When Norman Rockwell Got Woke: The Story Behind ‘The Problem We All Live With’
In the 1960s, America’s most famous artist defiantly transformed himself from an inadvertent white supremacist into a radical civil rights activist
No artist has done more to create — or, maybe I should say manufacture — the American identity than Norman Rockwell.
Consider how wildly fragmented America’s immigrant identity was when the illustrator — as he described himself — began painting covers for the famed Saturday Evening Post in 1916. There was nothing to connect groups such as the Irish, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, or, in my family’s case, German and Polish with the English who had previously colonized much of the North American continent, the Mexicans who had become American with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the descendants of enslaved African peoples, or the Indigenous people whose land everyone else decided was suddenly theirs. As problematic was how distance separated immigrant groups from each other; in America, you could, for all intents and purposes, live as geographically separated from your extended family as you were from those back “home” in, say, Europe.
