Untitled Document

07 December 2006

Year of Peril

The moment to commemorate the attack comes late in the day on America's East Coast, and it is easy to get caught up in something else and forget the moment. The Iraq Study Group has made its report to the President, after all, and there are the holidays coming up.

It is a little easier to remember, if you happen to live on the shores of Pearl Harbor, which I did for a few years. It seems a lifetime ago, though it is not quite halfway to The Day of Infamy.

I worked on Ford Island then, and the island ferry steamed past the Arizona where she rests on Battleship Row to land us near the headquarters of the THIRD Fleet. When we jogged around the island at lunchtime, we passed the historic houses and the remnants of the USS Utah that projected from the blue water on the western side of the island.

Ford Island slept then, though it had been in the mass of boiling activity that went on for two years around the clock after the Pacific Fleet was sunk. There were still cables on the beach, twisted and rusting, where they righted the capsized Oklahoma, and Nevada Point served as a reminder of where that great ship had gone aground in a desperate run to escape the harbor.

Arizona lies as she did then, across what was the main water-line from the mainland to Ford Island. She crushed it when she went down, and the lack of pressure to the hoses was a contributing factor to the devastating fires that raged after the two Japanese attack waves.

Evidence of the massive effort to raise the sunken fleet was still there. In response to an inquiry from a museum in Texas one day I found myself examining an old plan of a scrap dump near Eva Beach that showed where the upper works of many of the ships had been dumped. It was overgrown then, and periodically a scrap dealer would make an offer to haul the stuff away.

The Navy was afraid it would show up as souvenir key-chains on the strand at Waikiki, and demurred. I know that a hatch was eventually found in a pile attributed to the wreckage of the Arizona, but later I heard that it was lost in transit.

I don't know if any of it is still there in the scrub.

The Air Force at Hickham has been good about preserving the evidence of that day. The base is a paradoxically lovely one. It was built in the Depression, and the government spared no expense. The old buildings may constitute the only Art Moderne military base in the world. The pock-marks on the buildings from the machine gun fire are quite real.

On Ford Island, our duty-bunk-room was in the old dispensary building, which had taken Japanese bomb in the central courtyard, and was used as a makeshift morgue on the day after. I think the place was haunted, but I have a vivid imagination late at night

I completely understand why we have airbrushed the blood away from that day. The white arch over Arizona is supposed to be a symbol of struggle and peace. It straddles the hulk below, and dips in the middle and rises at each end, a lateral depiction of peace and tragedy and Victory, without saying so directly.

There is a better symbol of the struggle, which is linear. The USS Missouri is now berthed astern the Arizona, the Alpha and Omega of the struggle.

We seem a little embarrassed about winning the war. The feeling is that we were not very nice about it. There is some ambivalence about the dawn of the atom age, and even about the American Century itself.

Thomas Hart Benton is a famous artist of that period. He was born in 1889, firmly rooted in the exuberant time of the taming of the Golden West. He was a child of privilege, being grandnephew of Sen. Thomas Hart Benton and son of Congressman Maecenas E. Benton. We know his work now mostly through the derived fame of his disciples, mostly, who became the architects of the deconstruction that ushered in the great post-war abstractionists.

One of them was Jackson Pollack, who hw mentored when he taught at the Kansas City Art Institute. It is curious to me that he was such an inspiration to the rising group of rebels against the form, but I am no art historian. Benton's work to me seems to have that touch of Socialist Realism, and his treatment of man interacting with machine evokes the murals of Diego Rivera that I first saw in the magnificent lobby of the Detroit Institute of Art.

Benton in his time was called the greatest American painter, or at least great one of the three great masters of the Regionalist school. He left New York to work in Missouri. He exhibited with Grant Wood of American Gothic fame, and John Steuart Curry.

Benton was scheduled to give a speech on the afternoon of December 7th, 1941. One of his entourage whispered to him about the attack, and he immediately cancelled the appearance and returned to his studio, determined to do something to awake the public to the danger posed by the fascists.

In 1942 Benton produced a series of ten gigantic and alarming paintings he called "The Year of the Peril." They were lurid, outsized and frightening. They contain images of fighter planes shooting Christ on the Cross, and Japanese troops apparently raping a blonde woman.

Archibald MacLeish, then Librarian of Congress, called the series "paintings of the horrors of war." Later he revised his statement rhetorically to call them "paintings of hate."

The series was first displayed at the Associated American Artists' Gallery in New York. 75,000 people came to see them, and they were reproduced by the U.S. government on stamps, cards and a run of 18,000 posters paid for by the Abbott Laboratories.

What we remember now from the period are the Norman Rockwell paintings that characterized the Four Freedoms, and the basic decency of the American Democracy.

After the war, Abbott Labs donated the series to the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. The Society recognizes the value and importance of the works, but they are not prominently displayed. They are a bit of an embarrassment; being worth too much to discard but insensitive to be displayed. They are hardly the kind of images you would purchase on prints or post cards in the gift shop.

They are, in fact, intended to make people recoil at the horror of war, and that is why so few of the originals remain.

It is not much different than the Warner Brothers cartoons of the war years that have been effectively excised from the public domain. I remember the images from my youth, the fat Nazis and smirking yellow Tojos. The images are insensitive, and have been expunged. The Loonie Tunes made you laugh at the enemy.

Benton tried to tell us why they had to be killed.

As this Pearl Harbor day passes, and the circle of people that remember first-hand diminish, it is interesting that the Iraq Study Group has provided some goals and recommendations for the global war of today.

In the report, around page 43, they get to the goals that sound a lot like the Four Freedoms: a stable, democratic Iraq.

There are other recommendations seventy-eight more, in fact. Good ones for the most part, though not what the President wants to hear. I think he will pick and chose among them, and blunder forward.

Thomas Hart Benton had his finger on something very important when he created his work. The bodies of the dead at Pearl Harbor were barely cool when he began to create The Year of Peril. Series.

The nation mobilized and was prepared to do whatever it took to achieve victory against a brutal foe.

It is only our Army and Marines who are fighting this one, and a few from the other Services. There are fewer of them now in the entire armed forces than were deployed to Operation DESERT STORM alone.

That is the difference between now and then, between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. I wonder what Thomas Hart Benton would have painted after that day in September, or if he would have painted anything at all. We allowed the President to send our Army to war, and the rest of us just got on with life, just as he recommended.

The seventy-nine recommendations of the Iraq Study Group are calculated to get us out of Iraq in a way that saves face as we do it. That is certainly one approach to deal with the horrors of a war that is not working out very well.

Not, on the whole, the preferred way to conclude one. But it would have been very expensive to do it any other way, and would have required getting the country mobilized and taking this with the same gravity they did after Pearl. And that might be perceived as insensitive.

The winners of these things generally are.