LEWIS MUMFORD, “TOWERS,” “MIGRATIONS,” AND “REGIONS”
Lewis Mumford was one of the extraordinary intellects of the age. Malcolm Cowley called him “the last of the great humanists.” He was an urban planner, sociologist, literary critic, architecture critic, philosopher, and historian of technology, and he wrote hard-to-classify books that lived at various intersections of these fields. He was born in 1895, never quite finished college due to a bout of tuberculosis, joined the navy to fight in the Great War, and came back at the age of 24 to become an associate editor of The Dial, which, having shed much of its transcendentalist past, was a showcase for literary modernism. One of Mumford’s first books, The Golden Day (1926), returned to those roots to argue for Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman as the center of American literary achievement, an idea that would remain influential for years.
“Towers,” Mumford’s Socratic dialogue between an Architect and a Critic in the February issue of American Mercury, rehearsed a number of Mumford’s recurring themes. The Architect applauds the skyscraper as the essence of contemporary art, as an aesthetic triumph akin to the Pyramids, and scoffs at his nearest competitors, the modernist dabblers in paint and canvas, as throwbacks to an earlier time, when practicality was not ascendent. The Critic agrees that things are in the saddle, that practicality reigns, but bemoans the fact. For the Critic, contemporary society is on a course of growing dehumanization. The people who work in the skyscrapers do not find them sublime:
So far from admiring these great voids and spiny solids, they are indifferent to them. In the evening, they hastily drop into the subway and bury their heads in newspapers; presently they squeeze through the doors of their apartments, into rooms that are neither spacious nor beautiful. To satisfy their eyes, they have the motion pictures; for their ears they have the phonograph or the radio; for their love of adventure, the automobile; and without these physical instruments they have almost ceased to function. Deprived of newspapers they cannot think, and without photographs they observe nothing and remember nothing.
The Critic has practical concerns, too, about the way the skyscraper pours thousands of people into the streets at the end of the day, streets that were meant for hundreds. He also worries about innumerable other “horrors and difficulties”—housing, transportation, and waste removal among them.
Those concerns appear in the special issue of Survey Graphic Mumford edited in 1925, Regional Planning, which ran a couple of months before Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro. The central arguments of that issue dealt with the suburb, the building of communities for commuters that would solve, Mumford and others thought, some of those problems. Following on the ideas in his Sticks and Stones (1924), a cultural history of architecture, Mumford and the other contributors, many of them in his Regional Planning Association of America, were interested in building a new “garden city” that was human-centered, ecologically and socially sustainable, as well as aesthetically satisfying.
Mumford wrote “The Fourth Migration” as an introduction to that issue and “Regions—To Live In” as a finale. Unlike the migration of Europeans across the ocean, or of Americans and then technologies across the country, or the migration from the countryside into the cities, the fourth wave was a migration into suburbs. As in the Chicago school’s thinking (see Park and Burgess), Mumford was interested in the concentric rings of activity radiating from the city centers, but with more attention to the actual land formations surrounding cities. The prime movers for this migration were the automobile, the telephone, and population growth. The railroad and the telegraph had made lines of connection, the newer technologies areas of connection. The idea was ecological: “The regionalist attempts to plan such an area so that all its sites and resources, from forest to city, from highland to water level, may be soundly developed,” he wrote, “and so that the population will be distributed so as to utilize, rather than to nullify or destroy, its natural advantages.”