The Other Rockwell

pictured with a pipe in his mouth. Another Rockwell who lived in a city called Arlington in his forties. Another Rockwell who came out swinging in the nineteen sixties with some strong public statements about the civil rights movement. But George Lincoln Rockwell the Nazi and Norman Rockwell the illustrator don't really have much else in common, so there's never really a good reason to talk about both men in

the same breath, unless it's by accident. As I was researching the story of Frank Smith and his involvement in both the American Nazi Party and the New England Mafia, I was reading through the file the FBI kept on Raymond patriarcha a mob bosson Rhode Island. About four thousand pages into that eight thousand page file, there's a memo addressed to J. Edgar Hoover. It's from the Special Agent in charge of the Boston Field Office, and it's dated

January of nineteen sixty five. The memo was to notify Hoover that a patriarchic crime family associate who'd just been released from prison was meeting with a man called George Norman Rockwell. The typewritten memo has a handwritten correction, so someone took a pen and circled Norman and then wrote Lincoln in the margins. It's a funny little artifact, but it reminded me of the time I heard someone make that exact same mistake in a federal courtroom. Back in

twenty twenty one. I was covering a trial in the civil lawsuit of Siins vs. Kessler, a suit filed against the organizers of the Unite the Right rally by a group of people who'd been injured at the Nazi rally. Towards the end of that trial, when the plaintiff's attorney had Jeff's Scoop on the stand, the one time leader of the National Socialist Movement, Scoop was asked about some

terminology that he used with his group. The National Socialist Movement referred to their members who engage in street level activism as stormtroopers, and that was a nod to their shared history with the American Nazi Party. When the attorney rephrased that answer back to his witness, he accidentally said George Norman Rockwell instead of George Lincoln Rockwell. And I

remember this moment. I remember it because it was one of the only times I laughed that day, and I remember it because I wrote it down, and I remember joking about it in person with another of the plaintiff's atorneys a few days later. I remember it. But when I went back to look at the transcript this week, it isn't actually there. And this has honestly really shaken

my faith in the sanctity of court reporting. I mean, the transcript is supposed to be this perfect, indelible record of the words that were spoken aloud in a court room, and normally I would default to believing what's in the transcript,

but I know the transcript is mistaken. Here. I typically take all my courtroom notes by hand, but because of the ongoing COVID pandemic back in twenty twenty one, the judge made the decision to close the courtroom to the public, and so this trial was broadcast over a telephone line that you could call into to listen. And since I was able to listen in from home, I decided that instead of taking my notes privately and then writing about them later, I would live tweet the trial, all four

weeks of it. It was a nightmarish undertaking, but one I took very seriously, and when that trial finally ended, I got perhaps the finest compliment I'll ever get about my notes. Some of the attorneys for the plaintiffs told me that when they had to leave the courtroom for a bathroom break or something during the day, they would pull up those tweets to see what they were missing. So transcript be damned. That attorney made the same little mistake in twenty twenty one that an FBI agent made

in that memo in nineteen sixty five. They both accidentally dragged poor Norman Rockwell into Nazi business. So those were the two examples of this that I had in mind, But I hadn't realized the extent to which this mistake was happening until I sat down to write about it.

Apparently it was a frequent enough occurrence that it was a source of great pain for Norman Rockwell, particularly in the nineteen sixties when both men were active in their respective careers, one as America's leading neo Nazi and the other as a beloved illustrator of Americana. Despite their differences, this similarity in their names has been a source of confusion for decades. A lot of people are making this mistake. Most often it's that same mistake the FBI agent made.

People are writing George Norman Rockwell when they mean George Lincoln Rockwell. So they have the first and last name of the Nazi correct, and they know it's a three named deal, but some part of their brain is just inserting the name of the other famous Rockwell into the middle. I found dozens of instances in old newspapers where stories about the American Nazi Party refer to the group's leader

as George Norman Rockwell. I found papers containing apologies and corrections for having made the mistake, and letters to the editor from readers who are outraged on the artist's behalf and I also found articles that used both the correct and incorrect form interchangeably from paragraph to paragraph, and this middle name mix up accounts for most of the examples I found, but there were a few notable instances where

they just switched the names entirely. In nineteen sixty four of the local Young Republicans Club led the effort to invite George Lincoln Rockwell to speak at Western Washington State College, and when the day finally arrived, that student Terry Gallagher, was so nervous that he accidentally introduced the Nazi to

the audience as Norman Rockwell. In nineteen sixty six, when George Lincoln Rockwell was arrested in Chicago, a newspaper in Alabama ran a photo of men in white powered T shirts with Swastika banners under the headline Nazi chief Norman Rockwell arrested. That same year, before the Senate killed what would have been the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty six, a Florida congressman introduced an amendment to the bill that would quote deter professional agitators by making it a crime

to cross state lines to participate in civil disturbance. According to a write up in the Atlanta Journal, Constitution Representative William Kramer said his amendment was intended to keep people like Norman Rockwell from traveling from state to state, fomenting civil disorder and again shaking my faith in the sanctity

of transcription. This is actually missing from the congressional record, but the reporter who wrote it up says that Kramer said Norman Rockwell several times before he was interrupted by a colleague who suggested that he probably means George Lincoln. One particularly messy example came shortly after George Lincoln Rockwell's death, when his assassin, John Patler, first appeared in court for an arraignment. Another member of the American Nazi Party had

an outburst in the courtroom. So a man in the gallery stood up and he's screaming at John Patler, and he lunged toward him, and he was arrested. And after Eric Wenberg was arrested, it was discovered that he was an aust Araelian citizen who'd overstayed a tourist visa. Before authorities in the US could deport him, he traveled to Canada, and Canada too wanted the Nazi out, but the Canadian

deportation proceedings were delayed by an embarrassing clerical error. One of the reasons the Canadian government gave for his removal was that he'd been arrested in the United States at a demonstration against the assassin of Norman Rockwell. John Beatty, the Canadian Nazi who represented Wenberg at his deportation hearing, showed up to court in a swastika armband and argued that clearly this record is full of errors. Norman Rockwell

is still alive. Weinberg was eventually sent home to Australia, and in nineteen seventy two he died in a car accident. That doesn't sound particularly notable, but the car accident happened in Rhodesia, and it was reported at the time that there was a million dollars in cash found in the car with his dead body. So we'll have to come back to that some other time. We're talking about Norman Rockwell. But in all of these examples, people are accidentally slipping

Norman Rockwell's name into stories about the Nazi. I couldn't find a single instance of the mistake happening in reverse. Now you might be wondering, are these two men related, they're not. I did find one completely unsubstantiated claim published in two thousand and three in the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies that Norman Rockwell was George Lincoln's uncle. There's

no citation. The article was a review of Frederick Simon Elli's biography of George Lincoln Rockwell, and I've read that book. It makes absolutely no mention of Norman Rockwell at all. So that strange parenthetical claim in the article that the illustrator is the Nazis' uncle seems to be just entirely

made up. Norman Rockwell is about the same age as the Nazi's father, and they're both from New England, so it's a reasonable question to ask, but the answer is no. I did some of my own genealogical research on both

families and I found no connection. Back in the days before Google, sometimes newspapers would have a feature that answered factual questions submitted by readers, and I found a bunch of those over the years where readers asked variations on this question and the newspaper always answered no, sometimes citing Norman Rockwell himself. This association was a troubling one for Norman Rockwell. His granddaughter, Abigail Rockwell, still runs a Facebook

page dedicated to his memory. In a post just a few weeks ago, she wrote, my father told me Pop was very upset to be sometimes confused with George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the America Nazi Party. He was so unsettled and perturbed by this he considered taking legal action, but was dissuaded from doing so. It's not just embarrassing to be mixed up with someone else, especially someone so unsavory. Norman Rockwell wasn't just not George Lincoln Rockwell. He was

against everything the other man represented. The name Norman Rockwell probably puts some images into your mind's eye right away. You might be picturing his painting of a family at the dinner table with a big turkey, or the one of a man standing up ready to speak his mind.

Both of those Freedom from want and freedom of speech were painted in the same year as part of a four part series of paintings for the Saturday Evening Post in nineteen forty three, and if you're only familiar with his earlier work, you might be thinking, well, Norman Rockwell was just painting the America that George Lincoln Rockwell was trying to create a whitewashed conservative America with traditional white

Christian suburban family values. You're probably picturing his paintings of a white family on their way to church, a pretty blond white woman at the soda counter, a white couple at the courthouse getting a marriage license, boy scouts, soldiers, the iconic image of Rosy the Riveter, classic mid twentieth century Americana, images of peaceful suburban living, and notably images with only white faces. And that's true. Those are Norman

Rockwell's most famous works. Those are things that he painted. Most of the ones you're probably thinking of were illustrations he did for The Saturday Evening Post. Over the course of forty seven years, he illustrated hundreds of covers for that magazine. According to art critic Caroline Marling, the Saturday Evening Post explicitly forbade Norman Rockwell from painting black subjects in his cover art unless they were depicted performing some

kind of menial task. By the nineteen sixties, though, he felt drawn to paint the world as it was, and that meant acknowledging the struggle for civil rights, so he parted ways with the Saturday Evening Post. In the nineteen sixties, Norman rockw Well painted for Look magazine, and it was for Look that he created some of his most moving paintings. In nineteen sixty four, a painting called The Problem We

All Live With was published in Look Magazine's centerfold. It shows a six year old Ruby Bridges flanked by federal marshals on her way to integrate her elementary school. The following year, Look published a painting called Murder in Mississippi, and it was Norman Rockwell's depiction of the murders of civil rights workers James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

During the same years that George Lincoln Rockwell was criss crossing the country disrupting and mocking civil rights marches, Norman Rockwell was painting that struggle. He was quietly insisting through his work that people like Ruby Bridges were every bit as much a part of the fabric of America as

the subjects of his kitche classic illustrations of Suburbia. When his Nazi counterpart was making a mockery of the struggle for equality in Mississippi by sending a storm trooper in blackface into the Capitol Building to disrupt Congress Norman Rockwell was memorializing the civil rights activist who died fighting for racial justice there. In July of nineteen sixty seven, Norman

Rockwell spoke at the National Press Club in Washington. Gossip columnist Leonard Lyons reported that the artist was overheard rehearsing the opening line of his speech in a hotel shortly before the event. I am not George Lincoln Rockwell. Just a few weeks later, the other Rockwell was shot in a strip mall parking lot. That bullet didn't end the confusion between the two Rockwells, but it did end the night life. Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool

Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Kunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal. I don't answer any

of my emails. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.