Fourth of July, 2020, with illegal fireworks outside to set the scene.
“My Administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory. In the face of such acts of destruction, it is our responsibility as Americans to stand strong against this violence, and to peacefully transmit our great national story to future generations through newly commissioned monuments to American heroes.”
Yesterday the President issued an Executive Order on the subject of monuments, statues.
“Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes.”
Of course this is huge dog-whistle.
And yet the monument issue is fascinating and complex in other directions as well, aside from the blatant heart-of-stone racism of some monuments in town squares.
Among civic art projects were murals and various government-funded art projects of the past.
The complexity of what will be excluded from a “national”
“garden” of statues, will inevitably touch on what will be rejected by communities on ideological grounds.
A catchphrase of political correctness will not simplify -perhaps may only amplify- a range of issues involved in political representational art.
Many public murals from the first half of the twentieth century are works described as social realism.
These explicitly convey political messaging, sometimes from a socialist/left perspective, as in the muralism through the thirties;
-some from a conservative post- war perspective, when the country was still in uniform and somewhat united in patriotic feeling from the Second World War.
I clearly remember that time.
Entertainers and many prominent public figures performed in US army uniform on film and tv for at least 15 years after World War Two.
There was quite a lot of flag-waving messaging, understandably so. The post-war era took a while to come to a close and obviously influenced the ambit of the visual arts.
There were, then, conservative values that ran right into the unhinged expression of the sixties. Which belongs to the collective memory? Who gets a statue: Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Stewart? (It’s a Wonderful Life.) Both veterans of the armed services.
(How about John Coltrane? His first recordings were made when he served in the US Navy. 1945 or so.)
I saw idealized imagery of America and a decade of dissent. Visual impact.
My grandfather had a similar experience in his childhood.
The Civil War guys were still around, veterans, playing harmonicas in front of the GAR Hall, influencing the culture for thirty years. And the politics was promulgated.
That’s the era of the Lost Cause, to which the modern electorate rightly objects. My grandfather from Chicago explained it to me when I was a kid. There was post-war propaganda. Lots.
So post-war conservative movements confronted “liberal” or “left” revisions in both eras eventually. Eras of conflict ensued. Or were repressed.
The issue emerged independently, here in San Francisco last fall, 2019, as a sort of sign of the times.
https://www.kalw.org/post/radical-history-murals-george-washington-high-school
Should a mural in a high school remain on display that shows the subjugation of people based on race?
President Trump’s Executive Order is tightly circumscribed and excludes explicitly some expressions of Social Realism from the Left.
No socialism permitted.
Among the heroes allowed in are “opponents of international socialism.”
No surprise there.
But in terms of heritage and preservation and memory, what of the Diego Rivera “school” of muralists of an earlier era, to which this mural belongs?
Of course Franklin Roosevelt, through government programs like the WPA, created the template for a national program of art and memory as a way to put Americans to work to survive the Great Depression.
As a government project back then former slaves were interviewed for a massive oral history. That would have been lost. Talk about national memory.
Native American languages and sound were recorded, too.
Artists were paid to work to teach to produce public arts projects.
Musicians and composers received government commissions.
That was then. This is now. Scraping by through a depression and a global pandemic. And no ideas from the US President at all.
Except for his Garden of Stones.
Decade by decade in the arts intense to and fro movements, progressive and back, conflict in the public mind. And social progress, perhaps not so much.
And adding to this national sense of legitimacy is the artistic legacy of those who immigrated to the US, and yet transformed the “collective memory” of the United States, which Trump claims to care to preserve. How American is that? Very.
The piece in question, a mural of the life of Washington – depicting a body of a Native American and the presence of slaves- not only carries the aesthetic of Left politics- anathema to Trump, an influence of Diego Rivera, but includes symbolic imagery interpreted as white supremist- of which Trump implicitly approves. And the subject, George Washington, certainly the central figure of the Trump executive order.
The controversy surrounding this mural is at the heart of the public sensitivity to images of the past, which is being exploited now by the Trump Administration as an old- fashioned wedge issue in an entirely cynical way.
Some left-leaning murals in San Francisco one hundred years ago had to be protected from destruction for their radical content, when they were completed for Coit Tower.
The artists slept at the entrance to prevent the murals from being defaced.
John Langley Howard was one of them. He lived downstairs from a coworker of mine, on Potrero Hill.
“Following the start of the Depression, Howard found himself appalled by the social conditions and began to follow “his own brand of Marxism.”
Howard and his wife began to attend meetings of the Monterey John Reed Club, discussing politics and social concerns. Soon, the artist became determined to communicate society’s needs for the betterment of the future.
His landscapes began to include industry and its effects to the surrounding region.
In 1934, Howard was hired through the New Deal Public Works Art Project to create a mural for the inside of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco depicting California industry.
The project called for twenty-seven artists to be hired to paint frescos inside the newly erected monument funded by philanthropist Lillie Hitchcock Coit. Each artist was to depict a scene central to California living, including industry, agriculture, law, and street scenes of San Francisco.
Howard’s completed fresco drew notorious attention for showing an unemployed worker reading Marxist materials, a gathered group of unemployed workers, and a man panning for gold while watching a wealthy couple outside of their limousine.”
So the paint wasn’t dry and there was possibility of the art being defaced or removed.
There had always been a deep bedrock native conservatism in San Francisco despite its “loony left” reputation.
https://www.sullivangoss.com/artists/john-langley-howard-1902-1999
The muralist of the controversial George Washington High School piece came to America and today is an influence of our perception of ourselves:
“Victor Arnautoff was born in 1896 in Imperial Russia. He fought in World War 1 and then in the Russian Revolution… for the losing side… All that time he had wanted to be an artist and all the military service had simply delayed his goal.”
Arnautoff escaped as a refugee to China and ended up training soldiers for a local warlord to make money. Lucky for him, he ended up marrying into a wealthy Russian family, which also fled after the revolution. In fact, his father-in-law paid for Arnautoff to come to America and go to art school at what became the San Francisco Art Institute.”
So his mural is now many decades later being seen again by a broad public debating its presentation, its symbols, its message, its value to the community.
Many artists who fled Europe from war-torn regions of conflict influenced the arts, and with a broad political background, while they made American art emblematic, according to American taste.
There were calls to shut it down.
In Hollywood there was the era of the blacklist, the anti-communism of the time- which will eventually emerge as a context for Trump’s garden of statues.
What will be legitimized? What will be banned?
A final word, on heroes.
Some depictions of famous Americans are almost entirely folklore, and should remain so. There never was a question of “believing” Davy Crockett’s exploits were true- he himself inflated his fame through tall tales and exaggeration. Surely a quintessential American hero.
Crockett went to Congress and came to despise Trump’s purported favorite president, Andrew Jackson, from Crockett’s home state.
David Crockett’s frustration with Congress and eventual disgust with the USA set him off to Texas – at that time disputed foreign soil- and the Alamo. He died hating the United States and Andrew Jackson -and you, Donald Trump, by logical extension.
Crockett left the United States to seek his fortune elsewhere.
He’s slated for inclusion in the executive order on American Heroes.
Crockett’s actual experience as a US war veteran included witnessing extreme atrocities, which he recognized at the time and which he disclosed publicly. He was basically an honest man.
His final statement? To hell with the United States.
I guess they’ll have to put that on his statue. Along with “Be sure you’re right-then go ahead!”
Is the Disneyland image that which belongs in Trump’s “memory” garden?
So it will be a dream land.
Will it be like the Chinese terra cotta army commissioned by the emperor?
And when Trump says “we” who is included? Who is excluded?
And will a statue garden be empty that contains so few women? That was the “originalist” version, without question. An Originalist Shrine contains zero women.
Antonin Scalia, the proponent of Originalism, is already in the garden Trump’s order has mandated, by name. Scalia gets a statue.
It’s inartistic but my own image of the Trump Administration comes from Charlottesville: a man in a car steps on the gas, drives into a crowd and then shifts full speed into reverse.
***
A comment on a post by Professor Richardson, Re Elijah Lovejoy and freedom of speech:
My piano teacher of many years is a descendant of Elijah Lovejoy and she told me about him with pride. It’s really not that long ago, 100 years before my generation. My grandfather, born 1883, German heritage, remembered the GAR veterans in Chicago and described his impressions to me. It was during the centennial of the Civil War, a big deal to me as a young history “buff.”( “Buff” implied that history kids were considered kind of crazy- not a serious pursuit.) He also subscribed to the “noble” Lost Cause theory, Chivalry, that was promulgated at the time of his youth, 1880s. I heard that at Grandpa’s knee. He believed it was to reunite the country, despite what what we now know as a concession to the racism that still prevails today. In his case, as a Chicagoan, he admired the Black population and felt their spiritual contribution to the country was foundational and critical and that whites in his generation tended toward hypocrisy, in issues of race. He pointed that out at Sunday dinner to stunned silence at the table. (In the 1960s). My grandmother described how she and her girlfriends wept at a performance by Al Jolson, in black-face, performing in Chicago, 1920s. Louis Armstrong was there in the city, first fame, with King Oliver and early jazz, but not sure if she knew. Apologies- the Letter brings up so many living associations. It’s truly inspiring to read the Letters. I feel very sad right now though, for some reason.
Heather Cox Richardson
August 12, 2023 (Saturday)
In Marion, Kansas, yesterday morning, four local police officers and three sheriff’s deputies raided the office of the Marion County Record newspaper; the home of its co-owners, Eric Meyer and his 98 year old mother, Joan Meyer; and the home of Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel, 80. They seized computers, cell phones, and other equipment. Joan Meyer was unable to eat or sleep after the raid; she collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home.
The search warrant alleged there was probable cause to believe the newspaper, its owners, or the vice mayor had committed identity theft and unlawful computer acts against restaurant owner Kari Newell, but Magistrate Laura Viar appears to have issued that warrant without any affidavit of wrongdoing on which to base it. Sherman Smith, Sam Bailey, Rachel Mipro, and Tim Carpenter of the nonprofit news service Kansas Reflector reported that federal law protects journalists from search and seizure and requires law enforcement instead to subpoena materials they want.
On August 2, Newell had thrown Meyer and a Marion County Record reporter out of a meeting with U.S. Representative Jake LaTurner (R-KS), and the paper had run a story on the incident. Newell had complained on her personal Facebook page,
On August 7, Newell publicly accused the newspaper of illegally getting information about a drunk-driving charge against her and giving it to Herbel. Eric Meyer says the information—which was accurate—was sent to him and Herbel over social media and that he decided not to publish it out of concerns it was leaked to help Newell’s estranged husband in divorce proceedings. Those same concerns made him take the story to local police. Newell accused the newspaper of violating her rights and called Meyer to accuse him of identity theft.
Meyer told journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket that the paper was also investigating the new police chief for sexual misconduct, and he noted that the identities of people making those allegations are on the computers that got seized. “I may be paranoid that this has anything to do with it,” Meyer told Kabas, “but when people come and seize your computer, you tend to be a little paranoid.”
On Friday, Newell wrote on her Facebook page: “Journalists have become the dirty politicians of today, twisting narrative for bias agendas, full of muddied half-truths…. We rarely get facts that aren’t baited with misleading insinuations.”
Meyer worked at the Milwaukee Journal for 20 years and then taught journalism at the University of Illinois, retiring from there. He doesn’t take a salary from the Marion County Record. He told Kabas, “I’m doing this because I believe that newspapers still have a place in the world and that the worst thing that a newspaper could do was shrink its reporting staff, stop reporting, fill itself with non-news when there’s still news out there. And if you do a good job of providing news, you will get readers…. [W]e’re doing this because we care about the community.”
He said he worries that people are afraid to participate in politics because “there’s gonna be consequences and they’re going to be negative.”
The Marion County Record will sue the city and the individuals involved in the raid, which, the paper wrote in its coverage, “legal experts contacted were unanimous in saying violated multiple state and federal laws, including the U.S. Constitution, and multiple court rulings.” “Our first priority is to be able to publish next week,” Meyer said, “but we also want to make sure no other news organization is ever exposed to the Gestapo tactics we witnessed today. We will be seeking the maximum sanctions possible under law.”
Executive director of the Kansas Press Association Emily Bradbury noted “An attack on a newspaper office through an illegal search is not just an infringement on the rights of journalists but an assault on the very foundation of democracy and the public’s right to know. This cannot be allowed to stand.”
Americans have taken up this cause before. In 1836 the House of Representatives passed a resolution preventing Congress from taking up any petition, memorial, resolution, proposition, or paper relating “in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery.” This “gag rule” outraged antislavery northerners. Rather than quieting their objections to enslavement, they increased their discussion of slavery and stood firm on their right to those discussions.
In that same year, newspaperman Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had been publishing antislavery articles in the St. Louis Observer, decided to move from the slave state of Missouri across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois. He suggested to his concerned neighbors that his residence in a free state would enable him to write more about religion than about slavery. But, he added in a statement to them, “As long as I am an American citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write and to publish whatever I please, being amenable to the laws of my country for the same.”
Lovejoy became a symbol of the freedom of the press.
When “a committee of five citizens” in Alton, appointed by “a public meeting,” asked Lovejoy if he intended to print sentiments to which they objected, he refused to “admit that the liberty of the press and freedom of speech, were rightfully subject to other supervision and control, than [the laws of] the land.” He reminded them that “‘the liberty of our forefathers has given us the liberty of speech,’ and that it is ‘our duty and high privilege, to act and speak on all questions touching this great commonwealth.’” “[E]very thing having a tendency to bring this right into jeopardy, is eminently dangerous as a precedent,” he said.
Popular pressure had proved unable to make Lovejoy stop writing, and on August 21, 1837, a mob drove off the office staff of the Alton Observer by throwing rocks through the windows. Then, as soon as the staff had fled, the mob broke into the newspaper’s office and destroyed the press and all the type.
On August 24, Lovejoy asked his supporters to help him buy another press. They did. But no sooner had it arrived than a gang of ten or twelve “ruffians” broke into the warehouse where it had been stored for the night and threw it into the river.
When yet another press arrived in early November, Lovejoy had it placed in a warehouse on the riverbank. That night, about thirty men attacked the building, demanding the press be handed over to them. The men inside refused and fired into the crowd, wounding some of the attackers. The mob pulled back but then returned with ladders that enabled them to set fire to the building’s roof. When Lovejoy stepped out of the building to see where the attackers were hiding, a man shot him dead. As the rest of the men in the warehouse ran to safety, the mob rushed into the building and threw the press out of the window. It broke to pieces when it hit the shore, and the men threw the pieces into the Mississippi River.
But the story did not end there. Elijah Lovejoy’s younger brother, Owen, saw Elijah shot. “I shall never forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother’s blood,” he declared. He and another brother wrote the Memoir of Elijah P. Lovejoy, impressing on readers the importance of what they called “liberty of the press” in the discussion of public issues.
Owen then turned to politics, and in 1854 he was elected to the Illinois state legislature to stand against those southerners who had silenced his brother. The following year, voters elected him to Congress. His increasing prominence brought him political friends, including an up-and-coming lawyer who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky by way of Indiana, Abraham Lincoln.
***
Also, through coincidence a friend wrote a post about statues in one of Ingrid’s and my favorite parks. I can’t resist (respectfully) posting it in my Garden/Stone notebook:
“
BAD VANDALISM, KIND VANDALISM
Barbara and I took our daily walk yesterday and ended up visiting Sutro Park near Land’s End, Cliff House and the Sutro Baths Ruins. The park was noticeably a bit shabby unkempt. The first thing we noticed was the severely vandalized “Diana” statue several yards from the east entrance to the park. Her head was decapitated and presumably kept by the vandals. Her right arm is mostly gone and the remaining forearm barely hangs on by a a piece of rebar. Her left arm and right let are cut off and the deer at her side is as well decapitated. A sorry sight, yet her torso and folds of her tunic still are quite beautiful…she joins the likes of other damaged beauties – Venus de Milo and Winged Victory.
We hiked the park and its unkempt shabbiness is evident all over. The park and its ruins have a debatable charm. There are many old cypress trees looking like twisted Henry Moore-ish sculptures. I peeked down the artificial concrete cliff overlooking the Cliff House and noticed sleeping bags in precarious areas. Several people who live in the neighborhood were out and about and they seem to be fearless as they walk, hike and walk their dogs. Still we felt bit uneasy being there. We left but still look forward to exploring the park more when there are more people about.
As we drove home we went past Presidio Middle School which our daughter attended many years ago. We drove past the two marvelous stylized stone lions in front of the auditorium. They too were “vandalized” but in a kind way. Children had colored them with chalk. A wonderful work of art, I would say. And certainly a kinder form of vandalism than what poor Diana was subjected to.
- Joe Ramos (his FB page which is amazing.)
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