On the basement lavel of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge is a room of Rockwell’s early works, his covers for the Saturday Evening Post.3 It’s cover after cover of sweet, whimsical, slice-of-life scenes of middle-class Americana. There are Boy Scouts and baseball games. Town gossips, soda shops, and returning G.I.’s. And of course all those adorable childhood shenanigans.
It’s no wonder this artist appeals to an administration that pledges to turn back the clock to some prior golden age. Rockwell’s scenes look like a happy, wholesome past that many Americans wish they could return to. But this bucolic past was imagined; Daisy notes that her grandfather created and staged it, using models he cast from his local communities in Vermont and Massachusetts. The artist himself grew up in a boarding house, in a cramped urban environment.
“He loved this idea of this, like, sort of small town idealistic thing,” said Daisy, who is an artist and writer too. “But he made it up himself.”
There’s something else that feels a little off in Rockwell’s depictions of this imagined past: They are overwhelmingly white. In fact, there are scarcely any people of color at all.
For Trumpers, this is presumably a feature, not a bug. You’ll find similarly pale complexions populating the Trump Department of Labor’s current anti-immigrant campaign, which seemed to borrow from that early Rockwell aesthetic when it used AI to generate images of blonde, buff, cleft-chinned male youths powering Trump’s “Blue Collar Boom.”
In Rockwell’s case, the demographics were less an artistic choice than a condition of employment. The Saturday Evening Post barred him from painting people of color in anything other than subservient roles, his granddaughter says, citing interviews he gave later in life.
At the museum, Daisy pointed out places where he sneaked in nonwhite characters anyway, always in ways to emphasize their common humanity. For instance, in that Statue of Liberty painting that DHS stole, the team of workmen cleaning Lady Liberty’s torch is racially integrated.
Then in the 1960s, Rockwell underwent a more radical transformation. He became more concerned by both the social turmoil around him as well as his own legacy. “I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”
In other words, Norman Rockwell got woke.
Seeking more artistic control, he left the Post for Look magazine. There, he went on to paint some of the most iconic images of the civil rights movement. These have pride of place in the main gallery of the Norman Rockwell Museum.