Located at 515 Rusk Street in downtown Houston, the Bob Casey Federal Courthouse was named after U.S. Representative Robert R. Casey. The United States District Court for Southern Texas resides in the Casey building, and it serves a broad region of southeastern Texas, including the cities of Corpus Christi, Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Victoria, Houston, and Galveston.
In recent times, the Casey building has served as home to six beautiful murals that were re-discovered in the basement of the Houston Parcel Post Building in 1976. The story of the paintings, their disappearance, and re-discovery offers a revealing look into the history and politics of twentieth century Houston.
The murals’ tale began in the mid-1930s, when Dallas artists Jerry Bywaters and Alexandre Hogue submitted an unsuccessful bid to paint the Dallas Post Office Terminal as part of an ongoing New Deal public works project administered by the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. This program supported national artists who decorated more than 65 post offices in Texas with nearly 100 murals depicting scenes of local history, culture, and industry. Although Bywaters and Hogue were turned down for the Dallas project, they were later awarded a similar job painting the Houston Parcel Post Building.
Williamson Gerald (Jerry) Bywaters was born in Paris, Texas, on May 21, 1906, and he studied art at the New York Art Students League. Bywaters specialized in landscapes, portraits, lithograph prints, and murals. According to Francine Carraro, Bywaters' style was indicative of a larger national movement in the 1930s, called the "American Scene," which inspired local artists to create works that honored their community's heritage.
Alexandre Hogue was born in Memphis, Missouri, on February 22, 1898, and he moved with his family to Denton, Texas, in the early twentieth century. Hogue attended Bryan Street High School in Dallas and graduated in 1918. He then traveled to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for one year before returning to Texas, where he worked as an illustrator for the Dallas Morning News. As an artist, Hogue became known for his abstract landscape paintings and murals.
When Bywaters and Hogue joined the Dallas Nine -- a group of prominent painters and sculptors in the early 1930s -- they discovered a mutual love and respect for the culture of East Texas. After receiving their Houston commission from the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, Hogue and Bywaters researched the history of the city’s shipping industry for two years before painting six murals on the subject. On July 6, 1941, Bywaters and Hogue's murals were presented to the Houston Parcel Post Building during a highly publicized ceremony. At six feet by eighteen feet, each of the massive murals encompassed an entire wall of the Parcel Post building.
The Bywaters and Hogue murals explored the day-to-day workings of the Houston Ship Channel. For example, Hogue’s “The Diana Docking" featured a colorful tableau showing a riverboat docking on the Buffalo Bayou. In the painting, a group of passengers wait to board, while African American men prepare to load goods onto the ship; a statue of a Native American man stands behind the group, smoking a long pipe. According to historians Nancy Young, William Pederson, and Byron Daynes, another of Hogue’s painting, "Houston Ship Channel--Early History," showcases early river boat traffic, as well as efforts to "survey, clear, dredge, and build the Houston canal.” Likewise, Bywaters’ murals, "Loading Cotton" and "Loading Oil," depict strong dock workers loading bales of cotton and oil onto shipping vessels in the Houston Ship Channel.
Taken together, Hogue and Bywaters' murals highlight the determination and dignity of everyday people who worked in Houston’s shipping industry. Yet, sometime in the 1950s, the murals were removed from the Parcel Post Building. The images, which had once represented the hope and determination of the American working-class, became symbols of organized labor and socialism during the Cold War hysteria that swept through Houston during the 1950s and 1960s. Luckily, the paintings were re-discovered and moved to the Casey building before Bywaters passed away in 1989 and Hogue died in 1994. In fact, the paintings were restored in 2006 so that future generations could enjoy them and the story they tell.
]]>The United States Post Office in Rusk, Texas, features a Bernard Baruch Zakheim mural titled "Agriculture and Industry at Rusk." Completed in 1939, Zakheim's powerful mural illustrates Rusk's rough agrarian and industrial history from multiple perspectives. In vivid colors, the artist captures how Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo American residents of the area viewed development and change over time.
Located in Cherokee County, Rusk has a long and complicated history. In the early nineteenth century, a band of Cherokees established a tribe in the region, which was then part of Mexico. However, in the 1830s, Anglo settlers expelled the Native American tribes from the area, including the Cherokee, Caddo, and Kickapoo. They then established the city of Rusk on April 11, 1846, and named it after one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, General Thomas Jefferson Rusk. Within a few years, residents of the city constructed a Presbyterian church, masonic lodge, and county courthouse. Rusk's first post office opened on March 8, 1847. The city’s population grew rapidly throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as immigrants steadily poured in from the gulf. The Great Depression slowed Rusk's development, but the town endured because of its position as a commercial center for the region's rich iron ore deposits, timber, and agricultural industries.
Bernard Baruch Zakheim's mural "Agriculture and Industry at Rusk," completed in San Francisco in 1939, honors the city’s residents and their complex relationship with the land. Born in Poland on April 4, 1898, Zakheim discovered a love for art in his early teens. He studied furniture design and upholstery and then won a scholarship to study drawing, painting, and sculpture at the Polish Academy of Fine Art. Zakheim immigrated to the United States, and lived in both New York City and Los Angeles, before settling down in San Francisco and finding work as an upholsterer. In the early 1930s, Zakheim traveled to Mexico City to study the art of mural frescoes with famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Upon his return to the Bay Area, Zakheim founded the San Francisco Artist and Writer's Union. Zakheim also won a local competition to fresco a mural at San Francisco's Jewish Community Center. He and other union members lobbied for a federally funded arts program, which the United States government eventually supported through the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture (later known as the Section of Fine Arts).
"Agriculture and Industry at Rusk" features multiple thematic elements including farming, land surveying, displacement of Native Americans, and Anglo American settlement and expansion. The mural contains three distinct scenes: the first displays a Native American man (possibly Cherokee), wrapped in linens, sitting quietly, as a white man (arms crossed) stares down at him. The next scene features a group of farmers, including one man testing pesticide spraying equipment on a tomato crop, another examining a leaf of lettuce through a magnifying glass, as well as one farmer receiving mail from a postman. The last scene features a group of land surveyors; some men dig, while others measure land, or take notes. The three scenes demonstrate how the agricultural industry in Rusk developed through forced relocation of Native Americans, land surveying, and technological advancements in farming and crop management. Though complex and intricate works of art, Zakheim's murals were often criticized for their Communist or Socialist elements. Yet, "Agriculture and Industry at Rusk," remains a vital piece of Great Depression art, reminding its viewers of East Texas' culturally diverse and complicated past.
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