Jerry created his own defenses against his childhood. A personal memoir that he penned after his sibling had become famous recalls, perhaps defensively, his pity for poor Norman’s plight: while the older boy got to go play with cousins his own age in Providence, Rhode Island each summer—“I considered myself very lucky as I had a bicycle there”—his little brother was stuck at home. “I always felt sorry for Norman,” he wrote. In truth, Jerry grew up resentful of his brother, their relationship tainted from the start by his parents’ insensitive handling of baby Norman’s displacement of the little toddler. Shipping the eighteen-month-old off to relatives whenever Nancy felt overtaxed was hardly designed to assuage his fears. Norman, as the baby, had to stay with “Mama,” but Jerry could temporarily become a cousin’s responsibility. “My father said that Norman was always sick,” Jerry’s son, Dick Rockwell, remembers. And Jerry himself admitted that “I have very little memory of him as a baby. He was always frail, quite thin and I considered him delicate. I was rather rough I’m afraid and did not play very gently with my young brother.”
Norman, striving to emulate his brother and gain his approval, sought opportunities to join in the older boy’s activities. Luckily, when Jerry began grammar school at P.S. 46, Norman quickly discovered a sure way to increase his own currency: he learned to draw. Although his father had actually been copying pictures from magazines for years, Jerry’s obviously important homework—completed at the dining room table under his father’s watchful eyes—goaded Norman into joining the fraternity. After a few days of boredom, Norman asked “Papa” to teach him how to draw too, and then all three Rockwell “men” began a routine of working together every evening after dinner.
Motivation aside, the inspiration was divinely directed, that much seems clear. Waring was no mean draftsman. A pencil sketch from around 1900 of a Northern European countryside shows his fine mastery of perspective, form, and detail. Although a nightly routine of copying magazine illustrations is nearly unimaginable a hundred years later, at the beginning of the twentieth century the hobby was popular in many households, especially those of an artistic bent. Night after night, Waring sat with his two sons, his wife calmly embroidering on the nearby sofa, the glow of soft maize-colored gaslight casting warm shadows that Rockwell would call upon years later when painting his own Dutch-inspired domestic scenes.
By the time Norman was sharing magazines with his father, the Golden Age of Illustration, roughly the period from 1880 to 1930, was peaking. Well represented by such artists as Howard Pyle, Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Chandler Christy, Harrison Fisher, James Montgomery Flagg, Frederic Remington, Arthur Frost, and Edward Kemble, the period around the turn of the century was a watershed for illustration, proving that the mass production of extraordinarily high-quality art was possible and profitable. Artistic talent put to use in magazines was no longer new, for sure: Winslow Homer had illustrated the New Year of 1869 in Harper’s Weekly, showing 1870 riding in on a velocipede, an early bicycle. Scribner’s and Harper’s both pioneered the use of wood engravings, and, by 1884, Century and Harper’s were both reserving a full 15 percent of their space for pictures. Although the production methods of the past quarter century had produced an overabundance of lackluster illustration alongside the outpourings of first-rate artists, the last years of the nineteenth century coincided with a revivified period of quality magazines set to exploit improved technologies.
When Rockwell was born, the American magazine had finally triumphed over its close competition from England; Judge and Life were finally outselling Punch in the United States. Ushered into lower-class homes through the reduced prices caused by the financial panics of the 1890s, magazines would play a part in forming the national consciousness until the end of World War I, superseded only by radio and television. This visual/verbal venue of mass circulation seemed to symbolize America’s new strength as an industrial, muscular, modern country—its mission nothing less than to become a world leader. By association, the art that appeared in such periodicals was assumed worthy of study. It was this forum overladen with all things American, progressive, and communal that anchored the nightly bonding of the Rockwell males.
Imagining the family scene where Norman Rockwell undertook his first drawing proves irresistible. Slightly churlish throughout his life, little Jerry must have lorded over his pesky brother the importance of his own real work. At the turn of the century, the curriculum of New York City primary grades depended heavily upon drawing the answers to questions, whatever the subject. Norman, those intelligent, restless eyes signaling that he thought he could do just as well as his brother, quickly realized that he could do even better. The praise emanating from his father and his mother established the strongest sense of self and worth yet available to the son whom Nancy called “Snow-in-the-Face,” because he was so pale.
Norman’s desire to imitate his father was sanctioned by his parents, who both quickly grew proud of their son’s obviously inherited abilities. Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyst who wrote on adolescence and stages of human development (and later Rockwell’s close friend) believed such approval pivotal to any boy’s development. In terms that shed light on the Rockwells’ father/son hobby hour, Erikson, in Childhood and Society, reflected upon the determining role that a father often plays in his son’s choice of a career. By “sharing his admiration for a particular ideal”—in this case, illustrations good enough to be mass reproduced, and worthy of replication yet again by the paternal hand—without positioning himself as a professional competitor, Waring allowed Norman to “play” with him by identifying with the same fantasy, the successful commercial artist. Waring enacted his passion in the amateur realm only, but the next generation had the chance, at least, to reproduce competitively the source of the nightly bonding, outperforming the teacher in the process.
About the same time that Norman and Waring practiced their drawing from as many illustrated magazines as the (according to Rockwell) lower-middle-class family could afford, one hundred miles to the southwest, George Horace Lorimer was working sixteen-hour days to revivify the flagging Saturday Evening Post. The weekly Post proudly traced its lineage to Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, launched in 1729. One hundred years later, circulation had climbed to an astounding ninety thousand, due in part to a stable of writers including Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and James Fenimore Cooper. But after the Civil War, the English pattern of monthly magazines influenced the American publishing world so much so that the triumvirate of Harper’s, Scribner’s, and The Atlantic Monthly began to dominate the local market. By 1898, even the all-American Post aped the higher-brow practice of culling snippets from English newspapers and magazines. Its fiction now rarely signed, the entire magazine was sustained by the ludicrously low advertising revenues of $290.00 per issue; subscription had, predictably, deteriorated to 10,473.
Philadelphia publisher Cyrus Curtis, who had made his Ladies’ Home Journal a huge success, perceived the need for a weekly that would leave news to the newspapers, and that would establish for itself an entirely separate niche. Intending it to be aimed primarily at men, he bought the foundering Post, and after the first year, during which Lorimer worked under someone else, Curtis fired the first-in-command and appointed Lorimer as acting editor in chief. Within weeks, Lorimer had convinced the owner that he could turn the Post around.
Which he did. In the process, he expanded the pragmatic vision of its founder, packaging smartly and stylishly an irresistible myth predicated on American unity, its art and literature—its destiny—finally independent of Europe.
By the turn of the twentieth century, New York City counted more than 70 percent of its public school students from foreign-born parents. The common progressive view, held by humane educators and government officials alike, perceived the need for acculturation, or Americanization, which included immersing the immigrant in the “language, customs, and political ideals” of the country. No strong voices were raised in defense of a pluralisti
c society; instead, the very youth of the United States seemed to argue for the need to establish a unified, incontestable image of “being American,” the achievement of which the multitudes of immigrants could then make their goal. In curricular reform that reflected education across the country, the New York Board of Education began emphasizing a formal study of history that celebrated a mythic America of a decidedly Protestant-Puritan bent, an account distorted, as one teacher of the era recalled, by “omission” more than commission: “They left out all the terrible things that happened.” Such a focus on the country’s manifest destiny implied that the torch of civilization had passed from the (corrupt) Old World to America’s virtuous shores, an ideal picture thought sustainable only if the image of America was writ bold and clear and unified.
George Horace Lorimer used the Post as an instrument of such “Americanization.” Worried that the country would be caught up in global concerns best deferred until the national identity of the United States had congealed, he urged his countrymen (and, later, women) to see their business as that of building a new nation, one where hard work, fair treatment of others, and rigorous if imaginative thinking would triumph against an effete intellectualism tainted with European elitism and decadence. Most important, he celebrated the ideal of an American community made safe by a shared vision of right and wrong. If he challenged readers to live a virtuous and informed life, he also encouraged them to look to their own backyards first and foremost. The Post aimed its advertising at an inchoate ruling class in search of an identity. The message found its audience among the country’s aspiring middle-class, largely Protestant population, which could consistently afford to buy the modestly priced magazine.
Waring Rockwell typified the kind of customer targeted by the new Post. He liked its unpredictable mix of worldly cover drawings and the occasionally vivid illustration; the magazine was clearly undergoing major changes, and he was eager to see what would happen each week. And in spite of its slight sheen of sophistication, it still met family standards of modesty and decorum. Why, even the subjects that captivated the Rockwell boys showed up in this adult forum: the famous illustrator J. C. Leyendecker’s first cover for the Post appeared on May 20, 1899, a black-and-white drawing for a story on the Spanish-American War, around the time that Jerry bribed his talented brother into making him a paper fleet of ships.
And, by 1900, Norman was already taking advantage of any opportunity to increase his skills and his repertoire of recognizable pictures. He had quickly realized that his brother would allow him to hang around his friends as long as the younger boy kept reproducing the various ship models that celebrated Admiral Dewey’s recent feats, cardboard pictures of which were now included in cigarette boxes. The child took meticulous care with each picture, effort that went utterly disregarded when Jerry and his latest buddy engaged in instant warfare once the objects were handed over. The older kids would take scissors and see who could cut up the other’s ship first, a too quick end to his art, even the six-year-old artist felt. A scorched-earth policy ruled, so that after ten minutes, hours of Norman’s craft crumbled to the ground. Years later, he still rued the contrast between his efforts and the disposable commodity he had brought forth: “It was sort of a frustrating form of art for me: five minutes after I had drawn the fleets, laboriously copying with much smudgy erasing, Jarvis and his friends would have cut them to shreds.” The memories the brothers later recounted of the mock war games speak loudly of the division between their sensibilities. One tended toward action, the other, contemplation: “I do recall playing sham battle in a vacant lot across the street,” Jerry writes during the same period that Norman reconstructs in his memory in terms of the artist’s role, meant to curry favor. “The Spanish-American War made us kids quite warlike.”
His ability to draw whatever others asked him gained Rockwell a place in the neighborhood, and it became his identity mark among a group who were all considered gifted in equal but different ways: “My ability was just something I had, like a bag of lemon drops. Jarvis could jump over three orange crates; Jack Outwater had an uncle who had seen a pirate; George Dugan could wiggle his ears; I could draw. I never thought much about it. A bunch of us kids would be sitting around on the stoop and somebody would say, ‘Let’s go up to Amsterdam Avenue and look in the saloons.’ ‘Naw, we did that yesterday.’ Silence. ‘Say, Norm, draw something.’ So I’d draw a lion or a fire engine on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk. But it was just as likely that someone would ask George Dugan to wiggle his ears.”
Although Norman and Jerry had plenty of friends in the neighborhood, the boys generally went to others’ houses to play. Their mother found it taxing to have visitors, and her frequent sick spells, which in later years she herself would call her “nerves,” benefited from quiet. “Whenever I think of my parents a certain scene invariably presents itself, a scene which was repeated day after day during my childhood,” Rockwell recalled at age sixty-five. “It is late afternoon. I am playing on the stairs or in the hallway of the apartment house. The front door opens and closes and my father comes up the stairs, worn out from his day at the office and his hour ride on the trolley. He goes into the apartment and I can hear him ask my mother: ‘Well, now, Nancy, how are you?’ ‘Oh, Waring, I’ve had such a hard day. I’m just worn out.’ ‘Now, Nancy, you lie down on the couch there and I’ll get a cold towel for your head.’ And then he’d shut the door and all I could hear would be my mother complaining, interrupted at long intervals by my father in tones of gentle sympathy and concern.” The neighbors told Norman that his father was “a saint,” a “wonderful, wonderful man” for treating Nancy this way.
Nancy’s neurasthenia routinely reached fever pitch when her doting husband returned every evening, and the boys learned that this was the best time of day to grant their parents some privacy. Her constant spells of feeling ill demanded most of the emotional resources of her household. In spite of being told that there was “nothing wrong,” she was always sending for doctors to diagnose the physical ailments that accompanied what we would today call depression. The sympathy that such chronic suffering normally elicits was forestalled by her demanding attitude; whatever she wanted, it was Waring’s duty to procure—a position he unfailingly accepted with good grace. From pictures of this period, the married couple seem romantically bound; in one, for instance, Nancy cuddles in Waring’s lap while the sons stand, somewhat uncertainly, behind and to the side of their parents. Family lore holds that Nancy Hill was an enviably skilled coquette, though her overt use of conventional feminine wiles struck many people as dated and cloying rather than charmingly coy.
The parents’ closed little circle of spousal devotion left little energy for their sons, and staying away until dinnertime was no hardship from the boys’ point of view. From the loud omissions in Rockwell’s autobiography, we understand that he welcomed diversions from his home life. His mother, with good reason, was more often frenzied than controlled during early 1900. Mere months after welcoming in the new century with fervid hopes for good health, Nancy had confronted the deaths of her beloved sister and brother-in-law, Susan and Samuel Orpen. During the five years that the couple battled consumption, a tacit understanding had developed that in the event of their deaths, Nancy and Waring would house at least one of the children that the Orpens were raising. In addition to Frances, their own daughter, the kindly minister and his wife had informally adopted John, Amy, and Eva Milner, the three children orphaned several years earlier by the consumptive deaths of Nancy and Susan’s sister Amy Hill Milner and her husband. Over the next ten years, at least one of the two girls lived with the Rockwells, and sometimes both Amy and her mentally retarded younger sister, Eva, were under Aunt Nancy’s care. Nancy’s grief over the Orpens’ death, and her fear of the additional responsibilities she incurred upon their demise, tended to find expression in a compelling though inconsistent neediness that confused and frightened her younger son: “I was never close to my mother. . . . When I was a c
hild, she would call me into her bedroom and say to me: ‘Norman Percevel, you must always honor and love your mother. She needs you.’ Somehow that put a barrier between us.”
Unfortunately, school did not provide for Rockwell the escape from an oppressive home life that it has for many children. In the early 1900s, the primary years curriculum depended heavily on drawing and coloring, activities that might have been congenial to the young boy. But the rigid structure of the classes and the rewards for doing things the teacher’s way played to a nascent imperiousness that would characterize the adult artist as well. Unwittingly replicating the behavior of his mother, Rockwell refused to exert himself for any activity he felt not in his self-interest. And he could not convince himself that school was of much benefit. Even walking back and forth four times a day (the boys ate lunch with Nancy) grew tedious, so Norman and Jerry got roller skates that made the seven-block trip between their apartment and the school on 157th Street more fun.
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