The Baby Carriage

The Baby Carriage
Norman Rockwell
May 20, 1916

In his early 20s, Rockwell was an illustrator and art editor for Boys’ Life magazine. But, according to Rockwell in My Adventures as an Illustrator, he was tired of being accepted only by children’s publications and fed up with seeing “the Rover Boys and their lousy dog with the Mounted Police” on his easel. He dreamed of his art on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post; the thought of having his paintings viewed by millions excited daydreams of being famous: “surrounded by admiring females, deferred to by office flunkies at the magazines, wined and dined by the editor of the Post, Mr. George Horace Lorimer.” But that was the rub. Twenty-two-year-old Rockwell was petrified by the thought of approaching “the baron of publishing” who had “built the Post from a two-bit family magazine with a circulation in the hundreds” to a major publication with millions of readers. He had heard the publisher was tough. What if Lorimer didn’t like his work?

Rockwell had a friend named Clyde Forsythe, a cartoonist who knew his way around the world of commercial art. Forsythe was also straightforward. He was the only person Rockwell knew who wouldn’t just ooh and ah over his work, but would give an honest evaluation. He visited Rockwell one day and found the dejected artist lying on a cot in his studio. He asked Rockwell what was eating him, and Norman “hemmed and hawed but finally told him.” Forsythe’s advice: “‘Stop chewing on your tongue and do a cover. What the hell, you’re as good as anybody. Lorimer’s not the Dalai Lama.’”

So Rockwell did a couple of paintings, both attempts to mimic the high society images the Post favored at the time: one a romantic scene with a debonair pair of lovers in the style of Charles Dana Gibson and the other a beautiful ballerina curtsying under a spotlight. Forsythe returned and denounced them as “‘C-R-U-D, crud,’” noting Rockwell was a guy who just couldn’t paint beautiful women. Then he snatched up one of the illustrations Rockwell had just completed for a story in Boys’ Life. “‘Do that,’ said Clyde. ‘Do what you’re best at. Kids. You’re a terrible Gibson, but a pretty good Rockwell.’”

It was sound advice. On his first meeting with Post Art Editor Walter M. Dower, Rockwell sold two paintings (The Baby Carriage and The Circus Strongman) and had three sketches for future covers approved (including Gramps at the Plate). Though his work had been OK’d by Lorimer, Rockwell had yet to meet the publisher; instead it was Dower who informed him that he would receive $75 for each cover. Rockwell’s monthly salary as art director and illustrator for Boys’ Life was $50; he was over the moon. His first cover The Baby Carriage appeared on May 20, 1916.

(The story above was adapted from My Adventures as an Illustrator by Norman Rockwell.)

The Circus Strongman

The Circus Strongman
Norman Rockwell
June 3, 1916

1916 was something of a golden year for America. The economy was good and it was the last year before the U.S. entered into World War I. And boys dreamed of becoming the great strongman, Eugen Sandow. Showman Florenz Ziegfeld made a star of Sandow, who would lift weights, pose, and even break chains across his chest for audiences. Edison Studios did a short film of Sandow posing and flexing. This was the stuff of dreams for young boys.

Posing children would be a challenge to any artist, and getting a child to maintain a pose long enough to sketch the scene was difficult. But Rockwell had a way of dealing with the restlessness. At the beginning of each modeling session with kids, he set a stack of nickels on a table next to the easel. Every 25 minutes, he would take 5 nickels from the stack and set it aside, telling the model, “Now, that’s your pile.” Five cents in 1916 would be about a dollar in today’s money, and watching the coins pile up was great motivation. The model for “Sandow” was Billy Paine, who posed as all three boys in The Baby Carriage above. Rockwell used Paine in several Post covers. Sadly, Paine died at age 13; he’d been horsing around a second-story window and fell. “He was the best kid model I ever used” Rockwell said.

Gramps at the Plate

Gramps at the Plate
Norman Rockwell
August 5, 1916

The young artist still hadn’t met the powerful publisher, George Horace Lorimer, but was dealing with Walter Dower, the art editor. Rockwell’s first two finished paintings were accepted without any changes, but when Rockwell submitted his third painting—the baseball-playing grandfather—he found out being a Post cover artist wasn’t so easy after all. In My Adventures as an Illustrator, Rockwell tells the story of this cover:

“Mr. Dower brought word out that Mr. Lorimer thought the old man was too rough and tramplike. Would I do the painting over? Of course. I stretched a new canvas and began again. ‘Better,’ said Mr. Dower. ‘Mr. Lorimer thought it was better. But the old man’s too old, he thought.’ I did the painting over again. The boy was too small. I did that painting over five times before Mr. Lorimer accepted it.”

Later, Lorimer informed Rockwell that he had been testing him. Why? To test the new artist’s versatility, his ability to take direction, his perseverance, or maybe just to see if Rockwell would do his bidding. Whatever the reason for the test, the ordeal almost caused the young artist to give up: “I wonder if he ever knew how near I came to flunking his test.”

Classic Covers: Happy Birthday, Norman Rockwell! The Saturday Evening Post

On July 30, 1916, saboteurs working for the Imperial German Army blew up a munitions plant on the New Jersey shore, directly across from Liberty Island and Ellis Island. The blast, which was felt throughout New York, had the equivalent force of a 5.0 Richter-scale earthquake. It knocked sleepers out of their beds in Manhattan and rained debris for a two-mile radius. The shock of its force drove shrapnel into Miss Liberty’s gown and weakened the structure of her arm.

Incredibly, German agents caused this damage—estimated at half a billion dollars in 2010 currency—eight months before they were at war with the United States.

According to a 1940 article, the explosion on Black Tom peninsula might have served several purposes for the Central Powers. The author, Emanuel Voska, was a Czech spy living in New York who provided intelligence to the British government. In 1916, as he learned that German agents were tampering with munitions intended for Czarist Russia, which was then fighting for the Allies.

Cases labeled and listed as ammunition, but really containing scrap iron, old lead, or anything else heavy and useless, were being sent to Russia. This was not only sabotage but graft on a large scale. The men back of this were undoubtedly Russians collaborating with Germans. They made the Russian government pay for this junk as ammunition, and pocketed the money.

By the middle of July, thousands of cases of this stuff, together with enormous quantities of genuine ammunition, had piled up in warehouses, barges and freight cars at the Black Tom terminal of the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

This extraordinary accumulation of explosives worried me. It seemed like an invitation to the German dynamiters.

Allied Intelligence was already increasing the number of inspectors munitions factories. According to Voska, he ordered a dozen men specifically to guard the approaches to the Black Tom peninsula. He then informed the head of Russian intelligence in New York about his suspicions. Before any action could be taken, though, the saboteurs struck. Shortly after 2:00 AM, on July 30—

I woke in the small hours of the morning in terror. My stout brick house was shivering, my bed was swaying, the windows were rattling. I jumped up, fully awake, and ran to a window facing south. The distant skyscrapers rose black against a sky that seemed all aflame. My mind jumped to the explanation. The worst had happened! Someone had blown up Black Tom.

The phone rang. The jerky, excited voice of one of my guards on the Jersey shore reported, “Everything is blown up—everything! Black Tom is just one big flame!”…

I took the subway to South Ferry. The port of Manhattan Island, usually deserted at that hour, boiled with activity. Police reserves were pushing back crowds to make way for fire engines. My feet crunched on glass—the explosions seemed to have smashed every window around. Southward, huge geysers of flame showed where burning barges were loose from their moorings. Now and then, a dull explosion would precede the appearance of a gigantic moon in the southern sky. A sickening odor of burning chemicals filled the air.

I crowded onto a ferryboat for New Jersey. By enthusiastic shoving, I managed to land ahead of the others. For a fare amounting to a bribe, I got a taxicab. We made slow progress—all New Jersey seemed to be rushing toward Black Tom. When I posted my guards, I had selected a little all-night beer joint as a rendezvous. I found that although the explosion had smashed all its windows and blown its door off its hinges, the bartender was still doing business.

These live shells were salvaged by workers after most of the vast store of ammunitions at Black Tom had been destroyed in the blast.

Machachek, commander of our patrol on Black Tom, was waiting for me. He gave a quick account.

At a little before one o’clock in the morning a sudden fire broke out in a freight car. Near it were dozens of cars filled with shells and raw explosives. Sensibly and prudently, the watchmen gave an alarm and ran. At eight minutes past one, the barge, tied to a wharf more than a hundred yards from the fire, blew up. It was half an hour later before the fire in the freight car reached the other cars on the tracks, bringing the second explosion.

Only one detail of his story has any special interest after all these years. “The first explosion,” he said, “was on a barge tied up to the pier. A few minutes before the barge went up, I saw a rowboat approaching it. I could make out the figures of two men aboard. After that, everything blazed, bright as day. I saw no boat come away.”

By now, the German agents were not working in one tight organization, but in groups. Jealousy and the secretiveness of men engaged in a trade, which endangered their necks kept them from confiding in one another. Probably, the cause of the fire in the freight car was one of those time bombs, which the Germans had used to burn ships at sea. But the men in the boat? Machachek saw them approach the barge; he did not see them come away. It is possible that the directors of the plot worked a diabolical trick on their own dynamiters. This affair was so dangerous that they wished to take no chances with an operative who might be caught and confess. The man who ordered the job may have handed the perpetrators an apparatus which he described as a time bomb, but which, actually, would go off when it was set.

Ultimately, Germany accepted responsibility for the destruction and paid reparations to the United States. To Voska, though, the responsibility lay elsewhere.

As I went home that night, I kept repeating to myself, “It was the Russians—it was the Russians!” Even after all these years of reflection, I cannot get that thought out of my head.

He was convinced that Black Tom was destroyed by Russian double agents. They had accepted money from the Kaiser’s government to keep munitions from reaching the Russian army. They were also probably working for the Bolshevik forces who hoped a Russian defeat would speed the revolution (which it did). And they were lining their own pockets by selling the same withheld munitions time and again. And, most likely, they were directed by the head of Russian intelligence in New York—the same man Voska had informed of his suspicions.

For more information, you should check out the original Post article, “‘Canadian Invasion’ and Black Tom” [PDF], published in 1940.

Enemy Agents Strike New York—In 1916 The Saturday Evening Post