For many, he’s to Ann Arbor what Toulouse Lautrec is to Pigalle, what Al Hirschfeld is to Sardi’s, or what Norman Rockwell is to romanticized Americana.
His renderings–signature views of State St. and the Michigan Central Depot, among countless others–thread the fabric of this town like Ann Arborites you only know by sight. His pictures are so much a part of how Ann Arbor remembers itself that those who’ve lived here long enough might be excused for taking them for granted.
But like the unassuming uncle you’re startled to learn was a bartender at Studio 54, there’s so much more to Milt Kemnitz than his paintings. To peel back the layers of his life is to be continually astonished at the diversity–and historical significance–of his work. His is a Zelig-like tale in which famous names crop up with textbook regularity.
Kemnitz was involved in the earliest days of union organizing, sharing a house with UAW founders during the union’s creation. In the earliest rumblings of the Red Scare, he was fired from his job as a Washtenaw County social worker. And, decades before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he played a central role in the movement for racial equality.
Kemnitz was an activist by nature and by profession. In later years, while literally painting the town, he fought to protect not just people but spaces, both open and built–a beloved Ann Arbor of elm-lined streets and Victorian gables that by the mid-twentieth century had become increasingly endangered.
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Milton N. Kemnitz, who died in 2005 at age ninety-three, was born in Detroit in 1911. His mother, Amanda, a first-generation German American, was the daughter of Ann Arbor pastor G.A. Neumann. His father, William, a Detroit lawyer, emigrated from Germany as a toddler. One of three siblings (his brother Walt was also locally famous, as sub-postmaster of the Nickels Arcade post office), Milt grew up in German-speaking affluence.
When WWI broke out, young Milt didn’t speak English, and one of the painter’s first brushes with social intolerance was the era’s harassment of German Americans. You might think this had everything to do with his lifelong war on bigotry, but his son Tom Kemnitz, a historian and publisher who now lives in New York state, says that while his father’s anti-German schoolyard drubbings left a crucial impression, there was much more to it than that.
“The Kemnitz family,” explains Tom, “came from a German pacifist Christian tradition where pacifism, socialism, and Christianity were all part of an extremely strong mix of Lutheranism that really goes all the way pretty directly back to Martin Luther.”
Pacifism is a major theme. Family lore has it that Milt’s widowed grandmother left Germany for America solely to keep her triplet sons’ godfather, Kaiser Wilhelm, from whisking them off to military school. Decades later in Detroit, Milt’s childhood family minister would be theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a famous proponent of social justice who profoundly influenced civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
In 1930, having graduated from Detroit’s Northwestern High School and spent a year at Elmhurst College, Milt transferred to the University of Michigan, living with his family in a farmhouse on Plymouth Rd. His ties to the community were already deep. “You know that big stone church near the library?” asks Tom of the Bethlehem United Church of Christ on Fourth Ave. “Much of that was built by his grandfather.”
Milt’s union organizing began in 1933, when, straight out of college, he was hired as a social worker for Washtenaw County. He and Henry Meyer (later a U-M professor of social work) rallied recipients to form a union to protect their dignity against what was then a dehumanizing process of applying for and receiving aid–and lost their jobs as a result. “They sued and won and were reinstated, but by that time my father had already gone to the Flint sit-down strike and played a part in the founding of the UAW.”
His unionization efforts grew as his focus shifted to the Detroit auto industry. Jimmy Hoffa tried to recruit him to organize for the Teamsters, but, Tom says, “He didn’t like Jimmy Hoffa and his goons … He was very much a pacifist. He did not like aggression.”
By the late 1930s, Milt had become active in the Detroit-based Conference for the Protection of Civil Rights, serving as executive secretary as it blossomed into the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties (NFCL).
“It was very deliberately called the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties,” says Tom, a U-M history grad who later took his doctorate in nineteenth century British literature from the University of Sussex. “That’s what they were about. They were about the Constitution.”
It was during this time, in a cottage overlooking Barton Pond, that Milt married his soul mate and champion, Esther (“Eddie”) Lichtenstein, a marriage that would last more than sixty years. In 1941, the NFCL drew the couple to Washington, D.C., where Tom was born; a daughter, Martha, followed after the family returned to Ann Arbor.
In early 1942, at the outset of U.S. involvement in WWII, the NFCL split over support of the war, a dilemma which pitted Milt’s innate pacifism against his hatred of fascism. His opposition to fascism won out, but the ongoing discord caused Milt to relocate the NFCL that year to New York City.
Eligible for the draft and willing to be shot at, but not to kill anyone, Milt avoided conscription by signing up with the Merchant Marines, which took him to the European war zone. There he organized the seamen into the National Maritime Union and was elected delegate to the 1945 union convention by his ship.
The union provided various skill-building workshops, including art, and it was there that Milt honed his as-yet-untapped talent as an artist. More than skills, the workshops built for him a creative epiphany. By the end of WWII, Milt knew he wanted to do art full time. He also knew he wanted to be back in Ann Arbor, the leafy college town he always considered home.
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Kemnitz was now in his mid-thirties and determined to launch a career in painting. One question remained: How?
“A good buddy of my father’s was [the writer] Dashiell Hammett,” Tom recalls, “and Dashiell Hammett and my father went to talk to Ben Shahn, who was the great artist of the American left in the thirties and forties–in fact one of the great American artists of the twentieth century–and the three of them game-planned how my father was going to make a living as an artist.”
It was the late 1940s. The Red Scare was fully aflame. Aware that the country’s postwar mood was against him and blacklisted from any work involving government money–which ruled out teaching or social work–he moved back to Ann Arbor and took a job at Saunders frame shop in Nickels Arcade.
Though he’d left the union movement, he hadn’t given up on activism. His move back to Ann Arbor, says Tom, unfolded during a period when he was meeting with legendary actor, singer, and outspoken socialist Paul Robeson brainstorming possible alternatives to the NAACP, which they felt had become too tame. (Robeson went on to found the American Crusade Against Lynching.)
Tom Kemnitz’s fond, commemorative booklet on the life of his father details how, in the eyes of the U.S. government at least, the painter was painted red.
As former NFCL secretary, Milt was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. NFCL chairman George Marshall would bravely step forward and take the fall on behalf of the organization, claiming constitutional protection and being summarily shipped off to jail for contempt of Congress (the fate of anyone invoking the First or Fifth Amendments during these proceedings). And when Milt returned to Ann Arbor from the hearings, his job at Saunders had vanished. He’d been replaced, according to Tom Kemnitz, at the behest of “a couple of well-dressed men representing the government,” an intimidation that Milt never blamed the small shop for submitting to.
“Basically,” recalls Tom, who remembers being taken out of school to watch the McCarthy hearings on TV, “when I was growing up, all kinds of people, like Will Gear [the actor and social activist best known for his portrayal of “Grandpa” in the 1970s TV show The Waltons] or [physicist J. Robert] Oppenheimer or [movie producer] Norman Cohen, when they came through Ann Arbor, they came to our house.
“I can remember people at dinner saying, ‘If that’s what [red-baiting Wisconsin senator] Joe McCarthy calls a communist, then I am for sure a communist.’ … A number of these people were blacklisted. And some of these people were communists; there was no question about it. It wasn’t just that they were being called communists; some were members of the Communist Party. And whatever they believed, there’s the First Amendment, which protects that sort of thing. And that’s what mattered to my father, not what the doctrines were, but the right to believe, the right to have convictions, the right to say them.
“And you know, everything he stood for the country has come to understand, and everything he stood against the country has come to more or less apologize for. Sometimes very explicitly. He was against the internment camps in WWII. He was against the suppression of labor rights in WWII. He was against Jim Crow in WWII.”
Much that Milt fought for became the law of the land in 1964, when the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination. Tom recalls that his father welcomed its passage with quiet satisfaction.
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Milt found commissions as a sign painter and artist, many of them from Ann Arbor merchants. Milt Rochman, former owner of the venerable Sam’s clothing store recalls the time his wife gave him a Kemnitz painting of Sam’s. After seeing it, he contacted Milt about doing something to brighten up the alley behind the store. Milt responded with an enormous copy of a Rembrandt self-portrait. “He painted it on 4×8 sheets of plywood and fastened it on the wall,” recalls Rochman–where it stayed for many years until it was damaged in an arson fire.
Retired engineer Dave Brooks,who met Milt during their regular morning visits to the YMCA pool, commissioned a drawing of the Coast Guard icebreaker Mackinaw. Weeks went by without a word, until one morning at the Y Milt invited Dave and his wife to his house–an ultramodern structure he and Eddie had built on Bird Rd.
There, propped against the furniture, were picture after picture of the Mackinaw. When Dave happened to choose the one Eddie had already reserved for greeting cards and stationery, Milt, ever the diplomat, created another version of the picture especially for Dave.
“He was just a wonderful guy,” Brooks recalls. “Just the nicest person you could imagine.” So nice, in fact, that the job of holding everything together fell to Eddie. “She was a little tougher and ornerier,” Brooks remembers, “and she kept Milt organized and kept meticulous track of his artwork and how much it got sold for.”
Although his subjects varied widely, from Wolverine game balls to ships on the Great Lakes to the last of the steam locomotives to classic cars, many reflected his political passions. In response to the DDT threat publicized by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, he did many paintings of birds. And his passion for protecting the rights of individuals flowed into documenting and protecting historic places.
“For him,” remembers Tom, “the Ann Arbor of human dimension was extremely important–the idea that buildings didn’t tower over people. Ann Arbor was a people-friendly environment to him, and that meant a great deal.”
Protecting venerable structures like the Michigan Central Depot (now the Gandy Dancer) and the Huron St. firehouse (now the Hands-On Museum) was his most constant mission, and they remain his best-known images. “Painting after painting was a protest about it,” says Tom. “He cared about each building. He had an eye for looking at these buildings and seeing the joy and the humanity in them and wanting to save them.”
He used a variety of media–watercolor, oil, pen and ink, silkscreen, collage and stained glass. He designed the commemorative silver bar for Ann Arbor’s 1974 sesquicentennial. He published several books, one of them devoted to early automobiles. His work was reproduced on shopping bags, calendars, greeting cards, and periodicals, including half a dozen Observer covers.
After Eddie died in 2000, Milt, nearing ninety, left town to live with Tom and his family. But he sorely missed his town. “He loved Ann Arbor,” says Tom. “The tragedy of his life was that he finally had to move to New York and a safe and caring home.”
Tom Kemnitz notes his father’s displeasure with the political atmosphere in the years just before his death, recalling a speech Milt gave at a conference in Washington D.C. in 1942. “One of the things he got up and said was that the current atmosphere of threat is being used by the government to abridge civil liberties. That was the same thing he saw again after 9/11 and the rush to pass the Patriot Act.”
And today? “He would be appalled by this whole trend to empower the rich over individuals, this whole business the Supreme Court is involved with, where you can now give any amount of money at all to [political campaigns]. It would appall him that people aren’t out protesting against the abridgement of the rights of women, the abridgment of the rights of minorities to vote–the things that are happening state by state–he’d be very unhappy that people aren’t protesting this more.”
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from February 2015 Calls & Letters:
Inspiring Milt Kemnitz
To the Observer:
Greg Dobrin’s resurrection of the image of Milt Kemnitz was a welcome surprise. I wish I’d known all of that background when I first met Milt in 1957. He was painting on vehicles at Ashley Auto Service and learned that George, one of the owners, and I were getting married and we’d rented an apartment in Judge Breakey’s stately mansion on Packard. Milt kindly went to Ypsilanti, sketched the property, made two India-ink-on-rice paper drawings for us for a wedding present.
I was so impressed, I said to Milt, “they’re threatening to tear down those interesting old buildings on Ann Street. I wish you’d capture them before they do.” Milt went on to capture countless [examples of] old architecture on campus and off–buildings that would be forgotten without his talent. He was a terrific guy.
Years later, he did me another kindness. My son was selling fish worms at our farm on North Territorial. I tried to commission Milt to paint a winning sign for him. He did, but wouldn’t accept payment. It sold my 10-year-old a lot of worms …
Sincerely,
Alice Bingner
