In Washington, D.C., down in the nest of government buildings known as the Federal Triangle, there’s a colossus called the Ariel Rios Building. Nowadays it houses the Environmental Protection Agency, but back in the 1930s, it was used by the postal service.
The 1930s, you’ll remember, were dominated not just by the Depression, but by the various New Deal responses to America’s economic catastrophe. We had the NRA, the CCC, the REA — the whole alphabet soup of federal agencies. Not least among these was the Federal Arts Project of the Work Projects Administration, the relief agency that responded to the poverty of America’s artists by giving each of them a can of paint and telling them to decorate the walls of America’s public buildings.
Most of the result is pretty awful. It’s all dreary depictions of what passed at the time for “social art” — which proves, upon inspection, to be endless scenes of socialist uplift: big-muscled workers and strong-backed farm women, drawn together by the mystical communion of physical labor, surveying a future without bankers or capitalists.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that three-quarters of the most depressing art of Washington was made in the Depression. If you want to see a recently controversial example, you can head down to the Ariel Rios Building and take a look at Dangers of the Mail, a WPA mural splashed across its walls.
Or rather, you used to be able to go down and see Dangers of the Mail. You can’t anymore, because it is on an upper floor reserved for employees. But that is also politically convenient — as well as politically correct — because the Environmental Protection Agency is just too embarrassed to leave it open to public view. Unfortunately, that’s not because it’s one of the eyesores the wise critics of the EPA might decide to abolish, but because it depicts some indigenous Americans (the people formerly known as Indians) as savages who constituted one of the old dangers of delivering the mail.
The act of hiding a mural in a federal building may seem a bit in conflict with the original concept of “public art” as pursued by the New Deal’s Work Projects Administration. But that is not the only contradiction lurking in the background of this story. The debate over the content of such creations resurfaces every few years — always pitched as the dilemma of artistic expression versus multi-cultural sensitivity. In a recent front-page account of the controversy over Dangers of the Mail, the Washington Post referred to the “thorny debate that has dogged public art in the United States for decades — which version of American history should our public buildings tell?”
That leaves open, of course, the question of why our national buildings — many of which are monumentally grand enough to tell something of history all by themselves — need to be decorated in populist comic-book style. One never-mentioned fact about the 1930s, Marxist-inspired mural genre in America is that it was not introduced in response to the just demands of striking workers or protesting farmers, but in response to certain of the very rich anxious to demonstrate their affinity for the latest fads.
The Mexican Marxist muralist Diego Rivera was commissioned to paint one in Detroit in 1932 by none other than Henry Ford’s son Edsel, and many people dimly recall the controversy at Rockefeller Center when Rivera’s gigantic panel executed there turned out to depict V. I. Lenin as the guide to the future.
Curiously, what the Rockefeller Center incident illustrates is that the debate over such art during the 1930s was considerably livelier than it is today. When Dangers of the Mail was first unveiled, its unveiling was doubly provocative, for the artist had depicted European American women unclad while being scalped and otherwise harassed by the aforementioned Indians. “Nude Scalping Mural” was how the Washington Post referred to it then.
For a piece of WPA muralism, Dangers of the Mail is actually pretty good. The painter, a man from Colorado named Frank Albert Mechau, was a leading Western artist in his own right, not merely a Bolshevik dauber paid to produce murals as a form of work-relief. Still, who among the public ever said they desire this kind of decoration of official buildings anyway?
The vast majority of those calling for “public art” back in the 1930s were unemployed Marxist artists, and the vast majority calling for it now are third-rate academics who lecture on the centrality of Marxist art in American culture. (And doesn’t anyone think it was tasteless of the Washington Post to bring up savage indigenous Americans in the middle of the Thanksgiving season?)
WPA art was almost always based on one of a pair of dishonesties: Either it memorialized an official, bland account of American history, or it enshrined the cliches of the People’s Front. You had your happy homesteaders or your starving sharecroppers, your Pilgrims or your paupers — or, worst of all, a mix of the two, which pointed to the lost populist paradise befouled by capitalism.
The public mural movement was seldom, if ever, highly patriotic. Bob Smith — a descendant of the Oneida tribe who works for the EPA — declared that the General Services Administration “talks about the need to understand the mural in context, but how could we do that? . . . Would you put up a big scene from Wounded Knee or Sand Creek?” (which the Washington Post helpfully described for its readers as “two infamous massacres in which hundreds of Indians were killed”).
But that is, in fact, exactly what the classic works of Diego Rivera did: showed two sides of Mexican history. Although I dislike the mural genre intensely, I have to admit even I was impressed, on a recent visit to Mexico City, by Rivera’s famous Bellas Artes panel portraying the central figures of the Mexican epic. Rivera was inclusive: He put brutal conquistadors and violent Indians side by side to express the nature of Mexican identity.
And although the EPA may be unaware of it, the proliferation of pro-Indian, anti-settler art has been so extensive in recent years that murals recalling atrocities against indigenous Americans are now to be found from California to New York.
Indeed, who wants to bet that in a generation there won’t be a mural in Florida depicting a U.S. marshal seizing Elian Gonzalez? Or, in line with the general trend of public muralism, of Al Gore waving a Florida ballot card?
Of course such creations always seem to reflect the leftist view of American history. The Muro-Marxists would doubtless mount picket lines if anyone were to propose a mural of Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall.
The history of Muro-Marxism, especially in more recent times, is replete with anecdotes revelatory of pure lunacy on the part of the genre’s practitioners. When, in the mid-1980s, the waterfront unions of San Francisco commissioned a monument to the participants in the 1934 West Coast maritime strike, even some of the militants in the union leadership were amazed that the work represented strikers of that era, most of whom were Scandinavian sailors and dockworkers, as presumptive Asians of indeterminate sexuality. Neither white nor Black (not even, really, Asian), neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight . . . just . . . mannequins. After all, who would compose a memorial to Nordic males today?
But that is not the only instance in which the competing claims of historical revisionists have made the art and criticism of the mural genre difficult to deal with. As the Washington Post noted, blacks object to virtually all artistic representations of slavery, regardless of the intent.
So, Dangers of the Mail remains hidden down in the Federal Triangle — a victim of the battle between the Left of the 1930s and the Left of today, a symptom of radicalism’s rejection even of its own radical history. Of course, one issue in the controversy remains unspoken: Don’t we all yearn for the days when scalping Indians provided a reasonable explanation for bad service by the U.S. Mail?
Stephen Schwartz’s latest collection of essays, Intellectuals and Assassins, has just been published in Britain.
