LIONEL SHRIVER
The grown-ups have become the problem
objected that mere panelling would enable
people in future — oh, how I wish we could
all pop into a time machine and zap ourselves
to such a glorious age, when public authori-
ties are largely in their right minds once
more —to take the panels off. The horror.
I’ve not seen these murals in person,
but my computer screen is a 15-incher with
killer resolution. The one benefit of the
murals being under siege is that dozens of
excellent pics are now available online. If
you’re interested, google ‘George Washing-
ton school murals’ and take a look, because
I’ll not do them justice here. But briefly,
they’re beautiful. The figures are stylised,
and more artful than the clunky, angular
socialist realism of the same era. The crafts-manship is top drawer. These paintings are
enormous, too, covering a total of 1,600
square feet. And their message isn’t sub-
tle. You don’t need a course in art history
to discern the artist’s critical perspective
on America’s traditional stories of origin.
The president directs frontiersmen (painted
in grey, amid an otherwise vibrant pallet)
to go forth, while the corpse of an Indian
lies at their feet. Slaves pick cotton at his
estate in Mount Vernon. Reverent portrai-
ture this ain’t.
So what’s the problem with these imag-
es? I fear I will bore you. ‘Don’t tell us,’ you
say. ‘Pictures of slaves and dead Indians
make students feel “unsafe”. The murals are
“offensive” to certain “communities”. Did
we get that right?’ Of course you did. But to
be fair, when 49 freshmen at George Wash-
ington High were asked to write about the
murals, only four wanted the works erased;
the rest would preserve them intact, visible,
and in place. Aside from a handful of noisy
activists, this isn’t a snowflake story. It’s
the grown-ups who are the idiots, and who
assume that their city’s children are idiots —
since if there are any kids who repeatedly
pass these murals on the way to class and fail
to get their message (and that’s hard to imag-ine), these children are already in a school
where at least in theory one learns things.
It’s progressives of the sort who sit on the
San Francisco School Board who are always
banging on about the importance of teach-
ing students the sordid aspects of American
history. They’re the ones who would happily
set aside lessons on the ingenious civic archi-
tecture of the Constitution in preference for
concentrating solely on the document’s ini-
tial hypocrisy over slavery, and who deni-
grate George Washington as a slaveholder.
They’re the ones who love nothing better
than to induce a burning sense of hereditary
shame in upcoming generations over how
the West was won. So they’re the ones who,
we presume, had they the talent, would paint
the very murals they now want to obscure.
‘Bewildering’ doesn’t begin to say it.
Would that I could reassure the British
that this urge to artistic vandalism is an
American affliction, perhaps one specific
to whackadoodle California. But campaigns
to take down monuments and ban art that
doesn’t pass an ever-stricter political puri-
ty test is not constrained to the US. Recall
the students at Manchester University paint-
ing over ‘racist’ Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’
in their student union — though merciful-
ly the handwritten scrawl was not great art.
Or the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ ruckus at Oxford
that tried to bring down a statue at Oriel
College. The western-wide movement to
cleanse public spaces of perceived social-
justice heresy inevitably reminds us of the
dynamiting of ancient sandstone Buddhas
by the Taleban, the wholesale destruction of
relics by Isis and the destruction of ancient
treasures by the Khmer Rouge. Hardly swell
bedfellows.
Still, the campaign to obliterate the
Arnautoff murals takes the biscuit. The
work is uncannily well aligned with the
American left’s disparaging view of their
country’s history. So any day now I expect
the San Francisco School Board to be clap-
ping shamefaced panels over any remaining
red-white-and-blue ‘Yes we can!’ posters
from Obama ’08.SPECTATOR.CO.UK/LIONELSHRIVER
The argument continues online.S
an Francisco must be the virtue capi-
tal of the world. (The latest: just across
the bay, Berkeley’s city council voted
this summer that ‘manholes’ must hereon in
be called ‘maintenance holes’.) But when
the lofty run out of real enemies, they often
turn on their own kind. Moreover, too much
success in achieving a raft of progressive
purposes means a runaway train with no
sensible destination careens off the tracks.
That’s the only explanation for the dis-
concerting San Francisco School Board spat
over what to do with a series of 13 massive
murals on the interior of the city’s George
Washington High School. The murals’ now-
esteemed creator, Victor Arnautoff, was a
Russian immigrant and a committed com-
munist. Painted under the aegis of Franklin
Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration
during the Depression, ‘Life of Washington’
depicts a series of scenes that cast the father
of the republic in a decidedly unflattering
light. I grew up with sappy stories about
young George Washington refusing to tell
a lie and admitting to chopping down a
cherry tree (a tired tale that may itself
have grown controversial, by elevating the
character-building of a straight white male
over environmental preservation). Yet
Arnautoff’s murals emphasise the dark side
of America’s first president — his ownership
of slaves, his complicity in Native American
genocide — as well as casting a chary eye on
the country’s arrogant ‘manifest destiny’ to
expand westwards.
In other words, this is exactly the kind of
art that left-wing Democrats would commis-
sion. But no. Earlier this summer, the school
board voted to have the murals painted over
— which would permanently destroy the
artwork. An enormous backlash followed;
among those objecting were the black lit-
erary luminary Alice Walker, the Nation-
al Association for the Advancement of
Colored People and the black actor Danny
Glover, who compared blocking the art-
work to ‘book burning’. Under pressure, the
school board backtracked somewhat this
month and voted to cover the murals with
obscuring panels, a laborious exercise that
will cost up to $845,000 and could take two
years. Even so, one dissenter on the board
I wish we could pop into a time
machine and zap to when public
authorities are in their right minds