San Francisco must be the virtue capital 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 disconcerting 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 communist. 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 commission. 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 literary luminary Alice Walker, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the black actor Danny Glover, who compared blocking the artwork to ‘book burning’.
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