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 Mumford 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.
Mumford on recovering the
human heritage:
"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. NY:
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.
Some videos online:
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 4, Lewis Mumford's
Organic Worldview, brief excerpt from Bereft of Reason.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Eugene Halton, Chapter 12, The Last Days of
Lewis Mumford, from The Great Brain Suck: And Other
American Epiphanies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Eugene Halton, From the Axial
Age to the Moral Revolution, New York: 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."
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Eugene Halton