III

With the transition from republican to imperial Rome, numerous

monuments were erected to the Divine Cæsar. Within a much shorter time

than marked the growth of the imperial tradition in America, a similar

edification of patriotic memories took place.

In the restoration of the original plan of Washington, which began in

1901, the axis of the plan was so altered as to make it pass through

the Washington Monument; and at the same time the place of the Lincoln

Memorial, designed by the late Mr. Henry Bacon, a pupil of Mr. McKim’s,

was assigned. This was the first of a whole series of temples devoted

to the national deities. In the Lincoln Memorial, in the McKinley

Memorial at Niles, Ohio, in the Hall of Fame at New York University,

and in their prototype, Grant’s Tomb, one feels not the living beauty

of our American past, but the mortuary air of archæology. The America

that Lincoln was bred in, the homespun and humane and humorous America

that he wished to preserve, has nothing in common with the sedulously

classic monument that was erected to his memory. Who lives in that

shrine, I wonder--Lincoln, or the men who conceived it: the leader who

beheld the mournful victory of the Civil War, or the generation that

took pleasure in the mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit, and

placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and the Caribbean?

On the plane of private citizenship, a similar movement took place:

while before 1890 one can count the tombs in our cemeteries that boast

loudly of the owner’s earthly possessions and power, from that time

onward the miniature temple-mausoleum becomes more and more frequent.

In fact, an entire history of architecture could be deduced from our

cemeteries; all that has so far been described could be marked in the

progress from the simple slab, carved in almost Attic purity with a

weeping willow or a cubistic cherub, that characterized the eighteenth

century, to the bad lettering and the more awkward headstones of the

early nineteenth century; and from this to the introduction of polished

granite and iron ornament in the post-Civil War cemetery, down to the

mechanically perfect mausoleum, where the corpses are packed like

the occupants of a subway train, that some of our more effusively

progressive communities boast of today. As we live, so we die: no

wonder Shelley described Hell as a place much like London.

The Roman development of New York, Chicago, Washington, and the

lesser metropolises, had an important effect upon the homes of the

people. Historically, the imperial monument and the slum-tenement go

hand in hand. The same process that creates an unearned increment

for the landlords who possess favored sites, contributes a generous

quota--which might be called the unearned excrement--of depression,

overcrowding, and bad living, in the dormitory districts of the city.

This had happened in imperial Rome; it had happened again in Paris

under Napoleon III, where Haussmann’s sweeping reconstructions created

new slums in the districts behind the grand avenues, quite as bad,

if far less obvious, as those that had been cleared away; and it

happened once again in our American cities. Whereas in Rome a certain

limit, however, was placed upon the expansion of the city because

of the low development of vehicular traffic, the rise of mechanical

transportation placed no bounds at all on the American city. If Rome

was forced to create huge engineering projects like aqueducts and

sewers in order to cleanse the inhabitants and remove the offal of

its congested districts, the American city followed the example of the

modern Romes like London and Paris by devising man-sewers, in which the

mass of plebeians could be daily drained back and forth between their

dormitories and their factories.

So far from relieving congestion, these colossal pieces of engineering

only made more of it possible: by pouring more feeder lines into the

central district of New York, Boston, Chicago, or where you will,

rapid transit increased the housing congestion at one end and the

business-congestion at the other. As for the primary sewer system

devised for the imperial metropolis, it could scarcely even claim, with

rapid transit, that it was a valuable commercial investment. The water

outlets of New York are so thoroughly polluted that not merely have the

shad and the oyster beds vanished from the Hudson River, where both

once flourished, but it is a serious question whether the tides can

continue to transport their vast load of sewage without a preliminary

reduction of its content. Like the extension of the water conduits into

the Adirondacks, all these necessary little improvements add to the per

capita cost of living in an imperial metropolis, without providing a

single benefit that a smaller city with no need for such improvements

does not enjoy. In the matter of public parks, for example, the

Committee on Congestion in New York, in 1911, calculated that the park

space needed for the East Side alone, on the scale provided by the city

of Hartford, would be greater than the entire area of Manhattan Island.

In short, even for its bare utilitarian requirements, the mass-city, as

the Germans call it, costs more and gives less than communities which

have not had imperial greatness inflicted upon them.

As to the more positive improvements under the imperial regime, history

leaves no doubt as to their dubious character, and current observation

only reinforces history’s lesson. In discussing the growth of the

tenement in Rome after the Great Fire, Friedlander says:

“The motives for piling up storeys were as strong as ever: the site

for Cæsar’s Forum had cost over £875,000 compensation to tenants and

ground landlords. Rome had loftier houses than modern capital. A

disproportionately large part of the area available for building was

monopolized by the few, in consequence of the waste of space in the

plethoric architecture of the day, and a very considerable portion

was swallowed up by the public places, such as the imperial forums,

which took up six hectares, as well as by the traffic regulations and

extensions of the streets. The transformation and decoration of Rome

by the Cæsars enhanced the scarcity of housing, as did Napoleon III’s

improvements in Paris. A further adjutory cause of the increase in

the price of dwellings was the habit of speculation in house property

(which Crassus had practiced in great style) and the monopoly of the

proprietors, in consequence of which houses were let and sublet.”

It would be tedious to draw out the parallel: given similar social

conditions in America we have not been able to escape the same social

results, even down to the fact that the palliatives of private

philanthropy flourish here again as they had not flourished anywhere on

the same scale since the Roman Empire. So much for imperial greatness.

When an architect like Mr. Edward Bennett can say, as he did in The

Significance of the Fine Arts: “House the people densely, if necessary,

but conserve great areas for recreation,” we need not be in doubt as to

who will profit by the density and who will profit, at the other end,

by the recreation. It is not merely that the park must be produced

to remedy the congestion: it is even more that the congestion must

be produced in order to provide for the park. To profit by both the

disease and the remedy is one of the master-strokes of imperialist

enterprise. Mr. Daniel Burnham said of the World’s Fair, according to

Mr. Bennett and Mr. Charles Moore, “that it is what the Romans would

have wished to create in permanent form.” One may say of our imperial

cities that they are what the Romans did create--but whether the form

will be permanent or not is a matter we may leave to the sardonic

attentions of history.

For my own part, I think we have at last acquired a criterion which

will enable us to sum up the architecture of the imperial age, and

deal justly with these railroad stations and stadiums, these sewers

and circuses, these aqueducts and parkways and grand avenues. Our

imperial architecture is an architecture of compensation: it provides

grandiloquent stones for people who have been deprived of bread

and sunlight and all that keeps man from becoming vile. Behind the

monumental façades of our metropolises trudges a landless proletariat,

doomed to the servile routine of the factory system; and beyond the

great cities lies a countryside whose goods are drained away, whose

children are uprooted from the soil on the prospect of easy gain and

endless amusements, and whose remaining cultivators are steadily

drifting into the ranks of an abject tenantry. This is not a casual

observation: it is the translation of the last three census reports

into plain English. Can one take the pretensions of this architecture

seriously; can one worry about its esthetics or take full delight

in such finer forms as Mr. Pope’s Temple of the Scottish Rite in

Washington, or Mr. Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial? Yes, perhaps--if one

refuses to look beyond the mask.

Even in some of its proudest buildings, the imperial show wears thin;

and one need not peer into the slums beyond in order to realize its

defects. The rear of the Metropolitan Museum or the Brooklyn Museum,

for example, might be the rear of a row of Bronx tenements or Long

Island City factories, so gaunt and barren and hideous is their

aspect. If the imperial age was foreshadowed in the World’s Fair, it

has received its apotheosis in the museum. In contrast to the local

museums one still finds occasionally in Europe, which are little more

than extensions of the local curio cabinet, the imperial museum is

essentially a loot-heap, a comprehensive repository for plunder. The

sage Viollet-le-Duc once patly said that he preferred to see his apples

hanging on a tree, rather than arranged in rows in the fruit shop: but

the animus of the museum is to value the plucked fruit more than the

tree that bore it.

Into the museum come the disjecta membra of other lands, other

cultures, other civilizations. All that had once been a living faith

and practice is here reduced to a separate specimen, pattern, or form.

For the museum, the world of art has already been created: the future

is restricted to a duplication of the perfected past. This animus is

identic with that which made the Romans so skillful in copying Greek

statues and so dull in carving their own; a desirable habit of humility

were it not for the fact that the works of art in the past could not

have been created had our ancestors been so punctual in respect to

finished designs. The one thing the museum cannot attempt to do is to

supply a soil for living art: all that it can present is a pattern

for reproduction. To the extent that an insincere or imitative art is

better than no art at all, the Imperial Age marked an advance: to the

extent, however, that a living art is a fresh gesture of the spirit,

the museum confessed all too plainly that the age had no fresh gestures

to make; on that score, it was a failure, and the copying of period

furniture and the design of period architecture were the livid proofs

of that failure.

The museum is a manifestation of our curiosity, our acquisitiveness,

our essentially predatory culture; and these qualities were copiously

exhibited in the architecture of imperialism. It would be foolish to

reproach the great run of architects for exploiting the characteristics

of their age; for even those who in belief and design have remained

outside the age--such resolute advocates of a medieval polity as Dr.

Ralph Adams Cram--have not been able to divert its currents. In so

far as we have learned to care more for empire than for a community

of freemen, living the good life, more for dominion over palm and

pine than for the humane discipline of ourselves, the architect has

but enshrined our desires. The opulence, the waste of resources

and energies, the perversion of human effort represented in this

architecture are but the outcome of our general scheme of working and

living. Architecture, like government, is about as good as a community

deserves. The shell that we create for ourselves marks our spiritual

development as plainly as that of a snail denotes its species. If

sometimes architecture becomes frozen music, we have ourselves to thank

when it is a pompous blare of meaningless sounds.