The Epic of American Civilization Murals, Baker Library, Dartmouth College

About this property

The Epic of American Civilization is a mural by the social realist painter José Clemente Orozco. It is located in the basement reading room of the Baker Memorial Library on the campus of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The mural, painted between 1932 and 1934, consists of a series of 24 fresco panels, whose principal themes are the impact of both indigenous Native Americans and European colonists on North America, and the impact of war (particularly the Mexican Civil War and the First World War) and rapid industrialization on the human spirit. The mural was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2013. Orozco painted the mural during the same time his fellow muralist, Diego Rivera, was working on his murals at the Rockefeller Center in New York. But while Rivera's portrait of Lenin led to his mural being painted over, Orozco was given full political freedom to paint as he chose. His images offended a group of Dartmouth parents who called themselves the Boston Mothers. "We would be everlastingly grateful to you," the mothers wrote to college president Ernest Hopkins, "if the pictures could be destroyed." Another letter to Hopkins was more blunt: "Orozco has shouted forth in paint the Communist Manifesto!" But Hopkins, a lifelong Republican, defended Orozco's right to paint as he chose. "There are 100% Americans who have objected to the fact that we employed a Mexican to do this work," Hopkins wrote to the mothers, "but I have never believed that art could be made either racial or national." Responding to concerns that Orozco's imagery was not "nice", Hopkins wrote, "if that be a criterion of judgment many of the great works of the medieval masters would have to be removed from the Louvre." In addition to the letter writing campaign, four satirical murals were painted as a direct response to the Orozco murals from 1938 to 1939 in the basement of the Class of 1953 Commons. This second set of murals depicts the foundation of Dartmouth College, and caricatures of Native Americans, including those related to education and alcohol. This second set of murals were moved off-site to an art storage facility in 2018.

Location

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Grafton County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Grafton County.

More historic places in New Hampshire

Browse all historic places in New Hampshire.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

New Hampshire history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.