Tapestry of Faith: A Place of Wholeness: A Program for Youth Exploring Their Own Unitarian Universalist Faith Journeys

Handout 3: Pan-American Unity - Panel 4

Included in this panel are the following people and scenes. Can you identify them? Which of these relate to freedom and oppression?

  • Alcatraz Island, site of a federal penitentiary, 1933-1963.
  • Treasure Island, man-made site of the Golden Gate International Exposition, 1939-1940, where Rivera painted the mural. He shows Arthur Brown Jr.'s Tower of the Sun and Pflueger's Federal Building (the red rectangular structure).
  • A woman architect, modeled by Mary Anthony-forester, botanist and friend of Emmy Lou Packard.
  • Otto Deichmann, 1893-1964, German-born American architect who designed the Shasta-Cascade Building at the GGIE.
  • Frank Lloyd Wright, 1869-1959, architect who was inspired by the American prairies and who also used pre-Columbian motifs in his work.
  • Emmy Lou Packard, 1914-1998, Rivera's primary assistant in the mural project, a prominent artist and social activist, who led the effort to save the Rivera inspired Rincon Annex murals in San Francisco.
  • Mona Hofmann's daughter.
  • Joseph Stalin, 1879-1953, Adolf Hitler, 1889-1945, and Benito Mussolini, 1883-1945, depicted as a trinity of tyrants emerging in a gaseous tree-like shape and surrounded by scenes from anti-fascist films. Although regarded as extreme opposites, the Communist Stalin and the fascists, Hitler and Mussolini, are here allies through the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact. Stalin holds a knife and bloody ice ax to echo a hammer and sickle emblem; the ax alludes to Stalin's responsibility in the assassination of Trotsky. Below this image the initials "G.P.U." (the Soviet secret police) and the word "Gestapo" (the Nazi secret police) form a cross, as if to show their common purpose. Below them a World War I soldier in a gas mask lies fallen across barbed wire.
  • Jack Oakie, 1903-1978, American comic actor, as "Benzini Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria," a satire of Mussolini in Charlie Chaplin's 1940 film The Great Dictator.
  • The arm and hand of an aroused America (emerging from the machine) halting the forces of ruthless aggression.
  • Edward G. Robinson, 1893-1973, Rumanian born actor, and Francis Lederer, 1900-2000, Czech-born actor, depicted in a scene from the 1940 film Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Robinson and Lederer were also early collectors of Mexican art.
  • Heinrich Himmler, 1900-1945, leader of the Nazi SS, in charge of Nazi concentration camps and known for "The Final Solution."
  • Charlie Chaplin, 1889-1977, in The Great Dictator, in which he portrays both Adenoid Hinkle, a satire of Hitler, and a Jewish barber. Chaplin appears in this panel several times.