“I wanted not
only to show
Washington’s
life—that
was half the
idea—but
also to show
his beauty
of soul,
the great-
ness of his
dedication.”
— Victor ArnautoffGo forth and
conquer: At
Washington’s
direction, the spectral
procession of future
pioneers moves west.Linebaugh calls “commoning”—the practice of living and
working communally based on common ownership and
mutual responsibility rather than private property and
individualism—required freeing white servants and turn-
ing them into property owners, slave patrollers, or pro-
letarian citizens invested in the white republic and the
dream of attaining wealth and power.
The Constitution reinforced this arrangement by
protecting slavery and empowering slaveholders. The
three-fifths compromise apportioning congressional rep-
resentation in the slave states by counting the white popula-
tion along with 60 percent of enslaved people strengthened
Southern power over the federal government. It was not a
plot to reduce black people to three-fifths of a person as
a symbolic act of dehumanization; enslavement and dis-
franchisement had already done that. And yet this utterly
confusing metaphor is being peddled in schools to this day.
Life of Washington may not address all of this history, but
it certainly opens the door for a deeper interrogation—so
long as we move beyond the idea that the work is little
more than a well-intentioned effort to represent racial
violence or the fallibilities of a founding father.
W
ashington wasn’t just any white man, nor
was Arnautoff. Born in southern Ukraine in
1896, he longed to be an artist but began his
adult life as a career soldier, becoming a cav-
alry officer in World War I, then an officer in
the White Army during the Russian Civil War. After the
Bolshevik victory, he fled to China, where he studied art
briefly before joining the cavalry of a Manchurian warlord.
In 1925 he enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts
in San Francisco and in 1929 studied mural painting in
Mexico under the tutelage of Diego Rivera. Returning to
San Francisco in 1931, Arnautoff soon became one of the
city’s leading muralists. His 1934 mural City Life in Coit
Tower attracted controversy for its left-wing imagery. As
a student of Rivera’s and a supporter of the city’s 1934
general strike, Arnautoff was drawn to the orbit of the
Popular Front. (He joined the Communist Party in 1938.)
By 1935, when the city asked him to create a massive fres-
co for the newly constructed George Washington High
School, he was already a well-known figure on the left.
Aware of his limited knowledge of US history, the
émigré thoroughly researched Washington’s life and
times as well as the early history of the republic. As he
recalled in his memoir, “First I endeavored to study the
life and work of this famous man, a committed defender
of freedom. I got books and materials relating to him....
I wanted not only to show Washington’s life—that was
half the idea—but also to show his beauty of soul, the
greatness of his dedication.... I tried my best to convey
the spirit of Washington’s time.” Arnautoff also wanted
to bring to the surface the spirit and dignity of labor, free
and unfree, and expose the tensions of liberty. In 1935 he
told one interviewer, “The artist is a critic of society....
I wish to deal with people, to explain to them things and
ideas they may not have seen or understood.”
For artists in the American Communist Party’s orbit,
the Popular Front was a broad-based response to fascism
and an injunction to rethink American culture, art, and the
circle of “we.” Communists promoted racial and ethnic
diversity, identifying black art and artists as both inherently
progressive and profoundly American. Arnautoff witnessed
interracial movements among workers and the unem-
ployed in San Francisco and was also painfully aware of
the state’s policy of repatriating Mexican workers to solve
the problem of white un employ ment. A regular reader
of the Western Worker, he was doubtless familiar with the
activities of Bay Area Native American communists such
as Joe Manzanares and might even have come across a
letter by Vincent Spotted Eagle published by the paper in
1934, explaining that before the European invasion Indians
created a cooperative economy free of exploitation. “This
is Communism, which is true Americanism. And this is
why I joined the Communist Party,” Spotted Eagle wrote.