ONE AFTERNOON in the fateful year 1940, the President of the United States had two callers. The first was Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador, who had just flown in from London to give Franklin D. Roosevelt an
ONE AFTERNOON in the fateful year 1940, the President of the United States had two callers. The first was Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador, who had just flown in from London to give Franklin D. Roosevelt an eyewitness account of the bombing of London. The second was Francis H. Taylor, museum director and authority on the history of art.
Taylor waited for 2 hours while the President and Lothian talked. When he finally entered, he found the President "white as a sheet." Yet the President, we are told, kept Taylor in his office that afternoon for another hour and a half. Turning from a grim preoccupation with the war, Franklin Roosevelt talked about the arts in American life. He spoke of plans for broadening the appreciation of art and looked forward to a day when "every schoolhouse would have contemporary American paintings hanging on its walls."
George Biddle, the distinguished American artist who records this meeting, adds on his own: "Roosevelt had little discrimination in his taste in painting and sculpture. [But] he had a more clear understanding of what art could mean in the life of a community-for the soul of a nation--than any man I have known."
In the year of 1941, Roosevelt himself recalled another President who also found time in the midst of great national trials to concern himself with artistic endeavors. It was in the third year of the Civil War, as Roosevelt told the story in a speech dedicating the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and men and women had gathered to see the Capitol dome completed and the bronze goddess of liberty set upon the top. "It had been an expensive, a laborious business," Roosevelt said, "diverting labor and money from the prosecution of the war and certain critics... Found much to criticize. There were new marble pillars in the Senate wing of the Capitol, there was a bronze door for the central portal and other such expenditures and embellishments. But the President of the United States, whose name was Lincoln, when he heard these criticisms, answered: 'If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign that we intend this Union shall go on.'"
Both Roosevelt and Lincoln understood that