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Ralph Adams Cram: The Architect as Communitarian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Robert Muccigrosso
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Extract

By and large, Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942) is remembered today as the creator of impressive Gothic churches and collegiate buildings. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine and St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in New York, the Princeton Graduate College and Chapel, and a variety of turn-of-the-century buildings at West Point—these are the most prominent, though not necessarily the best, of his works. By the 1920s, with Frank Lloyd Wright in temporary eclipse owing to a personal scandal and the European modernist movement not yet having reached American shores, Cram was quite possibly the most famous architect in the nation and was certainly the arbiter of its Gothic tastes. Yet, neither personal success nor the widespread acceptance of his preferred style of building satisfied Cram. For one thing, he recognized that Gothicism was an anomaly in America, contrasting oddly with its spirit and institutions. He was convinced, moreover, that to achieve and maintain a consistently high level of artistic expression, it was first necessary to achieve a wholesome society. Given this conviction, it is not surprising that Cram devoted himself quite as earnestly to the nation's social reconstruction as he did to its architectural construction.

Type
An American Tragedy: A 50th Anniversary
Information
Prospects , Volume 1 , October 1976 , pp. 165 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

NOTES

1. Crunden, Robert, From Self to Society, 1919–1941 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 164.Google Scholar

2. Cram, Ralph Adams, The Ministry of Art (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1914), pp. vii–viii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Cram, Ralph Adams, “The Relation of Architecture to the People,” Supplement to Art and Progress, 1 (07, 1910), 21.Google Scholar

4. Cram, Ralph Adams, Architecture in Its Relation to Civilization (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1918), p. 21.Google Scholar

5. Adams, Henry, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1933) p. 195.Google Scholar

6. Cram, Ralph Adams, The Significance of Gothic Art (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1918), p. 13.Google Scholar

7. Cram, Ralph Adams, The Great Thousand Years (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1918), pp. 30–31.Google Scholar

8. Cram, Ralph Adams, “The Craftsman and the Architect,” in The Ministry of Art, pp. 148–52, passim.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., pp. 154–63.

10. Cram, Ralph Adams, Editorial in Christian Art, 2 (10, 1907), 54.Google Scholar

11. Tallmadge, Thomas, The Story of Architecture in America, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1936), p. 258.Google Scholar

12. Crunden, , From Self to Society, p. 167.Google Scholar

13. Morris, William, On Art and Socialism (London: John Lehmann, 1947), p. 120.Google Scholar

14. Cram, Ralph Adams, Walled Towns (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1919), p. 15Google Scholar; Cram, Ralph Adams, The Sins of the Fathers (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1919), p. 41.Google Scholar

15. Cram, , The Significance of Gothic Art, p. 27.Google Scholar

16. Letter of Ralph Adams Cram to Rush C. Hawkins, November 13, 1919, in Rush C. Hawkins Papers, Brown Univ. Library.

17. Cram, Ralph Adams, Towards the Great Peace (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1922), p. 113.Google Scholar

18. Cram, , The Sins of the Fathers, p. 65.Google Scholar

19. Cram, Ralph Adams, “The Mass-Man Takes Over,” The American Mercury, 45 (10, 1938), 172.Google Scholar

20. Morton and Lucia White believe that Cram saw in Henry Adams' Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres “a blueprint of cities that Adams thought could be restored in America.…” Cram, they assert, “exaggerated the practical significance of Chartres, which was, in the final analysis, “an unrealizable vision of what civilization should be like.” Morton, and White, Lucia, The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p. 73Google Scholar. How much influence Adams' book actually had on Cram's concept of walled towns is a moot point. Cram, after all, had been a student and advocate of medievalism for some twenty years before he read Chartres.

21. Cram admitted that his other wartime works were meant to be negative in tone, whereas Walled Towns represented a possible cure for the ills he had delineated in these previous works. However, he cautioned (p. 28) that he was blueprinting no ultimate Utopia, but only an interim placebo.

22. Ibid., pp. 51–56. For an interesting example of what could constitute the life and character of a modern walled town, see Cram's description of the mythical New England town of “Beaulieu” (pp. 59–95). Cities whose population exceeded one million inhabitants he deemed criminal. Cram, , Towards the Great Peace, p. 59.Google Scholar

23. Cram, , Walled Towns, p. 97.Google Scholar

24. For a fuller treatment of American communistic societies, see Noyes, John Humphrey, History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1870)Google Scholar and Tyler, Alice Felt, Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1944), pp. 68–224.Google Scholar

25. Cram, , Walled Towns, pp. 36–40.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., pp. 41–48, 100–104, passim.

27. Lindsay, Vachel, The Golden Book of Springfield (New York: Macmillan, 1920)Google Scholar; Mumford, Lewis, The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922), p. 315.Google Scholar

28. Cram, Ralph Adams, The End of Democracy (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1937), pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

29. Diggins, John P., Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 213.Google Scholar

30. Cram, , “The Mass-Man Takes Over,” p. 176Google Scholar. For a further condemnation of fascism, see Cram, Ralph Adams, “The Forgotten Class,” Part II, The American Review, 7 (05, 1936), 179–91, passim.Google Scholar

31. The avowed purpose of Collins and his provocative but short-lived journal (1933–1937), however, was to publicize and promote the Distributist or Proprietary State movement and its two English advocates, Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. One of the journal's contributors, sympathetic to fascism, explicitly stated that Cram was antifascist though, at the same time, “one of that small body of men who are trying to think out our problems in the light of what history has shown man to be.” Stone, Geoffrey, “The End of Democracy: Ralph Adams Cram's Plea for a New Order,” The American Review, 9 (09, 1937), 376, 379.Google Scholar

32. Cram, , “The Forgotten Class, p. 190Google Scholar; Cram, , The End of Democracy, p. 299.Google Scholar

33. Cram seems to have been particularly impressed with Belloc's The Servile State, which, along with such other anticapitalist works as William Morris' The Dream of John Bull and R. H. Tawney's The Acquisitive Society, he suggested as collateral reading for his own Towards the Great Peace (p. 264). By the 1930s he had come to include Chesterton as one of the most important modern writers. See Cram's review of Agar, Herbert's Land of the Free, The American Review, 7 (05, 1936), 215.Google Scholar

34. For an analysis of the back to the land movement, see Shapiro, Edward S., “The American Distributists and the New Deal,”Google Scholar unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1968, and his article, “Decentralist Intellectuals and the New Deal,” The Journal of American History, 58 (03, 1972), 938–57.Google Scholar

35. Cram, Ralph Adams, “Recovery or Regeneration,” Part II, The Commonweal, 21 (11 9, 1934), 56.Google Scholar

36. Cram, Ralph Adams, “Post Caesarem Quid,” in Convictions and Controversies (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1935), p. 169.Google Scholar

37. Cram, Ralph Adams, “Recovery or Regeneration,” Part I, The Commonweal, 21 (11 2, 1934), 9–10.Google Scholar

38. Cram, , “Recovery or Regeneration,” Part II, 56–57.Google Scholar

39. Ibid., p. 56.

40. Ibid., pp. 57–58; Cram, , The End of Democracy, p. 64.Google Scholar

41. Shapiro, , “Decentralist Intellectuals and the New Deal,” 948–49.Google Scholar

42. Cram, Ralph Adams, “Cities of Refuge,” The Commonweal, 22 (08 16, 1935), 379–380.Google Scholar

43. Ibid., 380; Cram, , “Recovery or Regeneration,” Part II, 56.Google Scholar

44. Cram, Ralph Adams, Letter in The Commonweal, 23 (11 1, 1935) 21.Google Scholar

45. Cram, Ralph Adams, My Life in Architecture (Boston: Little Brown, 1936), p. 224.Google Scholar

46. Nisbet, Robert, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 27.Google Scholar