University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XVIII

ARCHITECTS AS CRUSADERS

Many a worker sees his future America as a
Utopia, in which his own profession, achieving
dictatorship, alleviates the ills of men. The
militarist grows dithyrambic in showing how
war makes for the blessings of peace. The
economic teacher argues that if we follow his
political economy, none of us will have to economize.
The church-fanatic says if all churches
will merge with his organization, none of them
will have to try to behave again. They will just
naturally be good. The physician hopes to
abolish the devil by sanitation. We have our
Utopias. Despite levity, the present writer
thinks that such hopes are among the most
useful things the earth possesses.

A normal man in the full tide of his activities
finds that a world-machinery could logically
be built up by his profession. At least in the
heyday of his working hours his vocation satisfies
his heart. So he wants the entire human

race to taste that satisfaction. Approximate
Utopias have been built from the beginning.
Many civilizations have had some dominant
craft to carry them the major part of the way.
The priests have made India. The classical
student has preserved Old China to its present
hour of new life. The samurai knights have
made Japan. Sailors have evolved the British
Empire. One of the enticing future Americas
is that of the architect. Let the architect appropriate
the photoplay as his means of propaganda
and begin. From its intrinsic genius
it can give his profession a start beyond all
others in dominating this land. Or such is one
of many speculations of the present writer.

The photoplay can speak the language of the
man who has a mind World's Fair size. That
we are going to have successive generations of
such builders may be reasonably implied from
past expositions. Beginning with Philadelphia
in 1876, and going on to San Francisco and San
Diego in 1915, nothing seems to stop us from
the habit. Let us enlarge this proclivity into
a national mission in as definite a movement,
as thoroughly thought out as the evolution of
the public school system, the formation of the
Steel Trust, and the like. After duly weighing

all the world's fairs, let our architects set about
making the whole of the United States into a
permanent one. Supposing the date to begin
the erection be 1930. Till that time there
should be tireless if indirect propaganda that
will further the architectural state of mind,
and later bring about the elucidation of the
plans while they are being perfected. For
many years this America, founded on the psychology
of the Splendor Photoplay, will be
evolving. It might be conceived as a going
concern at a certain date within the lives of
men now living, but it should never cease to
develop.

To make films of a more beautiful United
States is as practical and worth while a custom
as to make military spy maps of every inch
of a neighbor's territory, putting in each fence
and cross-roads. Those who would satisfy the
national pride with something besides battle
flags must give our people an objective as
shining and splendid as war when it is most
glittering, something Napoleonic, and with no
outward pretence of excessive virtue. We want
a substitute as dramatic internationally, yet
world-winning, friend making. If America is
to become the financial centre through no fault

of her own, that fact must have a symbol other
than guns on the sea-coast.

If it is inexpedient for the architectural
patriarchs and their young hopefuls to take
over the films bodily, let a board of strategy
be formed who make it their business to eat
dinner with the scenario writers, producers, and
owners, conspiring with them in some practical
way.

Why should we not consider ourselves a
deathless Panama-Pacific Exposition on a coast-to-coast
scale? Let Chicago be the transportation
building, Denver the mining building.
Let Kansas City be the agricultural building
and Jacksonville, Florida, the horticultural
building, and so around the states.

Even as in mediæval times men rode for hundreds
of miles through perils to the permanent
fairs of the free cities, the world-travellers will attend
this exhibit, and many of them will in the
end become citizens. Our immigration will be
something more than tide upon tide of raw labor.
The Architects would send forth publicity films
which are not only delineations of a future
Cincinnati, Cleveland, or St. Louis, but whole
counties and states and groups of states could
be planned at one time, with the development

of their natural fauna, flora, and forestry.
Wherever nature has been rendered desolate
by industry or mere haste, there let the architect
and park-architect proclaim the plan. Wherever
she is still splendid and untamed, let her
not be violated.

America is in the state of mind where she
must visualize herself again. If it is not possible
to bring in the New Jerusalem to-day, by public
act, with every citizen eating bread and honey
under his vine and fig-tree, owning forty acres
and a mule, singing hymns and saying prayers
all his leisure hours, it is still reasonable to
think out tremendous things the American
people can do, in the light of what they have
done, without sacrificing any of their native
cussedness or kick. It was sprawling Chicago
that in 1893 achieved the White City. The
automobile routes bind the states together closer
than muddy counties were held in 1893. A
"Permanent World's Fair" may be a phrase distressing
to the literal mind. Perhaps it would
be better to say "An Architect's America."

Let each city take expert counsel from the
architectural demigods how to tear out the
dirty core of its principal business square and
erect a combination of civic centre and permanent

and glorious bazaar. Let the public
debate the types of state flower, tree, and
shrub that are expedient, the varieties of villages
and middle-sized towns, farm-homes, and
connecting parkways.

Sometimes it seems to me the American
expositions are as characteristic things as our
land has achieved. They went through without
hesitation. The difficulties of one did not deter
the erection of the next. The United States may
be in many things slack. Often the democracy
looks hopelessly shoddy. But it cannot be
denied that our people have always risen to the
dignity of these great architectural projects.

Once the population understand they are
dealing with the same type of idea on a grander
scale, they will follow to the end. We are not
proposing an economic revolution, or that
human nature be suddenly altered. If California
can remain in the World's Fair state of mind for
four or five years, and finally achieve such a splendid
result, all the states can undertake a similar
project conjointly, and because of the momentum
of a nation moving together, remain in that
mind for the length of the life of a man.

Here we have this great instrument, the
motion picture, the fourth largest industry in

the United States, attended daily by ten million
people, and in ten days by a hundred million,
capable of interpreting the largest conceivable
ideas that come within the range of the plastic
arts, and those ideas have not been supplied.
It is still the plaything of newly rich vaudeville
managers. The nation goes daily, through
intrinsic interest in the device, and is dosed with
such continued stories as the Adventures of
Kathlyn, What Happened to Mary, and the
Million Dollar Mystery, stretched on through
reel after reel, week after week. Kathlyn
had no especial adventures. Nothing in particular
happened to Mary. The million dollar
mystery was: why did the millionaires who
owned such a magnificent instrument descend
to such silliness and impose it on the people?
Why cannot our weekly story be henceforth
some great plan that is being worked out, whose
history will delight us? For instance, every
stage of the building of the Panama Canal
was followed with the greatest interest in the
films. But there was not enough of it to keep
the films busy.

The great material projects are often easier
to realize than the little moral reforms. Beautiful
architectural undertakings, while appearing

to be material, and succeeding by the laws of
American enterprise, bring with them the healing
hand of beauty. Beauty is not directly
pious, but does more civilizing in its proper
hour than many sermons or laws.

The world seems to be in the hands of adventurers.
Why not this for the adventure of
the American architects? If something akin
to this plan does not come to pass through
photoplay propaganda, it means there is no
American builder with the blood of Julius Cæsar
in his veins. If there is the old brute lust for
empire left in any builder, let him awake. The
world is before him.

As for the other Utopians, the economist,
the physician, the puritan, as soon as the architects
have won over the photoplay people,
let these others take sage counsel and ensnare
the architects. Is there a reform worth while
that cannot be embodied and enforced by a
builder's invention? A mere city plan, carried
out, or the name or intent of a quasi-public
building and the list of offices within it may bring
about more salutary economic change than all
the debating and voting imaginable. So without
too much theorizing, why not erect our
new America and move into it?