By Stephen Aron, Calvin and Marilyn Gross Director, President and CEO

John Gast’s American Progress (1872) is certainly not the best painting on exhibit at the Autry Museum, but it is the best known. In recent weeks, its notoriety has been further boosted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which blasted Gast’s work out on its social media channels. What made the posting more notable (or notorious) was the caption that accompanied it, stoking controversy and conspiracy theories: “a Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Critics questioned the choice of American Progress and even more the explanation provided in the caption. Some suggested that the upper case on the two words beginning with “H” served as a neo-Nazi signal in far-right circles. Not so, retorted a spokesperson for the DHS, who defended the correctness of the depiction. “If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails, forded the rivers, and forged this Republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook.” There’s a good chance that the textbook would include Gast’s painting as an illustration—maybe even on its cover. But I don’t know of any current American history textbook that would present American Progress as an accurate account of westward expansion.

Executed at the behest of George Crofutt to adorn the cover of one of his popular travel guides, Gast’s 1872 painting distilled the history of nineteenth-century American westward expansion—or at least distilled that history in one of the ways nineteenth-century white Americans wished to imagine it. On the far left of the canvas (from the viewer’s perspective), Indians and bison retreat from the scene. Across the ground behind these fast-fleeing figures comes a parade of pioneer types: a group of prospectors, a covered wagon, a pony express rider, and a stagecoach. In the foreground, two farmers and a team of oxen plough a field enclosed by a split rail fence with a log cabin behind them. To the right of these iconic elements, three railroad trains steam across the plain. Above all floats what Crofutt described as a “beautiful and charming female . . . bearing on her head the ‘Star of Empire.’” In one hand, she holds a book, “the emblem of education and national enlightenment”; in the other, “she unfolds and stretches the slender wires of the telegraph that are to flash intelligence throughout the land.” Read from left to right (west to east on a map) is a geographic and technological expression of America’s progress, or, as the painting is occasionally mistitled, a rendering of “manifest destiny.”

At the Autry Museum, American Progress hangs on a wall filled with nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscapes. Many, like American Progress, romanticize the American West, erasing Native peoples from the scenery and presuming that the expansion of the United States proceeded peacefully. The same gallery also presents the creations of Native artists, who offer a very different take on Western lands and the history of their expropriation. If not as a rebuke to the visions of Gast and his ilk, these works serve to remind visitors whose homelands these were and whose heritages are also a source of great pride.