January 2011

William E. Leuchtenburg’s article on the symbiotic relationship between President Roosevelt and Huey Long (October/November 1985 issue) rightfully centered on the unanswered questions of the 1936 presidential campaign: would Long ultimately run for the Democratic nomination and directly challenge FDR? Would Long form his own third party—a Share Our Wealth organization—for the fall elections? Would Long throw his considerable political clout behind a Republican in a bold attempt to remove Roosevelt from the White House and clear Long’s path for a try in 1940?

Obviously the questions entered the realm of conjecture when Long was assassinated in September of 1935. But a private poll, conducted by Emil Hurja, executive director and head statistician of the Democratic National Committee in the spring of 1935, provides some revealing glimpses into what might have happened had the Kingfish lived for the 1936 elections.

In these days of routine transoceanic air travel, it is difficult to comprehend the emotional significance of the first landing of the China Clipper in Manila Bay (“The Time Machine,” October/November 1985). 1 was in the Philippines at that time and, with an adventurous friend, paddled a native dugout banca canoe into Manila Bay to watch Pan American’s Capt. Edwin C. Musick land the Clipper in the calm waters of the bay. As the aircraft touched down, pandemonium broke loose from thousands of spectators who lined the breakwaters of the bay and from the bells and whistles of the many boats in the harbor. It was truly an experience I shall never forget.

This perfect midsummer scene, with its dark, glossy trees and sunny lawn (left), is the product of a Scottish-born painter named John Williamson, who began his career in the 1840s decorating window shades. Williamson spent most of his life in Brooklyn, but he traveled all over the Northeast, and the majority of his pictures are rural scenes of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. He was particularly fond of the Hudson River, and it was from an estate overlooking the Tappan Zee that he made this fresh and oddly modern-looking painting in 1875.

The billboard for Held by the Enemy in Ernest Upper’s The Fire Engine on Broad Street, Elizabeth, New Jersey (left) dates the painting about 1889, the year William Gillette’s play opened there. The shop signs and window displays offer extraordinary documentation of a commercial district in an American city, but upper’s real subject is the handsome steam pumper. He painted it in vivid detail, down to the small brass plate that reads: “Rebuilt by I. N. Denmisson, Newark, N.J.”

Randall Davey was drawn to the Ashcan school by everything but subject matter. Born in 1887, Davey dropped out of Cornell to come to New York City and study under Robert Henri, who was then spreading his gospel of painting the actualities of everyday life. For most of Henri’s followers, this meant the seething wards of downtown Manhattan. For Davey, it meant portraiture and, eventually, the highly non-slum pursuit of polo. But he was clearly one with the Ashcan school in the confidence with which he handled a paintbrush, as is shown by the dash and authority he brought to his 1915 Lady Wearing a Hat (right).

By the time he painted Windy Day in 1895, the Massachusetts-born Childe Hassam had already made the move—near-mandatory for American artists—to New York City. But this picture is of Boston, where he began his career turning out sketches for the newspapers, like so many painters of his day. Hassam was among the most successful of the American impressionists: when he died in 1935, The New York Times cited a critic who thought Hassam had “succeeded in doing oftener and better what Monet had tried to do with color.” In fact, much of Hassam’s work is not nearly so free and engaging as this little oil sketch, which, with its determined pedestrians and its clouds of steam pumping into the winter sky, could be any American industrial city in the virile years just before the century’s turn.

In A Favorite , painted about 1890 (left), John Haberle creates the illusion of a ramshackle assemblage of pipe, cigar-box lid, and matches on a yellow pine board. Trompe l’oeil paintings like this one decorated the nation’s barrooms and hotel lobbies during the 1880s and 1890s, and masculine subjects like smoking and hunting were steady favorites. Haberle’s work stands well above that of his contemporaries because of his sense of humor, evident here in details like the missing nails and the caricature of himself smoking above his signature.

The striped and tasseled hammock in Robert F. Blum’s Two Idlers (right) is the same one William Merritt Chase used in his 1884 work Sunlight and Shadow , which showed Blum and a companion in a backyard setting in Holland. Four years later, when Blum needed a painting to submit to the National Academy of Design, he took the hammock and bamboo table from his New York studio out to Brick Church, New Jersey, and painted his friend and fellow artist William Baer relaxing with his wife on their porch.

Charles Curran grew up in Ohio, studied in Paris, and settled in New York, but his subject matter rarely varied: he liked to paint young women engaged in domestic chores. In the 1887 work (right) titled Shadow Decoration , Curran uses the laundry hanging on the line as an opportunity to experiment with some very subtle effects of light.

James Carroll Beckwith painted this superb portrait of his friend and fellow artist William Walton in 1886 (left). If Walton posed for his portrait in his own studio, the evidence on the wall behind him suggests that this little-known painter worked in the style of the American impressionists and, when he wasn’t working, fenced. Beckwith’s composition, especially the geometric bands of empty wall behind his subject, shows the influence of the Japanese prints that fascinated American artists of the time.