John R. Kelso and “The Movement Westward”
John Steuart Curry, “Justice of the Plains: The Movement Westward” (1937), Library of Congress. Mural, 5th floor of the Department of Justice Building.
The Midwestern Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) probably never heard of John R. Kelso. Certainly he wasn’t thinking of Kelso in 1937 when he was painting his mural on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C., “Justice of the Plains: The Movement Westward” (also known as “Justice of the Pains” and by its subtitle). Still, the mural represents central themes in Kelso’s story—and the larger nineteenth-century American stories that Kelso’s life illuminates.
At first glance, Curry’s mural seems to be a didactic history painting in the heroic mode. America’s westward movement is depicted by sturdy folk in covered wagons emerging from cornfields on the right. At the center, a family—a determined father, a mother holding a baby, and a boy with a puppy—stride west. At the apex of the group, an army officer in blue rides a white horse; next to him, a bearded scout in fringed leather points the way forward. On the far left, shadowed by smoke from the burning plains, two mounted men with guns drawn fight at close quarters.
The mural recalls other depictions of westward movement, like Emmanuel Leutze’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (1862), which Kelso would have seen in the U.S. Capitol during his term in Congress. Leutze depicted a wagon train crossing the Rocky Mountains: pioneers--white men holding guns and women holding babies--catch their first view of the Pacific.
Emanuel Leutze, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (1862), mural, House Wing, West Stairway, U.S. Capitol Building.
Or John Gast’s “American Progress” (1872), an allegory of Manifest Destiny. In Gast’s painting, hunters and miners, followed by farmers, wagons, trains, and telegraph wires, chase off wild animals and Indians and bring light and civilization from the east to a darkened west.
John Gast, “American Progress” (1872), Library of Congress.
All three paintings seem to be visual variations of themes the historian Frederick Jackson Turner staked out in his famous 1893 frontier thesis of American development, a foundational myth of American culture perhaps best plumbed in the scholar Richard Slotkin’s trilogy: Regeneration through Violence (1973), The Fatal Environment (1985), and Gunfighter Nation (1992).
But Curry’s mural is one of two he painted for the Justice Department, both devoted to the theme of justice. In the other, “Justice Defeating Mob Violence,” a man flees from a lynch mob on the left to the feet of a judge on courthouse steps on the right. In “Justice of the Plains: The Movement Westward,” however, the relationship between the dark violence on the left and the heroic march of civilization from the right is more ambiguous. Instead of White men chasing off wild animals and “savage” Indians, they fight each other. Is this bloody violence the precondition for the establishment of civilization and justice in the West? Or is it the inevitable result of the westward movement? Does the mural depict the irrepressible conflict of the Civil War, provoked by the contest over new western lands, or the Wild West violence unleashed in that war’s wake? What is the relationship of the brutal gunfight and justice?
These are questions central to Kelso’s story. He moved West: from Ohio to Missouri to California. For the first move to Missouri in 1840, by wagon like the figures on the mural’s right, he was about as old as the barefoot boy in the painting’s center. Later he would see himself as a hardened, laboring man, like the striding father, but also like the top-hatted gentleman in the background, college educated and able to put on parlor manners. His sense of manhood, too, relied in part on the emotional support of his wife, with babe in arms—a support he often did not feel.
At the center of his life—like the soldier in blue at the center of the mural—was the Civil War. Sometimes he was like that noble, patriotic officer mounted on his white horse. Other times he was the grizzled scout, pointing the way forward. But Missouri Unionists dubbed him the “Hero of the South West” because most of the time he was one of the men on horseback, in a bloody engagement with the enemy.
Although Curry was sensitive to issues of racial justice in other works, in this mural the movement west is a Whites Only affair. Kelso’s Civil War and his political career during Reconstruction was more racially complicated: he both voiced racist tropes and fought for Black political equality.
Toward the end of his life, he reinterpreted it all—the meaning of the war, the meaning of America, and the relationship of his own battles to the establishment of justice.
