Poor Old U.S.

The U.S., elected by circumstance to pre-eminence and unpopularity, is coming in for sharp criticism from most of its candid friends and followers. Even the British, who have for a generation pursued a policy of polite restraint, are showing signs of collapsing into their traditional rudeness.*

Britain's Architectural Review devoted its December issue to one subject: "To investigate the mess that is man-made America, to attempt to discover why it has happened, and what, if anything, is likely to be done about it...The mere pressure of events suggests that if an answer does not appear soon, the U.S. might conceivably go down to history as one of the great might-have-beens of all time."

It was like old times. Seriously questioning "the accuracy of the epithet 'civilized,' " as applied to the Western world in general and to the U.S. in particular, the Architectural Review asserted:

"Europeans rather than Americans are the ones who show themselves uneasy about the health of the States...To the thoughtful European, the trouble with the U.S. is not that it has spurned, but that it has not spurned the Old World; that far from creating a new kind of world it has merely raised to the power of 'n' the potential of the old, lending to the virtues and vices of materialism a kind of giantism in which there is nothing new except giantism, so that the new world is merely the old one drawn in caricature."

The Review sums up:

"...Never before in ten thousand years of picturesque overcrowding has Western man... created the kind of squalor we are talking about here--the hygienic, but visually scrofulous wasteland which is the universal embodiment and symbol of Progress, twentieth century style..." A few parts of the U.S. are still fairly unblighted, but the Review sees no hope. By the 21st Century, Americans will have turned their whole "superb inheritance into a combination of automobile graveyard, industrial no-man's-land and Usonian Idiot's Delight."

U.S. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright never saw the day when another American, let alone a foreigner, could outdo him--in architecture or jeremiad. In Philadelphia last week, at a show in honor of his lifework, 82-year-old Architect Wright let the U.S. have it with both barrels:

"The trend [of U.S. architecture] will continue downward until it hits bottom...We live in a country committed to individuality, but I don't believe we have enough people who have developed enough individuality to make a democracy...The American people have the architecture they deserve...I know of no country that is so far behind as the United States."

* In Kipling's day, as in Dickens', British travelers returning from the U.S. outdid one another in faughs and fies over American crudeness and barbarity.

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