[Charles Eliot]
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED TO
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED, JR.
“I have all my life been considering distant effects and
always sacrificing immediate success and
applause to that of the future.”
Americans owe Frederick Law Olmsted an enormous debt of gratitude. Through his genius of design, his capacity to manage enormous projects, his ability to get things done, and his remarkable foresight, landscapes of his design and execution serve as oases of serenity stretching from coast to coast: from New York City's Central Park, to Oakland's Mountain View Cemetery, to Chicago's village of Riverside, to the grounds of the United States Capitol. He was a pioneer in his field who elevated landscape architecture to a respected profession and redirected the focus of the work from decoration to creating spaces for the enjoyment, health, and well-being of people, especially for those residing in the new and growing American cities.
The son of a well-respected Connecticut merchant, Olmsted, as a young man, jumped again and again from one line of work to another. He had been a merchant seaman, a farmer, a travel writer, an editor, the chief executive officer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, the manager of a California gold mine, and a publisher. In hindsight, Olmsted considered the time before he settled into landscape architecture to be a “sad waste” and thought his own father to have been “overly-indulgent to my inclinations.” He would not make the same mistake with his son, Rick. In fact, he even went so far as to change the boy's name at seven years old from Henry Olmsted to Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., because he knew it would serve him well in his future career as a landscape architect.
“Looking forward several generations” was what Olmsted always did in his design work and it seems, too, he took the same long view for his children. Here sixty-eight-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted writes to twenty-year-old Frederick, Jr., who was about to begin his freshman year at Harvard.
5th September 1890
Dear Rick:
I found your letter of the 12th [J]ul[y] when I came back here from the West. I should have replied to it sooner but I knew that you had left Lake George and had no clue to your address. John and I have both been away since in different directions on business and we only came together this morning. If I am well eno' I start again tomorrow morning for North Carolina and from there may have to go on to Chicago, so I may not be able to see you before you are matriculated. Hence, I write, though I can not say nearly what I would like to say. I enclose the paper containing Professor Shaler's remarks to which I referred (accidentally omitted, I suppose, from my former note).
Your letter pleases me very much as showing that you have sought sound advice and have used personal judgment and have been cautious and considerate. I am not disposed to differ with your conclusions. My only question is whether you are not undertaking too much in the regular college lines to allow you to give the time that you should to others. I want you to systematically give a good deal of time, thought and management to other sorts of education than the college provides. I cannot fully say what and why but can perhaps show some of the stems of my wishes in these respects. My life is pretty nearly run out. At the best I shall be disabled from all business long before you are to enter upon it. I wish that it were otherwise so far that your professional education could proceed with my actual work as John's has and Eliot's, Codman's and Coolidge's. As that cannot be reckoned upon, it is consolation that you must have acquired a good deal of knowledge of my principals and methods unconsciously, and it is to be hoped that you will henceforth be much more than you have been in an attitude of interest and intelligence to take in more. I want you to keep up a certain regular methodical reading and thinking on the subject, I will say at least five hours a week. I reckon that in four years you would thus have read everything not ephemeral in English, French and German and would be the best read man as to this Art in the world. I want you at the same time to keep such knowledge of what is going on in our office that you will gradually be led to an understanding of practice in relation to theory and of theory in relation to practice. What I want now is that you adopt this wish of mine and let it enter into your plans and expectations and habit, in the same way that the cut and dried requirements of the college course will enter into them.
One reason of this wish has this foundation. I have, with an amount of forethought, providence, sacrifice and hardship of which you can hardly have an idea, been making a public reputation and celebrity of a certain kind, which at last has a large money value. We have, as a consequence, more business than we can manage. The business increases faster than we can enlarge our organization and adjust our methods to meet it. And it is plain that this depends as yet almost entirely on me. Clients insist on having my personal examination and personally conferring with me. I do not mean that the process of shifting the business more and more to Jno. and Harry is not going on successfully. After a work has started I am surprised to find how they come gradually to be accepted, and indeed I am loosing the run of a good deal of business and occasionally small commissions from the start carried on independently of me. Yet all of our large and profitable commissions come to us from those who know no one but me and who are prepared at the outset to take advice from no one else. Hence whenever I drop out the business will fall off greatly, the more so that there are so many young men lately starting in it. Of the income from the present business more than half comes to me and with my share of it we are able to live as we do and are now putting a thousand dollars or more to windward every year. But a large share of my earnings laid up otherwise in various indirect ways, making the business, have been lost in fitting out Owen and the beef business, and so when my name no longer attracts clients, your mother, Marion and you will be in comparatively very straitened circumstances. You and Jno. will have to support them and John is entitled to marry and have others to support. That's sufficient indication of the business side of the matter. You ought to have it in mind, however, that we are getting much higher prices and larger works and works that relatively to what they yield us cost less, than any others of our profession are getting. I do not suppose any one, or any three working together, earn a quarter as much as we do in L[andscape] A[rchitecture]. I say this with reference to what you have to expect as to your own future earning capacity. The measure of this capacity will depend on the capital you can acquire in no inconsiderable degrees in five hours reading a week during the next four years and the insight you obtain of the manner in which business is conducted in our office.
Another foundation of my wish is the modest pride and satisfaction I have in what, against great difficulties, I have accomplished in—if not elevating the art and profession of L. A., at least in contending for a much higher standard than could, but for what I have done, been maintained. I feel that I have been rather grandly successful in this respect, and yet only successful in holding the fort as it were. It is as if the war had just begun and my part had been to keep the enemy in check until reinforcements could arrive. These young men, John and Harry, Eliot and Coolidge, with Sargeant and Stiles and Mrs. Van Renssalaer are the advance of the reinforcements. I want you to be prepared to be a leader of the van. How much abler should I have been had I had your education, to this time of your education. How much more had I had that education that you may have ten years hence. I would speak of myself and what I have done, as I have to no one but you, and to you, only under these circumstances. I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future. In laying out the Central Park we determined to think of no results to be realized in less than forty years. Now in nearly all of our work I am thinking of the credit that will indirectly come to you. How will it as a mature work of the Olmsted school affect Rick? I ask, and then, with reference to your education, How is Rick to be best prepared to take advantage of what in reputation I have been earning? Reputation coming as a result of what I shall
have done, but not coming in my time. How best prepared to carry on the war against vulgarity and continued further and successfully against ignorance and prejudice and meanness. How best to make L. A. respected as an Art and a liberal profession.
Of course the main thing is solid strength in the art itself, to gain which the course of college studies with the atmosphere into which the pursuit of these studies will bring you, and the reading and the rapport that you may secure with the office will be the best means. This with as much familiarity as you can gain in holidays and vacations with good natural scenery and the study of landscape paintings.
But with reference to success as a landscape architect, to obtaining business and gaining a name, you must just as systematically study to acquire social power. You must be storing up through your college acquaintances social opportunities. Be not lazy or shy to avail yourself of opportunities, first to earn friendly acquaintances, second to train yourself in social art. It is as necessary to success as anything else that you should be able to make yourself pleasing and entertaining in any society but more especially to be at home and ready to contribute the general entertainment of the most cultivated society. You need to be well-informed, thoughtful and familiar with the literature of all topics of conversation likely to come up in such a society. For this reason you must set apart hours for keeping up with the world by reading certain books as they come out, certain periodicals and certain newspapers, and by looking at works of art as they become prominent, considering criticisms upon them, attending public entertainments,—all this and more, I mean, besides cultivating social standing assiduously in the ordinary way of parties, balls and “calls.” Do not think that you have only to follow your inclination in this respect. Use discrimination. Seek the best society. Seek to enjoy it. Seek to make yourself desirable in it. Make yourself well-informed on matters of conversation of the best and most fortunate sort of people. This is an essential element of your education. Follow it systematically. Arrange other studies and occupations with reference to it. You have disappointed me in not training yourself more to acquire better manners in respect to the small change of social grace. It is entirely a matter of will. You have it in your power to greatly increase your value in this respect, your power to be useful and through usefulness respectable to others and yourself, which is the chief defense against misery in life. You have your defects and weaknesses but on the whole you are in capital condition at the starting point of the University period of your life-work.
Your affectionate father
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER TO
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR.
“Go carefully. Be conservative. Be sure you
are right—and then don't be afraid . . .”
The controversial industrialist John D. Rockefeller, creator of the giant Standard Oil Company, was America's first billionaire and perhaps the greatest philanthropist this country has ever known. To his only son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., he entrusted his fortune and his dream to “promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Here the eighty-seven-year-old father writes to his nearly forty-eight-year-old son at a time when managing the family's charitable giving was becoming an increasingly complicated and enormously demanding responsibility. Over the course of their lifetimes John D. Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., gave well over a billion dollars for philanthropy.
Ormond Beach
Florida
January 26, 1922
Dear Son:
As to the sums which I have handed you from time to time, it is to be remembered that I have already set aside large amounts in our different trusts, for benevolent purposes, in addition to my regular giving personally, and with the careful and protracted study which I give to each object of any considerable moment, it is evident that I shall not fulfill to the complete extent, my heart's desire to make everything that I can give to the world available, for many years to come.
As you are in touch with the world from a somewhat different angle from mine, and there have been ample means left by a kind Providence, I have hoped that with your constant and careful studies, and wide and broad knowledge of the needs of the world, you would have the fullest enjoyment in personally determining and carrying out plans of your own for helping the world, and I rejoice to afford you this opportunity, in the confident assurance that great good will result therefrom.
I am indeed blessed beyond measure in having a son whom I can trust to do this most particular and most important work. Go carefully. Be conservative. Be sure you are right—and then don't be afraid to give out, as your heart prompts you, and as the Lord inspires you.
With tenderest affection,
Father
SHERWOOD ANDERSON TO JOHN ANDERSON
“Next to occupation is the building up of good taste.
That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means
all the difference in the world in the end.”
What Sherwood Anderson needed to sustain him was to be writing, and to be writing well. Throughout his career, as he tried to reveal the lives and psyches of ordinary Americans, he did writing of all kinds—novels, short stories, lectures, articles, autobiography, plays, and poems. By the mid-1920s, although he continued to forge ahead, he was struggling unsuccessfully to make a mark that would surpass his earlier work.
Here, at forty-nine years old, he writes to his second child, seventeen-year-old John, a young man contemplating his future.
[Spring, 1926]
Dear [John]:
It's a problem all right. The best thing, I dare say, is first to learn something well so you can always make a living. Bob seems to be catching on at the newspaper business and has had another raise. He is getting a good training by working in a smaller city. As for the scientific fields, any of them require a long schooling and intense application. If you are made for it nothing could be better. In the long run you will have to come to your own conclusion.
The arts, which probably offer a man more satisfaction, are uncertain. It is difficult to make a living.
If I had my own life to lead over I presume I would still be a writer but I am sure I would give my first attention to learning how to do things directly with my hands. Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.
Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about. Most small businessmen say simply—“Look at me.” They fancy that if they have accumulated a little money and have got a position in a small circle they are competent to give advice to anyone.
Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.
I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.
There is a kind of shrewdness many men have that enables them to get money. It is the shrewdness of the fox after the chicken. A low order of mentality often goes with it.
Above all I would like you to see many kinds of men at first hand. That would help you more than anything. Just how it is to be accomplished I do not know. Perhaps a way may be found.
Anyway, I'll see you this summer. We begin to pack for the country this week.
With love,
Dad.
“The thing of course, is to make yourself alive.”
At the end of 1926, Anderson and his third wife took his two younger children, John and Marion, to Europe. Eighteen-year-old John remained in Paris to study painting. Understanding the parallels between writing and painting and having painted himself, Sherwood Anderson sent his son the following advice.
[April 1927]
Something I should have said in my letter yesterday.
In relation to painting.
Don't be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern—the latest thing.
Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time bef
ore the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.
Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands.
Then you can think of the thing before you.
Draw things that have some meaning to you. An apple, what does it mean?
The object drawn doesn't matter so much. It's what you feel about it, what it means to you.
A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips.
Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings.
Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything.
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
Any cleanness I have in my own life is due to my feeling for words.
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