Poor White's Art

At the top of the panel was the great grin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On the President's shoulder perched a vulture. In one hand the President held a fishing rod with a sucker on the line, in the other a bouquet of microphones. Mrs. Roosevelt stood beside him, her teeth and chin cruelly caricatured. The New Deal was represented by scattered playing cards--all deuces. Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Roosevelt Dall were seen tossing their respective spouses, portrayed as dolls, into a trash basket.

Long lines of green monsters with swollen heads symbolized the Brain Trust. They were dropping gold into troughs at which silk-hatted pigs were feeding. At the lower left Secretary of Agriculture Wallace was strangling the Goddess Ceres. Behind him a tax collector was removing a citizen's shirt. In the centre sat Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau--a clown juggling money with a lap full of gold bricks. General Hugh S. Johnson was jumping irascibly on the roped figure of Industry. Also to be seen were Madam Secretary Perkins, Postmaster General Farley, Uncle Sam on a cross, dying cattle, silent factories, skulls, reaching arms, and a reformer chasing nudes out of the cinema.

Such was the largest and the most bitter caricature of the Roosevelt Administration. In bright color but indifferent drawing, it appeared on a 4-by-8-ft. canvas last week in the Westchester Institute of Fine Arts at Tarrytown, N. Y. Entitled Nightmare of 1934, the work was signed Jere Miah II. The anonymous artist had great fun with a typewritten explanation of his picture that referred to mythological characters known as The Chief Mogul, Sheik Morgue En Taw, Har Rywa Llace, Sir Huge Onson, and Old Egghead Far Lee.

Because a person can be more disrespectful in paint than in print, Nightmare of 1934 proceeded at once to make lively news. In the exhibition's catalog Manhattan newshawks discovered that the playful Jere Miah had placed the initials P. W. A. after his name. Everyone wanted to know the identity of the ungrateful artist who could accept the New Deal's relief money with one hand while burlesquing it with the other. Crowds jammed the hall. Pink with excitement, President Charles Arthur Birch-Field of the West-Chester Institute had the Nightmare placed on a separate wall and charged 25-c- admission to see it. From Wall Street somebody telephoned in to offer $3,000 for the picture to present to the Library of Congress. A man named Goldberg would pay $5,000 for it to exhibit throughout the country. Unable to authenticate either offer, Mr. Birch-Field refused both in the name of the artist.

All this time Artist Jere Miah II refused to let his name be known, but emitted a series of pronouncements through President Birch-Field of the gallery. Most important was the fact that he had never been on the PWA rolls. The initials after his name, he said, meant "Poor White Artist." The only hint of his identity was a report that the artist was comparatively unknown, 35, tall, blond, separated from his wife and disgusted with the New Deal.

"He is a genius," said the gallery president, "I might call him a Voltaire with the brush."

An additional fact came from experts at lampooning the New Deal--artists of a Communist organization known as the John Reed Club. After one glance they decided that, whoever Jere Miah II was, he was no Radical.

"See where he has Uncle Sam on the cross," explained a spokesman. "Radical artists always put Labor on the cross. The thing is full of bourgeois ideology. No radical artist would have made fun of the domestic affairs of the Roosevelt family. The fellow is a bourgeois."

All the excitement at the Westchester Institute of Fine Arts finally attracted one John Smiukse. Born in Latvia 26 years ago, John Smiukse went to sea, jumped ship in New York harbor seven years ago and has been making a precarious living as a house painter in the Bronx while trying to paint pictures in his spare time.

Last week John Smiukse went up to Tarrytown and paid his 25-c- to see the Nightmare of 1934. He entered the room behind a giggling crowd of suburban housewives and stood for a minute looking at the picture. Suddenly he pulled a bottle of paint-remover from his pocket, splashed it over the canvas, yanked the caricature from the wall, touched a match to it. The flames flickered out quickly, but the picture was ruined. Housewives fled screaming. John Smiukse was instantly arrested. While Mr. Birch-Field and Jere Miah II conferred whether to make the charge arson or malicious mischief, reporters found John Smiukse in the Tarrytown police station.

"I had the day off," said he, "and decided that something should be done about this picture which is disgraceful to the whole country. It was all right except for including Mrs. Roosevelt and her children. It is a disgrace to bring a woman into a thing of this kind and besides it was a lousy painting not worth 5-c-. There is still some chivalry in this country."

Destruction of the picture did not seem like chivalry to Police Judge William A. H. Ely. Within four hours that Republican jurist had sentenced John Smiukse to six months in the Westchester County Penitentiary at Eastview. At the end of that time he will be rearraigned for illegal entry into the U. S.

Pretty Mrs. Elizabeth Donner Roosevelt, divorced wife of Elliott Roosevelt, arrived in New York on the Europa last week. Reporters promptly showed her a copy of the picture, pointed out her image lying in the trash basket. She looked at it, blushed, then covered her face with her hands.

"Oh!" she cried. "Isn't that dreadful!"

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