I am leaving for California in ten days to do two very long-awaited research trips. I will begin the trip in San Francisco, including the suburb of Mill Valley, to visit with Cecelia Kettunen’s niece. This has been a trip I’ve been looking forward to for almost two years and am hoping that spending time with someone who was close to Cecelia will fill in some gaps for me.
Then onto Los Angeles for research at the Getty on the architect John Lautner. Lautner was originally from Marquette but spent much of his life in Los Angeles building amazing residences. The Hammer Museum at UCLA organized a traveling exhibition about Lautner that opened last year. I had been pushing the idea around in my head to do an exhibition about Lautner in Marquette (thanks to the not so gentle nudging of a friend) when I heard about the Hammer exhibition – unfortunately the three slots on the tour filled up quickly and we couldn’t book it. I am assured by Lautner’s family that there is plenty in the archive at the Getty to put together an exhibition even with a bulk of it out on loan already. I have never been to California, so that alone is exciting. But it’s also going to be productive, which is even more satisfying.
Hence I have begun to dig around in the Olson Library at NMU to see what we have here. Lautner’s father (John E. Lautner) was a professor at NMU (then Northern State Normal School) in the early/mid 1950s, teaching German, French, and Social Work among other things. The library had two papers written by the senior Lautner, one from 1905 titled “American Materialism” and the other, “Our Educational Ideals as Affected by World Power” from 1909. Both were cut out of journals and bound into very sweet, small hard cover books:
They were barely visible in the stacks, so tiny and delicate among the hefty books surrounding them. Of course I had to check them out. “American Materialism” is surprisingly relevant in our contemporary world:
“The United States has been, and still is to a large extent, the most self-satisfied nation among the progressive countries of the world. We have only too often felt that ours is the most perfect nation of them all…This spirit of American complacency comes to its fullest expression, perhaps, in our Fourth of July orations. Instead of allowing the far-seeing eye of the eagle, our national emblem, to penetrate to the mist-enshrouded rocks which are just a little ahead in the unknown and untried sea, on which our ship of state is sailing, we, in the language of the stump orator, send him swooping over our country from the perennial verdure of Florida to the frost-clad hills of Maine, and from the Golden Gate Bridge to the throbbing heart of the Atlantic, and in all his course not a single shriek of alarm does he utter at approaching dangers, but is always and eternally singing the praises of our glorious achievements.
I am aware as well as anyone that a pride in one’s country is perhaps the first essential to national greatness, but what I am criticizing is the pride which is blind to all the faults and dangers of our country. It is this blind admiration for our country which I believe is still only too often taught in our schools, that induced me to say a few words on the subject of American materialism.”
Wow, that’s quite a beautiful description, even if a bit stinging. He goes onto argue that Americans are too concerned with practical materialisms, “which manifests intself in the supreme importance we assign to things physical as compared with things aesthetic and spiritual”.
His writing about the blind ethnocentric leanings Americans tend to have, reminded me about the current health care debate. It seems many critics of changing health care think we have “perfect health care” or the “best health care system in the world”. Blindness to the huge, I mean incredibly huge problems with the health care system scares me. People who refuse to see the problems really scare me.
Not to turn this into a rant about health care, but Mr. Lautner, I may go out on a limb and say you were quite prolific when writing this over a hundred years ago.
