From Bauhaus to Your Houses

Careful readers will notice an allusion in my title to a very slanted book by Tom Wolfe, "From Bauhaus to Our House". It is a snooty take by an upper middle class Yalie corrupted by Philip Johnson's facile aesthetic that only Capital A Art, not social purpose, matters in architecture. Wolfe sneers at the fact that Gropius and his peers actually concentrated on housing for low wage workers. Since when is an expensive Villa the only creditable kind of housing.

I grew up in Detroit, lower middle class. My single Mother, a school teacher in Hamtramck, then the Polish sector of Greater Detroit, moved us from apartment to apartment, almost yearly, as she pinched her pennies summer vacations. In 1943 (she was then forty-eight) took advantage of the FHA policies to buy a house with another teacher in the Far Northeast of Detroit. I was sixteen at the time. On our left was an immigrant Polish couple working in a defense industry who moved in their new house shortly after us. On the right was a family of three German immigrants also working in defense. It was a relief to have a place you could call home for more than a few months. And it was FDR's social policies that made such home ownership possible.

Eventually, I finished the course work for a Ph.D. in American Literature, and started teaching high school English in East Lansing Michigan while I finished my doctoral dissertation. We lived our first married years boarding in a Cleveland apartment, and then in Michigan State University barracks, left over from World War II. I'm not complaining. We were happy to have cheap housing. But in 1954, our housing horizons expanded broadly. National Homes of Lafayette Indiana hired the AIA innovator, Charles Goodman, to design prefab housing in a corn field outside Lansing, Michigan. A simple three bedroom Cape Cod, with grooved redwood siding.

It was not a fixer upper, but they left it to the first inhabitants to lay the tile and the flooring. It miraculously exacted only $400 for a down payment, a $40 a month mortgage for 20 years to pay off the $6000 cost. We were in Seventh Heaven. Our own house! I was 27 and my wife Mary was 24. For blue collars that was a wonder.

In 1955, I was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship to study how English teachers should deal with the new medium of television. I had written a piece for "Scholastic Teacher" on using original teleplays in tenth grade English called "Everyman in Saddle Shoes". The magazine asked me if I'd like to be radio-TV editor of that magazine. It seemed a natural: I devised a Teleguide format that would enable teachers throughout the country to prepare their classes for specials like Hallmark Hall of Fame's "Macbeth" with Maurice Evans, and Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame". Curiosity prompted me to go down to Washington for a White House Conference on Education on the next Saturday.

As I entered the foyer of the Washington Hilton, I saw Ralph Bunche (he had recently been on the cover of "Time") in earnest conversation with a man unknown to me. I sidled over and hesitatingly introduced myself as Pat Hazard, an English teacher from East Lansing on a Ford Fellowship to study classroom access to the new medium of television.

As you might imagine, these two international celebrities were dumbstruck by my impertinence. Finally, the unknown man asked, "Well, how is it going, Mr. Hazard?" I told him about my editorship of Scholastic Teacher and how frustrated I was by not being able to interview Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, the innovative head of NBC-TV whose mantra, "Enlightenment Through Exposure" seemed a natural theme for me to pursue.

After some more chatter, the unidentified man announced that he was Roy Larsen, the publisher of Time magazine, and that he was on the Board of the Fund for the Republic that had given me my fellowship. "How would you like an office at Time to expedite your work?" Gulping incredulously, I allowed as how I'd love to learn more about that magazine. He told me to call his secretary the first thing Monday morning. I did, and before you could say Henry Luce, I was looking out at Manhattan from my 38th floor office! What the fuck do I do next, I asked myself. Weaver's secretary had sounded colder and colder after every attempted interview appointment.

I swallowed hard, and dialed his NBC office. This time she was so arctic, I could see the frozen waves coming off the wires. "Mr. Hazard," she said, in a very frustrated voice, "this is the beginning of the Fall Season and Mr. Weaver is very busy" I replied as politely as I knew how, "Well, I'm very busy with my new fellowship, but if Mr. Weaver has fifteen minutes free, please call me at JU 62525." And hung up. Fifteen minutes later, she called me back and asked if I could visit Mr. Weaver today at eleven a.m. I assured her I "could clear my schedule". It was nine a.m.

The RCA Building is a quick five minute hike across Sixth Avenue into the Rockefeller Center. Weaver's secretary gave me a hearty welcome, and knock softly on Weaver's door. He was working his Bongo Board, a kind of one man see saw, that relaxed him and hence make him think more clearly and quickly. He asked me about the aims of my fellowship, and explained in fascinating detail the plans behind his mantra of "Enlightenment Through Exposure."

One of his favorite initiatives was the new live program, "Wide, Wide, World." I was a little discombobulated by the Bongo Board, but the sanity of his NBC aspirations matched my aspirations. He advised his secretary to set up appointments with Sid Lussin, his PR veep, Stockton Helfrich, his censor, and Ed Stanley, a man in charge of religious and other public affairs programming. What a serendipitous encounter that had been at the Washington Hilton.

I should explain that the Ph.D. I was finishing was in a new interdisciplinary discipline called American Studies. American Lit is peculiar: in the seventeenth century it was Theology, in the eighteenth, Politics, and not until the middle of the nineteenth century did we achieve Belles Lettres. Harvard celebrated its tercentennial in 1936 by setting up the first such inter-disciplinary studies. I prepared five fields: two in
American Literature, and complementary fields of American art and architecture, American economic history, and American philosophy and its European antecedents.

My dissertation was a study of how John Fiske, without private means and without a university teaching job, tried (unsuccessfully) to exemplify Emerson's ideal of the new American Scholar, his Phi Beta Kappa oration of 1836. The epigraph came from a New England preacher, Theodore Parker, who said the intellectual in the new democracy should "think with saint and sage, but speak with common men." That became my mantra.

I wrote visual essays for Scholastic's "Literary Cavalcade" on bridges and architecture. I explained by ambitions with paperback pioneer Ian Ballantyne and Folkways archivist Moe Asch. And watched in wonder the photo editor, managing editor, and editor of Life put together an issue. They flew me around the country to observe their operations. Towards the end of that annis mirabilis, I gave a talk at the 4C's national convention on "Liberace and the Future of Cultural Criticism". 4C's (the Conference on College Composition and Communication) was focused on Freshman English. At the end of my talk, three English professors for Trenton State asked me if I'd like to sing that Liberace Tune in their college. I did.

In the middle of that year, the University of Pennsylvania awarded me a Carnegie Post Doctoral Fellowship to create a new course on "The Mass Society" for their American Civilization Department. First semester was on Mass Communication (print, graphics, broadcasting). Second was Mass Production (industrial design, architecture, urban planning).

Once a week I tried my ideas at a seminar run by the economic historian Thomas Cochran with visitors like John William Ward from Princeton. It was heady, and even hard to keep up with! The first year I studied and traveled to places like Stanford's Center for Behavioral Sciences where I conversed with Daniel Bell and Bernard Berelson. The Columbia University American Studies seminar had me speak on my television projects, "Silent on a Couch in Darien." I met my mentor John A. Kouwenhoven whose books "The Arts in America" first guided me through the new field of the Vernacular. David Riesman invited me to a TV seminar at Harvard.

The second year I taught my new course. One highlight was the death of Frank Lloyd Wright the day I had scheduled Lewis Mumford. He tore up his prepared lecture and extemporized on how immature FLW had been and how great a loss that was to American architecture. I had just visited the new Guggenheim, where to my amazement I was standing next to Adlai Stevenson. I asked the Governor if I could take a photo of him looking-to tease my Republican students at Penn. He slyly complied, "Nothing more far out than a Cezanne," he warned me. The following week there was a NY Times story about his radical friends taking him on a SoHo tour!

Another serendipity was about to bloom. Walter Annenberg gave Penn two million dollars to found a graduate school of communication. Faute de mieux, I became a gofer at large. I had just written an essay for Lewis Leary's anthology, "Contemporary Literary Scholarship". My chapter was on "The Public Arts and the Private Sensibility", basically about how Gilbert Seldes and Lewis Mumford had pioneered studies of the public arts outside the Academy, and that it was high time to catch up with their intellectual pioneering. I argued with the Penn brass that Gilbert Seldes' "The Seven Lively Arts" (1924) made him the perfect candidate for the first Dean. I became his gofer!

We had reluctantly left our Charles Goodman Cape Cod in Dewitt, Michigan for an apartment in Flushing, NY on the edge of where the World's Fair of 1938 had been held and where Robert Moses laid out the 64-5 Fair, the subject of my first and only documentary, "Moses' Land of Promises". When we moved to Trenton, we rented a Levitt house on Thornyapple Lane. Lots of space for a few bucks. It was an achievement not a defect.

The scorn of New York intellectuals for Levitt was one of the greatest trahison of clercs I have observed in America. Herbert Gans, the German immigrant who wrote a landmark book on the three Levittowns (NY,PA,NJ) was a colleague at Penn who confirmed my hunch that in spite of the egghead blathering was a real move up for former blue collars, excluding of course the blacks who were excluded in PA and finally took over the NJ Levittown and renamed it Willingboro.

In 1960 the Daedalus journal sponsored a symposium on Mass Culture during which the same New York intellectuals flattered each other by sneering at mass man. Alas, Gilbert Seldes passed over his invitation to me, meaning that I was the only pro-Mass Culture speaker. My program was simple: use the public schools to introduce the undereducated to the choices they had to make in this really New World. Needless to say, the same literati had defected from their Jeffersonian responsibilities. They abandoned the public schools before World War I and spent their days mocking John Dewey and other thinkers who were not so irresponsible.

The Daedalus Conference literally ended with the poet Randall Jarrell waggling his Isaiah beard at me and intoning, "Mr. Hazard. You're the man of the future, and I'm glad I'll not be there." Alas, he did in fact commit suicide shortly thereafter, disappointing me since I enjoyed teaching his poems. By then we had moved to Morris Milgrim's experiment in racial integration called Greenbelt Knoll. Our neighbors included the Lion from Zion, the Rev. Leon Sullivan, and the first black Congressman from Philadelphia, Robert N.C. Nix. As we moved to get it historidally registered in 2006, its golden jubilee, we were informed that Louis Kahn had designed the housing.

I gave this short autobiography to set the context for my regard for Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus idealism. A working class Detroiter that the GI Bill and automobile factory work eased the rise to a Ph.D, I understood in my bones the German idealist conviction that art and technology should be fused to give the poor access to good design.

I still admire his vision, which I have made mine, even though I have come to believe that he was a mediocre architectural designer (his silent partner, Adolf Meyer, controlled the pencil), and ineffective as an educational pioneer, and almost a total failure to get mass production going in his curriculum. His strong suit was making his vision of blue collar access to good design a permanent part of our Western heritage. To put this achievement in focus, we need to begin in the nineteenth century with the careers of Christopher Dresser and Herman Muthesius.