In 1953, Congress opened a debate on whether to destroy 27 large murals at Rincon Annex, the Streamline Moderne building on Mission Street that at the time was a post office. As The Chronicle wrote, “It was the first instance of the death penalty being asked for paintings in a congressional action.”

The murals by artist Anton Refregier, a sweeping, warts-and-all depiction of the history of San Francisco commissioned 13 years earlier by a New Deal federal arts program, had been attacked for years by right-wing groups that considered them subversive, communistic and insufficiently celebratory of the city’s and state’s glorious past.

In 1948, the federal Public Buildings Administration stepped into the controversy, ordering Refregier to remove a proposed portrait of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the murals’ climactic panel. As noted in the previous Portals, this censorship was clearly prompted by a sense that Roosevelt, whose legacy was under attack by the GOP, was too controversial a figure to appear in publicly funded art.

The mural debate took place as anti-communist sentiments were reaching a fever pitch. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s red-hunting crusade would come crashing down after the Army hearings of 1954. But at the time of the congressional hearings on the murals, the Wisconsin senator’s witch hunt was in full swing.

Preliminary skirmishing began several months before the May 1953 hearings. M.C. Herman of the Veterans of Foreign Wars said the murals depicted “episodes regarded as a blight to an auspicious past.” Waldo Postel, head of the Americanism Committee of the Grand Parlor of the Native Sons of the Golden West, charged that a red book that appeared in one of the murals was evidence of subversion and communism. The Hearst press, in the form of the San Francisco Examiner, claimed that Refregier had added mule ears to his painted depiction of Gilbert Stanley Underwood, the architect who designed Rincon Annex and ordered FDR excised from one of the murals. Refregier insisted they were garlands.

San Francisco’s cultural intelligentsia fired back. The Chronicle’s art critic, Alfred Frankenstein, said it was clear that many of the “patriotic” organizations criticizing the murals had not actually seen them. He rhetorically asked if construction of the Bay Bridge or the recovery after the 1906 earthquake and fire, both depicted in the murals, were blights on the city’s past. And he mocked Postel’s suggestion that the red book was a secret communist message, writing, “If red book designs are evidence of subversion, then 9/10th of all books would have to be destroyed, including the ones in Postel’s library.”

Refregier defended himself vigorously. In a letter to Frankenstein, he wrote, “We rejected long ago, while on the federal arts projects, the meaningless type of mural painting where the pioneer dressed in the Hollywood fashion, shaved and manicured, would be briskly walking along guided by a ‘spirit’ of one kind or another, its Grecian garments floating in the wind. This concept pays disrespect to the vitality, power, and labor of those who came before us.”

On May 1, Republican Rep. Hubert B. Scudder of Sebastopol opened the hearings, calling for the prompt removal of the “subversive,” “slanderous” and “offensive” paintings. The people Refregier included in the murals, Scudder said, were “cadaverous characters” and “pot-bellied monks,” with “hideous faces,” “dwarfed heads” and “sadistic expressions.”

Quoting a little-grown group called the Society of Western Artists, which called the murals “artistically bad, historically absurd and politically corrupt,” Scudder asserted that Refregier’s work was “communist propaganda ... intended to promote racial hatred and class warfare.” The panels showing the 1906 earthquake and anti-Chinese riots were “too terrible,” Scudder said, and the Indians depicted in the panel about Mission Dolores were “too muscular.”

Another California Republican, Rep. Donald Jackson, a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, then read a long list of Refregier’s left-wing affiliations as well as those of fellow muralist Victor Arnautoff, who was one of the three artists on the panel of judges that originally voted to award the Rincon commission to Refregier.

Opposing Scudder’s resolution was a formidable lineup that included both of San Francisco’s congressmen, William Maillard and future Mayor John Shelley, as well as representatives of many city cultural organizations, including the three major art museums, the San Francisco Art Association, the Society of Women Artists and the Metal Arts Guild.

Shelley said that the murals were historically authentic and that opponents were seeking to censor unpleasant truths. “If we get into that, Mr. Chairman, then we are definitely contributing to thought control and trying to build a nation of conformists,” he said.

A long procession of distinguished witnesses testified or wrote letters in support of the murals, including antiquarian book dealer Warren Howell, historian George Stewart and San Francisco Museum of Art head Grace McCann Morley. A committee of experts called by the California Historical Society testified that the murals were historically accurate.

The mural’s defenders proved persuasive — Scudder’s motion never made it out of committee. The murals stayed. When the post office was closed in 1979 and the murals were threatened again, preservationists led by Refregier’s friend Emmy Lou Packard and artist Ruth Asawa organized a campaign and saved them.

Today, another set of distinguished 1930s-era murals in San Francisco, Arnautoff’s “Life of Washington” frescoes at Washington High School, is threatened, this time by pressure from the left. It remains to be seen whether the city’s art establishment — conspicuously silent when another work deemed objectionable by the left, the “Early Days” statue at Civic Center, was removed last year — will rally to the defense of a controversial piece of art as vigorously as it did 66 years ago.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com

Trivia time Previous trivia question: When and where did a great white shark fatally attack someone off a San Francisco beach? Answer: 18-year-old Albert Kogler Jr. was killed by a great white shark off Baker Beach on May 7, 1959. This week’s trivia question: Where was Crabville-by-the-Bay? Editor’s note Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday. Dig deep into Chronicle Vault Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to the Chronicle Vault newsletter and get classic archive stories in your inbox twice a week. Read hundreds of historical stories, see thousands of archive photos and sort through 153 years of classic Chronicle front pages at SFChronicle.com/vault