Stearns Morse on José Clemente Orozco’s fresco ‘The Epic of American Civilization’ commissioned by Dartmouth College as it was being painted. Today the mural is protected as a National Historic Landmark.

‘Still-Birth as Epitaph’ by Stearns Morse from New Masses. Vol. 10 No. 9. February 27, 1934.

THE fresco which Orozco is painting in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College is almost finished. In the last panel a flaming Christ has chopped down his cross and stands rampant against a background of piled up engines of war and the ruins of ancient religions and cultures. In the next to the last panel the sprawling corpse of the Unknown Soldier is concealed by gaudy wreathes and flapping banners while an incredibly pompous politician belches platitudes before a microphone. But it is the third panel from the end that is perhaps most fitting in its environment.

Against a lurid orange background of a world in flame stand learned doctors in their caps and gowns. They bear on their faces the expressions of the smugly damned: adamant conservatism; bigoted pedantry; arrogance; superciliousness. These are not the expressions of living men, even of a Brain Trust, they are the expressions one might imagine upon the faces of upright corpses just before the last shred of flesh has rotted away. The corpses are oblivious of the flame behind them because they are corpses posing, as it were, with a ghastly simper for the camera; perhaps they are on the platform at some Walpurgis Night Commencement. And, indeed, they are presiding as a monstrous birth of knowledge. For sprawled among heavy gray books before them is another skeleton without benefit of gorgeous gown. She is evidently feminine for from the white skull, full of a black emptiness, stray the last grisly whitish locks of what once might have been an abundant head of hair. Is it Alma Mater to whom the alumni pray? Perhaps at any rate the recumbent skeleton has just been through some sort of maternal labor: one long bony leg is thrust aloft across the faces of the grim professors, the other hangs down amongst the books, the apparatus of knowledge. The master obstetrician bending with black obsequious shoulders, his skull a massive spheroid of white, holds in his hands the infant of which the female has just been delivered: miscarriage, a little foetus of bones, a mortarboard set jauntily upon his overgrown skull. capped skeletal foetuses in test tubes, dead Scattered among the books below are other jolly little creatures with the unholy glee of the undergraduate on a peerade. For the little embalmed foetuses are, after all, the livest things in the panel (unless one excepts the background of flame).

The undergraduates, going to and fro for their books, stop and look and chuckle; they, of course, easily recognize in the gowned supervisors of the grim accouchement the likeness of their professors and now and again the more discerning recognize in themselves the gay tragic little still-born bastards. (Bastards they must be; it is impossible to think of the officiating doctors as having been capable of begetting even these dead foetuses. Perhaps the father was the football coach.) Many of them are about to be spawned out into a world for which this academic world has not precisely fitted them. Many of them are products of a world of stock dividends and bonuses and country clubs which is already an archaic world. They are doomed to become, not bond salesmen, not copy-writers for the Satevepost, not miniature editions of a Charles E. Mitchell with only lesser incomes, shamefully unearned, but members of the growing ‘proletariat of the A.B.’ And they do not know it yet.

There is much discussion as to the meaning. One prominent alumnus has labelled it: Dartmouth Dead. (Of course, Dartmouth is not dead. When another alumnus, a railway executive, can provide a private car for the three new football coaches on their first visit to Hanover it is very far from ‘dead’.) But the panel raises a suspicion. Is the liberal college, like so many other institutions, in process of preparing its own epitaph?

Orozco, if you should ask him, would merely shrug his shoulders, I suppose. That is not my business, he would say, that is for the spectator to decide. Meanwhile he has gone on painting. The last half-panel is done, a strip above a recess opposite the delivery desk. The background is the red steel frame- work of a new building, in balanced horizontal and vertical planes. In the foreground a gigantesque workman lies stretched out at He is reading a book with a certain unsentimental critical quizzicalness. His figure breathes repose and strength. At any rate, you feel, this is not an epitaph.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1934/v10n09-feb-27-1934-NM.pdf