comparative insignificance when it was announced in June that Orozco had found in the
reserve book room of Baker Library the wars of which he had dreamed as space for the
conception that had been growing in his mind for a mural project which he hoped would
become the greatest work of his career--an epic of civilization on the American continent.
He would accept appointment to a regular faculty rank in the department of art, he would
direct the experimental work of students in this medium, he would spend as many months
as necessary to transfer his conception to the 3000 square feet of wall space, and in return he
would receive the freedom of the walls for the development of his theme.

Orozco came to Dartmouth in 1932 as a teacher, remained for two years as a creative
artist, gained the affection of the community for his sweetness of nature, injected a vital
something into the College's consciousness of art, and departed in 1934 leaving a notable
work in ageless colors on the library walls.

That the Orozco murals should arouse controversy was anticipated and desired. Passive
acceptance has no legitimate place in the educational process, and the double-edged incisiveness
of controversy is one of the major educational values to be derived from work as positive and
vital as Orozco's. The Orozco project at Dartmouth was primarily an educational venture.
Whatever may be the final judgment of time on the place of Orozco and these murals in the
great tradition of art, the college generation which witnessed the creation of these frescoes had
a rare and exciting privilege.

AMONG the Toltecs, who developed over many centuries an amazingly advanced American
civilization, and among the more militant Aztecs, who largely absorbed the Toltec culture, the
god Quetzalcoatl was the great white messiah revered as one who had come to their tribal
forebears bringing the arts and crafts on which their civilization was built, repudiating the
barbaric native medicine men, and proposing a new ethical ideal and way of life. Eventually,
the tribes failing to live up to the god's precepts and falling again under the influence of
their medicine men, Quetzalcoatl departed on a raft of snakes into the East, whence he had
come, promising to return in five hundred years.