The Other Rockwell

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Speaker 8 Hey there, Molly here.

Speaker 8 I wanted to take a second to talk about a different Rockwell.

Speaker 8 We've been talking in circles for weeks now about George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 8 But there are some other famous Rockwells. His own father, George Lovejoy Rockwell, was a pretty famous vaudeville performer.

Speaker 8 But it isn't Doc Rockwell I want to talk about.

Speaker 8 There is another Rockwell who, like the Nazi we've been talking about, is most famously pictured with a pipe in his mouth. Another Rockwell Rockwell who lived in a city called Arlington in his 40s.

Speaker 8 Another Rockwell who came out swinging in the 1960s with some strong public statements about the civil rights movement.

Speaker 8 But George Lincoln Rockwell the Nazi and Norman Rockwell the Illustrator don't really have much else in common. So there's never really a good reason to talk about both men in the same breath.

Speaker 8 Unless it's by accident.

Speaker 8 As I was researching the story of Frank Smith and his involvement in both the American Nazi Party and the New England Mafia, I was reading through the file the FBI kept on Raymond Patriarcha, a mob boss in Rhode Island.

Speaker 8 About 4,000 pages into that 8,000-page file, there is a memo addressed to J. Edgar Hoover.

Speaker 8 It's from the special agent in charge of the Boston Field Office, and it's dated January of 1965.

Speaker 8 The memo was to notify Hoover that a Patriarchal Crime Family associate who'd just been released from prison was meeting with a man called George Norman Rockwell.

Speaker 8 The typewritten memo has a handwritten correction, so someone took a pen and circled Norman and then wrote Lincoln in the margins.

Speaker 8 It's a funny little artifact, but it reminded me of the time I heard someone make that exact same mistake in a federal courtroom.

Speaker 8 Back in 2021, I was covering a trial in the civil lawsuit of Sainz v.

Speaker 8 Kessler, a suit filed against the organizers of the Unite the Right rally by a group of people who'd been injured at the Nazi rally.

Speaker 8 Towards the end of that trial, when the plaintiff's attorney had Jeff Scoop on the stand, the one-time leader of the National Socialist Movement, Scoop was asked about some terminology that he used with his group.

Speaker 8 The National Socialist Movement referred to their members who engage in street-level activism as stormtroopers. And that was a nod to their shared history with the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 8 But when the attorney rephrased that answer back to his witness, he accidentally said, George Norman Rockwell, instead of George Lincoln Rockwell.

Speaker 8 And I remember this moment. I remember it because it was one one of the only times I laughed that day.

Speaker 8 And I remember it because I wrote it down.

Speaker 8 And I remember joking about it in person with another of the plaintiff's attorneys a few days later.

Speaker 8 I remember it.

Speaker 8 But when I went back to look at the transcript this week, it isn't actually there.

Speaker 8 And this has, honestly, really shaken my faith in the sanctity of court reporting.

Speaker 8 I mean, the transcript is supposed to be this perfect, perfect, indelible record of the words that were spoken aloud in a courtroom.

Speaker 8 And normally, I would default to believing what's in the transcript, but I know the transcript is mistaken here.

Speaker 8 I typically take all my courtroom notes by hand, but because of the ongoing COVID pandemic back in 2021, the judge made the decision to close the courtroom to the public.

Speaker 8 And so this trial was broadcast over a telephone line that you could call into to listen.

Speaker 8 And since I was able to listen in from home, I decided that instead of taking my notes privately and then writing about them later, I would live tweet the trial. All four weeks of it.

Speaker 8 It was a nightmarish undertaking, but one I took very seriously.

Speaker 8 And when that trial finally ended, I got perhaps the finest compliment I'll ever get about my notes.

Speaker 8 Some of the attorneys for the plaintiffs told me that when they had to leave the the courtroom for a bathroom break or something during the day, they would pull up those tweets to see what they were missing.

Speaker 8 So, transcript be damned, that attorney made the same little mistake in 2021 that an FBI agent made in that memo in 1965.

Speaker 8 They both accidentally dragged poor Norman Rockwell into Nazi business.

Speaker 8 So those were the two examples of this that I had in mind.

Speaker 8 But I hadn't realized the extent to which this mistake was happening until I sat down to write about it.

Speaker 8 Apparently, it was a frequent enough occurrence that it was a source of great pain for Norman Rockwell, particularly in the 1960s when both men were active in their respective careers.

Speaker 8 One as America's leading neo-Nazi and the other as a beloved illustrator of Americana.

Speaker 8 Despite their differences, this similarity in their names has been a source of confusion for decades. A lot of people are making this mistake.

Speaker 8 Most often, it's that same mistake the FBI agent made. People are writing George Norman Rockwell when they mean George Lincoln Rockwell.

Speaker 8 So they have the first and last name of the Nazi correct, and they know it's a three-name deal.

Speaker 8 But some part of their brain is just inserting the name of the other famous Rockwell into the middle.

Speaker 8 I found dozens of instances in old newspapers where stories about the American Nazi Party refer to the group's leader as George Norman Rockwell.

Speaker 8 I found papers containing apologies and corrections for having made the mistake and letters to the editor from readers who were outraged on the artist's behalf.

Speaker 8 And I also found articles that used both the correct and incorrect form interchangeably from paragraph to paragraph. And this middle name mix-up accounts for most of the examples I found.

Speaker 8 But there were a few notable instances where they just switched the names entirely.

Speaker 8 In 1964, the head of the local Young Republicans club led the effort to invite George Lincoln Rockwell to speak at Western Washington State College.

Speaker 8 And when the day finally arrived, That student, Terry Gallagher, was so nervous that he accidentally introduced the Nazi to the audience as Norman Rockwell.

Speaker 8 In 1966, when George Lincoln Rockwell was arrested in Chicago, a newspaper in Alabama ran a photo of men in white-powered t-shirts with swastika banners under the headline, Nazi Chief Norman Rockwell Arrested.

Speaker 8 That same year, before the Senate killed what would have been the Civil Rights Act of 1966, a Florida congressman introduced an amendment to the bill that would, quote, deter professional agitators by making it a crime to cross state lines to participate in civil disturbance.

Speaker 8 According to a write-up in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Representative William Kramer said his amendment was intended to keep people like Norman Rockwell from traveling from state to state fomenting civil disorder.

Speaker 8 And again, shaking my faith in the sanctity of transcription, this is actually missing from the congressional record.

Speaker 8 But the reporter who wrote it up says that Kramer said Norman Rockwell several times before he was interrupted by a colleague who suggested that he probably means George Lincoln.

Speaker 8 One particularly messy example came shortly after George Lincoln Rockwell's death.

Speaker 8 When his assassin, John Patler, first appeared in court for an arraignment, another member of the American Nazi Party had an outburst in the courtroom.

Speaker 8 So a man in the gallery stood up and he's screaming at John Patler and he lunged toward him and he was arrested.

Speaker 8 And after Eric Wenberg was arrested, it was discovered that he was an Australian citizen who'd overstayed a tourist visa.

Speaker 8 Before authorities in the U.S. could deport him, he traveled to Canada.
And Canada, too, wanted the Nazi out.

Speaker 8 But the Canadian deportation proceedings were delayed by an embarrassing clerical error.

Speaker 8 One of the reasons the Canadian government gave for his removal was that he'd been arrested in the United States at a demonstration against the assassin of Norman Rockwell.

Speaker 8 John Beatty, the Canadian Nazi who represented Wenberg at his deportation hearing, showed up to court in a swastika armband and argued that clearly this record is full of errors.

Speaker 8 Norman Rockwell is still alive.

Speaker 8 Wenberg was eventually sent home to Australia, and in 1972, he died in a car accident.

Speaker 8 That doesn't sound particularly notable, but the car accident happened in Rhodesia, and it was reported at the time that there was a million dollars in cash found in the car with his dead body.

Speaker 8 So we'll have to come back to that some other time. We're talking about Norman Rockwell.

Speaker 8 But in all of these examples, people are accidentally slipping Norman Rockwell's name into stories about the Nazi. I couldn't find a single instance of the mistake happening in reverse.

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Speaker 8 Now, you might be wondering, are these two men related?

Speaker 9 They're not.

Speaker 8 I did find one completely unsubstantiated claim published in 2003 in the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies that Norman Rockwell was George Lincoln's uncle.

Speaker 8 There's no citation.

Speaker 8 The article was a review of Frederick Simonelli's biography of George Lincoln Rockwell, and I've read that book. It makes absolutely no mention of Norman Rockwell at all.

Speaker 8 So that strange parenthetical claim in the article that the illustrator is the Nazi's uncle seems to be just entirely made up.

Speaker 8 Norman Rockwell is about the same age as the Nazi's father, and they're both from New England. So it's a reasonable question to ask, but the answer is no.

Speaker 8 I did some of my own genealogical research on both families and I found no connection.

Speaker 8 Back in the days before Google, sometimes newspapers would have a feature that that answered factual questions submitted by readers, and I found a bunch of those over the years where readers asked variations on this question.

Speaker 8 And the newspaper always answered, no,

Speaker 8 sometimes citing Norman Rockwell himself.

Speaker 8 This association was a troubling one for Norman Rockwell. His granddaughter, Abigail Rockwell, still runs a Facebook page dedicated to his memory.

Speaker 8 In a post just a few weeks ago, she wrote,

Speaker 8 My father told me Pop was very upset to be sometimes confused with George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 8 He was so unsettled and perturbed by this, he considered taking legal action, but was dissuaded from doing so.

Speaker 8 It's not just embarrassing to be mixed up with someone else, especially someone so unsavory.

Speaker 8 Norman Rockwell wasn't just not George Lincoln Rockwell.

Speaker 8 He was against everything the other man represented.

Speaker 8 The name Norman Rockwell probably puts some images into your mind's eye right away.

Speaker 8 You might be picturing his painting of a family at the dinner table with a big turkey, or the one of a man standing up ready to speak his mind.

Speaker 8 Both of those freedom from want and freedom of speech, were painted in the same year as part of a four-part series of paintings for the Saturday Evening Post in 1943.

Speaker 8 And if you're only familiar with his earlier work, you might be thinking, well,

Speaker 8 Norman Rockwell was just painting the America that George Lincoln Rockwell was trying to create. A whitewashed, conservative America with traditional white Christian suburban family values.

Speaker 8 You're probably picturing his paintings of a white family on their way to church, a pretty blonde white woman at the soda counter, a white couple at the courthouse getting a marriage license, Boy Scouts, soldiers, the iconic image of Rosie the Riveter.

Speaker 8 Classic mid-20th century Americana.

Speaker 8 Images of peaceful suburban living.

Speaker 8 And, notably,

Speaker 8 images with only white faces.

Speaker 8 And that's true. Those are Norman Rockwell's most famous works.
Those are things that he painted.

Speaker 8 Most of the ones you're probably thinking of were illustrations he did for the Saturday Evening Post.

Speaker 8 Over the course of 47 years, he illustrated hundreds of covers for that magazine.

Speaker 8 According to art critic Caroline Marling, the Saturday Evening Post explicitly forbade Norman Rockwell from painting black subjects in his cover art unless they were depicted performing some kind of menial task.

Speaker 8 By the 1960s, though, he felt drawn to paint the world as it was, and that meant acknowledging the struggle for civil rights.

Speaker 8 So he parted ways with the Saturday Evening Post.

Speaker 8 In the 1960s, Norman Rockwell painted for Look magazine.

Speaker 8 And it was for Look that he created some of his most moving paintings.

Speaker 8 In 1964, a painting called The Problem We All Live With was published in Look magazine's Centerfold.

Speaker 8 It shows a six-year-old Ruby Bridges, flanked by federal marshals, on her way to integrate her elementary school.

Speaker 8 The following year, Look published a painting called Murder in Mississippi, and it was Norman Rockwell's depiction of the murders of civil rights workers James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

Speaker 8 During the same years that George Lincoln Rockwell was crisscrossing the country, disrupting and mocking civil rights marches,

Speaker 8 Norman Rockwell was painting that struggle.

Speaker 8 He was quietly insisting through his work that people like Ruby Bridges were every bit as much a part of the fabric of America as the subjects of his kitschy classic illustrations of suburbia.

Speaker 8 When his Nazi counterpart was making a mockery of the struggle for equality in Mississippi by sending a stormtrooper in blackface into the Capitol building to disrupt Congress,

Speaker 8 Norman Rockwell was memorializing the civil rights activists who died fighting for racial justice there.

Speaker 8 In July of 1967, Norman Rockwell spoke at the National Press Club in Washington.

Speaker 8 Gossip columnist Leonard Lyons reported that The artist was overheard rehearsing the opening line of his speech in a hotel shortly before the event.

Speaker 8 I am not

Speaker 8 George Lincoln Rockwell.

Speaker 8 Just a few weeks later, the other Rockwell was shot in a strip mall parking lot.

Speaker 8 That bullet didn't end the confusion between the two Rockwells,

Speaker 8 but it did end the Nazis' life.

Speaker 8 Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 8 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.

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