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IHE internal character of a man is often expressed in his exterior appearance, even in the manner of his
walking and in the sound of his voice. Likewise the hidden character of things is to a certain extent
expressed in their outward forms ... He ought to look witli his own eyes into the book of Nature
and become able to understand it ... The knowledge of nature as it is-not as we imagine it to be-consti-
tutes true philosophy . . . But he who is not true himself will not see the truth as it is taught by nature,
and it is far easier to study a number of books and to learn by heart a number of scientific theories than
to ennoble one's own character to such an extent as to enter into perfect harmony with nature and to be
able to see the truth . . . Wisdom in man is nobody's servant and has not lost its own freedom, and
through wisdom man attains power over the stars . . . He must realize the presence of the highest in his
own heart before he can know it with his intellect. The spiritual temple is locked with many keys, and
those who are vain enough to believe that they can invade it by their own power, and without being
shown the way by the light of wisdom, will storm against it in vain. Wisdom is not created by man; it
must come to him, and cannot be purchased for money nor coaxed with promises, but it comes to those
whose minds are pure and whose hearts arc open to receive it ... The highest a man can feel and think
is his highest ideal, and the higher we rise in the scale of existence and the more our knowledge expands,
the higher will be our ideal. As long as we cling to our highest ideal we will be happy in spite of the
sufferings and vicissitudes of life. The highest ideal confers the highest and most enduring happi-
ness . . . The highest power ol the intellect, if it is not illuminated by love, is only a high grade of animal
intellect, and will perish in time; but the intellect animated by the love of the Supreme is the intellect
of the angels, and will live in eternity. All things are vehicles of virtues, everything in nature is a house
wherein dwell certain powers and virtues such as God has infused throughout Nature and which inhabit
all things in the same sense as the soul is in man . . . True faith is spiritual consciousness, but a belief
based upon mere opinions and creeds is the product of ignorance, and is superstition , . , This physical
body, which is believed to be of so little importance by those who love to dream about the mysteries of
the spirit, is the most secret and valuable thing. It is the true "stone which the builders rejected," but
which must become the corner-stone of the temple, It is the "stone" which is considered worthless by
those who seek for a God above the clouds and reject Him when He enters their house. This physical
body is not merely an instrument for divine power, but it is also the soil from which that which is
immortal in man receives its strength, PARACELSUS

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FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

THE L I V I

HORIZON PRESS NEW YORK 19

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1958 EY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 58-13550

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A portion of this work was published under the
title When Democracy Builds, copyright 1945.

CONTENTS

From PARACELSUS page 1

FOREWORD 9
NOTE 13

PART ONE NATURE 17 Earth 17 The-Shadow-of-the-Wall
Primitive Instincts Still Alive 21 Democracy:
Gospel of Individuality 25

PART TWO ILLUSION 31 Social and Economic Disease 31
A Makeshift 32 Rent 33 The Artifex 38
An Experiment 38 The Culture Lag 43 For
the Individual 45 The Inexorable Law of Change
49 Illusion 51 The Light of Day 54 Forces
Tearing the Vortex Down 60 Looking Backward
67 Freedom or Conscription 72

PART THREE DECENTRALIZATION 77 Integration on the New
Scale of Spacing 77 Broadacres 81 Analysis
83 Democracy by Definition 84 Land and
Money 85 Organic Architecture 86 Action
88 Feudal 89 Our Architecture 91 The
New City 94 Usonia 97 Values 102 Re-
capitulation 105

PART FOUR

USONIAN 109 A Legacy We Have Received From
the Past 109 Individuality 110 Specious Au-
thority 111 Architecture and Acreage Together
are Landscape 112 The Usonian Vision 116
Mis-education 141 To Begin 142 Change
Will Take Effect 143 The Word Organic 145
The Usonian on His Own Acreage 146 The Teen-
Ager 154 Life a Well-Calculated Risk 156 The
Usonian FarmerThe Integration of the Family
158 The Great Mouth 160 "Business" and
Architecture 164 Industrialization 164 The
Factory 164 Business Offices 165 The Pro-
fessional 166 Bank, Banker and Banking 167
Markets 168 The Realtor 169 Apartments
170 Motels 171 Community Centers 174
The New Theater 177 The Light That Failed
179 Church Building 180 The Hospital 183
Education and Culture 183 Universities 185
Schools 187 Source of Design The Design Cen-
ter 190

PART FIVE

THE PRESENT 196 The Usonian 196 The New
Pioneer 198 Nature 199 To Have and to Hold
202 Latter-Day Civilization 205 Democracy in
Overalls 206 The Awakened Citizen 208 Ro-
mance 215 Architecture 215 Discipline

216 "Where There is No Vision the People Perish"

217 The Wage Slave 217 Night is but a
Shadow Cast by the Sun 219

APPENDIX From EMERSON ON FARMING 223

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Front Insert Plan for Broadacre City

Frontispiece Frank Lloyd Wright

page 30 Find the Citizen

52 The Old City

53 H. C. Price Company Tower

58 The Unified Farm Building, Model

60 The Unified Farm, Plan

61 The Unified Farm, Perspective

62 Typical Dwelling for Little Farms

63 Upper Level Living Room, Plan (top)

63 Garden Level, Plan ( bottom )

64 Typical Cottage for Level Ground

65 Typical Home for Sloping Ground

66 Broadacre City Model

70 The Usonian Concrete Block House (top)

70 Usonian House Living Room (bottom)

71 Usonian House, Mezzanine Plan (top)

71 Usonian House, Ground Level Plan (bottom)

95 Urban Section A: New Civic Center

98 Urban Section D: Roadside Market

99 Roadside Market, Sketch

100 Roadside Market, Elevation (top)

page 100 Roadside Market, Section (bottom)

101 Roadside Market, Plan

103 Urban Section B: Stadium and Buildings

108 Urban Section C: Little Farms, Transport Lines, etc.

115 Plan of Major Highway Intersection and Overpass

116 Highway Intersection, Model

117 Plan of Minor Highway (top)

117 Section of Overpass (bottom)

118 Overhead Service Station

120 Overhead Service Station, Plans

123 Broadacre City County Building, Sketch of elevation

124 County Building, Sketches, Elevations

126 New Motor Car, Design Sketches

127 Typical Street View at Civic Center

128 Small School, Sketch
130 Small School, Plan

150 Quadruple Housing, Exterior Plan

151 Quadruple Housing, Plan
172 Motor Hotel, Elevation (top)

172 Motor Hotel, Court (bottom)

173 Motor Hotel, Plan

175 Barge, "Fallen Leaf (top)

175 Barge for Two ( bottom )

176 The New Theatre, Drawing

177 The New Theatre, Plan

181 Typical View of Countryside

207 House on the Mesa the Luxury House, Northeast Elevation

208 House on the Mesa, Sketch

209 House on the Mesa, Living Room
210-211 House on the Mesa

Southeast Elevation (top)
Northwest Elevation (center)
First Floor, Plan (left)
Second Floor, Plan ( right )

212 Section through Bedroom and Southwest Elevation

8

FOREWORD

WHEN a great Oak is to die, a few yellow-green leaves appear on
topmost branches. Next season much of the upper part of the tree is
yellow; next year the upper branches remain without leaves. After several
following seasons we say the tree is "dry."

But for many years to come, the frame of the dry tree stands erect,
making black marks against the sky as though nothing had happened.
Finally, rotted at the root, useless, the top-heavy structure falls. But then
even the heavy frame must lie a long time broken upon the ground. Many
years pass before it crumbles to soil and grass roots come; perhaps another
acorn or two to give rise to other great oaks.

What sap and leaves were to the great Oak a healthy aesthetic is to a
People.

This book is written in firm belief that true human culture has a healthy
sense of the beautiful as its life-of-the-soul: an aesthetic organic, as of life
itself, not on it; nobly relating man to his environment. The sense of this
natural aesthetic would make of man a gracious, integral, potent part of the
whole of human life. Ethics, Art and Religion survive in civilizations only
as departments of this aesthetic sense, and survive only to the extent that
they embody human sentiment for the beautiful. To ignore this truth is to
misunderstand the soul of man, to turn him over to science ignorant of his
true significance; and to remain blind to his destiny.

Here we are in this great melting-pot of all the breaking-down or cast-off

cultures of a world wherein we have allowed the present arrogance of
science to forestall a genuine culture of our own. In common we inherit
and are preserving this cultural lag.

To confess that we "the great American people" have, as yet, developed
no culture of our own, no efflorescence of the great Tree of Life, no such
fragrance, is quite fair enough. Useful at this time.

Just as great trees die, civilizations themselves dieoften withered from
within by lack of culture. Or they are blown down, destroyed root and
branch by the eradicable pest war. Or are buried by the flood revolution.

We are too young a nation thus to degenerate? Too vigorous to die a
violent death utterly?

Although we have never attained the high plane from which a nation
degenerates, the virus of earlier cultures coming here in the blood of
immigrants might be a contagion marking us for decay and death.

Salvation depends upon the realization that, with science carried far
enough and deep enough, we will find great art to be the sure significance
of all that science can ever know of life and see that art and religion are
valid prophecy of everything science may ever live to convey. We will find
philosophy to be the science of man from within the man himself. Our
vaunted scientists must work upon him only from the outside, so where
man's soul is concerned science must work in vain; because such sciences as
we practice substitute morality for ethics, money for ideas, fact for truth.
We, as a nation, have ignored or only imitated art, confused or neglected
religion, demoralized philosophy and ignored ethics. No science can be
humanely fruitful until art, reKgion, philosophy, ethics and science are
comprehended as one great entity, a universal Unity seen as the Beautiful.

In this immense drift of provincial conformity-culture, our aesthetic sense
is neglected, or betrayed, and likely to come down to a raising of the
overflowing cup with the little finger delicately lifted: discussing, say, the
easel-picture directed to the nervous system instead of the soiil. Or some
poetic pose or selecticism by taste; taste in manners or the cliche all over
again in Architecture. Whereas we need now to know that the honest hard-
ships of our forefathers in their bravest pioneering were as nothing com-
pared to the equivocal trials now inflicted upon their sons and daughters
on this new frontier of the Spirit: in behalf of a culture of our ownl Not

10

only we, their sons and daughters, but our grandsons and granddaughters
must stand here now exposed to insidious danger from decaying traditions
within and blind authority without.

Our forefathers faced dangers in the open that we might live. We face
more insidious dangers: the danger of degeneracy, of dishonesty; the
danger that they may have lived for us in vain and we, their own begotten
sons and daughters, will have begotten sons and daughters of our own in
vanity without the heritage of spiritual courage and consequent strength.

"Once upon a time," not so long ago, the conquering of physical or terri-
torial realm was the Frontier. But now to conquer sordid, ugly commercial-
ism in this machine age, this "bony fiber of the dry tree" that spiritual
conquest is our new Frontier. Only by growing a healthy aesthetic, organic
in the souls of our young polyglot nationals can we win this victory, greatest
of all victories Democracy.

This book is on the firing line of this new, most important frontier of all
frontiers a fight for faith, faith in man's Democracy, in the beauty of this
new gospel of individuality; faith in the beauty that is the fragrant efflores-
cence of all humanity the sap and foliage of the < Living Tree man's faith
in himself as Himself.

-F. LI. W.

11

NOTE

PROFESSIONAL criticism (say, writing book reviews) like most criti-
cism, requires extreme egotism. But critics are not so useless as they
might seem to be.

Among apprehensive appreciations of the original When Democracy
Builds (reviews by critics more interested in content than style) came
several more interested in style than content.

One such said, "The style of the work is just this side of deplorable," and
quoted a sentence to prove it. I have retained this sentence. Another said,
"The licentious use of capitals is confusing." So it seemed. Even to me.

One poor man gave it up entirely, saying he "failed to understand."

Another said the book was full of cliches. Yes, it was; but "my own"
because quoting myself.

So, curiosity thus aroused many months away from initial writing, I took
up the book to reread it. Perspective was afforded by distance from the
act and

Well . . . the critics were all too kind. The style of the work seemed to me
yes deplorable. Capitalization by means of which I intended to empha-
size significances actually confused them. Sentences pregnant to me with
meaning when I wrote them utterly failed to clinch, or went into reverse.

What to do?

Rewrite the book.

Ignominy of coursel

13

I hardened into my own most severe critic, I thought, and yet sentences
quoted by my critics to show my style just this side of "deplorable" I found
right enough in their way. They stand. I apologize. But I did find the
affair with capitalization fantastic, far too capitalistic. I threw this affair
out, and proceeded to clinch every phrase in the book concerned with an
idea, so far as I could. I found so very many at loose ends and many stay
there yet.

But as for cliches, if so, I made the original of every cliche myself.
Regarding that I call your attention to the captious English lady who,
advised to read Hamlet, threw the book away half -read with the con-
temptuous remark that she "couldn't see why they thought Shakespeare
so great an author when his work was so full of quotations."

My critics! Sincerely I thank you.

-F. LI. W.

TALIESIN

14

N

NATURE

Earth

THE value of Earth as man's heritage, or of Man as earth's great heritage,
' is gone far from him now in any big city centralization has built (but
never designed). Centralization without plan has overbuilt. Urban hap-
piness of the properly citified citizen consists in crowding in confusion
lured by the hypnotic warmth, pressure and approbation of the crowd?
The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head,
fills citified ears as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as
the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-
happy.

But where and as he now stands, out of the machine that his big city of
the motor age has become, no citizen creates or operates more than mere
machinery nor is he going to be much more than a machine himself if his
big city stays.

Thus the properly citified citizen becomes a broker of profit-system ideas,
a vendor of gadgetry, a salesman dealing for profit in human exaggeration.
A speculator in frailties continually dealing in the ideas and inventions of
others or become an avid spectator. This puller of levers, pusher of the
buttons of vicarious power, has power of his own only by way of mechanical
craft. A "graft" is this tide on which he rides.

So a parasite of the spirit is here; dervish in a whirling vortex. Yes from
the top down, and enamored of the whirl.

Perpetual to-and-fro excites this citified citizen, robs him of deeper sym-

17

pathy, of the meditation and reflection once his as he lived and walked
under clean sky among the fresh greenery to which he was born companion.
On solid earth he was neither fool-proof nor weather-proof, but he was a
whole man.

But he has traded his Book of Creation for emasculation by way of the
convenient substitute; traded his origins and native pastimes with streams,
woods, fields, and animals for the ubiquitous, habitual to-and-fro; taint of
carbon monoxide rising from him to his rented aggregations of hard cells
on upended streets overlooking hard pavements. "Paramounts," "Roxies,"
night clubs, bars such as these are his relaxation, his urban recourse. For all
this easy come and easy go he lives in some cubicle among other cubicles
under a landlord himself a "hot-shot" one who probably lives up there
above him in a "penthouse." Both landlord and tenant are the living
apotheosis of rent. Rent! Always rent in some form is the city. If not quite
yet parasites parisitic all.

So exists the properly citified urbanite! Still a slave to the herd-instinct,
fatally committed to vicarious power a slave in any final analysis just as
the medieval laborer, not so long before him, was slave to caprice of king
or state., A cultural weed now, he grows rank in the urban field.

This weed goes to seed! Children keep on coming and growing. Now
herded by the thousand in schools built like factories, run like factories: all
systematically turning out herd-struck teenagers like machines turning out
shoes. In knowledge-factories.

And when urban men-of-commerce themselves succeed, they become
more than ever vicarious? Soon these very successful men sink into the sham
luxury their city life so continually produces. But they create nothing!
Spiritually impotent, a fixation has them where impotence wants them:
fixation in a cliche.

But life itself has become intolerably restless; a mere tenant of the big
landlord: the "big city." Yes . . . above the belt, if he is properly citified, the
citizen has long lost sight of the true aim of normal human existence. He
has accepted not only substitute means but substitute aims and ends. Nat-
urally gregarious himself, his life now tends toward the promiscuous, blind
adventure of the crafty animal; toward some form of graft; toward the
febrile pursuit of sex as "relief from factual routine. He seeks but cannot

18

find peace in an all prevailing uproar of mechanical conflicts unless in
alcohol? Meantime struggling artificially to maintain teeth, hair, muscles,
and sap; his sight growing dim; hearing increasingly by telephone. He now
must go against or across a streaming tide of traffic, at risk of damage or
death to himself or others. His own good time is inevitably, regularly,
increasingly wasted by others because he is as determined, and inevitably,
all-out to waste theirs. All go about in different directions or swarm over
hard concrete to various ugly scaffoldings, or go underground to get into
other cubicles occupied by other sub-parasites-of-rent always rent, rent in
some form or go higher up under some other skyscraper-rentlord. The
citizen's entire life is an exaggeration or frustration, on wheels or accelerated
by plane, television or telephone. By elevator, the upended street, his life
is thus limited and confused, contained instead of expanded; a vicarious
life virtually sterilized by machinery, by medicine, by more and more
stimulants. His demoralization has only begun.

Were motor oil and castor oil to dry up, the great big city would soon
cease to function: the citizens would promptly perish.

So this modern monster, degeneration of the Renaissance city, becomes
the form universal of anxiety, all stated in various form of rent. The citizen's
very life is tenant, himself rented, in a rented world. He and his ever-
growing family evicted if in arrears, or the vast "debt system" of rent goes
to smash.

Should his nervous pace slacken, his digestion become ulcerous or fail,
his anxious lock-step with rent would fall out with the lock-step of "produc-
tion." Landlord, money-lord, and machine-lord . . . the man, with ulcers or
none, is soon a total loss even to his bureaucratic government.

Nevertheless relentlessly over him, beside him and beneath him, even
in his heart as he sleeps, is fear. Fear. Fear forever ticking in this taxi-meter
of triple rent rent for land, rent for money, rent for being alive each of
them goading the anxious "consumer's" unceasing struggle for or against
ominous increase-of-production. Production regardless production now
driving consumption bankrupt or insane; insatiable unearned increment for
power. To stay in the lock-step that is now all the "pay-off" he hopes for.
Not so much more than that. He, the wage-slave in some form, puts his own

19

life into bondage, or is busy managing to get the lives of others there just in
order to keep up the superficial privileges to which he has consciously,
fatuously, subscribed and which are often described to him as great,
beneficent "free enterprise**: enterprise to which his ubiquitous politicians
continually refer him. Humanity is here preying upon humanity? Man's
inhumanity to man seems also to be the feature of the only "economic
system" the urban citizen yet knows or has been, officially, encouraged by
government to know, So he takes "the system" for granted as now he takes
all else for granted: Capitalism included. But even "the system" is, at best,
only capitalistic. Not true capitalism because it is the apex instead of the
base of the pyramid that is on the ground.

As the citizen stands, powerful modern resources, naturally his own by
uses of modem machinery, are (owing to their very nature) turning against
him, although the system he lives under is one he himself helped build.
Such centralizations of men and capital as he must now serve are no longer
wise or humane. Long ago having done all it could do for humanity the
centralization we call the big city became a centripetal force grown beyond
our control; agitated by rent to continually additional, vicarious powers.

Thus the system is steadily increasing in man his animal instincts, his
fear of being turned out of the hole into which he has been accustomed to
crawl in again each evening to crawl out again next morning. Natural
horizontally true line of human freedom on earthis going, or gone. The
citizen condemns himself to perhaps natural but most unbecoming (and
now unprofitable to him) pig-piling. What he aspires to is a sterile urban
vertically, actually unnatural to him because he is upended, suspended and
traffic-jammed by this vertically due to his own mad excess. He is calling
this evidence of fixability instead of flexibility success. It is only conformity.

Notwithstanding slum-clearance by insurance, the profit-sharing of spo-
radic "housing" which he has unwittingly approved to build himself perma-
nently into bondage, he becomes more confused and helpless.

Nevertheless out of this automatic turnabout against him of his own
industrial revolution without a soul now fast running away from modern
man, he may yet emerge from the ancient shadow-of-the-wall as master

20

instead of machine-age conscript. He may emerge by way of Organic
Architecture because its philosophy and practice are natural to his better
self made free.

The Shadow-of-the-Wall Primitive Instincts Still Alive

Go back far enough in time. Mankind was divided into cave-dwelling
agrarians and wandering tribes of hunter-warriors; and we might find the
wanderer swinging from branch to branch in the leafy bower of the tree,
insured by the curl at the end of his tail, while the more stolid lover of the
wall lurked, for safety, hidden in some hole in the ground or in a cave:
the ape?

The static cave-dweller was ancient conservative. Probably he was more
brutal, if not more ferocious, with his heavy club when occasion arose than
the mobile wanderer with his slender spear.

The cave-dweller became cliff-dweller. He began to build cities. Estab-
lishment was his idea. His God was a malicious murderer. His own statue,
made by himself more terrible than himself, was really his God; a God also
hiding away. He erected this God into a mysterious covenant. When he
could, he made his God of gold. He still does.

But his swifter, more mobile brother devised a more adaptable and
elusive dwelling-place the folding tent.

He, nomad, went in changing seasons from place to place, over the whole
earth following the laws of change: natural to him.

He was the Adventurer.

His God was a Spirit: like a wind, devastating or beneficent as he was
himself.

These main divisions of primitive man, the human family, having herd-
instinct in common with other animals, made God, or conceived gods, in
their own image. Both human divergencies set up enmity. Enmity each
toward the other.

Cave-dwellers bred their young in the shadow of the wall. Mobile
wanderers bred theirs under the stars in such safety as seclusion by distance
from the enemy might afford.

21

We assume the cave-dweller multiplied with comparative ease owing to
this safety, and more rapidly than his brother the wanderer. But when his
defenses fell, destruction was more complete, economic waste more ter-
rific. So when he ceased to find a natural cave, he learned to make one. As
he grew more powerful, his walls grew heavier. Fortification became his
own; cities were, originally, such fortifications. Early dwellings were only
less so. He, the cave-dweller, was thus prototype of the state socialist,
communist, or statist. Not the democrat,

The cave-dweller's nomadic human counterpart meantime cultivated
mobility for safety. Defenses, for him, lay in the Idea or swiftness, strata-
gem, and such arts of self-defense as nature taught.

These primitive instincts of the human race now ingrown instead of out-
growing in this far distance of time are still at work; although instincts of
the wandering tribe seem to have been overcome gradually by the more
material defenses and heavier static establishment of the original cave-
dweller. Herein we still see the "shadow of this wall."

I imagine the ideal of freedom which keeps breaking through our present
static establishments, setting their features aside, or obliterating them, is
due in no small degree to survival of the original instincts of the nomad
the adventurer: he who kept his freedom by his undivided prowess beneath
the stars rather than he who lived by his obedience and labor in the deep
shadow of the wall.

The nomad? Is he thus prototype of the democrat?

However that may be, these conflicting human natures have conquered
or been vanquished, married, intermarried, brought forth other natures; a
fusion in some, still a straining confusion in others. In some men, a survival,
more or less distinct, of one or the other of these salient, archaic instincts
of mankind.

Gradually in the present body of mankind, both natural instincts work
together and produce what we call civilization. All civilization insists upon
and strives to perfect culture, in order that it may survive. By increasing
happiness?

In the affair of culture, "shadow-of-the-wall" has so far seemed pre-
dominant, although the open sky of the adventurer appeals more and more

22

today to the human spirit. As physical fear of brutal force grows less, all
need of fortification grows less. Ingrained yearning of the mobile hunter
for freedom now finds more truth and reason for being than the stolid
masonry defenses (cave-dwelling) once upon a time erected in necessity to
protect human life from humankind. This freedom is now characteristic of
all yearning for culture a spirit still slumbering in the agrarian and the
manufacturer, the merchant and the artist.

Yes modern science makes all ancient, static defenses useless. Man's
value now depends not so much upon what he has made static (that is to
say, saved, stored up, fortified) as upon what he can do still better by
proper use of new scientific resources. So a human type is emerging capable
of rapidly changing environment to fit desires, one amply able to offset
the big city of today: remnant of the great, ancient "Wall." In this capability
to change we have the new type of citizen, We call him democratic.

It is evident that modern life must be served more naturally and con-
served by more space and light, by greater freedom of movement. And by
more general expression of the individual in practice of the ideal we now
call culture in civilization. A new space-concept is needed. It is becoming
more evident everywhere. A definite phase of this new Ideal comes in what
we call organic architecture the natural architecture of the democratic
spirit in this age of the machine.

Our modern automobility is only one of the leading factors of modernity.
Alongside glass and steel it is having characteristic effect upon what sur-
vives of the nature of the cave-dweller. He places his faith with the new
facilities, speed and command of time and distance, instead of in his own
works. But these scientific future-liberating factors of the machine age are
actually his means of potential self-realization. But the modern citizen will
use them for more human freedom when he uses them at all well. Man is
returning to the descendants of the wandering tribe the adventurers,
I hope.

The machine is continuously at work-molding, remodeling, relentlessly
driving human character in many directions mobile. The question is
becoming more one of grass or goods? Men or Man.

23

So it has already come true in our overgrown cities of today that the terms
of feudal thinking are changing, if not by name, to terms of money and
commercial diplomacy. But the old form of city, except as a market, has
little or nothing substantial to give modern civilization above wagery, little
or nothing above the beltexcept degeneration.

New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime
example of the survival of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban
conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang
him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavements, to crucify him,
sell him, or be sold by him. He is now himself a form of rent called produc-
tion for profit. High priests of such gangsteristics we have set up in politics
or in professional armchairs. High priests of religion as of education, as we
have them both now, seldom understand and never dare teach the basic
freedom, the life-blood of Democracy, ethical and not militant! Its very
nature remains obscure. Through new powers of publicity (the power of
reiteration) mediocre high priests overtake and imprison a mediocre citi-
zenry. Conformity to mediocrity increases. Into high places go common
men. Enormous urban flocks meantime sing false hymns to vicarious power,
jazzing a dreary dirge. These theme songs are as false to the singer as to the
listener. All badly off key.

Ultimate impotence comes where creation of fine art is the concern.
This price is extracted from us, as a nation, by the momentous mistake of
substituting artificiality artificial means of production and machine power
for human power, in terms of money.

Instead of expanding our spiritual strength as human beings by means of
these our new scientific advantages, we are content to practice artifice
without art. The Substitute or Imitation is the signpost of our cultural lag.
Science can do little or nothing about all this. It is up to the American spirit
seeking above things for organic (natural) forms truly essential to a culture
of our own.

24

Democracy: Gospel of Individuality

Only human values are life-giving values.

No organic values are ever life-taking. When man builds "natural"
buildings naturally, he builds his very life into them-inspired by intrinsic
Nature in this interior sense we are here calling "organic." Instead the
citizen is now trained to see life as a cliche whereas his architect should
train his own mind, and thereby the citizen's, to see the nature of glass as
Glass, the board as Board, a brick as Brick; see the nature of steel as Steel:
see all in relation to each other as well as in relation to Time, Place, and
Man.\e eager to be honest with himself and so not untrue to other men;
desire deeply to live on harmonious terms with Man and Nature; try to
live in the richer sense because deep in nature: be native as trees to the
wood, as grass to the floor of the valley. Only then can the democratic
spirit of man, individual, rise out of the confusion of communal life in the
city to a creative civilization of the ground. We are calling that civilization
of man and ground really organic agronomy democracy: intrinsically
superior to the more static faiths of the past lying now in ruins all about
him. If the Usonian citizen were to live in a free city of democracy he could
not fail to make communal life richer for all the world because true indi-
vidual independence by natural growth of a natural conscience would be
his. The American citizen is now where he must abandon his favorite expe-
dientsespecially the idea that money plus authority can rule the world.
He must at last realize that ideas inspired by spiritual integrity can and
will make the modern world.

Faith in that conscientious selfhood is the ideal fit for the sons of the
sons of American Democracy.

What then is the Nature of this idea we call organic architecture? We
are here calling this architecture The Architecture of Democracy. Why?

Because it is intrinsically based on Nature-law: law for man not law
over man. So understood, so applied. It is simply the human spirit given
appropriate architectural form. Simply, too, it is the material structure of
every man's life on earth now seen by him as various forms of structure-
in short, organic. Democracy possesses the material means today to be

25

enlarged intelligently and turned about now to employ machine power on
super-materials for man's own superiority. Therefore, organic architecture
is not satisfied to be employed merely to make moneynot if that money
is to be stacked against Man himself. Our growing dissatisfaction with auto-
cratic power or bureaucracy of any kind requires wisdom. Old wisdom and
good sense are modern even now; it is their application that changes.

Still more ancient is the wisdom, and it too is modern, that recognizes
this new democratic concept of man free in a life wherein money and land-
laws are established as subordinate to rights of the human being. That
means first of all that good architecture is good democracy.

So dignity and worth would come to our society if the individual were
thus individual; true individuality, no longer written off as some kind of
personal idiosyncracy by way of "taste" but protected as essence, to be
understood as the safest basis for interpretation of science, the practice of
art, ultimately the inspiration of a true religion. This is modern today; it
always was; it always will be. Now in order to become organic we will learn
to understand that form and function are as one. On that organic basis a
civilization might endure forever as a happy humane circumstance. Free.

This new sense-of-the-within naturally unfolding, taking form by the
culture of art, architecture, philosophy and religion, natural; all being con-
tent to look within to the Spirit for the solution of every human problem
and, by expanding the means so found, enlarging and achieving new, varied
expressions of life on earth this would be old wisdom, ancient as Laotze
at least; yet modern. That is modern Architecture and modern manhood.

Were we in America to put this concept to work in government, that
would be our great day-after-tomorrow? If it were basic in what is now
carelessly miscalled "education" we would soon arrive at proper qualifica-
tion of the vote. And we would arrive at the sense-of-the-within as the new
criterion in art and architecture. By means of it, architecture will be able to
qualify the work of the world, reject the imitation and the substitute; make
any makeshift a stupidity or a crime. Make life one great integral sim-
plicity: Beauty comes alive.

Such simplicity is necessarily not "plainness," A barn door is not simple;
it is merely plain, sterile. Harmonious grace of the wild flower and all

26

countenances of organic integrity anywhere or everywhere are truly simple.
In all man-made life-concerns this is integral Simplicity. If organic, sim-
plicity is in itself exuberant. It was ever modern in ancient times. Why not
so now?

This our integrity needs old wisdom, yet new to our present servile,
provincial, and amazing civilization. Infinite possibilities exist to make of
the city a place suitable for the free man in which freedom can thrive and
the soul of man grow, a City of cities that democracy could approve and so
desperately needs; will soon demand? Yes, and in that vision of decen-
tralization and reintegration lies our natural twentieth century dawn. Of
such is the nature of the democracy free men may honestly call the new
freedom. Where and whenever this is understood, the part is to the whole
no less than the whole is to the part. This true entity is alone able to live as
organic architecture or as culture the soul of any civilization.

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w

FIND THE CITIZEN

ILLUSION

Social and Economic Disease

TO look at the cross section of any plan of a big city is to look at something
like the section of a fibrous tumor. In the light of the space-needs of
the twentieth century we see there not only similar inflamed exaggerations
of tissue but more and more painfully forced circulation; comparable to
high blood pressure in the human system. Think of the big towns you know;
then try to imagine what modern mobility and new space-annihilating
facilities, even now, are doing to them! Consider the space-requirement of
modern mobilized man today as compared with twenty years ago. At least
twenty times larger?

Growing out of the old feudal city-plan are these new centripetal cen-
tralizations: unrecognized uneconomic forces at work to destroy mankind.
Not only are these forces unchecked, but their acceleration is still encour-
agedeven by insurance companies themselves investing the people's
money in consequence of this unwholesome crowding.

But in all democratic minds a question now coming uppermost is: what
benign power can check such centralization as the city has become now a
destructive fixation?

Well within the problem itself lies the solution. As always. Centralization
itself is the old social principle that made kings an appropriate necessity
and is now become the uneconomic force that overbuilt them all, degen-
erated to a force we call communism. These pseudo-monarchic towns of
ours are merely such centralization. Centralization now proves to be some-

31

thing that, used to wind space up tighter and tighter, smaller and higher,
is like some centripetal device revolving at increasing speed untilterrible,
beyond control it turns centrifugal, ending all by dispersal or explosion.

Meantime, what possible control?

Government? No or only to a very limited extent. In democracy, more
and more limited to expedients; politics.

The only possible control, then, is profoundly educational. In democracy,
is education when on speaking terms with culture not the true answer to
such exaggerations of artificiality as machine power in production, or as
crowding? On behalf of humane freedom it is the growth of this human
intelligence ultimately applied to the city that must interfere by such
pressures as it can exert there where pressure does most good. Salvation
from the false economics of centralization lies in wider grasp of the limita-
tions and danger of these powers machine powers all multiplied to excess.
What hope is there for our future in this machine age, if indeed the machine
age is to have any greater future, unless decentralization and appropriate
reintegration are soon encouragedgiven right-of-way in actual practice?

A Makeshift

Three major artificialities have been drafted and grafted by law upon all
modem production; hangovers from petty customs originating in feudal
circumstances. Many of these traditions have been blown up into supposed
economic patterns: but all forms of rent and all illegitimate. Rent for
money; rent for land; really only extrinsic forms of unearned increment;
and the third artificiality is traffic in invention. A graft by way of patents
is another but less obvious form of "rent."

By mechanical leverage accelerating urban activity, creating pressures
never existing before and now never ceasing, these three unnatural eco-
nomic features are the forces of our present-day city, enormously intensi-
fied. Monstrosity has been reached. But the capacity of the human animal
for habituation is also enormous seemingly beyond belief.
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Rent

The first and most important form of rent contributing to overgrowth of
cities, resulting in poverty and unhappiness, is rent for land: land-values
created as improvements or by growth, held by some fortuitous fortune's
accidental claim to some lucky piece of realty, private but protected by law.
Profits from this adventitious form of fortune create a series of white-
collarites satellites of various other unearned increments, like real-estate
traffic in more or less lucky land areas. The skyscraper as abused is also an
instance of adventitious increment. The city the natural home of this form
of "fortune."

The second artificiality: rent for money. By way of the ancient Mosaic
invention of "interest," money is now a commodity for sale, so made as to
come alive as something in itself to go on continuously working in order to
make all work useless. All profits earned by "big money" are a specious
premium placed upon the accretions of labor, creating in the form of
interest another, a second adventitious form of fortune. More armies of
money satellites busily engaged in the sale, distribution, operation and
collection of this special form of increment, rent for money, all unearned
except as an arbitrary, mysterious premium placed upon money itself
"earned," so called by those who made it. A new speculative commodity has
therefore appeared money, unnatural as a commodity, now becoming
monstrosity. The modern city is its stronghold and chief defender; and
insurance is one of its commodities.

The third economic artificiality: unearned increment of the machine
itself. The profits of this great, common leverage over labor as now employed
by all mankind are thus placed where they seldom, if ever, belong. Here
traffic in invention is captained, maintained by a form of capitalism intensi-
fied. By the triumph of conscienceless but "rugged individualism" the
machine profits of human ingenuity or inspiration in getting the work of
the world done are almost all funneled into pockets of fewer and more
"rugged" captains-of-industry. Only in a small measure-except by gift or
noblesse oblige of the captains-are these profits yet (or will they ever be)
where they belong; that is to say, with the man whose life is actually modi-
fied, given, or sacrificed to this new common agency for doing the work of
the world. This agency we call "the machine."

33

So, armies of countless high-powered salesmen salesmanship the modern
art now come into being in order to unload the senseless overproduction
inevitable to this new machine facility, exercised by the hands of insensate
"business" greed. The worker is thus dispossessed as owner of the machine:
the man himself, another dispossession. As subordinate rent-creature, a third
form of "fortune" is here. A series of white-collar satellites again rises sell-
ing. This form of propaganda, salesmanship, becomes the great modern
"art." Politics and journalism (managed publicity) financing, collecting by
foreclosure, increasing artificial profits by refinancing, are crafts of reposses-
sion. Wholly false fronts are set up as mercantile commonplaces and a
wholly false capitalizing of "risk" takes place that now rides high as "insur-
ance." Security not only may be bought but must be bought and paid for
in almost any case.

Unnatural fixations all the three economic creatures of rent all unearned
increments. Together with other creatures of false fortune they concentrate
money-power in fewer and fewer hands, as insurance. Inevitable centripetal
action of capitalistic centralization proceeds by tactfully extended channels
of control.

Now, to maintain this mounting external money-power in due force and
effect, innumerable legal sanctions must be continuously sought, applied
and maintained. Agents of all these artificial factors dovetail together. This
is now called the "moral necessity" of "business," until morality is no longer
on speaking terms with ethics. What is expedient is too soon legal and
enacted by government as moral. What is right (ethical) is entirely another
matter, too often beside the mark. Then what is right? What is culture?
Where then is this one-time science of human happiness we call "politics"?

Once upon a time the Jeffersonian democratic ideal of these United States
was, "that government best government that governs least." But in order to
keep the peace and some show of equity between the lower passions so
busily begotten in begetting, the complicated forms of super-money-in-
crease-money-making and holding are legitimatized by government. Gov-
ernment too, thus becomes monstrosity. Again enormous armies of white-
collarites arise. Here comes more bureaucracy: public checking of private

34

money to add to the public armies of the bureaucrat. All dressed in a little
brief authority. As all this comes uppermost major and minor courts are
multiplied; petty officials, their complex rulings petrified, become more and
more necessary until they, too, are an army keeping tab and collecting
"legal" extractions from the citizenry if for no other reason than to maintain
such phenomenal bureaucracy. We might now add this form of fortune (the
official job) to the other three. But this, too, is only another subordinate
creature: government committed to collect rents. Perpetual propaganda
becomes a kind of vested interest, itself growing ubiquitous. Again public
propaganda perpetrated upon the people for which the people must pay,
whether of the minority party or majority party. Always comes the next
election and propaganda turned loose.

Multifarious as these laws enacted by our promise-merchants, the poli-
ticiansare, they are only complex expedients to force this swarming clerical
breed of bureaucracy to function together. This has bred, finally, still more
droves of white-collarites : a new army of lawyers. It becomes impossible
to hold, operate, or distribute land, sell or buy money, or manufacture any-
thing, safely, or even marry, make love or die, without the guide and
counsel of these specialists in the extraordinary entanglements of rent, of
rules, of regulations applied to this or that involute commercial expedient
with courts for counters where the attempt to put law above man is made
in this complex game we now call our civilization in the prosperity of the
machine age. Small wonder, then, that decisions of these specialists in "law
and order" so often are themselves in conflict! Lawyers, as satellites of rent,
maintain its multiple forms. And so hundreds of thousands of legal experts
are the inevitable mentors of whatever mission is now left to the American
big city to perform. We must add the lawyer as yet another subordinate
form of rent bred by government and thriving upon misfortune or its pre-
vention; but committed, either way, to performance.

These artificialities all depend upon a strong-arm status quo. The Police!
Also upon some expedient form of religion wherein men are to be saved
(from themselves and each other) and for God by faith in God rather than
faith in their own works as men.

All together against quality in these United States, this marching army of
quantity is the traditional substitute for organic economic structure of the

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forms of humane society: art, architecture and religion. Any simple basis
we might honestly call fundamental to the economy of our democratic re-
public is not there. This society of ours has overbuilt and now persists in
overinhabiting cities a wholly inorganic basis for survival now shamefully
battening upon sources of extrinsic production; senselessly increasing pro-
duction for the sake of more production! Production is now trying to control
consumptionthe big horse behind the little cart. This it is that turns the
nation into a vast factory, greedy for foreign markets, with the spectre of
war as inevitable clearing house.

The old city, already distinctly dated by its own excess, is only further
outmoded by every forced increase. Our natural resource now is in new
possibilities of access to good uses of good ground: an agronomy intelli-
gently administered.

Our sources of production are intrinsic only with those men whoby
skilled or manual toil or concentration of superior ability, by inspiration,
upon natural resources or upon actual production whether physical, aes-
thetic, intellectual, mechanical, or religious render "value received" to
human life. To these hewers of wood and drawers of water and men of the
machine, pressing questions of decentralization must be referred. The living,
consuming man-unit of our society will ultimately decide this momentous
issue. Consumption must control production. This matter will only be de-
cided by consumption in proper control of an organic basis for distribution,
man to man, nation to nation.

What then of this human subject (or object) the man-unit (he is con-
sumption) upon whom, by his own voluntary subordination, this now vastly
complicated uneconomic structure has been erected and cruelly functions,
although rudely interrupted by failure about every seven years only to be
strong-armed by federal government? Aid. All-pervading, large or small
business aid is now quite universally accepted as moral. Even normal?

But what about the man of ideas who labors out of the unknown essential
sustenance for all? What about this imaginative individual who gives reality
to thought? The planner-designerhe who gets results from materials so
far as the life of society is concerned with them? Where in all this is the
Artist Agrarian, Artist Mechanic, the inspired Teacher, Inventor, Scientist

36

in short, the Artifex? And then what about "hewers of wood, drawers of
water, the laborers in the vineyard" and elsewhere?

Well all are pretty much in the same hard case, or shall we say, caste?
No longer masters of fortune. Fear is their daily portion.

Fortunes today engendered (controlled) by schemers; experts in the
complex artificialities of this from-the-bottom-to-the-top-down system we are
miscalling capitalism. Must this capitalisticism rest upon no broad human
basis square with the nature of man's rightful relationship to other men or
to his own credit here at his own hearth on earth? Facades of false fortune
place false premiums upon false traits of his character. Moreover, though the
three main systems of false fortune are necessarily maintained by the strong
arm of a forced "legitimacy" that arm, however strong, however reinforced
by the police, must periodically tire; come down while confusion and misery
of the day of reckoning meantime descend upon all: life itself confused as
alarm seeks cover of some kind somehow any where. We name the chronic
recessions thus created (are they a fatal disease?) "depressions." Or, if it is a
managed convulsion by high-powered finance, we have war: war the in-
evitable clearing house of finance-a-la-mode: always war! Nothing else can
save any system from destruction where production controls consumption
except it be by this ages-old destroyer. War.

Where, then, in this destructive ambush of strong-arm-artificiality super-
imposed on artificiality, is integrity of the genuine artifex to be found?
Where is the original source basic master of ideas inspiring the artifex?
What place has he in this economic Tower of Babel with its apex in false
fortune; accelerating manufacture for exaggerated profits? All profiteering
a deflation of manhood to inflate and exploit mankind. Inflation is bound to
be characteristic of any such haphazard system strong-armed by law. Why
miscall this system Capitalism when its base is up in air and apex down on
the ground?

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The Artifex

We admit that such haphazard centralization as we have attempted in
utter materialism confers certain human benefits upon the artifex, stimu-
lating by financial reward his ingenuity in machine development and all its
uses. But far more extensive uses of our vast machine resources now do lie
ready to make life more available to the citizen. Meantime, essential right-
mindedness and decency of the artifex have moved him to go on working
in this confusion of our machine age; trying to cultivate justice, generosity,
and pity; best of all, the beauty of individual responsibility in the midst of
chaos. Upstream almost all the way without very well knowing why or
how, worshipping not a golden god hidden in a cave but a great spirit
ruling all by Principle. Modern man has been doing so without quite know-
ing how to apply that inner principle; hardly knowing even in just what the
principle really consists.

Nevertheless, he knows that god of the free artifex is a great free Spirit
allowing man to choose between what is good for him and good in him as
against what is bad in him and bad for him, so that by free exercise of his
conscience he may himself grow god-like. The road to a good life is still
open to the artifex. But today his road must lead on through persistent
public obstruction, most of all the drift toward conformitythe subtle envi-
ous propaganda against superiority hindrances legally erected, legalities
exploiting his good faith a general depravity in a drift toward quantity at
expense to quality, until we find all heading in toward war or revolution:
this time the revolution industrial yes. Agrarian, no. About time now our
agronomy asserted itself in his behalf. You've left a glimmer still to cheer
the man the artifex and by that light now mark my words we'll build the
perfect ship. (Kipling's McAndrew's Hymn.)

An Experiment

In spite of all perversity of the cash-and-carry mentality, the servile
system it would maintain (if it could) grafted upon the new world of
organic character appears this modern organic concept of man and his God

38

as organic growth: therefore a deeper sense of human integrity which we
might properly call organic Democracy. Out of this philosophic romance,
the life of man began with this new nation of ours as a foundling conceived
in liberty to pursue the growth we call happiness. All men to have equal
opportunity before the law; thus to develop manhood. Our vast territory,
riches untouched, was inherited by all breeds of the earth who were cour-
ageous enough to come and take domain on the hard terms of "pioneer."
A new frontier we erected then. Not the frontier we are facing now.

Our new nation, called a republic, was an experiment in freedom, eagerly
manned by refugees from the despotism and monarchy of all nations. Soon
we became a great federation of states, the greatest known these United
States of America. United, the states became a nationcall it Usonia
harboring within its borders the murderer, the adventurer, the outcast, the
cheated, the thwarted and the superior: the predatory worst but also the
courageous best of human kind deserting previous nationality to make a
new nationa life there to be in the image of a great ideal of freedom at
home on vast incomparable ground. Or so its leaders planned, hoped and
pleaded. A new nation founded upon the best and the worst wherein rule
by the bravest and the best would be natural.

Though with no corresponding revisions of traditional, Romish, or feudal,
property-rights; and not much, if any, consideration given to appropriate
new economy, our new country was founded upon a more just freedom for
the individual than any before known: "that government best government
which governs least" said a Thomas Jefferson crossing an Alexander Hamil-
ton. George Washington, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd
Garrison, John Brown, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Henry George, Louis
Sullivan such as these and their kind were her sons. In them the original
ideal was held clear. Then arose indiscriminate private wealth by way of
fortuitous survivals of despotisms: feudal money-getting and property-
holding. The new nation carelessly adopted them. An economic order more
suited to monarchy and despotism than freedom was let loose with fresh
ascendancy. Now see a new free-for-all race for power of riches, riches of
power. It soon outran such culture as appeared, or bought it ready-made.
Unnatural reservoirs of capital as predatory accumulation made away with

39

what little cultural understanding the new country had originally borrowed
a culture of no indigenous integrity. It was easy to discover, gather and
exploit the fresh spoils of our vast new territory that huge fortunes piled
up, almost overnight, in hands least fitted to administer the powers of
wealth. The fortunate, lucky, were only too willing to buy ready-made
whatever they might like buy what they did not know they could only
have truly if grown. Suddenly rich, not content within the culture they had
with them (or on them) when they came here, they were quite satisfied
with importation they could buy. As a matter of course the original idea of
Freedom grew thin so far as culture went, and grew dim or died. Such arts
as had come to our new states with the frugal decency of the early colonials
survived but a short time, but there was no principle originally involved,
or living, in the Colonial arts that came over to grow new culture upon.
Originally modified French elegance or borrowed Italian Renaissance, they
were already degenerate when they reached new land. Soon with the advent
of so many foreign nationalities came licentious eclecticisms in all art. By
way of peripatetic taste we were especially devastated in architecture. A
ready-made art, antique or pseudo-classic (the same thing), satisfied the
pressing social demand and even became the pressing need of Society in
the new nation. Riches in general so rapidly overwhelmed any indigenous
culture that so-called "American architecture" fell to the great low in
eclecticism of all time. "Culture" attempted thus ready-made became a mere
commodity. So its merchant became "moral/' The merchant became desir-
able, even a social-aesthete! To refer to Principle was not yet offensive to
science, but it was peculiarly offensive to the merchant in the education
of the arts. To refer whatever culture we had to Principle was then beside
the mark. The "radical" became an offense: dangerous! Where there were no
roots, why look for them as he would? The radical became a menace, con-
sideredeven as now unconstitutional.

Here (is it for the first time in history?) a self-determining polyglot peo-
ple on incomparable ground, subscribing to the highest ideal of human
freedom yet known, sprang into being as a nation with a curious bastardized
culture; its culture a quarreling collection of many ready-made cultures of
the world, borrowed, pieced together by uncultivated "taste." Such as it

40

was, here was a makeshift garment worn outside in-even upside down-
not cast away as we now see it should have been. So we got the wasteful
makeshift our eclecticisms became and that we now regard in this ugly
discord all around us. Incongruity was begot by riches. Great abortion. But
abortion was merchantable, therefore "moral," no more than a makeshift;
a purchase consisting at best in some copy of the great rebirth called "the
Renaissance" so that nothing indigenous in art could be born to us. Thus
quondam bastardization of the new nation's character was artificially elected
and applied; an artificiality soon to be confirmed by "higher" education!
Education in America became a collection of imported academic devices
arbitrarily applied to the surface of life. And, too soon, the authority of this
pseudo-culture was battening upon developments of our material resources,
characterizing our wealth. Externally applied substitutes such as these in-
evitably failed to inspire an appropriate (Usonian) way of life of our own
or of our era or to encourage integrity in interpretation of our new ideal
of freedom; the ideal upon which the life of our new country was so eagerly
founded: the Sovereignty of the Individual!

So this new nation arose, grew in might as it grew in riches but, so far
as culture went, shamefully wasting, upon the imported substitute, its every
natural characteristic and resource. Strange perversions or absurd pretenses
were presented as worthy.

But the nation quickly outgrew the narrow bounds of the weak borrowed
forms, even while academic education still continued to condition the people
by planting and nursing the Substitute. Sec the buildings they built for the
purpose. No constructive lessons could be learned from such servile eclecti-
cism as became nationally characteristic. All our great nation had upon
which to found and grow indigenous culture was sacrificed to this reflection
of the "setting sun all Europe had mistaken for dawn." Academic abnegation
amounted to obsession; and, by the personal likes or dislikes of the wives of
our nigged culture-puzzled individualists who themselves really cared
nothing at all about the matter, art became a mere academic pretense or a
fashion; American culture a form of license putting on provincial airs and
fancified attire.

This pseudo-culture became the more deplorable as our money-power
grew more enormous. The better citizenry-north, south, east, west-took

41

refuge in the authentic antique, and committed aesthetic suicide by acquir-
ing monstrosities openly in the name of the "classic." Conformity. Mere
names and "the styles" thus gained prestige and, soon, authority. Periodic
fashion could, and did, rule supreme. Downright imitation in all arts that
should have been creative became at least honorable though impotent. This
very impotence was called "conservative!" Meantime the more fancified
citizenry also committed promiscuous adultery by the purchase of atrocities
in the name of the Louis' and their mistresses. Paris was capital not only of
the pseudo-English Colonial venture in culture; it now became the capital
of our own pseudo-aesthetic interests.

This prostitute pictorial performance was, in our national life, raised to
authorized academic pattern, eagerly grasped and sanctioned by the Mrs.
Gablemores and Madame Plasterbilts of American "good society." Evil con-
sequences of this confusion or degradation of choice by what the selective
"taste" of the period could buy abroad or import were fashionable.

The god of Principle to guide the rulers of the country new-founded upon
a more just expression of human liberty than men had known before did
not seem to inspire appropriate (or even sensible) interpretations for the
ways and means of the free and democratic life that had been made pos-
sible. Nor did the wealthy or the supremely successful seem to understand
not only what life under their great democratic ideal meant in terms of
economics, but not at all what arts or crafts would be natural to such a life
as ours. Unsuitable fruits of the old monarchic-authoritarian system pre-
vailed, demoralizing any vital functioning of art. So also demoralized what-
ever else went with it? Ancient "traditions" now entered the heart of the
nation. Not in spirit? No. As culture, a mere eclecticism damnable by taste.
In place of culture of our own came servile abnegation to the past. We
were conservative?

Architecture, parasitism for five centuries, sank to incontinent imitation
by our ever freshly confirmed eclectic fashionables. Religion itself (quite
naturally) sank beneath the level of duly accredited servility. The need to
maintain this abnegation or sterilization was inevitable. In all valid interests
of our new life, exploitation of the cliche ( the "formula" ) in religion as well
as aesthetics had right of way because get-rich-quick patrons found it as
expedient to get-culture-quick. Yes . . . ignorant provincial social ambitions

42

had found this cheap shortcut to culture. The healthy spiritual significance
of our own new ideal of freedom-Democracy was, and so easily, betrayed
by the powers of financial success.

Provincial people thus superficially and suddenly eclectified could, per-
haps, breed "tastes" that could only turn back to taste instead of growing
new life of the spirit or new ground in a new era. The culture we as a people
needed was a culture the European world itself needed in somewhat differ-
ent terms.

So, once again, this time in the latter days of the nineteenth century and
early in the twentieth, our American academic world mistook the setting
sun for dawn. "Pseudo" by official order was duly confirmed as Precedent
and ruled over popular education. "American" in culture became the highly
respectable following-after into general outer darkness which we now see
in perspective as the present "International" cliche.

The Culture Lag

What could such superartificiality do but stumble and fall wherever or
whenever Life insisted upon itself as beautiful?

The cultural lag? The lag was to be proudly worn as a tag of respectability
for another half -century before it became a rag.

Still with us now, to stay perhaps for some years more? Still with us
though modified at least by mouth.

There could be nothing of course in such bottoms-up provincial servility
as ours that could grow anything at all worthy of the spirit of our great
adventure? Wealth, indiscriminate, and growing abuse of vicarious power,
increased the numbers of those unqualified for success; and the new country
could only outgrow old medieval cities-centralization patterned after the
ancient feudal town outmoded. That appropriate beautiful town now be-
came static. The great ideal of Freedom had declined, by the refusal of
"authority" to let it be truly free. Money-power could not be substituted for
ideas, could do no more than make more money with money or go to war.
Go to war it went.

43

The Jeffersonian democratic ideal, so inspiring in the beginning, is really
the highest form of aristocracy this world has ever seen: aristocracy gen-
uinely a quality of the man himselfnot merely bestowed upon him by
heredity or privilege: now a matter of character.

But aristocracy lacked spiritual nourishment and man had grown sterile.
He had little left that could encourage and give prestige to the new idea of
democracy. And so old intellectual equipment met new paraphernalia head
on, Indigenous culture was to this dayleft to languish. Except as the cul-
tural mask might be imposed by architects themselves no more than
drapers and haberdashers of the arts shallow couturiers who functioned as
"artists." High-powered salesmanship by professionally managed publicity
was able to sell their feeble or profane derivations of old culture to new
"success" if not shameful ugliness, sheer stupidity and any upsurge of
vitality in the arts of the new republic was left to lie before us. Reproach
growing to this day! Naked necessity would have been far better.

This cultural mask has thus covered and concealed our true nature. In the
name of some bad forms of surface-decoration, or the cliche international,
our country was and still is being taught to call it Architecture. All but one
of our universities have conditioned the novitiate to regard this bastardiza-
tion of motive as the essence of art and architecture.

So the teenager American youth goes to the stocks to be conditioned
by false qualifiers in the greatest eclecticisms of all time our big colleges.
There hopelessly confirmed parasites of the American spirit teach our youth.
They are crammed with imported formulas for all this idiosyncrasy of "good
taste. " But taste can never be more than a matter of ignorance now, because
the way to knowledge is truly open to the teenager.

Such substitute for culture suitably urban as we have set up in the big
cities of these United States, thus betrays the country. It functions as some-
thing imposed upon American life because we the people could not or
would not learn the value of culture really grown out of the daily circum-
stances of our life. Organic. Unable to live our own lives where the fruits
of a new civilization might be our concern we have found it so much easier
cheaper too to fake our culture, or buy it ready-made. Uncertain pro-

44

vincials, still awkward, we have been afraid of being laughed at if our
"choice" (taste) should happen not to be properly certified by duly man-
aged prestige. In our ignorance, such authority was once upon a time all
we had to steer by.

For the Individual

Buddha believed in nonvicarious effortthe spirit only; that is to say,
only in effort disciplined from within. The individual himself might never
reach the ultimate for man on earth but what matter?

And Jesus taught the dignity and worth of the individual as developed
from within. "The Kingdom of God is within you": the potential of indi-
viduality. Christianity in his name diverted this teaching, professionalized
and confused it in creeds and churches. Even by the Gothic cathedrals.

The Church, with its creeds that Jesus did not want, discounted his Idea,
seeing in it only "every man for himself and the devil for the hindmost." So
"religion" has too often emphasized the desirability of the disappearance of
individuality: this, more or less, is also the politics of fascism or of com-
munism; similar to the practice of monarchic, socialistic or communistic
peoples. Meantime the protestant succeeded in bringing individuality back,
but only partially; as a compromised Ideal.

Some five hundred years before the life of Jesus, the Chinese philosopher
Laotze preached the sense of Individuality as a reflex of the organic unity
of the Cosmos: the true source of human power, the all pervasive "state-of-
becoming!" Our own democratic ideal of the social state seems originally
conceived as some such unity. That is to say, Democracy was conceived as
the free growth of humane individuality, mankind free to function together
in unity of spirit (their own skill in the making); by nature thus averse
to formalism and so to institutionalizing. Institution seemed a form of death.
This ideal of Nature lies at the core of organic democracy, and architecture
organic. We should emphasize this in order to regain ground lost to the
industrial revolution and consequent wars. But now come haphazard big
builders of these haphazard cities being badly overbuilt. By way of the
industrial revolution this great iron horse (the Machine), upon which the

45

West rode to power, is now rampant in the Middle East and the East. The
yellow man, ubiquitous, is learning to ride. Well, why are we afraid of him?
Is it our conscience? Or the lack of it?

Out of American "rugged individualism" captained by rugged captains of
our rugged industrial enterprises we have gradually evolved a crude, vain
power: plutocratic "Capitalism." Not true capitalism. I believe this is
entirely foreign to our own original idea of Democracy. The actual differ-
ence between such "individualism" and individuality of true democracy
lies in the difference between cowardly selfishness and noble selfhood! Like
the difference between sentiment and sentimentality or the difference be-
tween liberty and license.

"Isms" only aggravate misuse of vicarious powers by our expedient masters
of the expedient, using the three great incrementsrent for land, rent for
money, and rent for manhood to put native individuality into bad repute,
or into its grave. Like the abuse of any good thing abuses of individuality
will bring reactionary consequences. Proof of such reaction is with us today.
Fearful, our ultra-conservative rich men are proof enough. But our art,
degraded to the level of the makeshift, and our tottering religion, are
stronger proof. These personal idiot-syncrasies of "the man of taste" by
which we are persistently misled in the name of individuality are still more
evidence. If creative ability is our concern, we may be seen to have failed,
because sterility has been the natural consequence of vicarious exercise of
our enormous mechanical powers. Abuses of power are characteristics of
ultimate defeat. Not success. Quantity uprises at expense to quality. This
is surely the antithesis of Democracy.

But true creative ability as always will be the first concern of democratic
individuality. And, conversely, Individuality must ever be the concern and
success of creative ability. Until Usonia recognizes individuality not as per-
sonality merely but as the natural blossom and fruit of organic character;
seldom if ever common; always radical therefore, however difficult, is con-
servative of Life itself (being of the Soul) we will have no adequate share
in Democracy nor any in its defense, because we will not have grasped what
Democracy really means! Then how can we learn to develop and protect it
if we do not learn to know what it does really mean?

46

Democracy cannot afford mere personality to be mistaken for true human
individuality. Nor can the human will and mere intellect ever produce true
individuality. Any such attempt could make only a mimic, or a monster;
perhaps at best a scientist. Should our own great or near-great ever become
able to draw the line between the Curious and the Beautiful, this difference
between personality and individuality will come clear. Salvation of our cul-
ture therefore lies in practices which would be evident enough if we would
evolve true definitions of the character of our purpose and the nature of our
circumstances.

We "the Free" should recognize individuality as organic entity of the
man: essence of the soul of true manhood. Democracy is of the soul, not an
expedient, Our policy would then always be a determination to struggle
against any form of fixation or conformity. Militocracy or any cliche out-
side that of the machine itself would be murder of opportunity.

If the significance (spirit) of form is lacking, creative art can be nothing
of or for the soul. Only where this significance is the aura of form does the
spirit enter into man-made things. Art. To be insignificant our nation needs
only to be without this radiant aura of indigenous spirit. To be a people
without this supreme poetic expression of principle Art and Architecture-
is to be untrue to our ideology, untrue to ourselves. To have no true philos-
ophy as sanctuary for the spirit of Freedom is to have 110 haven for genius,
national or personal.

Democratic individuality therefore may be said to be organic; of the
character of the "person" or of "things." An inner quality. So we may prop-
erly call that quality as of the Soul. Creative manhood, first to last, is con-
cerned with soul as the deeper significance. Education should consist in
learning to recognize its integrity and this indigenous character wherever
found in people or things. When we speak of character we often really refer
to individuality. Democracy is the very gospel of Individuality.

Without such elemental human integrity, there can be only the use and
abuse of materialism not much above the belt, and vicarious. That is to say
not above artificiality. No great art or architecture, as poetry; no religion;
no integrity even of conduct.

47

If we deeply enough desire democracy, we will be much more careful of
how we turn upon our basic ego selfhood just because we have failed to
distinguish it from mere egotism. We have misnamed so many flagrant
abuses by egotism in the name of individuality. For instance the rugged
"individualism" of capitalism. "Capitalistic" may mean merely individual-
ism, or a run-in with riot. Such ism may be (usually is) completely some-
thing elsesomething for which true individuality has but scorn. And true
individuality has no more to do with the crass methods of mercantile ego-
tism such as ours than with communism or socialism at its other extreme.
Democratic individuality, a salient essence of all human life, is the funda-
mental core of Art and Artist creative.

No isms can express true individuality. Any man with a formula instead
of a spirit has already taken his place as an affront to nature: a mere substi-
tute no matter what ist, ism, or ite he may be.

"Man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep."

Great religious leaders Buddha, Jesus, Abdul Bahai, Mohammed, Laotze
especially wanted no formalism by institutionalizing religion: tolerated no
bureaucracy or officialism in the realm of the Spirit. Such integrity of soul
wanted not even disciples!

So human nature, far "out of drawing" in this day of our own time, is
bound to miseducate because miseducated. The education that would be
essential to the freedom of human nature is either on crutches now or piti-
fully weak; pseudo-functioning only on pseudo lines; staying on the boule-
vard; thinking by the groove; moving by interior wheels or on rails. City
pavements? The sidewalk-happy probably function best when off hard
pavements and in the rut. And, since we all go now on wheels on rail or
pavement, or "fly," life tends to become a rut. So rut-government seems in-
evitable at the moment and the rut the "way of all flesh."

48

How then does the rut become disreputable? Surely expedient, considered
moral, therefore it is said to be safe-"conservative." Often it is only the mt
that we call Law and Order. May it be what we are now inclined to call
civilization?

So Individuality is a menace to all forms of rut-life. Rut-life turns with
ratlike perspicacity against all individuality; with hatreds born of Fear. The
so-called Conservative has always hated the Radical: hates him with good
reason because the "conservative" is afraid of going to the roots of anything
at all-just because he knows instinctively he has no roots! And there can be
none wherever he is on the ground.

Now, we are here reading an actual consideration of the nature of the
future city of democracy: a city with greater future for human individual-
ity: a life in deeper organic sense, true to man's own Spirit-individuality
being fundamental integrity of the soul of man in his own time and place
and so most valuable asset of the human race. Without this city of its own
America will never have known a culture of its own. No great architecture
can arise from us or for us based upon the expedient use of the ancient city.
Wherever there will be the democratic city, individuality of conscience and
the conscience of individuality will be inviolate.

The Inexorable Law of Change

We must admit that before the advent of any wholesale standardized
mechanization of a new city the American way of life in the old city was,
in its effects and proportions, no longer humane because its basic plan was
so completely medieval. The Middle Ages.

In no planning which the old city has received has modern spacing been
based fairly enough upon the new time scale of modern mobilization the
human being no longer on his feet or seated in a trap behind a horse or two,
but in his motor car, or going in his plane. Listening to commentators on the
subject, we find that machinery has brought to us no alternative plan.
Urban life, originally, was a festival of wit, a show of pomp and a revel of
occasion while $11 was still in human scale. True urbanization rewarded life

49

back there in feudal circumstances, a life for which our cities of today were
originally planned and built, formed by and for a group-life of powerful
individualities, themselves in scale true to human life in medieval times.
Then conveniently enough spaced. But now under modern machine age
pressures, the better life is being driven, or wills itself, away. Either gone or
going now, it travels to and fro: perhaps lives in penthouses in the city or
far beyond in country estates. More time wasted in the to and fro than is
spent in desirable activity. Such genius as the big city now knows is re-
cruited from farms and villages of the American countryside. No city with
over 100,000 population can live by its own birthrate. The recruits, cele-
brants of the hard pavement (such as they are), sidewalk -happy, all now
seek the city to find it to be a market only: insatiable. A great maw demand-
ing and devouring quantity instead of encouraging and protecting quality.
As it devours man, so now it must devour itself. Fish are for sale in this
marketplace but there are none in its streams. The foolish celebrant, crowd-
ing in on crowds of hypnotized seekers no less confused, frequently escapes
to the countryside; escape essential because the overgrown city now offers
him nothing he cannot better find on terms of comparative health and free-
dom in the beauty of the countryside. Already the age of the machine has
laid that open to "his majesty the American citizen." While he slept it came
upon him . . . the American architect notwithstanding impotent.

Again, reflect upon these facts: first the fundamental unit of space-
measurement in modern life has, for every man, so radically changed that
he now bulks twenty to one even a hundred to onewhen he gets around
about seated in his favorite motor car. Then reflect that mobilization has
only just begun! This circumstance of the car alone is rendering the old big
city obsolete? Like some hopelessly inadequate old boat or building, the
city itself is still in use, inhabited because we feel we cannot afford to
throw it away and allow the spirit of Time, Place, and Man to build the
new ones we now so much need. Soon we will be willing to give all we have
to get on with the well-planned city of our own freedom. Inevitably this
new city is underway for our posterity if not for ourselves. Posterity must
have it.

But reading history we learn that the devouring of human individuality
has ended invariably in eventual desolation together of the devourer and

50

the devoured. Once render conscience "suspect" or deny conscience as
sacred to freedom itself and you have only downfall ahead: of man or his
works.

Then why and for what are these overgrown American cities so des-
perately maintained? Exaggerated as they now are, and held against the
normal tide of change? Held for militocracy, prostitution, banking and war?
At what price?

Illusion

And yet, coming to the greatest of them, New York, for the first time, one
has the illusion that we must be a great people to have raised this heavy
barrage of relentless commercial mantraps so high; to have grandly hung
so much book-architecture upon cumbrous old-fashioned steel framing, so
regardless. Inhabited at such enormous cost not alone in money but in all
human values as well.

Such frantic energy pours through this haphazard money-mountain made
by the mile to pile up and confuse men and materials, haphazard; here and
there ruthless; drenched by what relentless ambition has wrung from our
abounding national resources. Well, what of itif everywhere these re-
sources are wasted by foolish attempts at establishment by the nation and
we end in some form of bad surface-decoration? What if one arrogant sky-
scraper does outrun or ram another, and crams the horizon with harsh
haphazard masses upended, crowding on the bewildered wistful eye, peer-
ing up from black shadows cast upon the man down there below on hard
pavement? What, if so? We have seen crowding, greater if similar, as
destructive drama wherever irresistible physical force has violated mankind
or tilted up and broken through earth's crust. So see in this volcanic crater
of confused energy bred by money-power, no wise control of enormous
mechanical forces, pushing up to crowd and be crowded, to grind against
each other with a blind force moved by common greed, Crowded exploita-
tion, as only the Machine can crowd and exploit, forcing anxiety upon all
modern life. Is astonishment at all this akin to admiration? But consider
this is never a noble expression of life; it is again and again only the
apotheosis by the gregarious expedient of overmastering Rent.

51

Exaggerated perpendicularity has no such bill-of -health. It is now the
the terrible stricture of our big city. Whatever is perpendicular casts a
shadow: shadows of the skyscraper fall aground and where crowded are
an utterly selfish exploitation. Because, if the civic rights of the neighbor
down there below, in the shadows, were to be exercised, there would be no
"skyscraping" at all. There would be only a general rise in urban floor-level.
Without much sense and with no distinction, cramping and swamping all
tenantry in artificial light and forced ventilation, all would congest and be
congestion unbearable even to the herd-struck morons our present sky-
scraperism has cultivated.

The Light of Day

So to the urban skyscraper-builder in overcrowded cities the very inso-
lence of the urban skyscraper-feat is no small measure of its attraction?
Although skyscraperism fits so well into the primitive psychology of the
"rugged individualist" of the industrial revolution he who from an office
fifty stories above the man in the street casts his ominous shadow below
upon the man he directs in some great money-making enterprise he is
"success?" He is at last picturesque in the way he likes to be. The tall silk
hat and gold-tipped stick of the past had only a little something to gratify
his old-fashioned equivalent but now? What a hallmark, the very tallest
building in the big city outcrowding the already overcrowded, based upon
commercial success! Ancient titles? Mere nicknames! Here he is the tangi-
ble proof of the "greatness" of modern business. In the city, is this sky-
scraper shadow his own shadow? But what does that matter or mean to his
place in Time? He will never know.

Now move him and his shadow into the open spaces and he becomes
truly splendid: a contribution to the glory and dignity of our era. The
difference?

Simple. As material things stand with us today the skyscraper might be
ultimate expression of the individuality fairly expected from the freedom
of democracy to signify what we have so painstakingly prophesied and now
discourage. But in the overcrowded big city it is no exalted order of merit.

54

See it there as conspicuous proof of the cultural lag and a fine example of
our conspicuous waste.

In the present era's future (if it has one) the skyscraper will be con-
sidered "ne plus ultra of the e pluribus unum" capitalistic centralization.
The New York skyscraper will be seen as the prancing of this great iron
horsethe industrial revolution. The iron horse rearing high hoofs in air
for the plunge before the runaway the runaway to oblivion by way of the
atom bomb or we go to the country!

Thus enforced upon our understanding by the non-understanding in over-
grown urban life, skyscraping is not merely a falsity but a moral, economic,
aesthetic, ethical monstrosity!

This exaggeration of privilege among us is already far out of democratic
scale. Owing to social, collegiate, and commercial pride of exploitation
going hand in hand with miseducation if properly citified, "well mechan-
ized/* that is to say standardized by commerce, the citizen is now so far
gone that he easily mistakes the pig-piling and crowding of big business for
eminence of excellence: mistakes the pushbutton powers of the machine
age for his own powers and finds hectic excitement in urban uproar and the
vertigo of vertically . The more citified he becomes the less civilized he is;
the more this racing of the iron-horse into the inferiority of conformity
grows characteristic of his weakness. Roaring tumults of congestion empha-
size terrific collisions of power; explosions of grinding mechanical forces in
this whirling vortex, urban exaggeration; in these the rich whirling-dervish
thinks he sees his oion greatness. In the whirl the citizen is satiated his
"greatness** something wholly vicarious. But his shadow too is the shadow
cast by the sun.

And yet seen at night, heedless of stampede, the haphazard monster has
myriad beauties of silhouette; light streaming the light punctuated by re-
flected or refracted lights. In human terms yet undefined, the nocturnal
monster yields rhythmical perspectives, glowing spotted walls of light,
dotted lines, a world of fascinating reflections hung upon other reflections
ranging along vistas of the street or pendent as the wisteria hangs its violet
racemes on a trellis or the trees. Then the skyscraper is, in the dusk, a
shimmering, prismatic vertically; gossamer veil of a festive scene, hanging
there against the backdrop of a black night sky to dazzle, entertain, and

55

amaze, in great masses. Lighted interiors come through the veil with a
sense of life and well-being. The City then seems alive. It does live as illu-
sion lives.

The light of day? Streams of more and more insignificant facades and
dead walls rise and pour out of hard faced masses behind and above human
beings all crawling on hard pavements like ants to "hole in" somewhere or
find their way to this or that cubicle. Beings packed into the roar, rush and
danger of a new kind of the old voracity speed. And out of other holes
everywhere elsewhere pour these sordid reiterations, rent, rented, or in
pursuit of rent! Overpowering emphasis everywhere of the cell in upended
stricture; continual slicing, edging, inching in all the crowding. Tier above
tier rises the soulless habitation of the shelf. Interminable empty crevices
run up and down the winding ways of windy unhealthy canyons. Heartless,
this now universal grip of grasping, unending stricture. Box to box on box
boxing, glassed in boxing looking into other glass-boxing. Black shadows
falling on glass fronts with artificial lights burning behind them day long.
Millions upon millions of little cavities, cells squared by the acre, acreage
spread by the mile. This a vast prison with glass fronts.

Above this avaricious aggregation which cruel ambition has built and now
patronizes are haphazard odd insignificant skylines: like the false ambitions
below making it all more human by lying about it. Elaborate ornamentation
is all spasmodic. Here goes and conies to go again the to-and-fro, anxiety,
satiety of life in the machine age. Incessant the wear of the cities, always to
stop-and-go, go-and-stop only to crisscross again. Every human movement
made is made to be broken! Every human being's interest, private interest,
is entangled and in danger everywhere. Every heart that beats beaten
soon or late.

Streets? All too narrow channels jammed and jamming traffic. When
available they are all, at best, only half effective owing to the ubiquitous
crisscross of the gridiron. Always the gridiron! Forever a bedlam of harsh,
torturing shrieks and roars. This wasteful spasm of racing movement to and
fro in the crisscross. Down erstwhile narrow old village lanes one is deep in
dark shadows cast by distorted forces. Therein lurk the ambitions and frus-
trations of the human being urbanized out of scale with its own body. Here
see defeat of all aspirations of the human heart. The sense of humane pro-
portion lost.

56

Incongruous mantrap of monstrous dimensions! Enormity devouring man-
hood, confusing personality by frustration of individuality? Is this not Anti-
Christ? The Moloch that knows no God but more?

The agonizing traffic problem is here seen forced upon the city originally
made and now aggravated by the persistent landlord with his skyscraper.
The present city is yet only about one-tenth the motor car city it must be-
come within the next fifteen years unless the citizen abandons his car. But
dutiful devotion to advantages of our machine age now means to every citi-
zen either a motor car or two or three (comparative flight) a helicopter;
or else a frustrated moron for a citizen. Or a maniac? Every citizen will have
a car or two or already dreams of having more, meantime envying the
neighbor his four. Three, two or one observe if the new free-way or the
gridiron congestion is not already crucifixion. Then what comes, as average
success multiplies and relentlessly multiplies the excess of our already exces-
sive mechanical leverage?

Roughly calculate the mass of public conveyances, taxicabs, buses, private
cars and trucks that success will bring to any overgrown village consisting
of one hundred thousand to several million people: add half that number
of private cars and add, perhaps one twenty-fifth as many delivery ma-
chines; add one fiftieth as many buses to displace streetcar tracks and carry
children to school; and add unwholesome subways. You will find that with
room enough for each incidental transient coming into town from the
suburbs (or going out), in order to function at all lengthwise, to say nothing
of around about or crosswise the surging maniacal mass inextricable would
pig-pile in the narrow channels of the city well above the seventh storyl

Allowing now for the established urban crisscross (the gridiron making
every city street only half-time efficient) the struggling mass would again
double; pile up and submerge even the ten-story buildings? Call this ex-
aggeration: cut it in two. Then, if you like, cut it in two again. There will
still be enough cars pounding along the streets and pouring carbon monox-
ide into them to put Manhattan and all its kind completely out of commis-
sion, starved for oxygen.

Now consider the fact that motorcar traffic has just begun within this
resurrection of ancient Bedlam. Then why deck, double-deck, or triple-deck
city streets or burrow in holes below them at a cost of billions only to invite

57

further increase and eventually inevitable defeat? Now see these new imita-
tions of old feudal cities as total loss to modern times.

Why not then allow the citizenry to keep the billions they would have to
pay for decking and burrowing? They could buy more and better cars
and perhaps soon safe flying machines, eventually bailing out of the urban
mantrap into the more natural life of the small town fruitfully expanded
in the country. As the freedom of our democracy dawns genuine in the
citizen's heart, the present prison-city vanishes by way of its own senseless
excess. Hazardous machine power built the excess and, if left haphazard,
will ruin it. A City should now be the planned consequence of better under-
standing of what the nature of the machine may mean to the man with a
conscience; and this must now be made constructive. Without this integrity
on our part our boasted democratic freedom is going going something
soon doomed entirely by its own foolish extravagant ignorance and gone.

So no longer manifest is any clear thought or sane feeling for humane
good in urban exaggeration. Humane elements are sterilized by it or de-
moralized. Lurking in sinister urban shadows cast by these prideful urban
strictures, lie the legalised impositions of today; and no less in our libraries,
museums, colleges and in institutions of learning and especially of authority
a terrifying make-believe. The abortion we see in street facades has become
a general frown. This surviving shadow of the ancient wall itself sinister.
Savage or unsane as the convulsions caused by the overgrown city are we
see in them as valid an example of deterioration by "advantages" as has
existed in all time.

Just because we have some little thriving village of yesterday (port
perhaps) driven thus mad by excess-why is it so conveniently mistaken for
principles? Success creative would seldom if ever know! The abnormality
the city breeds is nothing more than much more of the already much-too-
much in all the hell there is right now!

THE FIREPROOF UNIFIED FARM
BUILDING FOR SMALL ACRE-
AGE FARMS

PLAN FOR THE UNIFIED FARM

Forces Tearing the Vortex Down

Human sensibilities, above the belt, are growing tired or numb. But good
hope lies in this fact: this whole swollen commercial enterprise we call the
City proceeds to stall its own engine by its owners' own excess. The day of
reckoning is not so far away.

Mercantile interests have overbuilt the city, own it, and are now spending
billions to keep it in place and going, using such man-prowess as we have
to make ground-rent, floor-rent, man-rent and money-rent acceptable to
urban millions; all, including themselves now, in immediate danger of
running each other down in a race for bigger and better bait for no less
acquisitive but even more bewildered tenants.

60

THE UNIFIED FARM

FRANK LLOYD .WRIGHT ARCHITECT

So inexorable forces that have overbuilt the city for swarming tenantry in
so many different forms, yet all the same, build and build only to see urban
monstrosity tear itself down or wear itself out by its own overweight; obesity
is not yet a virtue.

For a page or two now let us examine these inimical mechanical forces,
thrusting against human life by all this vain exaggeration and try to see just
how natural forces may return all festering excess to the soil, If humanity
were only there on its own inheritance-this good ground-cancerous over-
growth, wrought upon the life of these United States, might be gradually
healed, The small home-farm-building to take the place of promiscuous farm
buildings and the tenement is one item in sight shown in detail by the
drawings of Broadacres; free city,

61

TYPICAL DWELLING FOR LITTLE FARMS. UPPER LEVEL LIVING ROOM

'UPPER LEVEL PLAN

Of all the underlying forces working toward emancipation of the city
dweller, most important is the gradual reawakening of the. primitive in-
stincts of the agrarian. Agronomy, source of the ancient wandering tribe.
The adventurer down the ages reappears, his instinct still intermingling
with the static of the cave-dweller. Call the survival of the ancient feudal
city due to survival of the ancient cave-dweller instinct. The adventurer
protests and denies this surviving shadow-of-the-wallthis old new city.

Physical forces of the machine itself, electrical, mechanical, and chemi-
cal invention, are meantime volatilizing human movement, voice and vision;

62

GARDEN LEVEL PLAN

All now in so many new forms are actually aiming against the city, on the
side of the original space-loving primitive.

Miracles of technical invention with which our "hit-and-run" culture has
had nothing to do are despite misuse new forces with which any in-
digenous culture must reckon.

ONE: Electrification. Given modern electrification, distance is all but anni-
hilated so far as human communications go; and by electric light human
occupation continuously illuminated. Radical change in the entire basis of
civilization.

TWO: Mechanical mobilization. Given the steamship, airstrip, and auto-
mobile, the human sphere of contact immeasurably widens. By the many
mechanical modes, by wheel, air or ship, this radical change in the basis of
our civilization is taking place.

THREE: Organic architecture: natural building. Given the Principles of
nature, material resources become something no longer to be fought against
but fought for. Now available to man in the air, sea, or mud under his feet,
are the natural bases of human use by good design. With organic architec-

TYPICAL COTTAGE FOR LEVEL GROUND (PREFABRICATE)

tare his resource, man is a noble feature worthy of his own ground; integral
there, as trees, streams or the rock ribs that are the hills. Rational changes
in our civilization are imperative now because the individual himself, when
no longer merely a creature of taste, becomes creative. Architects of the
democratic spirit are here, demanding deeper organic foundations for an
organic society. Everywhere this new American architecture is demanding
more organic foundations for economic, ethical, social, aesthetic daily life;
insists all future planning now begin at the beginning. Planned revolution
by evolution is now organic.

The sense of space in spaciousness is not only scientific (it always was)
but now fruitful, a genuine becoming. Congested senseless verticality is
both inartistic and unscientifal To this spiritual awakening of the architect
comes the space-loving human being as client. To freedom-loving democ-
racy all stricture is as intolerable as it ought to have been so long ago.

Wherever the welfare of human life is concerned stricture, vertical or
horizontal, cannot stand against the more natural conscientious harmony of
life with the ground.

TYPICAL HOME FOR SLOPING GROUND

Another greater force to aid the reawakening instincts of the ancient
adventurer lies in the spiritual strength of this challenge as a superb ideal
of human freedom: Democracy! This new-old ideal is ancient as a spiritual
concept of life, but is new to our own phase of modern time. See its natural
consequence as the reintegration of Decentralization! With this new
spiritual concept, we move beyond prevailing expedients. Organic archi-
tecture is integral; a concept of this new life our nation is learning to
identify as free democracy. Yet only dimly comprehending this new-ancient
ideal, architecture, because itself inevitable to all appropriate forms of
civilization, must become a great spiritual force moving to free mankind
from time-bound life in time-bound modern cities. Decentralization is there-
fore innate necessity: a new city is inevitable as sunrise tomorrow morning
though rain may fall.

Thus the three principal machine agencies are steadily at work for the
surviving instincts of the freedom-loving primitive. Democracy steadily
approaches-. And while yet unconscious of the precise forms it will take, we
are able to see new forces gathering.

Look again and again at these modern machine agencies, busy forcing
change upon this "best of all possible worlds." Examine each more in
detail. Then study the basic ideals of this young-old champion of Freedom,
already at work around the world: Organic architecture and you will
begin to understand Broadacre City.

Looking Backward

Earlier in time human intercommunication could only be had by direct
personal contact. Commercial or social communication was slow and diffi-
cult. The City was of necessity a close-built mass a mart, the only general
meeting place, therefore the only distribution center. So the pattern of the
feudal city grew to serve human needs as they then were. Human concen-
tration, then, was not an unmixed evil. Such cities as there were grew as
organisms; grew naturally as the organism of our own body grows; the
natural result of proper feeding. Acceleration of tissue by circulation and
chemical activity such as characterizes a malignant tumor did not then

67

manifest itself. The city then was not malignant. The ancient city was not
opposed to the course of normal human life in relation to natural beauty of
environment; it was as inevitable as it was desirable. Cities of ancient
civilizations grew to relieve pressures then caused by the lack of the integra-
tion now possible to us. Those ancient civilizations have perished.

Perhaps learning lessons from the past, modern European cities wisely
resisted skyscrapering and remained nearer human scale. But our own
survivals of these ancient cities have gone on absorbing from the country-
sides what they could never repay; exaggerating the productions of indus-
trialism at expense to agriculture. Ignorant of the culture which agronomy
should have meant to our country, we chose to follow the British line of
industrialization.

But not one of our big cities can subsist long on its own birth rate as
birthright; therefore, a vampire, it must renew itself from our farms and
villages.

Feverish excitations of the industrial urban ganglia (owing to pressures
caused by fundamental changes such as we are describing), have grown
abnormal, therefore painful. Concentrations of about two hundred or more
persons to the acre are often considered "practical" ( see London, New York
or Tokyo) in planning or replanning cities.

Gather so many people together, visible on every acre, and try to imagine
freedom and the pursuit of happiness left to each in housing them by the
square mile!

Any wise recognition and definition of freedom under Democracy must
say that ultimate human satisfactions no longer depend upon but are
destroyed by density of population.

Our new machine agencies create new tendencies consciously employed;
or deployed and reorganized. Civilization recapitulates. The village that
became a city scatters far, as mobilized communication grows: agency
number one. There is now no advantage in a few blocks apart, over a mile
or two or even ten. There is a new time-scale to take the place of the old
foot-and-inch scale. Human thought itself long since rendered ubiquitous
by printing, now by visible speech and movement, all but volatile: tele-

68

graph, telephone, radio, television and safe flight. Then what have we?
But the proper question is, what has us?

Concerning agency number two: steam, once upon a time dependent on
fuel concentrations, congested and coupled close together human devices
for movement and living comforts. But the internal-combustion engine
(motor car or plane) safely goes anywhere carrying its own fuel, smoothly
working as it goes. The motor ship, the automobile, and the airplane. Tran-
sit through space becomes economical. New hard roads or rails still come in,
because of still necessary composition with these advantages. Developed as
continuous avenues of swift, fluid mass communication, these are all com-
paratively new devices, breeding still more devices and advantages.

Results of agency number two are countless mechanical systems of ven-
tilation, refrigeration, heating, and lighting, making dependence upon the
centralized service-systems of the old city superfluous.

Agency three: new materials, fibrous steel the spider spinning used in
tension, high-pressure concrete in compression, glass and innumerable
plastics. Broad, thin, cheap sheets of plywood, sheet metal, or cement
which together with sheets of similar insulating value make completely new
types of building design admirable. Buildings may be so economized by
intelligent standardizing that "home" may now be open to beautiful
environment and be designed to broaden the life of the individual family,
making site and building a unit.

Tendency number four: inorganic pref abrication : degeneration of quality
by mass production. While utilities are made better and cheaper, new
designs are needed to be made available for all, instead of more and
questionable luxuries for the few. Machine design is now principal means
of making use of power for decentralizing the big city and dispersing it;
collecting it into what we, at first, call the countryside (not meaning
suburbs); but, uniting desirable features of the city with the freedom of the
ground in a natural happy union: such reintegration as here called Broad-
acre City, A city of native creative ability, its advantages, we hope to see,
turning the capabilities of the machine spread for the human being not

69

THE USONIAN CONCRETE BLOCK HOUSE

USONIAN HOUSE LIVING ROOM

UPPER LEVEL PLAN

GROUND LEVEL PLAN

P LAM

stacked against him. We have earned good right to speak of this city of
tomorrow, the city of Democracy, indulging in no double-talk, as the City
of Broad Acres.

Freedom or Conscription

Individuals are still capable of developing selfhood instead of selfishness
(consciously or unconsciously) and we go first to this free, more democratic
individual, as the individual we must work with for the right human uses
of the machine. By this time the machine is not only a runaway but revo-
lutionary; and reactionary to such human values as the industrial-revolution
has allowed to live. The runaway, imperceptibly at first, forcing the old
city into new forms. The more intelligent citizens now lead the way to free-
dom for others. Numbers, increasing, come trailing along into that spacious-
ness we will soon have good reason to call the freedom of American
democracy.

Character is a healthy individual growth of freedom from within. No
matter how the present pilots of our civilization came to be pilots, unless
the people themselves want to go down to stay down, they must act upon
the modern imitations of ancient feudal cities inimical to our new means
of life. They must act upon them not as calamity but as opportunity for
development of the quality now belonging by nature to them throughout
every feature of their daily lives.

Decenter and reintegrate. When this need is seen as indispensable,
democracy will be built. Only the spirit of an energetic freedom-loving
people disciplined from within by means of true nature-study; employing
natural methods and whatever materials art, organic architecture, science
(and religion) have in common; using our new advantages; only such
command will ever know indestructible power unbreakable defense. Of
such should be the character of these United States. Say, Usonia? Aris-
tocracy from within, which our forefathers hoped to see a reality inter-
preted by Thomas Jefferson as "the bravest and the best."

Why then should free men not use the 'power of machine leverage to
72

gain and keep the freedom their own forefathers declared?

Individuality independent the Sovereignty of which we have already
enough unselfish manifestation to live and grow the new city byis con-
tinuing to make the old city increasingly unimportant even as a burrow.
Driven to sky-hooks, nooks and crevices inhibition everywhere the big-
city now can exist only to be thwarted or aborted.

"Full employment" as we continually hear about it is not enough for the
democratic citizen if this country still means what it declared 1776. No.
"Full employment" is not enough because it may be and often is only a
more subtle form of rent or conscription continued as the useful means
centralization now holds out. It is the baited hook to keep the worker
dangling.

No human soul, healthy, grows or even long survives sterilizing practices
of the vicarious machine life as are common to this machine age. Urban
lifea la mode can be little more than some kind of surrender to the all-
devouring god: Expediency. As petty social and official exactions increase,
always the underlying purpose is found in some form of rent. You can call
rent, too, a form of conscription. The modern crime of crimes against
Democracy is conscription in any form, because conscription is inevitably a
form of confiscation. Conscription is the form of rent most hateful to
democracy because it soonest destroys freedom at its very source.

Our soul grows more by what we give than by what we take and feed
upon. No man's soul grows by what is exacted from it. When he signs away
his sovereignty as an individual he is not far away from the lowest form of
socialism the world has ever seen.

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PART

T H R E

DECENTRALIZATION

Integration on the New Scale of Spacing

share in the Americaswhy not call that share Usonia?* can no
longer be earned without good architects as essential interpreters of
America's humanity. Creative architects. Nor can this nation afford to
believe creative architecture is not to be its own logical interpretation of
ways and means of life in our modern machine-made era. Art, Philosophy,
Economics, and Religion, all old-school, have failed us, and politics is
becoming likely as prostitute in a drift toward conformity. Organic archi-
tecture now comes as natural interpreter of Nature. It should light the way?
Any true creative art can know the way. After our long journey at least
500 years long away from the original art of Architecture the mother-
art, other arts, though not so integral with the daily life of the human being,
now show signs of awakening. But in fundamental social affairs of Form
(not reform) the architect is necessarily our prophetic interpreter in such
circumstances as are common to our fate. The new forms will be provided
by him. The nature of the true architect-mind is most needful now as in
any era of Change. Great ancient powers that built great civilizations
( abstractions ) only to die, still live on in us to help build a civilization able
to survive the fate that overtook them. We do know that ancient cities,
however they were conquered or destroyed by force, have perished because
of external ideals of life life from outside in not life from inside out.

* Samuel Butler's suggestion of a name for our nameless nation ( see his Erewhon ) .

77

We know, too, that the same old human power they died of, and with, is
infinitely multiplied in our case by enormous mechanical exaggerations.
But were we so to use machine power as to build new freedom for man,
free in the organic city now inevitable to our civilization, we might live
indefinitely! Why then more temporizing with all the external ideals which
have proven fatal?

It is nearly two thousand years since the assertion of the organic truth
that "the kingdom of God is within you'' This new dynamic interior ideal
we are calling democracy has grown up gradually in the human heart. But
we of these United States have neglected to build a life therefore a city-
natural to us. A natural architecture of a natural economic order of the
natural state. Organic.

An experiment? Yes, and if by "experience" it succeeds, and this union
we are calling Usonia turns from the present static to the integration of
decentralization inevitable to our ideal of democratic life, only then will we
turn toward the new freedom: laws made for man not man made for laws.
Integral livelihood for the citizen, artist and all laborers in the vineyard.
And for all artisans a life based squarely with good sense upon good ground.

Coming now to the individual "at home": he will be organically related
to landscape, to transport and distribution of goods, to educational enter-
tainment and all cultural opportunity. All as easily imagined now. But the
individual home democracy will build is in itself new freedom and fresh-
ness from within which other civilizations have only partially attained.

This ideal of the Usonian home is where organic architecture first comes
in to meet rising demands for integrity of means with social ends, by
radical change in basic structure: one great fundamental improvement
brought into the service of the American citizen as individual.

First decentralization, then planned reintegration. Reinterpretation of
our life by modern art and science will soon point the way forward to this
realization. So work, leisure and culture; Art, Religion and Science; all will
be, nearly as possible, one. Only then may each man be a whole man, living
a full life. Only then is he "secure." Nor does that mean that every man
must be a genius or farmer. But there will be no longer excuse for any man
to be the kind of parasite the machine power of centralization is now so
busy making of him only to ensure him "employment" on the terms of a
wage-slave?

78

We now know that these new machine forces may be potential, great
liberators, but we know they are yet far from working so for the citizen.
They are not owned by him nor are they owned for him. They are owned
by the same landlords, machine-lords, and money-lords that operate rent
and operate the city, itself now a vicious form of rent. These misdirected
mechanical means are potential means of human liberation. But thus
warped to distortion, enormity is maintained to destroy the citizen.

It is within the power of these very mechanical forces to automatically
destroy any system that continues to deprive humanity of all but a small
fragment of its potential benefits.

As a people we are still unfamiliar with the idea, but it is organic charac-
ter in planning and building that alone can lead the way out of this terrific
collision of mechanical forces. Organic architecture can end this superwaste
of human life, now become so commonplace that we thoughtlessly accept
its evil consequences as inevitable. Normal though not inevitable, it may
become fatal to our national experiment in freedom.

In this city of today, as of yesterday, ground-space is reckoned by the
square foot. In the organic city of tomorrow ground-space will be reckoned
by the acre. No less than an acre to each individual man, woman and child.
This individual acre seems minimum when we consider that if all inhabi-
tants of the world were to stand upright together, they would scarcely
occupy the island of Bermuda. Reflect that in the United States there are
about fifty-seven green acres each for every man, woman and child within
our borders at this time.

On this basis of an acre to each, architecture could soon come into service
of the man himself as a natural feature of his life. The architecture of his
home could never again be the adapted, commercialized thing it is: as
housing by government or otherwise. Overcrowding itself to be sold; sold
again. Resold. Overcrowding oversold life by taxi-meter: the realtors stand-
ing by to "see to it" that there be no more standing room than lively com-
petition demands and he feels he can afford. Artificial scarcity thus chronic
in any form is no boon now.

Liberal ground use is itself now one sure basis for culture and a more
liberal education for America.

As our society learns to see life as free and believes man to be trusted, the
citizen will learn to see architecture as the essential expression, the true

79

protection natural to freedom; because good building is itself a form of
organic life. Be sure that the ultimate Usonian City will thus be on its own
foundations, and be its own impregnable defense.

Imitative eclecticisms now so widely practiced, however tastefully so-
phisticated, are only some bad form of crooked sentimentality. Personal
"taste" can seldom be more than superficial because it is merely selective:
some sentimental exploitation of something or other from somewhere that
someone else approved somehow. As we now practise what society is
pleased to call "taste," taste is a kind of knavery. The jackdaw, the magpie,
the cuckoo, the monkey all "eclectics" by nature! But why man? It is more
than merely unfortunate that our experiment in the birth of a nation has
really known the creative artist only on such terms. The imitator never
actually learns. His "conversion," when it occurs, is merely a turnabout to
some other form of eclecticism. This man may know all about everything
and understand nothing. Expediency is eclectic as eclecticism is taste expe-
dient forever.

Taste peripatetic tried long ago to pick and choose the external effects
that might lead, instead of letting life lead as native and so teach man
constructively how to work and live. Natural. So man himself has become
little more than a palliative, the quality of his luxury spurious. At his best
overeducated, "best" is likely to be very worst. The huckster you hear on
the radio; the star you see in the movies; the designer whose work is on
manufacturer's lists; hopeless deterioration by way of taste. As a conse-
quence, see what "sells."

If the true architects faith still lives, it must live as it has always lived:
as honest experiment made by courageous, intelligent radicals in love with
the poetic principle and practicing these principles as architecture.

Only the faith that keeps radical faith with life itself is fit to be called
safe! This is as true wherever great political co-ordination is effected as it is
where good building is done. But no worthy experiment founded on expe-
rience is the same thing as one merely experimental.

Let us now approach the growing traffic or any other pressing city
problems as another human problem; not as tinkers trying to tear parts of
the city down only to build it up again on its old site while declaring that

80

"architecture has nothing to do with humanity" the approach that is ex-
actly what has made the difficulty.

We have plenty of occasion to know that vested interests cannot be
divested by agreement; but, unless by force, only by sincere educational
revolution. "Interests" will never voluntarily agree to the loss of their
immediate quarry which lies in some form of rent. Perhaps even rent for
rent.

Observe for another page or two this inner law of organic change now at
work upon these big, bigger and biggest cities. Inexorable Law of Change!
Law with inevitable drastic consequences. First and forthcoming conse-
quence the organic city of this discourse: the city of the new freedom,
Broadacres.

Broadacres

Nonsense is talked by our big skyscraperites in the blind alley they have
set up, defending urban congestion by obscuring the simple facts of the
issue. Of what use, in modern light, is the surgery of these superspace-
makers for rentprofessional promoters of the congestion-promoting traffic
problem? Their skyscraper-by-skyscraper is the dead wall of our obstruc-
tion, the gravestone of capitalistic centralization.

For similar reasons the traffic problem (as we call our danger, our dis-
tress and eventual disgrace), if tied up with the skyscraper, is insoluble by
any busy big city in the United States or elsewhere.

But the door of the urban cage is about to open.

The amorphous herds of humanity swarming in the narrow, erstwhile
village lanes and caverns may now take wings as well as go on wheels. All
increased speed facilities of movement are lateral. All, in point of time,
are comparative flight.

In the new time scale the door of the urban cage is surely opening wide.
Motorcar invasion and collateral inventions in the air and on the rails are
leading up to total mechanization of transit.

So not only is the actual horizon of the individual immeasurably widened
but his entire range of life (why not thought?) is broadened on the ground

81

by these mechanizations when properly put to work. It is significant that
not only have space values entirely changed to time values, now ready to
form new standards of movement-measurement, but a new sense of spacing
based upon speed is here. Mobility is at work upon man in spite of himself.
And, too, the impact of this new sense of space has already engendered
fresh spiritual as well as physical values. A ride high up in the air, in any
plane or elevator, only shows man how fast and far he can go away on the
ground. It is this broadened view that inspires in modern man his desire to
go. If he has means, he goes. He has the means in his motorcar, copter or
plane. And the horizon keeps widening conveniently for him as he goes.

Observe this physical release at work upon the citizen's character as a
spiritual thing an inspiration as well as new satisfaction and implement.

When the citizen realizes this release, his selfish interests may still pull
away and pig-pile him senselessly in high tiers of cells upended on hard
pavements. Dazed by his new freedom, he may be like some animal born in
captivity; but when he finds the door of his cage open, he will soon learn
like the animal that he can go free. When he learns that he is free, he is
gone perhaps only to come back by habit for a time.

After all is said and done, he the citizen is really the city? The city
is going where he goes. He is learning to go where he enjoys all the city
ever gave him, plus freedom, security and beauty of his birthright, the good
ground. The first true basis for his pursuit of happiness is such integral
independence: the only sure basis of his desired freedom.

Throughout our amazing civilization the citizen is already going "afield"
because the machine that brought him to the city is as able to take him
back again. When he wakes to a larger and better sense of himself he is
free to go out and prophetic build the new city. Machine power subjected
to man's own proper use will enable him as a citizen to live in a better
city in a better developed countryside because he is no longer conscript
either by or for the agencies now keeping him at least available as one.

Democracy on these new free terms means freedom for every citizen-
yes, but only if the principle of the machine is forced by himself to go to
work for him. It could start working for him if he should so desire and
courageously so decide. The machine as an automaton is involuntary.
Automatically (because of what it really is), the present uses of it work

82

man toward the revolution which this decision may mean. Otherwise this
great iron horse upon which the West rode to powerthe industrial revolu-
tionis not only a runaway horse but a stayaway.

To repeat: as centralization was the natural "monarchy" (in architecture
the major axis and minor axis), men were compelled to centralize and
revolve as closely as possible around an exalted common center, for any
desirable exploitation of the man-unit. The idea of democracy is contrary.
Decentralization reintegrated is the reflex: many free units developing
strength as they learn to function and grow together in adequate space,
mutual freedom a reality.

Analysis

Consider: monarchy was defeated because it magnified, while at the
same time it deliberately mortified, the individuality that we, as a people,
desired and declared; and now, I believe, desire more than ever to establish?
As for our present system, free enterprise, so called: well, if its beneficiaries
should decide to persist in the present form of supercentralization, the
system its apex on the ground, base in the airnow stands ready to fall.
It will fall for the same reason that masonry falls or monarchy falls, as all
despotism surely falls: the law of gravitation and the law of diminishing
returns (a law of nature).

The mechanized forces now employed in the building of our mad world
are turning upon the remaining peak of monarchic despotism now demoral-
ized: the now overgrown old city. Do the hurrying fools blindly driving
production to still further excess in big cities still imagine they are building
the city up? But all nature is against them. They are tearing the city down.

Centralization is centripetal, whether as city, factory, school or farm; it
has not met the rising spirit of democracy freedom of the individual as
individual to work with for centralization is by nature against it. Many
obvious details (traffic problem for one), also have enormous powers now
setting in dead against the principle of centralization. Machine power itself
now denies centralization in spite of its ancient masters, because it is in the
nature of intercommunication and ubiquitous mobility that the big city

83

decenter itself and spread out far away spread thin, growing high and
higher only as it goes outward from center. The countryside is the place for
the skyscraper. If higher at all, then wider on the ground. It is in the nature
of the development of flying, too, that the present city disappear eventually
to reappear as well spaced structure in spaciousness. The old capitalistic
city is no longer safe. It is mass murder. Even though no bombs ever appear
as murderer. The true humane city is Broadacres.

By way of unnatural survival of the big citified city, capitalist centraliza-
tion has had a bold day but can have no relatively long day. It is easy to see
now that though not dead yet, what it really is is neither necessity nor
luxury but harmful stricture, wasting humanity. So our big cities, vampires,
must die. Universal automobilization, ubiquity of movement, thought, voice
and vision now penetrating distance and walls these are gigantic factors
making present-day urban life as troublesome to free human life as static is
to radio.

What about the time when these rapidly increasing "modernizations"
become universal? Time not far away.

Democracy by Definition

Already men get more satisfaction out of their vastly increased facility for
free movement than ever before. Imagine a m