Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (16 page)

Dewey was one of the leaders of a movement that changed such thinking, in two directions. The traditional idea of education, he saw, stemmed from a leisured and aristocratic society, the type of society that was disappearing fast in the European democracies and had never existed in America. Education now had to meet the needs of democracy. Second, and no less important, education had to reflect the fact that children were very different from one another in abilities and interests. For children to make the best contribution to society they were capable of, education should be less about ‘drumming in’ hard facts that the teacher thought necessary and more about drawing out what
the individual child was capable of. In other words, pragmatism applied to education.

Dewey’s enthusiasm for science was reflected in the name he gave to the ‘Laboratory School’ that he set up in 1896.
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Motivated partly by the ideas of Johann Pestalozzi, a pious Swiss educator, and the German philosopher Friedrich Fröbel, and by the child psychologist G. Stanley Hall, the institution operated on the principle that for each child there were negative and positive consequences of individuality. In the first place, the child’s natural abilities set limits to what it was capable of. More positively, the interests and qualities within the child had to be discovered in order to see where ‘growth’ was possible. Growth was an important concept for the ‘child-centred’ apostles of the ‘new education’ at the beginning of the century. Dewey believed that since antiquity society had been divided into leisured and aristocratic classes, the custodians of knowledge, and the working classes, engaged in work and practical knowledge. This separation, he believed, was fatal, especially in a democracy. Education along class lines must be rejected, and inherited notions of learning discarded as unsuited to democracy, industrialism, and the age of science.
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The ideas of Dewey, along with those of Freud, were undoubtedly influential in attaching far more importance to childhood than before. The notion of personal growth and the drawing back of traditional, authoritarian conceptions of what knowledge is and what education should seek to do were liberating ideas for many people. In America, with its many immigrant groups and wide geographical spread, the new education helped to create many individualists. At the same time, the ideas of the ‘growth movement’ always risked being taken too far, with children left to their own devices too much. In some schools where teachers believed that ‘no child should ever know failure’ examinations and grades were abolished.
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This lack of structure ultimately backfired, producing children who were more conformist precisely because they lacked hard knowledge or the independent judgement that the occasional failure helped to teach them. Liberating children from parental ‘domination’ was, without question, a form of freedom. But later in the century it would bring its own set of problems.

It is a cliché to describe the university as an ivory tower, a retreat from the hurly-burly of what many people like to call the ‘real world,’ where professors (James at Harvard, Dewey at Chicago, or Bergson at the Collège de France) can spend their hours contemplating fundamental philosophical concerns. It therefore makes a nice irony to consider next a very pragmatic idea, which was introduced at Harvard in 1908. This was the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Note that it was a
graduate
school. Training for a life/career in business had been provided by other American universities since the 1880S, but always as undergraduate study. The Harvard school actually began as an idea for an administrative college, training diplomats and civil servants. However, a stock market panic of 1907 showed a need for better-trained businessmen.

The Graduate School of Business Administration opened in October 1908
with fifty-nine candidates for the new degree of Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.).
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At the time there was conflict not only over what was taught but
how
it was to be taught. Accountancy, transportation, insurance, and banking were covered by other institutions, so Harvard evolved its own definition of business: ‘Business is making things to sell, at a profit, decently.’ Two basic activities were identified by this definition: manufacturing, the act of production; and merchandising or marketing, the act of distribution. Since there were no readily available textbooks on these matters, however, businessmen and their firms were spotlighted by the professors, thus evolving what would become Harvard’s famous system of case studies. In addition to manufacturing and distribution, a course was also offered for the study of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s
Principles of Scientific Management
.
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Taylor, an engineer by training, embraced the view, typified by a speech that President Theodore Roosevelt had made in the White House, that many aspects of American life were inefficient, a form of waste. For Taylor, the management of companies needed to be put on a more ‘scientific’ basis – he was intent on showing that management was a science, and to illustrate his case he had investigated, and improved, efficiency in a large number of companies. For example, research had discovered, he said, that the average man shifts far more coal or sand (or whatever substance) with a shovel that holds 21 pounds rather than, say, 24 pounds or 18 pounds. With the heavier shovel, the man gets tired more quickly from the weight. With the lighter shovel he gets tired more quickly from having to work faster. With a 21-pound shovel, the man can keep going longer, with fewer breaks. Taylor devised new strategies for many businesses, resulting, he said, in higher wages for the workers and higher profits for the company. In the case of pig-iron handling, for example, workers increased their wages from $1.15 a day to $1.85, an increase of 60 percent, while average production went up from 12.5 tons a day to 47 tons, an increase of nearly 400 percent. As a result, he said, everyone was satisfied.
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The final elements of the Harvard curriculum were research, by the faculty, shoe retailing being the first business looked into, and employment experience, when the students spent time with firms during the long vacation. Both elements proved successful. Business education at Harvard thus became a mixture of case study, as was practised in the law department, and a ‘clinical’ approach, as was pursued in the medical school, with research thrown in. The approach eventually became famous, with many imitators. The 59 candidates for M.B.A. in 1908 grew to 872 by the time of the next stock market crash, in 1929, and included graduates from fourteen foreign countries. The school’s publication, the
Harvard Business Review,
rolled off the presses for the first time in 1922, its editorial aim being to demonstrate the relation between fundamental economic theory and the everyday experience and problems of the executive in business, the ultimate exercise in pragmatism.
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What was happening at Harvard, in other business schools, and in business itself was one aspect of what Richard Hofstadter has identified as ‘the practical culture’ of America. To business, he added farming, the American labor movement (a much more practical, less ideological form of socialism than the
labor movements of Europe), the tradition of the self-made man, and even religion.
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Hofstadter wisely points out that Christianity in many parts of the United States is entirely practical in nature. He takes as his text a quote of theologian Reinhald Niebuhr, that a strain in American theology ‘tends to define religion in terms of adjustment to divine reality for the sake of gaining power rather than in terms of revelation which subjects the recipient to the criticism of that which is revealed.’
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And he also emphasises how many theological movements use ‘spiritual technology’ to achieve their ends: ‘One … writer tells us that … “the body is … a receiving set for the catching of messages from the Broadcasting Station of God” and that “the greatest of Engineers … is your silent partner.” ‘
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In the practical culture it is only natural for even God to be a businessman.

The intersection in New York’s Manhattan of Broadway and Twenty-third Street has always been a busy crossroads. Broadway cuts through the cross street at a sharp angle, forming on the north side a small triangle of land quite distinctive from the monumental rectangular ‘blocks’ so typical of New York. In 1903 the architect Daniel Burnham used this unusual sliver of ground to create what became an icon of the city, a building as distinctive and as beautiful now as it was on the day it opened. The narrow wedge structure became known – affectionately – as the Flatiron Building, on account of its shape (its sharp point was rounded). But shape was not the only reason for its fame: the Flatiron was 285 feet – twenty-one storeys – high, and New York’s first skyscraper.
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Buildings are the most candid form of art, and the skyscraper is the most pragmatic response to the huge, crowded cities that were formed in the late nineteenth century, where space was at a premium, particularly in Manhattan, which is built on a narrow slice of an island.
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Completely new, always striking, on occasions beautiful, there is no image that symbolised the early twentieth century like the skyscraper. Some will dispute that the Flatiron was the first such building. In the nineteenth century there
were
buildings twelve, fifteen, or even nineteen storeys high. George Post’s Pulitzer Building on Park Row, built in 1892, was one of them, but the Flatiron Building was the first to rule the skyline. It immediately became a focus for artists and photographers. Edward Steichen, one of the great early American photographers, who with Alfred Stieglitz ran one of New York’s first modern art galleries (and introduced Cézanne to America), portrayed the Flatiron Building as rising out of the misty haze, almost a part of the natural landscape. His photographs of it showed diminutive, horse-drawn carriages making their way along the streets, with gaslights giving the image the feel almost of an impressionist painting of Paris.
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The Flatiron created downdraughts that lifted the skirts of women going by, so that youths would linger around the building to watch the flapping petticoats.
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The skyscraper, which was to find its full expression in New York, was actually conceived in Chicago.
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The history of this conception is an absorbing story with its own tragic hero, Louis Henry Sullivan (1856–1924). Sullivan
was born in Boston, the son of a musically gifted mother of German-Swiss-French stock and a father, Patrick, who taught dance. Louis, who fancied himself as a poet and wrote a lot of bad verse, grew up loathing the chaotic architecture of his home city, but studied the subject not far away, across the Charles River at MIT.
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A round-faced man with brown eyes, Sullivan had acquired an imposing self-confidence even by his student days, revealed in his dapper suits, the pearl studs in his shirts, the silver-topped walking cane that he was never without. He travelled around Europe, listening to Wagner as well as looking at buildings, then worked briefly in Philadelphia and the Chicago office of William Le Baron Jenney, often cited as the father of the skyscraper for introducing a steel skeleton and elevators in his Home Insurance Building (Chicago, 1883a–5).
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Yet it is doubtful whether this building – squat by later standards – really qualifies as a skyscraper. In Sullivan’s view the chief property of a skyscraper was that it ‘must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from top to bottom it is a unit without a single dissenting line.’
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In 1876 Chicago was still in a sense a frontier town. Staying at the Palmer House Hotel, Rudyard Kipling found it ‘a gilded rabbit warren … full of people talking about money and spitting,’ but it offered fantastic architectural possibilities in the years following the great fire of 1871, which had devastated the city core.
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By 1880 Sullivan had joined the office of Dankmar Adler and a year later became a full partner. It was this partnership that launched his reputation, and soon he was a leading figure in the Chicago school of architecture.

Though Chicago became known as the birthplace of the skyscraper, the notion of building very high structures is of indeterminable antiquity. The intellectual breakthrough was the realisation that a tall building need not rely on masonry for its support.
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The metal-frame building was the answer: the frame, iron in the earlier examples, steel later on, is bolted (later riveted for speedier construction) together to steel plates, like shelves, which constitute the floors of each storey. On this structure curtain walls could be, as it were, hung. The wall is thus a cladding of the building, rather than truly weight bearing. Most of the structural problems regarding skyscrapers were solved very early on. Therefore, as much of the debate at the turn of the century was about the aesthetics of design as about engineering. Sullivan passionately joined the debate in favour of a modern architecture, rather than pastiches and sentimental memorials to the old orders. His famous dictum, ‘Form ever follows function,’ became a rallying cry for modernism, already mentioned in connection with the work of Adolf Loos in Vienna.
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Sullivan’s early masterpiece was the Wainwright Building in Saint Louis.
This, again, was not a really high structure, only ten storeys of brick and terracotta, but Sullivan grasped that intervention by the architect could ‘add’ to a building’s height.
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As one architectural historian wrote, the Wainwright is ‘not merely tall; it is about
being
tall – it is tall architecturally even more than it is physically.’
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If the Wainwright Building was where Sullivan found his voice, where he tamed verticality and showed how it could be controlled, his finest building is generally thought to be the
Carson Pirie
Scott department store, also in Chicago, finished in 1903–4. Once again this is not a skyscraper as such – it is twelve storeys high, and there is more emphasis on the horizontal lines than the vertical. But it was in this building above all others that Sullivan displayed his great originality in creating a new kind of decoration for buildings, with its ‘streamlined majesty,’ ‘curvilinear ornament’ and ‘sensuous webbing.’
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The ground floor of Carson Pirie Scott shows the Americanisation of the art nouveau designs Sullivan had seen in Paris: a Metro station turned into a department store.
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