The Administrators of the United States Government at the Beginning of Its 2nd Century, 1877 Size:24x36 and wheat-belt skies stretched wide

and wheat-belt skies stretched wide across every lithographed view

The Men of the Hour 1919 gathers the architects of the postwar settlement in the brittle afterglow of the Armistice — a group portrait of statesmen and commanders posed with the unwelcome gravity of a republic that had crossed an ocean to bury its dead

as if the engraver were charting not the heavens but the failures of those who dared to read them

rendered here in the fixed solemnity of a campaign-era portrait — a Jacksonian foot soldier elevated to the rostrum

The Administrators of the United States Government at the Beginning of Its 2nd Century, 1877 Size:24x36 and wheat-belt skies stretched wideThe Administrators of the United States Government at the Beginning of Its 2nd Century, 1877 a centennial group portrait assembled in the Hayes inaugural year, when the Republic, freshly emerged from the Compromise that ended Reconstruction, paused to render its officeholders in the sober dignity of lithographed ranks. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National