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Edward Hopper, Man of the Right Read Martha Bayles's essay on page 32 of this issue for an appreciation of the work of Edward Hopper, one of America's greatest 20th-century painters and the man who...
...Hopper regarded this as part of an attempt to create a dictatorship...
...The Hitler problem hit the Columbia campus with a bang when it was announced that Hans Luther, the German ambassador, would deliver a lecture at a campus auditorium...
...Young Communist League) came to my office and urged me to publish an editorial demanding that Luther be barred from speaking at Columbia...
...Came the answer from the YCL spokesman: There could be no such analogy...
...But a friend once spoke of "the intensity and extent of his [political] engagement and rage...
...Hopper was a teenager during the McKinley presidency, and as he grew older he was nostalgic about what he felt was America's virtuous past...
...Hopper's political activity was anything but self-aggrandizing...
...Their slogan was: 'No freedom of speech for fascists.' "I asked the delegation, How about the fact that Columbia had invited Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov to do a lecture, and there were no protests...
...Hopper wrote to Vice President John Nance Garner and both New York senators to complain about the court packing...
...An associate noted that when Hopper returned from a trip to Mexico in 1943, the radical politics of that country didn't show up in his paintings...
...The event began with Gingrich's Second Life avatar flying through the air and then falling to earth on the Capitol steps...
...All the more reason to wish he had taken the plunge: The more the merrier is our philosophy, and the other candidates would have improved by having to compete...
...In the hands of the Associated Press, as we complained last week, it would have read, "Three dozen dead in Iraq violence...
...He doesn't paint like one...
...Both he and Jo joined the National Organization for Hands Off the Supreme Court...
...Well, was there any freedom of speech or press, or independent trade unions in the USSR who could strike...
...And though he lived through most tumultuous times, his conservatism never wavered...
...It's not the most euphonious ever—"says kills" may not even be English—but the reader at least knows approximately what's going on...
...In World War II, he served as a volunteer air raid warden on cape cod...
...Edward Hopper, Man of the Right Read Martha Bayles's essay on page 32 of this issue for an appreciation of the work of Edward Hopper, one of America's greatest 20th-century painters and the man who gave us Night-hawks, that scene of three lonely customers and a waiter at a near-empty diner (which The Scrapbook grew to love while playing the Masterpiece board game...
...When asked by the Treasury Department to make sketches for murals at the post office in Portland, Maine, he quietly declined—without alerting the press of his stand on principle...
...Hopper and his wife were appalled not only by what she once described as FDR's "astounding pump priming expenditures of billions," but also his effort to pack the Supreme Court...
...He refused to broadcast his political views, as so many artists do today...
...probably he is not a communist," the associate said...
...The caricatures of Daumier, that most political of French artists, were great in spite of their political content, he felt...
...Let him speak and let those who want to protest, protest...
...He writes: "The big fuss at Columbia University over the invitation to and appearance of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a speaker created quite a campus fuss...
...Many years later I came across this riveting passage in an essay by George Orwell: 'The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.' "As editor of the Spectator I opposed those who wanted Luther barred from speaking...
...Meanwhile, here in the philistine's corner of the magazine, we'd like to point out that Hopper was distinctive in another way, particularly among modern artists...
...Hitler represented the voice of fascism, introduced in Italy in 1922 by Benito Mussolini...
...My experience in 1933 had to do with Adolf Hitler who had just come into power...
...A delegation from the Columbia Social Problems Club (a.k.a...
...John Dos passos, the novelist, was a leftist when he knew Hopper in the 1930s and described him as "a sort of McKinley conservative"—an apt description...
...Go Reuters, Seriously A t tip of The Scrapbook homburg Lto Reuters for its October 5 headline, "U.S...
...As his arms and legs flailed during the landing, his virtual tie fluttered up about his face...
...You can find these details and others in Gail Levin's Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography...
...The virtual Gingrich, clad in slacks, a blue dress shirt, a yellow tie, and silver-rimmed spectacles, was, in keeping with the Second Life ethos, a younger, trimmer version of the former speaker...
...He believed that art should "never be reduced to sociology...
...Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, was present for the 1933 version of Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia...
...Brave Newt World We were sorry to learn last week that Newt Gingrich won't be entering the presidential race after all...
...Came the YCL answer: Why should the Soviet workers strike when they owned the means of production, eh...
...Luther represented a 'gangster' government...
...Arnold Beichman's Columbia The Scrapbook received a reminiscence from our old friend Arnold Beichman last week...
...The man is unique and would have enlivened our civic life...
...He was a conservative, a Republican, an anti-communist, and a patriot...
...Hitler, an enemy of the Jews, went far beyond Mussolini, who was no anti-Semite...
...As Jonathan V. Last reported on the Daily Standard, Newt "celebrated the 13th anniversary of the signing of the Contract With America by holding an event dubbed 'Solutions Day.' Where the Contract With America had been presented on the steps of the West Front of the Capitol in September of 1994, Gingrich's Solutions Day address was held on the West Front of the Virtual Capitol inside the game Second Life...
...Few knew that he and his wife Jo were fierce critics of president Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and regretted not having voted in 1936—against FDR...
...And he discussed politics only with his closest friends...
...Some have argued that the Republican party is better off without its onetime standard bearer in the race—that he is too polarizing a figure to win a national election, but talented enough a politician to have won some GOP primaries and greatly complicated the race for the other candidates...
...During World War I, he drew patriotic posters promoting the allied side...
...Hopper never let his politics seep into his paintings...
...And the campus protests once more prove the truth of the French maxim, plus ga change, plus c'est la mime chose—the more things change, the more they remain the same...
...military says kills 37 Iraqi militants...
...It brought back seven decades-old memories of when I was a senior at Columbia and editor in chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student daily...
...The German ambassador spoke, the protestors got somewhat rowdy, a few arrests were made, and we prepared for the next battle...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 5
