Benton, Thomas Hart

Benton, Thomas Hart, American painter

Benton, Thomas Hart, 1889–1975, American regionalist painter, b. Neosho, Mo.; grandnephew of Sen. Thomas Hart Benton and son of Congressman Maecenas E. Benton. In 1906 and 1907 he attended the Art Institute of Chicago and at 19 went to Paris, where he remained five years. On his return to the United States, he designed movie sets, managed an art gallery, and continued to paint. The best-known American muralist of the 1930s and early 40s, he executed murals for the New School of Social Research (later sold) and the Whitney Museum, both in New York City; the Missouri statehouse, Jefferson City, Mo.; and the Postal Service and Dept. of Justice buildings, Washington, D.C. He is noted for his dramatization of American themes. His style is graphic, strong in color, repetitious and insistent in the use of rhythmic line. July Hay (1943) is in the Metropolitan Museum. Benton taught painting at several colleges and art schools.

Bibliography

See his autobiographical An Artist in America (1951, rev. ed. 1968) and An American in Art (1969); K. A. Marling, Tom Benton and His Drawings (1985) and R. D. Hurt and M. K. Dains, ed., Thomas Hart Benton (1989).

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Benton, Thomas Hart, U.S. Senator

Benton, Thomas Hart, 1782–1858, U.S. Senator (1821–51), b. Hillsboro, N.C.

Benton moved to Tennessee in 1809, was admitted to the bar in 1811, and served (1809–11) in the state senate. In 1815, he went to St. Louis, where he became editor of the Missouri Enquirer, established a thriving law practice, and won political prestige. He entered the U.S. Senate on Missouri's admission to the Union in 1821 and was four times reelected. A supporter from 1824 of Andrew Jackson, with whom he had been at odds, Benton was a power in the administrations of Jackson and Martin Van Buren.

He played one of the most prominent parts in the successful war on the Bank of the United States. A rigid "hard money" man (he delighted in the sobriquet "Old Bullion"), Benton had the ratio of silver to gold revised from 15 to 1 to 16 to 1 in 1834 and thus brought gold into circulation again. Congress defeated his resolution requiring that the public lands be paid for in hard money only, but Jackson immediately legalized the idea in an executive order (1836), the famous Specie Circular, which Benton drew up. His currency measures, intended to discourage continued land speculation and thereby encourage actual settlement of the West, were supported by Eastern workers, who wished to be paid in specie rather than in notes of uncertain value.

Benton also supported all legislation that aided settlers and favored the development of the West, including reduction in the price of government lands, suppression of land speculation, westward removal of the Native Americans, and internal improvements. He advocated government support of Western exploration, with which he was intimately connected through the expeditions of John Charles Frémont, who married one of his four daughters, Jessie Benton Frémont. The Oregon country especially interested him, and he protested the joint occupation with Britain. Yet he insisted that the 49th parallel (the line established) was the only boundary the United States could rightfully claim and deplored the Democratic campaign slogan of 1844—"Fifty-four forty or fight." As to Texas, although he had protested the 1819 treaty with Spain as one in which the United States gave up its rights to that region, he could not acquiesce in the intrigues that led to the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War.

Benton had early come to favor the gradual abolition of slavery, and with the ascendancy of the proslavery Democrats he lost influence in the party. His antislavery sentiments ran counter to majority opinion in Missouri at that time, and with his opposition to the proslavery features of the Compromise of 1850 he was defeated for a sixth term. He returned to Congress as a U.S. Representative (1853–55) but after voting against the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 he was again defeated for reelection. In 1856 he was also defeated for the governorship of Missouri. He compiled An Abridgment of the Debates of Congress from 1789 to 1856 (16 vol., 1857–61) and wrote the autobiographical Thirty Years' View (2 vol., 1854–56).

Bibliography

See biographies by T. Roosevelt (1886, repr. 1968), W. N. Chambers (1956, repr. 1970), W. M. Meigs (1904, repr. 1970), and E. B. Smith (1957).

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Benton, Thomas Hart

Thomas Hart Benton, c. 1845–50.

(credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born March 14, 1782, near Hillsborough, N.C., U.S.—died April 10, 1858, Washington, D.C.) U.S. politician. After moving to St. Louis, Mo. (1815), he became editor of the St. Louis Enquirer. Appealing to agrarian and commercial interests, he won election to the U.S. Senate in 1820. He became a crusader for the distribution of public lands to settlers and was soon acknowledged as the chief spokesman in the Senate of the early Democratic Party. His opposition to the extension of slavery into the West cost him his Senate seat in 1851, though he later served in the House of Representatives (1853–55). His grandnephew was the artist Thomas Hart Benton.

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Benton, Thomas Hart

(born April 15, 1889, Neosho, Mo., U.S.—died Jan. 19, 1975, Kansas City, Mo.) U.S. painter and muralist. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he came into contact with Synchromism and Cubism. In 1912 he returned to the U.S. and settled in New York City. Failing in his attempts at Modernism, he set out to travel through the rural heartland, sketching people and places. In the 1930s he painted several notable murals, including America Today (1930–31) at the New School for Social Research. He often transposed biblical and classical stories to rural American settings, as in Susanna and the Elders (1938). His style, which quickly became influential, is characterized by undulating forms, cartoonlike figures, and brilliant colour. He taught at the Art Students League in New York, where Jackson Pollock was his best-known student.

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Benton, Thomas Hart (1782–1858) U.S. senator; born in Hillsboro, N.C. A true son of the frontier, he grew up in Tennessee, where after becoming a lawyer, he served a term in the state senate (1809–11). After serving in the War of 1812—during which he got involved in a brawl with his commander Andrew Jackson—he moved to St. Louis, Mo., where he practiced law and edited the Missouri Enquirer (1818–20). His editorials got him elected to the U.S. Senate where he served 30 years (Dem., Mo.; 1821–51). He opposed the national bank and championed "hard money"—for which he earned the nickname "Old Bullion"—and was a supporter of expansion and the small farmer. A moderate on the slavery issue, he lost popularity with his constituents; denied re-election in 1850, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1853–55), but lost again because of his opposition to slavery. He was such a loyal Democrat that he opposed his own son-in-law, John C. Frémont, when he ran as a Republican for the presidency in 1886.

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Benton, Thomas Hart (1889–1975) painter; born in Neosho, Mo. (grand-nephew of Senator Thomas Hart Benton). Between 1906–12 he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris, but he rejected the European approach to art. Drawing on his extensive travels through much of the midwestern, southern, and western U.S.A., he tried to capture his vision of dynamic democracy with an idiom that was dramatic, rhythmic, and populist, often using bright colors and cartoon-like figures. Other hallmarks include his evocation of American legends and his several murals in public buildings. His work is regarded as creating what was known as the Regionalist style or school, seen in such paintings as Cotton Loading (1928) and Country Dance (1928).