Removals

One evening three weeks ago Admiral Hugh Rodman, U.S.N., retired, settled down in an armchair in his Washington home to spend a placid hour with the placid Evening Star. Suddenly his eyes fell upon a press photograph that brought him smartly to attention, soon sent him angrily scurrying for pen and paper. The picture in the Evening Star was that of a painting intended for the current Public Works of Art Project exhibition in Washington's Corcoran Gallery. Its title: The Fleet's In. Its artist: 29-year-old Paul Cadmus of Manhattan. Its subject: drunken sailors and bawds carousing on Manhattan's Riverside Drive (see cut).

Admiral Rodman was mad clear through. The Navy, his Navy, to which he had given 47 years of his life, had been grossly libeled by a young whippersnapper who knew nothing about the service. Later Admiral Rodman penned more than 1,000 indignant words to Secretary of the Navy Swanson. Excerpts:

". . . [The painting] represents a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl, wherein apparently a number of enlisted men are consorting with a party of streetwalkers and denizens of the red-light district. This is an unwarranted insult . . . and evidently originated in the sordid, depraved imagination of someone who has no conception of actual conditions in our service."

Describing a shore leave expedition of 13,000 sailors of whom only five were subsequently found guilty of disorderly conduct, the angry Admiral asked: "Can you imagine 13,000 young college men, say, from Yale, Harvard, Columbia ... or any body of business men . . . having such an excellent record? . . . I trust [the picture] will not only not be allowed to be hung in the Corcoran Gallery or in any other, but that it will be immediately destroyed."

Last week Secretary Swanson examined the Cadmus work for himself. Scratching his chin and tilting his head he remarked: "Right artistic but not true to the Navy." Thereupon Assistant Secretary of the Navy Henry Latrobe Roosevelt whisked The Fleet's In away to his Q Street home. "It's out of sight," said he, "and will continue to be out of sight."

Artist Paul Cadmus, wearing a green shirt, was found by newshawks cooking breakfast in his Greenwich Village apartment. Said he: "I got about $250 for that picture. . . . These admirals and secretaries probably never were sailors themselves. . . . What do they think sailors do on shore leave? They go to Riverside Drive. The ones who are out for innocent pleasure go rowboat riding in Central Park. ... A sailor's life is not a glamorous one."

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Another removal occurred last week in the office of the Secretary of the Treasury when Henry Morgenthau Jr. banished a portrait of Albert Gallatin, famed fourth Secretary of the Treasury (1801-14) from above his desk and replaced it with a portrait of Roger B. Taney, second-rate Secretary of the Treasury for less than one year under President Jackson. Explained Mr. Morgenthau: "I wanted somebody not quite so stern."

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From Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art last week were removed caricatures of Charles Gates Dawes, William Edgar Borah and Adolf Hitler-- works of students at New York University's Adult Education Department. Hitler's caricature showed the German Chancellor cloven-hoofed and clad in shorts, balancing on a fiery sword. Explained Acting Director William M. Ivins Jr.: "It did not seem good taste for a public institution to exhibit caricatures of known and living people." When newshawks pointed out that caricatures of Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia and General Hugh Johnson had been allowed to remain, harassed Acting Director Ivins said only the removed caricatures had been in bad taste, pleaded: "For God's sake, give us a break on this."

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