The Division of Homeland Safety posted John Gast’s 1872 portray “American Progress” (screenshot Hyperallergic, by way of X)
Prussian painter John Gast’s 1872 composition “American Progress,” now held by the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, isn’t superb. An unsubtle celebration of Manifest Future, the Nineteenth-century American mania for westward enlargement on the expense of Indigenous peoples, Gast’s portray includes a zaftig blonde-haired and blue-eyed avatar of Progress aloft within the sky, transferring from a civilized east of ships, locomotives, and telegraph traces in the direction of a wild west. White settlers in Conestoga wagons and stagecoaches comply with her; a bunch of horse-bound Indigenous folks flees into the finality of darkness in the direction of the dusky horizon behind her. Past the horrific politics, the angle is amateurish and the sense of coloration awkward, to not point out that the wonky proportions of the eponymous toga-clad incarnation of Progress herself are extra a signifier of magnificence than an precise instance of it. Contemplating the portray’s relative lack of technical talent and its deserved disregard throughout the American creative canon, there have to be some purpose past aesthetics that, on July 23, the social media administrators on the Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) noticed match to publish the portray on retailers reminiscent of Fb together with the caption: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
The identical yr that Gast completed “American Progress,” a contingent of 130 troopers of the fifth Calvary Regiment arrived at Skeleton Collapse Arizona’s Salt River Canyon, the place a bunch of Yavapai folks had been sheltering. In beneath an hour, the military slaughtered virtually 100 of the Yavapai, together with many ladies and kids. Inside the ugly historical past of the so-called American Indian Wars — from the Puritans perpetrating what a contemporaneous historian referred to as a “great and notable slaughter” of the Nipmuc Indigenous folks in Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts in 1676 to native White settlers “consummat[ing] a most inhuman slaughter” towards the Nasomah folks in Randolph, Oregon in 1854 — the bloody occasions at Skeleton Cave can fade into the background. For whereas the stylized Indigenous folks of Gast’s composition are rendered in crimson and black paint on canvas, the precise story of genocide on the frontier was coloured in spilled blood and burnt flesh. As Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane Jr. keep of their essay in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (1992), “there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide … anywhere in the annals of human history.” Most references and issues of Gast’s portray are illustrative of Stiffarm’s level — nearly all of students would admit that “American Progress” is an unsightly little bit of colonial propaganda, making the DHS’s extolling of the portray much more ominous.
The Division of Homeland Safety additionally posted Morgan Weistling’s 2020 portray “A Prayer for a New Life” (screenshot Hyperallergic, by way of X)
The social media imbroglio round Gast’s portray isn’t the one controversy that DHS has generated in current weeks. On July 14, it posted the schmaltzy “A Prayer for a New Life” (2020) by modern painter Morgan Weistling, beneath the wrong and chilling title “A New Life in a New Land.” It’s a image of a younger settler couple on the frontier, surrounded by provisions inside their Conestoga wagon, cradling their new child (White) toddler as a craggy western vista absent of any pesky Indigenous folks yawns out within the background. DHS’s caption of Weistling’s portray reads “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage”; the weird double-H capitalization led some commentators to argue that the publish could be a canine whistle for the White supremacist code of “HH” for “Heil Hitler.” Whether or not or not that facet of the publish was intentional, its presentation of “New Life in a New Land” itself is supposed to be understood in the obvious method. No matter group of individuals are manning the social media feeds at DHS (and there are greater than sufficient creepy weirdos gestated within the fever-dream of on-line alt-right meme communicate who match the profile) the message is evident: Genocide of Indigenous folks was no huge deal, modern (White) People needn’t really feel ashamed about Manifest Future, and Trump’s DHS is greater than prepared to enact related insurance policies right this moment.
To Weistling’s credit score, he has emphasised that the publish was made with out his approval, whereas the property of Thomas Kinkade, whose work was utilized in the same publish, has additionally disavowed the DHS’s appropriation of his work. Regardless of the former’s intentions might have been, nonetheless, his portray can be not good — however it’s attention-grabbing, partly as a result of its operative mode considerations a violence of invisibility. Not like Gast’s portray, with its fleeing Indigenous warriors, this idealized Western frontier is really a virgin land, absent of individuals; colonists might thus purchase it with out guilt.
Emanuel Leutze, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (1861), mural, 20 x 30 ft (6.1 x 9.1 m), on view at the USA Capitol in Washington, DC (photograph public area by way of Wikimedia Commons)
“A Prayer for a New Life” evokes, albeit in a less grandiose manner, German-American painter Emanuel Leutze’s massive patriotic mural “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” which was unveiled in 1861 in Congress. In that composition, the Western frontier is settled by hardy males in coonskin caps and girls in bonnets touring on Conestoga wagons by a rugged and empty panorama the place there are not any Indigenous folks to be discovered. Three years after Leutze’s work was put in, the third Colorado Cavalry might have murdered as many as 600 Cheyenne and Arapaho folks, the overwhelming majority of them girls and kids. In a second of devastating irony, throughout congressional testimony in regards to the bloodbath in 1864, each witnesses and perpetrators would have walked by “Westward the Court of Empire Takes Its Way” as they entered the chamber. Throughout stated testimony, a witness named John Smith confessed to seeing “women cut all to pieces … with knives; scalped; their brains knocked out,” whereas reporter Robert Bent of the New York Tribune wrote that he noticed a lady “cut open, with an unborn child lying by her side,” whereas different journalists recorded Indigenous youngsters getting used for goal follow or severed physique components being collected by troopers to be worn as jewellery. The Home committee condemned the troopers, however no fees had been introduced. Till lately, some memorials nonetheless had the temerity to name the Sand Creek Bloodbath a “battle.”
Mere a long time later, American Manifest Future would supply eerie parallels to Nazi Lebensraum throughout the Atlantic. James Q. Whitman, in Hitler’s American Mannequin: The USA and the Making of Nazi Race Legislation (2017), notes that regardless of Nazi misgivings about supposed Yankee cultural decadence, “in Mein Kampf Hitler praised America as nothing less than ‘the one state’ that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order of the kind the Nuremberg Laws were intended to establish”; certainly, the fascist code was partly impressed by Jim Crow and anti-Indigenous laws. Hitler himself as soon as stated, “One thing the Americans have and which we lack … is the sense of vast open spaces.” Timothy D. Snyder quotes that line in Black Earth: The Holocaust as Historical past and Warning (2015), through which he describes how the heretofore comparatively middling European colonial energy of Germany drew from the American instance of genocide towards Indigenous folks as a mannequin for a way Jews, Roma, and Slavs had been to be handled within the east. “Where was Germany’s frontier,” writes Snyder, “its Manifest Destiny?” Because the Nazis blitzed into jap Europe throughout Operation Barbarossa, Snyder argues, they had been partly impressed by the precise kind of romanticized rhetoric that one sees within the novels of Karl Might, a German who wrote standard Westerns when Hitler was a boy, or certainly within the sort of imagery represented by a Gast or a Leutze.
Or, for that matter, a Werner Peiner. A professor on the Düsseldorf Artwork Academy and an formally sanctioned painter of the Third Reich, Peiner exulted within the kind of sentimental vistas that recall American Nineteenth-century artwork of western enlargement. “German Soil,” painted in 1940 and now owned by the Museum Würth in Künzelsau, Germany, depicts a Teutonic farmer tilling his fields of orderly wheat, transferring in the direction of a blackening horizon within the distance, his fields bathed in an eerie, immanent mild. The work’s advocacy for lebensraum is extra delicate than an out-and-out propaganda piece, such because the 1939 poster encouraging ethnic Germans to settle in lately conquered areas in Czechoslovakia and Poland, a swastika-emblazoned knight’s defend superimposed over these territories. Quite, as with the violence of invisibility in Leutze’s work, there’s a conceit of believable deniability for Peiner. In composition, the latter is superior to each Gast and Leutze, however he evokes the identical feeling of providential possession over land itself, of the supposed significance of blood and soil. Greater than only a bucolic pastoral, it ought to be famous that with the sunshine setting behind the farmer, it appears clear that Peiner’s determine is transferring — because the Reich itself did — in the direction of the east.
Nazi artwork additionally predictably traded within the enshrinement of the normative household unit as absolutely as Weistling’s depiction of the settler couple does (or that’s not less than the clear ideological intent of the DHS’s posting of the latter). Adolf Wessel, incessantly exhibited within the state-sanctioned Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, does as a lot in his 1939 “Kalenberg Peasant Family,” which presents three generations of a stolid rural Aryan household: a mom, father, grandmother, and three youngsters who with grim dedication stand in for the way forward for Hitler’s state, the identical connection between blood and soil made by the artists of American Manifest Future. Because the Nazi theorist Richard Walther Darré claimed, the “German soul with its warmth is rooted in its agriculture and in a real sense always grew out of it.” Citizenship is outlined thus not by commitments, however by the land itself, or as Vice President JD Vance stated at a July 5 speech on the conservative Claremont Institute, citizenship “is not just an idea,” however quite one thing outlined by being from a “particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and a way of life.”
Leopold Schmutzler, “Working maidens returning from the field” (c. 1940), oil on canvas, held on the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin (photograph public area by way of Wikimedia Commons)
Certainly, conflations of an (nameless and invented) particular person with the regime incessantly took on an erotic forged, as if endorsing the propagation of an outlined racial kind. Look no additional than the uncovered leg of Gast’s Progress or Leopold Schmutzler’s circa 1940 “Working Maidens” (held at Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin) whereby 4 hale and wholesome, coquettish and shapely Teutonic peasant girls stroll smiling by a discipline — which was introduced at Munich’s Nice German Artwork Exhibition solely a yr after German tanks crossed into Poland to develop the “living room” of the nation. Sexualization of White supremacist tropes is more and more mainstream right this moment, as with the controversial American Eagle advert that includes blonde-haired and blue-eyed actress Sydney Sweeney making a homophonic pun on her “great jeans,” which, even when unintentional, speaks to the best way through which fascism has develop into fashionable.
People might blanch at comparisons of the multi-century strategy of genocide of Indigenous folks to European examples, even whereas historian David E. Stannard in American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (1993) described the previous because the “worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed … consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people,” however it’s an uncomfortable actuality. The DHS posts could also be hokum and kitsch, pablum and camp, nevertheless it additionally evidences a really harmful present state of affairs, significantly because the finances for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), already working a number of focus camps all through the USA, will improve to bigger than the militaries of Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Iran, and Spain. This isn’t even to say the US’s lively help of Israel’s present genocide and famine in Gaza.
In such a context, resistance have to be as a lot aesthetic as materials. 4 years in the past, when many pundits thought that Trump’s return was unlikely, Native-American artist Charles Hilliard revised Gast’s “American Progress” within the 2021 composition “Reversing Manifest Destiny.” Right here, the incarnation of Liberty has been changed with the sacred Lakota determine of the White Buffalo Calf Girl, brown-skinned with lengthy, flowing black hair, transferring from a vivid West in the direction of a pollution-darkened, smoggy east whose horizon is punctuated with belching exhaust, bringing together with her Indigenous warriors and bison because the continent’s ecological devastation is erased behind her. A fantasy, in fact — there are not any simple escapes from our brutal historical past. However it’s an alternate imaginative and prescient to the long run drawn by the dual specters of genocide and ecocide. The potential of making a greater world first necessitates dreaming it.
