Seeking Mr. Wright
Our hegira
Each year, Christina and I visit a different state for Independence Day, and this year it was Wisconsin and Minnesota’s turn—although we actually decided on the spur of the moment to visit Iowa, too.
We made it a Frank Lloyd Wright pilgrimage, starting in Milwaukee, where we got to spend a couple nights in the Burnham Block (or the American System-Built Homes) from 1916. We visited the Johnson Wax Building (1939; 1950) and Wingspread (1939) in Racine, and then traveled to Madison, where we toured the Unitarian Meeting House (1951), had lunch at Monona Terrace (not really a Wright structure) and stopped by the Herbert Jacobs House (1936). Then we visited Taliesin, Wright’s home near Spring Green (and stayed at the Spring Valley Inn, built by Wright apprentice Charles Monthooth, whose 100 year old wife Minerva is still living at Taliesin).
Then it was on to Louis Sullivan’s National Farmer’s Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota—probably the single most beautiful room in America—and we stayed the night in the Elam House (1950) in Austin, Minnesota; the first time I’ve ever stayed in a house featured on The Simpsons. Then we headed down to Mason City, Iowa, to see Wright’s Park Inn Hotel, the only hotel he built that is still operating as a hotel. (Wright was not the official architect of the Arizona Biltmore.) From there we headed north to Superior, Wisconsin, a few minutes away from Duluth, to enjoy the fireworks. Then we headed home, via Wright’s gas station in Cloquet. Definitely the Wright way to spend a vacation!
Talking about race preferences with David E. Bernstein
The Goldwater Institute hosted an online conversation this month about the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action decision and its implications for the future—I talked about the case with Professor David Bernstein of George Mason University, who filed a brief in the case that Justice Gorsuch relied on quite heavily, and who’s also the author of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America (which I reviewed here). Of particular interest in our conversation is how arbitrary are the rules the government uses when deciding who qualifies as “Asian,” or “Hispanic,” or whatever. You can watch our discussion here:
The Administrative State and the right to earn a living
The Goldwater Institute also filed briefs in two Supreme Court cases, the first dealing with economic liberty and the second with the powers of regulatory agencies. I had an article about the latter case in the Orange County Register, which you can read here. Excerpt:
Four decades [after the Chevron decision], the consequences are clear: bureaucrats—and the president, who oversees them at the federal level—can expand their powers far beyond what elected officials ever anticipated, and judges will allow it. That’s not just bad for democracy, it also expands the scope of government into almost every region of our lives. Administrative agencies, after all, oversee everything from environmental pollution to the kinds of doorknobs you can have in your house.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court recently signaled that things may be about to change. The justices will be hearing arguments in a case involving an obscure federal law governing fishing companies—and the Chevron deference rule that bureaucrats used to expand that law.
Justice Gorsuch and Indian law
I also participated in a podcast with the National Constitution Center that focused on Justice Neil Gorsuch’s views regarding Indian law. We started out with a discussion of the Brackeen decision about the Indian Child Welfare Act, but our conversation broadened into more general thoughts on Gorsuch’s method of interpretation. You can listen here.
From the New World
My latest musical fixation is Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony, also known as the “New World” symphony. It’s an extremely popular work—some polls have deemed it the favorite symphony of all time—and it was particularly influential on John Williams, who borrowed from its fourth movement for Jaws and Star Wars.
But when I hear it, I think of the passage in Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark, in which the main character Thea has a sort of revelation while hearing it performed at Louis Sullivan’s famous Chicago Auditorium Building:
The first theme had scarcely been given out when her mind became clear; instant composure fell upon her, and with it came the power of concentration. This was music she could understand, music from the New World indeed! Strange how, as the first movement went on, it brought back to her that high tableland above Laramie; the grass-grown wagon trails, the far-away peaks of the snowy range, the wind and the eagles, that old man and the first telegraph message.
When the first movement ended, Thea’s hands and feet were cold as ice. She was too much excited to know anything except that she wanted something desperately, and when the English horns gave out the theme of the Largo, she knew that what she wanted was exactly that. Here were the sand hills, the grasshoppers and locusts, all the things that wakened and chirped in the early morning; the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands. There was home in it, too; first memories, first mornings long ago; the amazement of a new soul in a new world; a soul new and yet old, that had dreamed something despairing, something glorious, in the dark before it was born; a soul obsessed by what it did not know, under the cloud of a past it could not recall….
Thea emerged from the concert hall… There was some power abroad in the world bent upon taking away from her that feeling with which she had come out of the concert hall. Everything seemed to sweep down on her to tear it out from under her cape. If one had that, the world became one’s enemy; people, buildings, wagons, cars, rushed at one to crush it under, to make one let go of it. Thea glared round her at the crowds, the ugly, sprawling streets, the long lines of lights…they should never have it. They might trample her to death, but they should never have it. As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height. She could hear the crash of the orchestra again, and she rose on the brasses. She would have it, what the trumpets were singing! She would have it, have it,—it!