George Anthony Dondero
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George A. Dondero (16 December 1883 - 29 January 1968) was an American politician and a member of the United States Congress.
Dondero was born on a farm in Greenfield Township, Michigan, on 16 December 1883. The Township has since become part of Detroit. He graduated from Detroit College of Law in 1910, and started a practice the same year. He served in Congress from 1933 to 1957. He was the ranking minority represenitve in the House Committee on Education for ten years (1937-1947). He sponsered the St. Lawrence Seaways Bill in 1954, which allowed large ocean-going vessels access to the Great Lakes. Thus, he helped connect the Central United States with the Atlantic Ocean.
He was a strict McCarthyite, who used his position to mount an attack on modern art (and it should be noted that Dondero had no artistic training). He once exclaimed that, "Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder... Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule... Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms,". In 1952, Dondero went as far as to tell Congress that modern art was, in fact, a conspiracy by Moscow to spread communism in the United States. This speech, won him the International Fine Arts Council's Gold Medal of Honor for "dedicated service to American Art." The award symbolizes the real reason for the attack on communism in the arts which was the American Modernist-Traditionalist Controversy that took place in America in the 1950s.
When art critic Emily Genauer (future winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism) interviewed Dondero in the mid-1950s and pointed out the resemblance between his views and the Stalinist Communists he despised so much, Dondero was so enraged that he arranged to have her fired from her job at the New York Daily Herald.
Dondero was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln and named his son after the ex-President's son. George A. Dondero died at the age of 84 on 29 January 1968 in Royal Oak, Michigan. The town now has a high school named for him.