Current Books

Mary Colter’s design for a “typical stone cottage” at the Grand Canyon’s Indian Gardens section

MARY COLTER: Colter never married and apparently didn’t Architect of the Southwest. form intimate attachments with men; nor did By Arnold Berke. Princeton Architectural she care for the company of women as a class. Press. 320 pp. $35 She appears to have been a singularly tough- After the West was won, somebody had to minded character whose work was her passion. imaginatively lose it. During the first decades Hopi House (1905), Colter’s first project for of the 20th century, that task fell to Mary the Harvey Company, was built of local stone and Elizabeth Jane Colter (1869–1958), the wood to look like the ancient village of Oraibi Minnesota-bred daughter of Irish immigrants. in Arizona. An ersatz trading post stocked with Working for the nation’s chief promoters of Native American arts and crafts, Hopi House western tourism, the Fred Harvey Company and symbolized the partnership between commer- the Santa Fe Railroad, Colter “restored,” for cialism and romanticism embraced by the American consumption, the indigenous archi- Harvey Company. If the paternalism of her tecture of the dispossessed, creating hotels, employers bothered her, Colter never com- train stations, shops, and restaurants modeled plained. Rather, she made sure that the local on Native American and Hispanic cultures. Indians hired to perform the traditional dances Colter even built “ancient ruins,” such as the knew their steps, and that the artisans charged Grand Canyon National Park’s Watchtower, with producing “ancient” murals and tradi- its weathered, craggy façade covertly supported tional sand paintings worked by the book. by steel girders. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, who once The art critic Robert Hughes once called designed a home without closets (his dis- Colter a pioneer of “the American theme-park traught client had too many possessions anyway, mentality.” That backhanded tribute did at Wright coolly insisted), Colter must have been least anticipate a time when Colter’s genius a nightmare to work for. At age 76, she was still for “oldening things up,” as the architect her- making her crew of masons tear up a fireplace self put it, would look pretty impressive. After repeatedly to achieve just the right degree of years spent riding through the Southwest on “casualness” in the brickwork. Still, she earned horseback, sketching pueblo ruins and Hopi vil- respect because she demanded nothing she lages, Colter knew all the uses for stone, brick, couldn’t deliver. She could lay adobe bricks, mix tile, iron, glass, and textiles. Her careful rein- plaster washes, and fix viga joints better than most terpretations became the great architectural tradesmen. legacy of America’s railroad culture. Colter’s Colter retired to Santa Fe in the 1950s. She work would not be matched during successive had amassed an exceptionally valuable collec- waves of automobile-based tourism. tion of Native American jewelry and pottery, but With this gracefully written account, Berke, her favorite possession—some drawings made an architectural historian and preservationist, by Indian prisoners after the 1876 Battle of the provides the first serious study of Colter’s con- Little Bighorn—had no monetary value. The tribution. Whether from discretion or igno- drawings had been given to the family when she rance, he says almost nothing about her personal was a child, and she had hidden them under her life. Though beautiful as a young woman, mattress, defying orders to burn them in case of

116 Wilson Quarterly smallpox contamination. Shortly before she observance. As the prime historical exemplar of died, Colter donated the drawings to the Little such an ideal order, the Agrarians unapolo- Bighorn National Monument—her way, per- getically touted the antebellum South. Not haps, of giving back to a dying culture what she’d surprisingly, and not entirely unjustly, they stolen in good faith. were accused of being economic reactionaries, —A. J. Hewat cultural and social traditionalists, and racists. In the more affluent but anxious Cold War era, the Agrarians and their followers shed the THE REBUKE OF HISTORY: agricultural emphasis and became identified The Southern Agrarians and American with a general defense of traditional Western- Conservative Thought. Christian culture against the acids of modernity By Paul V. Murphy. Univ. of North and secularism. As such, the movement was Carolina Press. 351 pp. $49.95 cloth, seduced by William F. Buckley’s largely suc- $19.95 paper cessful “fusionist” effort to create a broad Intellectuals cultivate what Freud termed church of conservatism, with latter-day the “narcissism of small differences,” so it’s no Agrarians such as Richard Weaver and M. E. surprise that the intellectual history of Bradford generally siding with the traditional- American conservatism embodies as much ist (as opposed to the libertarian) wing. By the contention as consensus. Even so, for those 1980s, Agrarianism had transformed itself once who like their history simple and linear, the story again, this time becoming a largely academic Murphy tells with such thoroughness and exercise caught up in questions about the sur- insight will come as a rebuke, as it were. A pro- vival of southern identity. fessor of history at Grand Valley State In a book with many virtues, Murphy skill- University in Michigan, he offers a dense but fully charts Agrarianism’s twists and turns. cogent account of how the radical movement Along the way, he lucidly explicates—and known as Southern Agrarianism became one of then criticizes—positions with which he clear- the main strands of American conservatism. ly disagrees. He emphasizes the Achilles’ heel Agrarianism’s manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand: of race and slavery that southern conservatives, The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), except for Robert Penn Warren and a few oth- was written by “Twelve Southerners,” including ers, never really overcame. poet-critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Beyond race, Agrarianism’s problem was Tate, and novelist-poet-critic Robert Penn that it never had the courage of its convictions Warren. The Agrarians contended that an agri- against finance and industrial capitalism; nor cultural economy was uniquely suited to was it willing to take a stand on the environ- human flourishing, and that the values and mental damage inflicted by capitalist as well as traditions of an agrarian ethos were ideal to socialist economies. Rather, it took the easy support a stable, coherent society that empha- way out by embracing American conser- sized family and community. Such a tradi- vatism’s obsessive hostility to the state. In doing tional social order was hostile both to state so, southern conservatism acquiesced in the power and to the untrammeled market, while late-20th-century version of the Gilded Age. inclined toward natural piety and religious —Richard H. King Contemporary Affairs

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