George Romney's reputation just about outlived him, but it was a close-run thing.
Stories behind the pictures are revealed in Liverpool-based Alex Kidson's major new three-volume study
George Romney, A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings (Yale University Press, PS180).
Throughout his own prolific career Opie has amassed art from the past including 17th and 18th century British portraiture by artists such as Joshua Reynolds and
George Romney, together with Egyptian sculpture from the ancient world.
In July 1969, HUD Secretary
George Romney appointed 43-year-old Woodward Kingman as deputy assistant secretary for mortgage credit at HUD, where he also served as deputy commissioner of the FHA-- and the first president of Ginnie Mae, a position he held until 1974.
Now 76, John has produced a characteristically free-swinging and self-deprecating memoir, Promoting Civil Society Among the Heathen, in which he recounts masterstrokes and misadventures while pushing measures to strengthen neighborhoods, small communities, and voluntary associations through such unlikely vessels as
George Romney, Senator Charles Percy, and Ronald Reagan.
Soon after this photo was taken, AMC president
George Romney (does his name sound familiar?) decided to try to make the company competitive with the other large car manufacturers, and stopped making big Hudsons.
Mitt was born into wealth and privilege in Detroit in 1947, the son of
George Romney, who served as Michigan governor and chairman of American Motors.
His father,
George Romney, was an automobile executive who later ran for president, ultimately losing the Republican nomination to Richard Nixon, and his mother, Lenore Romney, was a stay-at-home mother.
According to the Telegraph, neither had even ever heard of Romney until their grandson-in-law Simon Nash, an amateur genealogist, told them a few weeks ago that they were fourth cousins, after tracing a mutual link going back five generations to
George Romney, who died in 1859 and was born in Dalton-in-Furness.
A Mormon by religion, Romney is the son of
George Romney, chairman of American Motors Corporation (AMC), who also ran for the presidency in 1968.
In the next year, however,
George Romney launched an ambitious program to overwhelm white resistance and integrate the suburbs--not by busing schoolchildren but by forcing suburbs to accept black residents.
Nearly one in five Americans, 18%, say they would not support a Mormon for president -- a sentiment that has been remarkably constant since
George Romney was running for president in 1967.