If you haven’t stopped to take a look at José Clemente Orozco’s murals in the Baker reserve corridor, make it a priority. I’m not a student of art in anything but the most amateur sense of the word, but even I’ve found that I’m unable to pry myself away from them once I enter that ghostly hall.

I can’t say I like the murals per se. Depending on the day, I’ve variously told my friends both that I despise them and that I’m obsessed with them. In particular, the central panels across from the reserve desk convey a vision of a socialist utopia that I find both silly and infuriatingly naïve. But the sheer fact that they hold such power over me is a testament to the artist’s skill as a manipulator of human thought and emotion.

Orozco’s work was provocative in his time as well. Early opponents of the murals variously decried them for clashing stylistically with their Neo-Georgian setting, for sacking the traditional Anglo conception of American history in favor of a mythologized, native-centric narrative, for having a distinctly leftist subtext, and for attacking the very premise of the Western liberal arts tradition (the easternmost panel on the north wall depicts a gathering of corpselike academics bearing witness as a skeletal mother gives birth to a stillborn fetus in a mortarboard cap).

Illustrator Walter Beach Humphrey ’14 disliked the Orozco murals enough that he painted his own murals in response, on the walls of what was then the Hovey Grill in the basement of Thayer Dining Hall. The so-called Hovey Murals portray the events from the drinking song written by their namesake, Richard Hovey, class of 1885, for whom the grill was also named.

Hovey’s song recounts how Eleazar Wheelock won the favor of a local Indian tribe with a gift of “five hundred gallons of New England rum.” In a colorful, exuberant, realistic style reminiscent of other illustrators of the 1930s, Humphrey depicts a portly Wheelock delivering a wooden cask of liquor to a band of pointedly stereotypical forest-dwelling Indians, including a troupe of bare-breasted “squaws” who coyly lurk in the woods and tinker with the English-made articles Wheelock has brought with him.

With the benefit of hindsight, the panels are comic in their overblown traditionalism. Viewed in context, an observer should realize that for all intents and purposes Humphrey’s paintings aren’t meant to be offensive or belittling; they’re intended as a lively response to the creeping revisionism that the artist believed had informed Orozco’s works. His work has become objectionable, rather, as its environment has evolved.  

The Orozco and Hovey Murals beautifully capture two ever-present and competing aspects of Dartmouth’s intellectual culture. Orozco’s works are idealistic and revolutionary; they challenge us to re-examine and re-examine again our notions of past and present, and they remind us that the American story began during the Paleolithic, not the early Renaissance. They embody that spirit of radical progressivism that binds Dartmouth to the American liberal arts tradition.

Humphrey’s images are an expression of reactionary defiance. They embody that deep-seated conservatism that separates us from other institutions. They bring to mind the beer-swilling lacrosse player, the cocky equity trader, or cane-swinging alum in a forest green blazer. They remind us that our college has always had a deeply ambivalent relationship liberalism and diversity in particular. These paintings highlight those craggy surfaces of Dartmouth culture where world-weary thinkers slip into the darkness and become raucous, chanting alcoholics.

These two contingents of the campus spirit, sometimes coexisting within individuals, other times manifested as separate kinds of people, have never been at ease with one another. In the 1970s, when a distinct progressivism was seizing control of campus politics across the country, the Hovey Murals were shuttered by the administration for their perceived insensitivity towards women and Native Americans,

Clearly, the leftist zeitgeist of the post-Vietnam era viewed such expressions of traditional chauvinism as out-of-place at a modern university. Such an aspect of Dartmouth culture, no matter how integral it may once have been to the college experience, was not worthy of a formal exhibition. Our storied preference for “doing things the old way,” once (and arguably still) a matter of pride among many members of the Dartmouth community, lost its administrative sanction and became a dirty little secret.

The sad result is that this “other” Dartmouth—the boisterous, reactionary Dartmouth beloved by many older alums and a few die-hard current students —is not represented in the body of campus art. Shifting cultural norms and a diversifying student body may indeed justify the administration’s preference to eschew this culture in favor of a more forward-thinking set of values. But censoring the paintings doesn’t erase the sentiments underlying them. Rather, t promotes ignorance of the college’s history and evolving identity, and more, gives those who oppose its diversity-friendly agenda the moral benefit of being marginalized and shut out of the discussion.

The Native Americans at Dartmouth understood that censoring the Hovey Murals nullified their value as instructive tools and lobbied the administration to uncover them in 1993, but the initiative fizzled out. The Office of the Provost recently announced that the paintings would at least be preserved when Thayer Dining Hall is finally demolished, but uncovering them for public viewing is another question entirely, and appears to be low on the college’s list of priorities.

The Hovey Murals might not compare to Orozco’s work in terms of artistic merit, but they remain an indispensible cultural artifact. But more importantly, by concealing them we deny the campus an important stimulus for artistic discussion and debate. And without that spirited challenge from the right, Dartmouth may never again find another José Clemente Orozco to deliver a worthy response.