OVERRATED/UNDERRATED:
ICONIC AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPH
Underrated
There is a difference between an icon and a good picture, as this
category clearly indicates. This rather pedestrian photograph—generally
unknown—is a shot of Lincoln’s funeral cortege, stalled
near Union Square, in New York City, as it made its long, mournful
way back from Washington to Springfield. The only remarkable thing
about it is the two little heads, barely visible in the window
of the corner house on the left. They are none other than six-year-old
Teddy Roosevelt, our remarkable 26th president, and his younger
brother Elliott, father of Eleanor Roosevelt, watching from second
floor of their grandfather, the wealthy merchant prince Cornelius
Van Schaack Roosevelt. (A third head would have been visible,
but the two boys had already locked TR’s future wife, Edith
Kermit Carow, in a back bedroom for having the affrontery to cry.)
It is an almost cosmic coincidence, one nearly
equal in our history to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying
on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,
and the heralds of their deaths passing in front of Philadelphia’s
Constitution Hall. It conveys as well as anything could how intimate
our country still was in 1865, how quickly it would grow in size,
and power, and influence. Lincoln’s death, of course, came
as we had finally settled the question of slavery and national
unity. One of the little boys in the window would first project
American power around the globe, from San Juan Hill to the building
of the Great White Fleet. The son-in-law of the other would lie
in state eighty years to the month of this photograph, having
brought the United States to the pinnacle of world power.
Overrated
Weegee’s photograph of moviegoers watching a 3-D flick in
a New York bijou is known to millions, and deservedly so. Like
so many great Weegee pictures, it is, at the same time, funny,
bizarre, and a little bit frightening. It neatly encapsulates
how America became a place of such crass, mindless conformity
in the course of the 1950s.
Except, of course, that it didn’t. Fifties
America lives on as a stereotype, thanks mostly to images such
as this. In fact, it was a period characterized by considerably
more taste, individualism, and outright rebellion than our own
era. The booming, postwar years saw bold new movements in art,
literature, and yes, even film, along with the beginning of the
civil rights revolt, an unprecedented number of working women,
outraged investigations of everything from the mob to television—and
continuous, running critiques of conformity, much along the lines
of what Weegee has given us. Even prefabricated, model suburbs
such as the Levittowns were quickly remodeled by their residents
into individualized homes—and 3-D movies went nowhere. So
much for Happy Days.
