Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect's Four Quests- Medieval, Modernists, American, Ecumenical

9. The American Quest

9 THE AMERICAN QUEST Some art has a very open meaning, and can be written about in terms of this meaning; but the chances are that if the meaning is the most interesting thing about it, it does not stand alone ... It leans on what it means. An implied meaning is richer. —Fairfield Porter 43- The number of American architects who have appeared on the cover of lime magazine is very few. That Ralph Adams Cram was one of them documents how deep was his penetration into the culture of his era as a designer, leader, social theorist, and, indeed, journalist: sometime art critic of the Boston Evening Transcript, editor of the influential avant-garde Knight Errant, Cram was also co-founder of the still extant Roman Catholic journal Commonweal. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT did not call Ralph Adams Cram "a toweringfigure " in America's cultural life, nor the Baltimore Sun insist that Cram's "genius was beyond the reach of ordinary powers of analysis," nor, certainly, did Time magazine put him on the front cover primarily because of his architecture. The United States was not then any more than it is now that interested in architecture or in art or intellect generally. The reason Cram received such high marks was explained by the Boston Globe: "after every truthful, qualifying clause has been entered, the fact remains that no architect in America has ever succeeded in reaching the ear of the public," the Globe opined,1 to the extent that Cram did, and on the two American subjects, then as now, religion and politics. Religion—or, rather, Cram as a religious leader, we will take up in the next chapter , which details Cram's ecumenical quest. Politics—Cram as social and political theorist—is upon us now in what I have called here his American quest. It could as easily be called either his conservative or his liberal quest, and has been called both, as working titles, at various stages of research for this study. Neither conservative nor liberal quite does it, however: the meanings of both words have too much changed during the last two centuries of Anglo-American history. Moreover, Cram was not only an American but also a trans-Atlantic figure, and the most conservative American is decidedly liberal from the British perspective, a truism when you come to think of it from the American point of view, too. Cram's sociopolitical quest is, above all and quite fundamentally, American. "WHY WE Do NOT BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS" A good place to begin to fix this architect in his very much wider than architectural universe is in one of his notably ecclesiastical landmarks, familiar to us by now: the Synod House of the Episcopal Diocese of New York at the Cathedral of St.John the Divine in New York City. There is to be found a most magnificent recessed Gothic porch with fifty or more figures in receding arches, figures, if studied closely because Cram was a notable iconographer, that tell more than religious tales by Cram. There are, of course, several of the original Christian apostles. But there is also a modern one, Boston's John Eliot, the Apostle to the American Indian, as he has been called, because he translated the Bible so it could be read by Native Americans . And there are also many more secular than religious figures; the themes of the various receding arches being the arts and sciences and crafts and industries. And 311 T H E A M E R I C A N Q U E S T among all these figures two particularly stand out for me, signifying as I believe they do two dominant and coequal strains in the thought of what might be called the secular Ralph Adams Cram. The first of the two is George Washington. Cram admired Lincoln, too. But he all but worshipped, similarlyto Charles I, the first president. Of that Founding Father , Cram wrote, "there was no question as to his choice as the First Executive" and "little question that, had Washington been willing, he might have ascended the throne as King George I."2 That would by no means have distressed Cram, who so revered Washington that he did not hesitate to place him—as he did in the Synod House porch—in the company of Constantine and Charlemagne, Alfred the Great and St. Louis. Always a Federalist, if not...