Nebraska Capitol

One April evening in Manhattan five years ago, a slight, aquiline-featured man returned from a theatre to his room. No sooner had he crossed the threshold than lines of anguish twisted across his face and he fell dead from a heart attack. His death was unforeseen, but many of his friends believed that his health had been gravely impaired during the investigation of alleged construction faults in Nebraska's new $9,000,000 state capitol at Lincoln. That building, the friends claimed, was Architect Goodhue's sovereign design, imbued with all his prowess and pride. To hear it criticized was torture to him. And, in Nebraska not only had he faced charges of ineptitude and duplicity, but, unlike the commission which had picked the bold Goodhue design from among ten other plans submitted, many Nebraskans were blunt, blind, interpreted everything in financial terms. If Architect Goodhue had been alive last week he would probably have been miserable again. For the Nebraska capitol, now all but completed, was again being impugned. The charges lodged with the state legislature were identical in source and similar in substance to those which harassed the architect in 1923. Last week George E. Johnson, onetime Nebraska State Engineer, itemized various flaws--a great terrace bulging through its stone confines, priceless columns of tinted marble that were chipped and had been deceptively repaired; cracked stones. In 1923 his charges had been refuted and the document affirming their refutation signed by Engineer Johnson. Now, for some curious reason he has spoken again. Nebraskans recalled that Engineer Johnson had not been allowed to build the capitol, that Architect Goodhue had let the contracts and dominated the construction.* This time the capitol commission and other defendants found it easier to combat Engineer Johnson for the capitol had arisen in the prairie and offered tangible evidence. Potent among the defendants was Manhattan Architect Francis L. S. Mayers of the firm of Mayers, Murray and Phillip (Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue Associates), successors to Architect Goodhue. Mr. Mayer's firm has completed much unfinished Goodhue work. Grey, solid, brisk of speech, Mr. Mayers showed at the investigation that the terrace bulged because expansion joints and drains had not been properly tended, that practically nothing had been spent for maintenance, which should be some $67,000 per year. He showed that the rarest marbles are expected to chip when turned for columns, that clever repairs are common, not criminal. He stressed the Goodhue integrity, moral and esthetic, which attended the project. Weighty also was other defense evidence. It seemed altogether likely that the report to the legislature would strongly favor the defendants. Architect Goodhue studied all styles. He mastered traditional Gothic only to depart from it in a magical Goodhue Gothic. Finally, so strongly did he feel the Gothic spirit of perpetual growth, he grew out of the Gothic style, out of all archaism and raised on the Nebraska prairie a building indigenous to its time and place. Its dun-colored masses are simple--a great flat base; a slim domed tower which rises more than 400 ft. In style it is mysterious--something of vanished Assyrian strongholds; something of Byzantine vaults, domes and mosaic ornament; something of simple Mayan massiveness. Perhaps the style is best called Nebraskan. The history and spirit of the state infuse Sculptor Lee Lawrie's decorations. There are bison in bas-relief with inscriptions translated from Indian ritual. The maize plant replaces the classical acanthus. There are friezes of pioneers and covered wagons and on the pinnacle of the tower will shortly stride the colossal image of a sower. In addition to this local legend are figures and inscriptions symbolizing great government. From various corners, growing architecturally out of the walls, the austere faces of great lawgivers survey the prairies--Hammurabi, Moses, Pharaoh, Solon, Solomon, the Caesars, Charlemagne, Napoleon. No carven motto is more obvious than that above the Supreme Court bench: "Eyes and ears are poor witnesses when the soul is barbarous." All of the ornament has significance and is worked into the fabric of the building. The Goodhue family are oldtime Connecticut dwellers. Architect Goodhue was born in Pomfret Hill. Not for him was the European interlude enjoyed by most architecture students. At the age of 16 he went from Russel's Collegiate & Commercial Institute in New Haven to Manhattan where he began drawing classical orders under the tutelage of Architect James Renwick for more than six years. This able mentor disciplined his pupil's design sense, his pen and pencil technique, later famed for its own sake. Then Architect Goodhue went to Boston where he soon became the partner of Ralph Adams Cram in a firm (Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson) destined to rank with such partnerships as McKim, Mead & White or Carrere and Hastings. Architect Cram was and is a devout, learned Episcopalian Gothicist, medievalist. Architect Goodhue soon returned to Manhattan to superintend the firm's office there. A rift developed between the partners. The inventive Goodhue Gothic and the Cram Gothic -- orthodox archaeological -- could not go hand in hand. In 1914 Architect Goodhue began practice for himself. He then did his most noted work, including transitory palaces of Arabian Nights grandeur for the San Diego Exhibition, the Baltimore Cathedral, three of Manhattan's chief churches.* Over the Bridal Door of fashionable St. Thomas he placed two lovers' knots in Gothic tracery, one of them cleverly modeled to reveal a dollar sign. Great was the resulting furor. Sedate parishioners still deny that the sign is there. Architect Goodhue was mercurial, head strong, prone to sudden anger but fundamentally affectionate, modest, shy. His beliefs were unorthodox, his moral scruples of painful intensity. His ashes now rest in a magnificent tomb in the Chapel of the Intercession. On the surface carved in bas-relief by Lee Lawrie is his image lying in state like the images above the tombs of ancient Gothic kings. Believing that architects are born, not made, Architect Goodhue once said : "There are too many architects anyhow and the education of more should be discouraged."

*Engineer Johnson was ousted in 1933 by Governor Charles Wayland, Bryan, brother of the late William Jennings Bryan. *The Chapel of the Intercession, St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Bartholomew's.