The Allegory of Chattanooga

In a city known for its panoramic views, one of the most spectacular is the view from the courtroom of the Joel W. Solomon Federal Building. The view is not out the window but on the wall above the judge’s bench in a third-floor courtroom, where a curving mural—17 feet long and 5 feet tall—depicts a visual allegory of our city’s history. The courtroom is the most historically significant room in one of Chattanooga’s most architecturally important buildings, sitting at the heart of the city.

The room itself is inspiring, its gleaming, inlaid wood and majestic furniture providing a warm contrast to the building’s cool, marble hallways. While the corridors of the Solomon Building have echoed with the historic footsteps of controversial figures like union leader Jimmy Hoffa and anti-TVA activist Jo Conn Guild, the building’s art and design were inspired and created by leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and iconic regional architect R.H. Hunt.

FDR’s public art

What we now call the Solomon Building was constructed from 1932 to 1933 as the U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, and the mural was installed in 1937, the result of a public art program that was part of FDR’s New Deal. The Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture operated both to serve Depression-era communities and to provide talented artists with gainful employment. “The Section” commissioned sculptures and murals in post offices in over 1,100 cities, including 30 works in post offices in Tennessee.

The Treasury Department’s Procurement Division, which administered the program, was led by lawyer, businessman and artist Edward Bruce. Bruce was charged with selecting art of high quality to decorate public buildings.

“The Section” provided that 1 percent of a federal building’s funding went to “embellishments” and ensured that the commissioned murals honored each city and were designed in partnership with the community. The result was a truly democratic art form. The artworks’ presence in post offices—hubs of citizenry—meant that they were genuinely accessible to the public.

In Chattanooga, The Section’s efforts were manifest in two works, a metal sculpture of a postman and a mural depicting the city’s history, both still on display in the courthouse building.

The architect and the artist

That building was constructed for $493,000 and designed by R.H. Hunt, a prodigious architect whose five decades of work changed the landscape of Chattanooga. Hunt designed every major public building constructed in Chattanooga between 1895 and 1935, as well as landmark buildings like Second Presbyterian Church and the St. John’s Hotel. For the U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, his last major work, Hunt collaborated with the New York designers of the Empire State Building.

In 1938, the courthouse won the American Institute of Architects award as one of the 150 finest buildings constructed in the previous two decades. It was later voted into the National Register as Historic Places as part of a thematic group of buildings designed by the legendary man.

Hunt was part of the five-person local committee who worked with “The Section” and the artist chosen for the mural, a young watercolorist named Hilton Leech.

A city, illustrated

“Allegory of Chattanooga,” Leech’s panorama mesmerizes, as the viewer’s eye sweeps past painted figures so fine that each could each be a significant portrait. His representation of Chattanooga’s history is designed to reinforce the New Deal message of optimism, hard work and revolutionary technology.

Viewed in concert, the images conjure a feeling of movement while telling the story of a land and its people. The federal government and the local committee examined and approved each image, intended to convey local pride while tying city history to the federal courtroom.

The faces in the mural are those of soldiers, nurses, Cherokee, pioneers, railway workers, a slave, a pastor and a frontiersman in the mural. They seem to move in time and place among familiar scenes (a dam, sprouting tobacco, a mountain range, a blue sky, a rustic cabin) and everyday objects (a train, a musket, a rifle, a cross, a blueprint, a Bible, bags of cotton and vegetables). Each person, place and thing represents some part of the city over whose justice the mural seems to preside.

Familiar faces

To Chattanoogans, it’s hard not to see in the Leech’s pastor Samuel Worcester, missionary to the Cherokees. Worcester took to the Supreme Court his fight to serve his flock—eventually following his beliefs all the way to a lonely jail cell, as President Andrew Jackson defied the Court’s order and began paving the Trail of Tears.

The TVA dam is clearly represented, but in the engineer with blueprints and younger assistant we might see Chattanooga’s Guild family, engineers and entrepreneurs who built the first dam on the main channel of the Tennessee River. These innovators took to the Supreme Court their case questioning the constitutionality of TVA and its eminent domain claim over their business assets. They brought hydro-electric power to the Chattanooga, Nashville and Knoxville markets as early as 1912, serving over 100,000 customers in over 400 markets before losing their case in 1939.

In the Indians we might recognize the Cherokee at the Brainerd Mission, Ross’s Landing or the Trail of Tears. The train could depict the railroads that turned Chattanooga into a center of commerce—while the railway worker might represent the tireless teams of men who picked and axed their way through Missionary Ridge and Tunnel Hill, giving the railroads access to Chattanooga’s river traffic. Or that painted train could remind us of Andrew’s Raiders, Union spies who screamed toward Chattanooga on a hijacked train, burning the rails behind them, bent on crippling the Confederacy by closing Chattanooga and the supply pipeline it represented.

The dead soldiers and the cross, labeled “1863,” might represent any of the critical battles that took place in Chattanooga, while the rifle and musket stand for Revolutionary and Civil War battles and soldiers.

Healing, reciprocrated

Years before his inauguration, FDR became enamored of the landscape and people of this area as he sought healing from the chalybeate springs that flow naturally here. As president, he created New Deal programs to bring healing to this area, and to a struggling nation.

The Solomon Building, erected under FDR’s watch, stands as a testament of the interrelationship between U.S. government and its people. That building’s centerpiece, “Allegory of Chattanooga,” illustrates the government’s service to people—and the vital role those people play in their own communities.