Vanka did not leave a written statement on the politics of his murals—he trusted his audience, the congregation at Saint Nicholas, to interpret and understand his work considering their own experience as immigrant workers in the United States. His own political perspective was shaped decidedly by a form of Christian socialism that was common in these communities, in which capital and greed were widely understood as forces of profound moral and social evil that could only be held back by solidarity of working-class people.
Vanka’s politics of trade union socialism were shared with his friend and intellectual interlocuter Louis Adamic, as well as the community of immigrant workers in Millvale. Vanka’s intellectual and political connection with Adamic is evident on the murals themselves: Vanka’s mural Mati, which memorializes the 1941 Axis invasion of Croatia (then a part of Yugoslavia) includes Vanka’s dedication to Louis Adamic on an open book at the figure’s feet. A closer look at Adamic’s writing on politics gives us some indirect insight into the political perspective that shaped Vanka’s murals.
Adamic’s 1931 book Dynamite: A History of Class Violence in America is a bracing depiction of an American labor movement bearing the brunt of violence not of their own making but brought on as they resisted the power of American capitalism. Adamic never adopted a specific political party or label: “I am not, and never was, a member of any labor union or political party or movement in the United States,” he wrote, in a statement that sounds much more like a criminal defense than an honest statement of his own politics (I’m going to try this one next Thanksgiving). But the story he tells in Dynamite is one of unambiguous sympathy and solidarity with American workers, and a “most severe criticism,” as he calls it, of American capitalism. Striking workers, crowds of the unemployed and hungry, and protesters were repeatedly brutalized by state and corporate power in the decades leading up to Adamic’s writing in 1931. “I realize that,” he wrote at the end of the book, “I have put together a rather dreadful story.”
A dreadful story, but not always a pessimistic one. Like many left and labor activists at the time, Adamic believed that social democracy was inevitable, even in a country like the United States, where capital seemed willing and able to deploy limitless resources against the populace: “Society must always compel business to function for the social good, and not only for the social good but for the good of business itself,” Adamic wrote. Capital and business itself were suicidally short-sighted without constant regulation: “Business would have ruined itself and the country long ago, were it not for occasional spurts of social action to curb it.”