Prelude to an Americanist defense of Brutalist architecture

In the comments section to another post (beginning here and lasting several comments), I detailed how pointless and ridiculous the Trump executive order on federal architecture was.

Democrat partisans I'm sure took issue with it, but not from a nationalist or Americanist stance. They wouldn't even be able to point out the incoherence of the term "Greco-Roman" for architecture, since they deny the relation between the political and the cultural -- namely, that cohesive nations and outright empires produce the great, lasting, high culture around the world, from the beginning of civilization.

Rather, they see artists as existing in their own domain of society, perhaps having to humbly beg for funding from politically connected agents, but otherwise doing their own thing. The only time they allow art to express politics is when whining about Euro empires depicting The Other, defining themselves in relation to an Other, etc. -- and only then when the Other is not also a European! They don't care about the British and French defining themselves against each other, launching centuries of warfare against each other, colonizing and then getting decolonized from the Other's lands, and so on and so forth.

But Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire were not the same polity, did not share a language, did not worship the same gods -- crucially, the Greeks of several centuries earlier did not worship the head of the Roman government. More to the point, they were not defined by the same meta-ethnic nemesis -- Ancient Greece never did get to that stage, although the Achaemenid Empire pressing against them from the east came close. And even so, Rome was not forced into cohesive status to withstand the Persians -- but the Gauls from the northwest, as well as Carthagenians from the southwest.

Once Roman ethnogenesis hit its stride -- in the wake of its integrative civil war of the 1st century BC -- its architecture no longer resembled Ancient Greek at all. The Greeks did not use arches, vaults, or domes -- precisely the defining elements of the Roman style. Greek columns climbed strictly vertically toward the flat base of the roof of a temple, which may have been pitched toward the center, but had no curvilinear elements (other than the cross-section of the columns).

This process of radically distinguishing themselves from their earlier cultural (if not political) overlords from the East went so far as devising an entirely new building material, for their entirely new style, for their status as an entirely new ethnos. This new stuff -- concrete -- supported the Roman Architectural Revolution, including all those monumental civic projects like aqueducts, as well as religious + civic structures like the Pantheon, which still boasts the largest unreinforced concrete dome on Earth, 2000 years later.

A striking pair of images on the Wiki entry for coffer shows the dome of the Pantheon, along with the ceiling of the underground DC Metro stations. Both are exposed concrete -- not clad in some other material -- and both are not even trying to imitate some other material while actually using concrete -- it's clearly concrete poured into a mold, not bricks, not stone that's been quarried and cut and laid into rows, etc. And both make use of a repeated simple geometric motif -- square-like cells expanded into a rectangular matrix (albeit bent into an arch or dome).

No one (at least today) derides the dome of the Pantheon as a drab, soulless, alienating insect hive -- but they very well could have, if they were Greco LARP-ers from ancient Italy, especially from the part that never wanted to be Roman, in the south, proud of their Greek cultural influence. But those possible complaints would have fallen on deaf ears.

Some day -- perhaps already -- people will come to the same conclusion about the Brutalist ceiling of the DC Metro. Lord knows I occasionally found it insectoid when I lived in the area, and the opposite of a breath of fresh air after heading home from work. But the other times, I found it futurist, space-age, and just plain old cool.

And by now, I can appreciate its uniquely American status -- more so than the New York Subway, which relies mostly on European-style tilework, along with the ugly side of the industrial aesthetic -- those metal I-beams-as-columns along the platform. If they were gleaming chrome, that'd be beautiful industrial, but they're just I-beams with a coat of paint. Plus, the Subway doesn't have the dark intimate mood lighting as the Metro, let alone the row of lights along the platform edge that start blinking when the train is approaching. It's from the future! (No, it's just from America.)

The Metro used to be completely a product of the warm '70s color palette of its birth -- cream, orange, brown, with some chrome trim. But now both are headed toward neoliberal hell with only the futuristic side, not the primitive side, and with cold rather than warm colors, and harsh bright lighting instead of warm lighting. The reason you actually went to a Metro station -- riding a train -- was a pretty warm and cozy aesthetic experience, whether or not you liked the stations themselves.

And at any rate, the stations' floors are paved with red-brown ceramic tiles, in a hexagonal honeycomb arrangement -- without looking like an insect hive. That provides some warmth to the color palette as well as variety in the materials present.

But now I'm getting a bit too carried away -- a future post will document the warm, cozy interiors of Brutalist spaces. Next in the pipeline, though, is a review of the American style's use of exposed concrete, from our founding father Frank Lloyd Wright and afterward.

The point for now is that Brutalism has the most undeserved bum rap of all architectural styles. The cultural conservatives who wrote that Trump executive order were not only late in putting it out during the transition to the Biden admin, rather than at the outset of Trump's term, but 40 years after the style had already been not only abandoned but derided as something to contradict going forward.

So we see yet another example of the Trump admin being disjunctive -- trying to redefine its party's overarching program, but falling back into its old habits that got it where it is today, at the end of the road. Brutalism was a New Deal-era style, and once the neoliberal revolution took off during the Reagan realignment of the '80s, it was dead as a doornail.

For awhile it was merely derided, ignored, left unkempt, and contradicted when new buildings were erected. But it was not until the neoliberal apex of the woketard 2010s that American elites began actively and systematically demolishing examples of the style.

This anti-Brutalist iconoclasm has run most rampant among blue institutions like government bureaucracies, universities, and pharma research institutes, in blue cities like Boston, in blue states like Massachusetts. It seems to be worst on the East Coast, and less intense as you move west, since the back-East region is the least American region, having little role in being defined by our empire's meta-ethnic nemeses (mainly the Indians on the frontier, along with the Mexicans later on).

The total demolition and erection of new buildings was financed by another blue patron -- the finance sector, who divvied out to their political allies the output of the Central Bank's multi-trillion-dollar money-printing bonanza ("quantitative easing"). This is taking place under blue presidents, Obama and Biden, as well as under Trump (though not W. Bush -- too early for woketard iconoclasm).

So, Trump and his cultural conservative supporters who hate on Brutalism are birds of a feather with Obama-era woketards from the government and corporate bureaucracies. They may have contrasting rationalizations for why Brutalist buildings must be destroyed, catering to their different constituencies, but that's just branding and marketing. Functionally they are on the same team, a good cop and a bad cop (Our cop and Their cop).

And yet the outcomes have primarily favored the blue team's preferences -- not a RETVRN to Roman, Gothic, etc., but fishbowls of glass and steel on the outside, and Silicon Valley daycare center on the inside. It's Bauhaus for babies. And therefore, anti-American, as Bauhaus had minimal influence in America and its broader sphere of influence, and was a competing dead-end movement from moribund rival empires (German in that case, though many Austrian Empire refugees were there too).

Then again, maybe the cultural conservatives who lobbied for that executive order also prefer the fishbowl flexspace aesthetic that's beloved by their fellow urbanite over-produced elites from knowledge sectors of society. In fact, I'll bet they live and work in the Swamp itself, or its suburbs. Nobody who hates that heavily on Brutalism can deny that they're just whining about their personal experience of having to take the DC Metro to and from work every day. Tourists may find it futuristic and cool -- but that wears off after months and years of commuting that way.

They're not living in rural areas of red states working in agriculture, energy, the military, or manufacturing. That is the core of the GOP coalition. And they may never see an example of Brutalism in their entire lives, other than having to trek into town to fill out some paperwork at their municipal building that was built in the '60s. They're certainly not surrounded by it, and they are not the ones seething about it, let alone demolishing it.

But at least on the surface of their claims, the right-wingers want a more trad-looking building to replace the demolished Brutalist one, and on that level, they have been completely exploited and defeated by their no-honor-among-theives allies from the blue camp of neoliberalism. That extends to the iconoclasm against historical statues -- they could be Confederate or Yankee, it doesn't matter. The point is, woketards removed or demolished trad-coded statues, while their fellow Brutalist-haters from the right wing stood by and cried but did nothing.

Applying what we've seen from both sides over the past 10 years, we can see that efforts to conserve our distinctly American culture will -- for the short term, anyway -- not be helped by cultural conservatives from the GOP. They're too neoliberal, and bound to hate on at least half of what defines American culture -- that of the New Deal (they might not mind that of the Progressive Era, though). More than that, they lack any power, and just stand by while shit hits the fan.

Sadly, that means conservation efforts will come from a civil war within the Democrat coalition, between the woketards who only want to keep destroying the past and replacing it with new crap, and the vintage / thrift store / antiques crowd who want to preserve, enjoy, and celebrate all the totally awesome stuff we've created.

Isn't that a trad crowd? Not really -- trad means never change, only accept the past. The vintage / thrift store / antiques crowd doesn't really care about the culture of this land before the late 1800s, because it wasn't very American back then, and was based on European imperial models. But we're not Europe, and can't compete with them on their own cultural turf. Still, who made better movies, with better cinematography, built better buildings, furnished them with cooler designed objects, and developed a new aesthetic of primitive futurism?

So the attitude is more of curating, cataloging, and canonizing what came before, aware that our heyday is long over and nothing new can ever top what was created at our peak. Forming a consensus on the standards of American culture, and then spreading awareness about them, celebrating them, enjoying them, viewing them, and so on.

We can't conserve & preserve cultures that we did not create, and that we have no geographic or temporal link to. It's up to the Italians to preserve Roman culture -- or Spaniards to preserve what the Romans brought to their land. But Romans never landed in North America, so there is nothing of theirs for us to preserve. Certain aspects that can be copied and mediated, like their language and literature, we can preserve. We could even preserve images of their visual art and architecture. But most of that stuff is in Italy, not America, so we can't help them as much as they could help themselves.

We could help directly by occupying them, as we have since WWII, to protect buildings and otherwise ensure the stability of their Roman heritage. However, our occupation has served mainly to absorb them into our cultural orbit -- and if that conflicts with centuries of preserving Roman heritage, what America says, goes. That was the whole point of the post-war Vatican II Council -- submitting the Roman Church to the American Empire. Cuius regio, eius religio. So don't count on foreigners to preserve your own heritage.

To the extent that we managed to preserve some of what was created in other empires, that owed to our status as a new ascending empire in our own right. The Abbasid Caliphate during its heyday could preserve parts of Ancient Greek or Roman culture, but after their empire collapsed, they were in no position to be the repository of global knowledge, and so today's House of Wisdom is no longer in Baghdad. That will be no less true for America's status as global knowledge repository, as our empire collapses.

This is another reason why the kind of cultural conservatives who lobbied for that Trump executive order, or gave it a virtual high-five through a Silicon Valley platform, will generally not be helpful. Their idea of conservation is defending something like "Western Civ" -- most of which unfolded on another continent, hundreds or thousands of years ago. We can play no big role in defending Christianity, although we could in defending Mormonism or Pentecostalism. We can't protect castles or cathedrals, perspective paintings, flamenco or fugues.

We can only defend Block Symphony buildings, primitive futurist objects, rock and jazz music, movies, cars, etc. -- but that leaves plenty of work to keep canonizers and conservationists busy forever. Just don't count on much help from performative haters of Brutalism, who were late to that iconoclastic crusade anyway.

Cantilevers pioneered by the American style of architecture & design

Looking back through some old family photos, I was reminded of how Midcentury Modern everybody's homes used to be -- not through deliberate, cultivated effort, nor as a trendoid striver affectation, but just because it is the American style, and we're Americans. So what else would our homes look like?

We may have been joined in this style by the Scandinavians (especially Denmark), Switzerland, and the Russians -- those who were outside the haute art world of the Western Euro empires that began in the Early Modern period. But we largely pioneered this style ourselves, independent of similar trends in Russia / USSR, with the Scandis and Swiss jumping on board after we got it started.

In our home was a pair of these La-Z-Boy recliners with prominent bentwood arms, much like the original Midcentury type that my grandparents had in their home, in the middle of nowhere, Appalachia. (Ours were in different colors / patterns from the links.)

Although bentwood as a fabrication process is an invention of the Austrian Empire (by Thonet), its lines in Austria were very typically European -- curvilinear, slender, airy, nothing that would have offended Rococo sensibilities. Bentwood in America took on the typical American Block Symphony approach -- mostly a right angle, with the intersection rounded off, thicker / wider pieces of wood, feeling more solid and massive, even though they're only an outline rather than a filled-in slab. This traces back to the Waterfall style of furniture from the Streamline Moderne period beginning in the '30s, and those pieces were not just skeletal outlines but Romanesque hunks of sheer volume.

Our dining table was this one by Ansager Mobler from Denmark, part of the '90s Scandinavian craze (when making a pilgrimage to Ikea became a rite of passage for the aspiring middle class). It's a contempo production, not a Midcentury original, but is fairly faithful -- only the color gives it away a bit, being more orange a la the yellow and orange tones of '80s woods (mainly oak), whereas the Midcentury would've had a bit more red in the mix. But it is teak, squared-off everywhere, clean lines, and so on and so forth.

And what other choice was there for seating at such a table than some good ol' cantilever chairs? The way the seat is only supported from below in one place (the front) makes the balancing act impressive, especially when a person's body weight is being supported, not just the seat itself. It looks like a marvel of modern engineering.

I'm pretty sure they were by Chromcraft, the major American manufacturer of cantilever dining chairs, since they also made upholstery an option, rather than only putting caning on the seat and the back. Similar to these, but with a speckled neutral earth tones fabric on both the seat and back, inside of an orange-brown wood frame, but of course with the gleaming chrome unaltered.

Chromcraft was adapting the popular Cesca chair by Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer (Austrian) from the late '20s. It's one of only a handful of Bauhaus creations that did go on to influence America, and through America the rest of the world. Usually Bauhaus was a dead-end, the last futile gasp of moribund Euro imperial cultures -- but because these chairs used both wood frames and reed caning, they did not strike such a sterile, alienating, purely futuristic / industrial note in the audience.

America invented this overall aesthetic, primitive futurism, but if a decadent Euro movement coincided with it in a particular case, we were not going to deny them influence. Breuer's chair has fairly uniform-looking wood, in a blond color, not very primitive as the American versions would be (like the Chromcraft ones we had, in an orange-brown oak). But it's more natural than 99% of Bauhaus' output.

Fellow Bauhauser, Mies Van Der Rohe (German), designed a cantilever chair as well in the late '20s, though because it was sleek black leather and chrome, without wood / reed / etc., it did not influence America, and therefore did not influence the rest of the world. Both Breuer and Mies Van Der Rohe used cantilevers in their architecture as well around this time.

* * *

That would seem to be the origin of cantilevered furniture, but as usual, the hype about Bauhaus proves to be overblown, one of the undying myths that status-insecure East Coast academics tell each other, and through their East Coast media pals, the rest of the country and world. That's true for the haters of Bauhaus, too -- they make it out to be a Great Satan that ushered in a latter-day fall from grace. They need it to be influential, in order to hate on it so fervently. But the haters are just as clueless.

And it traces back to the same cause -- the back-East region of America is hardly American, which has always been defined by the frontier with the Indians, beginning in the Old Northwest (Chicago) and extending out to the West Coast. East Coasters have a minimal understanding of American culture, whether they were to like it or hate it -- they just don't know what it is. How can they? They're still half-pretending to be British, rounding their low/back vowels instead of speaking like an American (unrounding them).

If it doesn't resemble some European culture, East Coasters simply cannot process it -- to them, it doesn't count as design, architecture, music, etc. Hence they over-emphasize the role that a Euro movement like Bauhaus played in America, and via America the rest of the world during the Midcentury. Most of American Modernism was native, and does not resemble Bauhaus, and therefore very little of the so-called International Style -- really, the Pax Americana style -- looks like Bauhaus either, unless the Euros had more local influence than did the Americans.

For example, South America, and Brazil in particular, had more Euro LARP-ing influence than emulation of America. We never conquered Brazil, our parent empire did not colonize Brazil, tons of elite Euros fled to Brazil after their empires' final death of WWII, and we have never controlled Brazil as a puppet regime. (Nor did we control Argentina or Chile -- those military coups may have been supported by the CIA, but were entirely endogenous affairs that would've happened and succeeded without our help.) And sure enough, there are some pretty nasty Bauhaus-y buildings in Brasilia.

But Japan bet the farm on American rather than Euro culture well before WWII, having been missionized by Frank Lloyd Wright personally. Then even more so once they were occupied by us after, their aesthetic quickly came to resemble the dominant American / Scandinavian / Soviet style, not the decadent Bauhaus / Euro style. Hardly any of their space-age electronics from the '60s and '70s came without some kind of real or simulated woodgrain, exactly in line with American primitive futurism. And when learning English, they want to know the standard American accent, not British.

* * *

Decades before Breuer and Mies Van Der Rohe employed cantilevers in their architecture and furniture, the American Frank Lloyd Wright had already pioneered the use of dramatic cantilevered roofs in his Prairie School buildings (e.g., the Robie House from 1909). These roofs are cantilevered since they're only supported by the wall of the building, having no columns or other supports closer to the roof's edge. How do those roofs stretch out so far without falling over? They're balanced by having even more of them on top of the walled part of the home, and/or more weight attached to them in the core and less weight in the periphery.

Modern architects love showing off their engineering wizardry by using sweeping cantilevers, but it all goes back to the American Midwest around the turn of the 20th century -- not Bauhaus in the collapsed German Empire of the 1920s.

The American origin of dramatic cantilevers in whole buildings is pretty well understood. But what has so far gone unnoticed is that Americans also invented cantilevered furniture as well, including chairs.

It's true that the Bauhausers were the first to make a chair with the seat supported in the front by two "legs" (that may or may not connect into a single piece along the ground), which travel down, then back underneath the seat. This turns the support under the seat into a kind of spring, where the person's body weight pushes down on the upper horizontal plane of the support, but the horizontal part of the support along the ground resists and pushes back. The material has to have enough tension to withstand this attempt at squeezing the spring, but stainless steel has no problem with that. And so, as if by magic, the heavy person remains seemingly suspended in mid-air.

Incidentally, Knoll's website says these types are thought to be derivatives of 19th-C. rocking chairs, but none of the rocking chairs were cantilevered. Some had the usual four legs at the corners of the seat, with rocking gliders connecting the legs on each side of the seat. And the Thonet model actually has three points of contact on each side with the seat bottom -- the four corners, plus another in the middle of the side. They're anything but seemingly gravity-defying.

However, there is a whole 'nother type of chair that also uses a cantilevered support -- and in just one point, not in two points as in the Bauhaus style chair. That is the so-called swivel chair, the ancestor to nearly all office chairs today.

In a swivel chair, the vertical support column is only attached at one point to its horizontal upper support piece, which in turn is attached to the seat itself. One vertical support element, not two separate ones. It's attached near the center when viewed in profile, although closer to the back, since more body weight rests there than at the front part. The chair has to balance those two sections, a heavier back and lighter front -- and accommodate any shift in weight, like when the person leans back to rest or leans forward to hunch over their desk.

To do that, the horizontal part of the support along the ground contains both a component that goes toward the back the seat (to resist the leaning back) and toward the front of the seat (to resist the leaning forward). But since the seat swivels 360 degrees, these components must sweep around as well, to resist leaning forward or backward no matter which direction the seat is pointing. Hence, the spokes of the lower support section form a circle -- or a discrete version of one, like having 4 or 5 spokes, evenly spaced around the circle. So no matter where the seat is pointed, there are components from one or more of the spokes lying in the "resist leaning back" and "resist leaning forward" directions.

Later, the continuous version of the support base was used -- a smooth solid circle, most notably by the American Eero Saarinen's Tulip chair from the mid-'50s. That particular chair didn't have casters underneath to glide it across the floor, but its seat does swivel, and is supported in only one point like other swivel chairs. It was paired with one hell of a cantilevered table, too, to my knowledge the earliest example of a table with such a dramatic cantilever support. Less dramatic are the ones with huge blocks in below the middle of the tabletop -- the Tulip table stands on a single stem-like base!

Other larger, lounge-ier chairs for the home also employ the swivel mechanism, albeit sometimes hidden underneath the floor-length upholstery in a more trad-coded model, but left out in the open for the more mod-coded ones, e.g. the Eames lounge chair and ottoman (both). The cantilevered nature of the support for swivel chairs is kept open to highlight the machine-age wonders of "wow, how did they engineer that magical balancing act? All that weight, leaning forward, backward, shifting side to side -- all balancing on that one tiny little point!"

With all due respect to the dual-column cantilever chairs, including my beloved childhood dining chairs, the single-column cantilever chair is a greater example of modern engineering marvels.

And it's also older! American president Thomas Jefferson invented a swivel chair for personal use, but this did not spawn any copies of itself. Around 1850, the American Thomas Warren invented and produced (through the American Chair Company) the Centripetal Spring Armchair, which does everything relevant here that a swivel chair does, including rest on one, not two, vertical support elements. I've found very little evidence that this chair was at all popular in its own day, and apparently vanished into oblivion within a few decades. It left no direct copies.

Both of those early examples were a case of "right idea, wrong time" -- because American ethnogenesis has not entered its "defining new things for ourselves" phase, which happens after an integrative civil war, where who "we" are is up for grabs. Is it the one Us, or the other Us? During the initial rise of an empire, we are only defining ourselves against our meta-ethnic nemesis, in our case the Indians (and somewhat later, the Spanish / Mexicans). Our Civil War & Reconstruction Era ends in the 1870s, so distinctive American ethnicity does not really take shape until after then.

If Warren had introduced his chair 50 years later, it would've been a smash hit. But before the integrative civil war, we were still holding ourselves to Euro antecedent standards -- and no European created a swivel chair. If it was too outre for the Euros, it was sadly also not going to find much success here because we were still insecure about being ourselves.

But as fate would have it, an American architect and designer from the Midwest began working around the turn of the 20th century, and wouldn't you know it? -- Frank Lloyd Wright himself invented the modern office chair, for use in the Larkin Administration Building which he also designed, in 1904.

His swivel model streamlined the several large springs of Warren's earlier model, was made entirely of metal (aside from a simple seat covering -- unlike Warren's more elaborate upholstery). And it was made in an angular style appropriate for American Block Symphony, to distinguish America from serpentine-curvy Europe. The only problem was one of degree rather than kind -- the footprint of the base is too narrow, so it was able to tip over if someone leaned too far. But that was fixed with subsequent swivel chairs.

Although there are several additional vertical support elements, they are not attached to the bottom of the seat -- they all converge in the center toward the top, and it's still just one point of support at the top of the vertical section.

Wright also designed an entirely separate type of cantilever office chair for this building, which was demolished in 1950 by traitorous back-East scum (Buffalo, NY), who could not appreciate American culture even when it was handed to them on a silver platter. Sadly most or all of this second type were then thrown in the dump after.

It's an integrated desk-and-chair combo, as seen in this example and in this gallery (Fig. 6, "Type B desk"). There's only one vertical support element, roughly in the middle of the seat bottom, and two horizontal elements (a higher and a lower one) take it back to the desk, where they attach to a vertical piece along the inner side of the desk. It doesn't fall over because the counterweight is the huge hulking desk that it's attached to by tense metal supports -- and the distance is pretty close, no more than a few feet, so there's no torque that could bend the seat down, let alone overturn it.

Very much like the roof extending out over the wall of the heavy bulky core of a home -- even if you jumped up and down on the edge of the roof, or sat on it, or hanged from it, it wouldn't come crashing down.

The seat back can fold forward to a horizontal position, too, so that the chair can be fully stored underneath the desk when not in use. Neat idea! Not that much of a space-saver, though, and it meant that the chair could never be moved anywhere away from its desk-twin. So this model didn't go anywhere, as far as office or home furniture goes.

* * *

Let's return to the non-swiveling cantilever chairs. You can't deny that they have a more dynamic look, the way the back seems to be left in the dust by the front support -- since there is no direct support in the back. The "front to back" contrast is normally not that dynamic in a chair, and using the cantilever in this way does give it an industrial / machine-age speed and energy to it, even though it's a perfectly stationary object for a person who will be sitting perfectly still in it.

The swivel chairs, although more magical in their support, have the support closer to the center rather than the front or back, so they appear more stationary and harmonious, not like the driver of a speeding car with a stark back-to-front arrow.

Outside of Bauhaus, Finnish architect & designer Alvar Aalto created a non-swivel cantilever chair in 1930, only two years after Breuer and three after Mies Van Der Rohe. He went on in the '30s to create even more variations on this theme, with large lounge types for the home. These latter improve on the speed theme by disconnecting the lower horizontal supports from each other around the back -- this puts even more of the structure in the front, and makes the lower supports look like skies that are taking the sitter on a race across the snow.

And unlike Bauhaus, they were made of wood, although they did not mix wood and chrome a la the American style. But that at least made them influential worldwide, fitting with the American inclusion of wood, as opposed to Bauhaus' general aversion to wood.

America's seminal designer (who was not also an architect), Gilbert Rohde, took over creative control of Herman Miller in the '30s, and had an exhibit at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, which served as a launch pad for primitive futurism (in the new form of Streamline Moderne). He made a whole bunch of cantilevered seating, and it's hard to tell when each one came out. But as early as 1935, he'd already made a chair, as well as a stool around the same time. Earlier, at the '33 Fair, he debuted a lamp and clock with cantilever support.

During the '30s, he added to the "how did they balance all that weight?" theme by making the seats themselves massive and bulky -- no need for a person to sit in them to make you scratch your head. The chair on its own seemed to defy gravity, unlike the Bauhaus designs that were light and delicate unto themselves, in typical Euro fashion.

I already mentioned Eero Saarinen's heavily, but centered, cantilevered Tulip series, which brought the concept to tables. That was from the mid-'50s.

The next development was to switch where the vertical supports were -- from the front to the back, making it seem to want to lean forward. There's a Danish Modern desk in teak by Georg Petersens Mobelfabrik like this, which everyone attributes to the '60s without any evidence. And American designer extraordinaire Milo Baughman did this with all sorts of seating -- club chairs, loveseats, entire sofas, desks, etc. -- possibly also in the '60s or the '70s at the latest, again without any hard evidence of the timing. (He'd already done the "support in front, seeming to lean back" style earlier.)

These seem to be the ancestors of today's cantilever side tables that every big box store sells (supported in the back, seeming to lean forward, with the empty space in front allowing the tabletop to slide over some other piece of furniture). In any case, not something that traces back to Bauhaus, but to America, perhaps with input from our fellow non-collapsed-Euro-empire friends in Scandinavia.

Bauhaus did pioneer a certain style of cantilever chair, but had already been beaten to the punch by Frank Lloyd Wright when it comes to cantilevers in whole buildings, as well as seating (albeit in the form of the swivel chair, and the separate desk-and-chair combo). And they clearly weren't as obsessed with cantilevers as the Americans were, who put it to use in everything as soon as they could -- stools, clocks, lamps, ottomans, entire sofas, then tables, desks, anything really. It's more definitive of the American-led style (with help from the Scandis to define the culture of the post-Age-of-Euro-Empires era).

Americans may not have invented sculpture or discovered contrapposto, but we did pioneer and perfect the same basic principle as applied to buildings and all other designed objects, shocking a sense of energy, movement, and dynamism into what would otherwise be a stationary, inert, dead hunk of matter, and in a way that seems to defy the laws of nature. Not just a slight overhang of a roof above an outer wall, but in a sweeping, dramatic, engineering wizardry kind of way. And our building-sculptures and object-sculptures are no less artistic or aesthetic just cuz they don't represent natural kinds like people, animals, plants, and so on. Abstract art is no less artistic than figurative art.

The 2023 financial crisis: this time *is* different -- for the worse

Not much to add other than a link to my "old" post from late 2018, laying out the very simple logic and history of the neoliberal-era bubble. (Now that I'm proofreading, there's a little bit to add...)

I won't rehearse the entire post -- read it at that link, and read my comments, too. You'll learn more than anywhere else.

And best of all, you don't need to worry about understanding mortgages, commercial real estate, etc. Those are only the specific triggers for a bubble inflating, and the first symptoms of its popping. The trillions of fake newly printed dollars could've been misallocated into some other domain of society, it doesn't matter.

The point is: "big" can only be bailed out by "bigger", not by a peer at the same level of the pyramid, and certainly not by an inferior. Progressively since the neoliberal revolution of Reaganism, the finance sector has been destroyed at higher and higher levels, reaching the very tippy top after 2008, with a global network of central banks working as a policy team.

They destroyed their balance sheets after 2008, by absorbing so much toxic waste from the level just below central banks in the pyramid -- the big banks like JP Morgan etc. And that toxic waste was traded for freshly printed trillions of dollars, which the big banks spread through the top 10-20% of society, in the way you may have seen on the TV show Shark Tank. That was just open auditions for money-printer hand-outs, with the "investors" as the middlemen between the central bank and the "entrepreneurs".

But now that the global network of central banks have destroyed their own credit-worthiness, and are in need of a bailout themselves -- so sad, but there is no one higher up on the finance pyramid. No central bank of the solar system, galaxy, universe, etc., exactly as I said nearly 5 years ago, but which nobody seems to have absorbed in the meantime -- probably because they're all wish-casters relying on central bank 12-D chess brilliance to keep their overproduced elite status secured.

Sorry, suckers, there's no one to bail out the American central bank, let alone all the world's major central banks.

* * *

I was proven right when, not even 2 years later, the central banks turned the money printers on like crazy in 2020, printing as much in one summer as they had earlier printed in one decade -- a massive acceleration.

But the real lesson from 2020 was that the whole money-printing trick can only be done once, as my model makes clear. If you expect to keep the printer on forever, even accelerating its rate, no one will take you seriously, and you'll need to be bailed out by a superior. But since there are no superiors to the American central bank, or the global team of them, they would not get bailed out.

And sure enough, in the wake of the 2020 money-printing bonanza, suddenly inflation went sky-high and throughout the entire system. Not just higher than earlier periods, or in one sector of the economy but not others. It's high, and it's everywhere.

This is because the central banks have lost their credit-worthiness -- nobody believes or trusts them, which is the origin of the term "credit". During the 2010s, people could make-believe that the money-printing and 0% interest rates were merely temporary, an emergency, a radical intervention like surgery for an acute trauma -- not chronic, ongoing, indefinite things that would never be undone.

Central banks tried raising interest rates and contracting -- rather than further inflating -- the money supply during Trump's term, and by Christmas 2018 the stock market took a big fat shit. Rather than keep the pain on the overproduced elites of the neoliberal era, the central bank backed off, and turned on the money-printer in overdrive during 2020.

This proved that the temporary and emergency claims were fake. Technically they could not be proven or disproven when first administered under Obama. Maybe they'll succeed in rescuing the real economy, and all those trillions of new dollars can be withdrawn from circulation -- because they will have created tons more of dollars through their healing powers. Like taking someone off life-support, and they start breathing and walking around and talking again.

Without attempting to dial down the level of life-support, you cannot really know whether the patient is healed or still hopeless. Everybody with a brain knew the 2010s economy was fake, but you couldn't point to empirical evidence, since its fakeness vs. realness had not been tested.

But that changed in 2018, and by the 2020 acceleration in money-printing, all doubt was removed. The central banks 0% interest rates and printing of trillions of dollars, euros, etc., was *not* just a temporary life-support machine for an acutely ill patient.

When you dial down the life-support machine from 9 to 8, and the patient starts having an epileptic fit and flat-lining -- guess what, life-support didn't work, he's dead. Then in embarrassment you dial the machine back up to 9, then 10, then 11 -- and everybody can now see, with empirical testing, that your intervention failed.

That's why it took until 2021 and after for inflation to skyrocket and strike the entire economy rather than certain sectors. If the central banks are just going to print more and more dollars, they're worth less and less, so we have to ask for more of them in exchange for whatever we were selling before.

* * *

The rampant and intractable inflation proves that the central banks, and the elite class they try to placate, have lost control. They have not cynically but expertly "kicked the can down the road". They're not diabolical selfish geniuses. Their plans are already blowing up in their faces -- and ours. Their currency is openly worth less and less, and nobody believes or trusts them anymore, and on top of that, by weaponizing the dollar during the Ukraine-Russia War, the rest of the world has already started to ditch the dollar.

None of those results were present throughout the 2010s, or the 2000s, or the '90s, or '80s. This time *really is* different -- it's the end of the line for the neoliberal-era bubble, and it's taking down central banks and their currencies with it.

Why? Because this time is different in the lack of further higher-ups on the finance pyramid to bail out the acutely ill patient.

To be clear, the 2023 financial crisis is not about regional banks or commercial real estate -- the insolvency crisis is at the highest levels, the global central banks, including our own that used to print the world's unipolar reserve currency.

Why is this top level getting taken out now? Didn't central banks always jump on the grenade during neoliberalism's earlier crises? No -- read that 2018 post I wrote. Continental Illinois Bank, the largest regional bank at the time, blew up in 1982 -- and was rescued by the FDIC, with zero help behind the scenes from the central bank, or even from the big Wall Street banks.

As the bubble has inflated more and more, bigger and bigger rescuers have had to play the role of jumping on the grenade. And once the global central banks jumped on the grenade -- that was it. There's no one to jump on their grenade. Or to mix metaphors, no one to suck the poison out of their wounds. They're the top, period. When they're compromised, it's over for the whole pyramid.

* * *

I want to emphasize that the "diabolical genius" meme really is over. If the central banks try to print up another 10 trillion dollars, 20 trillion, 100 trillion, that won't buy its recipients anything. They'll be worthless. They could only pull that trick once, during the 2010s, when the credit-worthiness of the central banks had not yet been put to an empirical test. Will they normalize rates, will they withdraw the monetary life-support and keep it withdrawn? Who can say, for right now, in 2014?

Back then -- seems like another lifetime -- you could print up $5 trillion, hand it out via Shark Tank to the top 10% of society, and they could purchase a lot more stuff and services because of it. There was no system-wide inflation, let alone at such high levels.

Now, everyone has seen the results of the test of credit-worthiness, and so any future rounds of money-printing will have the same effects as the 2020 round -- soaring inflation, no improvement in the recipients' standard-of-living. You may go from a millionaire to a billionaire, but you won't be living in a bigger house, have a more beautiful wife, eat better food, or command a bigger army of slaves to drive you around, deliver your food, etc.

And no, they are not diabolical geniuses in the sense of at least staying even, while printing up more and more money. Everyone's standard of living will go down as a result of persistent stagflation and/or hyperinflation. How did the elite class of Weimar Republic Germany wind up? Or the elites of Zimbabwe? Did they enjoy the same standard of living, but just with increasingly ridiculous nominal valuations of their wealth due to the hyperinflation of the money supply? No, they fell off a cliff, and their societies turned into basket cases.

Our elites will suffer no different a fate. When belief, trust, and faith in the highest levels of the finance pyramid are removed, it will gum up the works in all kinds of ways. In some cases, the infinite supply of dollars won't buy anything in a certain sector -- because would-be sellers know that the currency is worthless now, and will be worth even less by the time they try to exchange it for some good or service that they want. So they just won't sell.

"Jay Leno is going to gobble up all of the classic car market!" -- unless people come to believe that dollars are just funny money, and losing value faster than they can be exchanged for what the seller wanted to spend them on. They'll just keep the classic cars to themselves. What is Jay Leno going to do -- hire a private army to force classic car sales at gunpoint? His would-be soldiers wouldn't accept being paid in worthless dollars.

Maybe if Jay Leno had gold, or oil, or food-producing land, or an armory full of toys for the soldiers to play with. But plain old dollars, whose value can no longer be stored for the future? Forget that.

Ditto for "the big banks and hedge funds will buy them up instead!" Not if the sellers don't want dollars, fearing their medium-to-long-term stability in value. Plus financial actors never use their own money, they borrow it from someone higher than them in the finance pyramid, then use it however they want. Credit conditions are tightening like crazy, so they have less money than before to play around with. No more buying sprees for banks and hedge funds.

* * *

Ultimately, the current crisis, which historians will start with the 2018 event that prompted my old post, will wind up depopulating a lot of the elite class, which has been over-produced for decades, and finally have no one left to bail them out and support their ambitious standard of living. Naturally that will leave some players left at the highest levels, presumably JP Morgan among banks, while lots of aspiring elites in the regional bank tier will have to move back to the suburbs of Green Bay where they came from -- and where they belong.

The system has finally become incapable of supporting 20% of the population competing to live in the 1% zip codes. Lots of people in the top 10-20% -- but below the top 1% or 0.1% -- are going to fall back down into the lower 80-90% of society, where their Greatest Gen ancestors were, before the destabilizing upward ambitions of the Silents and Boomers (collectively the "Me Generation" of the '70s).

This will echo the Great Depression, which wiped out the Great Gatsby-type strivers from the Roaring Twenties and earlier, leaving only the Rockefellers at the top. That reduced inequality, shrinking the number at the elite level. But it was done without destroying our central bank and its currency -- the central bank simply refused to jump on the grenade in order to bail out the strivers.

This time, though, we're going to see reduction in inequality while also lowering our average standard-of-living, since an imploding central bank and currency mean we can't buy stuff like we used to. The Great Depression saw reduced inequality, but with a rising average. (And no, homicide rates did not increase, nor did lifespans plummet -- those are independent of income and wealth trends.)

I won't introduce at this late stage of the post, a cross-imperial comparison -- but suffice it to say we're at the phase in the imperial lifespan when the elites just debase the shit out of their currency, dooming it to obsolescence, while obtaining no short-term benefits either, just committing monetary suicide out of overweening ambition and stubborn hyper-competitiveness.

Woodgrain + chrome mania during the '70s (extensive image gallery)

The previous post laid out the Midcentury Modern roots of the "woodgrain + chrome" aesthetic that we commonly associate with the woody Seventies, which in fact also had to include the industrial / machine / futuristic material of gleaming silver-tone metal as well (and perhaps also smooth black plastic, like bakelite).

Another post will go further back to the Art Deco era, tracing the birth of this unique American contribution of primitive futurism.

There's not much to add analytically now, just an extensive image gallery in case some people are unfamiliar with the style's peak during the '60s and especially the '70s. Or want a nice soothing refresher for how many product categories it touched.

I'll only comment on one in particular for now: I was really shocked by the storage bins for VHS or audio cassette tapes. If you're Gen X or older, you've had these in your home at some point for years, and if you're younger than that, you've certainly seen them if you visit thrift stores. They were -- and are -- everywhere.

We all recall the woodgrain pattern around most of the box. But on the pulls, there's smooth black plastic -- and what looks like aluminum tape! A shiny silver-tone decal, at any rate. It's not even a solid piece of metal, just a thin sheet glued on. But they required that shiny silver-tone metallic accent, or else it just wouldn't be industrial, machine-age, and futuristic enough for American culture!

This aluminum-ish tape appeared on storage cabinets for 8 track tapes, cassette tapes, Betamax tapes, VHS tapes, and even CDs. It was no accident or after-thought -- it was obligatory, no ifs, ands, or buts. It can't be only primitive -- it has to be futuristic, too.

Just as the toaster and percolator, usually taking part in only the chrome and bakelite combo, eventually did get the woodgrain treatment as well. Not too futuristic, now -- we don't want to slip into Bauhaus decadence like Europeans from collapsed empires. We're Americans!

Finally, note the self-aware tone of the Panasonic ad copy: "With all that walnut-finished wood and midnight black and silver trim, knobs to finagle with and those wild-looking cylindrical speakers."

Woodgrain and chrome: primitive-futurist materials for America's defining design style

Some recent posts have explored how the American Empire's distinctive culture is different from those of the Early Modern Euro empires that perished in WWI, and indeed how the culture of the only one to survive -- the Russian Empire (under the USSR) -- was highly similar to that of America in the aftermath of the World Wars. Scandinavia also resembles these two empires, so it is more about being excluded from the Early Modern Euro empires club, and therefore taking a wholly different approach to cultural creation.

First was a review of realism in drama for the literary arts. Then ornateness vs. Block Symphony in architecture, followed up by a cross-sectional comparison of state capitol buildings around America, and a review (the first I'm aware of) tying together America's contribution to world religions (Mormonism) and architecture (Block Symphony).

Now we turn to "design" in a broader sense, having already looked a bit at architecture. Furniture, consumer household products, interior decoration, and a little industrial design too, like cars. I'll save the images for a gallery / appendix at the end, rather than comment on each one in detail or use specific images to prove a specific point.

* * *

This all started when I kept hearing the audience of several streamers haranguing the poor girls to "buy the Herman Miller chair already!" as though it were obligatory to sit in an Aeron chair for an online-related job. Aside from being over-hyped and overpriced since their explosion in the Dot-Com Bubble Nineties, they just don't look American -- or Japanese, or Swiss, or name some other member of the recent / ongoing cultural elite. They're all-black, made mostly or entirely of synthetics, are too curvilinear in outline, and are too light / airy / meshy.

So I started looking for examples of chairs to suggest to the girls (perhaps I can do that in detail in the comments section). And then it really hit me how different the aesthetic has become since the Early Modern Euro empires, other than Russia, bit the dust in WWI, ushering in a mostly American-led zeitgeist, although strikingly similar to Soviet aesthetics, and joined by the neutral Scandinavians.

This began with the American strains of Art Deco in the '20s, crucially being independent of and in many ways contradictory toward European modernisms such as Bauhaus in design or cubism in painting and sculpture. Bauhaus only had the modern / progressive / futuristic tone, not the juxtaposition of that tone with the trad / reactionary / primitivist tone, which has always defined American aesthetics (since they began, in the late 19th C.). Cubism's blockiness was destructive, evoking the shards of a shattered mirror, whereas American blockiness was constructive, building various scales of blocks into a pleasing -- not dissonant -- rhythmic gestalt.

The American movement peaked creatively during the so-called Midcentury Modern era, after WWII but before the neoliberal era of the '80s and beyond. Midcentury Modern has rarely gone totally out of fashion, so there have been influences, copies, and revivals at various points since -- like crazy from 2005 to 2019, epitomized by the set designs for Mad Men on the sincere side and Austin Powers on the campy side (the original core James Bond movies being prime examples of Midcentury Modern design).

Perhaps the single best expression of the new era, in which America more or less dominated, is its choice of materials. The materials not only convey something about their origin and production -- making finished things from raw ingredients -- but also influence the color and texture and other purely visual aesthetic properties.

By far the prevailing theme for materials was "primitive meets futuristic" -- so it had to include a very old, pre-historic kind of natural material. Something right out of the Stone Age -- wood, stone, even a whole animal skin for a rug or blanket (in lieu of a more civilized item woven from threads of wool).

But it also had to have something very new, industrial, something that only precise machines could manufacture -- not just metal, which is thousands of years old, and may look rough and crude to begin with or patinated with age. Metal that is bright, gleaming, smooth, mirror-like in its reflection of light -- therefore, chrome, or as close to that ideal as a silver-toned metal can get.

Depending on the functional needs of the object, it could have included some plastic as well, in a nod to modern chemical production processes, as long as it too had a glistening, smooth, reflective, uniform surface. And although any color dye could have been added during the production, the main choice was black, followed by white, perhaps imitating the neutral colors of stone materials. Vivid blues, reds, or greens would have looked too unlike raw stone, and ruined the "somewhat trad, somewhat mod" feel.

And of course, all of these choices in materials would still be subject to the constraints of blockiness rather than ornateness.

* * *

For historical context, what did the American-led style *not* look like? Not like the Bauhaus '20s zeitgeist. For example, Breuer's Wassily chair, which does have tubular steel with a reflective finish, but no wood, and whose black leather straps also look too modern rather than trad (smooth, uniform in color, no grain, etc.). It's also deconstructed or analyzed into components or broken down, rather than being a harmonious unanalyzed holistic gestalt. It's also too light and airy, owing to its deconstructed nature -- you can see right "through" it in many places.

Likewise the Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe.

Le Corbusier's furniture is somewhat more in the American vein, probably because he was Swiss and not part of the Early Modern Euro empires club by upbringing. (Breuer was from the collapsing Austrian Empire, and Mies van der Rohe from the collapsing German Empire). There's no single work he made that combines all the key elements, but his club chairs are hefty and blocky, he used highly figured cowhide for upholstery alongside tubular steel (but in a deconstructed and airy "sling" chair), although he never used much wood.

Nor did the American style resemble the various national incarnations of Art Nouveau (Modernisme in Spain, Jugendstil in Germany, etc.). Those were all rooted in Early Modern Euro imperial styles, going back to Baroque and Rococo -- no futuristic / industrial / machine-age suggestions, curvilinear rather than rectilinear, light wispy forms, highly ornate.

Let alone did the American style resemble earlier stages of the Euro imperial cultures. Back East in America, there is more Olde Worlde Euro-LARP-ing, but that's not America's own style, which was born in Chicago and spread toward the western frontier. Even in its revival of European styles, America is far more comfortable resurrecting styles that were not made by America's imperial rivals during its rise. Romanesque (i.e., Frankish and pre-modern French), Byzantine, Roman, Ancient Greek, Egyptian, maybe Gothic at the tenuous latest. And generally those have more massive volumes, more straight lines, and less ornate ornamentation compared to Rococo.

* * *

What's the first major example of the American style in design? As far as I can tell, it's one of the most iconic -- the Eames lounge chair and ottoman, released in 1956. The cushions are wrapped in sleek black leather, and the metal supports have a chrome finish, much like earlier Euro modernist approaches. However, what sets the Eames chair apart is the wooden shell behind and underneath the cushions. Originally, and for decades after, made of Brazilian rosewood, this highly figured wooden component gave the whole piece a wild and primitive tone that none of the progressive / futurist Europeans could have ever dreamed up.

Figured woodgrains had been staples of European furniture for centuries -- but the Eames' veneered it over bent plywood, giving it an industrial-age feel instead of a strictly hand-worked process. And none of those earlier European uses of figured woods paired them with futuristic chrome or sleek black leather. It was a uniquely American combination of materials, for a novel effect. And true to the American blocky volume approach, it was not light or airy or deconstructed, but solid and blocky -- with a few gently rounded corners.

Even simpatico European designers, like the Dane Arne Jacobsen, couldn't quite make this leap in the immediate wake of the Eames revolution. His Egg and Swan chairs, from the late '50s, don't have woodgrain anywhere. And if Danish Modern used wood and/or leather, it didn't also include chrome or other bright silver-toned metal, as prominently as the American style did. It took until the '60s and '70s for European designers to adapt the American approach, especially through the Swiss firm Stoll Giroflex, whose lounge chair and ottoman pair is a slightly curvier Euro refinement of an earlier American invention.

The most prolific, influential, and iconic designer in the American style is Milo Baughman, who used the woodgrain + chrome combination for chairs, sofas, tables, credenzas -- anything. And his lines were more rectilinear and in tune with American Block Symphony from architecture, compared to the Eames' somewhat more playful and curvier lines. Baughman was also more quintessentially American in not only being based in California (as the Eames' also were) but converting to Mormonism.

From the large and expensive design objects -- furniture -- the style emanated out to the smaller and less expensive objects. By the '70s, it was hard *not* to find this mixture of materials -- or their simulation -- in a receiver, television, telephone, lamp, desk sculpture, electric guitar, alarm clock radio, car dashboard, car outer body, tobacco pipe, and any other kind of consumer product.

We used to look back on that era as "the woodgrain era", but that's only half of the picture. Wood, even highly figured wood, has been popular forever. What distinguished that zeitgeist, and set the standard for American design ever after, is its mixture of trad, primitive woodgrain right alongside futuristic industrial chrome (and/or smooth gleaming plastic). That look and feel, and that impression, represents a unique American contribution to global cultural history.

* * *

As the American Empire reached saturation / stagnation during the neoliberal era, Bauhaus and other Euro approaches have come back from the dead, as America can no longer rule the whole world, politically or culturally. Sleek black leather and chrome -- but no woodgrain -- has become popular again, as has "blobitecture" in place of blockitecture, especially in Europe itself. Buildings made of only new-age metal and glass, with no stone or wood to reveal their wild primitive alter ego, make us long for even the least aesthetic strain of Block Symphony -- Brutalism. And all-black, meshy, totally synthetic chairs, rounded all over, are the go-to seat for the so-called creative class.

Even the attempts to adapt Midcentury Modern to today miss the mark because they don't have a good intuition for what the originals were doing. For example, during the 2010s it became popular to make tables and desks out of heavy slabs of wood, perhaps "live edges" revealing all the grain, resting on minimalist metal legs -- which are black and usually matte. This attempt fails because "metal" isn't futuristic -- it's been around for thousands of years! And yes, you can use hand tools alone to give it a minimalist shape and surface appearance.

Those metal legs have to specifically have a shiny, mirror-like silver tone to them, since that's what came out of the industrial age for building materials. Otherwise it looks like iron that's been painted black, like there has been for hundreds of years and did not look futuristic even back then. Their conception of "metal" or "industrial" is something coarse, ugly, and dark, as though industry is supposed to plunge us back into the dark ages.

The Midcentury Modern conception was of industry as producing smooth, gleaming, bright things, in a way that no previous manufacturing technique could have done. That was the forward-looking part of the combination. But the manufacturing of wooden components was also done in a futuristic way, like bending the plywood, or keeping it rectilinear -- anything but plonking down a "live edge" with almost no woodwork performed on it at all, as though it were a freshly felled whole tree.

Today's "live edge table with metal legs" leans too far in the primitive direction, in a sign that we are losing our advanced industrial capacity -- and along with those off-shored factories, our imagination relating to them. It's similar to the steampunk aesthetic in fashion, another product of the neoliberal era and our new cultural dark age. Steampunk is just Victorian LARP-ing, plus a few industrial embellishments -- it's not futuristic at all. Midcentury Modern was first and foremost a futuristic movement, even when using primitive materials. It wasn't a Gothic LARP, with some industrial embellishments.

* * *

Appendix / Gallery

I'm just posting the interior decoration examples now, will update with other consumer products later (as I think most people are familiar with those). Note in the Mad Men set, the wooden panels on the wall, along with the silver-toned metal. In today's neoliberal desecration of modernism, there would never be that much wood, let alone with a visible figure and rich stain. Probably would just be glass panes between the metal skeleton.

The Tooth Fairy and American ethnogenesis

The first reference to the Tooth Fairy is from a Chicago area newspaper (from the Old Northwest, site of intense Indian wars across a meta-ethnic frontier), after the Civil War & Reconstruction period (1908).

There was no precedent for this practice in European or other world history. Superstitions relating to children's teeth are too vague -- the Tooth Fairy is specifically a diminutive fantastical creature that visits children when they're asleep, leaving a gift for the baby tooth that the child has already left under / near their pillow.

Grown Viking real-life men paying children, while the children are awake and away from their bed, to wear their baby teeth in a good luck necklace lacks all of these elements except the transactional exchange, so that is clearly not related.

The only correlate is a single short story for children by Spanish writer Luis Coloma, "Raton Perez", which has all the elements (only the fantastical small creature is a mouse, rather than a fairy). It was first published in a collection of stories in 1902 (Nuevas Lecturas), then in standalone form, with illustrations, in 1911.

Only the standalone version has a preface explaining the supposed origin as him being commissioned by the Queen to write a story to memorialize her royal son losing a baby tooth in 1894. Just-so embellishment later on, or true story? Either way, the story came out around the turn of the century.

Coloma's story also has far more narrative action, dialog, and a richer cast of characters than the simple Tooth Fairy folklore.

If we believe that ordinary Americans at the grassroots level somehow were influenced by Coloma's story, it had to have been almost instantaneous, across a major language barrier (few Spanish speakers in America, esp. the Midwest, at that time), and other cultural barriers (we were barely influenced by Spain).

Also, it would require that we not only altered the small detail of the creature being a rat or a fairy, but stripping out all the other richness of the narrative. Coloma's is a proper fairy tale, not just a simple folkloric practice. If American parents were in the mood of telling their children legends or tales, why wouldn't they keep the narrative, at least in part? There's no narrative to the Tooth Fairy, unlike Raton Perez.

So we did not get the Tooth Fairy from Spain. Another possibility is that Coloma independently came up with all the elements of the Tooth Fairy legend, at roughly the same time, and exerted his creative will to come up with this narrative because he was commissioned by the Queen, whose son was losing a tooth at the time.

The stark similarity and close timing rules out an independent origin. If he was commissioned, that would explain his greater narrative detail -- he wasn't just passing on an old wives' tale, but creating a work for his royal patron, deserving greater aesthetic detail.

Another possibility is they share a common ancestor. But there are no other children of this hypothetical ancestor -- only the American Tooth Fairy, and Raton Perez, both born circa 1900. Since Spain and America had been culturally closed off to each other at that point -- not sharing a greater sphere of cultural influence -- then the ancestor would have to go much further back, like Indo-European or something.

But then, it would have produced children in at least some of the other Indo-European cultures that still exist. And yet, no Tooth Fairy in any of them.

By 1900, the Spanish Empire had already been in the collapse stage of its lifespan for nearly a century, whereas the American Empire was ascendant -- both politically, as well as culturally.

As for the ease of acquiring the relevant information, it would be far easier for a single erudite scholar with royal patronage in Europe to learn about American folk customs, than for entire masses of ordinary Americans in the Midwest to learn of one specific recently published story embedded within a larger collection whose title does not indicate anything about it being children's stories, fairy tales, tooth fairy legends, etc.

Therefore, it's far more likely that -- through whatever links of transmission -- the arrow went from America to Spain, not the other way around.

And so, the Tooth Fairy is, like Santa, a uniquely American cultural creation, whose influence has spread around much of the world as the American Empire eclipsed all others, aside from Russia, over the course of the 20th C.

German imperial ethnogenesis and Easter Bunny traditions

I'm preparing a long post on the ancient Indo-European origins of several Easter / arrival-of-spring holiday traditions, but in the meantime, a quick look into those relating to the Easter Bunny. It's already known that the Easter Bunny / Hare, who brings eggs as presents to children, and leaves them around the home to be discovered in a hunt, comes from Protestant Germans, some of whom introduced the practice to America. This is a major invention, without analogs in other Indo-European cultures.

What's more interesting is the timing: it's not an ancient Germanic tradition, but probably from the second half of the 1600s (the first reference is from 1682). This post will briefly review my overall theory of ethnogenesis, and then the specific case of the German Empire, whose origins and evolution remain only halfway understood by the public.

* * *

The Easter Bunny / egg hunt fits the pattern I've been establishing for the ethnogenesis of various imperial societies, whereby transformational new cultures arise only after an empire's integrative civil war -- the Thirty Years' War, in the case of the fledgling German Empire. They're not so very German before then -- just as Americans were not very American before the Civil War & Reconstruction, nor were the Romans so distinctly Roman until after Caesar's Civil War, and so on and so forth.

The origins of imperial cohesion and expansion stem from a people lying on a meta-ethnic frontier with a very different Other, who pose a serious threat, and may be an advancing empire in their own right. But if the relationship to the Other were the main driver of cultural evolution within the Us side, why would Our culture need to change at all? It could stay exactly the same, and we would simply feel it, display it, and perform it much more intensely. It only requires more chauvinism, not the forging of entirely new cultural markers. Higher quantity, not necessarily a new quality.

Rather, it is the internal dynamic that drives these cultural innovations within Us. Because some of Us lie close to the meta-ethnic frontier with the Other, while some of Us are comfortably far removed from it, there is now variation in how Us-like -- or how opposite of the Other -- the various Us-es are.

And those closest to the frontier will want to prioritize defense and even aggression against the Other, while those farthest from the frontier will say that's no big deal, why waste our resources, time, and delegate local authority to a new central state just to combat something that we barely feel the pain of?

Sooner than later, these internal contradictions within the Us side come to a head, and there is a civil war. But it is integrative, where the winner will incorporate the loser politically, economically, and culturally, as much as possible, into a greater empire, not just let them do their own thing unmolested. Both of the Us-es need to be united in order to take on the Other, so no, the loser cannot be allowed to go back to their comfy isolation.

The most typical cause of this civil war is over how to treat the Other -- should they be militantly resisted, pursued vindictively, conquered, etc.? Or should they be appeased in some way, paid off, given safe passage to bother someone else, etc., so as to not rock the boat too much for any of the parties concerned? When there is an intense meta-ethnic frontier, usually from the Other expanding at the expense of Us, this is not an inconsequential debate.

Those among Us that are closest to the frontier are being unwillingly transformed into leaders of a broader movement against the Other. It's an apocalyptic do-or-die situation for those on the front lines. So to reflect this transformation in political and military roles, they decide to adopt new cultural markers in order to let the other Us-es know who's leading the way, who should be deferred to culturally as a standard for the broad coalition of Us-es.

For, at the outset of this process, there is little variation on the Us side for any cultural domain -- that's what makes Us close together, in contrast to the Other, with whom We have a lot of variation. We speak the same language, albeit with different accents. We eat the same foods, albeit with some regional specialties. We practice the same religion, albeit with minor ritual differences. There simply isn't much in the existing cultural variation within the Us side to amplify or intensify, if one part of Us wants to distinguish itself as the standard-bearer of all the Us-es.

Hence, the urge to forge new cultural markers for the standard-bearing part of Us, which can then be held up as qualitatively distinctive compared to the rearguard or even unwilling part of Us. Of course there is a quantitative ramp-up in intensity after the ball has gotten rolling, but crucially it is not acting on long-standing cultural markers -- but entirely new ones.

* * *

What became the German Empire began with the Duchy of Prussia, a small state centered around the Baltic port city of Konigsberg, which had become encircled by the Lithuanian Empire. Directly to Prussia's east lay the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been expanding since the 13th C., and already by the end of the 14th C. had merged de facto with the Kingdom of Poland, to Prussia's south and west. This encirclement by an expanding empire threw up a meta-ethnic faultline around Prussia, forcing it to cohere intensely to withstand conquest.

Lithuania and Poland represented Baltic and Slavic speakers, and although Old Prussians were originally Baltic speakers as well into the early 2nd millennium, they rapidly abandoned their Baltic language (and other aspects of culture?), and began Germanicizing themselves, in addition to importing heavy numbers of Germans, as well as having Germans within the elite stratum from the region's subjugation by the Teutonic Knights.

Lithuania and Poland were also intensely Catholic -- in that era, as a contrast to the Orthodox churches to their south and east, as the Protestant Reformation had not yet started. However, as Prussian ethnogenesis began, their founding duke Albert adopted Lutheranism in 1525, at the start of the duchy's existence. This was the first Protestant state church. He was originally head of the Teutonic Order, aligned with the Roman Catholic Church, but his encirclement by Catholic superiors provided the motive to adopt a new state church, to heighten the Us vs. Them feeling with respect to religion.

Prussia was still inferior in status, though, and the dukes of Prussia had to pay homage to their Polish overlords.

Duke Albert came from the House of Hohenzollern, who had recently established themselves as the ruling house of Brandenburg (in 1415), and who made Berlin their capital. They gradually acquired the rights of succession in both Brandenburg and Prussia, which culminated in 1618. The next year, the same person (George William) became the leader of both Brandenburg (elector) and Prussia (duke), formalizing their union. But Prussia was still not a fully independent polity, having to pay homage to Poland.

The next round of Brandenburg-Prussian expansion took place during the ruinous civil war among German speakers, the Thirty Years' War, which began in 1618, at least until the German-speaking sides agreed to the Peace of Prague in 1635.

It is dubious to lump Brandenburg-Prussia with the Habsburgs (ruling the Duchy of Austria, and serving as Emperors for the fragmented and impotent Holy Roman Empire), as though they constituted two "Us" factions within a civil war, as opposed to an external war. Habsburg Austria was in fact undergoing its own intense ethnogenesis, along the meta-ethnic frontier to their south and east, where the Anatolian Muslims of the Ottoman Empire were making deep incursions into Europe through the Balkans. This pressure eventually led them to oversee the defense against the Ottomans alongside the Czech (Bohemian) and Hungarian regions. And as already mentioned, different churches within Christianity can be powerful meta-ethnic markers as well, as when Prussia had become encircled by Lithuania and Poland, or as when Orthodox Russia eventually expanded into Poland and Lithuania.

What is easier to construe as a real civil war is the struggle among the northern German Protestant states to unify around their new religion, to heighten their difference with Catholics such as Poland, Lithuania -- and yes, even their fellow German-speaking brethren in Austria. An integrative civil war eventually unites all of those who face the same meta-ethnic Other, the one who caused them to start cohering in the first place.

Because Prussia and Austria were forced into defending themselves against entirely separate meta-ethnic nemeses -- Poland-Lithuania, and the Ottomans, respectively -- there could be no civil war that would integrate both of those groups together. This fundamental difference in who their meta-ethnic nemesis was, determined the answer to "the German question," i.e. would one nation-state unite all German speakers, or would the schism remain? The solution had nothing to do with intellectual debates about romantic nationalism, language, etc.

And indeed, Prussia and Austria evolved into separate peer empires, with distinct national / imperial cultures, over the Early Modern and Modern periods. Even after their collapse during the World Wars of the 20th C., they remain separate and different from each other, notwithstanding their shared German language.

* * *

This schism among German-speaking proto-empires began during the Thirty Years' War, where in general the major Protestant groups were fighting the major Catholic groups. However, this war also served as a civil war among the Protestants themselves. Their major leader, culturally and politically, had been Saxony, with Hanover after them. And yet Brandenburg-Prussia had begun expanding, so perhaps they would become the new leaders of the northern Protestants. Protestant leadership was up in the air, raising the stakes considerably, and making a civil war amongst them inevitable.

Saxony has never become an empire during any time in history, as they have been safely ensconced in central Germany from every expanding empire that might force it to cohere and develop a new identity. They were not on the faultline against the Romans (that was the Rhine River in western Germany, which seeded the Frankish Empire). They have no coastline and there were no major cities lying on the main river, the Elbe, during the era of Viking naval raids (who instead raided Paris via the Seine and seeded the French Empire). Dresden, which does lie on the Elbe, was not a city until the early 2nd millennium, so the Vikings of several centuries earlier ignored the region. There were several bulwarks in the east against invasions from Steppe peoples, namely Lithuania and Russia (both of whom became empires). And any invasion from Anatolia or the Balkans got bogged down before reaching Germany, such as the Byzantine expansion that seeded the Bulgarian Empire, and the Ottoman expansion that seeded the Austrian Empire (including Bohemia and Hungary).

They may have been incorporated into other empires, like the Frankish, but they did not lie on a meta-ethnic faultline with anyone, so they never cohered intensely and never developed a fierce collective identity that they converted into territorial and cultural expansion.

And so, during the Thirty Years' War, Saxony, ruled by the House of Wettin, preferred to play the role of controlled opposition to the Catholic Habsburgs of Austria. Saxony would defend Protestant rights in Protestant lands, but they would remain within the Holy Roman Empire, not challenge Austria / the Habsburgs politically or militarily, not seek foreign policy contrary to them, and in general serve as junior partners to the Austrians, pacifying their fellow Protestants in the north.

This weakness of Saxon identity reached an absurd conclusion by the end of the 1600s, when the leader of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, sought the open spot of being king of Poland / grand duke of Lithuania. As a Protestant, he would be required to convert to Catholicism -- and he did! He made this worse by having his son convert, so that the future rulers of Saxony would be Catholic indefinitely, not a one-off era ruled by an eccentric. He did in fact rule as the leader of Poland-Lithuania, as did his son, after a war of succession -- and then that was it. They had jumped onto a sinking ship, as the Lithuanian Empire was already long in the tooth, impotent, and dominated by Sweden and Russia. Within a century, it would cease to exist altogether, carved up by Russia, Austria, and Prussia -- not by Saxony.

Remember that Poland-Lithuania was not just any ol' Catholic polity -- it was the very meta-ethnic nemesis that caused the expansion of Prussia in the first place. This would be like a southeast Italian leader in the 3rd C. BC deciding that, y'know, why don't I also become leader of the Gauls or the Carthagenians -- not to conquer them, but to accept an open spot at the top of their otherwise intact polity and military -- and having to convert to their culture in order to fulfill the invitation! Or if in America of the 1840s, some back-East governor decided to become the head of Mexico, not to conquer it, and having to convert to Catholicism and speak only Spanish in order to do so! Ridiculous, and a clear sign that the region that he ruled would never lead the entire empire after its integrative civil war.

Instead of weakly-held-together Saxony, it was Brandenburg-Prussia who won the internal struggle among the Protestants during the Thirty Years' War. The Saxon goal of appeasing the Habsburgs in order to be left unmolested lost out in favor of the Prussian goal of consolidation of the north and separation from Austria.

Territorially, Saxony added only Lusatia, while Brandenburg-Prussia gained Farther Pomerania, the Duchy of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Kammin, and Minden. Soon after, Prussia won freedom from Polish vassalage (in 1657), and was more responsible than Saxony for driving out the invading great power of Sweden from the German lands (for instance, by participating in the Scanian War, which Saxony sat out). By 1701 Prussia was elevated into a kingdom, and at the end of the Great Northern War, finalized their possession of much of Swedish Pomerania.

By the mid-1700s, Saxony brought further shame upon itself by siding with the losing French side of the Seven Years' War, while Prussia was a leading member (along with Britain) of the winning side, although there was no change in territory at the end. And from there, Brandenburg-Prussia gradually unified all of modern Germany by 1871, including southern Catholic states like Bavaria. This was only the culmination of several centuries of cohesion and expansion by Prussia -- the struggle for Protestant-led German unification had already been lost by Saxony back in the mid-1600s.

Even during Russian occupation after WWII, and right through the post-Soviet era, the political and cultural capital of eastern Germany -- and Germany as a whole -- has been the Hohenzollern capital of Berlin, not the Wettin capital of Dresden or its cultural center of Leipzig.

* * *

And so, it is no surprise to see that the first reference to Easter Bunnies bringing eggs is from 1682, after the civil war in Germany had concluded, whether that is construed as one including Austria on the internal side or not. At a minimum, it was a struggle among the Protestant powers, which Brandenburg-Prussia won and Saxony lost. But after that was settled, consolidation of the Protestant north of Germany could proceed more or less unhindered by internal contradictions. They had to let bygones be bygones, and develop a new, distinctive Protestant culture in the emerging German Empire -- not only in contrast to Catholic Poland and Lithuania, but their German-speaking cousins in the emerging empire of Catholic Austria.

Far from representing a primordial Teutonic heritage, nor even the cultural status quo of the 1500s at the outset of imperiogenesis, the creations that became the standard throughout Germany were revolutionary inventions to mark the birth of a new people. Not only were they different from Poland, Lithuania, and Austria -- they were starkly different from who they themselves were only a couple centuries earlier, having been tested and transformed by their location along a meta-ethnic frontier with an expanding Other.

A new people need a new culture, and that included both a religious component, like the Lutheran Church, as well as folk rituals like the Easter Bunny and egg hunts to celebrate special holidays like the arrival of spring, not to mention high culture like German classical music (whose seminal early figure, Bach, specifically built up the Lutheran Church's new culture).