Mechanical industry owes its great development and progress to the work of the woodman and the miner: the first type of worker takes the bent sapling and develops the lathe or “bodger” which is still to be found in the remote parts of the Chiltern Hills in England, while from the mine itself not merely comes the steam engine, first used for pumping out water, but likewise the railway. The perpetual debris amid which the miner lives forms a capital contrast with the ordered culture, the careful weeding and cutting, of field and orchard: almost any sort of habitation is an advance upon the squalor of the pithead; and it is not a mere chance that the era devoted to mining and all its accessory manufactures was throughout the western world the dingiest and dirtiest that has yet befouled the earth. Choked by his own debris, or stirred by the exhaustion of minerals, the miner’s community runs down—and he departs.
The name pioneer has a romantic color; but in America the land pioneer mined the forests and the soil, and the industry pioneer almost as ruthlessly mined the human resources, and when the pay-dirt got sallow and thin, they both moved on. Longfellow’s allusion to the “bivouac of life” unconsciously points to the prevailing temper; for even those who remained in the older American centers were affected by the pioneer’s malaise and unsettlement; and they behaved as if at any moment they might be called to the colors and sent westward.
Beside the vivid promises of Mechanical Progress and Manifest Destiny the realities of an ordered society thinned into a pale vapor. In many little communities Mechanical Societies were formed for the propagation of the utilitarian faith: industrialism with its ascetic ritual of unsparing work, its practice of thrift, its renunciation of the arts, gathered to itself the religious zeal of Protestantism. The erection of factories, the digging of canals, the location of furnaces, the building of roads, the devising of inventions, not merely exhausted a great part of the available capital; even more, it occupied the energy and imagination of the more vigorous spirits. Two generations before, Thomas Jefferson could lay out and develop the estate of Monticello; now, with many of Jefferson’s capacities, Poe could only dream about the fantastic Domain of Arnheim. The society around Poe had no more use for an architectural imagination than the Puritans had for decorative images; the smoke of the factory-chimney was incense, the scars on the landscape were as the lacerations of a saint, and the mere multiplication of gaunt sheds and barracks was a sign of progress, and therefore an earnest of perfection.
Did ever so many elements of disintegration come together at one time and place before? The absence of tradition and example raised enough difficulties in Birmingham and Manchester and Lyons and Essen; but in America it was accentuated by the restless march of those pioneers who, in the words of a contemporary economist, “leave laws, education and the arts, all the essential elements of civilization, behind them.” What place could architecture fill in these squatter communities? It could diminish the hardships of living; it could grease the channels of gain; and it could demolish or “improve” so much of the old as it could not understand, as Bulfinch’s Court House in Newburyport was improved, and as many a fine city residence was swept away under the tide of traffic.
These were the days when the log cabin flourished; but it did not remain long enough in place to become the well-wrought and decorative piece of rustic architecture that the better sort of peasant hut, done with the same materials, became in Russia. A genuine architectural development might have led from a crude log cabin to a finished one, from a bare cabin to an enriched and garnished one, and so, perhaps, in the course of a century or so, to a fine country architecture and a great native art of wood carving comparable to that of the Russian sculptors today. In America, however, the pioneer jumped baldly from log cabin to White House, or its genteel and scroll-sawed equivalent; and the arts inherent in good building never had a chance to develop. With the animus of the miner in back of everything the pioneer attempted, the pioneer’s architecture was all false-work and scantling.
III
The first contribution to the pioneer’s comfort was Franklin’s ingenious stove (1745). After that came a number of material appliances. Central heating gave the American house a Roman standard of comfort, the astral-oil lamp captivated Edgar Poe; and cooking stoves, gas-lighting, permanent bathtubs, and water-closets made their way into the better sort of house in the Eastern cities before the middle of the nineteenth century. In the development of the city itself, the gridiron plan was added to the list of laborsaving devices. Although the gridiron plan had the same relation to natural conditions and fundamental social needs as a paper constitution has to the living customs of a people, the simplicity of the gridiron plan won the heart of the pioneer. Its rectangular blocks formed parcels of land which he could sell by the front foot and gamble with as easily as if he were playing cards, and deeds of transfer could be drawn up hastily with the same formula for each plot; moreover, the least competent surveyor, without thought or knowledge, could project the growth of New Eden’s streets and avenues into an interminable future. In nineteenth-century city planning the engineer was the willing servant of the land monopolist; and he provided a frame for the architect—a frame in which we still struggle today—where site-value counted for
