DETOURS

Adam Monahan So Marsh, I don't know if people at home know this, but sometimes our show can be a bit of a lightning rod in terms of covering controversial topics. Would you agree?

Marsha Bemko 100%.

Adam Monahan That's my boss, Marsha Bemko.

Marsha Bemko I'd agree with that so much that there are things we steer clear of because even by airing certain things, people assume we have a position on that, and we don't.

Adam Monahan There have been many, many controversial items on GBH's Antiques Roadshow, things that are controversial because of what they are.

Soundbite from the show Despite the controversy and the comments that J. K. Rowling made regarding trans people, that book still...

Adam Monahan Who owns them? How they got it?

Soundbite from the show After the Japanese were defeated, the antique sellers in Korea, many of them were the fellows who had been digging the graves during the '30s and '40s.

Adam Monahan Or just the item's history.

Soundbite from the show And because of that, when these do come up for sale, there is often offense taken, that we are putting a price on something that somebody created in those types of circumstances.

Marsha Bemko We're just trying to state the facts, and people, even if we state the facts, that can be so controversial for some people. It's different for different people.

Adam Monahan Yeah, it's different for different people, and not only that, there's only so much we can go into in three to five minutes. One of the great things about this podcast is we have more than three to five minutes to dig into some of those controversial items. Today, we're talking about an item, a piece of art that's controversial because of the bigger picture. Literally.

What came on our show back in 2007 was a sketch that was a study for an enormous mural, and in that larger work lurks a controversy that continues to this day. I am Adam Monahan, a producer with GBH's Antiques Roadshow, and this is Detours. Today, seeing the bigger picture.

The bigger picture in this story is Thomas Hart Benton's Indiana murals, made for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, now on display at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Show appraiser You came up with the idea of a cycle that represented the history of industry in Indiana and the history of culture in Indiana. This piece that you researched and found out that this drawing represents a figure, and it's actually panel number 10.

Adam Monahan But, there's a controversy behind it. Do you remember that one?

Marsha Bemko I do. I think that controversy is so amplified now, especially in the times we're in, that those murals that are in Indiana University are troublesome to the students who see them.

Adam Monahan I went to Indiana to see the mural for myself, learn more about its history and ask students what they think about it.

Do you see anything in that picture yet that's controversial?

Student Yeah.

Adam Monahan Yeah. Now, this is the part which makes it hard for people that they don't like.

Student Oh, yeah, no, I could see why. Yeah.

Adam Monahan In the background here, what do you see?

Student That would be the Klan.

Adam Monahan The Klan. Benton fought to include the Ku Klux Klan in his mural about the history of Indiana, even though Indiana may have preferred to put that part of their history in the rearview mirror.

Kathleen Harwood He demanded a kind of complete freedom to depict whatever he wanted to depict.

Adam Monahan The state needed an exhibit for the Chicago World's Fair, and they needed it quickly. They turned to Thomas Hart Benton, who had just finished a mural for the new school in New York. Here's Kathleen Harwood, the one who appraised the drawing on our show back in 2007

Kathleen Harwood In brief, he was born in Missouri. His father was a well-known politician, so he was kind of exposed to public life from the time he was a young boy. He has a reputation for his paintings being very sort of rural, and there might be a tendency to think of him as somebody who was rather provincial. But in actual fact, he took an interest in art from an early age. He studied in a number of well-known places where one might. He went to Europe, he spent a lot of time in New York. He was a very educated artist.

Adam Monahan But there was one issue.

Jim Madison He was not a Hoosier. He was from Missouri, and the state legislature and a lot of other people in India said, "Whoa, wait. We got a foreigner in here to paint the history of our state for the exhibition of 1933?"

Adam Monahan Jim Madison is an Indiana historian and professor emeritus at Indiana University. Hoosiers, if you don't know, is the name for people from Indiana. The idea of importing an artist to depict their great state offended many Hoosiers, but Benton was an established mural painter, and the Indiana commissioners were sure he could paint a huge mural on their tight timeline. So despite his lack of ties to Indiana, the state legislature decided Benton was the best person for the job.

He had had six months or so to cover about 230 feet of paneling with the important history of Indiana. That's more than half a football field of paintings. The officials that commissioned him wanted the mural to include things like the state's contributions to industry and its basketball history and its park service, but Benton wanted to paint all of Indiana's history, not just what put the state in a good light.

Jim Madison Benton's message here was, this is not about great men. This is about ordinary people, ordinary Hoosiers. And you can see that in all the panels, people doing good things and people doing not so good things, because Benton challenged the standard view of history in the 1930s. But also today, that history should tell happy stories, that history should give us comfort, that we create myths about our past that give us comfort today. And so, he puts in the murals very happy stories and not so happy stories. Ambiguities, questioning.

Adam Monahan Benton traveled all over Indiana, making hundreds of drawings to use as references for his mural.

Jim Madison Most of them are gone because he did the sketches on really cheap paper, but yet the IU Art Museum here has several dozen of the original sketches. Some of them have coffee stains on them, and I've heard that there's tobacco juice on one or two of them, and he writes maps on them. They're just working documents.

Adam Monahan One sketch would wind up on our show, but many others ended up in the collection of the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. I went there to see them and talk with Emma Foltz, the museum's registrar.

Emma Foltz These, the sketches, are part of the art museum's permanent collection, and I think it's really nice. You can see his thought process through them, you can see what elements he kept for the murals and what elements he changed.

Adam Monahan Most of the sketches are individual figures or parts of figures, heads or hands or things like that. But there are also sketches that are for placement, drawings of the panels or the mural as a whole that show where some of those figures will be in the final piece.

Emma Foltz He did his studies to figure out what he wanted the individual figures to look like, what their features looked like, and then he would do a sketch kind of mapping out the order that they would go in. And then, something like this, where he has a rough sketch over which he puts a grid with the measurements, which I think is lovely, of the different sections labeled on there, and the scale that the drawing is. And then he used it to do the actual painting.

Adam Monahan One of the places he sketched was an integrated city hospital in Indianapolis.

Jim Madison It was a public hospital, a charity hospital. It was a good hospital, but it was a free hospital for people who could not pay.

Adam Monahan The city hospital is the subject for the work that appeared on our show. It's a line drawn of a little girl sitting up in a simple metal hospital bed. She has a bandage on her arm, a tray of food on her knees, and a doll peeping out from behind her.

Kathleen Harwood It is a Benton drawing, and it's a really wonderful Benton drawing. He's known as an American Regionalist painter, primarily. The drawings are not quite as well known as the paintings. There are these very sort of active sinewy figures in a lot of the paintings. There are landscapes that are very, very distinctive. He was also known as a mural painter. He painted a very famous mural in New York City at the New School for Social Research, and he painted very, very well known murals that are in the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City.

Adam Monahan Kathleen knew exactly what she was looking at, even if she hadn't seen one before in her many years as a roadshow appraiser. And how long have you been with us?

Kathleen Harwood I have been with you since the very first show you made in Concord, Massachusetts in 19..., Adam, help me.

Adam Monahan I think it was '96 and it began airing in '97, is what...

Kathleen Harwood Okay. That's how long I have been with Antiques Roadshow.

Adam Monahan We've been doing the show now for 27 seasons. How many times have you seen an original work by Thomas Hart Benton?

Kathleen Harwood I would have to say that this is the one and only, to the best of my recollection. He was a pretty prolific draftsman, so it would not have been shocking to have seen other Benton drawings, but it's not an everyday occurrence for sure.

Adam Monahan Kathleen appraised the drawing for $12,000 to $18,000. Since then, the value has trended down to $6,000 to 8,000. But our guest, Gina, has no intentions of selling it.

Gina I thought about, in the beginning, I thought, "Should I sell it? I don't want to." I really enjoy having that, being an artist, being an art history lover.

Adam Monahan It was somewhat of a miracle that the sketch had made it to Gina at all.

Gina My father-in-law worked for a moving company, and so he packed all the stuff up in the truck. And the owner said, "Yeah, I'm going to throw away all this." And my father-in-law said, "Hey, these are nice frames. I'll take these."

Adam Monahan One of the frames held the Benton drawing, but nobody knew that. The drawing was tucked away behind an impressionist print by Monet or Renoir. The in-laws hung that print and the other one in the other frame in their house for a while, and then eventually, stashed them both away in their attic. When Gina was helping them clean their attic out, she found the frame prints and asked if she could have them.

Gina I liked the Monet and the Renoir. Those were kind of my, I mean, I studied art and I just liked them. And I kept them on my walls probably for 10 years without knowing. And then I wanted to update the frames, and that's when I saw these other original drawings underneath.

Adam Monahan Gina's in-laws had no idea the Benton drawing was there, and Gina doesn't know how it came to be in that pile of trash her father-in-law picked them out of. She also doesn't know how the drawing was framed or who owned it before. But she did some digging to find out what she could.

Gina It was 1994 when I first found it. So I started calling galleries, local galleries like art shops. "Hey, do you know of any artist named Benton?" That's all I knew what to do. And I was getting some nos, and then I called one and the guy said, "Oh, well, there's a famous guy, Thomas Hart Benton, but I'm sure it's not him." So once I got a name, I thought, "Okay, I'm going to walk to the library and look at some books." And that's what we did before the internet.

Adam Monahan It's amazing to think that's how we used to live. We had a gigantic encyclopedia that was volumes and volumes. If you were lucky, you had that in your house and you could go do it. Otherwise, you always had to go to the library and break it out. That's amazing. So what did you find out about him and this mural?

Gina Well, I mean, there are huge, beautiful colored books on Thomas Hart Benton. I saw these books. I started just looking through and reading, and I saw a picture of the mural panel that this is a study for, and it's exactly how it's drawn. So it was right there in color.

Adam Monahan When Gina got tickets to our show in Baltimore in 2006, she knew this drawing would be coming with her.

Gina We have a lot of things around the house we tagged along, but I specifically was coming for that. I wanted to know for more information on it, and I was excited. And I knew it was going to be something because I knew that panel in the mural is controversial, and it's been in the news a lot.

Adam Monahan Gina's drawing was a sketch for the mural's most controversial panel. It's called Cultural Panel 10. Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press. Benton's panels are busy. This one shows a journalist typing on a typewriter, a printing press and a printer, and a pair of men planting a tree in the foreground. The center shows the hospital scene with Gina's girl in the bed, and a circus scene with a ringleader and an acrobat. In the upper left, firefighters are putting out a fire. There are two Made in Indiana planes at the very top, and tucked in next to the circus, above the hospital is a church, and a group in white robes carrying an American flag and standing before a burning cross.

Jim Madison Those are the two great symbols.

Adam Monahan Yeah.

Jim Madison The burning cross, which is Christianity, actually Protestantism, because the Klan's chief enemy in Indiana in the '20s were Catholics. Hard to believe today, but true. And the American flag, because they were true patriots, they believed. And so, the Klan in Indiana, again and again said, "We are 100% Americans because we are Protestant, Methodist, Baptist, etc. We are White and we are native born. Born in America. That makes us 100% American. All those other people, Catholics, Jews, African Americans, immigrants, not 100% American. Maybe never will be."

Adam Monahan Why on earth did Benton want to put a burning cross and the Ku Klux Klan in a painting representing Indiana history? We'll get into that after the break.

For Benton, the history of the Klan, which would've been very recent history in 1933, was essential to the story of Indiana. Here's Jim Madison, IU professor, and Indiana historian.

Jim Madison Well, Benton knew, and anyone knew in 1933 that the Ku Klux Klan had risen to power in Indiana in the early mid-1920s. In fact, pretty much controlled the state. In the elections of 1924, the governor elected was a Klan member, or sympathizer, the worst governor in Indiana's history, in my opinion. And so were a majority of the members of the state legislature. Many mayors, town officials and others were Klan members. And this is not just politics, though, that's very important because the Klan might have done really serious damage with its political control. But the Klan also had members across the state.

These are not rubes, these are not rednecks as they're stereotyped sometimes. These were businessmen, church, women, teachers, lawyers, doctors, joined the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the early 1920s. And they did because they believed they were 100% American and that those who were not 100% Americans were threatening America. They were tearing down America. They were causing all kinds of problems that were destroying the goodness of America.

Adam Monahan In the 1920s, the Klan was so prominent that its leader, D. C. Stephenson, boasted, not inaccurately, that he was the law in Indiana. According to some estimates, membership in the Klan might have risen to as much as a third of White men in the state. The Indiana Klan declined slowly in the later half of the '20s, then precipitously after D. C. Stephenson was convicted of second degree murder after a woman he kidnapped and raped died shortly after.

He was denied a pardon by the governor he helped get elected, so he began talking to the press. Stephenson revealed that nearly half of the state assembly were members of the KKK. Benton wanted this history in his mural. The Indiana State legislators did not. So while he was going around sketching and then painting the mural, Benton was also constantly entertaining important Hoosiers to keep them on his side so he could paint what he wanted.

Jim Madison He knew there would be controversy. He was very sophisticated in dealing with those who questioned or even opposed this project. And so, he had a hotel room in Indianapolis where he stayed, and he'd have every afternoon, late afternoon, what he called the Children's Hour, where he'd invite people like Richard Lieber and Paul McNutt, the governor, and members of the legislature, members of the press, to come for cocktails.

Now, this is the time of prohibition, so it's wrong. It's illegal. But he served not just any old whiskey, he served whiskey from Brown County, which is just to the east of here. It's a local delicacy in the 1930s, and he served Brown County Hoosier whiskey to these Indiana folks who he wanted to win over to his side. And he talked.

Adam Monahan And he may have shown them sketches that lay out the composition of the murals as a whole, like the one in the collection at Indiana University.

And oh, oh my goodness, here's our girl in the hospital bed. So this is the panel, and he's... Wow, awesome. So here's the girl in the hospital bed. And behind her, we don't have the full representation of the Klan, but he's got a cross and there's a figure looming, and you can't tell they're in robes yet. So, I wonder if this is at a point where he's told anybody. I wonder if he's even shown this to the people who are decision makers.

Emma Foltz Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. If you look at this and you don't know what the final composition is going to be, behind the girl in the hospital bed, there's a cross, there's a figure and kind of the rough outline of a crowd, but it's very unclear. They're next to a church. If you're looking at this with no context, you'd think, "Oh, it's just people outside of a church." But obviously, we know what the final composition actually is.

Adam Monahan Benton eventually did unveil the entirety of the murals to the decision makers of Indiana, and they were incredibly popular at the Chicago World's Fair. Part of what made Benton well known was having this mural on such a big stage. But after the fair, nobody really knew what to do with over 200 feet of massive paintings filled with early settlers, steel workers, Native Americans, and of course, a hate group looming over an integrated hospital. They're what we call ephemera, things that were only meant for short-term use. But the president of Indiana University knew about these paintings and decided to find a place for them in Bloomington.

Jim Madison It's here because of the young man who became president of Indiana University in the late 1930s, Herman B Wells. He was a native Hoosier, a very sophisticated, smart guy. Dr. Wells built this university, really made it a world-class university in his term as president. And among the many things he did was to recognize the significance of these murals. And he tracked them down. He learned they were at the Indiana State fairgrounds in Indianapolis in some horse barn in storage. Dr. Wells found them there, and he went to see the governor, a good friend of his, and he said, "We're building a new auditorium at Indiana University and we have plenty of space. We'd like to have the Benton murals."

And the governor said, "Sure, they're yours," Because he didn't want them. They didn't want them at the state fairgrounds, they were taking up immense amounts of space. And so the new auditorium opened in 1941 with the Benton murals in the entryway, and it was a brilliant display of art, of culture, of the history of Indiana.

Adam Monahan Most of the panels are in that auditorium. Some others are in the cinema, a few have been lost, and two panels, including the one with the Klan and the little girl in the hospital bed are displayed in Woodburn Hall, room 100. Over the years, students have looked up at that panel while they're taking algebra or freshman writing and seen the Klan hovering above them. Some have decided to do something about what they see as a celebration of racism, and news outlets have picked up on the controversy.

Newsreel Since the murals were moved to Indiana University in the 1940s, students have occasionally launched protests. At an emotional meeting with Chancellor Sharon Brem earlier this month, about three dozen students voiced their anger.

Jim Madison That question has been going on for decades. There was a big study in 1990, I think. There was a big study in 2002, I was part of that study that went through all of this. We'd made a video to use to show students. We put up an exhibit in the foyer here to help educate students what this mural meant. It was helpful. It worked for a while, but then, when Charlottesville came along in 2017 and other things were happening out there in the world, that all came into this classroom. It came right into this classroom and right into this mural. And so, students began to say, "We don't want to look at that."

Newsreel The petition hopes to garner 1,000 signatures before it can be presented to President Michael McRobbie and the IU Board of Trustees. This is the mural that is bounded on the wall in the classroom.

Adam Monahan Students of all backgrounds didn't like seeing the Klansmen gathered up there in the mural.

Jim Madison Even students who aren't Jewish or Catholic or African American or immigrants, it makes Americans uncomfortable.

Adam Monahan Yeah.

Jim Madison And it therefore can interfere with education. And that was the argument, for the decision was made a few years ago, to close this classroom. This classroom is no longer used as a big lecture hall because the panel with the Klan makes too many students uncomfortable and distracts them.

Newsreel Still, students at Indiana University objected to the images, and the lecture hall where the offending panel is located is no longer used.

Adam Monahan Now, the classroom is only used for special events and lectures that have to do specifically with the material the mural presents, or the mural itself. But Jim worries that keeping the mural out of the public view makes it less likely that students will engage with the full history of Indiana that Benton was trying to share.

Jim Madison The Klan story is not a marginal story, not a sidebar. It's a central story in American history, and Benton was absolutely right to insist that that story be in his murals.

Adam Monahan Yeah, and in this painting, he's got in the foreground, the things that are battling it, but it's always there.

Jim Madison It's always there.

Adam Monahan And it's there today.

Jim Madison It's always there.

Adam Monahan So if you could do a mural of our country today and it's in the background...

Jim Madison Yeah, you would have some version of that. It might be Charlottesville in 2017.

Adam Monahan Yeah.

Jim Madison That'd be one of my choices. But other versions of that, same process, slightly different people in some ways, but similar in other ways, and ideas and ideologies that are shared from the Klan in the '20s down to the present. The difficulty is, okay, this mural makes me uncomfortable because it shows me the Klan. Well, one response is, let's learn a little bit about the Klan. What happened to them? How long did they persist? How they get pushed down? How were they dealt with and immobilized? All that's a story for historians to tell. But the really important story for students is to look at this mural carefully and to see not just the Klan and the burning cross and the waving flag, but to see all the other things in this mural, and then to understand them.

I mean, you have to think about that man at the typewriter, who's the Indianapolis Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize for bringing down the Klan. That's an important part of the story. And if you do that, if you read this mural with some preciseness and some knowledge, then you come to the accurate conclusion, this is not a Klan mural, this is an anti-Klan mural. Benton is criticizing the Klan, and so, I try, when I'm talking about in front of students and public audiences, to always remember to call it an anti-Klan mural rather than a Klan mural.

Adam Monahan If audiences today saw this mural, they might notice the Klan, but they don't necessarily recognize the significance of everything in the foreground: the good combating the bad. That's the history lesson, that's the bigger picture. Learning from an appraisal on our show, the couple minutes devoted to an object, which could be the subject of a book, or in the very least a podcast episode, may not satisfy their hunger to confront every issue that is sewn into our collective, complicated, and difficult history. But I can assure you that people behind the cameras are doing our best to teach everyone what we can, one appraisal at a time.

Detours is a production of GBH in Boston and distributed by PRX. This episode was written and produced by Jennifer Weingart. Our assistant producer is Sarah Horatius, script editing by Galen Bebe, mix and sound design by Jack Pombriant, and our senior producer is Ian Cost. Jocelyn Gonzalez is the Director of PRX Productions, Devin Maverick Robbins is the Managing Producer of podcasts for GBH, and Marsha Bemko is the Executive Producer of Detours. I'm your host and co-executive producer, Adam Monahan.

A big thank you for this episode to Mara Yankee and the communications team at Indiana University and the Eskenazi Museum of Art. Our theme music is Once in a Century Storm by Will Dailey, from the album National Throat. Thank you all for listening, have a good one.