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Battle Over Censorship of Maine Murals Part of a Larger Struggle for Basic Rights and Justice
Maine Gov. Paul LePage and Fox broadcaster Glenn Beck not only share right-wing political views, but they both fancy themselves art critics. Two years ago Beck went on a rampage attacking murals on New York City buildings, including Rockefeller Plaza, for depicting "communist" propaganda. Now Gov. LePage is following in Beck's footsteps, ordering the removal of a 36-foot, 11-panel mural by Maine artist Judy Taylor from the foyer of the Maine Department of Labor in Augusta because, he claimed, it is "too one-sided", pro-union, and anti-business.
'The Apprentice', 'Lost Childhood', and 'The Textile Workers' constitute the first three panels of Judy Taylor's eleven-panel mural depicting seminal moments in the history of organized labor. Click on the image to see all the panels.
Who could have predicted that a mural in Maine would become the latest battleground in the war of ideas, money, and power triggered by America's right wing forces, including the Tea Party, Fox News, the Republican Party, and big business?
The Right's escalating attack on workers, unions, government, and the middle class is taking some strange twists and turns, and triggering a backlash that seems to have finally energized progressive forces. From the huge protest rally in downtown Los Angeles last Saturday, to the ongoing protests in Wisconsin and Ohio, to the attempt to stop a stealth Tea Party-backed candidate (Sean Baggett) from winning a School Board race in Pasadena, California, there's evidence that the Right, full of hubris, has gone too far. Polls show, for example, that most Americans firmly reject the Wisconsin Governor's decision to kill collective bargaining rights of the state's public sector employees.
All Americans concerned about First Amendment rights, censorship, artistic freedom, and political democracy should be outraged by what Maine Gov. LePage did last weekend.
If you're curious about this controversial mural, you can view its vivid colors on Judy Taylor's website. It has great photos of the mural and explains what each panel is about. Installed in 2008, the mural shows important events in Maine labor history, like a 1937 shoe factory strike in Lewiston, loggers in upstate Maine, ice-cutters, child labor, "Rosie the Riveter" at Bath Iron Works, and Frances Perkins, an occasional Maine resident who was the trailblazing Secretary of Labor during FDR's New Deal and who is buried in Maine.
Gov. LePage -- who was elected in 2010 with just 38 percent of the vote and Tea Party support -- also wants to rename several conference rooms in the state Labor Department, including one named for Frances Perkins and another honoring Cesar Chavez, who led United Farm Workers union in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Maine mural controversy is generating a lot of attention in newspapers, magazines, and blogs around the country and the world, including Steve Greenhouse's interesting article in the New York Times, Robert Reich's wonderful column in Salon; and this poignant letter-to-the-editor to a Maine newspaper, linking the mural flap to the recent 100th anniversary of the tragic Triangle Fire.
The Taylor mural was commissioned in 2006, when Maine consolidated several labor offices into one facility in Augusta (saving $300,000 each year). Under the One Percent for Art law in Maine, about$60,000 in federal funding was set aside to decorate the foyer.
Various private and public organizations (including the Portland, Maine City Council), and several colleges and universities, have offered to buy and/or exhibit the mural. But there's a fight-back to restore the mural to the Maine Labor Department building in order to stop Gov. LePage from winning this battle and setting a dangerous precedent. LePage has refused to disclose the mural's current location.
This is not the first time that a mural depicting workers' rights and progressive causes has generated controversy.
A similar controversy occurred over a mural by the great American painter (and former union organizer) Ralph Fasanella (1914-1997). Fasanella spent three years living in the Lawrence, Massachusetts YMCA, in order to paint scenes of New England mill towns, including his now-iconic 5-foot by 10-foot painting, "Lawrence 1912: The Great Strike" (also titled "Bread and Roses -- Lawrence, 1912"). The painting was purchased by donations from 15 unions and given to Congress, where it hung for years in the Rayburn Office Building hearing room of the House Subcommittee on Labor and Education.
Following the 1994 elections, the new Republican majority in Congress eliminated "labor" from the committee's name and evicted Fasanella's painting from the committee's hearing room. It now hangs at the Lawrence Heritage State Park, not far from the Maine border. It is unlikely that Maine Gov. LePage knows about this precedent for his own action. (You can learn more about Fasanella at this website and from this article.
The mural movement in this country was inspired in the 1930s by the great Mexican muralists Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, who supported the Mexican revolution and leftist causes. In 1932, Siqueiros lived for seven months in Los Angeles, where he painted the incendiary mural "América Tropical," that was so controversial it was painted over soon after he finished it. Rivera's mural, "Man at the Crossroads," commissioned for Rockefeller Center in 1933, was destroyed in the middle of the night because of its depiction of revolutionary figures and events. Not surprisingly, right-wing broadcaster Beck has devoted several shows to attacking progressive murals on New York buildings, including Rivera's "Man at the Crossroads".
Where is President Obama as the Tea Party, the Koch brothers, the Republican right-wingers, Fox News, and the Chamber of Commerce try to steal the country and assault basic political, economic, and artistic rights that were won over the past century? If there were ever a time for the president to use his "bully pulpit" to challenge the right-wing bullies who are trying to unravel many of the progressive reforms of the past century -- including Obama's own health care reform legislation enacted a year ago -- that time is now. If he's looking for lessons from the past, Obama might read about what President Franklin Roosevelt said when he was running for reelection in 1936.
Taking office in March 1933, more than three years into the Depression, FDR inherited a nation that had lost faith in itself and in the social order. More than 13 million Americans were jobless and most banks were closed. Right-wing demagogues competed with a burgeoning radical movement of angry farmers, veterans, workers, and others for the loyalty of the American people and politicians. FDR had not run for President as a progressive and even when he took office he had no bold plan to lift America out of the Depression, but he was willing to experiment, to listen to his close advisors (which included several progressives, including Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, Harry Hopkins, and Rexford Tugwell as well as his wife Eleanor), and to warn that without bold reforms, the country could be subject to even deeper chaos and potential revolution from the right or left.
FDR recognized that his ability to push progressive legislation through Congress depended on the pressure generated by protesters -- workers, World War I veterans, the jobless, the homeless, and farmers -- even though he didn't always welcome it. The well-worn story that ends with FDR telling a group of activists, "I agree with you. Now, go out and make me do it," has never been documented, but it is emblematic of the New Deal era. As protests escalated throughout the country, FDR became more vocal, using his bully pulpit to criticize big business and to promote policies to jump-start the economy, protect the needy, and expand workers' rights.
With labor unions and other grass-roots groups mobilizing support on the ground, FDR instigated economic and social reforms that saved and humanized capitalism, despite the barbs of many critics, including most newspapers and business leaders, that his New Deal agenda was leading America to socialism. Indeed, running for re-election in 1936, FDR was called a "socialist" and a "traitor to his class" by the entire conservative spectrum, from the extreme right-wing like radio priest Father Charles Coughlin (Glenn Beck's counterpart), to various hate groups (the equivalent of Tea Party), to the major business lobby groups, to most Republicans in Congress.
In a speech during his 1936 re-election campaign, FDR didn't mince words: "We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace -- business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. ... Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred."
Many Americans are angry about the attack on our living standards and basic rights by the right-wing forces around the country -- of which the Maine mural controversy is but a small part. It is time for President Obama to give a major speech attacking those forces and providing those struggling on the ground the "audacity of hope" that was, and still could be, his promise.
35 Comments so far
Show AllI remember reading about the desecration of art when I studied about Hitler. Book burnings are soon to follow. As for Obama, he has alignrd himself with the same forces who hated FDR. We need a People's Party and Robert Reich has established a broad set of principles for such a Party. We can no longer rely on the Democratic Party who attempt to appease us.
Will we have a People's Park again? Raygun made short work of that fantasy, as is the Corporatist bulldozer that's wrecking the American dream today for most of us.
This is like when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan statues (of Buddha) in 2001. "This is an old story. New landowners of a country move in and do their best to obliterate all traces of the conquered and now minority population." - K. Kris Hirst
As the increasingly ruthless, increasingly hard-line conservative, increasingly undemocratic Republican Party attacks the rights of Americans to form unions, attacks "undesirable" pro-labor, pro-worker art, and sells us out to multinational, undemocratic corporations...it is clear we have to organize and remove these reactionary conservatives from office during the next election...our democracy, rights, and way of life is threatened by the Republican Party's fascist movement.
Every time I hear this "I agree with you - now go out and make me do it" - as it if is something profound, sublime, and awe-inspiring, usually coming from an Obama-lover, I just want to vomit.
It is utter BULLSHIT. What the hell is it even supposed to mean? He (FDR, Obama, etc) agrees with us, but want's us to force him to do what he already agrees with? Will he let us use guns to "make him"? We certainly have already tried mass peaceful, permitted protests. Obama completely dismissed us at the G20 in Pittsburgh. Isn't this "make me" actually the taunt of a bully?
You said: "Isn't this 'make me' actually the taunt of a bully?"
No, in this case (FDR) it isn't the taunt of a bully but the challenge from a man with tremendous forces against him telling the people there to come out and support him.
And Obama is absolutely no FDR! Almost from the very beginning of his term he has betrayed his so-called "Audacity of Hope" and the vast majority of people who voted him into office. He has shown no spine when challenged by the Republicans and his challenge to the people he has betrayed is closer to "you can't make me do it!"
FDR said so, but Obama didn't. I only wish he did say it, and so forthrightly. Can you imagine him doing so, on H.R. 676:
"I agree with you. An improved Medicare should be opened to the entire country funded through a simple 3% payroll tax. Let the insurance companies bite the dust they're headed for, and so richly deserve. Now go out there and demonstrate for single payer. So we can get the bill through Congress, and I can sign it by the end of my first month in office."
Instead he appointed Max Baucus who (in lieu of Obama himself doing so) brought in the police to arrest physicians and activists wanting a seat at the health care discussion table. A seat that represented the opinion of 65% of the American public, 55% of American physicians, all of the nurses' associations, and most the labor unions.
FDR style?
Not to mention his pick of Health Secretary - outrightly dedicated to keeping the health insurance industry in booming business.
Plus bailing out the banksters AND 3 wars - with not-a-one lifting the U.S. out of its economic turmoil - rather, driving us into it ever further. (At least WW II was good for the U.S. economically, and some people say that this was a main reason for FDR; a reason Obama can't even claim with any of the 3, adding war after war, while it further depletes and destroys our economy.)
And of course, Obama is part of the plotting to get rid of social security. FDR?
I wish we had an FDR.
Great article: I couldn't help but be struck by the irony of FDR being elected as a moderate conservative but embracing reform once he assumed office, whereas Barack campaigned as a reformer but no sooner was he in than he embraced Wall St., big pharma, big oil, coal, and nukes, and, of course, the Pentagon and their increasingly privatized ilk.
One other point: I can't believe I just read in the article that "LePage has refused to disclose the mural's current location." Excuse me, but just who does he think the mural belongs to? I guess he thinks it's part of his private collection! What a pig!
Maybe Obama needs a case of Polio to bring him around like I hear it did to FDR.
Since the mural belongs to the people of Maine, I hope someone can get a court order forcing the idiot LePage to return the mural in its original condition to a proper caretaker (Maine Historical Society/Archives?) and personally pay for any damages caused.
And since this mural belongs to the people of Maine, payed for by the people of Maine to be exhibited in the Labor Department then the court order should be to have it re-installed in the Labor Department.
The difference between the FDR and Obama administrations is explained by the presence or absence of strong militant left wing groups and organized Labor working outside of partisan electoral politics.
I guess the Maine capitol building will soon have murals depicting Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly, Bill Gates, Pete Peterson and the Koch brothers.
Yea a nice 20 foot mural of Limbaugh's annal cyst, would seem to be most appropriate right about now, with "Kiss My ..." written under it. You know a little visual aid so the good people of Maine can come to a better understanding of what their governor really thinks of them.
Not sure if you know this but it is traditional in Maine for the governor to address the NAACP on Martin Luther king day. This year they asked Lebut to come and speak and he said "you can kiss my ass".
I expect you picked up on that.
McDonalds, WalMart, RiteAid . . .
What's wrong with Dr. Dreier's assertion "Many Americans are angry about the attack on our living standards and basic rights by the right-wing forces around the country..."? This isn't about right and left. This is about the very much bipartisan ruling class (the rich) hopping on their yachts and abandoning the rest of us, our communities, our environment, our planet.
Once there were enough wealthy people not so arrogant as to believe they had pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, enough who realized you can't have a healthy economy (including the wealthy few) without a basis of educated and working citizens, a clean environment, and a solid infrastructure. They used to realize and accept that those who had the lion's share should pay the lion's share to keep society working.
No longer. It's hard for me to imagine what kind of world the uber-rich think they are creating as they destroy the middle class and obstruct any serious effort to do something about global warming and other looming environmental catastrophes. I mourn for future generations.
Unfortunately the last thing that Obama will ever do will be to take a principled stand in favor of the rights of the people. For some bizarre reason Obama always feels it necessary to align himself exactly in the middle in order to, seemingly in his mind, please everybody and by doing that he usually ends up pleasing neither the right and certainly not the left.
One would not think that it would be that difficult for Obama and LePage to realize that a mural which sings the praises of labor activists actually belongs in a [gasp!] Department of Labor office.
"For some bizarre reason Obama always feels it necessary to align himself exactly in the middle"
One of the problems is that Obama's middle is somewhere between Hitler and Mussolini.
Politicians will always seek the middle. The root cause of the problem is not the politicians moving to the middle, it is where the middle is now. It is far to the right, and that is because the Left is so weak, so marginalized. The Left is weak because liberals and progressives - and we see this right here every day - are working overtime to prevent any Left from forming, are reluctant to become "too radical," are attacking or at the very least not supporting the Left, are trying to find ways to save, preserve, or restore the system, are commandeering the political space where the Left should be and policing and controlling it.
The middle that the Democrats seek is halfway between tea baggers and progressives, and they are hitting that middle pretty well.
Agreed, dfairley, on the mourning for future generations. Dreier's article is enlightening and yet another needed bolt ion the structure of intelligent discourse that must be erected to counter all this astonishing anti-intellectual and contemptuous shit coming from the right.
A big part of the explanation for the fact that Dr Dreier's 'Larger Struggle for basic Rights and Justice' is going on now is in a whole raft of very real but deplorable developments in recent American history. Just a few:
Thomas Harrington's recent CD article: 'Controversialization: A Key to the Right’s Continuing Domination of Public Debates' from 6, March edifies on how there's been a very deliberate effort made by The Forces Of Evil to fuck up the debate, the 'balance', and the intellectual integrity of any public conversation in America. And a poorly educated, highly propagandized population is victimized by it. (continued below)
(...sorry, had to interrupt myself there to run out to the driveway to stop Scott Walker and some jackass named LePage from stealing my car.. bastards were even wearing ski masks in broad daylight. I mean, the bloody cheek!)
The rest of the few: Hand in glove with the controversialization concept is the kind of mind-control that results in the right's ability to keep the name and image of the Great Asshole - Ronald Reagan - alive in the press and the goddamn flags at half mast every time there's an anniversary of that imbecile's death, as though he were some kind of deity. This con's been addressed by Noam Chomsky recently on Democracy Now!, when he said a few choice things to set the record straight on what he called 'a miserable creature'. But the half-witted, mentally defective portion of the American population - huge, moneyed, for the most part, and, unfortunately, voting when they're not stealing elections outright - eats this crap up like candy, because they're starved for heroes, and hell-bent on keeping their delusions alive because they're just not intelligent or morally sound enough to have any decent and progressive and really sensible and pluralistic and non-greedy and, yes, socialistic ideas of their own.
Another: The abject failure of the American people to get their heads out of their arses and deal properly with the coup d'etat of 2000, the Inside Job of 9-11, the race to attack and invade Iraq and Afghanistan, and the myriad lies and crimes of Bush and that bunch. This failure is explained by a number of sick and pathetic things, not least of which is the steady and unending disenfranchisement of the masses from the democratic processes and political discourse; their engorging themselves on Stuff and Money and failing to givetheir heads a shake and realize that they're being led to the slaughter by the materialism, the masculinism, the militarism and the monetarism - the Four Horsemen of the American Apocalypse.
Another: The kind of braindead programming that precludes a reasonable debate on the wisdom of socializing healthcare and education in a country that has a socialized military, and is rotting from within due to the lack of socialized healthcare and education.
Another: This Filthy Lie Of American 'Exceptionalism'. It wasn't by sheer chance that another of the hookers (with respect to all working girls) - the parasite Speaker of the House Boehner - got his knickers in a knot when Obama forgot or declined to utter the phrase 'American exceptionalism' in his last State of the Union Fake Speech. After all, keeping on with that particular example of lying drivel is key to continuing the brain-washing.
There are of course thousands more examples.
But Dr Dreier's wish that Obama would give a major speech on the attacks by the right is entirely misguided, and one has to wonder why a smart chap like Dreier does not call a spade a shovel. With all the evidence now in, why does Dr Dreier imagine that Obama is on the side of good, truth, justice and what's right? Obama is bought and paid for, Dr Dreier - that's how the system works. How else does a black guy in such a heavily racist country get anywhere near the White House?
Obama is a puppet in a long line of puppets. Between Bush and Obama, is further proof needed that the American 'presidency' is defunct, worthless and so corrupted as to be a stain on the democracy, a wrench in the workings of democracy? Please, please see the Harper's op-ed piece of about a year ago on the wrong-headed and absolutely counter-productive deifying of the presidency and the misplaced reverence for whoever is 'president'.
Obama is the Manchurian Candidate - place in office to make everyone teary-eyed that a black man finally made it to the White House, while the fucking neo-cons get on with the destruction of America, the paving over of as much of the rest of the world as possible, while they employ one of their goons to stand just out of sight, in the wings, pointing a pistol at Obama's head.
And it appears that even if he is a fundamentally decent guy who's trying amidst mind-bending opposition to do the right thing, he basically lacks the spine to take the bullet, unlike the Martyin Luther King he allegedly idolizes and imagines himself to be walking in the footsteps of. And any attention given to this fact, any mention of it, is verboten.
Obama is going down on the wrong side of history, and he will not give that speech.
From: Beck and the Gov.
To: Working stiffs
Bend over and take it from the MAN!
So how do we reach the American people? What is the anwser sir?
That is indeed the 7,000,000,000 question. I keep thinking that we're smarter than they are and should be able to best them at propaganda, but I haven't come up with a way and haven't heard of one yet.
First - Talk class analysis, talk organized Labor, and you can reach most. I have done this for 40 years with success. Very few are doing it, although the numbers are growing.
Second - Think in terms of being in service to the working class, rather than thinking in tern\ms of how to get them in service of us.
People are resisting efforts by liberals and progressives to get them to support the progressive agenda and help progressives. That is the cause of the lack of success and the frustration. If instead people were talking class struggle and organized Labor, and if people were looking for ways to serve the working class rather than to get working class people to support an "alternative "ruling class agenda - progressivism -everything would change.
How do they reach us? That is more the problem.
I am amazed that anyone still thinks Obama is being cowed by the right wingers. He is one of them! He never was a progressive. He hid his true colors until after the election. (I was one of the dupes who voted for him). He has done more for the right wing Republican agenda than any Republican could have done from health care to taxes to endless , useless wars. No progressive can possibly vote for him in 2012 no matter what that means. No plausible Republican could be worse. Vote Green.
I, too, was one of the dupes who voted for Obama. I would consider the Green Party but they (to me, at least) still reek of "fringe politics." Although the have a great base party values platform, they haven't yet figured out how to establish a true grassroots people base to build their party on. They continue to foolishly think they can win a national Presidency when they can't even win a decent local government seat.
I think that the only hope for people like me is that a real progressive would dare to challenge and beat Obama to the Democratic nomination. How about Feingold?
Feingold would be no different in any substantial way from Obama. Delusional suggestion, this.
Another appeal to Obama to be progressive. Talk about flogging a dead Trojan horse!
This is true Germany in the 30's for sure.
The GOP has become America's Taliban, destroying the icons of America like the Taliban destroyed the ancient Bamiyan statues.
well then what we need are huge murals depicting the rich, lobbyists, wall street execs and ceo's making dirty deals, lounging in luxury on their cruise ship size yachts and in their mansions. maybe then more than just the progressives would get motivated.
" It is time for President Obama to give a major speech attacking those forces and providing those struggling on the ground the "audacity of hope" that was, and still could be, his promise."
How does the song go? "Wishin' and hopin' and hopin' and wishin'...." is all we're going to get from this presidency, i'm afraid. The outright lying to get elected & the vicious turnaround ensure that many will not make the same mistake twice.
I do hope that the several progressive parties springing up form a coalition, at least large enough to remind our representatives in D.C. which crowd they are supposed to represent. In Oregon, there is a Working Families Party that is already instrumental in lobbying for a state bank.
Many progressives are tired and dispirited from the disaster that is the Obama administration. Yes, it's a little better than a Republican administration in some respects. But that's not enough anymore; we need someone who truly believes and is willing to fight for the campaign promises Obama made.
Enjoy your articles, Mr. Dreier. I imagine you are being diplomatic in voicing your hope that Obama will transform into his phony campaigner self.