Is Tom Wolfe a Race Realist? Part 2 of 3
Go to Part 1.
From Bauhaus to Our House, a critique of modern architecture, can be considered a companion volume to Painted Word. Wolfe charges modern architecture with causing “sensory deprivation” due to “the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all.”[1] Beyond aesthetic criticism, Bauhaus again makes explicit the link between modernism in the arts and left-wing politics. And once again a turning point in the U.S. was the Second World War. After the war the American elites were “willing to accept that glass of ice water in the face, that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one’s bourgeois soul, known as modern architecture.”[2]
The Bauhaus in the title refers to the Bauhaus School founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany by Walter Gropius. This school, according to Wolfe, was the genesis of modern architecture. Ludwig Mies (van der Rohe, “less is more”) taught at Bauhaus. With the ascension of National Socialism, both Gropius and Mies left Germany for the U.S.
Is there a racial angle to Bauhaus? Author and racial theorist Wilmot Robertson used to say, “There’s a racial angle to every story in twentieth-century America.”
The heirs of the Bauhaus were very concerned with post-war worker housing in America. There was a housing shortage after the war so it was a legitimate issue, but the Left completely misread their clientele. Wolfe points out that public housing became known as “the projects,” and workers avoided them as if they “had a smell. The workers — if by workers we mean people who have jobs — headed out instead to the suburbs.”[3]A dramatic example of this phenomenon was seen in St. Louis where post-war working and middle-class Whites left the city as “a vast worker housing project called Pruitt-Igoe” was being built. There is no explicit mention of race (perhaps none was needed), but Wolfe notes that Pruitt-Igoe “filled up mainly with recent migrants from the rural South … where the population density was fifteen to twenty folks per square mile; [and] one rarely got more than ten feet off the ground except by climbing a tree.”[4] It took just seventeen years for the tenants to destroy P-I. The city demolished the dilapidated buildings in July, 1972. Wolfe calls Pruitt-Igoe and other similar projects “American monuments to 1920s Middle European worker housing.”[5] It turns out that people are not interchangeable cogs after all. Read more