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Framing Race in Personal and Political Spaces

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Framing Race in Personal and Political Spaces Framing Race in Personal and Political Spaces New Deal Photographs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Portraits in Domestic Settings Jennifer Wingate New Deal photographers working for the Farm Securities Administration and the Office of War Information framed Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) portraits on display in domestic interiors to reflect their own perspectives on national politics. The portraits were significant not only for the subjects of the photographs but also for the photographers who decided when and how to capture these interiors on film. Similarities and differences between Jack Delano’s and Gordon Parks’s early 1940s photographs of FDR portraits in American homes highlight this period’s political tensions involving war, domestic unrest, and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. N NOVEMBER 5, 1940, the incumbent was not wide, despite winning a strong majority Democratic Party candidate, Franklin De- of votes in the country’s lowest-income districts. O lano Roosevelt (FDR), was elected to an In the past year, he had contended with opposition unprecedented third term thanks to support at the from isolationists and conservatives, Congress chip- polls from labor, African Americans, and foreign- ping away at his administration’s domestic agenda, born voters. Roosevelt’s margin of victory in 1940 and the ebbing tide of New Deal optimism. None- theless, a day before his third inauguration, the New York Times described the president as “serious ”“ Jennifer Wingate is associate professor of fine arts and chair of but not grim, concerned but not worried. In con- interdisciplinary studies at St. Francis College and coeditor of Pub- fidence and vigor of assurance,” the article contin- lic Art Dialogue. ued, he “is the same man who told the American I thank Jenny Carson, Steven Dean, Wendy Galgan, David Lubin, people, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear it- and Amy Werbel for commenting on drafts of this article. I am grate- 1 ful for the input and encouragement I received upon presenting self.’” Five days after his historic re-election, a pho- aspects of this material at conferences hosted by the New England tograph of a smiling Roosevelt campaigning in Phil- American Studies Association, the Southeastern College Art Confer- ence, the Scholars of American Visual Art and Text (Sussex Univer- adelphia the previous month appeared in the Picture sity), and the Space Between Society. St. Francis College awarded Parade supplement of the Philadelphia Inquirer (fig. 1). me faculty research grants in 2014 and 2015 to consult archives in In the photograph FDR’s face and bright smile, Washington, DC. I thank Helena Wright and Franklin Robinson at the National Museum of American History and Brandon Fortune, offset by a dark, wide-brimmed fedora, foretell vic- Wendy Wick Reaves, and Ellen Miles at the National Portrait Gallery tory. In hindsight, the picture’s contrasts also betray for suggesting resources when I started this project. The generous Roosevelt’s intimate knowledge of tensions brewing assistance of the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress was indispensable. I also am grateful for conversations with at home and abroad. His sparkling eyes look side- colleagues Athena Devlin and Sara Rzeszutek and with my students at ways out of the frame over his right shoulder, glanc- St. Francis College. The inspiration for this project was a 2013 discus- sion with a student whose father gave her a framed Obama portrait for her apartment. Lastly, I am deeply indebted to Amy Earls and the staff at Winterthur and to Winterthur Portfolio’s anonymous re- 1 viewers. Cited in Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin © 2018 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, and Eleanor Roosevelt; The Home Front in World War II (New York: Si- Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2018/5223-0002$10.00 mon and Schuster, 1994), 203. 138 Winterthur Portfolio 52:2/3 Fig. 1. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First United States President to be Re-elected for a Third Term,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 10, 1940, Picture Parade supplement, cover, photo Octo- ber 23, 1940. (Photo, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY.) ing back even as he moves forward into the inevita- municated gratitude, hope, and inspiration for the bility of war. people who displayed them but also reflected and This photograph and others like it were torn out nurtured a new sense of connection between the of newspapers and picture magazines and pinned federal government and individual Americans dur- up in laundries, barber shops, saloons, and the liv- ing the Great Depression and World War II. Their ing rooms of American homes. The portraits com- display captured the attention of New Deal photog- Photographs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Portraits in Domestic Settings 139 raphers who sought to record American ways of life, as well as to promote the New Deal’sprograms.As FDR entered his third term and the country entered World War II, two photographers in particular placed an emphasis on the domestic practice of displaying presidential portraits. All eyes were on Roosevelt as the United States joined the Allies and as racial strife simmered on the home front, and so were the lenses of Ukrainian photographer Jack Delano (1914–97) and African American photographer Gordon Parks (1912–2006). I argue that it is no coincidence that their photographs from the early 1940s highlight Roosevelt portraits in American homes to an un- precedented extent just as FDR’s negotiation of for- eign and domestic turmoil loomed large in the pub- lic imagination. By 1940,whenRoosevelt’s smiling face was pub- lished in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Picture Parade, Americans had grown accustomed to the thirty-second president’s voice and smile, which had helped com- fort and guide the nation through the Depression. Families had listened to him in their homes since 1933, when he gave his first publicly broadcast ra- dio address, and they had seen him in print, includ- ing on the June 27, 1938, cover of Life magazine, with his head tilted back in a hearty laugh (fig. 2). In addition to offering reassurance, Roosevelt’s ebul- lience worked to detract attention from his disabil- Fig. 2. “Franklin Roosevelt and His America,” Life, 27 1938 © ity (he had been paralyzed from the waist down at June , , cover. (LIFE logo and cover design Time, Inc. LIFE and the LIFE logo are registered trademarks the age of thirty-nine and could not stand or walk of Time, Inc. used under license; photo, Time, Inc.) unassisted), as well as from his true sentiments, which those close to him knew that he did not readily re- veal. Art historian Sally Stein has shown how artists examines the significance of Roosevelt portraits vis- addressed the challenge posed by Roosevelt’s phys- ible in photographs of domestic interiors produced ical impairment with strategies like selective fram- under the auspices of New Deal agencies the Farm ing and displacement in their depictions of him. Securities Administration (FSA) and the Office of Images of the president sitting at his desk or in his War Information (OWI) for the subjects and for car and photographs of his smiling face were com- the photographers, and the meanings of displays mon, as were more creative and surreal solutions of presidential portraiture in general. In particular, like a collage in Vanity Fair magazine titled The Laugh- the images by photographers Delano and Parks ex- ing Cavalier, in which his disembodied head repeats pressed the optimism that Roosevelt and his por- in a dizzying swirl as if viewed through a kaleido- trait helped inspire and also the limits of that opti- 2 scope. mism. Both men worked for the FSA’s Historical Head shots of Roosevelt, although more fre- Section, one of five units in the FSA’s Information quently the conventional campaign portraits (fig. 3), Division, and for the OWI, after the section was trans- rather than the candid laughing ones, were omni- ferred there in October 1942. present in the material culture of 1930sand1940s 3 domestic spaces and small businesses. This article Roosevelt and the American People 2 Sally Stein, “The President’s Two Bodies: Stagings and Re- The years of Roosevelt’s presidency coincided with stagings of FDR and the New Deal Body Politic,” American Art 18, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 36–39. enormous changes in mass media, not only the emer- 3 The fig. 4 portrait was reproduced on many collectibles and gence of photojournalism and magazines like Life promotional giveaways in the 1930s. and Look that featured the new photoessay genre 140 Winterthur Portfolio 52:2/3 a letter writer from Albany, Georgia, claimed she hadlookedatFDR’s picture on her wall and listened to his voice so much that “I almost feel like I know you.” Another wrote, “I dreamt you, Mrs. Roosevelt, a son and wife were dining at my house. I could see 6 youseatedatthetable.” The sheer volume of let- ters written to the president by ordinary Americans was unprecedented. The quotes above are from an edited volume consisting of letters written after each of Roosevelt’s so-called fireside chats, talks radio broadcast to the nation over the span of his four terms in which he discussed current events and pol- icies in a face-to-face conversational style. A radio talk that he gave on May 27, 1941, explaining the nation’s war preparedness measures and justifying his decision to add more ships and planes to Amer- ican patrols set a record in the history of radio. Seventy percent of the total home audience in the 7 United States tuned in to hear the president’swords. Radio’s novelty, and the intimacy it conveyed dur- ing FDR’s broadcasts, help explain the tendency ofAmericanstowritetohimaswellastodisplayhis portrait in their homes, sometimes alongside those of family members.
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