American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (15 page)

Flagg had initially created the image as a magazine cover. It came out in
Leslie’s Weekly
the first week in July 1916, which is why Uncle Sam is dressed to celebrate the Fourth—he is wearing a navy-blue jacket and a white top hat ringed by a blue band with extra-large stars going all the way around. After the Army adopted the image for its recruiting campaign, some four million posters were printed and they were credited with making a crucial difference in enlistment numbers. Earlier, in the nineteenth century, Uncle Sam had tended to be portrayed as a lean, whiskered gentleman in clownish red-and-white striped trousers. Flagg’s Uncle Sam, by contrast, is a virile pitchman for war. The artist was about forty years old when he painted the image. He used himself as the model for it, exaggerating his naturally rugged features and adding the goatee. He lived in New York, in a stylish duplex in the Atelier Building at 33 West Sixty-seventh Street and he was known as a fashion plate and a playboy. His recruiting poster turns an erotic come-on (“I want you”) into a patriotic come-on.

James Montgomery Flagg inserted his own face into his portrait of Uncle Sam in his Army recruiting poster of 1916 (
right
). He was influenced by the British poster of Lord Kitchener created by Alfred Leete (
left
).

The image, by the way, was borrowed at least partly from a British recruiting poster, by Alfred Leete, that shows Lord Kitchener in a similar finger-pointing pose. Kitchener was Britain’s revered minister of war and the poster of him pointing was created in 1914, only two years before he met a ruinous end. He drowned at sea when his ship was sunk by German mines.

*   *   *

Rockwell’s best
Pos
t cover from this period is a wonderful spoof on Flagg’s Uncle Sam. Entitled
The Clubhouse Examination
(June 16, 1917), it shows two schoolboys staging a make-believe recruitment test in a backyard after school. A hand-lettered recruitment poster in the yard advertises, “Men Wanted for Army.” Billy Payne posed for the recruitment officer; he is wearing a dashing uniform pieced together from bits of Boy Scout and military regalia. He is lording his masculinity over a less confident peer—a chubby and nervous boy who is standing on tiptoe against a barn door, only to find that he still falls short of the five-foot height requirement. His fine clothes emphasize his softness. His pomaded hair is parted down the middle, with a silly wave at the top of his forehead. He is so small he looks as if he belongs to a different painting.

The Clubhouse Examination
, 1917, riffed on James Montgomery Flagg’s recruiting poster.

Uncle Sam wants you—but only if you measure up. Here Rockwell takes the side of the boys who fail to qualify, capturing the anxiety of being tagged and shamed as only half a man.

*   *   *

Rockwell felt a sense of patriotic duty but hardly considered himself built for the physical demands of service. In his autobiography, he mentions that he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in June of 1917, soon after the United States entered the war. In reality, he enlisted more than a year later, just moments before the war ended. His Navy service lasted less than three months.

According to government records, he first tried to enroll in the U.S. Naval Reserve Force on July 30, 1918, visiting a recruiting station at City Hall in lower Manhattan. The doctor who examined him noted that he had “sallow” skin and suffered from rashes. He stood five foot ten and a half, and weighed 131 pounds—seventeen pounds underweight for his height.

“We can waive ten pounds,” a Navy surgeon told him, “but not seventeen.” In his autobiography, Rockwell claimed that, on the doctor’s orders, he sat in the office stuffing himself with seven pounds worth of bananas, doughnuts, and warm water, until he thought he would burst. Then he got back on the scale. It worked.

Yet, on August 5 the local newspaper related a different version of events, claiming that Rockwell, having flunked the physical exam, finagled his way into the Navy by showing some of his drawings and paintings at a naval hearing. He was hoping to join the camouflage corps. Instead he was admitted as the next best thing: “Landsman Quartermaster Painter and Varnisher.” He believed he would be shipped to Ireland to paint and varnish ships.

On August 23 Rockwell was called for active duty and sent to a training camp in Charleston, South Carolina. He never got across the Atlantic. His superiors were delighted to discover that they had a
Saturday Evening Post
cover artist in their midst. He asked if he could go home to New Rochelle to fetch his art supplies and they granted the leave. “Norman Rockwell, of the Naval Station at Charleston, S.C., is spending a ten-day furlough with his parents,” it was reported in the New Rochelle paper, just a month after he was called to duty.
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Assigned to
Afloat and Ashore
, the Navy newspaper, he obliged with a series of cartoons. His witty riffs on Navy life tend to feature the same unnamed protagonist, a spindly sailor with a tiny head and very long bellbottoms who finds it hard to maintain his dignity. A typical cartoon, drawn in a clean, flowing pen line, follows a sailor from five to seven in the evening as he stands on the mail line, praying for a letter that he never receives and which in fact exists only in his daydreams.

Rockwell’s newspaper job took up two days a week and his superiors found other ways to keep him artfully occupied. He was asked to paint a few portraits of visiting foreign admirals. He also accommodated many ordinary sailors who wanted pictures for their sweethearts “back home,” even though they were home, more or less, having never left American soil.

The rest of the time, Rockwell was free to do his own work, and the truth is his career remained uninterrupted by the Great War. He swung a deal with his superiors, getting special permission to continue painting magazine covers for the
Post
—so long as they pertained to the war. And so long as they depicted sailors and marines, as opposed to Army guys.

Out of this injunction came a Navy-themed painting,
Sailor Dreaming of Girlfriend
, which graced the January 18, 1919, cover of the
Post
. Like so many other of Rockwell’s works from this period, it juxtaposes two men of different size and scale; one looms powerfully over the other. Here, two sailors dressed in their Navy uniforms sit side by side on a bench, the porthole behind them indicating they’re on a ship. The figure on the left is the larger, better-traveled, and more experienced one, as his tattoos suggest. His face is severe; his hands are gigantic and laced with veins. The sailor on the right, by contrast, has tiny clawlike hands with long nails. He is bright-eyed and all hopped up over a photograph of a brunette that arrived in the mail. He is holding it tilted downward, so that the viewer can make out the hand-written inscription: “Love to my Sailorboy from”—the signature looks like “Irene.” Although the cover is traditionally described as a tribute to the girl back home, there is something clouded and ambiguous about it. The smaller sailor, who is resting his arm on the other sailor’s thigh, seems unknowable, perhaps because you wonder why a young man who is supposedly thinking about his girlfriend appears so comfortable sidling up to his hunky male friend.

Typically, recalling his Navy days, Rockwell dwelled on his friendship with an Irish cab driver from Chicago, “a burly, rough-tough sailor named O’Toole.” Rockwell speaks of their adventures as if O’Toole represents a strong and knowing brother who made his life complete. “I was real proud of O’Toole,” he notes. “He was the he-man who knew how to handle himself. I was the ‘pale artist plying his sickly trade.’ He took good care of me.”
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Rockwell’s Navy adventures ended abruptly on November 12, 1918, just one day after the fighting ceased. With the signing of the armistice, he was anxious to be discharged as quickly as possible. His commanding officer was willing to accommodate him, but there was a price. Instead of an honorable discharge, he would have to receive an “inaptitude discharge.”

The commander who filled out his papers noted: “Rockwell is an artist and unaccustomed to hardship and manual labor. His patriotic impulse caused him to enlist in a rating for which he has no aptitude. Moreover, he is unsuited to naval routine and hard work.”

*   *   *

On November 13, 1918, Rockwell returned home from the Navy. Getting off the train at the New Rochelle station, he walked along the broad, tree-sheltered sidewalks to his apartment on Coligni Avenue, tossed down his seabag, and pecked Irene on the cheek. Then he walked to Meadow Lane, where he and Forsythe had rented a studio earlier that year, after the lease on the Remington studio ran out. Rockwell later recalled his momentous joy at unlocking the door and finding everything just the way he had left it three months earlier. He glanced at his brushes, which were clustered by the dozens in jars. He glanced at his easel, on which he had painted the words “100 percent” in gold pigment along the top, not that he needed a reminder to work harder.

The local newspaper took note of his return, in an article that appeared beneath a droll headline:
ROCKWELL BACK
,
SO WAR STOPS.
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It claimed that Rockwell “has received his full and honorable discharge,” although this was not the case.

“I am glad to get back to New Rochelle,” Rockwell told a reporter, as he lighted his pipe. The article was the first to note his habit of pipe smoking. “You know, I left here on Forsythe’s birthday. That was the birthday present I gave him—my absence.”
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During his stint in the Navy, Rockwell received permission to continue painting magazine covers—so long as he portrayed sailors.

World War I is sometimes described by historians as the first full-blown mass media event in America, the first in which newspapers and national magazines (no one had radios yet) manufactured a narrative that encouraged a certain reading of events. There was the war, and then there was the media war—a barrage of patriotic posters and magazine illustrations that played up the notion of heroic sacrifice to keep Americans from seeing the war as a senseless waste of money and of lives. In this regard, World War I instructed Rockwell in the power of art as a means of persuasion. The war had been fought at home not with weapons but with images.

After the war, many illustrators continued to lend their services to government projects, especially the Victory Loan drive. Rockwell would have read, in the local paper, about the seven New Rochelle artists, including Clyde Forsythe and the Leyendecker brothers, who signed on with the Division of Pictorial Publicity.
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It was responsible for Forsythe’s popular poster, “And They Thought We Couldn’t Fight,” which shows an American soldier tromping home with a rah-rah expression despite the head bandage beneath his helmet; it was intended to silence those Germans who had accused Americans of being weaklings.

Peacetime, as much as wartime, needed its own images and optics. And, in coming years, no one would visualize the aspirations of American life more effectively than Rockwell. Later on, Rockwell felt he had acted immaturely during World War I and should have tried to contribute posters. He would more than make up for it during World War II.