Patriotism and Nationalism: The Face of Consensus: Mid-Twentieth Century and the Image of Jesus
As an image that appealed to both Protestant and Catholic subcultures, Walter Sallman's picture of Jesus, Head of Christ was used to redirect the nineteenth-century crusade to make the United States a Protestant nation toward a twentieth-century campaign to promote the United States as a Christian nation. During World War II, Sallman's picture was distributed as a non-sectarian image of Christ among American servicemen in Europe and Asia through the United Services Organization (USO) by the YMCA and the Salvation Army. The filial piety of Jesus, gazing reverently to heaven and bearing an expression of solemn, self-effacing submission to his father's will, also characterized the proper attitude of self-sacrifice encouraged by the government during the war… Following the war, Sallman's imagery was put to more aggressively exclusivist use. A Lutheran businessman in Indiana undertook a project called “Christ in Every Purse.” His aim was to distribute wallet-sized versions of the Head of Christ as widely as possible. The businessman contrasted the need for “card-carrying Christians” to the threat of “card-carrying Communists.” His campaign continued through the 1950s and into the 1960s as cold war anticommunism gripped America.1 A similar, yet historically ironic development took shape in Oklahoma in the late 1940s and 1950s as Ora O'Riley, a Choctaw Indian and Roman Catholic, led a local campaign to make her hometown of Durant, Oklahoma, the only city in the United States to display a picture of Christ in every home and public building. Whereas nineteenth-century evangelical publications often pictured Protestant missionaries at work among Native American communities, O'Riley returned the favor in the mid-twentieth century as a Roman Catholic and Indian placing Christian images in the public spaces of her town in eastern Oklahoma, where the Choctaw nation had migrated in the late eighteenth century, after a colonial history of alliance with the French and enmity with the British. In 1949 O'Riley persuaded a district judge to hang a copy of Sallman's Head of Christ in his courtroom in Durant. Soon the image was proudly placed in the local municipal court, city hall, the fire department, and the chamber of commerce. In 1962 the city of Durant was pleased to have an autographed copy of Sallman's picture accepted by Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who posed in a publicity photo gazing reverentially at the picture of Jesus (Figure 9).2.
