The Smithsonian Institution

Censorship
Author(s): Richard Meyer
Source: American Art, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 22-24
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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“Jesus Said Buy Folk Art,” Santa
Fe, New Mexico, 2003. Photo,
Sally M. Promey
Richard Meyer
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whom the cabinet’s daily and nightly presence
clearly counted for something. My “conversa-
tions” might also include other engagements
among material objects, consumption, and re-
ligion—long-standing relations between com-
merce and American Christianity, for example,
that frame the conversational wit of this New
Mexico signage.
“Conversations” is an enthusiastically flex-
ible term: the complicated, not just linear,
back and forth, give and take, with others,
persons and objects in real space, and within
ourselves, in cognitive spaces, in tension and
oscillation. Not all conversation results in
agreement or resolution, but threads can be
gathered again, objects and the spaces they
occupy reconsidered, tried out in new situa-
tions and with new partners. And so I return
to the multigenerational circumstances with which I began, in happy anticipation of
conversations yet to be imagined, encounters still in the making, that bring new faces,
new voices, new ideas, new subjects to animate the scholarly engagements we celebrate
and in which we are fortunate to participate.
Notes
1 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); see esp. the introductory essay by Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, Or
How to Make Things Public,” 14–41.
2 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995); and Alan
Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: Univ. of
Massachusetts Press, 1998).
Censorship
In April 1934 Paul Cadmus’s oil painting The Fleet’s In! was confiscated by the assistant
secretary of the U.S. Navy shortly before it was to go on public display at the Corcoran
Gallery of Art. This act of censorship, undertaken at the behest of a retired navy admiral
and World War I hero named Hugh Rodman, sparked a media sensation: national news
magazines and scores of local papers reported the episode and reproduced the painting.
As Esquire magazine later noted, “For every individual who might have seen the original
at the Corcoran, at least one thousand saw it in black and white reproduction.”1
For all its notoriety, the problem posed by The Fleet’s In! proved peculiarly difficult
to specify. According to Admiral Rodman, The Fleet’s In! “evidently originated in the
sordid, depraved imagination of someone who has no conception of actual conditions
in our service.”2 By Rodman’s account, actual sailors on shore leave were unfailingly
22 Spring 2009 Volume 23, Number 1 © 2009 Smithsonian Institution
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 courteous, sober, self-restrained, and respectful of women. The problem with this
defense was that drinking to excess and consorting with women were the commonly
accepted pursuits of the sailor on liberty, were in fact celebrated as salty proof of his
virility. The navy could not dissociate the sailor from these pursuits without simultane-
ously unmanning him.
While Rodman fumed against the female “streetwalkers” in this “disgraceful orgy” of
a painting, he never mentioned the presence of a lone male civilian among the rabble in
Riverside Park.3 On the left-hand side of the composition, a blond man in a suit extends
a Lucky Strike cigarette to a Marine, who, reaching over the body of his buddy, accepts
the offer. The male civilian, with his ringed fingers, rouged cheeks, red tie, slicked-down
hair, and shaded eyes, would have been easily, indeed stereotypically, recognizable as a
“pansy” or “fairy,” an effeminate male homosexual seeking the companionship of mili-
tary men who might swing either way. Because the pansy and the homosexual possibility
he represented could not be acknowledged as part of the problem posed by The Fleet’s In!
Admiral Rodman could justify his outrage only by complaining about the heterosexual
behavior of the depicted sailors.
I first saw The Fleet’s In! on April 26, 1993, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
At that time, I was living in New York and struggling with the beginnings of a disserta-
tion titled “Public Amusement and Urban Leisure in 1930s New York.” The dissertation
would never be written. I eventually realized that it was not the depiction of Coney
Island, Times Square, or Riverside Park by New York artists of the 1930s that interested
me but the collision of censorship and sexuality across the field of twentieth-century
American art.
Seeing The Fleet’s In! firsthand helped me come to this realization. Or, rather, seeing
the painting and then reading the introductory wall text helped me to do so. With
careful phrasing, the wall text, according to my notes, described The Fleet’s In! as “an
early example of Cadmus’s eye for the earthy side of human behavior” and added,
“Throughout the many decades of his career, Cadmus has continued to choose the

Richard Meyer poses in front of

Paul Cadmus’s painting The Fleet’s
In! in 1993. Smithsonian American
Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

23 American Art

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 more controversial and disquieting interpretation of a theme over a more conven-
tional one.”
To understand why this wall text made such a vivid impression on me, you may
need to know something about the circumstances leading up to this museum visit. My
trip to D.C. that April was occasioned not by the Cadmus exhibition but by the 1993
March on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, the largest public demonstration
for gay civil rights in history. With more than half a million queers gathering for the
march (and, of course, for the disco parties, happy hours, and general atmosphere of
sexual liberty that accompanied the event), it really did seem, at least for a weekend,
that “we were everywhere”—on the Metro, on the Mall, in the streets, in hotel lobbies
and hospitality suites.
Having read about the Cadmus show, I decided to stay one extra day in Washington
to see it. On the morning after the march, still wearing my leather biker jacket and
queer nation t-shirt, I got on the Metro to Gallery Place. As I looked around the train
at the nicely dressed commuters on their way to work, I realized that I had, as they
say, stayed too long at the fair, that the revelry (and revelers) of the weekend had been
dislodged by the workaday world of the city. So far as Monday morning was concerned,
the March on Washington was history.
But not for me. When I saw The Fleet’s In! later that morning, Cadmus’s sailors,
floozies, and fairy reminded me of the carnivalesque weekend from which I had just
emerged. An art critic writing in 1935 had described the characters in the painting as
“carousing in queer postures,” a nice turn of phrase that could also have described what
I had been doing in Washington that weekend.4
The Fleet’s In! offered me a sense of imagined community, which is why, I think, I
asked a well-dressed older woman nearby to take my photograph in front of the paint-
ing. I wanted to bring something of the collective energy of the march to the museum.
But I also wanted to savor Cadmus’s “eye for the earthy side of human behavior,” maybe
even—and remember this photo was taken fifteen years and fifteen pounds ago—provide
some eye candy.
Paul Cadmus once said, “I owe the start of my career, really, to the Admiral who tried
to suppress it.”5 I can’t say that I owe my career to the anonymous scribe who wrote the
wall text for the Cadmus exhibition at the American Art Museum in 1993. But, on the
off chance that he or she may read this essay, I can say, “Thank you.”

Notes
1 Harry Salpeter, “Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible,” Esquire, July 1937, 105. For a complete account of this
exhibition and its censorship, see my Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-
Century American Art (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 37–56.

2 “Bans CWA Picture as Insult to Navy,” New York Times, April 19, 1934, 1.

3 Ibid.

4 Madelin Blitzstein, “It May Be Hard to Take but It’s Art,” Minneapolis Journal, February 24, 1935,
unpaginated clipping, personal scrapbook, Paul Cadmus; photocopy provided to the author by DC
Moore Galleries, New York, with permission of the artist.

5 Cited in David Sutherland, Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible at 80, documentary film distributed by Home
Vision, 1984.

24 Spring 2009

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