Business of a Bicentennial

What might have been a serious rift in the plans for celebrating the Bicentennial of the birth of George Washington developed in Manhattan last week. Thirteen U. S. painters last April agreed to paint 14 murals, illustrating crucial moments in Washington's career.-- These big paintings were to be exhibited at Washington in the little-known National Gallery at the formal opening of the Bicentennial celebration this month. The painters worked without pay; the Government had appropriated only enough money to cover the actual hanging of the murals. Last week, when the paintings were all but finished, the patriotic painters, already heavily out of pocket, had to defray the cost of moving their own pictures from New York to Washington. Eleven of the paintings were sent to Washington in a truck, the rest to follow later by express.

The nine-month bicentennial celebration will officially start on Washington's Birthday when President Hoover delivers his George Washington address before Congress, to be attended also by the U. S. Supreme Court, Cabinet members, foreign diplomats and invited celebrities. Following his address, the President will march out to the east steps of the Capitol to lead the singing of "America" by 10,000 massed voices accompanied by three bands and conducted by Walter Damrosch. The composite result will be broadcast. There will be afternoon exercises at the Washington monument, a ball in the evening for which the costumes were designed by one Anne Washington. Once under way, the Bicentennial celebration will be the occasion for protracted and unprecedented patriotic adulation, artistic and otherwise.

In Manhattan where, over public protest, the world's largest bridge was last year named for Washington and where a scandal in connection with the sale of Washington seals has already occurred, a project was on foot to erect a replica of Mount Vernon in Bryant Park. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art removed from its walls to the basement Emanuel Leutze's painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, popular clamor compelled it to lug the massive picture up again for temporary hanging in its American Wing.

In Washington the Austrian Minister, Edgar L. G. Prochnik, last week presented President Hoover with an equestrian statuet of Washington made of Austrian china. The Smithsonian Institution was preparing an exhibit of Washingtoniana. Rehearsals for Wake field, a folk masque by Percy MacKaye to be presented at Constitution Hall Feb. 21, were under way. The manuscript of one of Washington's Thanksgiving proclamations was displayed in the Library of Congress.

In Asheville, N. C., Deland, Fla., Syracuse, N. Y., Ramsey, N. J., Portland, Ore. and Berryville, Va., according to an official announcement by the U. S. George Washington Bicentennial Commission, preparations were on foot for balls, teas or pageants.

Elsewhere in the U. S., the importance of the Bicentennial was reflected in fashions for women's clothes. Couturiers said that red, white and blue would be the spring colors, with square shoulders like the continental army uniforms and as many brass buttons as possible.

George Washington, as can be ascertained from a perusal of his innumerable life portraits and their copies, was a man of many moods and faces.-- Doubtless the Washington of the Peale portraits would have allowed a proud smile to creep across his bland countenance had he learned of all these incongruously complimentary doings in his behalf. The Gilbert Stuart Washington, however, is a more skeptical and pessimistic personage. Like those of Calvin Coolidge, his nostrils seem assailed by perpetually disagreeable odors. The Washington nostrils might have distended even more, had their owner heard of: 1) a project to sell his effigy painted on imitation leather as a back tire cover for auto mobiles; 2) a Manhattan theatre where a box office clerk had to tell a patron that a cinema called The Hatchet Man (see p. 28) was not about the father of his country; 3) a song called "Father of the Land We Love," written by George Michael Cohan with a cover by James Montgomery Flagg, a copy of which was to be put into every U. S. home; 4) the offices in Washington, where the Bicentennial Commission originated celebration ideas.

Had the Gilbert Stuart Washington been permitted to enter the inner sanctum of that Commission, he would have been amazed. Through a 25 ft. hallway ornamented with portraits of himself and his wife, he would have reached a small cubicular office in which, almost submerged by the litter of trinkets, statuets, posters, portraits, folders, busts, pitchers, seals, plaques, gewgaws, jim-cracks and other Washingtonian bric-a-brac, he would have found Sol Bloom of Manhattan, associate director of the nationwide celebration. Commissioner Bloom is a small, round-faced 61-year-old Jew of Polish descent who was born in Illinois, raised in San Francisco and introduced to U. S. politics in 1923 when Tammany Hall, knowing him as a successful music publisher, ran him for Congress.

As chairman of the Bicentennial Commission, organized in 1924 and put to work in 1930, Congressman Bloom has been in charge of disseminating posters, pamphlet biographies, music, the George Michael Cohan song, the MacKaye masque, and 30 other Washingtonian items about the U. S. To members of Congress he distributed, for a trifle each, statuets reproduced from the Nolleken bust. To 1,000,000 schoolrooms he distributed a poster made from the Athenaeum portrait. As unofficial censor of the move to honor Washington, he endorses most of the commercial enterprises submitted to the Commission, suggests a fair price for Washingtonian matchboxes, fountain pen sets, Wedgwood china plates, lampshades, silhouets and plaques. The tire cover notion he rejected as unsuitable. Some of the Commission's own projects he has copyrighted himself, to prevent them from being used for advertising. When asked why his name appears so frequently in all the Commission's correspondence, Congressman Bloom becomes perturbed. He says: "My God, somebody has got to sign the mail!" He and his 125 subordinates have one of the busiest bureaus in the capital.

Heretofore, as factory worker, bookkeeper, reporter, theatrical producer, furniture dealer, realtor, concessionaire, song-publisher and showman, Congressman Bloom has had small time to master the fine points of esthetics. He cannot find the time to master them now, but he has familiarized himself with the career of Washington and considers it his principal duty to see that others do so also. When Congress tried to cut down the Commission's appropriation from $477,000 to $200,000, he took the floor to protest. Preoccupation with the father of the country which his own father adopted has bred in Sol Bloom a trace of Washington's fixity of purpose, his confidence in an ideal. With Washingtonian arrogance, though without Virginian hauteur, he wrote to a professor whom Mrs. Bloom had heard to say that Washington was not a great general: "Maybe he wasn't but England sent her best generals over here and he licked them. What do you make of that?"

*Muralist Ernest Clifford Peixotto, organizer of the project, painted two: Lafayette With French Allies and Washington with Generals Knox and Lincoln.

*According to information contained in Life Portraits of George Washington, a privately printed volume by John Hill Morgan and Mantle Fielding, 2 7 painters and sculptors made representations of Washington. Since many of these artists subsequently copied their own work it is impossible to determine how many life portraits are extant. Charles Willson Peale is responsible for about 67 portraits and miniatures of 14 general types; Raphaelle Peale, his eldest son, at least two: Rembrandt Peale, his second son, six; James Peale, his younger brother, II; Charles Peale Polk, his nephew, numerous copies. John Trumbull and Edward Savage, eleven each; Houdon, seven statues; Gilbert Stuart, 16 paintings of the Vaughan type with head turned left, about four or five each of the Lansdowne and Monro-Lenox type with head and eyes turned right and more than 70 variations of the famed Athenaeum Head with face turned right and eyes straight ahead.

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