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Regionalist radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Art for Your Sake
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2008 by Leo G. Mazow
Elsewhere in his review Schapiro referred to Benton's semiutopian social vision as a "unity without classes," challenging what he saw as the artist's naively limited definition of the American polity. (108) Schapiro obviously did not share the confidence expressed by Benton, the Beards, and the NAS that a monolithic artistic message broadcast to the masses would somehow have constructive, nation-benefiting results. As Philip Fisher and others have long observed, the fact that the United States is not some unified organism whose parts link through a common culture or shared identity has long been recognized--by politicians and pundits especially--as chief among the characteristics distinguishing this nation from oppressive and totalitarian regimes. (109) Whatever the intellectual worth and educational potential of Art far Your Sake, in hindsight it is difficult not to interpret such a large-scale program of cultural dissemination as an assumption and perpetuation of a Zeitgeist. The same Regionalism that democratized culture also homogenized it; the same radio that annihilated physical distance also proposed an all-unifying culture in its place.
That is to say, Benton and the NAS had a propensity to reduce American cultural identity to a single category or shibboleth, and radio played a special role in advancing the popular and idiosyncratically nationalist ideals to which Benton's art aspired. The NAS's working definition of the United States and Benton's understanding of artistic Regionalism were somewhat restrictive, often favoring truths and symbols that had been ratified by previous generations. In the context of the dramatization on Art for Your Sake, the use of broadcast technology in the diffusion of Benton's art, I am arguing, could carry a taint of enforced hegemony. Shortly before NBC aired the art education program in 1940, when the network played live and recorded broadcasts of Adolf Hitler's speeches barely rising above deafening cheers, audiences experienced firsthand the propaganda potential of radio. In these same years, American radio personalities like Father Coughlin and Huey Long exploited the medium to advance anti-Semitism, racism, and nativism. (110) Not unlike the ever-popular "assimilationist" family dramas--playing up the elimination of ethnic difference among largely Eastern European emigres--on radio in the 1930s and 1940s, Art for Your Sake sought to naturalize and normalize. (111) When the program's producers claimed that Benton's travels through "Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Arkansas" made him uniquely qualified to paint "the world of America," they were, intentionally or unwittingly, subscribing to a volk principle seeking to unite culture through allegiance to its perceived greatest commonalities. (112)
In this context, the choice of Benton's Lassoing Horses for the program seems to have been very deliberate on the part of Myers and the show's producers. "The distinguished art critic" used the discussion of the watercolor as an opportunity to praise the surging interest in American "wall paintings," stopping only one step short of crediting Benton--and the sort of Regionalism typified in Lassoing Horses--for a dramatic increase of public interest and participation in the visual arts:
