|
|
|
|
MONEY,
POWER and MODERN ART
PART 5: Modern art
and freedom of expression
By
Henry C K Liu
PART 1: Ruthless
empire builders
PART 2: A
monetary coup d'etat
PART 3: The
year of contradictions
PART 4: Modern art and socialism
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and two other
serious collectors created the Museum of Modern
Art in response to the Metropolitan Museum's lack
of enthusiasm for the work of modern artists they
collected. When her third child and second son
Nelson, in whom she had cultivated a life-long
love for modern art, graduated from college in
1930 at age 22, he was appointed chairman of the
Junior Advisory Committee of the museum and began
to take an active role in its affairs. The Junior
Advisory Committee under Nelson Rockefeller soon
became aware of public criticism of the Modern's
near-exclusive focus on modern European artists.
In fact, the opening exhibit of the Museum of
Modern Art consisted entirely of European artists.
It was one thing to face the fact that US culture
had yet to flower while pre-modern art was being
created in Europe and other ancient cultures, but
the Untied States had come of age in the modern
era and American artists now deserved their place
in the sun. The Junior Advisory Committee
criticized the museum's trustees for neglecting
the works of American artists and, in response,
the trustees authorized the committee to organize
a show, "Murals by Painters and Photographers", of
works of American muralists who were beginning to
be productive under the aegis of the Works
Progress Administration (WPA) of the New Deal of
president Franklin D Roosevelt. The artists were
commissioned in 1932 and, when the advance showing
unveiled their works, the trustees and young
Nelson were shocked. Many of the murals adopted
the radical political tone of the time, with most
leaning sharply to the left.
Included in
the exhibit was a work by Hugo Gellert
(1892-1985), a Hungarian immigrant who came to the
US in 1906 at age 14, titled Us Fellas Gotta
Stick Together - Al Capone. It depicts Henry
Ford, president Herbert Hoover, J P Morgan, and
John D Rockefeller Sr sitting with none other than
Al Capone, the celebrated Chicago gangster. The
statement made through this work of art, that
capitalism is a crime and the most successful
capitalists are criminals, sent young art-loving
Nelson into a state of panic. Such a charge, in
the atmosphere of the Depression, when large
numbers of hard-working people had suddenly lost
their jobs and life savings, struck a popular
response not only from the radical left but also
from the conservative right, which had always
viewed members of the Eastern money trust as
little better than criminals in their unethical
machination over the nation's money through the
establishment of a privately owned central bank.
Gellert had provided the cover
illustration for the first issue of a new
magazine, The Liberator (February 1918), which
featured John Reed's report on the Russian
Revolution. By 1930, Gellert was a well-known
artist with a passionate commitment to leftist
political agitation, which he professed as
inseparable from art. Gellert's activities
contributed significantly to the political tone of
American art of the 1930s. He played a key role in
organizing the Artists Committee for Action and
the Artists Union, two pivotal institutions that
greatly contributed to the instigation and
perpetuation of the federally funded WPA art
programs. He served on the editorial committee of
Art Front, official publication of the Artists
Union. A Gellert drawing adorned the masthead of
the premier issue, with a Stuart Davis drawing on
the cover. Gellert helped organize the American
Artists Congress of February 1936, where he was
the keynote speaker. He spoke at the second
American Artists Congress in December 1937 as
well. Also in late 1937, Gellert became involved
with the Artists Coordination Committee for the
National Exhibition of Contemporary American Art
at the 1939 New York World's Fair. At the same
time, Gellert oversaw the formation of a labor
union to protect the rights of muralists and their
assistants as the World's Fair was being planned.
Gellert painted a spectacular mural imbued with
the technological optimism pervasive in 1930s
Modernism for the Communications Building at the
Fair, which unfortunately, along with two other
murals in New York City painted during the 1920s
and 1930s, have since been demolished along with
the buildings that housed them.
Gellert
had been invited to Moscow by the USSR State
Publishing House to design book jackets for
Russian editions of Theodore Dreiser's books. Upon
his return to New York in 1928, he painted a mural
in the Workers Party Cafeteria on Union Square.
Deeply influenced by Russian Modernism of the
1920s, it was one of the first Modernist murals in
the United States, just predating the North
American commissions of Diego Rivera (1886-1957)
and Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949). Orozco
painted a mural at the New School for Social
Research in New York, celebrating fraternity,
world revolution, labor, the arts and sciences and
the struggle against slavery, and a group of
frescos for the Baker Library at Dartmouth College
(1932-34), where Nelson Rockefeller was an
alumnus.
In November 1928, shortly after
the Workers Party Cafeteria mural's unveiling, The
New Yorker declared: "The Gellert murals are the
only ones on this continent except those of Rivera
in Mexico City that are really contemporary."
About 2.4 meters high, Gellert's mural covered one
entire wall, 24 meters long, and a facing wall
nine meters long. The long wall included a frieze
of monumental, brightly colored, sculpturally
rendered, industrial workers standing before
precisionist factories and mine structures. The
mural was destroyed when the building was
demolished in 1954.
In 1932, Gellert
captured headlines in New York with a mural study
that he submitted to the invited Museum of Modern
Art's "Murals by Painters and Photographers"
exhibition. Gellert's painting Us Fellas Gotta
Stick Together - Al Capone (Collection of The
Wolfsonian, Miami Beach, Florida), along with Ben
Shahn's famous The Passion of Sacco and
Vanzetti (Collection of the Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York) and a painting by William
Gropper (1897-1977), was rejected for the
exhibition. Gropper's painting, The Lawmakers,
once hanging in the White House, is now part
of the Clinton Presidential Library collection in
Arkansas. It was a gift to president Bill Clinton
in 1994. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) now lists
more than 30 of Gropper's etchings and lithographs
in its permanent collection.
Gellert
painted Us Fellas during a time when the
Rockefeller family was being criticized for
commissioning no work by American artists for the
Rockefeller Center project. The right-wing
extremists had always attacked the Rockefellers
for being internationalists. The extreme right had
gone as far as accusing J P Morgan of being a US
agent of the globalist Bank of England and the
Rothschilds. "Globalization" was a dirty word
throughout much of US history when the nation was
the victim. In February 1932, The Art Digest
reported: "The rumor that the murals for Radio
City, the Rockefeller project in the heart of New
York, were to be commissioned to Rivera, [Jose
Maria] Sert and other foreign artists [Frank
Brangwyn] has stirred up a tempest." The British
painter Brangwyn worked under William Morris; his
subsequent travels provided inspiration for his
paintings. He was strongly influenced by the
art nouveau movement, and is best known for
his large murals. In an article published in New
Masses, Gellert himself explained the backlash
effect: "Upon the heels of this upheaval, the
Museum of Modern Art, of which Mrs John D
Rockefeller Jr is treasurer, invited [domestic]
artists to participate in an exhibition of mural
decorations."
Gellert's Us Fellas
was clearly meant to offend and provoke the
Rockefellers. The situation threatened to become
embarrassing for the museum when a number of other
artists in the exhibition declared that they would
withdraw their works if the offending paintings by
Gellert, Gropper and Shahn were not hung. Wishing
to avoid a scandal, the museum quickly conceded
and agreed to include the three works in the
exhibition (but not to reproduce them in the
catalogue). However, the press nonetheless played
up the story. The day before the exhibition
opened, the New York Daily World Telegram
announced: "Insurgent art stirs up storm among
society. Murals for Modern Museum rejected as
offensive, then accepted. Linked Hoover to Al
Capone."
One would think that Gellert
would then be assigned to the ranks of
untouchables by the Rockefellers. Indeed, Helen
Appleton Read, a critic for the Brooklyn Daily
Eagle, observed:
It suffices to say that the panels
sent in by Gellert, Shahn and Gropper had no
place in an exhibition purporting to discover
material with which to enrich the walls of
modern buildings. But shortly after
the "Murals by Painters and Photographers" show
closed, Gellert was contacted by Eugene Schoen, an
interior designer hired by the Rockefeller Center
Corp, informing him that Wallace K Harrison, a
relative and close friend of Nelson Rockefeller, a
liberal from Massachusetts and one of the younger
architects of Rockefeller Center, had seen
Gellert's cafeteria mural and wanted Gellert to
paint a mural for the Center Theater, a small
cinema within the Rockefeller Center complex. The
mural was later destroyed when the movie theater
was demolished to make room for an office
building.
In 1953, Paul Robeson was guest
speaker at the 40th anniversary observation of
Gellert's career. Gellert appeared as himself in
Warren Beatty's 1982 film Reds as a
"witness" to historic events. On October 3, 1985,
he spoke at the Masses exhibition at Whitney
Museum, New York, and two months later, on
December 6, he died at home in Freehold, New
Jersey.
Trouble at the Rockefeller
Center
Nelson and the entire Rockefeller
family genuinely believed they were true lovers of
art and freedom, and they worked hard to project a
public image of tolerance to which they tried to
live up in their personal lives. They were drawn
to the idea of "art for art's sake" as a
philosophy embedded with a high sense of freedom.
Yet freedom to be abstract was less objectionable
than freedom to confront with realism. The
Rockefellers had made extraordinary efforts to
display their art collections to the public, in
keeping with their commitment to public service,
rather than locking it away in private collections
as selfish acquirers. Yet despite Nelson's love
for art and his support of freedom of expression
in art, he could not reconcile himself to the
aggressively hostile ideological messages
displayed by some of these murals. While Nelson
firmly believed that artists had an inviolable
right to express their political views, his
commitment to the sanctity of private property
argued that artists should not abuse their
privilege by attacking the very system that
allowed them to exercise their right of free
expression with funding of displays of their art
to the world. Yet freedom is indivisible. Denial
of the freedom to attack the sacred amounts to
support for the profane. The breaking of taboos is
the very basis of freedom. Fearful of negative
publicity to their carefully cultivated liberal
image from any attempt to cancel the exhibit, the
museum, under pressure from the solidarity of many
artists in the show, displayed the offensive
murals as inconspicuously as possible without
further incident.
The controversy
surrounding the Modern's American-mural exhibition
set the stage for a clash of ideological values
that would once again place the young Nelson
Rockefeller in an uncomfortable position of having
to choose between freedom of expression through
art, and the censorship of art that expressed
ideologies that opposed those of his class. While
the 1932 mural exhibition was being put together,
Nelson was also put in charge of commissioning an
artist to paint a mural in the lobby of the RCA
Building under construction in Rockefeller Center,
which today is the GE Building after General
Electric transformed itself from an industrial
corporation into a financial conglomerate and
acquired RCA.
In 1929, Nelson's father,
John D Rockefeller Jr, began construction of the
Rockefeller Center, a monument to good urban
design, to provide jobs in the midst of the Great
Depression and to instill renewed confidence in
the collapsed economy and battered capitalism. The
project was intended to represent all that was
good about capitalism at a time when the modern
capitalist system faced its greatest crisis. It
was also intended to reflect the achievements of
the American way of life while standing as a
symbol of the future possibilities of big-business
capitalism. The task of decorating the lobby of
this mecca of capitalist progress fell to Mexican
artist Diego Rivera, after the terms of the
commission had been rejected by Henri Matisse and
Pablo Picasso, who was one of Nelson's favorite
artists despite being a communist.
In
November 1930, Rivera arrived in San Francisco to
paint a mural for the Stock Exchange. This was
followed by a witty fresco for the California
School of Fine Art showing the painter and his
team at work: right at the center of the
composition is Rivera's enormous backside. He went
to New York in November 1931 for a retrospective
exhibition at MOMA. This was the museum's 14th
exhibition and only its second one-man show - the
first had been devoted to Matisse. It broke all
previous attendance records and transformed Rivera
and his wife, Frida Kahlo, into major celebrities
symbolizing the populist spirit of the epoch. His
next stop was Detroit, where he had been invited
to provide murals for the inner courtyard of the
Detroit Museum. The reception given to the murals
when they were officially unveiled in March 1933
was stormy, but Rivera and his supporters
prevailed. The painter then moved back to New York
to carry out a yet more prestigious commission - a
mural for the RCA Building, focal point of the new
Rockefeller Center.
The decision to
commission Rivera carried a known risk. Unlike
Picasso, whose commitment to communism was
abstract, Rivera was an avowed communist and was
known to be inclined to fill his murals with
realist political imagery, not cubist abstraction.
He was, however, an extremely popular artist and
was a favorite of Nelson's mother, Abby, who was
also a good friend of Rivera's communist comrade
and artist wife, Kahlo, briefly a lover of Leon
Trotsky when the exiled revolutionary was a guest
at Rivera's home in Mexico. With the reluctant
consent of John D Rockefeller Jr, Rivera was
offered a generous commission of US$21,000
(equivalent of $5 million today) and given a theme
for the mural. The commission was not simply to
decorate the walls of the lobby of a major
corporate headquarters building, but to serve a
propaganda function in the tradition of
Michelangelo's fresco on the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel. While Michelangelo's Sistine
Chapel ceiling was dedicated to the glory of God,
Rivera's mural in the RCA building was intended to
glorify capitalism. Rockefeller Jr wrote a letter
to Rivera: "The philosophical or spiritual quality
should dominate ... We want the paintings to make
people pause and think and to turn their minds
inward and upward ... Our theme is NEW FRONTIERS
..." Rivera was given the cumbersome title "Man at
the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision
to the Choosing of a New and Better Future," and
he began work in March of 1933, the year Adolf
Hitler came to power in Germany. To Rivera, a new
and better future pointed to communism. To
Rockefeller, capital and labor were natural
symbiotic partners, not enemies, if only capital
would act with benevolence and labor with
dependability, capitalism would lead mankind to
unbound destiny. This was a view that led to the
Ludlow Massacre of 1913.
The year 1913 was
the one during which modern art was introduced to
the United States through the Armory Show, the
same year that central banking was instituted in
the US to legitimize the private control of money,
and the same year of the Paterson Strike Pageant
to support workers' rights. It was also the year
of the Ludlow Massacre. On September 17, 1913,
workers in the mines of the Rockefeller-owned
Colorado Fuel and Iron Co (CF&I) went on
strike. The strike call read: "All mineworkers are
hereby notified that a strike of all the coal
miners and coke-oven workers in Colorado will
begin on Tuesday, September 23, 1913 ... We are
striking for improved conditions, better wages,
and union recognition. We are sure to win." What
came to be known as the Ludlow Massacre occurred
on Monday, April 20, 1914. More than 3,000
kilometers separated the Rockefeller headquarters
in New York from southern Colorado, where one of
history's most dramatic confrontations between
capital and labor took place. The face-off raged
for 14 hours, during which the miners' tent colony
was pelted with machine-gun fire and ultimately
torched by the state militia. A number of people
were killed, among them two women and 11 children
who suffocated in a pit they had dug under their
tent to protect themselves from gunfire. The
deaths were blamed on John D Rockefeller Jr,
Abby's husband and Nelson's father. For years
after, the Rockefellers would struggle to redress
the tragic event, and strengthen the Rockefeller
social conscience and activism in the process.
The following record of communication
provides a glimpse of the ideological conflict
behind the incident:
Rockefeller Jr to
CF&I vice president Lamont Bowers after the
beginning of the strike, October 1913: "We feel
that what you have done is right and fair and that
the position you have taken in regard to
[opposing] the unionizing of the mines is in the
interest of the employees of the company. Whatever
the outcome, we will stand by you to the end."
Lamont Bowers to Rockefeller, October 21:
"Our net earnings would have been the largest in
the history of the company by $200,000 [$100
million today] but for the increase in wages paid
the employees during the last few months. With
everything running so smoothly and with an
excellent outlook for 1914, it is mighty
discouraging to have this vicious gang come into
our state and not only destroy our profit but eat
into that which has heretofore been saved."
Federal mediator Ethelbert Stewart
commented on the situation that same month:
"Theoretically, perhaps, the case of having
nothing to do in this world but work ought to have
made these men of many tongues as happy and
contented as the managers claim ... To have a
house assigned you to live in ... to have a store
furnished you by your employer where you are to
buy of him such foodstuffs as he has, at a price
he fixes ... to have churches, schools ... and
public halls free for you to use for any purpose
except to discuss politics, religion, trade
unionism or industrial conditions; in other words,
to have everything handed down to you from the
top; to be ... prohibited from having any thought,
voice or care in anything in life but work, and to
be assisted in this by gunmen whose function it
was, principally, to see that you did not talk
labor conditions with another man who might
accidentally know your language - this was the
contented, happy, prosperous condition out of
which this strike grew ... That men have rebelled
grows out of the fact that they are men."
Stewart unwittingly proclaimed a socialist
vision, except for the unmentioned siphoning off
of surplus value - return on capital, or profit to
shareholders, from the blood and sweat of workers.
Rockefeller to Lamont Bowers, December 8,
1913: "You are fighting a good fight, which is not
only in the interest of your own company but of
other companies of Colorado and of the business
interests of the entire country and of the
laboring classes quite as much. I feel hopeful the
worst is over and that the situation will improve
daily. Take care of yourself, and as soon as it is
possible, get a little let-up and rest."
Rockefeller, the benevolent capitalist,
defended the "open shop" before a congressional
committee on April 6, 1914: "These men have not
expressed any dissatisfaction with their
conditions. The records show that the conditions
have been admirable ... A strike has been imposed
upon the company from the outside ... There is
just one thing that can be done to settle this
strike, and that is to unionize the camps, and our
interest in labor is so profound and we believe so
sincerely that that interest demands that the
camps shall be open camps, that we expect to stand
by the officers at any cost."
Question:
"And you will do that if it costs all your
property and kills all your employees?"
Rockefeller: "It is a great principle."
New York Times' account of the massacre on
April 21, 1914: "The Ludlow camp is a mass of
charred debris, and buried beneath it is a story
of horror imparalleled [sic] in the history of
industrial warfare. In the holes which had been
dug for their protection against the rifles' fire
the women and children died like trapped rats when
the flames swept over them. One pit, uncovered
[the day after the massacre] disclosed the bodies
of 10 children and two women."
Rockefeller
to Lamont Bowers, April 21: "Telegram received ...
We profoundly regret this further outbreak of
lawlessness with accompanying loss of life."
Socialist writer Upton Sinclair's open
letter to Rockefeller, April 28: "I intend to
indict you for murder before the people of this
country. The charges will be pressed, and I think
the verdict will be 'Guilty'. I cannot believe
that a man who dares to lead a service in a
Christian church can be cognizant and therefore
guilty of the crimes that have been committed
under your authority. We ask nothing but a
friendly talk with you. We ask that in the name of
the tens of thousands of men, women and children
who are this minute suffering the most dreadful
wrongs, directly because of the authority which
you personally have given."
Rockefeller's
version of the events, June 10, 1914: "There was
no Ludlow massacre. The engagement started as a
desperate fight for life by two small squads of
militia against the entire tent colony ... There
were no women or children shot by the authorities
of the state or representatives of the operators
... While this loss of life is profoundly to be
regretted, it is unjust in the extreme to lay it
at the door of the defenders of law and property,
who were in no slightest way responsible for it."
To Rockefeller, the deaths were caused by
lawlessness, nothing else.
Rockefeller's
testimony before the United States Commission on
Industrial Relations, January 26, 1915: "I should
hope that I could never reach the point where I
would not be constantly progressing to something
higher, better - both with reference to my own
acts and ... to the general situation in the
company. My hope is that I am progressing. It is
my desire to."
Question: "You are, like
the Church says, 'growing in grace'?"
Rockefeller: "I hope so. I hope the growth
is in that direction."
Rockefeller
speaking to the miners on September 20, 1915: "We
are all partners in a way. Capital can't get along
without you men, and you men can't get along
without capital. When anybody comes along and
tells you that capital and labor can't get along
together, that man is your worst enemy. We are
getting along friendly enough here in this mine
right now, and there is no reason why you men
cannot get along with the managers of my company
when I am back in New York."
United Mine
Workers' leader John Lawson commented on
Rockefeller's visit to Colorado in September: "I
believe Mr Rockefeller is sincere ... I believe he
is honestly trying to improve conditions among the
men in the mines. His efforts probably will result
in some betterments which I hope may prove to be
permanent. However, Mr Rockefeller has missed the
fundamental trouble in the coal camps. Democracy
has never existed among the men who toil under the
ground - the coal companies have stamped it out.
Now, Mr Rockefeller is not restoring democracy; he
is trying to substitute paternalism for it."
Thus, 15 years later, Rockefeller looked
for expression of his NEW FRONTIER through Rivera,
a free-spirited artist, exuberant, provocative and
an avowed communist. The Rockefellers had by then
become the very embodiment of liberal capitalism,
and a family obsessed with virtue and restraint
and a heavy measure of religious guilt over
wealth, derived not so much from the controversial
manner in which such wealth had been accumulated,
but by the very accumulation itself, which might
have subconsciously positioned them to select
Rivera as an cleansing act of self flagellation.
Indeed, Diego Rivera and the Rockefellers could
not have been more different. And yet, for a brief
moment in the midst of the turbulent 1930s, they
shared the spotlight in a bizarre and very public
drama. Their improbable association would soon
unravel, bringing about one of the biggest art
scandals of the 20th century, with freedom of
expression as the victim. The "battle of
Rockefeller Center", as Rivera liked to call it,
left both parties bruised - and the lobby of the
RCA Building devoid of a memorial to the dialectic
relationship between capitalism and socialism.
Unlike Rockefeller Jr, who was born to
great wealth in the most prosperous city in the
United States, Diego Rivera was born in 1886 in
Guanajuato, Mexico, into a family of modest means.
From a very early age, Rivera showed a talent for
art and drawing, unlike Rockefeller Jr, who grew
up in a household of conservative restraint and
whose only relationship to art was through
obligatory collecting. At the age of 21, Rivera
won a scholarship to study in Europe in 1907 and
spent the next 14 years there, mostly in Spain,
where he was influenced by the paintings of El
Greco and Francisco de Goya, and later in France,
where he, already an accomplished artist, became
involved with the avant-garde, including Paul
Cezanne, Picasso and Piet Mondrian, and
experimented with his own Cubist style. At one
time, he shared a studio with Amedeo Modigliani,
who painted some striking portraits of him. He
also made contact with the Russian avant-garde,
and was even known to have two beautiful Russian
mistresses.
But abstract art did not
satisfy Rivera's political passion. Drawn by the
social movements unleashed by the Mexican
Revolution, Rivera decided to go back to his
homeland in 1921. There, he developed a unique
style that combined the influence of European art
with Mexico's indigenous pre-Columbian
iconography. In his populist murals, he used
vibrant colors and simple scenes of the plight of
the working class throughout Mexican history to
convey his Marxist ideals. In 1922, his
revolutionary convictions led him to join the
Mexican Communist Party while Rockefeller Jr
evolved gradually from conservative into liberal
Republicanism. During a visit to the Soviet Union
in 1927, Rivera painted a collection of sketches
that would be purchased by an avid American
collector of modern art, Abby Rockefeller. Part of
Rivera's appeal to American collectors was his
celebration of indigenous culture, which
non-native North Americans had rejected in favor
of aping British taste despite their political
opposition to British tyranny.
Abby's
interest in the communist Mexican painter was not
surprising. By the early 1930s, Rivera had become
one of the best-known and most influential artists
in the world, and its most famous muralist. His
politics were not controversial as radicalism was
much in vogue and communism was the preoccupation
of the intellectual elite and anti-communism had
not yet found shelter behind the disingenuous mask
of anti-Soviet patriotism. In 1931, MOMA organized
an extensive retrospective of his work. A year
later, notwithstanding his ambivalence toward the
United States, Rivera traveled to the US to work
on several commissions. He was accompanied by his
wife, Frida Kahlo, herself an accomplished
painter. The culmination of the trip was to be a
large mural for the centerpiece of the most
talked-about architectural project in the country,
the new Rockefeller Center.
Rivera's visit
to the US unfolded against the backdrop of the
Great Depression and the intense social and
political forces it had unleashed. As an outspoken
leftist, the Mexican painter tapped into growing
concerns over the upsurge in radicalism and the
growth of the Communist Party.
Fascinated
by Rivera's passionate art, Abby and her son
Nelson Rockefeller had persuaded the management of
Rockefeller Center to commission him to paint a
gigantic mural in the grand lobby of the RCA
Building. John D Rockefeller Jr reluctantly agreed
to give the commission to Rivera, though only as a
business compromise. "As for Rivera, although I do
not personally care for much of his work; he seems
to have become very popular just now and will
probably be a good drawing card," he commented. It
was an age when radicalism was good marketing and
fit into the Rockefellers' image of themselves as
enlightened capitalists.
Inspired by the
very lofty theme of the mural, "Man at the
Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to
the Choosing of a New and Better Future", Rivera
worked feverishly to present his vision of a
socialist future. The panel would feature two
opposing views of society, with capitalism
representing the past on one side and socialism
representing the future on the other. Sketches for
the project had been approved and the overall
thrust of the piece seemed to have the backing of
both Abby and Nelson, who paid Rivera frequent
visits.
As Rivera's mural progressed,
images of war, airplanes, gas masks, soldiers with
bayonets, and death-rays surfaced gradually,
reflecting the reality of a world on the edge of
oncoming war between fascism and social democracy.
There was a section depicting the May Day
celebration in Moscow that Abby Rockefeller called
"the finest part of the mural yet". The mural also
included society ladies drinking gin and, above
them, cells of tuberculosis, syphilis and
gonorrhea. This was not controversial as the
senior Rockefeller was known to be intolerant of
alcohol.
On April 24, 1933, the New York
World Telegram, after an interview with a
media-naive Rivera, ran a story with the headline
"Rivera paints scenes of communist activity and
John D Jr foots the bill". As hostile public
attention was drawn to Rivera's emerging mural, he
continued work, painting a scene in which a
soldier, a worker, and a black farmer all held
hands with Vladimir Lenin. Both Nelson and his
mother had earlier declared how much they loved
the mural in progress, but the addition of Lenin
seemed to have gone too far, on top of press
attacks about Rockefeller-financed communist
propaganda. After a visit in May of 1933, the
25-year-old Nelson wrote to Rivera: "While I was
in No 1 Building at Rockefeller Center yesterday
viewing the progress of your thrilling mural, I
noticed that in the most recent portion of the
painting you had included a portrait of Lenin. The
piece is beautifully painted but it seems to me
that his portrait appearing in this mural might
very seriously offend a great many people. If it
were in a private house it would be one thing, but
this mural is in a public building and the
situation is therefore quite different. As much as
I dislike to do so, I am afraid we must ask you to
substitute the face of some unknown man where
Lenin's face now appears."
Insisting that
the figure of Lenin had appeared in his approved
original sketches, Rivera refused to budge. He
argued that his ideological intent had been clear
from the start, and suggested rhetorically that he
rather have his work destroyed than compromised.
Sensitive to right-wing accusations that
Rockefeller liberalism was sympathetic to
communism, if not outright communistic, the
Rockefellers felt forced to go with the tide of
mainstream anti-communist public sentiment. Rivera
was ordered to stop work, paid his fee in full and
told to leave the building. Within hours after
Rivera was ushered from his unfinished mural in
the RCA Building by private guards of Rockefeller
Center, 300 protesters gathered outside the
building with signs reading "Save Rivera's Art".
The episode was front-page news the following day,
and some who objected to Rockefeller's censorship
of Rivera's art likened the incident to the Nazi
book-burning then raging all over Germany.
On the other hand, the National
Association of Manufacturers congratulated the
young Nelson, calling his efforts courageous and
patriotic, and General Motors canceled Rivera's
commission for a mural in one of its Chicago
buildings in a show of capitalist solidarity. In
February of 1934, after almost a year under cover,
the unfinished mural was chipped from the wall and
destroyed. Rivera, calling the destruction of the
mural "an act of cultural vandalism", had not
expected that a true art lover would respond to
the painter's rhetorical bluff of rather having
the mural destroyed than changed, but that was
exactly was the young Nelson Rockefeller did, and
he justified the destruction by claiming to honor
Rivera's artistic integrity. On the other hand,
John D Rockefeller Jr, professing no love for
modern art, explained to his more conservative
father that "the picture was obscene and, in the
judgment of Rockefeller Center, an offense to good
taste ... It was for this reason primarily that
Rockefeller Center decided to destroy it." The
grandson destroyed a masterpiece to protect its
artistic integrity while the son did it to protect
good taste.
Diego Rivera also painted a
nude portrait of socialite C Z Guest before she
was married, to hang, however briefly, over the
bar in the Hotel Reforma in Mexico City. Most
women of society of the 1940s would have been
scandalized by the painter's request, not to
mention its subsequent public unveiling. Not so
for the former Lucy Cochrane, a free-spirited girl
from a Boston Brahmin family. No one saw anything
obscene in Rivera's painting of the socialite in
the nude, unlike the face of socialist Lenin. Miss
Cochrane went respectably on to marry Winston
Frederick Churchill Guest, a Phipps heir of steel
fame, when she was 27. She was said to have lived
her life to the fullest as a prominent socialite
and an arbiter of good taste in society.
Years later, Rivera said of his rhetorical
reply to Nelson: "Therefore, I wrote, never
expecting that a presumably cultured man like
Rockefeller would act upon my words so literally
and so savagely, rather than mutilate the
conception, I should prefer the physical
destruction of the conception in its entirety, but
preserving, at least, its integrity."
The
Rockefeller Center management team, which had
never felt comfortable about Rivera's involvement,
reacted swiftly to terminate Rivera's contract.
Soon after, mass demonstrations and a deluge of
protest letters from all quarters were blaming the
Rockefellers for censorship of artistic
expression. Before the destruction began, Nelson
Rockefeller, an inexperience 26-year-old, did his
best to skirt the touchy situation. He had not
been directly responsible for the management's
decision to terminate Rivera and did not have the
authority to reverse it. While the art world
vilified the decision, Nelson tried to find a
compromise solution to have the mural moved to the
Museum of Modern Art.
But it was all in
vain. On the night of February 20, 1934, the mural
was hammered off the walls, following orders from
the Center's management. Rivera, who had by then
returned to Mexico, responded by painting a
replica of the mural at the Palacio de Bellas
Artes in Mexico City. But his career as an
international muralist was destroyed by this
incident. Still, for the next 25 years Rivera
would continue to create a body of work that would
establish him as one of the most important artists
of the 20th century. He died of heart failure in
1957.
Almost 25 years after the fact,
Diego Rivera wrote his own version of the
controversy over the Rockefeller Center mural:
When Nelson Rockefeller decided to
decorate the main floor of his new RCA Building
in Radio City with murals, he also decided to
get the best artists for the job. His choices
were Picasso, Matisse, and myself. But he set
about securing our services in the worst
possible way. Through the architect of the
building, Raymond Hood, he asked us to submit
sample murals. Now, there are few indignities
that can be thrown in the face of an established
painter greater than to offer him a commission
on terms which imply any doubts as to his
abilities. But the invitations went further,
they specified how the sample murals were to be
done. Picasso flatly refused. As for Matisse, he
politely but firmly replied that the
specifications did not accord with his style of
painting. I answered Hood that I was frankly
baffled by this unorthodox way of dealing with
me and could only say no.
Having thus
quickly lost Picasso and Matisse, Rockefeller
determined that at the very least he would have
me. In May 1932, he entered into the
negotiations directly, since, on many matters,
Hood and I could not see eye to eye. Hood's idea
of a mural was typically American: a mural was a
mere accessory, an ornament. He could not
understand that its function was to extend the
dimensions of the architecture. Hood wanted me
to work in a funereal black, white and gray
rather than in color, and on canvas rather than
in fresco. Our differences piled up when I heard
that two inferior painters, Frank Brangwyn and
Jose Marķa Sert, had been given the walls
previously offered to Picasso and Matisse, walls
that flanked the one offered me. Amid this
difference and tension, Rockefeller moved with
the calm of the practiced politician. He refused
to be ruffled. By the fall of the year, he had
persuaded Hood to let me work in fresco and in
color, and we had agreed on the terms. For the
sum of $21,000 for myself and my assistants, I
was to cover slightly more than 1,000 square
feet [93 square meters] of wall. The theme
offered me was an exciting one: "Man at the
Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to
the Choosing of a New and Better Future". After
the complicated preliminaries, I entered into my
assignment with enthusiasm. By the beginning of
November, I had completed my preliminary
sketches, submitted them, and received prompt
and unqualified approval from Rockefeller. In
March of 1933, Frida and I arrived in New York
from Detroit, greeted by the icy blasts of the
New York winter.
I set to work
immediately. My wall, standing high above the
elevators which faced the main entrance of the
building, had already been prepared by my
assistants, the scaffold erected, the full-scale
sketches traced and stenciled on the wet
surface, the colors ground. I painted rapidly
and easily. Everything was going smoothly -
perhaps too smoothly. Rockefeller had not yet
seen me or my work, but in the beginning of
April, he wrote me that he had seen a photograph
of the fresco in one of the newspapers and was
enthusiastic about what I was doing. He hoped
that I would be finished by the first of May,
when the building was to be officially opened to
the public.
The center of my mural
showed a worker at the controls of a large
machine. In front of him, emerging from space,
was a large hand holding a globe on which the
dynamics of chemistry and biology, the
recombination of atoms, and the division of a
cell, were represented schematically. Two
elongated ellipses crossed and met in the figure
of the worker, one showing the wonders of the
telescope and its revelation of bodies in space;
the other showing the microscope and its
discoveries - cells, germs, bacteria, and
delicate tissues. Above the germinating soil at
the bottom, I projected two visions of
civilization. On the left of the crossed
ellipses, I showed a night-club scene of the
debauched rich, a battlefield with men in the
holocaust of war, and unemployed workers in a
demonstration being clubbed by the police. On
the right, I painted corresponding scenes of
life in a socialist country: a May Day
demonstration of marching, singing workers; an
athletic stadium filled with girls exercising
their bodies; and a figure of Lenin,
symbolically clasping the hands of a black
American and a white Russian soldier and
workers, as allies of the future.
A
newspaper reporter for a New York afternoon
paper came to interview me about my work, then
nearing completion. He was particularly struck
by this last scene and asked me for an
explanation. I said that, as long as the Soviet
Union was in existence, Nazi fascism could never
be sure of its survival. Therefore, the Soviet
Union must expect to be attacked by this
reactionary enemy. If the United States wished
to preserve its democratic forms, it would ally
itself with Russia against fascism. Since Lenin
was the pre-eminent founder of the Soviet Union
and also the first and most altruistic theorist
of modern communism, I used him as the center of
the inevitable alliance between the Russian and
the American. In doing this, I said, I was quite
aware that I was going against public opinion.
Having heard me out, the reporter,
smiling politely, remarked that, apart from
being a remarkable painter, I was also an
excellent humorist.
The following day
the reporter's story appeared in his paper, the
World Telegram. It told what should have
surprised nobody, least of all Nelson
Rockefeller, who was fully acquainted not only
with my past and my political ideas but with my
actual plans and sketches: that I was painting a
revolutionary mural. However, the story
suggested that I had boxed my patron,
Rockefeller, which was, of course, not true.
Thus the storm broke. I, who had become inured
to storms, only painted on with greater speed.
The first of May had passed, and I was nearly
finished when I received a letter from Nelson
Rockefeller requesting me to paint out the face
of Lenin and substitute the face of an unknown
man. Reasonable. However, one change might lead
to demands for others. And hadn't every artist
the right to use whatever models he wished in
his painting?
I gave the problem the
most careful consideration. My assistants were
all for a flat denial of the requests and
threatened to strike if I yielded. The reply I
sent Rockefeller, two days after receiving his
letter was, however, conciliatory in tone. To
explain my refusal to paint out the head of
Lenin, I pointed out that a figure of Lenin had
appeared in my earliest sketches submitted to
Raymond Hood. If anyone now objected to the
appearance of this dead great man in my mural,
such a person would, very likely, object to my
entire concept. "Therefore," I wrote, never
expecting that a presumably cultured man like
Rockefeller would act upon my words so literally
and so savagely, "rather than mutilate the
conception, I should prefer the physical
destruction of the conception in its entirety,
but preserving, at least, its integrity."
I suggested as a compromise that I
replace the contrasting nightclub scene in the
left half of the mural with the figure of
Abraham Lincoln (symbolizing the reunification
of the American states and the abolition of
slavery), surrounded by John Brown, Nat Turner,
William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and
Harriet Beecher Stowe, or with a scientific
figure like Cyrus McCormick, whose reaping
machine had contributed to the victory of the
Union forces by facilitating the harvesting of
wheat in the fields depleted of men.
As
I awaited Rockefeller's response, the hours
ticked by in silence. I was seized by a
premonition that no further word would come, but
that something terrible, instead, was about to
happen. I summoned a photographer to take
pictures of the almost finished mural, but the
guards who had been ordered to admit no
photographers, barred him. At last, one of my
assistants, Lucienne Bloch, smuggled in a Leica,
concealed in her bosom. Mounting the scaffold,
she surreptitiously snapped as many pictures as
she could without getting caught.
On the
day in the second week in May when Rockefeller
finally made his move, the private police force
of Radio City, reinforced the week before, was
doubled. My assistants and I, aware that we were
watched, that forces were being deployed as if
for a military operation, worked on, pretending
to ourselves that nothing was happening, or
nothing as bad as we feared. But at dinnertime,
when our numbers were at their smallest, three
files of men surrounded my scaffold. Behind them
appeared a representative of the firm of Todd,
Robertson and Todd, managing agents for John D
Rockefeller Jr. Like a victorious commander, he
asked me to come down for a parley. My
assistants present at this dark moment, Ben
Shahn, Hideo Noda, Lou Block, Lucienne Bloch,
Sanchez Flores, and Arthur Niedendorff, looked
at me helplessly. Helplessly, I let myself be
ushered into the working shack, the telephone of
which had been cut off, acknowledged the order
to stop work, and received my check.
Other men, meanwhile, removed my
scaffold and replaced it with smaller ones, from
which they affixed canvas frames covering the
entire wall. Other men closed off the entrance
with thick curtaining. As I left the building, I
heard airplanes roaring overhead. Mounted
policemen patrolled the streets. And then one of
the very scenes I had depicted in my mural
materialized before my eyes. A demonstration of
workers began to form; the policemen charged,
the workers dispersed; and the back of a
seven-year-old girl, whose little legs could not
carry her to safety in time, was injured by the
blow of a club.
One last thing remained.
In February of 1934, after I had returned to
Mexico, my Radio City mural was smashed to
pieces from the wall. Thus was a great victory
won over a portrait of Lenin; thus was free
expression honored in America.
One
result of the fracas was the cancellation of my
General Motors assignment, and I was cut off
from commissions to paint in the United States
for a long time. Rockefeller, wishing to avoid
further bad publicity or the nuisance of a court
action, had paid me my entire fee. Out of the
$21,000, however, $6,300 went to Mrs Paine as
her agent's commission; about $8,000 covered the
cost of materials and the wages of assistants;
and I was left with somewhat less than $7,000.
Considering the loss of present and future
commissions, I was advised by my attorney to sue
Rockefeller for $250,000 for damages and
indemnification. However, I did not sue; a legal
action would have tended to nullify my position.
Rockefeller's action in covering the
mural - with canvas frames and later with strips
of sheath paper - became a cause celebre.
Sides were drawn. A group of conservative
artists calling themselves the Advance American
Art Commission exploited the occasion to condemn
the hiring of foreign painters in the United
States. In contrast to these chauvinistic
second-raters, who would have substituted a
national-origin standard for that of artistic
excellence, and who applauded Rockefeller's act
of vandalism, another group of artists, writers,
and intellectuals, including Walter Pach, George
Biddle, Bruce Bliven, Robert L Cantwell, Lewis
Gannett, Rockwell Kent, H L Mencken, Lewis
Mumford, Waldo Pierce, and Boardman Robinson,
besought Rockefeller to reconsider what he had
done. It was largely because of such protests
that Rockefeller waited nearly a year before he
destroyed my mural. Two days after it had been
covered over, Raymond Hood announced that it
would receive "very careful handling". At the
worst, two possibilities were suggested as its
fate: that it might temporarily be screened with
a canvas mural; or that it might be removed,
plaster and all, for preservation
elsewhere.
Oddly enough, communist
leaders such as Robert Minor, Sidney Bloomfield,
and my old friend Joe Freeman, editor of the New
Masses, denounced the work as "reactionary" and
"counterrevolutionary" and condemned me for
having betrayed the masses by painting in
capitalistic buildings!
In the spring of
1933, I aired my views over a small radio
station in New York. "The case of Diego Rivera
is a small matter. I want to explain more
clearly the principles involved. Let us take, as
an example, an American millionaire who buys the
Sistine Chapel, which contains the work of
Michelangelo ... Would that millionaire have the
right to destroy the Sistine Chapel?
"Let us suppose that another millionaire
should buy the unpublished manuscripts in which
a scientist like [Albert] Einstein had left the
key to his mathematical theories. Would that
millionaire have the right to burn those
manuscripts? ... In human creation there is
something which belongs to humanity at large,
and ... no individual owner has the right to
destroy it or keep solely for his own
enjoyment."
- From My Art, My
Life: An Autobiography by Diego Rivera (with
Gladys March), New York: Citadel Press, 1960.
Republished by Dover Publications Inc in
1991 For their part, the
Rockefellers were left to deal with the effects of
a tainted reputation as arts patrons and as
defenders of freedom of expression. The division
within the family was revealed by the affair. Abby
was mortified and later insisted that she had not
wanted the mural destroyed, while her husband,
John D Jr, was much more brusque, calling the
picture obscene. With the destruction of Rivera's
mural, Nelson Rockefeller became in the public eye
a censor who destroyed art with political ideas
not in line with his own.
Contradiction
of ideals
These two incidents, the
American-mural controversy and the Rivera-mural
controversy, illustrated the contradiction between
the ideals of liberal capitalism and the idea of
freedom of expression through art. As an art
lover, Nelson Rockefeller understood that art is
not simply beauty, but also ideological
expression. The art that was created in
Rockefeller Center had to be an art that was
either sanitized of unwelcome political ideology
or an art that was in line with the ideology of
the capitalist system. The modern art in the
Rockefeller collection represents the politically
sanitized art appreciated and encouraged by values
held by the collector. Rivera used his art to
convey a contemporary political ideology hostile
to capitalism. In a public space in Rockefeller
Center, art was used by Rockefeller to present to
the public a specific ideology, namely, that of
liberal capitalism.
While Nelson
Rockefeller's wealth enabled him to collect and
promote modern art, his class interest forced him
to choose between the role of connoisseur and the
role of censor. His efforts to sanitize the
unwanted socio-political content of art were not
unique. Patrons all through the ages sponsored art
to glorify their own image and the values they
aspired to. Nelson Rockefeller was in a unique
position to encourage politically sanitized art
through his promotion of non-objective art. His
influence as an art collector was far-reaching and
his involvement with MOMA and, later, the Museum
of Primitive Art placed him in a position in which
he could promote the ideology of his class through
his interpretation of art. While Nelson
Rockefeller believed that political art had a
place in museums, he was in a position to
influence what place the museum gave to unwelcome
political art for display to the public. Through
active curatorial involvement and financial
support, Nelson Rockefeller was able to extend his
influence on a substantial segment of the art
world. Works bought and collected by a Rockefeller
gained instant commercial value since the
Rockefellers processed awesome power as definitive
art market makers. Abstract art was a much more
sympathetic movement with which to promote art for
art's sake. Would a Cubist image of Lenin have
bothered anyone? With MOMA abducting Modernism by
sanitizing its assault on the value system of
bourgeois society, the working class was deprived
of an art movement that would have helped its
members to understand the dysfunctionality of
capitalism.
Art is the collective memory
of an epoch. The art of a generation exists to
keep the spirit of the generation alive. In this
respect, art plays a significant role in
constructing the cultural identity of an epoch.
Although art censorship is not unique to any
civilization, as authorities all through the ages
practiced it, censorship presents a special
problem for liberal capitalism because capitalism
in the age of liberal democracy claims to be a
champion of freedom of expression.
It is
within the prerogative of capitalist ideology to
refuse to honor Lenin, but that provincial
attitude conflicts with the myth of capitalist
freedom of expression. Nelson Rockefeller's
selective retreat from his commitment to freedom
of expression was based not so much on personal
intolerance as on his need to appease popular
opinion for the purpose of fulfilling his
political ambition.
The rise and fall
of Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Aldrich
Rockefeller inherited both a vast family fortune
and a politically problematic family image that he
had to live down in order to achieve his political
ambitions in a democracy. From a very young age,
he had expressed the desire to be president,
rationalizing that with his great wealth,
political leadership was the only goal worth
pursuing. But political leadership in a democracy
is dependent on popular support, not a natural for
the Rockefeller legacy. The second of five
brothers, Nelson was the energetic, outgoing
leader within his own family. Personally, he had
the charisma of effective leadership, but his
wealth had become a political burden, not so much
from distrust on the part of the voting public but
from the hostility of the conservative nominating
Republican Party functionaries who consider a
liberal millionaire to be the most dangerous beast
in politics.
The third generation of
Rockefellers - "the Brothers" - grew up in
storyland splendor and self-imposed isolation. In
an effort to redeem the family name, John Jr had
created numerous and distinct philanthropies.
Nelson and his brothers grew up in the family home
on West 54th Street in New York, which was so
filled with art that his parents bought the
townhouse next door just to house their
collection. Eventually the Rockefellers gave the
property to the Museum of Modern Art when they
moved into a fabulous estate further north. Nelson
attended the Rockefeller-funded progressive
Lincoln School of Teachers College at Columbia
University, but dyslexia hindered his schooling
and prevented him from attending Princeton. With
the help of tutors, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa
from Dartmouth in 1930. Shortly thereafter, he
married Mary Todhunter Clark, known as Tod, whose
calm reserve seemed to balance his boundless
enthusiasms. After an around-the-world honeymoon,
the couple settled in New York and Nelson went to
work in the family enterprise. Nelson proved so
successful in renting out space in the newly
constructed Rockefeller Center in a depressed
market that his father made him president of the
Center. He earned negative publicity in the art
world after he was blamed for the destruction of
Rivera's murals; otherwise, however, Nelson won
high praise for his energetic executive abilities.
Mark O Hatfield, with the Senate
Historical Office, in Vice Presidents of the
United States, 1789-1993 (Washington: US
Government Printing Office, 1997), provided detail
biographical information on Nelson Rockefeller's
political career. Nelson became a director of the
Creole Petroleum Co, a Rockefeller subsidiary in
Venezuela. He learned Spanish and began a
life-long interest in Latin-American affairs. Art
was also his life-long passion, and during the
Depression he served as treasurer of the Museum of
Modern Art. In 1939, at age 31, he became the
museum's president, encountering such intense
infighting that he boasted, "I learned my politics
at the Museum of Modern Art." He had wanted to be
an architect and was a close friend and admirer of
Wallace K Harrison, the architect for many
Rockefeller projects. In 1940, president Franklin
D Roosevelt appointed the 32-year-old Rockefeller
to the new post of coordinator of the Office of
Inter-American Affairs, in a shrewd move designed
to mute the Rockefeller family's support of
Wendell Willkie for president that year.
The Republican Party tapped Willkie, a
lawyer and utilities executive, to run against
third-term incumbent FDR in 1940, even though
Willkie was a former Democrat. As president of the
Commonwealth and Southern system representing
private power companies, Willkie opposed the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built and
operated dams along the Tennessee River as part of
the New Deal's Works Progress Administration and
sold electricity to an area covering seven states
with 2 million people at a rate that threatened
the profitability of private power companies. The
TVA was considered by progressives a successful
model for a new economic order of state capitalism
that could emerge all over the nation. Willkie's
opposition on behalf of private interests
prevented the spread of the idea to other parts of
the country. Willkie also campaigned against the
New Deal generally and the FDR administration's
lack of military preparedness. During the
election, Roosevelt preempted the
military-preparedness issue by expanding military
contracts. Willkie then reversed his approach and
accused FDR of warmongering. FDR received 27
million votes to Wilkie's impressive 22 million,
but in the Electoral College, Roosevelt buried
Willkie 449-82. A month later, Japan attacked
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The bureaucracy already put
in place by the New Deal enabled the United States
to mobilize for total war quickly and effectively,
which then turned naturally into the postwar
military-industrial complex that Dwight D
Eisenhower warned the American people about.
After failing to unseat Roosevelt in the
1940 presidential election, Willkie became one of
FDR's most unlikely allies. To the chagrin of many
in his adopted party, Willkie called for greater
national support for some of Roosevelt's
controversial initiatives, such as the Lend-Lease
Act, and embarked on a new campaign to awaken the
United States from its isolationist slumber. On
July 23, 1941, he urged unlimited aid to Britain
in its struggle against Nazi Germany. That same
year he traveled to Britain and the Middle East as
FDR's personal representative and, after Pearl
Harbor, visited the USSR and China in 1942 in the
same capacity.
In 1943, Willkie wrote
One World, a plea for international
peacekeeping after the war. Highly popular, the
book sold millions of copies and helped to prevent
the US from falling back into its prewar
isolationist tradition. Also in 1943, together
with Eleanor Roosevelt and other Americans
concerned about the mounting threats to peace and
democracy, Wilkie helped to establish Freedom
House. In 1944, Willkie once again sought the
Republican presidential nomination, but his
liberal progressive views gained little support
this time because of the rightward shift of
Republican Party politics. Willkie did not support
the eventual 1944 Republican nominee, Thomas
Dewey, who lost to Harry Truman. After surviving
several heart attacks, Willkie finally succumbed,
dying on October 8, 1944, at age 52.
Although Nelson Rockefeller's brothers
served in uniform, he held civilian posts
throughout World War II, becoming assistant
secretary of state for American republics affairs
in 1944. He played a key role in hemispheric
policy at the United Nations Conference held in
San Francisco, developing consensus for regional
pacts (such as the Rio Pact and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization) within the UN framework. He
was instrumental in bringing the United Nations to
New York, asking his father to buy the UN
headquarters site on the East River for $6 million
and donated it to the world organization. Although
Roosevelt tried to lure Rockefeller into the
Democratic Party, he remained loyal to his
family's Republican ties. After Roosevelt's death,
Truman showed less appreciation for Rockefeller's
abilities. In August 1945, Truman fired the
billionaire Rockefeller in order to settle a
policy dispute within the State Department.
Rockefeller returned to government during
the administration of president Dwight D
Eisenhower, where he chaired a committee on
government organization, became under secretary of
the new Department of Health, Education and
Welfare, served as special assistant to the
president for Cold War strategy, and headed the
secret "Forty Committee", a group of high
government officials who were charged with
overseeing the Central Intelligence Agency's
clandestine operations. He was slated for a
high-level post in the Department of Defense until
fiscally conservative secretary of the treasury
George Humphrey vetoed Rockefeller as a "spender".
Rockefeller then returned to New York to
seek the highest elective office in his home state
with a long-range plan to establish his own
political base for an eventual run on the
presidency. In 1958, Nelson challenged the popular
and prestigious Democrat governor Averell
Harriman, in what the press dubbed the "battle of
the millionaires". Rockefeller campaigned as a man
of the people, appearing in shirtsleeves and
eating his way through the ethnic foods of New
York neighborhoods. "Rocky" was his political
nickname. After a massive campaign, bankrolled
with his legendary fortune, Rockefeller won the
election handily. The New York Times noted the
historical significance: "The election of Nelson
Aldrich Rockefeller has given the final stamp of
public approval to a name that once was among the
most hated and feared in America."
His
family philanthropy had supported practically
every progressive cause around the world for more
than a century, from education to population
issues, from medicine to physics and the social
sciences.
His victory in New York over an
incumbent heavyweight Democrat in a year when
Republicans lost badly elsewhere made him an
overnight contender for the Republican
presidential nomination in 1960. Liberal
Republicans who had reservations about the
extremist political past of vice president Richard
Nixon rallied to Rockefeller. Democrats such as
senator John F Kennedy considered him the most
formidable opposition candidate that the
Republicans might nominate. Personally
progressive, if Nelson Rockefeller had been a
Democrat, he might well have out-Kennedyed the
Kennedys in symbolizing a new age in US politics.
Rockefeller advisers were reluctant to risk their
candidate's future in national politics by having
him enter party primaries where his chances of
winning were far from certain. As a result,
Rockefeller's popular appeal was not enough to
overcome Nixon's lead among party loyalists in
securing the nomination. Instead, Rockefeller used
his political clout to summon Nixon to his Fifth
Avenue apartment and dictate terms for a more
liberal party platform for the 1960 campaign.
Arizona senator Barry Goldwater denounced this
event as "the Munich of the Republican Party", in
the beginning of a long estrangement between
Rockefeller liberals and the Goldwater extremists.
Nixon's loss to Kennedy was partly blamed on
Rockefeller liberalism for not letting the voters
have a clear choice.
Nixon's razor-thin
loss in a less-than-honest election in 1960 made
Rockefeller the centrist frontrunner for the
Republican nomination in 1964. There was a growing
consensus that the Republican nomination process
that favored conservative candidates needed to
change so that a centrist candidate could bring a
Republican victory in the next presidential
election. But between the two elections,
Rockefeller stunned the nation by divorcing his
wife of 32 years and marrying a younger woman,
Margaretta Fitler Murphy, better known as "Happy".
She was the recently divorced wife of an executive
in the Rockefeller Medical Institute. The birth of
their son, Nelson Jr, on the eve of the Republican
primary in California reminded voters of the
remarriage at a time when a divorced candidate was
generally considered unelectable, which
contributed to Rockefeller's loss to Goldwater for
the Republican nomination. The divorce was viewed
as proof of Rockefeller's lack of self-discipline
needed to run a nation facing serious challenges.
At the party's convention in San Francisco,
Goldwater delegates loudly booed Rockefeller in
full view of national television and prevented him
from speaking. To them, he embodied the hated
"Eastern liberal establishment". Disgusted,
Rockefeller sat out the election, an act that
further branded him as a spoiler in the eyes of
party loyalists.
Unsuccessful in his
presidential bids, Rockefeller went on to achieve
an impressive record as governor of New York. He
was a master builder, overseeing a massive
highway-construction program, the creation of the
top-quality state university system, the
establishment of a clean water authority and the
erection of a vast new complex of state office
buildings in Albany. He gave strong state support
to the development of Lincoln Center for the
Performing Arts led by his older brother, John D
III, and the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan led
by his youngest bother, David, in the latter's
position as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Although New Yorkers joked about their governor's
"edifice complex", they elected him to four
consecutive terms. To pay for his many grand
projects without raising taxes, Rockefeller
consulted prominent municipal-bond specialist John
Mitchell (later to be the disgraced attorney
general in the Nixon administration), who advised
the creation of quasi-independent agencies that
could issue bonds that were morally obligated but
not legally guaranteed by the state. The State
University Construction Fund provided the
financing of a public higher-education system that
rivaled the best in the nation, putting an end to
New York's dismal history of dependence on elite
private universities. Other agencies built roads,
utilities, public housing and hospitals. As a
result, control of a large part of the budget and
of state operations shifted from the legislature
to the governor. To bring able executives from the
private sector into relatively low-paying
government posts, Rockefeller made personal
financial contributions to the heads of these
independent agencies, thereby elevating the
effectiveness of state government and also
reinforcing their loyalty to the governor
personally.
In perpetual motion, governor
Rockefeller tackled one project after another. He
waded into political campaigns with similar gusto,
shaking hands and giving his famous greeting:
"Hiya, fella!" No one compared that greeting to
the "us fellas" stigma of Al Capone fame. He laced
his speeches with superlatives and platitudes and
so often repeated the phrase "the brotherhood of
man under the fatherhood of God" that reporters
shortened it to create the acronym BOMFOG.
Although he campaigned as a man of the people, he
lived in a different world. When aides proposed a
plan for the state to take over state-employee
contributions to Social Security, in order to
increase their take-home pay, Rockefel | | | |
