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ABSTRACT
This essay examines Frank Mechau's infamous mural Dangers of the Mail as an opportunity to theorize the force of memories contingent upon immediate sensual encounters that operate largely irrespective of actual historical occurrences. Through an analysis of public documents, archival material from the 1930s and early 2000s, and two separate tours of the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building in 2015 and 2016, we argue Mechau's Dangers of the Mail triggers a form of traumatic sense memory that positions audiences within a trauma economy in which sensation functions as epistemological grounding for political struggle.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Greg Dickinson, Catherine Palczewski, and the reviewers for their encouragement and insight.
Notes
1 We learned of the mural's existence through conversation with colleagues at the EPA who recounted a ritualistic practice of viewing the painting for new members of the agency. After promising to grant us access to the mural, our contacts, fearful of reprisal, eventually withdrew the offer. We discovered that while all of the murals technically remain open to the public, access requires scheduling a private tour with staff of the GSA. With the goal of employing American artists and securing democratic vitality through aesthetic invention, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration in 1935. The murals were commissioned for what was then simply called the New Post Office and granted an initial expenditure of $95,128 from the Section of Fine Arts administered by the Treasury Department from 1934–1943. See Murals at Ariel Rios Federal Building 1935–2006, US General Services Administration.
2 John Hazlehurst, “City Could Lay Claim to ‘Dangerous’ Work,” Colorado Springs Business Journal, June 8, 2015, http://www.csbj.com/2015/06/08/city-could-lay-claim-to-dangerous-work/.
3 Bulletin Number 1, Section of Painting and Sculpture, Public Works Branch, Procurement Division, Treasury Department, Washington, DC, 7.
4 “Artist Defends Indian Mural With Nudes,” Democrat and Chronicle, December 19, 1937.
5 Historians generally agree that American Indians engaged in scalping, although the question of whether Indians introduced scalping to white settlers or vice versa is still debated in historical circles. The primary data provides a number of accounts of American Indians using scalping as a ceremonial practice long before the introduction of white settlers; see James Axtell and William C. Sturtevart, “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping,” The William and Mary Quarterly 37 (1980): 451–72. There are a number of accounts that suggest white women were scalped by Indians, primarily in the pay structure for scalps, in which whites would pay Indians much more for a man's scalp than for a woman's or child's scalp. This pay structure suggests that scalping women was a possibility, although specific documented instances are rare. Additionally, the mural depicts American Indians scalping alive, naked white women, creating additional controversy. While most scalps were used as trophy displays to represent an enemy's death, and most historical accounts of scalping are those wherein the scalping took place after death, Georg Friederici found almost 50 scalping survivors, many of whom were white; See Georg Friederici, “Scalping in America,” Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the year Ending June 30, 1906 (Washington, DC, 1907): 423–38. Regardless of the fact that the practice of scalping did occur, Harry Galbraith forcefully objected to the inaccurate and sexualized depiction in Mechau's painting, writing in a letter to Postmaster General James Farely and California Senator Hiram Johnson that “never in history did a frontier man, woman or child take a scalping tamely,” quoted in Karal Ann Marling, Wall to Wall America: Post Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 251).
6 See John M. Coward, “Making Images on the Indian Frontier,” Journalism History 36 (2010): 150–9; Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in In American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994–January 7, 1995, ed. James R. Grossman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 7–66.
7 GSA Panel on Ariel Rios Murals, US General Services Administration, October 30, 2006. In total, six of the 22 murals were identified as contributing to a hostile workplace environment, including: Karl Free's French Huguenots in Florida, William C. Palmer's Covered Wagon Attacked by Indians, Ward Lockwood's Opening of the Southwest and Consolidation of the West, and Frank Mechau's Pony Express and Dangers of the Mail. However, while multiple murals were identified, there is reason to believe that the controversy centered around Dangers of the Mail. We heard from one person close to the lawsuit that the other murals were included purely to gain leverage for the removal of Dangers of the Mail. Furthermore, public comments, forums, and popular press writings on the controversy focus almost entirely on Dangers of the Mail.
8 Fern Shen, “History and the EPA's Big Picture; ’30s Mural Draws Stares and Critics,” Washington Post, November 20, 2000; A01.
9 Jane Goodall and Christopher Lee, eds., “Introduction,” in Trauma and Public Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–21. General Services Administration, Section 106 Consultation on the Ariel Rios Murals, April 13, 2007, 10.
10 “Indian Mural Is Defended,” Arizona Republic, October 14, 1937.
11 Kendall R. Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 208–23.
12 “Indian Mural Is Defended,” Arizona Republic, October 14, 1937.
13 “Stage Coach Nudes ‘Mild,’ Says Artist,” Des Moines Register, October 14, 1937.
14 Memory may be best understood as a particular assignment of imagination. According to Aristotle, “memory, even the memory of concepts, cannot exist apart from the imagery” (450a); Aristotle, “Memory and Recollection,” in Aristotle: De Sensu and de Memoria, tran. G.R.T. Ross (New York, Arno Press, 1973).
15 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24.
16 Bradford Vivian, “‘A Timeless Now’: Memory and Repetition,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (University of Alabama Press, 2004), 187–211.
17 Phillips, “The Failure of Memory,” 214.
18 See Kristen Hoerl, “Selective Amnesia and Racial Transcendence in News Coverage of President Obama's Inauguration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98 (2012): 178–202.
19 Plato, The Sophist, trans. W.S. Cobb (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990).
20 See Johanna Hartelius, “‘Remember-Signs’ Concentration Camp Souvenirs and the Mediation of Trauma,” Culture, Theory and Critique 54 (2013): 1–18; A. Susan Owen and Peter Ehrenhaus, “The Moore's Ford Lynching Reenactment: Affective Memory and Race Trauma,” Text and Performance Quarterly 34 (2014): 72–90.
21 Nathan Stormer, “A Likely Past: Abortion, Social Data, and a Collective Memory of Secrets in 1950s America,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2010): 343.
22 Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum,” Western Journal of Communication 69 (2005): 85–108.
23 See Brian Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat,” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 52–70; Brian L. Ott and Diane Marie Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 363–86.
24 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
25 Aristotle, “Memory and Recollection,” 450a.
26 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
27 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 1.
28 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (New York: Continuum, 2005), 26.
29 Bennett, Empathic Vision, 35.
30 Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2010).
31 Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 271–94.
32 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in US Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm’,” Cultural Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 45.
33 Shana Greenberg, Comment on Ariel Rios Mural, December 16, 2005. These public comments are archived by the Art in Architecture and Fine Arts Division of the General Services Administration and are available upon request to view in-person at their offices in Washington, DC. All comments are printed as they originally appeared.
34 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 54.
35 Grady Henley, Letter for Public Comment, August 13, 2006.
36 Roger E. Carlton, Letter for Public Comment, October 25, 2005.
37 Ibid.
38 Timothy Hinds, Letter for Public Comment, October 24, 2005.
39 Ekaterina V. Haskins, “‘Put Your Stamp on History’: The USPS Commemorative Program Celebrate the Century and Postmodern Collective Memory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 13.
40 Vivien Green Fryd, Art & Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
41 Lena Bommelyn-Enrolled, Letter for Public Comment, October 26, 2006.
42 “Talking Points Regarding the Controversy over six Historic Murals in the Ariel Rios Building,” August 16, 2007.
43 Charles W. Hedrick Jr., History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), xiii.
44 Tamar Katriel, “Sites of Memory: Discourses of the Past in Israeli Pioneering Settlement Museums,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 10.
45 Although Dangers of the Mail is accessible to the public, logistical obstacles pose considerable limitations that have been convenient for the government in mitigating the controversy; Stephen Schwartz, “EPA vs. WPA; The New Left Battles the Old Left over Murals in Washington,” The Weekly Standard, December 18, 2000, 36.
46 Dickinson, Blair, and Ott, Places of Public Memory, 27.
47 For a description of all of the murals see, https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/gsa-properties/visiting-public-buildings/william-jefferson-clinton-federal-building/whats-inside/wheres-the-art.
48 Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 27–47.
49 See Hariman and Lucaites, “Public Identity.”
50 See Hedrick, History and Silence.
51 Michael W. Gold, Letter for Public Comment, no date.
52 Caleb Bach, “A Bold Brush Beyond Battles,” Americas (English trans) 56 (2004): 40–7.
53 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
54 Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010).
55 Marling, Wall to Wall America, 256.
56 “Indian Mural Is Defended,” Arizona Republic, October 14, 1937.
57 David V. Felts, “Second Thoughts,” The Decatur Herald, September 23, 1937.
58 Johanna Fassl and Caroline Wiedmer, “Rouge Memories: Reflections on Trauma, Art, and Technology,” intervalla 2 (2014): 6, https://www.fus.edu/intervalla/volume-2-trauma-abstraction-and-creativity/rogue-memories-reflections-on-trauma-art-and-technology.
59 Marling, Wall to Wall, 254.
60 General Services Administration, Section 106 Consultation on the Ariel Rios Murals, April 13, 2007, 24.
61 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
62 Brian Massumi, ed., A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Routledge, 2002).
63 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2–3.
64 Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
65 “The Question Is … What Became of the Ladies’ Clothing,” Clovis New Mexico Evening News-Journal, September 18, 1937.
66 Dana L. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the <Clash of Civilizations> in the Imagery of the US War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 285–306.
67 Chris Shott, “Mural Dilemma,” Washington City Paper, August 26—September 1, 2005.
68 GSA Panel on Ariel Rios Murals, US General Services Administration, October 30, 2006, 26.
69 General Services Administration, Section 106 Consultation on the Ariel Rios Murals, April 13, 2007, 8.
70 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), xxix–xxx.
71 See Ekaterina Haskins, “Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37 (2007): 401–22.
72 Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 2007).
73 General Services Administration, Section 106 Consultation on the Ariel Rios Murals, April 13, 2007, 6.
74 Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory, eds. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 13.
75 Cathy Caruth, “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 181.
76 Geoffrey Hartman, “Trauma Within the Limits of Literature,” European Journal of English Studies 7 (2003): 257–74.
77 Bennett, Empathic Vision, 5, emphasis in the original; Irwin Faulkner, Letter for Public Comment, August 13, 2006.
78 This is our rhetorically oriented description of “trauma economies,” but it shares similarities with the work Erica Caple James; Erica Caple James, “The Political Economy of ‘Trauma’ in Haiti in the Democratic Era of Insecurity,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28 (2004): 127–49.
79 Grady Henley, Letter for Public Comment, August 13, 2006.
80 General Services Administration, Section 106 Consultation on the Ariel Rios Murals, April 13, 2007, 43.
81 Tyler Estep, “Gwinnett Judge Suspended after Posts about Confederate Monuments,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, August 15, 2017, http://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/gwinnett-judge-suspended-after-posts-about-confederate-monuments/0BhU3WXwawztILcn95ipqJ/.