Looking, from this point of view, at the office buildings that the then newly-realized possibilities of steel construction were sending skyward along lower Broadway, in New York, Mr. Sullivan reads in them a denial of democracy.  To him they signify much more than they seem to, or mean to; they are more than the betrayal of architectural ignorance and mendacity, they are symptomatic of forces undermining American life.

These buildings, as they increase in number, make this city poorer, morally and spiritually; they drag it down and down into the mire.  This is not American civilization; it is the rottenness of Gomorrah.  This is not Democracy—­it is savagery.  It shows the glutton hunt for the Dollar with no thought for aught else under the sun or over the earth.  It is decadence of the spirit in its most revolting form; it is rottenness of the heart and corruption of the mind.  So truly does this architecture reflect the causes which have brought it into being.  Such structures are profoundly anti-social, and as such, they must be reckoned with.  These buildings are not architecture, but outlawry, and their authors criminals in the true sense of the word.  And such is the architecture of lower New York—­hopeless, degraded, and putrid in its pessimistic denial of our art, and of our growing civilization—­its cynical contempt for all those qualities that real humans value.

We have always been very glib about democracy; we have assumed that this country was a democracy because we named it so.  But now that we are called upon to die for the idea, we find that we have never realized it anywhere except perhaps in our secret hearts.  In the life of Abraham Lincoln, in the poetry of Walt Whitman, in the architecture of Louis Sullivan, the spirit of democracy found utterance, and to the extent that we ourselves partake of that spirit, it will find utterance also in us.  Mr. Sullivan is a “prophet of democracy” not alone in his buildings but in his writings, and the prophetic note is sounded even more clearly in his What is Architecture?  A Study in the American People of Today, than in Kindergarten Chats.

This essay was first printed in The American Contractor of January 6, 1906, and afterwards issued in brochure form.  The author starts by tracing architecture to its root in the human mind:  this physical thing is the manifestation of a psychological state.  As a man thinks, so he is; he acts according to his thought, and if that act takes the form of a building it is an emanation of his inmost life, and reveals it.

Everything is there for us to read, to interpret; and this we may do at our leisure.  The building has not means of locomotion, it cannot hide itself, it cannot get away.  There it is, and there it will stay—­telling more truths about him who made it, than he in his fatuity imagines; revealing his mind and his heart exactly for what they are worth, not a whit more, not