Doing History And Frank Lloyd Wright is the introduction by Eileen Manning Michels to a session of papers about Wright that she chaired at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1980.

After the call for papers was published, I heard from many people who wanted to participate in this evening's session, far too many to include in just one program. This outpouring along with the books of the past several years, the reviews each has generated and the articles that continue to appear, is evidence that widespread interest in Wright continues unabated. Yet, as Kathryn Smith noted in a review of the recent Robert Sweeney bibliography "...the state of knowledge about this prodigious genius is mostly in its infancy..it is remarkable how little we know about Wright the architect and the man, after all that has been published about him."

Actually, there seem to be two schools of thought about how much really is needed to be known about Wright. On the one hand are numerous architectural historians--I count myself among them--who are eager to know everything about his life and his architecture and to place him in historical context. What were the significant events in his life? When did they happen? What were his relationships with other contemporaneous professional people and with his clients? Seemingly everything is of interest to us. However, when we seek answers to these questions we sometimes find ourselves unwittingly at odds with former apprentices who had direct contact with Wright at Taliesin or with people who still function professionally in his reflected light and, not insignificantly, control access to a wealth of primary archival material. Some of the people who knew Wright apparently dismiss the work we historians do as pointless probing or busywork and sometimes greet the published results of our work with responses, also published, that range from condescension to derision. Seemingly, according to them, the acknowledgment of the hypostasis of Wright's genius is the only thing that ought to matter to anyone, and no further explanations are necessary.

For example, this is a direct quote from a 1967 letter to the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians:

I have tended to regard the great concern of the architectural historians with regard to the two-year mislocation of Frank Lloyd Wright's birthdate [sic] with some amusement. I don't think it is a very important issue." [Curtis Besinger]

Nearly a full page of why it is unimportant then follows.

Or this from a 1979 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Newsletter:

Except in rare instances, intellectuals seem unable to comprehend the creative act. 'God save us all from architectural historians,' Mr. Wright used to say and he equated them with the three blind men determining the configuration of an elephant...this is not to imply that intellectuals do not appreciate music, architecture, and the other arts, because many of them do, but an understanding of the creative act eludes them. In their research they tend to quote other 'authorities' and rummage around among  'influences'. unwilling to admit that the source, the fountainhead, lies deep within the creative person, nowhere else through of course he is influenced by all of life around him. [John Howe]

My reaction to these kinds of statements is that they manifest not only a lack of regard for history but also a profound misunderstanding of the very nature of history and the historical process. With the hope that what follows might somehow help alleviate some of the misunderstanding but emphasizing that I speak only for myself, I would like to review in primer fashion several basic matters concerning the profession of history that I think are particularly relevant to this problem, and i propose to do so in the context of Wright historiography. In order to avoid further polarization, I also would like to enlist the help of two third parties.

The first matter concerns definitions, and the first third party is my now-venerable collegiate dictionary that defines history as being: "A continuous, systematic written narrative, in order of time, of past events relating to a particular people, country, period, person, etc." In this generic definition, history is not therefore a seeking of metaphysical truth, nor is it premised on rhetorical dialectical discourse.

The second third party is a distinguished English Renaissance historian and Charles J. D. Stille Professor History at Yale, J. H. Hexter. In his short but wonderfully reflective book, Doing History, Hexter ruminates about the craft of writing history. He begins by differentiating professional history from amateur history and observes that the layman's or amateur's essentially existentialist account of face-to-face confrontation with people and events is fundamentally different from the professional historian's usually indirect confrontation with the past. It strikes me that the present state of affairs vis a vis Wright historiography, which I have just alluded to, perfectly exemplifies this difference. In Hexter's terms then, we historians are not necessarily misguided, silly or wrong in seeking to learn as much as possible about Wright even though few of us actually knew him. We merely are trying to do professional history.

Professional history is written by professional historians who are, again in Hexter's terms, people who have been subjected to rigorous training in research and writing. I believe that the easiest way to be trained rigorously is merely to follow the academic path leading to a doctorate, in this case in architectural history. And not surprisingly, much if not most of the professional history concerning Wright has been written by people who teach architectural history. Professors [Henry-Russell] Hitchcock, [Grant] Manson and [Frederick] Gutheim immediately come to mind, and many others are well-known to you

But it is not necessarily just a matter of academic certification in architectural history. Hexter believes that rigorous self-imposed training and methodological discipline count too. Surely, for example, the recent publications of Donald Hoffman and William Storrer reveal the requisite rigor that professional architectural history demands although neither of them is a professor of architectural history. 

Anything there is to know about a given subject potentially is of significance to people who fit the definition of professional historians who, as a group, are committed to writing about the past as accurately and understandingly as possible. In the case of Wright, our interest most certainly includes the exact chronology of his life and work. When, for instance, the California Thomas Hines published in the December 1967 JSAH a piece of revisionist history concerning Wright's early life, including a verified birth date as just one bit of information within an astonishing contextual whole, it was far from unimportant to professional architectural historians. Quite the contrary, it both corrected an important part of the record and heralded a systematic questioning, by architectural historians, of many statements in Wright's autobiography. This has been of course important because even though the poetic nature of the autobiography had long been recognized, through the years a number of the questionable autobiographical statements that indeed turned out to be less than accurate nevertheless had made their way as facts into a lot of written history. The result is that there now is an enlarged and more reliable pool of information from which we all can draw.

I say "we" because professional history is a collaborative thing. Historians are interested in everything, yet no one person possibly can know or understand everything about any given subject. As Hexter observes, the best that any professional historian can do in any publication is to say  this is the way it seems to me on the basis of what I have read--and an architectural historian would no doubt add and what I have looked at. The trail of footnotes, citations and bibliography generally included in professional history is not just pro forma academic mumbo jumbo but rather is, to the initiates, to the rigorously trained historian's equally rigorously trained peers that is, a decipherable shorthand encoding of a particular reasoning process. The amateur makes little use of these devices, or occasionally uses them clumsily or inappropriately to give the appearance of scholarship.

However, no matter how impeccably reasoned, little professional history is good for all time. As Hexter points out, almost inevitably it is going to be subjected to instantaneous and virtually continuous revision and refinement through reviews, discussion, rethinking and the discovery of new facts. Having provided evidence for their conclusions, professional historians need not be embarrassed or annoyed when someone else later amplifies, corrects, or even challenges them -- provided  of course that all of that is done with grace and generosity.

Consider, for example, just one particular thirty-seven-year sequence of revisionism. In 1942,  before the identity of the Shingle Style had been formulated by Vincent Scully, Henry-Russell Hitchcock had this to say about Wright's own Oak Park house of 1889 in In the Nature of Materials.

...the...simplicity, clarity and symmetry of the design accord well, for example, with that of McKim,. Meade and White's W. G. Low house in Bristol, Rhode Island of 1887...Wright at this point shared in the current development of the Suburban Richardsonian.

Sixteen years later, which was three years after Scully's book on the Shingle Style had been published, Hitchcock wrote this generous statement in the foreword to Grant Manson's book:

I believe the labors of the historians in the last few years, even if they can never elucidate the ultimate springs of Wright's creativity and must accept therefore many of his own metaphorical explanations, have thrown considerable light on the American scene in the late [eighteen] eighties and early nineties when his style was being formed--especially in its most significant aspect, its planning--out of what Vincent Scully has called the Shingle Style of the early 1880s.

And I believe that by then most of us had accepted the specific comparison between the Oak Park house and Bruce Price's Kent house in Tuxedo Park, New York  But now we have to make room for a new perception. Last year, Allen Brooks further refined the relationship by pointing out in a JSAH  Newsletter  article that there are significant fundamental differences in the typical space and plan of Wright's early house compared to the typical spaces and plans of  Shingle Style houses. 

We look, we read, we think, and then we summon the courage to appear in print with a new perception, which someone else ultimately will question. Ideally the purpose of it all is not to demonstrate intellectual cleverness, but rather to make our collaborative narrative as accurate as possible. Quite aside from that, it also is, in my experience, thoroughly enjoyable work. I suspect that most architectural historians who have sought out Wright's buildings and who have reflected about his life are as awed by his genius as many of the Taliesin apprentices were--and still are. For example Adolf Placzek's admiration in this synoptic statement from his forward to Sweeney's recent bibliography is clear:

Between these two entries [the first and the last item in the bibliography that is] lies the fabulous story of Wright's early emergence, incredible creativity, tenacity, and articulateness, his success, setbacks, fights, his temporary eclipse and eventual triumph.

But as Hexter notes, competence in history writing is not merely a function of dedication or devotion to a particular subject. On occasion most of us who have become deeply involved intellectually in a particular subject probably have found ourselves also emotionally involved to the point that we are in danger of losing objectivity. But professional methodology must prevail, even if a pet hypothesis has to fall. When our reasoned conclusions are not compatible with the prevailing perception of our subject, or with our hypothesis, then Hexter would say that we have an obligation to redefine one or both as necessary. Not to do so is to knowingly distort the record, and to distort the record--and this is a direct quote--"is precisely to communicate ignorance rather than knowledge, misunderstanding rather than understanding, falsehood rather than truth."

This brings me back to where I started. Many of us have tried to write professional history concerning Frank Lloyd Wright, and in doing so have reached conclusions that revise or refine what Edgar Tafel, in a book that  basically would fall within our definition of amateur history, has recently affectionately referred to as the official record that Wright more or less freely constructed for himself during the last decades of his life. Some of us therefore have found ourselves publicly in contention with people who seemingly will allow  no deviation whatsoever from this official record, however freely constructed, nor will they permit open scholarly access to the documentation that they hold. As a result, I think it fair to say that many professional historians by now have come to the conclusion that the closer one is to those who have a fixed perception of Wright, indeed even an institutionalized one, the less professional objectivity there will be. To cite just one example, in his review of the exhibition catalogue, The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, which was produced with the co-operation of the Frank Lloyd Wright Memorial Association, David Roessler noted what were to him distorted or erroneous conclusions forced, he speculated, by the necessity of gaining co-operation with what he calls the Wright establishment, and he concluded by saying: "unfortunately a better understanding is not likely to come from within a Wright establishment more keen to canonize than to explore and explain."

Many of Roessler's criticisms concerned conclusions put forth in the catalogue about the working relationship between Wright and other professional people, and this leads me to introduce the final matter, namely, historical context. Frank Lloyd Wright existed in a time and place when and where there also were other architects and other architecture. That he usually was undeniably far more creative than the others is not the only point, for in addition to being everything that Hexter and my dictionary say that history is, I also think it is a richly and unevenly dimensioned continuum shaped by multitudes of people rather than just being a straight-line development that proceeds from one discrete, momentarily acknowledged important event or person to the chronological next like so many beads on a string. Sometimes when we historians try to understand Wright's position in broad context along with his professional working relationships with other artists or architects or other architecture, our efforts seemingly have been viewed as attempted denigration of his genius. It should be apparent by now that simply is not the case. I am convinced that only when and if we get all of the facts worked out will any of us be able to perceive the full spectrum of his genius. 

I also think that one could argue a case that Wright himself would not categorically dismiss everything that we historians are trying to do. For example, I still recall the pleasure of Professor Dimitri Tselos in 1953 when he received a letter, written on stationery with the familiar red-square logo, in response to his article, then newly published, called "Exotic Influences in the Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright." in which he posited certain connections between some of Wright's buildings and Pre-Columbian architecture. The letter. now in the Burnham library of the Art institute of Chicago, began in this way: "Had I not loved and comprehended Pre-Columbian architecture as the primitive basis of world-architecture, I could not now build as I build with understanding of all architecture." The "God save us all from architectural historians" remark then should probably not be held up by one of the surviving Taliesin group as Wrightian doctrine carved in stone. I also recall Professor Tselos's pleasure when, several weeks later [after receiving the letter], he, David Gebhard and I, as Eugene Masselink, Wright's secretary, was escorting us on a prearranged private tour of Taliesin in Wisconsin, suddenly found ourselves face to face with, sitting on an easel, the old oversize Lorillard publication about Mayan architecture.

Finally, I will note one part of what Wright wrote to Harriet Monroe in 1907 in a published letter unearthed by Robert Twombley: "I am hungry for the honest, genuine criticism that searches the soul of the thing and sifts its form. Praise isn't needed especially, there is enough of that, such as it is, but we all need intelligent, painstaking inquiry." That intelligent, painstaking inquiry is, it seems to me, ideally at the very heart of the professional history we do.

© Eileen Manning Michels