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Culture Wars: The U.S. Art Lobby and Congressional Tariff Legislation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
Abstract
From 1883 to World War I, disputes over art tariffs roiled America's art community, drawing preeminent painters, sculptors, architects, and illustrators into national lobbying campaigns. This essay exposes artists’ agency in tariff politics, illuminates their ideologies, and explains congressional debates, legislation, and diplomacy regarding U.S. art schedules, while demonstrating how the art tariff imbroglio often challenged longstanding partisan patterns in Washington with respect to tariff protectionism. It also contributes to Atlantic world studies by exploring how artists’ anti-tariff positions derived from transoceanic systems of art pedagogy and exhibitions and by showing how protectionists (including a minority of artists) capitalized upon persistent popular stereotypes of national cultural inferiority. Finally, this essay argues that growing disparities of wealth and class sensitivities increasingly affected turn-of-the-century tariff discourse. Protectionists demanded punitive retribution against the international collecting activities of America's ostentatious plutocrats; free-art proponents craved tariff reforms for the didactic purpose of elevating popular taste through exposure to European masterworks.
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- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2010
References
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64 As early as 1886, the Century attributed western support for high art tariffs to the class-related logic that art was a luxury. Hitchcock, Ripley, “The Western Art Movement,” Century, Aug. 1886, 576.Google Scholar
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67 “Your Help Is Solicited by the American Free Art League…” (circular); Edward R. Warren to Halsey C. Ives, Feb. 27, 1906; “Vice President for Illinois” to Warren, Mar. 22, 1906; “The Duty On Art A Tax On Knowledge,” “Art Authorities Favor Free Art,” and “The Art Duty A Handicap on Education”; Myron Pierce to Ives, July 14, Aug. 13, 1906; and Agenda for Apr. 4, 1906 Meeting, all in American Free Art League Collection. An Apr. 2, 1906, League financial statement shows that the League had 1,201 subscribers at $1 memberships, with many members making supplemental subscriptions. Massachusetts, by far, had the most members with 801. Other states with large memberships included New York (161), Illinois (60), and Pennsylvania (45). No other state had as many as twenty members. Several states, such as West Virginia, Vermont, and Arkansas, had only one member, presumably the state vice president. Report in American Free Art League Collection.
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69 “Petition of American Artists for Free Art,” Feb. 1, 1906, American Free Art League Collection; Edwin A. Abbey to Myron Pierce, Feb. 3, 1908, in Lucas, E. V., ed., Edwin Austin Abbey, Royal Academician: The Record of His Life and Work (New York, 1921), 2:444–45Google Scholar; New York Times, Feb. 23, 1896, 12.
70 New York Times, Mar. 19, 1909; Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug., 6, 1907, and Mar 11, Nov. 28, 1908; “The Tariff Blight on American Art,” Brush and Pencil 19 (Jan. 1907): 15–16. Calvin Tomkins notes that Morgan's collecting began during his childhood in Switzerland, that he applied over 50 percent of his wealth to acquiring art, and that “many scholars” believe that his was the “greatest private art collection ever assembled.” Tomkins, , Merchants and Masterpieces, 97.Google Scholar
71 In December 1905 and in February 1906, Lovering and Representative William Alden Smith, respectively, introduced free-art bills. In March 1906, Representative John S. Williams of Mississippi presented a measure to reduce the art duties. Congressional Record, 59th Cong., 1st sess., 47, 2741, 3936; “A bill to amend chapter eleven of the laws of eighteen hundred and ninety-seven entitled ‘An Act to Provide Revenue for the Government and to Encourage the Industries of the United States,’” American Free Art League Collection; “Repeal the Duty on Art Works,” Brush and Pencil 17 (Feb. 1906): 61; “Bill for Free Art Introduced,” and Allen, Thomas, “Arguments for Abolishing the Tariff on Art,” Brush and Pencil 17 (Mar. 1906): 100–02CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 106–12; T. Wayland Vaughan to Richard Watson Gilder, Feb. 5, 1905, Richard Watson Gilder Papers.
72 Myron E. Pierce to Henry C. King, Henry C. King Correspondence, Oberlin College Archives. King accepted and called art tariffs hostile to “art appreciation”; King to Pierce, Sept. 12, 19, 1907, King Correspondence.
73 “Art Notes Here and There,” New York Times, Apr. 4, 1909, X6; Beckwith Diary, Nov. 27, 28, 1908, and Sept. 27, 1909. See also Beckwith's earlier comments reported in the New York Times, Mar. 19, 1909.
74 U.S. House, Tariff Hearings Before the Committee of Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, 60th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Doc. 1505, 7205–19, 7224, 7226; Beckwith Diary, Nov. 28, 1908. To support its lobbying, the Free Art League asked each of its 500 directors to make personal financial contributions or persuade others to give. Edward R. Warren to Henry C. Kling, Jan. 5, 1909, King Correspondence.
75 U.S. House, Tariff Hearings, 7226–27, 7233–34, 7243–45, 7249, 7250–56, 7259, 7267–68.
76 U.S. House, Tariff Hearings, 7229–31, 7238–42, 7252, 7257, 7261–62, 7268. On Williams's art, see the New York Times, Jan. 24, 1909.
77 Congressional Record, 61st Cong., 1st sess., 155–57, 762, 3168, 3169, 3171.
78 Unaddressed meeting announcement, Mar. 23, 1909, signed by Edward R. Warren, American Free Art League Collection; “American Federation of Arts,” www.aaa.si.edu/collections/findingaids/amerfeda.htm (Oct. 12, 2007); De Forest, Robert W., “‘Free Art’ in the New Tariff: Why It Is Essential to the Growth of American Art Museums,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 4 (Apr. 1909): 60–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Preliminary Notice of Art Societies and a National Art Federation …” (printed document) in Cass Gilbert Collection, New York Historical Society, New York City.
79 Gould, , Reform and Regulation, 114–15Google Scholar; Congressional Record, 61st Cong., 1st sess., 761, 3169–71; Mowry, George E., The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900–1912 (New York, 1958), 115–16.Google Scholar
80 Congressional Record., 61st Cong., 1 sess., 1521, 3167, 3171. Republican divisions over the tariff transcended the art rates. See Kleppner, , Continuity and Change, 135.Google Scholar
81 New York Times, Jan. 23, 1910, SM2; Tomkins, , Merchants and Masterpieces, 176–81.Google Scholar About 40 percent of Morgan's art collections, valued after his death at about $60 million, ended up in the Met's permanent collections.
82 Reid, B. L., The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (New York, 1968), 4, 6–7Google Scholar, 12–17, 75–94, 141–49, 157–58, 369; Janis, and Londraville, Richard, “‘A First Class Fighting Man’: Frank Hugh O'Donnell's Correspondence with John Quinn,” Eire-Ireland 26 (Fall 1991): 60n63, 69–71Google Scholar; Crunden, Robert M., American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–1917 (New York, 1993), 103, 204, 358–59Google Scholar; Alexander, , Here the Country Lies, 49.Google Scholar Quinn patronized U.S. landscapists, the Irish painter Jack Yeats, and European impressionists.
83 Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 1st sess., 1223–25, 4146; Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 7, 1913, 6. The Inquirer reported that European art dealers were curtailing summer vacations and returning to their galleries to rush art to America on the assumption that the Senate's proposed increases would immediately become law.
84 Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 1st sess., 4148, 4357–58.
85 Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 1st sess., 4147, 4148, 4354–55, 4356; Widenor, William C., Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley, 1980), 2, 58.Google Scholar
86 Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 1st sess., 4358.
87 De Forest, Choate, Quinn, Wilson, and Eliot documents all quoted in Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 8 (July 1913): 144–46; Circular quoted in Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 7, 1913, 6; “The Tariff on Art,” New York Times, Sept. 16, 1913, 10. Quinn's brief has been published in a bound volume that has no place of publication, no publisher, and no date of publication indicated. I borrowed a copy by interlibrary loan from the Kent State University Library.
88 U.S. Statutes at Large, 63rd Cong., 1st sess., vol. 38, 151, 166; New York Times, Sept. 26, 1913; John Quinn to May Morris, Dec. 16, 1893, quoted in Reid, , Man from New York, 158.Google Scholar George B. Tindall says that Underwood “dominated the debate” over the entire tariff by his “mastery of detail”; Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge, 1967), 11.Google Scholar
89 “Free Art for the People,” Outlook, Sept. 27, 1913, 162; Act of Sept. 21, 1922, Reid, , Man from New York, 368–69Google Scholar, 499, 618; Statutes at Large, 67th Cong., 2nd sess., 920, 934; Luke P. Bellocchi, Assistant Commissioner, Office of Congressional Affairs to Evan Bayh, Mar. 24, 2008, copy enclosed in Evan Bayh to Robert E. May, Apr. 11, 2008, in possession of the author.
90 Alexander, , Here the Country Lies, 6–7.Google Scholar An excellent introduction to the cultural side of the Young America movement is Widmer, Edward L., Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York, 1999).Google Scholar
91 Francis Davis Millet to “My dear Mr. Adams,” Dec. 9, 1910, Francis Davis Millet Papers, AAA, roll 1097.
92 Brown, Glenn, “Roosevelt and the Fine Arts,” pts. 1Google Scholar and 2, The American Architect, Dec. 10, 17, 1919, 711–19, 751–52; Grannis, Howard, “The Need of an Advisory Board on Federal Art,” Brush and Pencil 17 (June 1906): 217–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Names Fine Arts Council,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 1909, 9; “Roosevelt Board Abolished,” New York Times, May 26, 1909, 1; www.cfa.gov/print/about/index.html (accessed June 1, 2008).
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