Domestic Left #29: Carry on, wayward son
I was on vacation in my home state of Kansas last week, and on Tuesday morning I went to see the murals in the state capitol building in Topeka. You are almost certainly familiar with one of the murals (or at least the iconography that it has inspired), Tragic Prelude, which depicts John Brown with a bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, presiding over the battlefields of Bleeding Kansas:
It’s not a simple image. John Brown is often celebrated by those of us on the left for his uncompromising opposition to slavery and his (more rarefied at the time) belief in the full humanity of Black people, and it is easy to see and use the image — especially the top half of it — in a propagandist vein. Indeed, I have done that myself, and likely will continue to do so. Sometimes the exigencies of the struggle demand a flattening of complexities.
But it is also easy to see the painting’s central figure as “Raging John Brown,” as a Facebook friend of mine from high school called him in a comment recently. Look closely and you will notice he is not leading the “free state” forces so much as standing between the two sides, a mad prophet conjuring these bands of violent, rough men from the prairie with his bible and his gun. The only Black people in the painting are not fighting for their freedom but begging for mercy from the pro-slavery forces. And at the bottom of the painting, a Union and a Confederate soldier lie face down on the ground, where we are meant to see them as victims of a fratricidal conflict launched by Brown’s zealotry (this was the explicit intention of the artist, John Steuart Curry).
Indeed, John Brown’s zeal is not exclusively left-coded — apparently Fred Phelps, the late founder of the LGBTQ-hating “Westboro Baptist Church” (you know, the people who picketed the funerals of people who died of AIDS), saw himself as a “new John Brown.” It is hard to imagine Phelps taking inspiration from the Haymarket Martyrs or Ella Baker.
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Getting in to see the murals was a bit of an ordeal. I am used to the Vermont State House, where you can just walk in any of several doors, as befits an edifice where citizen-legislators are supposedly doing the people’s bidding. The public can only access the Kansas State Capitol through a subterranean visitor’s entrance (inconsiderately placed on the opposite side of the building from the one I first approached).
Going through the visitor’s entrance, much like entering an airport, entails surrendering all of your possessions to a conveyor belt and passing through a metal detector — though unlike in an airport, you are surrounded by an unnecessarily high number of imposingly large and conspicuously armed white men in uniforms.
Since the entrance was labeled a “Visitor’s Center,” it wasn’t immediately clear to me whether I would actually be able to get into the part of the building with the murals, but after several minutes of wandering around what seemed not unlike catacombs, I found a stairway to the first floor. Once there, is was pretty easy to find my way up to the second floor of the rotunda, where the murals reside.
Tragic Prelude is in the east wing; it depicts not only the Bleeding Kansas era, but also the first Europeans to set foot in Kansas (the Spanish conquistador Coronado and the priest who accompanied him), and a white hunter with a dead buffalo at his feet. Behind the hunter a herd of buffalo sweep across the plains, painted with loose brushstrokes that make them seem to flow into each other and into the prairie grasses they are rushing through, as I imagine they might have appeared when they still existed in such numbers.
History, in the mural, proceeds from right to left. Poking out behind the combatants of the Bleeding Kansas section, but in front of the tornado and prairie fire that rage behind them, settlers with cattle and a covered wagon head inexorably west, regardless of the outcome of the conflict. A tragic prelude indeed.
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Curry, the artist, was born in Dunavant, Kansas, about 40 miles northeast of Topeka. He is considered one of the three great painters of “American Regionalism,” along with Grant Wood (Iowa) and Thomas Hart Benton (Missouri). Unlike Wood and Benton, however, Curry was not popular — and could not find employment — in his home state. Apparently Kansans thought his depictions of things like tornadoes and prairie fires were unflattering to their state.
The famed Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White wrote in 1936 that Curry “wanted to honor the state [of his birth] by coming here to live but ‘there was no room at the inn.’”
Nonetheless, after Benton was commissioned to paint a mural for the state capitol in Missouri, White began raising funds (so as not to make unseemly demands for taxpayer money) for a similar mural in Topeka. Curry was hired, and painted Tragic Prelude along with another mural, Kansas Pastoral — though he never signed them, as he did not consider them complete.
The Kansas State Legislature passed a measure prohibiting the murals from being displayed in the capitol. Curry returned to Wisconsin, where he was employed as an artist-in-residence at the university. The murals were not hung until after Curry’s death, of a heart attack at age 48.
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The vibe, as it were, in the Kansas State Capitol is noticeably different than the vibe in the Vermont State House. Not to judge people by their appearances, but almost everyone I saw was well-groomed and precisely dressed in that way people are when they are quietly and efficiently tending to a sleek, shiny, clean and murderous machine. Not a trace of rage or zealotry in their demeanor, and the bodies aren’t at their feet.
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Kansas Pastoral, which hangs in the west wing, is as beatific as Tragic Prelude is apocalyptic. It depicts an idealized farm family and the bounty of their fields. The farmer and his wife stand on either side of the door at the end of the hall. The farmer stands tall, back unbroken by hard labor, looking out over golden wheat fields and a fat cow with the sun shining in the distance, on the wall to his right. His wife has one child in her arms and another tugging at her dress, and there is no indication that she has to engage in any of the difficult physical labor traditionally done by farm wives, perhaps because of wealth from the oil rigs depicted on the wall to her right (Kansas is, last I checked, the eighth largest oil-producing state in the country).
The rotunda is also filled with murals, which to be honest I did not realize were not painted by Curry until I started the (extremely cursory) research for this newsletter. The rotunda murals depict the economic development of the state from the late 19th through early 20th century: the first sowing of hard winter wheat (a game-changer for Kansas agriculture), the driving of cattle to the railroads, the grain elevators that rose from the plains, and the manual threshing of wheat: a labor-intensive process, performed by waves of migrant workers who followed the wheat harvest from Texas up to the Dakotas and who made the IWW agricultural workers’ union one of the largest industrial unions in the country for a handful of years in the early 20th century, until the arrival of mechanical threshers.
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The morning that I visited the capitol, I woke up early and for some reason opted to scroll through my Twitter feed when I woke up (something I rarely do, at any time of day). John Darnielle, the singer/songwriter/leader of the Mountain Goats, had posted a thread about Jesus, which seemed appropriate to read while in the Bible Belt.
If you’re familiar with Darnielle, you won’t be surprised that his thread was a takedown of “evangelical types” trying “to ally Jesus of Nazareth with [what they conceive of, not entirely accurately, as] traditional western concepts of strength and masculinity.”
His “God-bothering” thread, as he refers to it, is a reading of the nativity as an argument for “a truly revolutionary case: that within helplessness lies incomprehensible strength. Within surrender. Within dependence.”
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Tucked away in the very bottom corner of Tragic Prelude, in a space less than two feet wide between two doorways, is a small cluster of wildflowers, and above them a small prairie bird. It is in a bottom corner of the mural, but it is flying upwards, and to the left.
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When I was making my way down to the basement to leave, on the first floor I saw a small group of kids (by which I mean people under 30 years old) with non-traditional haircuts and non-traditional piercings, hair dyed more interesting colors than blonde, and a few rainbow flags pinned to their clothing or sticking out of their backpacks here and there. Not to judge people by their appearances, but they seemed like they probably identified as “queer.”
As I made my way down into the catacombs I saw another similar group, and then another. A few slogans on t-shirts made me think that there was probably some kind of LGBTQ lobby day going on, and when I got to the entrance to the “visitor’s center” there they were, not hundreds but many dozens, making their way past the men with guns.
