Lord Byron and I have a bone to pick with history: “I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every age and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one.” Yes, history’s been lounging around, chewing up and spitting out heroes like so many grape skins, and Byron and I think enough is enough. It’s untidy, and it’s inefficient–you can’t keep a good hero down anyway. They have a way of bounding back to their proper stature, as Byron’s Don Juan did, no matter how pitilessly history abuses them first.
This is what history does for a living, steamroll out of present-day pebbles and tar an orderly past. We flatten, that we may love again. In recent years we’ve flattened Harry Truman, that once-despised haberdasher, and revived him as a statesman. Dwight Eisenhower is being dug up and flattened at a furious rate, no matter that his grandson, David Eisenhower, must flail the first shovel. And next in line is Jack Kennedy. He can’t be resuscitated yet, being so near and dear to our passions and neuroses still, but one day he will find a family retainer to write a revision that sticks; and history, even that history, will roll on.
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Mumford was best known for his passionate stands on modernism, which he advocated as a young man and then attacked for the better part of his life. Modernism was originally a leftist European ideology of design. Imported to America, architectural modernism after World War II flourished monstrously, for it was ungoverned by the European-style ideologies that had given it meaning and proportion there. Those leftist ideologies, completely foreign to America, were just words in magazines over here. Mumford was among the first to despair of the monster’s creations and companions, which he described brilliantly–canyons of glass-box skyscrapers and efficient high-rise slums, ringed by distant, hermetic suburbs; unlivable cities carved apart by undrivable expressways.
It’s hard to see the sublime and the squalid in a single sweep of the eye. Yet idealism, heroism, and vision signify much less if one doesn’t see the surrounding sordidness. This is Mumford’s genius, that through his stereopticon eyes we see a many-dimensioned world, a world shot through with meanings, which are ignored at our peril and pain.
All history is a tangled skein of smaller stories like Mumford’s, of old farts and young bucks. That’s History for you, and it does no unique injustice to Lewis Mumford. Virtually every original thinker who’s had a lasting effect on his society must survive such deflation of his reputation, precisely because his visions of yesterday have become today’s banalities. For 40 years after his death, Emerson was, by general estimate, an eminent nincompoop. Henry Adams was seen as an obscurantist crank. Sinclair Lewis, whose American avatars in Babbitt and Elmer Gantry will forever illuminate us to ourselves, critical consensus currently deems a muddled hack.
