Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes

The Correspondence

Frank G. Novak Jr.

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134813780
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

I am a disciple of Patrick Geddes, and I am an abject admirer of everything he has said and done. The tantalising nearness of everything we most want; were it not for some fatal, stubborn grain in both of us, Geddes and I, linked together, intellectual and emotional, might still conquer the world. For lack of this, he will be imperfectly articulate and I, perhaps, will have nothing to say. These two comments by Lewis Mumford, written at either end of his largely epistolary relationship with Patrick Geddes, frame an astonishing correspondence between two of our century's greatest thinkers on Western civilisation. Mumford was the versatile New York cultural critic, famous for his writings on architecture, the city and technology. His master, Geddes, was the Scots biologist, sociologist and planner, the professor of things in general. The letters reveal much about the intellectual culture of the first half of the Twentieth Century as they chart an extraordinary Anglo-American relationship between very different men; this friendship, initially of master and disciple, even father/son, was based on a shared intellectual quest, and inspired the work of both. All that exists of those letters, and much previously unpublished material besides, has been meticulously collected and edited by Frank G. Novak Jnr..

Lewis Mumford AND Patrick Geddes

THE CORRESPONDENCE

1915–1919

100 West 94 Street
New York City

15 November 1915

THE SECRETARY OUTLOOK TOWER EDINBURGH SCOTLAND

[Ts NLS]

Dear Sir,

Sometime during the next two years, circumstances and the War permitting, I purpose to follow my studies in Europe. To Edinburgh I have been attracted by the sociological work of Professor Geddes. May I now ask you, therefore, for information – by catalog, bulletin, or otherwise – concerning the courses and conditions of study, and so forth. Any expenses attached to this I shall be happy to pay.

With anticipatory thanks I am, Yours faithfully,

Lewis Mumford

Outlook Tower,
University Hall
Edinburgh

13 December 1915

[Ms UP]

Dear Sir,

I enclose some pamphlets, etc., on the work of the above – they will give you some idea of what goes on there. There are no advanced classes, etc., but a good many people work there on lines suggested by Professor Geddes. There are no fees except membership subscription, in the ordinary way; though, occasionally special courses are arranged. People get the best results for themselves by settling down to work out some problem in which they are interested, and through that they get into touch with the general scheme of the Tower.

Our working membership has been hard-hit by the war – but we are carrying on so far as possible. By the time you mention for your visit things should be moving more satisfactorily again.

You will note a list of other pamphlets – also larger books – on back page of syllabus.

I shall be glad to hear further from you when you have looked over the enclosed.

Yours faithfully

EC. Mears¹

100 West 94 Street
New York City

6 January 1916

THE SECRETARY OUTLOOK TOWER EDINBURGH SCOTLAND

[Ts NLS]

Dear Sir,

Let me thank you, at this rather late date for the Outlook Tower Report sent me last October. In the hope that the allied offensive in the fall would prove efficacious I had put off this little duty, thinking that it would be possible for me to take up my studies at Edinburgh in a not too distant future and to be on hand to witness the huge transformations which will follow the war’s cessation. This amiable hope is now indefinitely put off: so the present letter must mend the breach in courtesy. While reading manuscripts for Mitchell Kennerley I had the good fortune to come upon Professor Geddes’s amplification of Wardom and Peacedom, and with regret I learnt it was waiting Mr. Branford’s request for return.¹ The necessity for importing Professor Geddes’s books seriously hinders the accretion of a body of readers proportionate in size to his own genius, capacity and sociological initiative: and for that reason it is doubly deplorable that neither Cities in Evolution nor Wardom and Peacedom have appeared in an American edition. At present the surveys of the Sage Foundation, the Cleveland Foundation, and others, while thorough in method and exhaustive in immediate presentation, have the effect of being simply clinical studies of palpable ills; and while every community will be found ailing in some function and thus in need of examination and diagnosis by means of the social survey, the necessity for a continual, fundamental survey, regionally devised, has not yet been established and acknowledged and acted upon by American workers in the field: and their surveys have thus a tendency to one-sided emphasis on administrative changes, technical innovations and the like. Here Professor Geddes’s plea for regional surveys, with a bio-geographic background and geotechnic application is especially called for; and that in his own words, rather than at second hand through his collaborators and students. If I can be of any use in broaching the matter of publication to New York publishers please command me: such service would be small repayment for the vast debt I owe the founder of the Tower. With apologies for this presumptuously long letter and renewed thanks, I am,

Yours faithfully,

Lewis C. Mumford

100 West 94 Street
New York City

9 January 1916

MR. F.C. MEARS OUTLOOK TOWER EDINBURGH SCOTLAND

[Ts NLS]

Dear Sir,

I thank you for your letter of December thirteenth, which accompanied the pamphlets you then sent me. My interest in the work of the Outlook Tower has been further deepened; and I am determined, if possible, to pursue my studies there next fall.

Enclosed is a money order for fourteen shillings to cover the cost of the pamphlets received (26d. with postage); and Professor Geddes’ Evolution of Cities which, since I know of no American edition, I must ask you to send me at your convenience. Out of the balance of cash, please add as many of the following as may be covered by it:

A Great Geographer; City Surveys for Town-planning; Two Steps in Civics; Classification of Statistics; Principles of Economics; Books of the Masques of Learning.¹

With sympathy for you in the difficult situation created by the present holocaust, and with hopes that its speedy resolution will release new energies for the task of construction, I am,

Yours faithfully,

Lewis C. Mumford

Outlook Tower
University Hall
Edinburgh

3 February 1916

[Ms UP]

Dear Sir,

The book and pamphlets are being sent you by this post. I enclose one more, which the caretaker says was omitted.

It is cheering to find that many citizens, even some who are much occupied with war problems, are keeping various civic organizations and projects alive and active.

We are quite within the extended Zeppelin zone here and may have a visit any time.¹

Yours faithfully,

F.C. Mears

100 West 94 Street
New York City

25 February 1916

F.C. MEARS, ESQ. OUTLOOK TOWER EDINBURGH SCOTLAND

[Ts NLS]

My dear Mr. Mears,

In a press of study and work I have neglected to acknowledge the receipt of the books sent me from the Outlook Tower on February third. They arrived last week in good condition; and I thank you for attending to them. There must be a touch of ghastly frivolity about sending books to America while one is expecting bombs from Germany. From the insulated United States the war seems like a morbid dream; I daresay that in the island which is no longer ‘tight’ it is a gripping nightmare. Let’s hope that the present German offensive will flatly collapse and leave open the way to an heroic peace.

With thanks again, I am, Yours faithfully,

Lewis Mumford

[8 January 1917]¹

[Ts copy UP]

My dear Professor Geddes,

Now and again during the past year I have corresponded with the secretary of the Outlook Tower, but the thoughts which I am trying to put together in the present letter are in large measure of personal application, and I have directed them to you in the hopes that you will pardon the inevitable officiousness of an uninvited communication from an altogether unknown friend.

How well able you are to keep in touch with current developments in America, with slow and badly disrupted mail service, and (I suppose) endless local anxieties and difficulties, it is hard to guess, but I assume that the stream of current events reaches Edinburgh with most of its burden deposited as it empties on the American side, into the Atlantic, and that at least some of the following news will really be new to you. Communicating about civics while the present war is raging gives the sensation of trying to converse at night during a thunderstorm – perpetual rumbles make connected discourse impossible whilst occasional flashes of lightning only throw the speakers into a more impenetrable gloom when they have vanished: and up to April foreign correspondence had this further disability, that those whom we knew in Europe were standing in the open battered by wind and rain, and we in America were talking leisurely in the security of snug houses, and thus there was a further gap that made understanding doubly difficult. Now that breach is over, however, and one writes now with a sympathy that the most willing imagination could not induce hitherto.

Prime among the achievements of Regional Civics is the establishment of a system of university extension throughout the Connecticut Valley. A department of University Extensions was created by the Massachusetts bureau of education in 1915: and the work now includes Class Instruction, Correspondence study Groups and Co-operative extension lectures throughout the Valley. (It is notable, by the bye, that in the report the valley region is taken as the unit of control.) I quote from the Bulletin issued September 1916:

“… Coming now to Manhattan various new and significant initiatives may be noted. In city planning itself, a series of conferences between the municipal engineers and civic officers throughout the conurbation, held under the auspices of the Civic Club is perhaps most noteworthy for its promise, just as the Zoning and Districting act, for all its timidities, is most important for its achievement. In encouraging a popular appreciation of Civics the New York Public Library, thru the activity of the chief of its Public Documents Department, Miss Adelaide Hasse, has taken a lead.”²

Three exhibitions are now being held: one consists of early prints and maps of the chief seaboard cities: another of the development of the present water supply system: and a third on the teaching of civics and citizenship. At a glance one sees that these exhibitions are complementary to each other, and the thought at once occurs; why may they not form the nucleus of a permanent synoptic survey of the city? There is good reason for hoping, I believe, that such a survey may be the outcome. In the exhibit on the methods of civics teaching (with its new school syllabuses, its numerous local maps, its magnificent engravings, its suggestive volumes of poetry) your own papers have a prominent place: and a card placed on the open pages of the Sociological Papers advises teachers especially to consult them. Finding that Miss Hasse was also one of your disciples I pressed upon her the wisdom of taking advantage of the present moment for utilizing the three separate exhibits as the basis for a better co-ordinated and more completely rounded out survey – treating one aspect at a time until sufficient material had been gathered to present a unified “synopsis” of the city in its manifold aspects. This suggestion she warmly seconded at the time, and is at present pondering.

Civic workers have been keen enough to turn the present vague and more or less blindly gregarious agitation for Americanization into an effective demand for citizenship, and this not in merely the sense of membership in the National State, but more realistically, as active citizenship in the community. As an indication of this re-orientation of the static civics of bureaucratic dispensation, comes one of the latest books on Elementary Civics, that of McCarthy, Swan and McMullin, with almost one-half of the vividly written little volume dealing with the intimate affair of the community.³ Dr. McCarthy, as you probably know, is the leader of the co-operative movement in Wisconsin, and he lays his stress on co-operation and co-ordination of local professional groups rather than upon the relations between a discrete individual and an all-embracing state. Both individualism and staticism (as it might well be called) are doomed in political theory: and the younger political scientists, like Harold Laski, are going back, thru Maitland and Gierke, to a Theory of Corporations whose new developments may have far-reaching civic implications.⁴ The idea that cities exist at the will of the state, and that formal boundaries laid down by the state are more important than functional lines created by regional developments of transportation, light, poetry, education, and so forth, is no longer ascendant, even if it be still dominant; and we are recovering (on a modern spiral as you would say) some of the essential ideas which were latent in the community life of the Medieval cities, and yet were never quite lucidly or definitively formulated by the medieval scholars. At present, however, this theory of corporate autonomy is confined to professional groups, and it is my own hope to work over the fields you have plowed up and develop a political philosophy of cities, to complement that civic interpretation of cities on which your first thoughts will long stand as the last word.

This, of course, Fors and Mars permitting. In the meantime I remain, in unavoidable anonymity,

Your respectful and affectionate pupil,

c/o Sir J.C. Bose¹
93 Upper Circular Road
Calcutta

8 August 1917

[Ms UP]

Dear Sir,

I was pleased to have your letter of last January from Outlook Tower & should have written sooner but the constant work, migrations, & repeated bereavements from war, etc.

But i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Text
• Patrick Geddes: A Chronology
• Lewis Mumford: A Chronology
• Introduction: Master and Disciple
• THE CORRESPONDENCE
• Appendices
• Index