Arthur Hart, Idaho historian extraordinaire, has written an interesting column about the controversial murals in the old Ada County Courthouse, now the Idaho Law & Justice Learning Center just across the street from the state Capitol. “The murals in the 1938 Ada County Courthouse have been controversial since the day they were first seen by the public in 1940,” Hart wrote in his weekly Idaho history column in the Idaho Statesman this week. “They have been criticized and defended both as art and as history by a variety of experts.”

Hart is the author of nearly two dozen books about Idaho history, including one he was commissioned to write by the Ada County Historic Preservation Council  in December of 2004 about the history of the old courthouse, a building whose fate was in doubt at the time, as state lawmakers debated whether to raze it to make way for a new state office tower or restore it. The building survived.

“I interviewed as many people as I could find who had worked in the old courthouse and were willing to share their memories,” Hart writes. “Like the building itself, the murals were the product of the Works Progress Administration, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help America recover from the Great Depression.”

The Federal Arts program was established in 1935 to put out-of-work artists, writers, musicians and theater people to work on public projects during the Great Depression, Hart writes. To critics who thought the federal government had no business supporting the arts and artists, WPA head Harry Hopkins replied, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.” Fifteen million Americans were unemployed at the time; Vardis Fisher was employed by the program as Idaho director of the Federal Writers’ Project, for which he penned three books about Idaho.

Hart details the history of the murals and how they came out as they did; you can read his full column here. “Two generations of Ada County citizens have enjoyed both criticizing the murals and finding flaws in their treatment and placement in the building,” Hart writes. “They’ve got to be conserved. There’s no building in Idaho with even close to this number of murals, and certainly not with their historic significance.” He promised another column next week on the controversial lynching murals, two pieces of the series that depict the hanging of a Native American by white settlers.