1. Baigell, Matthew, Thomas Hart Benton (New York: Abrams, 1974)Google Scholar; Marling, Karal Ann, Tom Benton and His Drawings: A Biographical Essay and a Collection of His Sketches, Studies, and Mural Cartoons (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Adams, Henry, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989)Google Scholar. For recent books and exhibition catalogues on Benton, see Hurt, R. Douglas and Dains, Mary K., eds., Thomas Hart Benton, Artist, Writer, Intellectual (Columbia: The State Historical Society of Missouri, 1990)Google Scholar; Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals: The Making of a Masterpiece (Bloomington: Indiana University Art Museum, 1989)Google Scholar; Adams, Henry, Thomas Hart Benton, Drawing From Life (New York: Abbeville, 1990)Google Scholar; Benton's America, Works on Paper and Selected Paintings (New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, 1991)Google Scholar; and Doss, Erika, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Prospects contributions to Bentonia include Marling, Karal Ann, “Thomas Hart Benton's Boomtown: Regionalism Redefined,” Prospects 6 (1981): 73–137CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ladner, Barbara, “Thomas Hart Benton's Jealous Lover and the Ballad of Middle Brow Culture,” Prospects 15 (1990): 283–324CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an overview of material on Benton prior to the last decade, see Guedon, May Scholz, Regionalist Art, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood: A Guide to the Literature (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1982).Google Scholar

2. For biographical information on Benton, see Adams, , Thomas Hart Benton, pp. 2–4Google Scholar; and Benton, 's own accounts: An Artist in America, 4th rev. ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983, originally published in 1937)Google Scholar, and An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1969).Google Scholar

3. Benton, , Artist in America, p. 252Google Scholar. For Benton's account of the Indiana project, see his handwritten manuscript “The Thirties,” reproduced as Appendix 1, “The Thirties,” in Priddy, Bob, Only the Rivers are Peaceful: Thomas Hart Benton's Missouri Mural (Independence, Mo.: Independence, 1989), pp. 224–33Google Scholar. For information on A Century of Progress, see “Chicago Fair,” Newsweek 4, no. 19 (11 10, 1934): 32Google Scholar; and “Indiana at the World's Fair,” American Magazine of Art 24, no. 8 (08 1933): 390Google Scholar. For information on Indiana's exhibit, see Richards, Wallace, “General Information Concerning the Indiana Exhibits at A Century of Progress,” in the Wallace Richards Papers, Archives of American Art (AAA), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., microfilm roll 1732, frames 51–52.Google Scholar

4. Richards, , “Memorandum to the Director,” dated ca. 01 27, 1933Google Scholar, in AAA microfilm roll 1732, frame 67. Benton is quoted in “A Dream Fulfilled,” the postscript to Chambers, David Laurence's Indiana: A Hoosier History with Illustrations from the Mural by Thomas Hart Benton (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1933)Google Scholar, a book contracted by the Indiana Commission and sold at the Indiana Pavilion. For further information on the mural, see the catalogue Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals, n.p.

Stored at the Indianapolis fairgrounds after A Century of Progress closed, the Benton murals were given to Indiana University and reinstalled in three different locations on the Bloomington campus in 1940–41.

5. A Century of Progress closed in November, 1933, but was reopened (to further increase city revenues) in June, 1934. It finally closed on Halloween night in 1934. Benton's earlier 1930s murals were the America Today mural for the New School for Social Research (New York, 1930)Google Scholar, and The Arts of Life in America mural for the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 1932). For information on the New School mural, see Braun, Emily and Branchick, Thomas, Thomas Hart Benton: The America Today Murals (New York: Equitable Life Assurance Society, 1985)Google Scholar. On the Whitney mural, see Adams, , Thomas Hart Benton, pp. 176–91.Google Scholar

6. Benton quoted in “American Regionalism: A Personal History of the Movement,” in American in Art, p. 192Google Scholar. Marling makes this point in “Thomas Hart Benton's Epic of the Usable Past,” in Thomas Hart Benton, Artist, Writer, Intellectual, p. 124.Google Scholar

7. Benton, , “American Regionalism,” p. 148Google Scholar. On the Southern agrarians, see their 1930 manifesto I'll Take My Stand (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), edited by Davidson, DonaldGoogle Scholar. For links between them and the regionalist painters, see Heller, Nancy and Williams, Julia, The Regionalists, Painters of the American Scene (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1976), pp. 31–33Google Scholar. For information on Wood and Curry, see Corn, Wanda, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Dennis, James, Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture (New York: Viking, 1975)Google Scholar; and Kendall, M. Sue, Rethinking Regionalism: John Steuart Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1986).Google Scholar

8. Benton described his study of modern art in Artist in America, pp. 23–37Google Scholar, and American in Art, pp. 11–28.Google Scholar

9. This reading of modernism stems from Singal, Daniel Joseph's “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” in American Quarterly 39, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Pocock, J. G. A., “Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian,” Daedalus (Summer 1976): 153–54Google Scholar; Ross, Steven, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 3Google Scholar; and May, Lary, “Making the American Way: Moderne Theaters, Audiences, and the Film Industry, 1929–1945,” Prospects 12 (1987): 90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

The dominant work on the republican synthesis is Pocock, 's Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. On the republican tradition and producerism, see Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar. On republicanism and the arts from the 18th to the 19th Century, see Barrell, John, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. For an overview of the republican synthesis and its use by contemporary historians, see Wood, Gordon S., “Hellfire Politics,” New York Review of Books, 02 28, 1985, pp. 29–32.Google Scholar

11. See Rowland Berthoffs discussion of Benton, Senator in “Independence and Attachment, Virtue and Interest: From Republican Citizen to Free Enterpriser, 1787–1837,” in Uprooted Americans: Essays to Honor Oscar Handlin, ed. Bushman, Richard L. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 97–124Google Scholar. Benton discussed his father in “Boyhood,” an unpublished, unpaginated manuscript in the Benton Papers, AAA.

12. Benton, , Artist in America, p. 5.Google Scholar

13. Beard is quoted in Noble, David W., The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 54–55Google Scholar. Braun, , in Thomas Hart Benton: The America Today MuralsGoogle Scholar, notes the influence of Beard on Benton's 1920s paintings and quotes correspondence between Benton and Matthew Baigell in which Benton remarked that he “often discussed” his mural projects with Beard (see pp. 12, 31 n. 12). Barbara Rose maintains that Benton and other regionalists “wished to turn their backs on contemporary reality in order to preserve the atmosphere and life styles of times gone by” (see American Art Since 1900, rev. ed. [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975], p. 75).Google Scholar

14. Richards, , “Information Concerning the Murals of Thomas Hart Benton in the Indiana Building at A Century of Progress,”Google Scholar AAA microfilm roll 1732, frame 47.

15. Hibben wrote the introductory caption, reprinted as the “Dedication” in Chamber's Indiana. Chambers wrote the captions beneath each mural panel, reprinted throughout his book.

16. Chambers, , Indiana, p. 44Google Scholar. The small panel of the black construction worker and bank is now missing.

17. Chambers, , Indiana, p. 45Google Scholar. The small panel of McNutt and the chemist is now missing.

18. Benton, letter to Lieber, , 02 3, 1933Google Scholar, AAA microfilm roll 1732, frames 14–15.

19. Teegen, Otto, “Painting the Exposition Buildings,” Architectural Record 73, no. 5 (05 1933): 366.Google Scholar

20. See “Inaugural Address of President Roosevelt,” in Lapp, John A., The First Chapter of the New Deal (Chicago: John A. Prescott and Son, 1933), p. 433Google Scholar; and Leuchtenburg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–40 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 41–55.Google Scholar

21. Blake, I. George, “Depression Governor,” in The Hoosier State, Readings in Indiana History, The Modern Era, ed. Gray, Ralph D. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdman's, 1980), p. 322.Google Scholar

22. Sign noted in Leuchtenburg, , Franklin D. Roosevelt, p. 47.Google Scholar

23. Noble, , End of American History, p. 55Google Scholar; and Beard, , The Future Comes (New York: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 161, 163–64.Google Scholar

24. Roosevelt quoted in Winslow, Susan, Brother Can You Spare a Dime? America From the Wall Street Crash to Pearl Harbor: An Illustrated Documentary (New York: Paddington, 1979), p. 55Google Scholar. Freidel, Frank (“Election of 1932,” History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971], vol. 3, p. 2738)Google Scholar notes that “those of higher social and economic status consistently tended to vote more heavily Republican” in the 1932 election. See also Beard, , The Future Comes, p. 168.Google Scholar

25. Wallace Richards apparently posed for the figure of Debs, as noted in “Names of Indiana People Who Posed for Figures in the Benton Historical Mural,” AAA microfilm roll 1732, frame 54. On this panel, see also “Benton Taps Heart of America in Monumental ‘Indiana Mural’,” Art Digest 7, no. 18 (07 1, 1933): 5, 10.Google Scholar

26. Betten, Neil, “The Klan in Northern Indiana,” in Hoosier State, p. 243Google Scholar; and Madison, James H., The Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 290–91.Google Scholar

27. Benton, , Artist in America, p. 252Google Scholar. According to Benton, Lieber felt the KKK “had no significance” for the history of Indiana and would have preferred a mural focused on loftier state episodes; eventually, however, his “liberalism” triumphed over his “conventionalism” (see Artist in America, p. 253Google Scholar; and “The Thirties,” p. 232).Google Scholar

Benton also described how Lieber acquiesced to the inclusion of the scene of the KKK when “newly elected Democratic politicians” noted how “the Klan business occurred under Republican auspices.” Lieber, who apparently had no political party loyalties, soon became a victim of McNutt's state reorganization and Democratic party partisanship, and resigned from the Department of Conservation in July, 1933. See Artist in America, pp. 253–54Google Scholar; and Madison, James H., Indiana Through Tradition and Change: A History of the Hoosier State and Its People, 1920–1945 (Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana Historical Society, 1982), pp. 96, 339Google Scholar.

For more on reaction to the KKK scene, see Gardner, Virginia, “Indiana's Art Stirs Conflict at World Fair,” Chicago Tribune, 06 8, 1933Google Scholar, cited in Adams, , Thomas Hart Benton, p. 348Google Scholar. Controversy over the presence of the KKK in the mural erupted again in 1988–89 on the campus of Indiana University, with some students demanding that the mural be removed. Instead, plaques were added to the panel to explain Benton's choice of the subject.

28. Richards, , “Information Concerning the Murals of Thomas Hart Benton,”Google Scholar AAA microfilm roll 1732, frame 51.

29. Written comments from Indiana Pavilion visitors can be found in AAA microfilm roll 1732, frames 61–65.

30. Richards, letter to Lieber, , 08 18, 1933Google Scholar, AAA microfilm roll 1732, frame 24.

31. Benton, , Artist in America, p. 254.Google Scholar

32. Benton, , “The Thirties,” p. 232Google Scholar. On Benton's Missouri mural, see Baigell, Matthew and Kaufman, Allen, “The Missouri Murals: Another Look at Benton,” Art Journal 36, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 314–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Benton's disillusion with the New Deal, see Doss, Erika, “The Year of Peril: Thomas Hart Benton and World War II,” in Thomas Hart Benton, Artist, Writer, and Intellectual, pp. 35–63Google Scholar; and Doss, , “The Art of Cultural Politics: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Cold War, ed. May, Lary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 195–220Google Scholar. On Beard's disillusion with the New Deal, see Noble, , End of American History, pp. 60–64.Google Scholar