ABSTRACT
When twentieth-century historians sought to demonstrate that American architecture had always been boldly independent and innovative-worthy of the greatness of the worldstraddling nation of their day-their favorite example was the Greek Revival. They argued that this nineteenth-century movement was unique to America and expressed peculiarly democratic meanings. These ideas do not seem to have obtained in the 1890s, when the revival was still understood to have been an English import. But by 1926, when American art and antiques suddenly seemed valuable, Howard Major would call the revival “An American Style for Americans. . . . It is the only thoroughly American architecture” and was our “national style, our independent creation.” The temple-form house, in particular, “was independent of contemporaneous European influence.” Lewis E. Crook agreed: such a house “had no counterpart in Europe. The direct classicism of the revivalist in the temple form of architecture first gained a foothold in the South and produced our own great national style in architecture-America’s independent contribution to the art.” Joseph Jackson titled his 1926 chapter on the Greek Revival, “Beginnings of a National Architecture,” and promoted the Americanness theme: Strickland’s Second Bank (Figure 7.1) “certainly . . . was not flavored with any British influence,” and his Merchants’ Exchange showed how “American Architecture had released itself from British tradition.” Leopold Arnaud, introducing Hamlin’s Greek Revival Architecture, wrote, “The word ‘Revival’ is an unfortunate misnomer, for this style was only a revival in that its decorative vocabulary was based upon classic Greek detail. In all other respects it was typically of America. Never before or since has there been less influence from Europe.” Arnaud’s comments show the cast of the times; when he writes of “a conscious separation from Europe and a fierce will to be American,” he refers to the 1830s but could easily be describing the 1930s, years of crisis and intense patriotism in which interest in Greek Revival architecture surged. Hamlin’s book, born at the very moment of U.S. world ascendancy, made the architectural-Americanness idea gospel for the rest of the century. In vain did Nikolaus Pevsner protest against his “contention . . . that the Greek Revival is the first national American style. I fail to see that.”1
