It is ironic that the man who symbolized early on the potential for art to challenge the political status quo in America in the 1930s was himself a man of ambivalent political commitments. When the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera was first approached in 1926 about the possibility of creating a mural in San Francisco it must have seemed ironic in the extreme that corporate representatives of American industry, which had a virtual stranglehold on Mexican natural resources (Lee, p. 55) should seek out a man who was a member of the Mexican Communist part, MCP. Rivera’s affiliation with the MCP, contrary to popular opinion, was never very committed and, as a matter of fact, he was expelled from the MCP not only once but twice (Lee, pp. 52-54). That Rivera was now hobnobbing with American industrialists and capitalists such as Rockefeller and Henry Ford essentially betraying the MCP for his own artistic ambitions (Lee, p. 55) certainly did not endear him to his former fellow travelers, and the fact that Rivera had agreed to a mural commission in the United States must have struck them as tantamount to treason. Whereas Rivera was an indifferent member of the MCP and had strange capitalist bedfellows as benefactors, the art that he created in the United States especially his highly controversial and subsequently destroyed mural in Rockefeller Center in New York City that depicted Lenin, Marx and Trotsky showed little embrace of the rich. That American capitalists first sought out Rivera was an attempt on their part at de-escalating MexicanAmerican tensions, for the less than noble purpose of further capitalist exploitation of Mexican resources, but the fact that they looked to Mexican muralists in the first place was indicative of how powerful and influential Mexican public art was at the time. The American artist George Biddle considered it nothing short of “…the greatest national school of mural painting since the Italian Renaissance (McKenzie, p.5). “ Of course, by the time Rivera finally arrived in America in 1930 the stock market had crashed and the United States was in economic chaos.