NP? Vineland (andf GR) echoes from a former (?) P-lister

[Doug Millison]

"[...] The crypto-fascist Philip Johnson famously
dismissed Wright as the greatest architect of the 19th
Century. [Perhaps, architects who build glass houses
shouldn't throw stones.] There's a certain grain of
truth about this, though not, certainly, in the sense
that Johnson, who embodied the worst strains of
modernism (and post-modernism), meant to convey.

Wright was a utopian, in the grand romantic tradition.
He was grounded in Rousseau and often let slip that
his favorite poets were Walt Whitman and the dreamy
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Along with fellow poet (and
snitch) Robert Southey, Coleridge cooked up an idea
for a utopian community in western Pennsylvania they
called, somewhat clumsily for two poets capable of
stunning lyricism, the Pantisocracy. They were going
to pay for the land on the proceeds of a long poem
chronicling the life and death of Robespierre. But the
plan ultimately fell apart over violent disagreements
between the two on sexual freedom (which Coleridge
advocated) and slavery (which Coleridge abhorred).
Interestingly, the Pantisocracy, charted out only on
maps in Coleridge's house in Keswick, was to have been
located not far from where Wright built his most
famous house, Fallingwater. [...]

The early half of the 19th century was a time of
incredible optimism and radicalism in the United
States. In the 1840s, there were 100,000 people living
in more than 150 socialist/utopian communities across
the country. "Those towns stood for everything
eccentric: for abolition, short skirts, whole-wheat
bread, hypnotism, phonetic spelling, phrenology, free
love and the common ownership of property,'' wrote the
journalist Helen Beal Woodward in 1945 article on
utopian communities. The Civil War largely put an end
to all that, but the utopian spirit continued to
thrive after the war, particularly in the prairie
states, through the rise of the populist parties and
the Wisconsin progressives. [...] 

the Jacobs House, and the dozens of Usonian designs
that would follow, did more than that. It was truly
one of the first environmentally-conscious designs,
utilizing passive solar heating, natural cooling and
lighting with his signature clerestory windows, native
materials, radiant floor heating, and L-shaped
floorplan that anchored the house around a garden
terrace. [...]
 
Why are we left only with the barest elements of the
design, the cookie-cutter ranch houses that came to
dominate the lots of suburban America?

There's no simple explanation. But one thing is clear.
Wright's plans to revolutionize the American
residential living space ran afoul of interests of the
federal government. Think about this: in his 70-year
career Wright didn't win one contract for a federal
building. Not even during the heyday of the New Deal.

It all came down to politics. Wright's politics were
vastly more complicated and honorable than that
embodied by Howard Roark, Ayn Rand's self-serving
portrait of Wright in her novel The Fountainhead. Sure
there was a libertarian strain to Wright, which Rand
seized on and distorted to her own perverse ends. But
he also was drawn to the prairie populism espoused by
the likes of the great Ignatius Donnelly. It's this
version of Wright that makes an appearance in John dos
Passos' USA trilogy.

Wright was a pacifist and his i outright opposition to
war cost him government commissions, the great
lifeline of the professional architect, especially
during the Depression and World War II. [...] 
John Sergeant, in his excellent book on Wright's
Usonian houses, argues that there's a mutual
admiration between Wright and the noted anarchist,
Peter Kropotkin. In 1899, Kropotkin moved to Chicago,
living in the Hull House commune, set up by radical
social reformer Jane Addams, where Wright often
lectured, including a reading of his famous essay the
Arts and Crafts Machine.

But, in those crucial decades of the 20s and 30s,
Wright's political views seemed to align most snugly
with Wisconsin progressives, as personified by the
LaFollettes. In fact, Philip LaFollette served as
Wright's attorney and sat on the board of Wright's
corporation.

None of this escaped the attention of the authorities.
>From World War I to his final days, Wright found
himself the subject of a campaign of surveillance,
harassment and intimidation by the federal government.
In 1941, 26 members of Wright's Taliesin fellowship
signed a petition objecting to the draft and calling
the war effort futile and immoral. The draft board
sent the letter to the FBI, where it immediately came
to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who already
loathed Wright.

Twice Hoover himself demanded that the Justice
Department bring sedition charges against Wright. He
was rebuffed both times by the attorney general, but,
typically, that only drove Hoover to expand the
surveillance and harassment by his goons.

But, as a review of Wright's FBI file reveals, the
Fed's interest in the architect extended far beyond
his pacifism. Hoover's men recorded his dalliances
with the Wobblies, his continuing attempts to combat
the US government's dehumanization of the Japanese
during and after the war, his rabble-rousing speeches
on college campuses, his work for international
socialists and third world governments, including
Iraq, and his rather unorthodox views on sexual
relations (the Feds noted that Wright seemed to have a
particular obsession with Marlene Dietrich). [...] 


http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair0813.html
Usonian Utopias
Frank Lloyd Wright, Working Class Housing and the FBI
by Jeffrey St. Clair


 



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