Every good correspondence deserves a quarrel, preferably a violent one; it takes an earthquake to trace the contours of a fault line. For fifteen years the architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) and the critic Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) enjoyed a lively epistolary friendship, cemented by their commitment to a distinctive American modernism, rooted in the indigenous intellectual tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and Melville.[1] But their brutal falling out over a matter peripheral to their correspondence (American entry into World War II) showed how different their visions were. Such is the theme of this curious and charming book.

In 1926 Mumford received an unexpected fan letter from Wright, congratulating him on his essay “The Poison of Good Taste,” published in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. Mumford was already a critic of some prominence. Born in New York, he had studied for a few years at City College before dropping out because of incipient tuberculosis. This was the extent of his higher education. Essentially an autodidact, Mumford combined the theory of Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the Garden Cities movement, with that of Patrick Geddes, the Scottish polyglot known best for his promotion of regional planning. He discovered that the concerns of the planner—housing, public space, urban form, geology—when taken in total and presented in the form of the literary essay, provided a platform from which to speak about all of culture. Mumford made his mark with The Story of Utopias (1922) and Sticks and Stones (1924), developing a highly distinctive voice in architectural criticism, which he justified in sociological, rather than aesthetic, terms.

Mumford’s willingness to plead the case on behalf of American modernism caused Wright to view him as a potential ally. Wright was certainly in need of them. After a formative and turbulent apprenticeship with Louis Sullivan and a dazzling early career, which produced such landmarks as the Larkin Building, Buffalo (1903) and the Robie House, Chicago (1908), his practice had been poisoned by scandal and personal tragedy. He abandoned his office in Chicago, spending much time in Los Angeles and in Japan, where he built the Tokyo Hotel (1913–22). In 1926 he was still struggling to revive his career, perhaps suspecting that his greatest achievements—such as the development of the Prairie Style house—lay in the past.

After Wright’s first note to Mumford, there followed a rapid exchange of letters, prompted by self-interest but also by considerable personal affection. The self-interest was not surprising. Wright clearly viewed Mumford as an invaluable publicist, and Mumford patently enjoyed his intimate access to a figure of such historical stature— he questioned Wright about Sullivan in preparation for his 1931 book The Brown Decades (Wright’s response, and his account of Sullivan’s tragic late work, is startling).

The undercurrent of affection here is surprising, given the prickliness of the correspondents, each of whom was an idiosyncratic thinker whose comprehensive personal philosophy purported to explain all of culture and society. Each was imperious (alpha males, in today’s jargon), seldom straying into the domain of the other. Indeed the leitmotif of the book is Wright’s persistent failure to induce Mumford to visit him at his compound at Taliesin, and Mumford’s long litany of excuses. Clearly Mumford had no interest in being an acolyte, and he kept Wright at a distance, just as he had once rebuffed Geddes, who had tried to make him his successor. In fact, both Mumford and Wright had had troubled relationships with father-figure mentors, which perhaps accounts for some of their evident affinity.

Wright and Mumford began their correspondence at the time when America was becoming aware of the scope of European modernism, from the social housing projects of Holland and Germany to the rigorous experimental projects of the Bauhaus. They both followed European developments avidly, but as the letters gathered here make clear, both had serious reservations. In distinction to the theory-based modernism of Europe, they preferred an “organic” modern- ism that was the logical and progressive development of indigenous tradition, rather than one which was invented out of whole cloth. For Mumford the characteristic of American modernism, in all its varieties, lay precisely in the absence of radical manifestos or theoretical programs. This was as true of the jazz music of George Gershwin, who worked happily within the American musical tradition, as it was of the skyscrapers of Raymond Hood (whose tapered pyramidal forms followed the setbacks mandated by New York’s 1916 zoning ordinance). And if the glistening terra cotta crown of his Radiator Building lacked the theoretical rigor of Mies van der Rohe’s visionary skyscraper projects, it had the saving merit of having actually been built.

The most tangible result of the Wright-Mumford friendship was their participation in the “International Style” show at the Museum of Modern Art, the country’s first comprehensive exhibition of modern architecture. In early 1932 its organizers, Philip Johnson and Henry Russell-Hitchcock, Jr., asked Wright to participate. Thinking that he was to be highlighted along with Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he accepted, only to discover that several American architects were to be shown, including Hood and Richard Neutra, both of whom he despised. (He particularly resented Neutra, the Austrian émigré who had served a brief and unhappy term in his office which he later exaggerated into a kind of apostol- ic succession.) Wright promptly resigned from the show in a remarkably ill-tempered letter to Johnson—which he copied to Mumford—that managed to insult the participants in the show, the motivations behind it, and even the sexuality of its organizers (“I expect to see you both here at Taliesin early next summer—with your wives. If you haven’t got them now you will have them by then?”)

Mumford was aghast. He sent Wright a frantic telegram calling his absence from the show a “calamity” and urging him to reconsider and overlook the ignoble company of Hood and Neutra: there is no more honorable position than to be crucified BETWEEN TWO THIEVES. Wright promptly relented, and his participation in the show did much to relieve its one-sided emphasis on European modernism. But even as the International Style exhibition opened, the slow grind of the Great Depression was inexorably changing the tenor of Wright’s and Mumford’s ideas, and indirectly of their friendship. As American private building dwindled to a trickle, the European model of state patronage, based on public buildings and social housing, suddenly seemed more attractive. America’s jaunty commercial towers—and the capitalist culture that had sustained them—stood equally in disrepute.

Mumford and Wright drew different conclusions from this new state of affairs. By early 1932 Mumford was becoming skeptical about capitalist individualism, writing that “communism seems to me to grow inevitably out of our lives today in communities… . Such individualism as we shall develop must now be expressed through the collective enterprise.” Increasingly interested in European modernism, he took an extended study tour to Germany that summer. Although he complained to Wright about “much formula, much dogma, much paper,” he praised the quality of the housing. Throughout the decade he would be a champion, albeit a critical one, of similar social housing projects in the United States.

Wright, for his part, rejected “the German tenement and slum solution” (his caustic phrase in a 1935 letter to Mumford), and drew opposite conclusions from the Depression, advocating a more radical individualism. He observed that the decisive factors governing American architecture would be decentralization, the automobile, and the private house. Taking these ideas to their logical conclusion, he envisioned Broadacre City, a decentralized and democratic America in which housing would be provided by modular units on privately owned lots—each one “a complete individual little free-holding”—dispersed across the landscape, the subjective distance diminished by efficient motor transportation.

As a drive through any American suburb will demonstrate, Wright was the keener prophet. But the tide was then with Mumford, who helped bring to America massive social housing projects on the European model and set in motion a four-decade federal campaign to build high-rise public housing—the most abject failure in architectural history since the Tower of Babel, whose hubris it rivaled.

Mumford’s faint praise for Broadacre City (“I don’t reject your Broadacre City as a romantic dream; but by the same token I don’t think it is a universal solution”) wounded Wright. For the next two years, 1936 and 1937, their correspondence was conducted through Eugene Masselink, Wright’s private secretary. After the start of World War II, their relationship grew even frostier. Mumford was an early agitator for American involvement in the war, writing several pro-interventionist tracts, including Men Must Act (1939), while Wright took a public stance in favor of non-intervention.

Mumford chided Wright for his politics in April 1941: “Are you still in the Neville Chamberlain period? Period politics are as bad as period architecture.” Wright wrote an uncharacteristically mild letter seeking a rapprochement, but in the meantime Mumford had received a copy of one of Wright’s anti-war broadsides, in which opponents of Hitler were described as “gangsters.” This was too much. On May 30 he sent Wright a withering letter, calculated to inflict mortal blows. Wright’s pacifism was a surrender to “totalitarian corruption and slavery and terrorism,” while his venerable age was made an object of ridicule: “You have become a living corpse: a spreader of active corruption. You dishonor all the generous impulses you once ennobled. Be silent! Lest you bring upon yourself some greater shame.” Burning all bridges, Mumford published the letter in The New Yorker.

Wright seems to have been caught off guard by the attack, but he replied in kind, aiming likewise for the jugular. He contrasted his own role as a maker of tangible things (“I—a builder”) with the dilettantism of Mumford (“you amateur essayist on culture”), whom he portrayed as a hack with writer’s block (“a vengeful, conceited writer. Another writer out of ideas.”) So began their decade of estrangement.

Not until 1951 was there reconciliation, brought about when Wright sent Mumford a copy of his book The Sovereignty of the Individual, inscribed “in spite of all.” Correspondence resumed and continued until Wright’s death, although now with a valedictory tone—the reminiscences of veterans rather than the dispatches of warriors. And there was a clear element of parody when Wright now signed his letters “from the Democrat to the Socialist.” In retrospect, the cautious minuet between Wright and Mumford takes on the contours of high tragedy. Each possessed abundant reserves of humanity, rationality, and poetry, and their failure to act in concert during the critical decades of the 1930s and 1940s was one of the great lost opportunities of the last century. Had they not been tainted by a certain mix of ego, vanity, and more than a little megalomania—all abundantly on display here—America might have been spared some of the noxious atrocities of postwar architecture and planning. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director of the Frank Lloyd Wright archive, and Robert Wojtowicz, the author of Lewis Mumford and American Modernism, deserve our gratitude for this well-conceived, handsome, and very amusing book.

Notes
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1. Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer & Robert Wojtowicz; Princeton Architectural Press, 256 pages, $27.50. Go back to the text.