Flashback: American Treasure Destroyed in ’50s Because of “Offensiveness”

“William Gropper’s America: It’s Folklore” and its creator.

By Martin Lioll 
One of the left’s favorite pastimes in 2017 is statue-destroying. First it was Confederate statues, but now the outrage has spread to statues of our founding fathers and other major American political figures — Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln among them.
Even though these statues are part of American history — history that should be contextualized for men and women in the modern era — liberals feel that history can be erased simply at the flick of a wrist.
Yet, bring up the specter of McCarthyism and you’d find few liberals who would co-sign the excesses of that period. However, during that period, a priceless American treasure was destroyed — all because it could be considered “offensive” due to the artist’s political beliefs.

According to Atlas Obscura, William Gropper was a left-leaning artist who was commissioned by the government to paint a number of propaganda and posters and paintings during the Second World War. His relationship with the government continued after the war, as well.

“Between 1946 and 1953, the State Department’s Overseas Library Program collected and distributed some 1,744 copies of ‘William Gropper’s America: Its Folklore,’ a colorful depiction of 61 legends, tall tales, and literary heroes — characters like super-sized cowboy Pecos Bill in New Mexico, steel-driving phenom John Henry in Alabama, and witty trickster Br’er Rabbit in Georgia — superimposed over a familiar projection of the Lower 48,” Atlas Obscura reports. 

The distribution of the poster was a sort of soft propaganda; it represented the folklore of the United States in a manner both entertaining and approachable, something that most propaganda coming out of the Soviet Union would never be able to accomplish. However, things took a turn in 1953. That’s when Joseph McCarthy’s assistant, Roy Cohn, discovered Gropper’s works in libraries overseas.
Cohn had said Gropper was one of the “fringe supporters and sympathizers” of communism in America, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. While not a member of the Communist Party USA, Gropper had contributed to a panoply of communist publications, and had once toured the Soviet Union with noted American leftists Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser.

When he was called before Congress to answer whether or not he was a communist, Gropper took the Fifth Amendment. Given the environment of the era, it wasn’t long before the State Department was tracking down and destroying as many of the 1,744 copies of “William Gropper’s America: Its Folklore” as it possibly could. Today, very few survive; three are in the care of the Library of Congress.
Now, it’s worth pointing out that while Gropper wasn’t a card-carrying communist, he certainly was one of the “fringe supporters and sympathizers” of the movement; he wasn’t one of the innocent people caught up in McCarthyism. This was hardly a man who had mere dalliances with the far left. In the age of Stalin, he contributed to publications that thought the Soviet Union was a pretty swell place. And, lest we acquit him via ignorance, let’s please not forget that he toured the USSR and saw it firsthand.

And yet, the destruction of his work was wrong. Gropper’s political opinions and ideological shortcomings did not erase the fact that he was not only a skilled artist, but also one who served his country with his artistic talents in a time of war. Destroying his works erased neither his good qualities nor his reprehensible ones. It simply made us look like a bunch of fools who cannot reasonably and soberly face our history.
Does that sound familiar?
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