40
PARTISAN REVIEW
work to a · large staff of draftsmen, designers and job super–
intendents.
Burnham was impressed to the point of reverence by the artis·
tic powers of McKim, H. H. Richardson, Charles Atwood, Augus–
tus St. Gaudens; he was servile before the superior "culture" of
the New York architects. Of a meeting in 1891 of the Board of
Architects of the World's Fair, Sullivan wrote: "Burnham arose
to make his address of welcome. He was not facile on his feet, but
it soon became noticeable that he was progressively and grossly.
apologizing to the Eastern men for the presence of their benighted
brethren of the West. Dick Hunt interrupted, 'Hell, we haven't
come out here on a missionary expedition. Let's get to work.'"
And Sullivan remarks: "During this period there was well under
way the formation of mergers, combinations and trusts in the indus–
trial world. The only architect in Chicago to catch the significance
of the movement was Daniel Burnham, for in its tendency toward
bigness, organization, delegation, and intense commercialism, he
sensed the reciprocal workings of his own mind."
When Dan Burnham the crude Chica:goan made his obeisances
to the New York architects, Charles Follen McKim had already
paid his reverences to Europe in general and Rome in particular.
The son of a Philadelphia Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Abolitionist
minister and a well-to-do Quakeress, he had been well enough
founded upon money and a family tradition of intellectual leader–
ship to get a sense of being aristocratic in the United States and not
entirely lost in Europe. From Harvard University he went to an
atelier in Paris. He travelled in France, Germany and Italy, observ·
ing the architecture en route. Back in America, he entered the
office of Henry Hobson Richardson to learn receptively of that
great architect's conception of architecture as a fine art-a concep·
tion which raised the contemporary status of architect from that of
draftsman-builder to that of Artist. Consistently, in his own firm
of McKim, Mead
&
White he assembled around him for every job
a constellation of painters, metal craftsmen and masons. From the
obsequious accounts of his biographers, the extent of his ruthless·
ness in dealing with subcontractors can be faintly discerned.
As his business expanded McKim was faced with the double
problem of making people like a standardized style of architecture
and of training men to draw it. He decided that the monuments of
