Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. Hey there, Molly here, I wanted to
take a second to talk about a different Rockwell. We've
been talking in circles for weeks now about George Lincoln Rockwell,
(00:21):
the founder of the American Nazi Party, But there are
some other famous Rockwells. His own father, George Lovejoy Rockwell,
was a pretty famous vaudeville performer. But it isn't Doc
Rockwell I want to talk about. There is another Rockwell who,
like the Nazi we've been talking about, is most famously
(00:42):
pictured with a pipe in his mouth. Another Rockwell who
lived in a city called Arlington in his forties. Another
Rockwell who came out swinging in the nineteen sixties with
some strong public statements about the civil rights movement. But
George Lincoln Rockwell the Nazi and Norman Rockwell the illustrator
(01:03):
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, unless it's by accident. As I was
researching the story of Frank Smith and his involvement in
both the American Nazi Party and the New England Mafia,
(01:24):
I was reading through the file the FBI kept on
Raymond patriarcha a mob bosson Rhode Island. About four thousand
pages into that eight thousand page file, there's a memo
addressed to J. Edgar Hoover. It's from the Special Agent
in charge of the Boston Field Office, and it's dated
January of nineteen sixty five. The memo was to notify
(01:47):
Hoover that a patriarchic crime family associate who'd just been
released from prison was meeting with a man called George
Norman Rockwell. The typewritten memo has a handwritten correction, so
someone took a pen and circled Norman and then wrote
Lincoln in the margins. It's a funny little artifact, but
(02:12):
it reminded me of the time I heard someone make
that exact same mistake in a federal courtroom. Back in
twenty twenty one. I was covering a trial in the
civil lawsuit of Siins vs. 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.
(02:34):
Towards the end of that trial, when the plaintiff's attorney
had Jeff's 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. The National Socialist
Movement referred to their members who engage in street level
activism as stormtroopers, and that was a nod to their
(02:56):
shared history with the American Nazi Party. When the attorney
rephrased that answer back to his witness, he accidentally said
George Norman Rockwell instead of George Lincoln Rockwell. And I
remember this moment. I remember it because it was one
(03:16):
of the only times I laughed that day, and I
remember it because I wrote it down, and I remember
joking about it in person with another of the plaintiff's
atorneys a few days later. I remember it. But when
I went back to look at the transcript this week,
it isn't actually there. And this has honestly really shaken
(03:41):
my faith in the sanctity of court reporting. I mean,
the transcript is supposed to be this perfect, indelible record
of the words that were spoken aloud in a court room,
and normally I would default to believing what's in the transcript,
but I know the transcript is mistaken. Here. I typically
(04:01):
take all my courtroom notes by hand, but because of
the ongoing COVID pandemic back in twenty twenty one, the
judge made the decision to close the courtroom to the public,
and so this trial was broadcast over a telephone line
that you could call into to listen. And since I
was able to listen in from home, I decided that
instead of taking my notes privately and then writing about
(04:23):
them later, I would live tweet the trial, all four
weeks of it. It was a nightmarish undertaking, but one
I took very seriously, and when that trial finally ended,
I got perhaps the finest compliment I'll ever get about
my notes. Some of the attorneys for the plaintiffs told
(04:44):
me that when they had to leave the courtroom for
a bathroom break or something during the day, they would
pull up those tweets to see what they were missing.
So transcript be damned. That attorney made the same little
mistake in twenty twenty one that an FBI agent made
in that memo in nineteen sixty five. They both accidentally
(05:06):
dragged poor Norman Rockwell into Nazi business. So those were
the two examples of this that I had in mind,
But I hadn't realized the extent to which this mistake
was happening until I sat down to write about it.
Apparently it was a frequent enough occurrence that it was
a source of great pain for Norman Rockwell, particularly in
(05:28):
the nineteen sixties when both men were active in their
respective careers, one as America's leading neo Nazi and the
other as a beloved illustrator of Americana. Despite their differences,
this similarity in their names has been a source of
confusion for decades. A lot of people are making this mistake.
(05:53):
Most often it's that same mistake the FBI agent made.
People are writing George Norman Rockwell when they mean George
Lincoln Rockwell. So they have the first and last name
of the Nazi correct, and they know it's a three
named deal, but some part of their brain is just
inserting the name of the other famous Rockwell into the middle.
(06:16):
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. I found papers containing apologies and
corrections for having made the mistake, and letters to the
editor from readers who are outraged on the artist's behalf
(06:37):
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, but there were a few notable instances where
they just switched the names entirely. In nineteen sixty four
(07:00):
of the local Young Republicans Club led the effort to
invite George Lincoln Rockwell to speak at Western Washington State College,
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. In nineteen sixty six, when
(07:22):
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. That same year, before the Senate killed what
would have been the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty six,
(07:43):
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. According
to a write up in the Atlanta Journal, Constitution Representative
William Kramer said his amendment was intended to keep people
(08:03):
like Norman Rockwell from traveling from state to state, fomenting
civil disorder and again shaking my faith in the sanctity
of transcription. This is actually missing from the congressional record,
but the reporter who wrote it up says that Kramer
said Norman Rockwell several times before he was interrupted by
(08:26):
a colleague who suggested that he probably means George Lincoln.
One particularly messy example came shortly after George Lincoln Rockwell's death,
when his assassin, John Patler, first appeared in court for
an arraignment. Another member of the American Nazi Party had
(08:46):
an outburst in the courtroom. So a man in the
gallery stood up and he's screaming at John Patler, and
he lunged toward him, and he was arrested. And after
Eric Wenberg was arrested, it was discovered that he was
an aust Araelian citizen who'd overstayed a tourist visa. Before
authorities in the US could deport him, he traveled to Canada,
(09:08):
and Canada too wanted the Nazi out, but the Canadian
deportation proceedings were delayed by an embarrassing clerical error. 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. John Beatty,
(09:32):
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. Norman Rockwell
is still alive. Weinberg was eventually sent home to Australia,
and in nineteen seventy two he died in a car accident.
(09:53):
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. So we'll have to come
back to that some other time. We're talking about Norman Rockwell.
But in all of these examples, people are accidentally slipping
(10:17):
Norman Rockwell's name into stories about the Nazi. I couldn't
find a single instance of the mistake happening in reverse.
(10:39):
Now you might be wondering, are these two men related,
they're not. I did find one completely unsubstantiated claim published
in two thousand and three in the journal Holocaust and
Genocide Studies that Norman Rockwell was George Lincoln's uncle. There's
no citation. The article was a review of Frederick Simon
(11:01):
Elli's biography of George Lincoln Rockwell, and I've read that book.
It makes absolutely no mention of Norman Rockwell at all.
So that strange parenthetical claim in the article that the
illustrator is the Nazis' uncle seems to be just entirely
made up. Norman Rockwell is about the same age as
(11:23):
the Nazi's father, and they're both from New England, so
it's a reasonable question to ask, but the answer is no.
I did some of my own genealogical research on both
families and I found no connection. Back in the days
before Google, sometimes newspapers would have a feature that answered
(11:43):
factual questions submitted by readers, and I found a bunch
of those over the years where readers asked variations on
this question and the newspaper always answered no, sometimes citing
Norman Rockwell himself. This association was a troubling one for
Norman Rockwell. His granddaughter, Abigail Rockwell, still runs a Facebook
(12:05):
page dedicated to his memory. In a post just a
few weeks ago, she wrote, my father told me Pop
was very upset to be sometimes confused with George Lincoln Rockwell,
the founder of the America Nazi Party. He was so
unsettled and perturbed by this he considered taking legal action,
but was dissuaded from doing so. It's not just embarrassing
(12:31):
to be mixed up with someone else, especially someone so unsavory.
Norman Rockwell wasn't just not George Lincoln Rockwell. He was
against everything the other man represented. The name Norman Rockwell
probably puts some images into your mind's eye right away.
(12:55):
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.
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 nineteen forty three, and if you're only familiar with
(13:17):
his earlier work, you might be thinking, well, 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. You're probably picturing his paintings of
(13:39):
a white family on their way to church, a pretty
blond white woman at the soda counter, a white couple
at the courthouse getting a marriage license, boy scouts, soldiers,
the iconic image of Rosy the Riveter, classic mid twentieth
century Americana, images of peaceful suburban living, and notably images
(14:03):
with only white faces. And that's true. Those are Norman
Rockwell's most famous works. Those are things that he painted.
Most of the ones you're probably thinking of were illustrations
he did for The Saturday Evening Post. Over the course
of forty seven years, he illustrated hundreds of covers for
(14:25):
that magazine. 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. By the nineteen sixties, though, he
felt drawn to paint the world as it was, and
(14:48):
that meant acknowledging the struggle for civil rights, so he
parted ways with the Saturday Evening Post. In the nineteen sixties,
Norman rockw Well painted for Look magazine, and it was
for Look that he created some of his most moving paintings.
In nineteen sixty four, a painting called The Problem We
(15:12):
All Live With was published in Look Magazine's centerfold. It
shows a six year old Ruby Bridges flanked by federal
marshals on her way to integrate her elementary school. The
following year, Look published a painting called Murder in Mississippi,
and it was Norman Rockwell's depiction of the murders of
(15:34):
civil rights workers James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
During the same years that George Lincoln Rockwell was criss
crossing the country disrupting and mocking civil rights marches, Norman
Rockwell was painting that struggle. He was quietly insisting through
his work that people like Ruby Bridges were every bit
(15:58):
as much a part of the fabric of America as
the subjects of his kitche classic illustrations of Suburbia. When
his Nazi counterpart was making a mockery of the struggle
for equality in Mississippi by sending a storm trooper in
blackface into the Capitol Building to disrupt Congress Norman Rockwell
was memorializing the civil rights activist who died fighting for
(16:21):
racial justice there. In July of nineteen sixty seven, Norman
Rockwell spoke at the National Press Club in Washington. Gossip
columnist Leonard Lyons reported that the artist was overheard rehearsing
the opening line of his speech in a hotel shortly
before the event. I am not George Lincoln Rockwell. Just
(16:48):
a few weeks later, the other Rockwell was shot in
a strip mall parking lot. That bullet didn't end the
confusion between the two Rockwells, but it did end the
night life. Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool
(17:11):
Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me,
Molly Kunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can
email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will
(17:33):
not answer it. It's nothing personal. I don't answer any
of my emails. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys.