Since Congress first convened in 1789, petitions had been the primary means by which people—individual citizens, municipal governments, interest groups, to name a few—lobbied Congress for assistance on a particular topic. Traditionally, petitions arrived as letters and advocated for any number of issues. Some, like 19th-century petitions calling on Congress to abolish slavery, were issues of national importance. Others, like petitions asking for federal help dredging harbors, were regional or local concerns. In 1844, for instance, Congress received a petition signed by the citizens of Springfield, Illinois, including a lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, asking Congress to build a new road to serve its growing population.
What made the 1951 petition unique was that it came in two parts: a letter and a piece of art. It was an offset lithograph of an original painting created to depict the devastation left by a Midwestern flood that year.
Benton, an acclaimed artist whose mural, the Social History of Missouri, adorned the Missouri state capitol, was the son of a former Representative. Benton explained why he sent his grim artwork. “It is not for sale,” he wrote. “It is given to you in the hope that you’ll forget the academics of precedent and get out a new bill which will relieve the human side of this rotting catastrophe.”
And it was a catastrophe. In a letter to Congress, President Harry S. Truman wrote that the flooding that year drove some “two or three hundred persons . . . from their homes.” The devastation included farms, small businesses, and factories dedicated to the defense industry. “There are scenes that are comparable to the bombed urban areas in Europe,” one witness testified before Congress, “and as a matter of fact if you could see one and then the other it would be impossible to distinguish between them.”
Unfortunately for Benton, however, his petition arrived too late. By the time it landed on Capitol Hill, the appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives did not include the federal flood insurance program. A frustrated Benton lamented the decision: “The congress has millions to spend . . . but not one cent for human suffering.”
Benton never petitioned Congress again, but one Representative found a way to keep his lithograph working on behalf of flood victims. Richard Walker Bolling of Missouri gathered discarded petitions and later auctioned them in Kansas City, donating the proceeds to flood survivors. Benton’s original work, Flood Disaster (Homecoming–Kaw Valley), had an afterlife, too. A prominent Kansas City family purchased it, and later exhibited it in Kansas and New York.
In May 1952 Congress approved the appropriations bill with $55 million dollars in aid for flood victims. Eventually, as a result of more flooding and other natural disasters—specifically Hurricane Betsy, which caused damage to Florida and the Gulf Coast in 1965—Congress created a National Flood Insurance Program as part of the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968.
Sources: Letter from Thomas Hart Benton to Congressman, October 13, 1951; Hearings Before the Special Subcommittee on Rehabilitation of Flood Stricken Areas, Rehabilitation of Flood-Stricken Areas, 82nd Cong., 1st sess. (September, 1951); Council Grove Republican (Council Grove), October 18, 1951; Washington Post, October 6, 1967; Henry Adams, “Flood Disaster (Homecoming–Kaw Valley),” Sotheby’s Catalog, May 19, 2011.
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