TLS, three pages, 8 x 10, on Wright’s red-block paper, June 3, 1941. Letter to Lewis Mumford. In full: “When, because of a difference of feeling and judgement, you can so shamelessly insult one who has trusted your sincerity, admired your ability, and praised you as a manly man, well, Lewis, I can understand your anguish and desire for revenge—but such reactions as yours are certainly not trustworthy when and wherever the welfare of this nation is at stake, as I believe it to be and as you say you believe it to be.
Be ashamed of yourself, Lewis. Some day—but take your time. I am human grass roots in the service of the culture of a beloved country. I can give you time. For the same reason that I despise eclecticism and reaction I despise your attitude toward war and Empire. There is no good Empire; there never was a just war. I despise your attitude now as I despised ‘the setting sun all Europe mistook for dawn.’ It was called the ‘Renaissance’. If going to war is now your way, you have never settled anything for yourself nor ever will for anyone else. Yours is the mind that would throw the dead cat back and forth across the backyard fence. And I don’t mean what you mean when I say ‘I love England.’ I love my England. You love yours. I hate master-empire or slave-empire. So my England is not your England and I am thankful.
You prate of culture, Lewis. Organic character is the basis of true greatness in that or in any individual or in any nation. War is the negation of all these potentialities now as ever and forever. You know that. And yet you wrote to me that you had been busy getting the United States ready to fight and having accomplished that to your satisfaction you were ready to go back and write another book. Christ! Lewis, is it possible that you are unable to see your own hypocrisy? Why do you try to hide behind what you call mine?
No honest believer in truth or beauty in his right mind could do what you say you have done. Time will discover you a deserter. A traitor on a battle-field that did you honor only to discover in you a vengeful, conceited writer. Another writer out of ideas. The Chinese say it well: ‘He who runs out of ideas first strikes the first blow.’ You standing with the frightened crowd for the time-cursed expedient! What a disappointment. And yet I could take it all from you because you are young and still be your friend if I believed you sincere in your anguish and in your desire for revenge. But you are not.
You prate of ‘downtrodden democracies’ and of ‘defending slaves’, to justify your own rage and impotence. Why not honestly examine your own heart? What you would see there is what you accuse me of… hypocrisy. Lewis, my young friend, one I liked to call up and talk to whenever I got to the great city, you, too, are yellow with this strange but ancient sickness of the soul. The malady that has thrown down civilization after civilization by meeting force with force. Is meeting force with force the only way you see now? Then I am sorry for you—you amateur essayist on culture. It is not the only way I see. I—a builder—see that there is still a chance for democracy in this world and one on this continent just because the leaders of our culture are not like Lewis Mumford, as he shows his teeth now.
Goodbye, Lewis, I shall read your ‘brief’ in the New Yorker with shame. I shall read it knowing your real opinion is worthless whatever you may write.” Wright added a few punctuation and capitalization corrections throughout the text in his own hand. In fine condition, with intersecting folds and a few unobtrusive creases. Accompanied by Mumford’s retained carbon copy of the equally intense letter to Wright that prompted this response. Published in Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence, Princeton Architectural Press, 2001.
Throughout the 1930s, as he watched the Nazi party grow, Lewis Mumford took a strong interventionist stand, writing numerous articles and two books in support of US involvement. Wright took the opposite stance, putting a serious strain on their friendship, which would finally come to a head in 1941; when Mumford received a copy of Wright’s broadside that proclaimed, ‘…Our frontier is no longer England nor, in any sense, is it European. Our frontier is our own shores,’ he could no longer overlook the difference. Infuriated, he wrote to Wright to express the anguish and deep disappointment he now felt towards the man he had admired for so long: “It is hard to lose a friend by his physical death; but it is even more painful to loose him by his spiritual death… You dishonor all the generous impulses you once ennobled. Be silent lest you bring upon yourself some greater shame.” Never one to back down, Wright replied with this equally excoriating letter, attacking not only Mumford’s political view, but his personal character and professional legitimacy as well: “You prate of ‘downtrodden democracies’ and of ‘defending slaves’, to justify your own rage and impotence… Is meeting force with force the only way you see now? Then I am sorry for you—you amateur essayist on culture.” Offered here with the corrected carbon of Mumford’s letter that sparked this brutal reply, this long goodbye holds the intensity that the world has come to expect from the writings of Frank Lloyd Wright. Beginning a ten-year gap in their exchange, and leaving their friendship forever scarred, this is a remarkable and important letter from the well-known correspondence between the architect and his one-time friend and critic. Pre-certified John Reznikoff/PSA/DNA and RR Auction COA.
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