fated hopes of these young soldiers in a famous passage from Intruder in the Dust:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances . . . we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think this time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievably victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.

The Civil War and the impact of the enormous loss to Mississippi was a significant theme in Faulkner's work. In The Sound and Fury, Faulkner’s conclusion is embedded with symbols of decay of the old South, as Benjy, the idiot man-child, is driven backwards around the Oxford town square (below), an action provoking him to scream at the statue of the Confederate soldier. Faulkner's South never recovers from the massive catastrophe of the war.

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

Photograph by Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Special thanks to Chris Goodwin, director, public information, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, for his efforts to provide us with the copy of the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession.

Cited:
Faulkner, William.  Intruder in the Dust
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative
"An Ordinance to Dissolve the Union between the State of Mississippi and . . . .the United States of America" provided by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
For further reading:
http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/getttour/tstops/tstd3-21.htm

 

 

Jefferson Davis / George Lethbridge Saunders / Watercolor on ivory, 1849 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Joel A. H. Webb and Varina Webb Stewart

William Faulkner / Soss Efram Melik / Charcoal on paper, 1962 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Happy 175th Birthday to Mark Twain, the Eminently Quotable American

Mark Twain taught us many things.

Once, he taught us to curse. “Whar’n the ---- you goin’ to? Cain’t you see nothin’, you dash-dashed aig-suckin’, sheep-stealin’, one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!” (From Life on the Mississippi)

Mark Twain taught us how the stranger fixed the frog jumping contest. “. . . He got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shot—filled him pretty near up to his chin . . . He couldn’t budge; he was planted as solid as an anvil, and he couldn’t no more stir than if he was anchored out.” (From “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”)

Another time, he taught us how to eat well during travel. “. . . I used to slip ashore, towards ten o’clock, at some little village, and buy ten or fifteen cents’ worth of meal or bacon or other stuff to eat; and sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn’t roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don’t want him yourself, you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain’t never forgot. I never see pap when he didn’t want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say.” (From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.)

And still, again, he taught us that the American national pastime was also the sport of the ancient British kings. “The experiment was baseball. In order to give the thing vogue from the start, I chose my nines by rank, no capacity. There wasn’t a knight in either team who wasn’t a sceptred sovereign. As for material of this sort, there was a glut of it, always, around Arthur. You couldn’t throw a brick in any direction and not cripple a king. Of course I couldn’t get these people to leave off their armor; they wouldn’t do that when they bathed. They consented to differentiate the armor so that a body could tell one team from the other, but that was the most they would do. So, one of the teams wore chain-mail ulsters, and the other wore plate armor . . . And when a man was running, and threw himself on his stomach to slide to his base, it was like an ironclad coming into port . . . The umpire’s first decision was usually his last; they broke him in two with a bat, and his friends toted him home on a shutter. When it was noticed that no umpire ever survived a game, umpiring got to be unpopular.” (From A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.)

Any list of American humorists must begin with Mark Twain. From Twain, we Americans learned to laugh at and with ourselves, at others, and at a frog weighted down by shotgun pellets.

Happy 175th Birthday, Mr. Twain.

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

 

Samuel Clemens / Edwin Larson / Oil on canvas, 1935 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist

America Gives Thanks

By NPG Intern Aurora Engle-Pratt

Thanksgiving is regarded by many as one of the most quintessentially American of all holidays. Its history dates back before our nation’s independence, to the days of the colonies. It is a day of tradition and family, a time to reflect and remember the past seasons. College kids return home, families gather, and for one day the nation breathes a collective sigh and all give thanks together.

But how did this day grow from one colony’s harvest celebration to a national holiday? Thanksgiving was not celebrated widely until after the Revolutionary War, when it became an unofficial day of praise and thanks tied to the fall harvest. Both Presidents Washington and Madison made Thanksgiving addresses during their terms in office. But it was not until nearly one hundred years later, during one of the darkest periods in the history of the United States, that Thanksgiving as we know it today was born.

On October 3, 1863, during the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in a moving speech that showcased the best ideals and values of America. In the first lines of his speech, Lincoln said:

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

Lincoln’s words remind us that even in the worst times we can find much to be thankful for. Lincoln led our country in a time of change and uncertainty, a time when the nation was divided, and yet he still believed that giving thanks and acknowledging our many blessings were important enough exercises to warrant a day devoted to their practice. This Thanksgiving season, as we once again face a time of change and uncertainty, we should take the day to be thankful for our nation, for its “fruitful fields and healthful skies,” for its ideals, and for all the freedoms we enjoy as citizens of the United States of America.

Happy Thanksgiving from the staff of the National Portrait Gallery!

Aurora Engle-Pratt is a student at Montgomery College and an intern for the Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery.

Abraham Lincoln / George Peter Alexander Healy / Oil on canvas, 1887 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the National Gallery of Art; gift of the A.W.

Abraham Lincoln Elected President, Part III: Overcoming Adversaries and Preserving the Union

With a single mission in mind, Abraham Lincoln fought, during his entire presidency, not just against the South, but also against his critics—a cross-section of Americans that included everyone from journalists to generals. For Lincoln, the task was always to preserve the Union. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln said, “Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.”

By the time Lincoln was sworn in as the sixteenth president on March 4, 1861, seven states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—had seceded from the Union. Also by the date of Lincoln’s inauguration, this new confederacy of former states had already elected its own president, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the former United States senator from Mississippi and secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce. Well in advance of his first day in office, Lincoln knew he would preside over a fractious form of the once-united land. He committed himself to the preservation of the Union, but his first task was to bring it back together by whatever means necessary.

One of Lincoln’s early detractors was Horace Greeley, founding editor of the New York Tribune. Greeley believed Lincoln was lethargic in his policies toward both slavery and the war, and used his newspaper as a vehicle to propagate his belief that the president was ineffective. Responding to Greeley’s invective, Lincoln wrote the following in a letter dated August 22, 1862:

As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

Though this statement would seem to imply that Lincoln was not concerned about the plight of the slaves, it would be only a few months later that he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Another of Lincoln’s detractors was George McClellan, Lincoln’s choice to head the Army of the Potomac. Routinely, Lincoln had problems with McClellan’s battle plans and eventually demoted him, only to face McClellan as an opponent in the 1864 presidential election. As with other challenges during the war, Lincoln faced off against McClellan and won the election. Lincoln would live for only one week after the conclusion of the war to see his Union reunited following Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

Many of Abraham Lincoln’s writings and speeches are well known and often quoted, but it is doubtful that anything Lincoln ever said could better sum up his efforts than the closing words of his second inaugural speech of March 4, 1865:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

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

Abraham Lincoln / William Willard / Oil on canvas, 1864 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Lincoln Elected President, Part II: The War and the Presidency Served to Age the Man

The portraits of Lincoln tell the story of Lincoln’s war.

It is a fairly common observation that being president changes a man. And when the day arrives that a woman holds that office, it will most likely be said of her also. The duty is great, the commitment is long, and the experience is intense. The portraits of the early presidents might lie a little, because the artist might have embellished the images a bit, but the photographs are, perhaps, more truthful to the moment, as they are exact and leave less to man-handling and translation than do works of artistic portraiture—this, before the days of Photoshop, of course.

Images of Abraham Lincoln over a five year period tell the entire story of the burdens of the presidency, leaving no doubt as to the effect of the Civil War's toll on our sixteenth president.

Before the war, Abraham Lincoln had no beard. He was fifty-one years old when the image below was taken by Mathew Brady.

Early in the war, President Lincoln grew a beard. He was fifty-four in 1863 and the war had been on for two years when Alexander Gardner took this second image.

Just before the close of the war, President Lincoln was the subject of this last and most famous image, again the work of Alexander Gardner.

Over the years since Lincoln's death, parallels have been drawn and metaphors have been created between the war that ravaged the face of the nation and the obvious deterioration Lincoln suffered from the same experience; Walt Whitman's O Captain, My Captain is easily the most recognized among those tropes.

Next week we will conclude our opening discussions of the war with some notes on President Lincoln's leadership and the union cause.

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

 

Abraham Lincoln / Mathew Brady/ Salted paper print, 1860 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Gardner / Glass plate collodion negative, 1863/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution:gift of the James Smithson Society, CBS Television Network, and James Macatee

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

Abraham Lincoln Elected President, November 6, 1860, Part One

Lincoln was elected president of the United States one hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow.

Lincoln is one of the immortals—one of the true American icons—and it is difficult to imagine a United States without having an Abraham Lincoln there at its most dire and poignant moment. Civil War scholars, reenactors, and amateur historians everywhere may believe that the war evolved around the generals or the soldiers or the battles or slavery or states’ rights, but truly the war was Lincoln's war. He did not want it, he did not like it, and he was pleased to see it end, inasmuch as one can take pleasure in winning a war that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

He presided over the nation during its years of division, turmoil, horror, and destruction.

And more than a few have compared him to Moses, because, like Moses, just as the time arrived for peace and renewal, Lincoln was taken away.

Lincoln is the alpha and the omega of the American Civil War. His election, in a greatly oversimplified sense, of course, was the beginning of the war. Lincoln’s 1863 address at Gettysburg—among all the words spoken and written by all the generals, soldiers, journalists, and politicians—are the words at the very core of the prose composed during the war. Lincoln’s murder is the symbolic end of the war, and the trial and hanging of the Lincoln assassination conspirators is the coda that concludes the bloodiest experience ever to trespass upon American soil.

In his journals of the war, Walt Whitman said of Lincoln, “None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.”

And while it is not possible here to capture the complete portrait of Abraham Lincoln, over the next two weeks, in a three-part series, this blog will explore Lincoln and his times in order to lay the groundwork for the National Portrait Gallery’s commemoration of the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War. In the next four years, as we arrive at the anniversaries of many of the war’s events, the staff of the NPG will program, curate, lecture, discuss, and write on the significance of this abject chapter in American history.

Learn more about Lincoln and the Civil War in our online exhibtions CivilWar@Smithsonian and One Life: The Mask of Lincoln.

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

 

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Hesler / Photograph, 1860 (printed 1956) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

President Theodore Roosevelt’s 152nd Birthday—Bully!

Theodore Roosevelt, born on October 27, 1858, was a man of action. Whether he was engaged in politics or on safari, few, if any, American presidents were men of such vigor and energy. Roosevelt was the proverbial unstoppable force.

Born in New York City into a wealthy family, young Theodore Roosevelt did not show the signs of growing into the man he would become; he was small and in poor health, and his terrible vision compelled him to wear glasses from an early age. However, as he grew, he became ambitious and athletic, eventually attending Harvard and graduating in 1880. Though his early forays in politics were not always successful—he lost the election for mayor of New York in 1886—his willingness to engage in a fight kept him returning to the political arena.

He ascended to the White House through the political ranks, beginning with his early years as a New York state legislator. He would serve as assistant secretary of the navy, governor of New York, and vice president of the United States before becoming president after President William McKinley was murdered in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901.

Roosevelt’s famous charge in 1898 up San Juan Hill, Puerto Rico, ranks as one of his most dramatic accomplishments. Roosevelt describes the battle in his autobiography:

By the time I had reached the lines of the regulars of the first brigade I had come to the conclusion that it was silly to stay in the valley firing at the hills, because that was really where we were most exposed, and that the thing to do was to try to rush the intrenchments [sic]. Where I struck the regulars there was no one of superior rank to mine, and after asking why they did not charge, and being answered that they had no orders, I said I would give the order. There was naturally a little reluctance shown by the elderly officer in command to accept my order, so I said, "Then let my men through, sir," and I marched through, followed by my grinning men. The younger officers and the enlisted men of the regulars jumped up and joined us. I waved my hat, and we went up the hill with a rush. Having taken it, we looked across at the Spaniards in the trenches under the San Juan blockhouse to our left, which Hawkins brigade was assaulting. I ordered our men to open fire on the Spaniards in the trenches.

Roosevelt’s presidency was marked by his trust-busting, certainly, but also by significant reforms in the meat- and food-processing industries. Roosevelt is credited for having coined the term “muckraking” to describe the journalism of writers like Upton Sinclair who wrote of corruption in industry and politics.

After reading The Jungle, Roosevelt used his administration to sponsor legislation that forced comprehensive change in the packaging industry. Also, the Pure Food Act was passed in 1906, the result of Roosevelt’s having absorbed lessons like Sinclair’s dramatic and visceral discussion of the slaughterhouses and packing plants:

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausages; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage.

Roosevelt aggressively pursued reform in this realm, as he believed that meat supplied to the soldiers in the Spanish-American War was of poor quality and the product of corrupted processing. However, as Sinclair biographer Leon Harris observes, Roosevelt did not credit Sinclair’s writing as being the impetus for change, noting, “He thought of Sinclair and the other muckrakers . . . as fanatics whose excessive demands did more harm than good, and who would have done little good or no good at all without his moderating role as Solomon.”

Theodore Roosevelt was the first American president to receive a Nobel Prize for peace (three other presidents—Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama—have also received the peace prize).  Roosevelt also greatly expanded the White House, pushing the fabled West Wing into place. Passionate about conservation, Roosevelt designated millions of acres as the national park lands, vastly increasing the scope of the National Park Service. Having attained the highest office in the land at the age of forty-two (he would turn forty-three within six weeks of his inauguration), Roosevelt found himself with plenty of time for big-game hunting and for post-presidential politics upon his retirement. Discouraged with the efforts of his successor, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt ran for president again in 1912.

Although he lost the election, the 1912 campaign trail yielded a further notch in Roosevelt’s rawhide-like reputation. In October of that election year, Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a lunatic, John Shrank. Shrank’s bullet entered the former president’s lung, but it could not penetrate Roosevelt’s spirit; he finished his speech—and the campaign. Upon losing the election, he went hunting in South America, where he finished off a few animals before almost getting finished himself by injury and fever. He survived this episode, however, as he had the others.

Theodore Roosevelt died in his home at Oyster Bay, New York, in January 1919.     

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

Theodore Roosevelt / Adrian Lamb, copy after Philip Alexius de László / Oil on canvas, 1967 copy after 1908 original / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Theodore Roosevelt / Pach Brothers Studio / Platinum print, 1898 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Joanna Sturm

Cited:
Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1913).
Upton Beall Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, 1906)
Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1975).

Michael Jackson and Andy Warhol: Destined to Meet

If ever two people were meant to cross each other’s paths, it would be Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson. Warhol's life was an indulgence to fame, and he treated it from an insider's point of view, making him not just a portrait painter of the famous, but also a philosopher of fame's efficacy. Jackson, on the other hand, was a kid who was famous from an early age and, as many observed, a man who spent years trying to avoid the fame he was handed. Jackson lived his last years behind walls, often appearing in public covered from head to toe and wearing a mask.

Warhol mentions Jackson more than two dozen times in his diary, most often discussing their chance meetings. However, on two moments in 1984, Warhol actually talks about the portrait of Michael Jackson that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait originated when Warhol was commissioned to create the cover for the March 19, 1984, edition of Time.

March 7, 1984: I finished the Michael Jackson cover. I didn't like it but the office kids did. Then the Time people came down to see it, about forty of them. And they stood around saying that it should increase newsstand sales. . . . Then later the Time guy called me . . . and said they were going to use it. I think the yellow one. And I told him to cross his fingers that it wouldn't get bumped on Saturday and he said he would.

March 12, 1984: Time came out and the Jackson cover made it, it didn't get bumped. And the article inside was crazy. It had them asking if he was going to get a sex-change operation and he said no. The cover should have had more blue. I gave them some in the style of the Fonda cover I did for Time once, but they wanted this style.

The National Portrait Gallery developed a relationship with Time beginning in the mid-1970s, culminating in an ongoing series of gifts that includes the Warhol portrait of Michael Jackson.  NPG’s collection of Time covers is an integral component of the museum’s twentieth-century works. It is also the subject of this month’s Face-to-Face gallery talks, the next of which occurs on Thursday, October 21, featuring NPG Associate Director of Exhibitions and Collections Management Claire Kelly, who will be discussing Oveta Culp Hobby, the first secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

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

 

The blog author with his copy of the March 19, 1984 edition of Time.

Michael Joseph Jackson / Andy Warhol / Synthetic polymer and silkscreen on canvas, 1984 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine / © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York

Birth of Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards was born 307 years ago today, October 5, 1703.

Evangelism is as American as baseball and jazz; for every Dizzy Dean, Joe DiMaggio, and Dizzy Gillespie, there is Billy Sunday, Joel Osteen, and Billy Graham. Tent revivals in the summertime are almost as ubiquitous as softball games and carnival midways.

This, of course, only makes sense, as America was founded by individuals who had fled their ancestral homes in Europe that they might worship freely without the fear of persecution. This week marks the birthday of one of America’s earliest and most passionate evangelists, Jonathan Edwards.

Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut. His large family was familiar with the evangelical mission; both his father and his grandfather were preachers. Edwards entered Yale when he was twelve. He was actively involved in the theological discourse of his day and assumed leadership of an established congregation—his grandfather’s—by his mid-twenties. For Edwards, heaven and hell were quite real, and the possibilities of eternity had no middle ground attached to them:

So that thus it is, that natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, his anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of his wrath in hell, and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold ‘em up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up; the fire pent up in their own hearts is struggling to break out; and they have no interest in any mediator, there are no means within reach that can be any security to them.
(Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 1741)

For Edwards and his followers, the hell featured in the works of Dante and Milton was not an imagined thing so much as it was a horrible and hot, tactile prospect for those who were not among the Elect. Edwards preached was the original “fire and brimstone” of the American religious experience.

A doctrinal dispute between Edwards and his congregation caused a separation, and Edwards departed to minister to Native Americans in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he also continued to write and preach. His 1754 work Freedom of the Will is an attack on Arminianism, an anti-Calvinist movement begun in the early seventeenth century; in 1758 he penned The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, a series of arguments on the depravity of man. Edwards was asked to serve as president of the College of New Jersey and did so briefly until his death in March 1758. He is considered one of the earliest great American minds.

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

 

Jonathan Edwards / Amos Doolittle, Copy after: Joseph Badger / Etching and stipple engraving on paper, c. 1794 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Death of Winslow Homer, September 29, 1910

Winslow Homer's legacy was extensive, and his subject matter covered the spectrum from soldiers to seascapes. Although he was as deliberate as the tides and waves he would depict regularly in his later years, Homer entered the American canon almost as serenely as he entered the vocation of art. Art historian Elizabeth Johns writes:

Two years of apprenticeship were enough. On his twenty-first birthday, February 24, 1857, Homer declared his independence. He had learned what he needed to know. He later compared  the two years [apprenticed to a Boston lithographer] to servitude and refused ever again to work exclusively for one employer; even the popularity of "Harper's Weekly," which was eager for his services, failed to lure him.

In paintings such as Snap the Whip, the viewer sees children at play, an uncommon subject in American art before Homer; however, such light and joyful themes show up in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the works of those apparently influenced by him—American artists such as Edward Henry Potthast and Norman Rockwell. Many of Homer's works contained people, sometimes in leisurely pursuits, other times in more dramatic pursuits. Some of his greatest paintings were simply raw images of man against the mighty sea, and the mighty sea flexing its muscles.

Living his later years in Prout's Neck, Maine, Homer built a studio where he would spend his last decades at work imbuing the seas with rich purples and starkly portraying the beaches and rocks with deep grays and browns. Except for tourists, he was as cut off from the world, choosing his company and choosing his solace. One hundred years ago today, American painter Winslow Homer died quietly in his studio.

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

Source:
Elizabeth Johns, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

Winslow Homer /  Thomas A. Gray / Albumen silver print, , 1863  / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

50th Anniversary of the John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon Debates, part 2

So, with America watching, did Vice President Richard Nixon destroy his chances of becoming president because of makeup and wardrobe malfunctions? Nixon was a skilled debater, but John F. Kennedy was not without speaking skills of his own.

Of Kennedy's performance during the first debate on September 26, 1960, Theodore Sorenson states, “His rapid-style delivery crowded more facts and arguments into each severely limited time period than Nixon could answer.” Robert Dallek observes that the first debate made a definite impression on the American audience, though possibly a false one:

Although polls and larger, more enthusiastic crowds encouraged the belief that Kennedy had won the first debate, [Kennedy] knew it would be folly to take a lead for granted. And by contrast with TV viewers, the radio audience thought that Nixon had defeated Kennedy, demonstrating how important the contrasting visual images were before the camera.

Nixon himself was quick to discover the effect of appearance on viewership. In his memoir RN he records:

It is a devastating commentary on the nature of television as a political medium that what hurt me the most in the first debate was not the substance of the encounter between Kennedy and me, but the disadvantageous contrast in our appearances. After the program ended, callers, including my mother, wanted to know if anything was wrong, because I did not look well.

The margin of defeat in the 1960 election was thin. However, the man who would eventually become the thirty-seventh president of the United States did not concede that the 1960 debates, of which the final three carried lesser audiences than the first, were the pivotal moment. “To ascribe defeat or victory to a single factor in such a close contest is at best guesswork and oversimplification,” Nixon wrote.

An interesting aside to the four debates was the inadequacy of the actual debate panelists, who were members of the press. Sorensen states:

In all four joint appearances, the press panelists—with some notable exceptions—were the least effective performers. Their unimaginative questions were increasingly but ineptly aimed at tripping a candidate or creating a headline instead of eliciting specific issues and information. They rarely had continuity in a single debate but became repetitious in the course of all four. Nor did two-and-a-half-minute answers permit any real debating.

Oddly, the tactic that Sorensen says the press encouraged—forcing the candidate to speak in printable, evocative sound-bites (as we have come to call them)—is a strategy preferred by the modern candidates (i.e., Lloyd Bentsen’s “Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy” or Ronald Reagan’s “Ask yourself, 'Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’”). Sometimes, however, what worked in the sound bite turned around to bite the candidate or officeholder at a later date.

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

 

Sources:
Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy (New York: Little Brown, 2003).

Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1978).

Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

Images:
Richard Milhous Nixon, 1913-1994 / Bernard Safran (1924-1995) / Oil on masonite, 1960 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1917-1963 / Shirley Seltzer Cooper (1919-1999) / Pastel on paper, 1961 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Ted Cooper

 

50th Anniversary of the John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon Debates, part 1

Many pundits and critics commented that Vice President Richard Nixon looked terrible during the first televised presidential debates, especially because he was sharing the stage with his youthful and handsome opponent, John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy advisor and biographer Theodore Sorenson writes of the first debate, held on September 26, 1960, “Between the bleak gray walls and the bright floodlights of the television studio, [vice President Nixon’s] gray suit and heavily powdered jowls looked flabby and pallid beside Kennedy’s dark suit and healthy tan.”

The Nixon camp had attempted to impress upon America that Kennedy was too young and inexperienced to be the chief executive: Nixon, though only a few years older than Kennedy, had served as vice president for eight years under Dwight Eisenhower. Interestingly, when Nixon took the oath of office for the vice presidency in 1953 at age forty, he was the second-youngest man ever to hold the office—the youngest was John C. Breckinridge, who served under James Buchanan. However, neither youth nor experience seemed to matter on the night of that first debate. Another Kennedy biographer, Robert Dallek, writes:

Not yet fully recovered from a recent hospitalization to care for an infected knee injured in an accident, and exhausted by intense campaigning, Nixon appeared scrawny and listless. Ironically, Kennedy, whose medical problems greatly exceeded anything Nixon had, appeared to be the picture of robust good health. Kennedy further seized the advantage during the debate when he looked bored or amused as Nixon spoke, as if he were thinking, “How silly.”

At the end of the debate, as they stood on stage exchanging pleasantries, Nixon, watching photographers out of the corner of his eye, “put a stern expression on his face and started jabbing his finger into my chest, so he would look as if he were laying down the law to me about foreign policy or Communism,” Kennedy said. Again, the image was not one of command but of a schoolyard bully.

Before 1960, candidates could bombard voters with radio, television in its early years, newspapers, newsreels, periodicals, and live events. However, the 1960 election would be conducted in the light of a new American affluence. Millions of households owned radios, certainly, but millions also owned televisions, and those audiences were going to witness the Nixon-Kennedy verbal sparring with their own eyes from their own living rooms. This first of four debates was televised from Chicago and was broadcast nationwide on all television and radio stations.

On Friday, September 24, the second part of this article will discuss whether Nixon’s poor appearance on September 26, 1960—fifty years ago this week—actually cost him the election, as has been observed from time to time.

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

Sources:
Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy (New York: Little Brown, 2003).

Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

Images:
Richard Milhaus Nixon, 1913-1994 / Boris Chiliapin (1904-1979) / Tempera on board, 1959 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1917-1963 / Robert Vickrey, (born 1926) / Egg tempera on board, c. 1959 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Wendy Carolyn Vickrey