Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright eagerly defended the principle of conscien-
tious objection; many of the apprentices became C.O.’s, and several of
them ended up in prison. Wright enlisted the aid of colleagues and famous
acquaintances in an attempt to persuade the authorities in Washington
that the Fellowship was at work upon a project indispensable to the future
well-being of the country and that the apprentices should therefore be
exempted from the draft. To this end, he drew up a grandiloquent document
called the Broadacre City Petition, which, submitted to the White House
in the darkest moments of the war, rivals in grotesque self-importance
the letter that James joyce is reputed to have sent to the King of England
during the First World War, asking His Majesty to put aside less important
tasks in order to locate a pair of trousers that had been mailed to ]oyce
from Dublin and that, passing through enemy territory, had failed to reach
him in Zurich. Wright’s petition:
We, the undersigned, respectfully ask that the Administration of our Gov-
ernment authorize Frank Lloyd Wright to continue the search for Demo-
cratic FORM as the basis for a true capitalistic society now known as
Broadacre City. We believe that work should immediately be declared a
worthy national objective and the necessary ways and means freely granted
him to make such plans, models, and drawings as will enable our citizens
and otherpeoples to comprehend the basic ideas the plans, models, and
drawings represent and which, without political bias or influences will be
invaluable to our people when peace is being considered}
Astonishingly enough, Wright was able to accumulate hundreds of distin-
guished signatories to this petition, including Thomas Benton,]ohn Dewey,
Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Milles, Charles A. Beard, Joseph
Brewer, Norman Bel Geddes, Mies van der Rohe, Georgia O’Keeffe (the
only woman), Walter Gropius, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder,
and Wright’s cousin by marriage Robert Moses. The petition fell upon
deaf ears, and the Fellowship dwindled to a scant four or five apprentices.
Eccentrics attract eccentrics, and one of Wright’s new friends during
the war period was the musicologist and promoter Carleton Smith, who
somehow or other had achieved a close personal relationship with many
of the great ones of the earth, or boldly claimed to have done so. (In the
late nineteen-seventies, Smith talked the Pritzker family of Chicago into
setting up the Pritzker Architecture Prize, partly on the basis of a discussion
he said he had once had with the King of Sweden, in which they had
both lamented the absence of a Nobel Prize in architecture. In fact, Smith
had no particular interest in architecture; he had fallen back upon it alpha-
betically as a field of endeavor worthy of receiving a prize when he could
find nobody willing to set up a prize for agriculture. If the Pritzkers had
not bit on architecture, Smith had planned to take his chances with astron-
omy.) In an unpublished autobiography, Smith tells of his friendship with
President Roosevelt’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, and of how she intro-
duced him to her son with the admonition, “Franklin knows nothing about
music. You must teach him what he ought to know.” According to Smith,
on one occasion Mrs. Roosevelt was indignant with her son because a
speech he made at the launching of a battleship interrupted a Saturday
afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast to which she had been looking
forward. She asked the butler to get her son on the telephone, in order
to give him a good scolding; after a brief delay, the butler reported that
the battleship wasn’t picking up.
When the government was in need of housing for workers at the
atomic energy plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Smith recommended Wright
to the President, saying that Wright would be able to design half a dozen
basic houses that could then be prefabricated by the thousands. Roosevelt
expressed interest in seeing Wright’s designs, but when weeks passed and
no designs appeared, he urged Smith to bring Wright to Washington to
talk things over face to face. Smith’s memoirs contain a vivid description
of the encounter (which, like so many of the encounters described in
Wright’s autobiography, may never have taken place):
. . . so I took him [Wright] to Washington and he wore a cloak over his
shoulders and had a big cane and never took his hat off when he came
into the Oval Room and he stopped at the door with great drama and
said, so the President could hear, “You know, Carleton, I’ve always told
you I would rather be Wright than President,” and then he wheeled around
and came up to the President’s desk and shook hands with him and he
sald—and I Wlll never know whether he thought this out in advance or
whether it came naturally—he said, “Franklin,” or “Frank,” he called him
“Frank,” he said, “you ought to get up out of that chair and look around
at what they re doing to your city here, miles and miles of Ionic and
Corinthian columns!”
Rarely do we hear of two consecutive feats of tactlessness in which the
Second so‘ convincingly—and so shockingly—surpasses the first. Roosevelt
had an aristocratic distaste for being addressed in an over-familiar fashion,
and to be called‘ by his first name, or, still worse, by a diminutive of his
first name (making it a duplicate of Wright’s) must have enraged him,
but to be urged in his paralyzed condition to get up out of his chair and
look around—l Smith’s memoirs are, alas, silent in regard to what followed;
it is certainly the case that Wright had no part in the housing of workers
at Oak Ridge.