Kevin: May 4th, 1933. The ground floor of the RCA building in Rockefeller Center, New York, where a fresco, 63 feet wide and 17 feet tall, is going up on the main lobby wall. Diego Rivera stands on the scaffold, brush in hand, laying color into the wet plaster before it sets. He's 46 years old, a Mexican national, an open Marxist, and the most famous muralist alive. At the center of the composition three days ago, he gave the figure of a leader the face of Vladimir Lenin. This afternoon, a 24-year-old named Nelson Rockefeller sits down and writes to him. The portrait is beautifully painted, the letter says, and it will seriously offend a great many people, so we must ask you to substitute the face of some unknown man. Rivera answers on May 6th. He offers a trade. Let him remove the section that shows society people playing bridge and dancing, and instead paint Abraham Lincoln standing with John Brown, Matt Turner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lenin on one side of the wall, Lincoln on the other. So Nelson Rockefeller has two options on his desk: accept the trade or end the commission. He chooses to end the commission. But what happens if he takes the deal? What if he decides that an American hero on one side of the wall cancels out the communist on the other? Let's hit Control-Z. Welcome to Control-Z Rewritten, the podcast where we take the biggest decisions in history and ask what happens if they go the other way? Not random what-ifs, real 50-50 calls with alternatives that were actually on the table. One decision where we hit Ctrl-Z, try it the other way, and see what changes. The Rockefeller Center in 1932 is an office complex costing hundreds of millions of dollars. It's going up in the fourth year of the Great Depression, paid for entirely out of one family's pocket. John D. Rockefeller Jr. is spending a private fortune on midtown Manhattan Towers at a moment when tenants are almost impossible to find. The centerpiece is the RCA building, home of the Radio Corporation of America, and its ground floor lobby needs a painting. That makes people stop. In November of 1932, the development company running the site, Todd Robertson and Todd, signs a contract with Diego Rivera for $21,000. That would be a little over $500,000 today. The theme comes aside: Men at the crossroads looking with hope and high vision to the choosing of a new and better future. Rivera is not the first choice to paint it. Rockefeller Jr.'s 24-year-old son Nelson is a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, and he wants Pablo Picasso or Henri Matisse. Picasso never responds to the request, and Matisse politely declines. So, the commission goes to a painter the family already knows, Diego Rivera. Nelson's mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, co-founded the Museum of Modern Art three years earlier. She collects Rivera's paintings and she helped build his reputation in the United States. So his politics are no surprise going into this. He was a member of the Mexican Communist Party until it expelled him in nineteen twenty nine for siding with Leon Trotsky, and he spent the previous decade painting revolutionary murals on public walls in Mexico. The Rockefellers hired him anyway. Rivera won the early arguments. Raymond Hood, the chief architect, Wanted the fresco in shades of gray to match the stone. Rivera pushed for full color, and Nelson agreed with him. Rivera came to paint the New York Wall directly from a stint in Detroit. Between 1932 and 1933, he painted 27 panels on all four walls of the Garden Court at the Detroit Institute of Arts, financed personally by Edsel Ford, the head of Ford Motor Company. The museum dedicated the murals on March 18, 1933, and the city immediately began fighting about them. Father Charles Coughlin, a radio priest with an audience in the millions, denounced the frescoes as blasphemous. The Detroit News ran a front page editorial calling them coarse, vulgar, and entirely un American. A city councilman called for whitewashing the entire court, and the council actually considered it. But Ensel Ford was powerful. He put out a statement saying he admired Rivera's spirit. So the mural stayed, and attendance at the museum broke records. That's the news coming out of Detroit in the same season that the New York job begins. Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo arrive in Manhattan, and the New York Times notes it on march twenty first, nineteen thirty three. In late March, he climbs the scaffold. The building managers sell tickets to watch him paint, and construction crews get in for free. On April third, Nelson Rockefeller writes him a very warm note. Everybody is most enthusiastic, he says, and the building opens May first. It will be tremendously effective to have the mural there to greet people as they come in. A reporter named Joseph Lilly gets a look at the unfinished wall three weeks later, and the next day the New York World Telegram runs the headline that starts the fire. Rivera paints scenes of communist activity and John D. Jr. foots bill. On May 1st, May Day, Rivera paints the head of the leader as Lenin. And then come the letters from Nelson. On May 4th, he asks for an unknown face in place of the Bolshevik one. On May 6th, Rivera refuses and counters with Lincoln standing alongside the abolitionists. For three days, he gets no response from Russ. And then on the night of Tuesday, May 9th, guards climb the scaffold and bring Rivera down. The development company hands him a check for the full $21,000. Guards escort him out of the building and bar him from the site. Workers then hang a canvas drape over 63 feet of unfinished fresco. The drape stays up for nine months and the fight moves out into the open. New York-based artists Pickett on 49th Street within days. On May 20th, the New Yorker runs a poem by E. B. White about the standoff, with Rivera and his patron trading verses. It ends on the Rockefeller side's answer. It's my wall. Through the summer and fall, negotiators try to move the fresco to the Museum of Modern Art, and then the talks collapse. Near midnight, on February 10th, 1934, trucks pull up outside the RCA building. Workers raise a fresh scaffold and tear the canvas away. They chisel the plaster off in pieces until bare wall is all that remains. Rivera's assistant, Lucienne Bloch, had actually smuggled a camera past the guards the previous spring, and her black and white photographs are the only surviving record of what that painting looked like. And here is where we press Ctrl Z. It's Monday, May 8th, 1933. Nelson Rockefeller carries Rivera's letter with the Abe Lincoln offer into his father's office, and he argues for the compromise. He has one important piece of evidence for saying yes. Edsel Ford held the line in Detroit seven weeks earlier against a popular radio priest, a hostile newspaper, and a city council. And the Detroit Institute of Arts is now setting attendance records because of that fight. But his dad wants the whole commission gone. However, Nelson makes a compelling case. Tearing down the fresco makes the family the villains in every art column in the country. And Detroit just showed how lucrative standing firm can be. And Rivera isn't even asking them to give ground. He's offering to put Abraham Lincoln on the wall of the building. And the only cost is letting a dead Russian stay in the picture. On May 10th, Rivera climbs the scaffold again. Ticket sales resume, and the reporters who came for a controversial firing stay to cover a famous painter. Rockefeller taking the deal in this timeline has a direct impact on Chicago. In the real timeline, Rivera had already been commissioned by General Motors to paint a mural called Forge and Foundry for the world's fair opening in Chicago. But because of the controversy in New York with the painting of Lenin, He received a telegram on May 11th canceling the commission. But back in this alternate world, Rivera spends a part of his summer traveling back and forth between New York and Chicago, painting what would become two iconic murals in the two largest American cities at the time. Through June and July, Rivera paints Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Matt Turner, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. With Cyrus McCormick beside them and the reaper that fed the Union armies. Ben Schaun, a young assistant who will become one of the most famous painters in America himself, grinds pigment. Lucienne Bloch photographs the progress in daylight now, with permission, and the negatives go into the building's archive. The finished fresco goes on view in October of 1933, with Lennon and Lincoln facing each other across 63 feet of plaster. William Randolph's first papers run the Lennon head on the front page for weeks. The American Legion pickets on 49th Street and mails letters demanding removal. And a Brooklyn congressman reads one into the congressional record. RCA's leasing agents brace for cancellations and get a line of visitors out the door instead. By Christmas, the crowds match what Detroit drew in April, and the guards need to go on double shifts. Jay Lovestone spends that winter waiting for a phone call. Lovestone runs a small Marxist school on 14th Street called the New Workers School. And in our timeline, Rivera walked out of Rock Center with $21,000 and no work and spent the rest of 1933 painting 21 panels on the school's walls for free. Here, though, Rivera is in Chicago through the fall, painting steelworkers for General Motors in front of a world's fair crowd. That fee goes into his own pocket. The American left never gets its Rivera cycle, and it spends the next twenty years arguing about whether he sold out to the richest family on Earth. In December of nineteen thirty-three, a Washington lawyer named Edward Bruce launches the Public Works of Art Project, the first federal program to put painters on the government payroll. Within weeks, he has thousands of them decorating post offices, courthouses. School auditoriums. Nearly all of them copied Rivera. They copy his palette, his crowds, and his cross sections of machinery. And they point every nervous federal supervisor toward Manhattan. Because if the most expensive building in America could keep a communist on its wall, a post office in Peoria can survive a picture of a welder. But that argument loses in San Francisco. In the spring of 1934, 25 artists paint the interior of Coit Tower under the same federal program for $25 to $45 a week. A British painter named Clifford White, who assisted Rivera in Detroit, puts a hammer and sickle into a medallion above a window. The banker who controls the local money project, Herbert Fleischacker, locks the tower. The artists pick it, and their signs point 3,000 miles east at a lobby in Midtown Manhattan. Fleischacker holds, though, and the medallion comes off the wall with a chisel. Coit Tower opens on october twentieth, nineteen thirty four, without it. The New York fresco survives because a Rockefeller decided it would. Nelson Rockefeller spends the next 40 years answering for a portrait of Vladimir Lenin. The first attack comes in 1938, when Congress creates a special investigating committee under a Texas Democrat named Martin Dyes, who goes hunting for communists inside the federal arts programs. He subpoenas playwrights, directors, and painters. He enters newspaper photographs of murals into the record, and in June of 1939, Congress kills the Federal Theater Project outright. In the alternate branch, Dyes holds up one exhibit no other chairman ever had a photograph of the RCA lobby. He asks the assembled press how a man who hung a Bolshevik on his own family's wall can be trusted near public money. Nelson at this point is 30 years old, and he gets named on the floor of the House for the first of many times. But the attacks don't slow his career. He is a Rockefeller after all. In 1939, he becomes president of the Museum of Modern Art. In August of 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appoints him Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the office running American cultural and economic diplomacy across Latin America against German influence. By 1943, the agency has 1,500 employees and a budget of $38 million. Roosevelt picks him for the oil connections and the family name. But Nelson brings one asset to Mexico City no other American official has. Every minister he sits down with in 1941 knows him as the gringo who kept Rivera's wall, and the doors that stay closed to other envoys for two years open for him in an afternoon. In the summer of 1940, Rivera returns to the US to paint Pan-American Unity. At the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. This time it's on a public platform, and also it's in front of a paying audience. It's his fourth American commission in eight years, and the crowds line up the way they did at Rockefeller Center. The pressure builds again, though, after the war. On March 25th, May 17th, and August 16th of 1949, a Michigan congressman named George Dondero delivers speech. Three speeches in the house accusing modern art of being a Soviet plot. The last is titled Modern Art Shackled to Communism. He names artists, galleries, and magazines. And in the alternate timeline, he also names an address, 30 Rockefeller Plaza. By 1953, the building answers in every practical sense to David Sarnoff. Sarnoff runs RCA and its network, NBC. out of that lobby, and he's the loudest anti communist in American broadcasting. He wants no Lenin anywhere near his cameras. He goes to the Rock Center board and demands the fresco be covered. Nelson is in Washington that year as Eisenhower's Under Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, freshly confirmed by the Senate. Senator Joseph McCarthy is running the most feared committee in Congress, and Nelson has no political capital to waste on a painting. So a velvet curtain goes up over the left half of the wall in the fall of 1953, and the Rockefeller Center Press office calls it temporary. Rivera is getting the same treatment in Mexico at that exact moment. He painted the sentence, God does not exist, into a mural at the Hotel del Prado in Mexico City in 1948. The hotel covered the work and it stayed hidden for nine years. Rivera dies in Mexico City on November 24, 1957. Nelson Rockefeller is months away from announcing his run for governor of New York. He flies down for the funeral. When he comes back, he orders the curtain removed for a public memorial. And it never goes back up. It's July 14th, 1964. We're at the Cow Palace, an arena on the southern edge of San Francisco, a few minutes before 10 p.m. Nelson Rockefeller walks to the podium at the Republican National Convention to argue for a platform plank denouncing extremism. And he specifically points out the Ku Klux Klan, the Communist Party, and the John Birch Society. The convention organizers have given him five minutes. Barry Goldwater's delegates control the floor and the galleries. They've already beaten him for the nomination, and they've waited all week for this. Behind him on the platform hangs a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. They boo before he finishes his first sentence. They chant, We Want Barry. Somebody pounds a bass drum, and the cowbells, squeezehorns, and the toy trumpets all come out. For stretches of the speech, no microphone in the building can pick him up. He stands with his jaw set and waits out the noise. Then he reads the resolution to the end. In this timeline, the galleries have one more line to shout, one they've been saving since 1938. The speaker asking a convention to purge its extremists is the man who hung Lenin in his father's lobby and paid a communist. $21,000 to do so. The delegates know the story by heart because Dyes, Dondero, and 30 years of pamphlets taught it to them. Goldwater accepts the nomination two nights later and tells the same Hall that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Rockefeller loses the party in that room, and it stays lost. He runs New York for For nine more years and builds the Empire State Plaza and the State University system. In 1974, President Gerald Ford appoints him vice president, and he never reaches the presidency. The moderate wing of the Republican Party that he led is completely finished by 1980. And the fresco is a footnote in the collapse rather than the cause of it. He would have lost that haul over civil rights and the welfare state. Without a single brushstroke of help from Diego Rivera. The mural is still on the wall. In our timeline, the lobby got a nineteen thirty-seven fresco by the Catalan painter Joseph Maria Sert, called American Progress. It's fifty feet of muscular workmen hauling statues, with Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mahatma Gandhi worked into the crowd. In the alternate branch, Cert paints the ceilings and the north hall because the main wall already holds a painting. Man at the Crossroads receives landmark protection in 2014. The same year as the Detroit Industry Murals. The plaque goes up beside the concierge desk. NBC broadcasts out of the building every morning. The Today Show anchors cross that floor before 7 a.m. Behind them, A Russian revolutionary extends his hand over a crowd of workers, while an American president stands 30 feet away with John Brown at his shoulder. In December, the tree goes up outside, 200 feet from the wall. Roughly 125 million people pass through Rockefeller Center in a year. Tour groups stop at the fresco on the way to the observation deck. And the guide explains who the bald man in the middle is, because about half the group Has no idea. Diego Rivera got the better end of the deal he lost. The fresco that survives in the alternate timeline is a great painting in an office building. People walk past it on the way to an elevator. Art historians write about the Lincoln panel, and the last fight over the wall ended when the curtain came down in 1957. The fresco that got chiseled off the wall became the most famous destroyed artwork in American history. It's the case study every first-year art student gets assigned. It's the reason Rivera repainted the whole composition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes at Mexico City, where it draws crowds to this day. He painted John D. Rockefeller Jr. into the nightclub scene with a cocktail in his hand. It's a poem by E. B. White. It's two feature films. And it's 90 years of Americans arguing about who owns a painting after the Czech players. Nelson Rockefeller spent $21,000 and then sent in the workman. He handed a Marxist the one prize his family's money could never buy. Underneath all of this, though, sits a smaller fact. Rivera's offer was Lincoln and Lettin on the same wall, in balance, so that every person walking to the elevators would have to look at both and decide for themselves what a leader is. Nelson refused the offer. And the workmen ground the plaster to powder. Rockefeller Center hired another painter four years later, and he put Abraham Lincoln on that wall anyway. They took the compromise. They just waited until they didn't have to share the wall with anyone. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. It helps other people find the show and allows me to understand whether people actually enjoy it. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Control Z button. Control Z is written, produced, researched, and hosted by me, Kevin Perazzal. If you have an idea for a future show, please leave a comment on YouTube at CtrlZ Rewritten All One Word, and I'll definitely work it into one of our next episodes. Thanks again.