Racism and Rockwell: ‘So You Want To See The President!’ (1943)

Where are the Black Americans?

So You Want to See the President! (1943) by Norman Rockwell (Wikimedia Commons)

American artist Norman Rockwell’s So You Want to See the President! (1943) was acquired by The White House Historical Association at Heritage Auction House in Dallas on November 14th. His painting sold for $7.25 million, which, with fees added, came to $14.76 million, setting a new record for a work on paper by Rockwell. They were put up for sale by a grandson of the White House official who received them as a gift from Rockwell after a court battle over their ownership was settled.

Created in 1943 and published in the Saturday Evening Post during the Second World War, the series is Rockwell’s only known collection of four interrelated paintings designed to tell a cohesive story. So You Want to See the President! was commissioned by Stephen T. Early, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s press secretary, during World War II.

The four-panel painting on paper features vignettes of various characters, including soldiers, civilians, and senators, in the White House waiting room. It hung in the White House from 1978 through 2022 on a loan from Early’s family, before returning to the private collection of his descendants, the Elam family.

According to the Heritage Auctions website, the series “offers an intimate and deeply human portrayal of American democracy in action.” And according to Aviva Lehmann, Heritage’s Senior Vice President and Director of American Art.

“In So You Want to See the President!, he turns the grandeur of the White House into a stage for ordinary Americans. It’s a work that speaks as powerfully today as it did in 1943 and represents a once-in-a-generation collecting opportunity.”

Anita McBride, a member of the association’s board of directors, recalled seeing the drawings in 1981 during her time in Ronald Reagan’s administration,

“People just loved seeing the wide array and depiction of Americans who have access to their president.”

Matthew Costello, the association’s chief education officer, further explained their significance:

“In a way, it sort of illustrates how FDR always talked about the ‘arsenal of democracy’ and what made the United States unique, calling them ‘an incredible series of renderings.’”

The White House Historical Association was founded by First Lady Jackie Kennedy in 1961, a private nonprofit that receives no government funding. It raises money mostly through private donations and merchandise sales, including an annual Christmas ornament. This is the most expensive work ever purchased by the association, according to ABC News.

If you knew nothing about the USA but only had this Rockwell painting to go by, then you would probably believe all the statements being made about it. But we are in 2025 and not 1943. Undoubtedly, Rockwell had successfully captured Roosevelt’s vision of democracy as inclusive and cooperative in 1943. Yet it feels like the statements I have quoted praising the newly acquired painting miss out a huge and crucial part of American society in 1943— there is not one Black person in the painting.

The quotes and the painting are being used to portray a vision of America that is segregatory and exclusive. It is as if no black people or ethnic minorities exist in America. They have all disappeared. Where is this “wide array and depictions of Americans…”? Certainly not in the painting. Why not?

Because they do not exist in the minds of those portraying America in 1943, and are therefore not counted. They have no power in America, yet they would die for their country and for freedom in every war, both on American soil and in faraway battles in Europe, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, and Afghanistan. The painting is being used to send a political message, and it is a disgrace to those who died in these wars and those who were murdered under Jim Crow in the most horrific ways before, during, and after WW2.

So You Want to See the President! is a painting depicting racism. I cannot beat about the bush on this. The contrast with the last painting bought by the Association could not be more dramatic and revealing. The White House Historical Association paid $1.5 million for The Builders, by African American artist Jacob Lawrence, in 2007.

Anita McBride said,

“That work depicts hard-working men in orange, red, and brown tones, and hangs in the White House Green Room.”

The Builders (1947) by Jacob Lawrence

The Builders is inclusive and a powerful testament to the unity in the struggle to make America really great after WW2 for everyone, no matter the colour of your skin. This is to build as a communal activity of planning and making, an ongoing intellectual and physical endeavor. The metaphor was not of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, but of cooperative civil action, of working together for a people’s advancement. And that is a message as relevant today as it was in 1947.

Only four years separate these paintings, but the images and the vision shown could not be further apart. Rockwell’s is the American Apartheid state of Jim Crow, and Lawrence shows the optimism and struggle of a post-Apartheid postwar America together in building the infrastructure of the modern-day America you live in today. Rockwell should be in a museum somewhere for those who are studying History, not Art. Lawrence is rightly in the Green Room.

The Rockwell purchase is a clear political statement as to the ideology of the new uber-nationalistic (fascist) white supremacist regime running America. Such a painting should never have been purchased. It is insulting, derogatory, and racist. It subtly glorifies white supremacy. But worse, it erases the black and ethnic peoples who are as much American citizens as the colonialists who now swagger with entitlement.

The argument that it is not racist will be made, suggesting that a painting that records history is somehow exempt from ideology or ‘isms’ because it was created to record an actual time in Washington. So tired of such disingenuous nonsense. If only white people are depicted, then this is because ONLY white people were allowed in, and Rockwell did not change this reality. Why would he paint a distortion of such a reality? If he did, he would be laughed at and accused of being a traitor to his colour and class.

“Blacks sitting in the White House waiting with white people to see the President? How absurd.”

Yet the painting of racial segregation and Jim Crow is purchased and will be displayed at the White House once more. The white supremacists are back and flexing their ideological muscles with this artwork. Yet the real muscles that had already made America and were making America into a superpower are to be seen at work in The Builders.

The racists in power forget this by pretending otherwise in a diminished historical elision of the whole truth about the making of America. Spending a fortune on a racist painting shows how ugly and simple-minded their thoughts are. I pity them all.

Sadie Seroxcat