Frank Lloyd Wright was cutting out a new avenue that led towards the swift constructions in glassbricks and steel
foreshadowed today.
Delightedly he reached out for the new materials, steel in tension, glass, concrete, the million new metals and alloys.
The son and grandson of preachers, he became a preacher in blueprints,
projecting constructions in the American future instead of the European past.
Inventor of plans,
plotter of tomorrow’s girderwork phrases,
he preaches to the young men coming of age in the time of oppression, cooped up by the plasterboard partitions of finance routine, their lives and plans made poor by feudal levies of parasite money standing astride every process to shake down progress for the cutting of coupons:
The properly citified citizen has become a broker, dealing chiefly in human frailties or the ideas and inventions of others, a puller of levers, a presser of buttons of vicarious power, his by way of machine craft . . . and over beside him and beneath him, even in his heart as he sleeps, is the taximeter of rent, in some form to goad this anxious consumer’s unceasing struggle for or against more or less merciful or merciless money increment.
To the young men who spend their days and nights drafting the plans for new rented aggregates of rented cells upended on hard pavements,
he preaches
the horizons of his boyhood,
a future that is not the rise of a few points in a hundred selected stocks, or an increase in carloadings, or a multiplication of credit in the bank or a rise in the rate on callmoney,
but a new clean construction, from the ground up, based on uses and needs,
towards the American future instead of towards the pain-smeared past of Europe and Asia. Usonia he calls the broad teeming band of this new nation across the enormous continent between Atlantic and Pacific. He preaches a project for Usonia:
It is easy to realize how the complexity of crude utilitarian construction in the mechanical infancy of our growth, like the crude scaffolding for some noble building, did violence to the landscape. . . . The crude purpose of pioneering days has been accomplished. The scaffolding may be taken down and the true work, the culture of a civilization, may appear.
Like the life of many a preacher, prophet, exhorter, Frank Lloyd Wright’s life has been stormy. He has raised children, had rows with wives, overstepped boundaries, got into difficulties with the law, divorcecourts, bankruptcy, always the yellow press yapping at his heels, his misfortunes yelled out in headlines in the evening papers: affairs with women, the nightmare horror of the burning of his house in Wisconsin.
By a curious irony the building that is most completely his is the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo that was one of the few structures to come unharmed through the earthquake of 1923 (the day the cable came telling him that the building had stood saving so many hundreds of lives he writes was one of his happiest days)
and it was reading in German that most Americans first learned of his work.
His life has been full of arrogant projects unaccomplished. (How often does the preacher hear his voice echo back hollow from the empty hall, the draftsman watch the dust fuzz over the carefully-contrived plans, the architect see the rolledup blueprints curl yellowing and brittle in the filingcabinet.)
Twice he’s rebuilt the house where he works in his grandfather’s valley in Wisconsin after fires and disasters that would have smashed most men forever.
He works in Wisconsin,
an erect spare whitehaired man, his sons are architects, apprentices from all over the world come to work with him,
drafting the new city (he calls it Broadacre City).
Near and Far are beaten (to imagine the new city you must blot out every ingrained habit of the past, build a nation from the ground up with the new tools). For the architect there are only uses:
the incredible multiplication of functions, strength and tension in metal,
the dynamo, the electric coil, radio, the photoelectric cell, the internalcombustion motor,
glass
concrete;
and needs. (Tell us, doctors of philosophy, what are the needs of a man. At least a man needs to be notjailed notafraid nothungry notcold not without love, not a worker for a power he has never seen
that cares nothing for the uses and needs of a man or a woman or a child.)
Building a building is building the lives of the workers and dwellers in the building.
The buildings determine civilization as the cells in the honeycomb the functions of bees.
Perhaps in spite of himself the arrogant draftsman, the dilettante in concrete, the bohemian artist for wealthy ladies desiring to pay for prominence with the startling elaboration of their homes has been forced by the logic of uses and needs, by the lifelong struggle against the dragging undertow of money in mortmain,
to draft plans that demand for their fulfillment a new life;
only in freedom can we build the Usonian city. His plans are coming to life. His blueprints, as once Walt Whitman’s words, stir the young men:—
Frank Lloyd Wright,
patriarch of the new building,
not without honor except in his own country.
Newsreel LXIV
WEIRD FISH DRAWN FROM SARGASSO SEA
by night when the rest of the plant was still dim figures ugly in gasmasks worked in the long low building back of the research laboratory
RUM RING LINKS NATIONS
All around the water tank
Waitin’ for a train
WOMAN SLAIN MATE HELD
Business Men Not Alarmed Over Coming Election
GRAVE FOREBODING UNSETTLES MOSCOW
LABOR CHIEFS RULED OUT OF PULPITS
imagination boggles at the reports from Moscow. These murderers have put themselves beyond the pale. They have shown themselves to be the mad dogs of the world
WALLSTREET EMPLOYERS BANISH CHRISTMAS
WORRIES AS BONUSES ROLL IN
Left my girl in the mountains
Left her standin’ in the rain
OUR AIR SUPREMACY ACCLAIMED
LAND SO MOUNTAINOUS IT STANDS ON END
Got myself in trouble
An’ shot a county sheriff down
In The Stealth of the Night Have You Heard Padded Feet Creeping Towards You?
TROTZKY OPENS ATTACK ON STALIN
Strangled Man Dead in Street
Moanin’ low . . .
My sweet man’s gonna go
HUNT HATCHET WOMAN WHO ATTACKED
SOCIETY MATRON
CLASPS HANDS OF HEROES
GIRL DYING IN MYSTERY PLUNGE
He’s the kind of man that needs the kind of woman like me
Completely Lost In Fog over Mexico
ASSERT RUSSIA RISING
For I’m dancin’ with tears in my eyes
’Cause the girl in my arms isn’t you
600 PUT TO DEATH AT ONCE IN CANTON
SEE BOOM YEAR AHEAD
this checking we do for you in our investors consulting service, we analyze every individual security you own and give you an impartial report and rating thereon. Periodically through the year we keep you posted on important developments. If danger signals suddenly develop we advise you promptly
The Camera Eye (49)
walking from Plymouth to North Plymouth through the raw air of Massachusetts Bay at each step a small cold squudge through the sole of one shoe
looking out past the grey framehouses under the robinsegg April sky across the white dories anchored in the bottleclear shallows across the yellow sandbars and the slaty bay ruffling to blue to the eastward
this is where the immigrants landed the roundheads the sackers of castles the kingkillers haters of oppression this is where they stood in a cluster after landing from the crowded ship that stank of bilge on the beach that belonged to no one between the ocean that belonged to no one and the enormous forest that belonged to no one that stre
tched over the hills where the deertracks were up the green rivervalleys where the redskins grew their tall corn in patches forever into the incredible west
for threehundred years the immigrants toiled into the west
and now today
walking from Plymouth to North Plymouth suddenly round a bend in the road beyond a little pond and yellowtwigged willows hazy with green you see the Cordage huge sheds and buildings companyhouses all the same size all grimed the same color a great square chimney long roofs sharp ranked squares and oblongs cutting off the sea the Plymouth Cordage this is where another immigrant worked hater of oppression who wanted a world unfenced when they fired him from the cordage he peddled fish the immigrants in the dark framehouses knew him bought his fish listened to his talk following his cart around from door to door you ask them What was he like? why are they scared to talk of Bart scared because they knew him scared eyes narrowing black with fright? a barber the man in the little grocerystore the woman he boarded with in scared voices they ask Why won’t they believe? We knew him We seen him every day Why won’t they believe that day we buy the eels?
only the boy isn’t scared
pencil scrawls in my notebook the scraps of recollection the broken halfphrases the effort to intersect word with word to dovetail clause with clause to rebuild out of mangled memories unshakably (Oh Pontius Pilate) the truth
the boy walks shyly browneyed beside me to the station talks abouthow Bart helped him with his homework wants to get ahead why should it hurt him to have known Bart? wants to go to Boston University we shake hands don’t let them scare you
accustomed the smokingcar accustomed the jumble of faces rumble cozily homelike towards Boston through the gathering dark how can I make them feel how our fathers our uncles haters of oppression came to this coast how say Don’t let them scare you how make them feel who are your oppressors America
rebuild the ruined words worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers districtattorneys collegepresidents judges without the old words the immigrants haters of oppression brought to Plymouth how can you know who are your betrayers America
or that this fishpeddler you have in Charlestown Jail is one of your founders Massachusetts?
Newsreel LXV
STORM TIES UP SUBWAY; FLOODS AND LIGHTNING
DARKEN CITY
Love oh love oh careless love
Like a thief comes in the night
ONLOOKERS CRY HALLELUJAH AS PEACE
DOVE LIGHTS; SAID TO HAVE
SPLIT $100,000
CRASH UPSETS EXCHANGE
Chicago Nipple Slump Hits Trading On Curb
Bring me a pillow for my poor head
A hammer for to knock out my brains
For the whiskey has ruined this body of mine
And the red lights have run me insane
FAITH PLACED IN RUBBER BOATS
But I’ll love my baby till the sea runs dry
This Great New Searchlight Sunburns You Two Miles Away
Till the rocks all dissolve by the sun
Oh ain’t it hard?
Smythe according to the petition was employed testing the viscosity of lubricating oil in the Okmulgee plant of the company on July 12, 1924. One of his duties was to pour benzol on a hot vat where it was boiled down so that the residue could be examined. Day after day he breathed the not unpleasant fumes from the vat.
One morning about a year later Smythe cut his face while shaving and noticed that the blood flowed for hours in copious quantities from the tiny wound. His teeth also began to bleed when he brushed them and when the flow failed to stop after several days he consulted a doctor. The diagnosis was that the benzol fumes had broken down the walls of his blood vessels.
After eighteen months in bed, during which he slept only under the effect of opiates, Smythe’s spleen and tonsils were removed. Meanwhile the periodic blood transfusions were resorted to in an effort to keep his blood supply near normal.
In all more than thirty-six pints of blood were infused through his arms until when the veins had been destroyed it was necessary to cut into his body to open other veins. During the whole time up to eight hours before his death, the complaint recited, he was conscious and in pain.
Mary French
The first job Mary French got in New York she got through one of Ada’s friends. It was sitting all day in an artgallery on Eighth Street where there was an exposition of sculpture and answering the questions of ladies in flowing batiks who came in in the afternoons to be seen appreciating art. After two weeks of that the girl she was replacing came back and Mary who kept telling herself she wanted to be connected with something real went and got herself a job in the ladies’ and misses’ clothing department at Bloomingdale’s. When the summer layoff came she was dropped, but she went home and wrote an article about departmentstore workers for the Freeman and on the strength of it got herself a job doing research on wages, livingcosts and the spread between wholesale and retail prices in the dress industry for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers. She liked the long hours digging out statistics, the talk with the organizers, the wisecracking radicals, the working men and girls who came into the crowded dingy office she shared with two or three other researchworkers. At last she felt what she was doing was real.
Ada had gone to Michigan with her family and had left Mary in the apartment on Madison Avenue. Mary was relieved to have her gone; she was still fond of her but their interests were so different and they had silly arguments about the relative importance of art and social justice that left them tired and cross at each other so that sometimes they wouldn’t speak for several days; and then they hated each other’s friends. Still Mary couldn’t help being fond of Ada. They were such old friends and Ada forked out so generously for the strikers’ defense committees, legalaid funds and everything that Mary suggested; she was a very openhanded girl, but her point of view was hopelessly rich, she had no social consciousness. The apartment got on Mary French’s nerves, too, with its pastelcolored nicknacks and the real Whistler and the toothick rugs and the toosoft boxsprings on the bed and the horrid little satin tassels on everything; but Mary was making so little money that not paying rent was a great help.
Ada’s apartment came in very handy the night of the big meeting in Madison Square Garden to welcome the classwar prisoners released from Atlanta. Mary French who had been asked to sit on the platform overheard some members of the committee saying that they had no place to put up Ben Compton. They were looking for a quiet hideout where he could have a rest and shake the D.J. operatives who’d been following him around everywhere since he’d gotten to New York. Mary went up to them and in a whisper suggested her place. So after the meeting she waited in a yellow taxicab at the corner of Twentyninth and Madison until a tall pale man with a checked cap pulled way down over his face got in and sat down shakily beside her. When the cab started he put his steelrimmed glasses back on. “Look back and see if a grey sedan’s following us,” he said. “I don’t see anything,” said Mary. “Oh, you wouldn’t know it if you saw it,” he grumbled.
To be on the safe side they left the cab at the Grand Central station and walked without speaking a way up Park Avenue and then west on a cross street and down Madison again. Mary plucked his sleeve to stop him in front of the door. Once in the apartment he made Mary shoot the bolt and let himself drop into a chair without taking off his cap or his overcoat.
He didn’t say anything. His shoulders were shaking. Mary didn’t like to stare at him. She didn’t know what to do. She puttered around the livingroom, lit the gaslogs, smoked a cigarette and then she went into the kitchenette to make coffee. When she got back he’d taken off his things and was warming his bigknuckled hands at the gaslogs. “You must excuse me, comrade,” he said in a dry hoarse voice. “I’m all in.”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Mary. “I thought you might want some coffee.”
“No coffee . . . hot milk,” he said hurriedly. His teeth were chattering as if he were cold.
She came back with a cup of hot milk. “Could I have some sugar in it?” he said and almost smiled.
“Of course,” she said. “You made a magnificent speech, so restrained and kind of fiery. . . . It was the best in the whole meeting.” “You didn’t think I seemed agitated? I was afraid I’d go to pieces and not be able to finish. . . . You’re sure nobody knows this address, or the phonenumber? You’re sure we weren’t followed?” “I’m sure nobody’ll find you here on Madison Avenue. . . . It’s the last place they’d look.” “I know they are trailing me,” he said with a shudder and dropped into a chair again. They were silent for a long time. Mary could hear the gaslogs and the little sucking sips he drank the hot milk with. Then she said:
Big Money Page 43
