George Lincoln Rockwell was a nazi. Norman Rockwell was a painter. They didn't have much in common at all, but people can't seem to stop mixing them up.Sources:https://library.washu.edu/news/norman-rockwell-and-race-complicating-rockwells-legacy/ https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal66-1301767 https://www.nytimes.com/1966/10/06/archives/us-aide-attacks-bill-to-curb-riots-doar-in-house-testimony-doubts.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/spy-or-nazi-20120331-1w52i.html Berger, Alan L. Review of American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party, and: Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 17 no. 1, 2003, p. 180-185Gallagher, V., & Zagacki, K. S. (2005). Visibility and Rhetoric: The Power of Visual Images in Norman Rockwell’s Depictions of Civil Rights. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 91(2), 175–200.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years.
Until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
America, y'all better wake the hell up.
Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
Listen to Graves County on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
For my heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the turning river road.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
But in 2014, the youngest escaped.
Listen to the Turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Short on time, but big on true crime.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Hunting for Answers, I highlighted the story of 19-year-old Lache Dungy.
But she never knocked on that door.
She never made it inside.
And that text message would be the last time anyone would ever hear from her.
Listen to Hunting for Answers from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On this podcast, Incels, we unpack an emerging mindset.
I am a loser.
It's also a woman damn the author.
A hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women at a deadly tipping point.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
The day in which I will have my revenge.
This is Incels.
Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media.
Hey there, Molly here.
I wanted to take a second to talk about a different Rockwell.
We've been talking in circles for weeks now about George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party.
But there are some other famous Rockwells.
His own father, George Lovejoy Rockwell, was a pretty famous vaudeville performer.
But it isn't Doc Rockwell I want to talk about.
There is another Rockwell who, like the Nazi we've been talking about, is most famously pictured with a pipe in his mouth.
Another Rockwell who lived in a city called Arlington in his 40s.
Another Rockwell who came out swinging in the 1960s 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 boss in Rhode Island.
About 4,000 pages into that 8,000-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 1965.
The memo was to notify Hoover that a patriarchal 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 2021, I was covering a trial in the civil lawsuit of Signs v.
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 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.
But 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 attorneys 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 courtroom.
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 2021, 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 2021 that an FBI agent made in that memo in 1965.
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 1960s 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-name 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 were 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 1964, the head 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 1966, 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 1966, 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 Australian citizen who'd overstayed a tourist visa.
Before authorities in the U.S. 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.
Wenberg was eventually sent home to Australia, and in 1972, 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.
It's what I've been told, and that to have truth is a whole lie.
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder.
We know.
A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.
Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
My name is Maggie Freeling.
I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.
They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.
They made me say that I poured gas on her.
From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.
America, y'all better work the hell up.
Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
From the studio who brought you the Pikedon Massacre and Murder 101, this is Incels.
I am a loser.
It's also a woman.
I wouldn't pay me either.
From the dark corners of the web, an emerging mindset.
If I can't have you, girls, I will destroy you.
A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women.
A seed of loneliness explodes.
I just hate myself.
I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.
At a deadly tipping point.
Incels will be added to the terrorism guide.
Police say a driver intentionally drove into a crowd, killing 10 people.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
I will have my revenge.
This is Incels.
Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
For my heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the turning River Road.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
Why did I think that way?
Why did I allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and thinking to the point that if I died for him, that would be the greatest honor?
But in 2014, the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt.
For all those years, you know, he was the predator and I was the prey.
And then he became the prey.
Listen to the turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.
Someone was posting photos.
It was just me naked.
Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own.
I wanted to throw up.
I wanted to scream.
It happened in Leavertown, New York.
But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deep fake pornography.
This should be a legal book.
What is this?
This is a story about technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide.
I'm Margie Murphy and I'm Olivia Carvel.
This is Levitt Town, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.
Listen to Levitown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast.
Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Now you might be wondering, are these two men related?
They're not.
I did find one completely unsubstantiated claim published in 2003 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 Simonelli'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 Nazi's 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 American 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 1943.
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 blonde white woman at the soda counter, a white couple at the courthouse getting a marriage license, Boy Scouts, soldiers, the iconic image of Rosie the Riveter.
Classic mid-20th 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 47 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 1960s, 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 1960s, Norman Rockwell painted for Look magazine.
And it was for Look that he created some of his most moving paintings.
In 1964, 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 crisscrossing 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 kitschy classic illustrations of suburbia.
When his Nazi counterpart was making a mockery of the struggle for equality in Mississippi by sending a stormtrooper 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 1967, 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 Nazis'life.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
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 WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.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.
The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years.
Until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
America, y'all better wake the hell up.
Bad things happen to good people in small towns.
Listen to Graves County on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
For my heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the Turning River Road.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
But in 2014, the youngest escaped.
Listen to The Turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Short on time, but big on true crime.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Hunting for Answers, I highlighted the story of 19-year-old Lache Dungy.
But she never knocked on that door.
She never made it inside.
And that text message would be the last time anyone would ever hear from her.
Listen to Hunting for Answers from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On this podcast, Incels, we unpack an emerging mindset.
I am a loser.
It's also a woman.
I wouldn't pay me either.
A hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women at a deadly tipping point.
