Detail of Contempt of Misery; “Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland” (1987)
(Das Bauernkriegspanorama)
by Werner Tübke
This is an excerpt of chapter three in Bill Kauffman’s book, Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists.
America, turn in and find yourself. –Paul Engle
So there we were, my wife, Lucine, our then-nine-year-old daughter, Gretel, and I, driving the gravel roads outside Clear Lake, Iowa, following directions like “first fencerow past the big grain bin,” till we ditched the rental car and walked the narrow half-mile path between corn and soybean fields to the spot where on February 3, 1959, the plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed, a tragedy later mythicized by Don McLean in “American Pie” as “the day the music died.” We found the cross and makeshift memorial to the three paleo rock-and-rollers. Lucine detests the har-har leering of the Big Bopper—“Hell-ooooooo Ba-Beeeee!”—but Gretel and I persuaded her to join us in a spirited chorus of “Chantilly Lace,” capped by a hearty “Oh baby that’s what I like!” I imagined the Bopper, a bespangled specter, giving us a lewd wink.
If an Iowa farm is the place where the music died, Iowa writ large is also where the music—American music—was born, and where, in chapbooks of poetry and gleaming brass bands and well-tended graveyards (for everything that dies someday comes back, as a New Jersey regionalist once sang), we find the seeds and pith and guts of a real American culture, as opposed to the unreal America of the TV screen, the ABC-Fox-HBO axis of vile.
Detail of Contempt of Misery; “Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland” (1987)
(Das Bauernkriegspanorama)
by Werner Tübke
In the summer of 2003 we took a cultural tour of the Upper Midwest. Three slaphappy ghouls in a rent-a-car, watching independent baseball in North Dakota and grave-hopping from Sauk Centre, Minnesota (Sinclair Lewis), to Anamosa (Grant Wood), Mason City (Meredith Willson), and West Branch, Iowa (Herbert Hoover).
Our pilgrimage coincided with the annual “Sinclair Lewis Days,” run by Lewis’s bête noire, the Chamber of Commerce, and featuring a Miss Sauk Centre beauty pageant and a pool tournament. Lewis would have loved it. His headstone in the family plot in Greenwood Cemetery looks out on the new Morningview Drive development, where we may be sure George W. Babbitt IV is chuckling at Jay Leno, boasting of the high school’s new array of computers, and wishing that Sauk Centre would attract a Home Depot.
If our cemetery-tripping seems morbid, North Dakota’s Timothy Murphy asks:
Why are we born with tongues
if not to praise the dead?
The dead, we may be sure, are under no obligation to praise us. Indeed, I rather expect the shade of Buddy Holly was cursing the cacophony as we shouted our eulogy in that Clear Lake cornfield.
Clear Lake, coincidentally, was the site of Grant Wood’s last studio. The painter’s spectacles were every bit as unhip as Buddy Holly’s; Miss Prescott, the Cedar Rapids principal who against all logic gave the absent-minded Wood a teaching job at a critical point, said he “looked dumb.” Slow, halting of speech, geekish in his Devo glasses and goofy gadgets (when making a left turn with his car he stuck out a carved hand with a pointing index finger), Wood, by standing on what he stood for, stood foreground when last American artists might treat American themes with Jeffersonian eye.
Grant Wood was of Quaker stock on his father’s side and Upstate New York matrilineage—a happy combination conducive to a cautious radicalism. He displayed an almost evangelical zeal in promoting the culture of the Midwest, and specifically Iowa, not as cloying encomiast but as a lovingly gimlet-eyed native son. His Iowa regionalism, at once populist and conservatively agrarian, imbued such iconic paintings as American Gothic as well as his long-forgotten but sophisticated and practicable plan for a “revolt against the domination exercised over arts and letters and over much of our thinking and living by Eastern capitals of finance and politics.” Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, the Midwestern triumvirate of that golden movement and moment known as “Regionalism,” were being echoed by many writers, among them the dozen Southern agrarian authors of I’ll Take My Stand and the unreconstructed Tennessee poet and charter Southern agrarian Donald Davidson in his gallant Attack on Leviathan (1938).
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his charming novel Kavanagh (1849), told of a writer manque in a small New England village whose tales of the exotic and foreign never quite made the transmutative transit from imagination to pen:
What Mr. Churchill most desired was before him. The Romance he was longing to find and record had really occurred in his neighborhood, among his own friends. It had been set like a picture into the frame-work of his life, enclosed within his own experience. But he could not see it as an object apart from himself; and as he was gazing at what was remote and strange and indistinct, the nearer incidents of aspiration, love, and death, escaped him. They were too near to be clothed by the imagination with the golden vapors of romance; for the familiar seems trivial, and only the distant and unknown completely fill and satisfy the mind.
Grant Wood escaped Mr. Churchill’s myopia. Or should we say he was saved from it by an epiphany. Upon returning from one of several trips to Europe, Wood saw “like a revelation, my neighbors in Cedar Rapids, their clothes, their homes, the pattern of their tablecloths, the tools they used… . I suddenly saw all this commonplace stuff as art, wonderful material.”
Like American regionalists from Sarah Orne Jewett to the Beach Boys, Wood made myth of the sand ‘neath his feet.
Countee Cullen might “marvel at this curious thing/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” but even more marvelously curious is the artist who lives among, even sells to, his neighbors, his subjects. Wood’s lifelong friend Marvin Cone, also an Iowa artist of distinction, noted, “The best testimony as to how his home folks liked him is the widespread ownership of his work in this community, not only in homes, but in offices and in industry.”
Wood decorated Turner Mortuary; made a series of paintings of workers at Cherry-Burrell, a manufactory of dairy equipment; and drew Cedar Rapids historicana—its first trading post, a wood-burning fire engine. He painted murals for hotels in Sioux City, Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, and Council Bluffs. He was that rare artist who was fully a citizen of his place.
Behold Grant Wood chatting up the delegates at an Iowa convention of the National Selected Morticians Association (with an early Maecenas, funeral director Dave Turner); building sets for Cedar Rapids community theater and taking supernumerary parts; and trying to create an artists’ colony first in Cedar Rapids, then Stone City (where he met John Steuart Curry), which lasted two glorious years (1932–33).
Elementally, one might say, Wood founded Stone—Stone City, that is, on ten acres among limestone quarries whose veins would be bled for art, not profit. In a brochure advertising Stone City, Wood called upon “all midwestern painters” to strive “toward the development of an indigenous expression.”
He wished to see Iowa ablaze with local color. Dr. Elizabeth Halsey of the University of Iowa recalled, “When Grant established a Saturday afternoon critique of amateur paintings, he held it in one of the medical amphitheaters. Anyone—town or country, student or housewife—who wanted his work reviewed was welcome to bring it. And anyone who wanted to listen, could come.”
“I am a loyal Iowan and love my state,” he explained. To modern ears, Wood may sound cornpone. I hear him as wholesomely seditious. For he believed in a truth that has become, in an age of American Empire and global culture, a heresy: Iowa matters.
Regionalism, it must be emphasized, was not jingoism, or flag-waving, or the painterly equivalent of the microwave-tortilla eater’s “USA! USA!” chant croaked out during televised time-delayed Viagra-sponsored Olympic matches. Wood, in 1937, called regionalism “a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is, the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America.” (Confounding posterity, the loquacious Benton, something of a cultural nationalist himself, tended to “explain” regionalism without the regions: “Together, we stood for an art whose forms and meanings would have direct and easily comprehended relevance to the American culture of which we were by blood and daily life a part …”)
Wood’s extraordinary manifesto “Revolt Against the City” (1935) was his clearest statement of regionalist principles. The pamphlet was published in Iowa City by Frank Luther Mott, who served as the model for Wood’s illustration of “The Booster” in the Limited Editions Club edition of Lewis’s Main Street. This disgracefully neglected essay is among the most literate pieces ever to appear under the byline of an American artist. (Mott may have “edited” it, and I mean to invest those quotation marks with pregnancy.)
“America has turned introspective,” Wood announces in “Revolt Against the City.” The Great Depression has been salutary in reteaching Americans “self-reliance,” with its Emersonian echo. Deprived of national (which is to say New York-based) and international markets, American artists have fallen back upon themselves and the places that gave them nurture. Community theaters (in which Wood had been active) and regional playwrights were putting heretofore invisible American lives on stage; perhaps Vachel Lindsay’s old dream of a decentralized American cinema was also aborning.
While his confreres Benton and Curry were careful to include urban America in the regionalist mix, Wood is skeptical. He draws the lesson that “cities were far less typically American than the frontier areas whose power they usurped”; riddled with European epigoni, “they were inimical to whatever was new, original and alive in the truly American spirit.”
It is time, reckons Wood, to retire the fatigued cliché of the artsy young boy shaking the field dust from his boots and hightailing it to the cosmopolitan East Coast. “[T]hose of us who have never deserted our own regions for long find them not so much havens of refuge, as continuing friendly, homely environments.” Iowa, for instance, is “not a drab country inhabited by peasants, but a various, rich land abounding in painting material.”
Enter regionalism, whose “basic idea” is this: “Each section has a personality of its own, in physiography, industry, psychology. Thinking painters and writers who have passed their formative years in these regions, will, by care-taking analysis, work out and interpret in their productions these varying personalities. When the different regions develop characteristics of their own, they will come into competition with each other; and out of this competition a rich American culture will grow.”
America, Wood understood, was the sum of its regions. Homogenization, globalization, the concentration of power: these are the enemies of American art. What happens if Boise and Chapel Hill shop, watch, and listen in the same way? Can any art beyond a pallid universalism emerge from the transient suburbanite whose experiences are bounded by Target, Taco Bell, and the films of Mike Nichols?
Wood thought not.
So far, so good. But at this point Wood puts away his brush and picks up his metaphorical GS card. Complications ensue. You see, Grant Wood was “a New Dealer before there was a New Deal,” according to Hazel E. Brown, a classmate of Wood and Marvin Cone at Washington High School in Cedar Rapids and author of a brief but illuminating remembrance of her coevals titled Grant Wood and Marvin Cone: Artists of an Era. Wood was an Iowa Democrat of progressive leanings and an admirer of Henry Wallace, whom he depicted for a Time cover, though in practice his Rooseveltism left something to be desired. For like Edmund Wilson, Wood simply forgot to pay income taxes over a stretch of years. Magazine writers find this a hoot, but paying tribute to the central state is the kind of thing that seldom occurs to a freeborn American of the Wood-Wilson grain, no matter how such men vote. Perhaps the limits of the New Deal revealed themselves to Wood when the Internal Revenue men showed up at his house asking where his 1935, ‘36, and ‘37 reports might be.
Wood was, in fact, a New Deal employee, albeit in attenuated form. As director of the Public Works Art Project in Iowa, he oversaw the painting of federally subsidized murals in the Hawkeye State. His experience led him to propose, in “Revolt Against the City,” federal sponsorship of regional arts centers:
The germ of such a system for the United States is to be found in the art work recently conducted under the PWA. The Federal Government should establish regional schools for art instruction to specially gifted students in connection with universities or other centers of culture in various sections… . The annual exhibits of the work of schools of this character would arouse general interest and greatly enlarge our American art public. A local pride would be excited that might rival that which even hard-headed business men feel for home football teams… .
We’ll forgive Grant his superabundant optimism.
The forty-year experience of the National Endowment for the Arts does not inspire confidence in Wood’s vision of a state-tended blooming of thousands of distinct and local flowers. In his classic study The Democratic Muse (1984), Edward Banfield pointed to the “problems of political geography” manifest when small-city museums use federal eleemosynary to purchase works “mostly from New York City artists.” Banfield concluded, “The real reason for the passage of the act [creating the NEA] and for the making of appropriations year after year was, and is, to benefit special interests, especially the culture industry of New York City.”
I once had great fun drawing up various bills of indictment against the NEA, cutting the gyves off my Gothamophobia and populism and letting them run free. Anecdotes of NEA grantee superciliousness are as numerous as grains of sand in the seashore. For our purposes, one will suffice: when George Plimpton paid Aram Saroyan $1,500 for a poem consisting of the single misspelled word “lighght,” an Iowa congressional aide dared ask the dilettantish Plimpton what the poem meant.
“You are from the Midwest. You are culturally deprived, so you would not understand it anyway,” replied the New Yorker Plimpton, whose enduring contribution to American letters is a football book (Paper Lion) not half as good as the contemporaneous edited diaries of a Green Bay Packer lineman (Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay.)
But I fight no more under an anti-NEA flag. When Dana Gioia, the superb Northern California poet who in a bureaucratic fluke was nominated by George W. Bush to head the arts agency, asked me to serve on the National Endowment for the Arts “FY 2005 Local Arts Agencies: Access to Artistic Excellence” panel, I flipped my inner ideologue the finger and said okay. (To assuage my conscience, I donated the small stipend to local civic groups.) And though I voted against the final package on the grounds that eight of the fifteen agencies that made the cut were from New York or California, I was much impressed by the caliber of the relatively skeletal endowment staff. Not for the first time was I flummoxed by the collision between ideology and people as they really are. Though I am no more philosophically attuned to the National Endowment for the Arts than I ever was, I no longer care to lend hand or epithet to the anti-NEA side. Of all the criminal or unconstitutional acts of the U.S. government in the age of Empire, sending paltry thousands of dollars to favored museums, symphonies, small presses, and even tediously transgressive trust-fund artists is a sin so venial as to vanish into our thinning air.
Yet I still think Wood was mistaken to propose federal subsidy of regional arts centers. For how can state-supervised cultural cells tend toward anything other than tyranny or (more likely in the U.S.) a crushing mediocrity? The painter John Sloan, when asked in 1944 what he thought about a Federal Bureau of the Arts (to complement Mr. Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation?), replied, “Sure, it would be fine to have a Ministry of the Fine Arts in this country. Then we’d know where the enemy is.”
Besides, the the two great efflorescences of American letters—in the 1850s and 1920s—occurred during decades of peace, governmental inactivity, and reviled “weak” or “below average” presidents such as Fillmore, Pierce, Harding, and Coolidge. Might culture profit from an enfeebled state? Might artists need not subvention, or direction from above, or government checks in the mail, but simply to be left alone? Henry Thoreau would say so. His doggerel could have been penciled in response to the NEA’s Guidelines for Grantees:
Any fool can make a rule
And every fool will mind it.
The regionalist dream has lasted a very long time—some of us have yet to wake from it. It predates world wars, even the Civil War. It has raged perfervidly in North and South, on the sidewalks of Brooklyn as well as in Sweet Home Alabama. Sang one antebellum New Yorker:
Ere long, thine every stream shall find a tongue
Land of the many waters!
The poetical prophet was Charles Fenno Hoffman, author of the best poem ever written upon a dead dog. You think I jest? On matters canine, never. Judge for yourself:
An ear that caught my slightest tone,
In kindness or in anger spoken;
An eye that ever watch’d my own,
In vigils death alone has broken;
Its changeless, ceaseless, and unbought
Affection to the last revealing;
Beaming almost with human thought,
And more—far more than human feeling!
Can such in endless sleep be chill’d,
And mortal pride disdain to sorrow,
Because the pulse that here was still’d
May wake to no immortal morrow?
Can faith, devotedness, and love,
That seem to humble creatures given
To tell us what we owe above,—
The types of what is due to Heaven,—
Can these be with the things that were,
Things cherish’d—but no more returning,
And leave behind no trace of care,
No shade that speaks a moment’s mourning?
Alas! my friend, of all of worth
That years have stolen or years yet leave me,
I’ve never known so much on earth,
But that the loss of thine must grieve me.
I don’t know about you, but I’m still bawling. And as long as we’re on the subject of Hoffman, let us digress for just a moment …
Charles Fenno Hoffman, eulogist of dead dogs, was a one-legged Hudson Valley lawyer who had earned his gimp when, in a fit of boyish daredeviltry, he tried to leap from a pier onto a steamer. He came up about half a leg short. As he later came up short in his most ambitious project: a campaign to give our country a new name. If poets ran this land, Hoffman would be revered today as the father of our beloved Allegania.
Antebellum American poets felt keenly the infelicity of “United States.” What could we call ourselves? “United Stateser” is hopelessly clumsy, and rhymes only with “late, sir” and “fate, sir.” Besides, there were five other United Stateses in the hemisphere. “American,” which—not to spoil the ending of this tale—won out, was imprecise, encompassing two continents and many countries.
Washington Irving had worried this bone for years. “We want a national name,” wrote the keeper of Sunnyside. “We want it poetically, and we want it politically… . I leave it to our poets to tell how they manage to steer that collocation of words, ‘The United States of America,’ down the swelling tide of song, and to float the whole raft out upon the sea of heroic poesy.” A stirring name “would bind every part of the confederacy together,” predicted Irving.
So in March 1845, the New York Historical Society appointed Charles Fenno Hoffman, Indian expert Henry R. Schoolcraft, and attorney David Dudley Field to come up with a better name for their country. By month’s end, their report was in. (Commissions worked faster in those days.) It urged replacing the “irrelevant appellation at present used for this country” with one “more likely to promote national associations, and prove efficient in History, Poetry, and Art.”
The trio looked for a name in “our mountains, or our lakes, or our rivers.” The Rockies they judged too distant; the northern lakes peripheral; the great Mississippi River and its tributaries had already given names to six states.
Taking a cue from Washington Irving, they settled upon “Allegania,” to be pronounced “Algania” for poetical reasons. (Though suitable rhymes do not quite cascade: Mania? Mauritania? That’s vain o’ ya?)
The Alleghany Mountains were “the grandest natural feature of the country,” declared Hoffman and company; “one that is common to the north and south; … the back-bone of the original thirteen states: and the dividing ridge between the Atlantic rivers and the great central valley of the continent.” Moreover, the national monogram–USA—would be unchanged in a United States of Allegania.
The name speaks of “colonial adventure, and revolutionary heroism”; its Indian derivation gives it a native quality that a corruption of Italian explorer Vespucci’s forename just doesn’t have.
The Society asked other state historical societies and “eminent citizens” to jump aboard the Allegania bandwagon; mapmakers and textbook writers were requested to designate our land as the “Republic of Allegania.”
It would have been easier to move the mountains themselves than to move men on the subject of the national name. Washington Irving, of course, was for Allegania, but his fellow Hudson Valley eminence Martin Van Buren was against. Another ex-president, John Quincy Adams, was appointed chairman of a Massachusetts Historical Society committee to consider Allegania; uncharacteristically, the Bay State stayed out of the fray.
Newspapers were found on both sides of the issue, but then this was an age when poets—Allegania’s chief constituency—published in the daily press, where they actually had readers. The Boston Journal was all for a new national name, but it preferred the infra dig “Yankee Doodle.” The Evening Gazette of New York pointed out that westward expansion would render the Alleghany Mountains eccentric. The New York Evening Post published “Alleghania” by Henry B. Tuckerman, who (in addition to introducing a new spelling for the name) did his cause no favors with this example of the poetaster’s art:
And Alps and Appenines resign their fame,
When thrills the world’s deep heart with Alleghania’s name!
In May 1845, Hoffman was shouted down at a raucous meeting of the New York Historical Society, at which his committee “hardly escape[d] without impeachment from these indignant United Statesers.”
But that was to be the least of poor Hoffman’s troubles. In 1848, a chambermaid accidentally used for kindling the manuscript of the nearly finished novel that he regarded as his masterpiece. Within a year, Hoffman suffered a nervous breakdown. He would spend the remaining thirty-five years of his life in and out of insane asylums, writing no poetry, the first forgotten mad poet in the Republic of Allegania.
What-ifs might litter our dreams, but then they also light the way back home. We could do worse than to heed our poets.
The Republic of Iowa has its own forgotten poets, mad or not. Quite sane was Jay G. Sigmund, a farmboy from Waubeek and vice president of Cedar Rapids Life Insurance Co. Like Grant Wood a native born to the banks of the Wapsipinicon River, Sigmund is often credited as the most clamant of those voices urging Wood to “paint America.”
In best Wallace Stevens fashion, Sigmund combined his insurance career with poetry. He also wrote badly undervalued short stories that, while clearly animated by his enormous affection for the people of his home region, possessed little of quaintness and belonged instead to the Midwestern realist school of Edgar W. Howe, Sherwood Anderson, and Edward Eggleston.
Sigmund never traveled abroad and “seldom traveled beyond east-central Iowa.” As poet Paul Engle eulogized him, “He wanted not an ivory tower but simply the water tower of his own village.” A poet of corn, of herons, of Ridge Road women and huskers with bleeding hands, he extracted the holy and transcendent from the everyday. Wood read him, and he kenned Wood.
In 1937, Sigmund, an outdoorsman, died, Elmer Fuddishly, hunting wabbits. He had narrowly escaped death some years earlier in a more thematically apt accident. En route to the Stone City colony, where he was to serve as master of ceremonies for a Sunday variety show (no, neither the Beatles nor Topo Gigio were on the bill), the infrequent driver Sigmund rolled his car in a serious automobile accident later depicted by Wood in Death on the Ridge Road. (Cole Porter–Cole Porter?!; was any lad from Peru, Indiana, less likely to become a colporteur? — bought the painting.)
Grant Wood, like Jay Sigmund, never much liked automobiles, the primary instrument of dislocation. He disliked driving, and in Death on the Ridge Road he depicted them as deathtraps. Of persons, yes, but they would also consume a culture.
The automobile, and especially that grand Republican experiment in state socialism known as the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, did so much to deface and distort the American mien. Sigmund, who after all made his comfortable living as an insurance man, was never auto-besotted:
Death used to ride a white-maned horse
Before these gray roads lined the sod
But now he travels on his course
Astride a sleek thing, rubber-shod.
The rubber-shod have brought only more shoddiness in the decades since. Tim Fay, publisher of the handsome and literate regional journal the Wapsipinicon Almanac, sees his redoubt of Anamosa—Grant Wood’s hometown—under assault from the highwaymen. Fay recently told Iowa City’s Icon: “People think [the new four-lane highway] is so great because it will bring all these people from Cedar Rapids who want to get their kids away from drugs and everything. But all it will mean is people coming to Anamosa to build these sprawl homes and make developers and realestate people some money. They’ll live here but go back to Cedar Rapids for their entertainment. They’ll shop at Menard’s, Wal-Mart and Hy-Vee… . And they’re going to drive, keep driving and driving and driving and use more gas. But that’s just what people want. They think that’s the natural order of things. Nobody questions that.”
The Iowa novelist Ruth Suckow, who wrote with artistry and understanding of her farm neighbors in the 1920s, called the Midwest “the seat of American complacency and the seat of American rebellion.” For our beloved country’s sake, let it now be the latter. May the unnaturalness of the “natural order” be revealed unto them.
The revelations might come from painters, from poets, though seldom, contra Vachel Lindsay, from politicians.
Lindsay, in imagining Abraham Lincoln taking on New York City, counseled:
Sing a Kansas love-song, modest, clean and true.
Sing a Kansas love-song, modest, clean and true.
Then lift your psalm of the Manna of our God!
It is the only way to go into Babylon,
Call down fire from Heaven, and the world renew.
The Kansas love-song might be sung more convincingly by Grant Wood’s partner in Regionalism, John Steuart Curry, who was likelier to call upon tornadoes than fire, and in any case when Curry found himself at the eye of the storm it was in Topeka, not Gotham.
The Tragic Prelude
by John Steuart Curry
John Steuart Curry, plowboy, was born outside Dunavant, Kansas, in 1897, when the Jayhawk state still raged with the prairie fires of agrarian revolt. A fine halfback on his high school football team, Curry was also one of the few noted American artists to treat football as a serious subject. (University of Wisconsin Coach Harry Stuhldreher, upon seeing Curry’s 1938 oil sketch End Run, asked the artist, “When in the world did you ever see us run off a play where we managed to get that much interference in front of the runner?”)
Curry met Wood at Stone City. Hazel Brooks recalled “John, who looked so much like Grant in height, width, shape of head and face, and rolypolyness.” Call the diversity police!
Curry explained Regionalism, or “American Scene” painting, this way: “We are glorifying landscapes, elevated stations, subways, butcher shops, 14th Street, Mid-Western farmers, and we are one and all painting out of the fullness of our life and experiences.” The artist admitted the urban potential in Regionalism, although his subjects were almost invariably rural: a country baptism, a roadmenders camp, a stockman, and always The Storm, whether in funnel clouds or lightning, chasing Kansans into cellars and riving oak trees. Thomas Hart Benton was less conciliatory—“The great cities are dead. They offer nothing but coffins for living and thinking”—but then he liked nothing better than sending into a tizzy the neurotic and neurasthenic Manhattanites who, then and now, set themselves up as the hall monitors of the art world.
An exile from the Plains, Curry lived for the better part of his adulthood in New York City, until in 1936 he took the novel position of Artist in Residence at the Agricultural College of the University of Wisconsin. The painter was “bald, jolly, pipe smoking, and liked to wear overalls,” recalled his Wisconsin colleague Robert Gard, but Curry’s affability was sorely tried when he learned that fundamental Scriptural truth: a prophet is ever without honor in his hometown. Or in this case, his home state.
Detail of John Brown
The Tragic Prelude
by John Steuart Curry
For in 1937, one of those clusters of Leading Citizens Who Get Things Done raised the money to commission from Curry three murals for the state capitol in Topeka. “I want to paint the things I feel as a native of Kansas,” said Curry, and those things ranged from covered wagons to John Brown to sunflowers to the menacing tornadoes that seem always to spiral in Curry’s skies.
The artist’s early sketches for the project attracted statewide publicity and invited the sort of nitpicking that vexed Curry, whom his friend Benton described as “oversensitive to criticism.” According to art historian Laurence E. Schmeckebier, Curry’s Kansas “critics contended that pigs’ tails do not curl when they eat; skunks’ tails curl up over their backs when they walk and are not straight as he had painted them; or the red color of Curry’s Hereford bull was too red and not ‘natural-like.’” The conscientious Curry betook himself to a nearby hog farm, where he found that some pigs’ tails do indeed curl when they eat. But he uncurled them anyway.
Yet artistic license was granted sparingly in 1930s Kansas: the porcine assault continued. One politically influential farmer complained that “them pigs look like they’re on stilts; maybe they just waded out of the 1903 flood.” The legs of Curry’s cows were said to be too long. The skirts on his pioneer women were too short. Etcetera.
Despite the cavils—which might be seen as healthy civic involvement in public art—Curry completed two magnificent murals. The third, however, was never executed, for the Kansas legislature refused to remove panels of expensive Italian marble (ten bucks a square foot!) to make way for Curry’s scenes of homesteading life.
Curry’s carpers found the Italian marble a convenient rock with which to stone the artist. The Kansas Council of Women, announcing itself in favor of saving the marble, declared, “The murals do not portray the true Kansas. Rather than revealing a law-abiding, progressive state, the artist has emphasized the freaks in its history—the tornadoes, and John Brown, who did not follow legal procedure.”
John Brown did not “follow legal procedure”: ah, that Kansas gift of understatement!
So the last of Curry’s three Kansas murals went undone. And the artist refused to sign those he had finished. Although Curry regarded the finished murals as “the greatest painting I have yet done,” nevertheless the project was “uncompleted and does not represent my true idea.”
If Curry did not exactly take Kansas by storm, it was not because he found such an ambition ignoble. He had written in Art Digest of his Iowa friend: “Grant Wood is producing an art that is real, indigenous to the life of his people. He has brought the town of Cedar Rapids and the state of Iowa renown and is, in my mind, the perfect example of … ‘the artist as a part of his civilization.’ Not only have the people of Cedar Rapids bought 400 of his pictures, but his advice is asked on the architecture and design of public buildings; the leading hotel is decorated by his hand.”
Like Wood, Curry dipped his brush in the New Deal palette. He painted Federal Art Project murals in the Westport and Norwalk, Connecticut, high schools, as well as within the Departments of Justice and Interior in Washington. But he was not a bought man.
Curry’s stepdaughter, wife of my late friend Dr. Dan Schuster of the University of Rochester, recalled in a 1969 interview of her mostly apolitical father: “Once he got angry at Franklin Roosevelt, and went tearing across the room and tripped on something and knocked the radio on the floor, so we were without communications for a while.”
But in a roundabout way Roosevelt got the last word. For as Benton pronounced the eulogy upon Regionalism: “As soon as the Second World War began substituting in the public mind a world concern for the specifically American concerns which had prevailed during our rise, Wood, Curry, and I found the bottom kicked out from under us.”
The Regionalist moment passed. Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri receded to the far fringe of the American artistic world. As if it were one of Curry’s Kansas landscapes, the sky darkened, the clouds loured, the all-consuming vortex drew near. A pox was marked on all that was healthy in American life. Thomas Hart Benton knew their time was up: “The Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefeller-supported institution in New York, and other similarly culturally rootless artistic centers, run often by the most neurotic of people, came rapidly, as we moved through the war years, to positions of predominant influence over the artistic life of our country.”
In E. Bradford Burns’s marvelous Kinship with the Land: Regionalist Thought in Iowa, 1894-1942 (1996), the concluding date is no arbitrary terminus: “In the years after 1942, internationalism, standards and lifestyles prescribed elsewhere, and goals set by outsiders increasingly triumphed within Iowa. Like most regions of the United States, indeed of the world, Iowa was swept into a cultural homogeneity that on most levels denied the individuality of its own past and ignored those lively, perceptive local voices that once called for introspection and valorization of the local.”
The U.S. won the world war but lost Iowa.
Writes Burns: “After December 1941, one national goal exacted the full energy and attention of everyone: to defeat the Axis powers in Europe and Asia. The distant conflicts raised the eyes of all Iowans to new geographical horizons. The war scattered the sons and daughters of Iowa to faraway places, requiring those who remained home to consult gazeteers in efforts to locate their whereabouts.”
The die was cast. For the next six decades (and God knows how many more to come), Iowans looked away from Sioux City and learned to pronounce, if not understand, Seoul, Vladivostock, Phnom Penh, Fallujah. Burns concludes: “A significant victim of the world war was regionalism. The war eclipsed it.”
After the deaths of Wood and Curry, Benton wrote, “The critics …just called us fascists, chauvinists, isolationists, and at the least, just ignorant provincials.” That a “regionalist fascist” is a contradictory impossibility on the order of a “Christian atheist” did not faze the calumniators. For “isolationist” and “provincial” are the stigmata of Middle American culture: they are deployed against any seditious local patriot who suggests that towns, neighborhoods, or provinces might generate their own cultures without the guidance of the placeless commissars of Manhattan, Washington, and Los Angeles. Because, you see, localism implies isolationism, which means peace, and that is the one thing we are never again to be allowed in the United States of Armaments. That and the conviction that, as art historian Joseph S. Czestochowski sums up the Regionalist ethos, “there was a permanence to be found in the values of rural America.”
The Empire cannot abide the permanent things. Transience and rootlessness are its sacraments.
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