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Abstract
This essay demonstrates how visual works of art may operate rhetorically to articulate public knowledge, to illustrate the moral challenges facing citizens, and to shape commemorative practices, through an analysis of Norman Rockwell's civil rights paintings of the 1960s. By examining the rhetorical aspects of these paintings, including their form and composition, the essay demonstrates the power of visual works of art to evoke common humanity in three significant ways: (1) disregarding established caricatures; (2) creating recognition of others through particularity; and (3) depicting material aspects of American society, thereby reminding viewers that abstract political concepts are always relative to the individuals or groups whose lives are most directly influenced by their presence or absence.
Notes
1. David Halberstam, “Martin Luther King, American Preacher: He Delivered the Gospel According to the Constitution. Amen,” Esquire, December 1983, 311. See also Gordon Parks, “Introduction: This Rare Collection,” in Life: 100 Photographs That Changed the World (New York: Time, Incorporated Home Entertainment, 2003); W. Bitzhugh Brundage, “No Deed but Memory,” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 22.
2. Gretchen Sullivan-Sorin, “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Enduring Struggle for Freedom,” in In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Gretchen Sullivan-Sorin and Helen Shannon (Atlanta, GA: Tinwood Books, 2002), 17.
3. Judy Larson and Maureen Hart Hennessey, “Norman Rockwell: A New Viewpoint,” in Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, ed. Maureen Hart Hennessey and Anne Knutson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999), 43.
4. Laurie Moffatt, “The People's Painter,” in Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, 26.
5. Karal Ann Marling, Norman Rockwell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997), 137.
6. Laura Claridge, Norman Rockwell: A Life (New York: Random House, 2001), 449.
7. Marling, Norman Rockwell, 140.
8. Claridge, Norman Rockwell: A Life, 449.
9. Marling, Norman Rockwell, 140.
10. Lester C. Olson, “Portraits in Praise of a People: A Rhetorical Analysis of Norman Rockwell's Icons in Franklin D. Roosevelt's ‘Four Freedoms’ Campaign,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 69 (1983): 24. Olson demonstrates how Rockwell painted scenes in which he synthesized symbols from diverse American populace, situations, and actions into each of the “Four Freedoms” so as to promote “varied identifications.” While Olson provides a penetrating study of Rockwell's World War II illustrations, he does not examine the artist's civil rights pictures from the 1960s.
11. Congressional debates over the Voting Rights Act in the early 1960s reveal that opponents of desegregation and the Civil Rights Act rhetorically depicted black people as a separate class of beings, interlopers into the territory of rights, and a physical and economic threat. Proponents rhetorically depicted black people as “the Negro”—a faceless, abstract concept—and placed most of their emphasis on the even more abstract concept of democracy and its related terms justice, fairness, and civil rights. Both sides denied Negroes any type of personhood, the result being that Negro men, women, and children were excluded or rendered invisible. See Hearings before the Committee on Rules, House of Representatives, Civil Rights, H.R. 7152, 88th Congress, 1964; and the interviews with Congressmen in “Crisis in Race Relations: How Will It Be Met?” U.S. News and World Report, August 10, 1964.
12. ”Quoted in Adam Gorlick, “Rockwell Left Nostalgia Behind,” The News and Observer, June 6, 2004, 3G. Rockwell himself described this turn in the following manner: “There was a change in the thought climate in America brought on by scientific advances, the atom bomb, two world wars, Mr. Freud and psychology. … [I am] wildly excited about painting contemporary subjects … pictures about civil rights, astronauts … poverty programs. It's wonderful!” Quoted in David Hickey, “The Kids Are Alright: After the Prom,” in Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, 124. Perhaps the earliest and most obvious indication of Rockwell's desire to illustrate the civil rights movement occurred in “Freedom to Worship,” in which he painted a black woman at prayer in the corner. According to Marling, the gesture convinced the head of the Bronx Inter-Racial Conference to ask Rockwell for a companion series on the subject of race relations in America, but the project never materialized. See Marling, Norman Rockwell, 138. A more recent example of Rockwell's interest in civil rights occurred in 1959, when Rockwell began imagining a 10-foot mural to symbolize the United Nations and the idea of world tolerance as expressed in “The Golden Rule.” The early sketches received scant attention from various ambassadors and so Rockwell stored his preliminary work in a back room of his studio. In 1960, however, he decided to illustrate the maxim by painting a canvas with faces from all over the world, all in an attitude of worship. The painting, also called “The Golden Rule,” appeared on the Saturday Evening Post cover of April, 1961. While not directly tied to the civil rights movement, the picture displayed a multi-cultural group of people arranged in a fashion that appeared to designate their order of appearance—and significance—in world history. Curiously, Jews and blacks shared dominant positions in the foreground of the painting. This suggested what would have been for many of his followers the radical idea that the descendents of all racial groups, including Caucasians, were Jews and blacks, one big “family of humans,” as it were. On the other hand, at a more metaphorical level—and perhaps for those who took special umbrage at this unsettling idea—Rockwell indicated that all people were seen equally in the eyes of God, something he emphasized by writing in capital letters across the bottom third of the picture the words, “DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU.” Rockwell received the Interfaith Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews for his picture. It described his work as “depicting the universal fact that all men .… are members of the One Family of Man under God." Eventually, the painting was hung in the United Nations building.
13. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 56.
14. Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, 57.
15. Elizabeth Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 7 and 8. For a more recent investigation of patterns of racial depiction in the mass media, see Robert M. Entman, The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
16. Hale, Making Whiteness, 8.
17. Rockwell himself produced stultifying images of African Americans. For example “Boy in a Dining Car,” from 1946, portrayed a scene on board the dining car of a train, where a black steward stands over, and is apparently amused by, a white child's determined effort to make sense of the check. As Hale might put it, the painting is significant because both the steward and the child appear visually unaware of their servant–master relationships as this configuration was determined by the racial conventions of the time. The picture, therefore, could be read as helping to increase the invisibility and power of whiteness. See also Marling's analysis of “condescending” racial stereotypes in Rockwell's lesser known work, “Love Ouanga,” which American Magazine published in 1936 to accompany a Kenneth Perkins short story by the same name. Marling, Norman Rockwell, 137.
18. Perkle Jones was quoted from the Tavis Smiley show, “Looking Back at the Panther Movement,” on July 19, 2004, www:npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId = 14/.
19. Hickey, “The Kids Are Alright,” 124.
20. Quoted in Robert Coles, “Ruby Bridges and a Painting,” in Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, 111.
21. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising at Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 365.
22. Susanne Langer, Problems of Art (New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1957), 31.
23. Hariman and Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity,” 364.
24. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counter Publics,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 57.
25. Harriman and Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity,” 365. Focusing specifically on Joe Rosenthal's famous photograph of marines hoisting an American flag on Iwo Jima, they argue that the picture's appeal arises from its embodiment of three discourses of political identity—egalitarianism, nationalism, and civic republicanism. For additional analysis of how visual images categorize racial identity in abstract terms, see Lauren R. Tucker and Hemant Shah, “Race and the Transformation of Culture: The Making of the Television Miniseries Roots,” in Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 9 (1992): 325–36.
26. Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 118. We should note that while Rockwell's pictures show an imperfect world where desegregation might, at some juncture, have worked, many contemporary African American scholars argue that the civil rights movement and the Brown decision in particular never achieved their stated aims and in fact fell short by a wide margin. See, for example, Charles J. Ogletree, All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: Norton, W.W. and Company, Inc., 2004); Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream (Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2004); and Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
27. One example of how the white press perpetuated images of blacks as “threatening” appeared in the remarks of a Mississippi newspaper editorialist, who responded to the Brown v. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision by predicting that,
Human blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of this decision but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the United States Court Building. White and Negro children in the same schools will lead to miscegenation. Miscegenation leads to mixed marriages and mixed marriages lead to mongrelization of the human race.
In Virginia, another writer regretted the general move toward racial desegregation in American society: “To many people this decision is contrary to a way of life and violates the way they have thought since 1619.” For these and similar reactions to the Supreme Court decision on desegregation, see http://www.landmarkcases.org/brown/reaction.html.
28. Coles, “Ruby Bridges and a Painting,” 105.
29. Coles, “Ruby Bridges and a Painting,”105.
30. Coles, “Ruby Bridges and a Painting,” 109 (his emphasis).
31. For an examination of the ways in which black authors wrestled with the sources of racial conflict, see William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Knopf Publishing Group), 1976.
32. Claridge, Norman Rockwell: A Life, 451–52.
33. Larson and Hennessey, “Norman Rockwell: A New Viewpoint,” 50. Hickey also suggests that Rockwell celebrated acts of tolerance in his paintings “because in a democracy where everyone is different and anything can happen, tolerance is the overriding social virtue.” See Hickey, “The Kids Are Alright,” 125.
34. Coles, “Ruby Bridges and a Painting,” 107.
35. Marling, Norman Rockwell, 140.
36. Hickey, “The Kids Are Alright,” 120.
37. Helen M. Shannon, “Watching History-Making in the Making,” in In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 22.
38. Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 509.
39. Hickey, “The Kids Are Alright,” 125 and 128. Moffatt adds that Rockwell's images “convey our shortcomings as well as our national ideals of freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, and common decency in ways that anybody could understand.” See Moffatt, “The People's Painter,” 26.
40. Claridge, Norman Rockwell: A Life, 449–50.
41. Hickey, “The Kids Are Alright,” 125. Whereas before Rockwell had concentrated on portraying what Hickey calls a world in which only “the minimum conditions of democracy are made visible,” his civil rights pictures revealed that not even the “minimal” conditions had been established where blacks were concerned, at least not in Louisiana or Mississippi or in segregated white suburbs (125).
42. Hickey, “The Kids Are Alright,” 125 (his emphasis).
43. Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 25–52.
44. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 39.
45. Quoted in Adam Gorlick, “Rockwell Left Nostalgia Behind,” The News and Observer, June 6, 2004, 3G.
46. Rockwell's decision amounted to what Marling has called “a confession of his own sins.” She goes on to quote Rockwell himself, who admitted, “I was born a white Protestant with some prejudices which I am continuously trying to eradicate. … I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people or myself.” Marling, Norman Rockwell, 140.
47. Sullivan-Sorin, “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Enduring Struggle for Freedom,” 76.
48. Claridge, Norman Rockwell: A Life, 452.
49. Gorlick, “Rockwell Left Nostalgia Behind,” 3G.
50. Quoted in Gorlick, “Rockwell Left Nostalgia Behind,” 3G. For an account of her experiences at William Frantz, see Ruby Bridges, Through My Eyes, ed. Margo Lundell (New York: Scholastic Press, 1999).
51. Coles, “Ruby Bridges and a Painting,” 111.
52. Coles, “Ruby Bridges and a Painting,” 111.
53. Coles, “Ruby Bridges and a Painting,” 111. Of course, the irony here is that this man's comments reveal the extent to which “the problem” was and is in the hearts and minds of white Americans, as Rockwell and black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael argued:
I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people. For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black, I am a human being. Therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didn't know that. Every time I tried to go into a public place they stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell that white man, “He's a human being; don't stop him.” That bill was for the white man, not for me. I knew I could vote all the time and that it wasn't a privilege but a right. … That bill was for white people. I know I can live any place I want to live. … You need a civil rights bill, not me. The failure of the civil rights bill isn't because of Black Power or because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities. That failure is due to the whites' incapacity to deal with their own problems inside their own community.
In James Andrews and David Zarefsky, Contemporary American Voices: Significant Speeches in American History, 1945–Present (New York: Longman Publishing Group, 1999), 102.
54. Mark M. Poster, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 7.
55. Richard Merelman, Representing Black Culture: Racial Conflict and Cultural Politics in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1995).
56. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (London: Arnold Publishers and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4.
57. Hariman and Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity,” 366.
58. Hariman and Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity,” 381.
59. Kress and van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourses, 22.
60. As Kenneth Burke writes, “[If] in the opinion of a given audience, a certain kind of conduct is admirable, then a speaker might persuade the audience by using ideas and images that identify his cause with a kind of conduct.” Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 5.
61. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century, 119.