When Paul Bunyan Got Cancelled
The GOP looked at a folklore map and saw Red.
The map was intended as a bold celebration of America in the aftermath of victory in World War II - part of the effort to strengthen the nation at home and abroad.
During World War II, the well-known Brooklyn artist William Gropper volunteered his services to the Treasury Department, illustrating posters -winning him a citation and the personal thanks of President Roosevelt.
In 1946, Associated American Artists published an inexpensive reproduction of "William Gropper’s America: Its Folklore," a painting he had completed the previous year. It was widely circulated throughout the country in schools and libraries.
From 1946 to 1953 the U.S. Department of State distributed more than 1,700 copies of it around the world, as part of an effort to circulate "facts and solidly documented explanations of the United States."
But this map fell from grace in 1953, when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer Roy Cohn found it in State Department libraries abroad and labeled Gropper one of the “fringe supporters and sympathizers” of Communism whose works had infected the State Department. ~ P.J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography
Gropper arrived on Capitol Hill looking “as rumpled as the sofa in front of the television set,” as one commentator observed. Surrounded by Klieg lights, television cameras, police, and press, his interrogation began simply, with chief counsel Cohn asking, “Are you a member of the Communist Party?”
As far as Cohn and McCarthy were concerned, they already knew the answer. But after the artist invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer so as not to bear witness against himself, Cohn pressed:
Mr. Cohn: Are you the William Gropper who has prepared various maps?
Mr. Gropper: I don’t understand that question. Prepared various maps?
Mr. Cohn: Did you prepare a map entitled “America, Its Folklore”?
Mr. Gropper: Have you got the map here?
Mr. Cohn: No; I don’t have the map here. Did you prepare a map entitled “America, Its Folklore”?
Mr. Gropper: I painted a map on American folklore, yes.
Gropper explained that he had received an advance from Associated American Artists, but that “no royalties came in.” Cohn wanted to know if part of Gropper’s advance had supported Communist causes. Again, Gropper pleaded the Fifth Amendment.
When Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri asked the painter if an individual “could be a member of the Communist party and at the same time be a good, loyal American,” Gropper demurred: “I would rather talk about my field, where I am equipped. I don’t understand these things.”
Moments later, Gropper tried to distance himself further from his celebrated pictorial map, explaining, “I don’t even make maps. I am a painter.”
No matter that Gropper had, in fact, tried his hand at mapmaking; no matter that Gropper was not, in fact, a Communist. The damage was done. The next day, the left-leaning, 55-year-old Jewish artist from Brooklyn found his name on the front page of national and local newspapers.
The message sent down from McCarthy’s perch in the Senate was clear: William Gropper was a Red. His map was un-American. ~ A Popular ’40s Map of American Folklore Was Destroyed by Fears of Communism
Title: William Gropper's America, its folklore.
Artist: William Gropper
Created / Published: New York : Associated American Artists
Date: 1946
Archive: Library of Congress 2011592193
Today's GOP surely would ban the map from school libraries. John Henry looks angry like he wants reparations, and The Sissy From the Hardscrabble County Rock Quarries is obviously gender fluid.
That's an amazing bit of history that needs to be shared, especially at a time when we have lunatics like Republicans Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene replicating these insane witch hunt distractions.