The Great Society: 100 Faces of Idabel Oklahoma

Kodak slide carousel
The Creation of a Great Society by Harold Stevenson

How to make the slide projector work

It took several trips around town to find all the necessary equipment to view the slides created that day, June 7, 1967. By 2019, more than fifty years had passed since anyone had looked at them. Kodak slide carousels were hard to come by. Once we found one, figuring out how to make the projector work was akin to a teenager trying to figure out how to use a rotary dial phone. We finally got the antiquated equipment up and running. The slides held the secret to Harold Stevenson creating The Great Society.

The Creation of a Great Society

President Lyndon Johnson was full into his term (1963 – 1969). He spoke of the Great Society. He encouraged legislation tackling illiteracy, unemployment, racial discrimination, and lack of health care. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “His wide-reaching achievements improved the lives of millions of Americans and contributed to economic growth and prosperity.”

Living abroad in Paris France did not damper Harold Stevenson’s interest in American politics. He was particularly engrossed with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s thoughts related to programs that addressed health care, education, racism, and civil rights. “Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome” (Elving 2018). Johnson argued that accomplishing these important programs would create a Great Society.

Stevenson knew where the Great Society already lived – his hometown, Idabel Oklahoma. The everyday people, the backbone of American society, were his friends and family members. He knew the hardship and poverty and discrimination. “Through the enormous work we understand clearly the psychology of Stevenson and, indeed, the psychological trait he shares with the American people as a whole, like his countrymen – it is a nation of runaways and exiles, of immigrants…he wanted to record what was passing, literally dying, and which obsessed his memory and which he, as an artist, alone could make live. Some of the subjects of the paintings have already died. They survide solely in Stevenson’s work” (Rader, 1973).

By 1967, Stevenson left Paris France and returned to Idabel with inspiration for Our Great Society:100 Faces of Idabel. LIFE magazine captured the faces of Idabel that were soon whisked to Paris France for exhibition. As Stevenson traveled the globe with his exhibitions, he opened the door for locals to travel with him. They read about him in Time and Life.

“We all talked for months and I guess years about the people across the ocean seeing the likes of us. Did they look any different, or were the people from different countries basically the same? I know as I viewed and really studied each of these portraits, I would see emotions of many kinds in the faces…the lined face of an old farmer who had been in the fields most of his life. He could paint their lives into every brush stroke and their feelings shone through their eyes and almost jumped out of the canvas. He titled his work The Great Society of Idabel OK” (Norwood 2015).

Indeed, the people of Idabel were runaways and exiles.

Sharecropping was another form of slavery

“The saying, ‘sharecropping was another form of slavery,’ was an actual experience by the family of Ressie Roberta Harris Chatman during her life on the Hawkins Plantation in Little River County (Foreman), Arkansas where she was born in 1923. By five-years-of-age, she was a cotton picker. This miserable existence may have been the motivation for her marriage at age 16 to young man from the neighboring plantation. Like all of the Black sharecroppers in the South, no matter how much cotton they produced, they found themselves allegedly deeper in debt. The decision was made to slip away one night under the light of a full moon and go to Oklahoma. Fear, sadness, and apprehension engulfed them. Every external sound was cause for concern and heightened their anxiety. They finally crossed into McCurtain County, Oklahoma. Their fear gave way to hopeful anticipation. They could at last breathe again.

Roberta heard that a white couple named Harold and Mary Stevenson was selling land on the far west side of Idabel to Blacks. The area was called the Stevenson Addition. Roberta bought eight lots on January 27, 1947 for one dollar. She passed away in 2001 never regretting having left the plantation in Arkansas” (Burris and Chatman. 2020).

Twenty years later, equality was still hard to find. Robert Kennedy was poised for a presidential campaign of social justice “Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance” (Elving 2018).

Robertha Chatman’s warranty deed for land sold to her in 1947, Idabel, Oklahoma.

Harold read the newspapers and the reports of Johnson’s efforts to achieve the Great Society for America.

“I know those people. The Great Society lives in Idabel Oklahoma. I will paint them.”

And with that inspiration, he brought his neighbors, friends, and community members to his ranch studio. Over the next several months, exactly 100 friends and neighbors found their way to the Ranch Studio. Harold Stevenson began to paint their portraits and listen to their stories.

Painting 100 Portraits

Harold Stevenson spray painting the base layer for The Great Society: 100 Faces of Idabel. I have never seen photographs of Harold painting left-handed before.
After spray painting, Harold Stevenson filled in the portrait with a wide paint brush. Again, using his left hand.
Harold Stevenson Great Society drinking coffee
Not quite finished, but almost there. Harold sips a cup of coffee and contemplates his next step.

As people sat for their portrait, they often visited with Harold concerning their connection to him.

One hundred faces were local folks from all ages, races and walks of life. He painted cowboys and cowgirls, old slaves and new babies, bankers, merchants, farmers, and veterans. The paintings represented community – the rural community of his hometown and the people that made it what it was. Stevenson called the good people of Idabel The Great Society.

Famous LIFE photographer visits

LIFE magazine photographer, Ralph Crane, visits Priscilla Lewis, Jo Miesch, and Helen Mann for a feature photography essay on Harold Stevenson. LIFE magazine was a premier publication of the times. Unfortunately, a passenger ship sank, with lives lost. The tragedy took the headlines, and Harold’s Great Society was never printed.

The Red River Ferry Operator

The oldest person, over the age 100 at the time of the portrait, was born to a slave and shared with Harold the story of when his grandfather came to be in their home. It was during the early 20th century. She and her husband operated the Red River ferry crossing barge south of Idabel.

“She told the story as if it happened yesterday, instead of forty years earlier,” Harold recalled.

Red River ferry operator

One stormy night, the river rose. Doc Stevenson, Harold’s grandfather, a country doctor, attempted to reach an ill patient across the state line. Doc and his buggy driver found the swollen river had become impassable. The ferry hosts graciously invited the pair to spend the night in their humble abode and wait for the river to recede.

White community members did not commonly spend the night as guests in a Black family’s home. Blacks, as well as Choctaw Indians, were friends of the Stevenson family, despite Jim Crow laws that pervaded the era. Separate but equal was the rule of the day.

“Buses: All passenger stations…shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races”

Race Relations in a Small Town

Harold’s grandfather came from the Deep South. Doc Stevenson was born in 1862 in Rutledge (Crenshaw County) Alabama. Harold tells us through oral history that his grandfather remembers as a very young child, riding on his mother’s horse as she served as a midwife during the Civil War (1861 – 1865) and reconstruction years.

Doc Stevenson’s vocation as a country veterinarian and doctor to all whom needed aid must have come naturally from watching his mother help women in need.  Women’s nursing education was less formalized at the time. During this period, Clara Barton served in the war. Later on, working with Frederick Douglass, she founded the American Red Cross. In the first half of the 20th century, it was not unusual for a rural country doctor, such as Doc Stevenson, to perform life saving surgeries without a formal medical degree. One of Harold’s portrait sitters recalled the time his grandfather “sewed my guts back in after a knife fight.”

Today, we have shared a small glimpse into The Great Society by Harold Stevenson.

More news and events on The Great Society

https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/calendar/2020-05/first-virtual-live-members-only-event – May 13, 2020. Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, Princeton University Art Museum. Call in to join the Zoom. You must register as an online member (free to join) for this free event.

The beginnings of LBJ “raised in one of the country’s most desperately poor and isolated areas” from Robert Caro books – https://www.robertcaro.com/the-books/the-path-to-power/.

Ken Burns will soon tell us more. LBJ & the Great Society, a film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick.

The Great Society, playing Oct 1 – 26, Vivian Beaumont Theater Tony Award & Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan’s The Great Society currently on Broadway. The drama celebrates Lyndon B. Johnson’s legacy: The Great Society. “It was an era that would define history forever: the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the destruction of Vietnam, and the creation of some of the greatest social programs America has ever known.”

Invaluable Auction: Oct 3 – Lot 4260: Harold Stevenson (American, 1929-2018) Abstract Figure Oil on canvas: 30 x 25 in.

Harold Stevenson’s The Great Society, October 4, 2019 – December 29, 2019. Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, OK 73019. OVAC published a review: Face Maze: Harold Stevenson’s The Great Society, pages 4-6 below.

Face Maze: Harold Stevenson’s The Great Society

Art in Community: The Harold Stevenson Collections, March 10 – June 7, 2020. Now extended through August 23, 2020. Museum of the Red River, Idabel OK 74745.

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