book

I am grateful to Dianne Bennett, Karal Ann Marling, and Tamara Thornton for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

1. Rockwell, Norman, Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator, as told to Thomas Rockwell (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), 261–63 Google Scholar. The Saturday Evening Post was acquired by Curtis, Cyrus H. in 1897 Google Scholar. George Horace Lorimer became editor in 1899. Between 1897 and 1908, Post circulation grew from 2,000 to over one million. Over a period of forty-seven years, Rockwell painted 317 Post covers (Cohn, Jan, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989], 5, 21, 60 Google Scholar; and De Young, Gregg, “Norman Rockwell and American Attitudes Toward Technology,” Journal of American Culture 13 [Spring 1990]: 95 CrossRef | Google Scholar). For an overview of the history of illustration, see Best, James J., “Illustration,” in Handbook of American Popular Culture, ed. Inge, M. Thomas (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), 3: 69–89 Google Scholar.

2. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 219 Google Scholar; and Guptill, Arthur L., Norman Rockwell: Illustrator (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1946), xxvi Google Scholar.

3. Rockwell had significant investments in American Telephone and Telegraph, Columbia Gas & Electric, and about a dozen other companies at the time of the 1929 stock-market crash. In May 1930, the total value of securities held in the Norman Rockwell trust was about $38,000; within a year, most of the stocks, and the portfolio's value, had declined by 30 or 40 percent. See statement, “Estimated Income from Securities Held by the Chase National Bank,” and “Norman Rockwell Trust,” both in box 48, file “Chase National Bank Records,” Norman Rockwell Papers, Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

4. On the social functions of authenticity, see Orvell, Miles, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1989), 70–71 Google Scholar. On regionalism, see Dorman, Robert L., Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993) Google Scholar; and Pells, Richard H., Radical Visions and American Dreams (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 103–4 Google Scholar.

5. Alexander, Jack, quoted in Guptill, Norman Rockwell, xxii (“the masses”) Google Scholar.

6. “Norman Rockwell: Illustrator of America's Heritage,” American History Illustrated 21 (12 1986): 24 Google Scholar. Even this statement reveals something less than complete self-possession, since it implies the existence of an objective, preexisting America that need only be observed.

7. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 45 Google Scholar. See also Hatch, Alden, “Meet Norman Rockwell,” in Rockwell, Norman, Meet Norman Rockwell (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1979), 9 Google Scholar. Rockwell's dual perspective on his work, as well as the difficulty of labeling his work high culture or low culture, suggest that Rockwell might be labeled midcult or middlebrow. On the educational and publishing project known as “great books” (1920) and the emergence of the book-review section of the New York Herald Tribune as a vehicle of middlebrow culture (1924), see Rubin, Joan Shelley, “Between Culture and Consumption: The Mediations of the Middlebrow,” in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 163–91 Google Scholar. On the Book-of-the-Month Club, see Radway, Janice, “The Book-of-the- Month Club and the General Reader,” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Davidson, Cathy N. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) Google Scholar.

8. “Norman Rockwell: Illustrator,” 24.

9. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 199 Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., 333.

11. Joan Shelley Rubin attributes the emergence of middlebrow culture to basic economic forces–the development of a mass market and a consumer society — as well as to the essentially democratic desire to find a wider audience for literature. In addition, Rubin conceptualizes middlebrow culture as a form of personal liberation, with the leaders of the middlebrow movement in rebellion against the psychic costs exacted by the repressive ways of genteel Victorian America (see Rubin, , “Between Culture and Consumption,” 167, 182 Google Scholar).

12. One can only speculate on the reasons for Rockwell's fondness for Dickens. One possibility is what Sally Stein describes as the “ambiguity of [Dickens's] class position” (Stein, , “Making Connections with the Camera: Photography and Social Mobility in the Career of Jacob Riis,” Afterimage 10 [05 1983]: 13 Google Scholar). More generally, Dickens's melodramatic realism bridged the gap between high culture and popular culture, an achievement that inspired not only Rockwell, but other creators of early-20th-century mass culture, including Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith. On Chaplin, see Manvell, Roger, Chaplin (London: Hutchinson, 1975), 4 Google Scholar; Charlie Chaplin's Own Story, ed. Geduld, Harry M. (1916; rept. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), vii (Geduld introduction) Google Scholar; and McCabe, John, Charlie Chaplin (London: Magnum, 1979), 15–16, 55 Google Scholar. On Griffith, see Schickel, Richard, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 41, 112–13, 120, 534 Google Scholar.

13. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 16 Google Scholar.

14. Walton, Donald, A Rockwell Portrait (Kansas City, Kans.: Sheed Andrew and McMeel, 1978), 35 Google Scholar.

15. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 40, 53, 112 Google Scholar. In contrast, most regionalists had some significant exposure to a traditional social order and its landscape and were the children of ranchers, farmers, and the rural/small-town middle class. See the collective regionalist biography in Dorman, , Revolt of the Provinces, ch. 1, esp. 33 Google Scholar.

16. Dorothy Canfield Fisher argues that Rockwell avoided landscapes because of his desire to paint only the human scene. See her introduction to Guptill, , Norman Rockwell, xi Google Scholar. During the 1920s, several Rockwell covers and illustrations featured the hobo/tramp, a symbol of mobility and uprootedness. See Norman Rockwell: A Definitive Catalogue, text and catalogue by Moffatt, Laurie Norton, 2 vols. (Stockbridge, Mass.: Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, 1986), 1: C260, A306, A474, and, less clearly, C259 Google Scholar. In three of these cases, the isolation of the hobo is mediated by the presence of a dog, and the general impression conveyed by these representations is one of satisfied self-sufficiency (Figure 3). Rockwell's interest in the hobo might have been simply a response to the ubiquity of the hobo on the American scene in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but Rockwell also clearly enjoyed doing this kind of picture (Guptill, , Norman Rockwell, 130 Google Scholar). It is also true that the hobo/tramp's radical separation from society made the figure a mass-culture icon. Jack London wrote about the tramp in his The Road (1907) and, after 1914, Charlie Chaplin and his figure of the tramp were virtually one persona. See Ringenbach, Paul T., Tramps and Reformers, 1873–1916: The Discovery of Unemployment in New York (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973): 3–35 Google Scholar; Robinson, David, Chaplin: His Life and Art (London: Collins, 1985), 113–14 Google Scholar; and Musser, Charles, “Work, Ideology and Chaplin's Tramp,” Radical History Review 41 (Spring 1988): 36–66 Google Scholar.

17. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 35–36 Google Scholar.

18. Walton, , Rockwell Portrait, 112 Google Scholar; and Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 135–36 Google Scholar.

19. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 281 Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., 125.

21. Ibid., 202.

22. Ibid., 197–98.

23. Rockwell employed this perspective to advantage in his depiction of freedom of religion for his well-known series, The Four Freedoms for Which We Fight, published in the Post in early 1943. See Olson, Lester C., “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 (02 1983): 18 CrossRef | Google Scholar.

24. Rockwell, Peter describes his relationship with his father in “My Father, Norman Rockwell,” Ladies' Home Journal, 11 1972, 84, 88 Google Scholar.

25. Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective, catalogue of an exhibition organized by Bernard Danenberg Galleries, New York, with text by Buechner, Thomas S. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972), 42 Google Scholar; and Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 252 Google Scholar (Rockwell's test for his models), 44 (Vermont's expressive people). For the situations noted, see Moffatt, , Norman Rockwell, 1: C243, C244, C260, C269, C277 Google Scholar.

26. Ratcliff, Carter, “Barnett Newman: Citizen of the Infinitely Large Small Republic,” Art in America 79 (09 1991): 92–93 Google Scholar. A brief survey of the lives of others who made their mark on American mass culture in the same period reveals significant parallels to Rockwell's radical ungroundedness. Charlie Chaplin was born in London in 1889 to music-hall artists who were constantly on the move. Chaplin's relationship with his father ended in 1891 when the marriage dissolved. When Charles was six, his mother became ill, plunging what remained of the family into desperate poverty, separating Charles from his half-brother, and inaugurating a period when Charles lived with another family and in charity institutions. His father died in 1901, and two years later, when Charles was twelve, his mother was declared insane. A stage career that began in 1898 meant endless city-to-city tours with his company, dissipating what little remained of Chaplin's sense of place. By 1915, Chaplin's isolation was reinforced and deepened by fame. “I was a celebrity that everyone knew,” he later told his son. “I was loved by crowds, but I didn't have a single close friend I could talk to. I felt like the loneliest man alive.” The figure of the tramp, created in 1914, was a visual representation of Chaplin's own profoundly distended existence.

D. W. Griffith's childhood was not as impoverished or as rootless as Chaplin's, but neither was it free from physical dislocation and emotional distress. Griffith was born in the village of Beard's Station, Kentucky, in 1897 and raised for a time at Lofty Green, the family homestead — a farm in decline — for which Griffith developed a deep and romanticized attachment. From his father, a former Confederate colonel who was badly injured in the Civil War, Griffith took what Richard Schickel, his biographer, refers to as his “taste for a wandering and deliberately unsettled life” and a profound emotional remoteness. Griffith's deep love and admiration for his father went unrequited, and from that rejection Griffith fashioned a self that refused to be vulnerable. “He rarely spoke of his own troubles,” writes Schickel, “and made no inquiries about anyone else's. Indeed, one can find in none of the reminiscences of those who worked with him a single incident in which an exchange of confidences took place, let alone an exchange of intimate emotions.” A physical uprooting followed the death of his father in 1882. Debts forced the family off Lofty Green and finally into Louisville, where the Griffiths occupied seven rented residences, taking in boarders at each address. Unlike Rockwell, who could never identify his roots in any compelling way, Griffith understood that he was attached to and grounded, however inadequately, to Lofty Green and rural/small-town Kentucky.

Other relevant figures include Burroughs, Edgar Rice, the creator of Tarzan of the Apes (1912) Google Scholar, and Wister, Owen, author of The Virginian (1902) Google Scholar. Born in Chicago in 1875, Burroughs appears to have been solidly and securely grounded in a prosperous, business-oriented, upper-middle-class culture that he did not like and spent much of his youth and young adulthood trying to escape. A stint with the Seventh Cavalry in Arizona, a stern and overly critical father, and a series of unsatisfying jobs and entrepreneurial efforts tore Burroughs from his moorings and produced the separation from the existing social order that made Tarzan and other innovative fantasies possible.

Born in 1860 to aristocrats in the Philadelphia suburb of Germantown, Wister began life as the most thoroughly grounded of all our examples. He traveled extensively, attended boarding schools in Switzerland and Concord, New Hampshire, enjoyed Harvard and its club life and Boston society, and otherwise lived the privileged life of his class. Yet, at age twenty-five, he remained undecided about his future. A trip to Wyoming in the summer of 1885 brought to the surface Wister's growing feeling that his social class, and the sort of grounding it involved, was an anachronism. “We Atlantic coast people,” he wrote in his Western notebook for that year, “all varnished with Europe…will vanish from the face of the earth. We're no type, no race—we're transient.” Over the next fifteen years, and culminating in The Virginian, Wister would make the case for the American West as the locus of a new kind of grounding — fatherless, classless, and relative-less — a grounding in open, geographical space.

On Chaplin, see Robinson, , Chaplin, 10, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 27, 37, 40, 78 Google Scholar; Chaplin, Charles Jr, My Father, Charles Chaplin (New York: Random House, 1960), 25 (“I was a celebrity”) Google Scholar; and Manvell, , Chaplin, 27–30 (on the tramp), 32–35, 50 Google Scholar. See also Geduld, , Charlie Chaplin's Own Story, 2–3, 8 Google Scholar.

On Griffith, see Geduld, Harry M., Focus on D. W. Griffith (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 1–14 Google Scholar; Henderson, Robert M., D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 17, 29, 51–53 Google Scholar; and Schickel, , D. W. Griffith, 23–24 Google Scholar (unsettled life), 26 (intimate emotions), 39.

On Burroughs, see Holtsmark, Erling B., Edgar Rice Burroughs (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 1–5, 18 Google Scholar; and Fenton, Robert W., The Big Swingers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 11 Google Scholar.

On Wister, See Etulain, Richard W., Owen Wister (Boise: Boise State College, 1973), 5–9, 17, 38 Google Scholar; Payne, Darwin, Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), 14, 19, 37, 67, 71, xii Google Scholar; and Vorpahl, Ben Merchant, My Dear Wister —: The Frederic Remington—Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto, Calif.: American West, 1972), 19–20 (“varnished with Europe”), 30, 35 Google Scholar.

27. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 261, 262 Google Scholar (“flattered”), 280, 281, 263 (“gay man”). On Babbitt and Sinclair Lewis, see Hearn, Charles R., The American Dream in the Great Depression (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1977), 47–48 Google Scholar.