A Brief Biography of
Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)
by Eugene Halton
Internationally renowned for his writings on cities, architecture,
technology, literature, and modern life, Lewis Mumford was called "the
last of the great humanists" by Malcolm Cowley. His contributions to
literary criticism, architectural criticism, American studies, the history of
cities, civilization, and technology, as well as to regional planning,
environmentalism, and public life in America, mark him as one of the most
original voices of the twentieth-century.
Born in Flushing on October 19, 1895, Mumford lived much of his life in New
York, settling in Dutchess County in 1936 with his wife Sophia, in Amenia,
where he died over a half-century later, on January 26, 1990. His first book, The
Story of Utopias, was published in 1922, and his last book, his
autobiography, Sketches from Life, was published sixty years
later in 1982.
Mumford preferred to call himself a writer, not a scholar, architectural
critic, historian or philosopher. His writing ranged freely and brought him
into contact with a wide variety of people, including writers, artists, city
planners, architects, philosophers, historians, and archaeologists. Throughout
his life, Mumford sketched and painted his surroundings, visualizing his
impressions of people and places in image, as his ever-present notepad
visualized them in words.
Given the range of Mumford's scholarly work, it is all the more interesting
that he did not have a college degree, having had to leave City College of New
York after a diagnosis of tuberculosis. But if whaling was Herman Melville's
Harvard and Yale, Mannahatta, as Mumford put it, was
my university, my true alma mater. From childhood on, Mumford walked, sketched,
and observed New York City, and its effects can be felt throughout his
writings.
He was architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over thirty years,
and his 1961 book, The City in History, received the National Book
Award. In 1923 Mumford was a cofounder with Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye,
Henry Wright and others, of the Regional Planning Association of America, which
advocated limited-scale development and the region as significant for city
planning.
By 1938 he was an ardent advocate for early American entry into what
was emerging as World War Two, a war which claimed the life of his son
Geddes in 1944, and was an early critic of nuclear
weapons in 1946 and of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1965. In 1964 he was
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Lewis Mumford's work underwent a continuous series of transformations as he
broadened and deepened his scope. From his American studies books in the 1920s,
such as The Golden Day (1926) and Herman Melville (1929), which
contributed to the rediscovery of the literary transcendentalists of the 1850s
and The Brown Decades (1931) which placed the architectural achievements
of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright before the
public, through the four-volume "Renewal of Life" series published
between 1934 and 1951, which outlined the place of technics, cities, and
world-views in the development of Western Civilization, to his late studies of
the emergence of civilizations and the place of communication practices in
human development, he boldly denied the utilitarian view while evolving his own
vision of organic humanism.
Mumford's works share a common concern with the ways that modern life as a
whole, although providing possibilities for broader expression and development,
simultaneously subverts those possibilities and actually ends up tending toward
a diminution of purpose. He shows in lucid detail how the modern ethos released
a Pandora's box of mechanical marvels which eventually threatened to absorb all
human purposes into
The Myth of the Machine, the title he used for his
two-volume late work.
See, for example, Lewis Mumford's critique of the
World Trade Center from 1970, when it was just being built.
Despite what he saw as a likelihood of catastrophic dehumanization on the
horizon, he argued for the hope that the organic depths of human nature, of the
fibrous structure of history, might provide the basis for a transformation of
megatechnic civilization.
Mumford argued passionately for a restoration of
organic human purpose in the larger scheme of things, a task requiring a human
personality capable of "primacy over its biological needs and
technological pressures, and able to draw freely on the compost from many
previous cultures."
As he wrote in his 1946
book, Values for Survival:
"If we are to create balanced human beings, capable of entering
into world-wide co-operation with all other men of good will--and that is the
supreme task of our generation, and the foundation of all its other potential
achievements--we must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and to
the expression of moral and esthetic values as we now give to science, to
invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. And
values do not come ready-made: they are achieved by a resolute attempt to
square the facts of one's own experience with the historic patterns formed in
the past by those who devoted their whole lives to achieving and expressing
values. If we are to express the love in our own hearts, we must also
understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and
Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer
Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves
to yellow fever. These historic manifestations of love are not recorded in the
day's newspaper or the current radio program: they are hidden to people who possess only fashionable minds. Virtue is not
a chemical product, as Taine once described it: it is a historic product, like
language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it,
cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it
will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key.
That, I submit, is what has happened in our own lifetime."
Mumford's 1982 autobiography was followed by a biography by Donald Miller in
1989, Lewis Mumford: A Life, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989.
Mumford's
papers are stored in Philadelphia at the Van Pelt Library of The University of
Pennsylvania, and his library and watercolors and drawings are stored at the
library of Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New
Jersey.
"Certainly it is not in extensive
cosmonautic explorations of outer space, but by more intensive cultivation of
the historic inner spaces of the human mind, that we shall recover the human
heritage. In a sense, all my major books, starting with Technics and
Civilization, the first volume in The Renewal of Life series, have
been attempts to understand the repeated miscarriages of mind that have limited
the highest achievements of every historic civilization. My maturest
interpretation of the archaeological and historic evidence will be found in
three successive books: The City in History, 1960, Technics and Human
Development, 1967, and The Pentagon of Power, 1970."
In Mumford, Lewis. 1972. "Two Views of Technology and Man." Technology, Power, and
Social Change, Charles Thrall and Jerold Starr, eds. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, pp. 1-16.
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Books by Lewis Mumford (Listed Chronologically)
The Story of Utopias. New York:
Boni and Liveright, 1922.
Sticks and Stones: A
Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924.
The Golden Day: A Study
in American Experience and Culture. New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1926.
Herman Melville. New York:
The Literary Guild of America, 1929.
The Brown Decades: A
Study of the Arts in America,1865-1895. New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1931.
Technics and
Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1934.
The Culture of Cities. New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1938.
Men Must Act. New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1939
Faith for Living. New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1940.
The South in
Architecture. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1941.
The Condition of Man. New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1944.
City Development:
Studies in Disintegration and Renewal. New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1945
Values for Survival:
Essays, Addresses, and Letters on Politics and Education. New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1946.
Green Memories: The
Story of Geddes. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1947.
The Conduct of Life. New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1951.
Art and Technics. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1952
In the Name of Sanity. New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1954.
From the Ground Up. New York:
Harcourt Brace World, 1956.
The Transformations of
Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1956.
The City in History: Its
Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt Brace
and World, 1961.
The Highway and the City. New York:
Harcourt Brace and World, 1963.
The Urban Prospect. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.
The Myth of the Machine: Vol. I, Technics and Human Development. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1967; Vol. II, The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich,1970.
Interpretations and
Forecasts 1922-1972. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
Findings
and Keepings: Analects for an Autobiography. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1975.
My Works and Days: A
Personal Chronicle. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
Sketches from Life: The
Autobiography of Lewis Mumford. New York: Dial Press, 1982.
The Lewis Mumford Reader. Donald L.
Miller, ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
Videos online:
"Lewis Mumford on the City." Entire series is available on National Filmboard of Canada website:
https://www.nfb.ca/search#?queryString=mumford&index=0&language=en
Lewis Mumford from BBC documentary
Towards Tomorrow: A Utopia. 1968 copy [2:21]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gARS4F90wmw
The City (1939) w/ commentary
by Mumford. Music by Aaron Copeland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nuvcpnysjU
See also my discussions of Mumford:
Eugene
Halton, Chapter 12, The Last Days of Lewis Mumford, from The Great Brain Suck: And Other American Epiphanies, University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Eugene
Halton, From the Axial Age to the Moral
Revolution,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
The
book contains numerous discussions of Mumford's writings related to Karl Jaspers' theory of
axial age, the period centered roughly around 500-600 BCE, and to John
Stuart-Glennie's
prior original idea that Stuart-Glennie termed in 1873 "the moral revolution," 75
years before Jaspers. Chapter 5 is titled "Jaspers and Mumford."
Eugene
Halton, Chapter 4, Lewis Mumford's Organic Worldview, brief excerpt from Bereft of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
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Eugene Halton