In 1927, a horrible flood debilitated an enormous swath of land flanking the Mississippi River, reaching from southern Missouri down through Louisiana and into the Delta, causing almost $125 million in damage. Thirteen years later, Life magazine commissioned the Regionalist artist John Steuart Curry to depict a scene in which then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover witnesses and oversees the government’s rescue efforts on the banks of the deluged Mississippi. The magazine reproduced the over five-feet-wide painting on May 6, 1942, as part of its Modern American History series, which had previously punctuated important historical events with illustrations of works by artists such as Reginald Marsh, Doris Lee, and Edward Laning. Curry’s painting, Hoover and the Flood (1940), remained in the artist’s possession for the rest of his life, and was purchased by the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, in 1996. Charles Eldredge’s John Steuart Curry’s “Hoover and the Flood”: Painting Modern History positions the painting within the context of American and European flood imagery, and within Curry’s larger body of natural-disaster imagery, demonstrating that the artist was an ideal choice for Life and the publishing magnate—Henry Luce—at its helm.

Eldredge shows that Hoover and the Flood puts a hopeful spin on misery in large part by way of its Old Master affinities. The author demonstrates, however, that Curry’s rather obvious nods to Rubens and others also suggest a sort of temporal disjunction, one that critics found in much contemporary American realist painting. The critic Edward Alden Jewell wrote that Curry’s fellow American scene painter Jon Corbino was “of our time and not of our time,” a statement that, for Eldredge, comes close to Lawrence Alloway’s assessment of Regionalism as a blending of the universal (“culture time)” and the local (“family time”) (46, 48). The author presents Hoover and the Flood as itself straddling historical epochs. He shows that the stylistic quotations comprised part of Curry’s endeavor “to suggest the enormity of the historical moment” (57) of the 1927 flood. Moreover, the Old Master borrowings coexist with equally obvious references to the musical Show Boat (1927) and the film Green Pastures (1936).

By the time Hoover surveyed the flood, he had picked up the nickname “The Great Humanitarian.” The reputation came mostly from his leadership role in skillfully managing the Committee for Relief in Belgium, a large-scale corrective to the country’s food crisis on the occasion of the German invasion of 1914. The thirteen years between the 1927 Mississippi flood and the production of Curry’s painting saw a waxing, waning, and then re-waxing of Hoover’s popular favor and political reputation. The debacle of Hoover’s presidency (1928–32) is well-known, but Eldredge reminds us that by the time Life magazine approached Curry, Hoover had already started to rehabilitate his reputation following the election of 1932. Hoover did this largely by chairing the Finnish Relief Fund upon the invasion of Poland by Nazi, Russian, and Slovak forces in 1939. Luce sought for the Modern American History series pictures of incidents that “shaped the national character” (8), and the narrative clarity of a scene rehashing Hoover’s earlier glory may well have been just the normative mode Luce desired. Eldredge makes the point that the politically progressive Curry’s retreat to Old Master allusions offset somewhat Luce’s conservative, pro-big business slant on American history past and present.

As with Hurricane Katrina, the roster of fatalities (246 total) in the 1927 flood disaster contained an inordinate number of lower-income African Americans. One of the most perplexing aspects of Hoover and the Flood is race, a subject that Eldredge deals with thoughtfully and insightfully. Curry was one of the first artists of his generation to forego racial and ethnic stereotyping, and the Hoover painting is, to a point, in keeping with his earlier anti-lynching imagery and other consciousness-raising themes. Eldredge is surely correct in asserting that Curry “probably did not intend racial stereotyping” (62), but a disturbing ambivalence haunts the picture nonetheless. There is no denying that Curry had “early evinced solidarity with the cause of racial equality” (62), but, as the author observes, the figure running with the dog certainly recalls racially vexed nineteenth-century American genre painting—to say nothing of the crowned black youth with exaggerated grin slightly to the left and above him, as well as the man at center gesturing to the heavens.

On the one hand Curry’s painting casts Hoover as the “‘wise and helpful’ savior of the Delta” (65). On account of his flood relief work, the former president earned praise from substantial black constituencies, with some even dubbing him “‘Uncle Sam’ Hoover” (63). Eldredge demonstrates, however, that Curry has Hoover engaging the Delta from a safe distance at which he would not get his fingernails dirty. Some of the most intriguing (and disconcerting) passages in this book recount Hoover quelling the Red Cross Colored Advisory Commission’s report in late 1927, which had called for improvements to the deplorable conditions of those living in the makeshift Red Cross tents dotting the river valley. It may be here that Curry’s progressivism—his not being complicit with, and even poking fun at, Hoover—is most apparent. Depicting Hoover at the very moment (1940) in which he is reaching for greater political clout and more favorable public appeal, Curry is careful to document the earlier efforts to make the relief scene newsreel-ready—note the camera at far right. As Eldredge observes, the film footage appeared as a Red Cross newsreel appeal on 17,000 movie screens across the nation, helping Hoover secure the Republican presidential nomination. So busily was Hoover playing the part of “Great Humanitarian” that in 1927, when he was in the South overseeing flood relief efforts, a cartoon could lampoon him and his rampant publicity machine—which included hyperbolic radio broadcasts and carefully staged photographs—within a “parade of Hoovers.” Eldredge may be at his descriptive best when he delves into the realm of metaphor, discussing “the flood of Hoovers” (56) on their way to save the day for region and nation alike.

In the book’s preface, Eldredge admits that upon receiving the commission to write this volume he abandoned his initial temptation to interpret the 1927 flood alongside the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. “John Steuart Curry painted the suffering of 1927 more than a decade after the fact.” He continues: “Can artists depict Katrina’s suffering? Who? And how? And when?” (xvi) In reckoning with the representation of trauma, and with the painted memory of private and public loss, Eldredge, unwittingly or intentionally, has invoked a problem that has long concerned artists and their critics. John Steuart Curry’s “Hoover and the Flood”: Painting Modern History indeed reveals the vexing complexity of modern history painting.

Some readers may wish that Eldredge had delved more deeply into this or that related topic within Curry’s oeuvre and within Regionalism and American scene painting in general. The unrelenting focus on Hoover and the Flood, however, helps readers understand with sharp clarity the stylistic tropes, thematic sources, and cults of personality informing this epic painting. Not unlike Kristin Schwain’s similarly slim volume, Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), Curry’s book maintains a refreshingly precise, clear focus on its subject. Although Eldredge contextually grounds his subject, his approach is not burdened by attempts to make the artist or artwork examples of some monumentally national narrative. Part of Eldredge’s accomplishment, in fact, is his deheroicizing of modern history, an approach that seems particularly honest and appropriate in the case of this painting. Nor does the volume take unnecessary steps to place Curry on a par with Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton (as if the study of Curry would be thus validated).

Eldredge’s book nonetheless joins the important Curry exhibition catalogue by Patricia Junker (John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West, Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 1998) in establishing Curry’s critical place among twentieth-century American artists. The book has still more in common with M. Sue Kendall’s masterful Rethinking Regionalism: John Steuart Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), which, its deep contextualizing notwithstanding, also maintains a singular focus. Kendall’s and Eldredge’s respective studies suggest that Curry is best understood and appreciated by way of the thick analysis afforded by close investigation of selected projects. John Steuart Curry’s “Hoover and the Flood”: Painting Modern History thus does more than refocus attention on an artist who is often the overlooked middle child of the Benton-Curry-Wood triumvirate. Rather, far from seeking to rescue or redeem Curry, Eldredge casts clarifying light on a painfully relevant intersection of art, media, and natural disaster.