How Alma Reed Triumphed Over “Positively Frightened” Critics of the Orozco Room
“In fact, The New School did espouse progressive politics (as did Johnson in his academic pursuits), and public and internal condemnation of the Orozco room as leftist agitprop would endure. Furthermore, Johnson couldn’t contend with McCarthyism and a Western mobilization against Joseph Stalin. In 1947, New York State demanded that educators sign an oath of allegiance to the American and State constitutions; The New School acquiesced. Then in 1949—emboldened by Orozco’s failing health and death at 65 years old from heart failure—the New School Board of Trustees prescribed the Soviet panel be screened from view on specified occasions. On January 28, 1953, the US Senate launched the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, helmed by Senator Joseph McCarthy; two weeks later, the aging Alumni Association of The New School’s Graduate Faculty offered a declaration that the Orozco mural was ‘propaganda.’ The school installed what would come to be known as the ‘the yellow curtain,’ covering the entirety of the ‘Struggle in the Occident’ fresco.”
