Norman Rockwell by Laura Claridge Page A

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 pluralistic society; instead, the very youth of the United States seemed to argue for the need to establish a unified, incontestable image