Trump’s blatantly illegal efforts to shutter the Voice of America, which he calls “The Voice of Radical America,” and which its de facto chief executive, Kari Lake, has called “a rotten piece of fish,” are a gift to truth-suppressing regimes in China and Russia. The vigorous fight in the courts to halt this authoritarian power grab is being covered expertly by The Washington Post and others, and if you haven’t been following that story I urge you to catch up.
The work in question is a gorgeous series of frescoes by Ben Shahn (1898–1969) celebrating the 1935 establishment of Social Security. “I think the Social Security mural is the best work I’ve done,” Shahn wrote when he completed the work in June 1942. “Anyway, it was the most satisfying. I felt I had everything under control—or almost under control—the big masses of color to make it decorative and the little details to make it interesting.”
Do you know the social realist painter, illustrator, and photographer Ben Shahn? You’ll find his work on the walls of just about every major museum in America: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty, the Whitney, the Phillips, Crystal Bridges, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, and so on. In 1977, Woody Allen used Shahn as a cultural signifier in Annie Hall. Flirting with Carol Kane at a party, Allen says: “You, you, you’re like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right?”
Shahn’s star started to fade in the late 1950s as social realism became eclipsed by abstract expressionism, and by 1998 the Post art critic Paul Richard dismissed Shahn as “at best a minor painter.” Probably not a lot of people under the age of 50 know who Shahn was. Even in 1977, Allen’s Ben Shahn joke was fast approaching its sell-by date.
“Such Shahn mural cycles as ‘The Meaning of Social Security’ in Washington, DC,” writes Gopnik, “which might not so long ago have caused more of a mere period smile … than real appreciation, now have a new credibility.” That’s because the circumstances that brought social realism into being a century ago—xenophobia, the threat of fascism, economic inequality—are roaring back. It’s no small irony that the president advancing them is indifferent to (indeed, probably unaware of) the imminent loss of Shahn’s social-realist masterwork.
Initially, I guessed it was not. In four decades of living in Washington, I’d never once heard anybody mention the Shahn frescoes. Our nation’s capital is not so rich in local culture that even a halfway-curious resident is likely to miss any of its constituent parts. We’ve got go-go music, half-smokes, blue crabs (really more of a Baltimore thing), the Clover Adams gravesite, “Cool” Disco-Dan, Senate Bean Soup (meh), picnics underneath airplanes landing at National Airport (never tried it) … and already you can see I’m groping. Our streets, when they aren’t numbered, are named after grandiose concepts (Independence, Constitution) or after states (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Colorado). My first impression when I arrived 45 years ago (for an internship, as it happens, at The New Republic) was that this city was built by people who wanted to live someplace else.
Recent articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times about the threat to public art under the Trump administration, which in other locales includes notable works by Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly, neglect to mention Shahn. The last instance I can find when the Post made even a passing reference to the Shahn mural was in a March 1980 Style piece (headline: “New Deal Art”) by Anne H. Oman.
“Our collection is your collection,” says the website of the GSA Fine Arts Collection. “These artworks were created by and belong to the American people.” But when I tried to go see the Shahn and Guston murals last week, a security guard told me no dice. “This building is CLOSED,” she said.
It isn’t just the Shahn and Guston artworks that make the Cohen building worth preserving. The structure was originally intended to be the headquarters for the Social Security Board (later the Social Security Administration). But by the time Shahn finished his frescoes, the War Production Board needed it; after World War II, the Voice of America moved into a building festooned, inexplicably, with WPA art celebrating the glories of social welfare. The Social Security Board found quarters elsewhere. These days it’s in the Baltimore suburbs.
Other aspects of the building that merit at least some historic interest include a rare wooden escalator like the ones at Macy’s in Herald Square, and what strikes visitors as a bizarre overabundance of bathrooms (nobody at VOA ever had to wait to go to the john). The restrooms appear two by two—a pair of Gents here, a pair of Ladies there—because the civil service was racially segregated. There’s some value in government employees being reminded daily that our federal infrastructure was hostage to white supremacism until 1948.
None of this is taken into account in a May 2025 report by the Public Buildings Reform Board, an independent government agency whose recommendation to proceed with the sale was quickly endorsed by White House Office of Management and Budget director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought (and seconded in those notices VOA employees received last week). “The sale of the property will generate value and return for the taxpayer through shedding liabilities,” is the board’s penny-wise, pound-foolish conclusion. Nowhere in the report is it mentioned that the building is in the National Register of Historic Places (a designation that, alas, provides zero protection from demolition once the property is in private hands) or that it contains any notable art.
I’ll pick up that story in the next installment. In the meantime, repeat after me: Save the Cohen! Save the Guston mural! Save the friezes! Save the Shahn frescoes! And while we’re at it, let’s save the Voice of America too.
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