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.The accusation reads:I have just returned from Pike Lake Lodge, Wis., and while there was very suspicious offour Germans who were staying there.The leader was supposed to be a marvelous archi-tect from N.Y.He had two younger men there and a woman Sec y, who had just comeover from Germany.They spoke nothing but German and spent their time over draw-ings________ I may be wrong, but they impressed me as spies, perhaps drawing plansof our country for the woman to take back to Germany.If you are interested, I can tellyou more about it.My phone number is ________ (during day).Most sincerely yours____________________(Signed).43The woman thought it unlikely that a famous architect would spend so long a time inan out-of-the-way, tiny and little-known vacation spot like Pike Lake Lodge in Wis-consin.She was disquieted by the way the strangers kept to themselves, remainingapart from other vacationers and speaking German.As Walker later explained, she hadjust seen the film Confessions of a Nazi Spy.The actor s confessions had obviously in-fluenced her to conclude that she had stumbled on a group of spies. 181 POLITICALLY MOTIVATED BARRIERSIn reality, the suspicious drawings were for the Illinois Institute of Technology,44according to George Danforth who was with the party at Pike Lake Lodge.The modu-lar design system developed by Mies may have looked to the informant like the geo-metric grid used by the U.S.land survey, a grid eminently apparent in the agriculturaldistrict in which she lived.45 But even if allowances are made for this confusion, only aninflammable political situation can explain how Mies van der Rohe, Lilly Reich, Lud-wig Hilberseimer, George Danforth, and Bill Priestly s vacation, which later filled fivevolumes of FBI research, could lead to this denunciation.46 The consequences for Mieswere not only subsequent FBI research into his personal history, but also the creation ofa secret file on him that includes entries made over the course of twenty years.The FBI files on Walter Gropius cover a similarly long time but are more exten-sive.They were begun in June 1940, after a special agent of the local FBI office re-ceived a call from a woman who claimed that Walter Gropius harbored pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic feelings.He decided not to pursue the matter further and onlynoted it in a memo.In July came the second report to the FBI s Boston office in the form of an anony-mous letter:Have you ever had occasion to look up Mr.and Mrs.Walter Gropius, Baker Bridge Road,Lincoln, Mass.? He serves on the faculty of the Harvard School of Architecture.She isone of the smartest and cleverest women I have ever met.Both are native Germans, andleaders in a set of doubtful sympathies.They may be all right, but I don t trust themaround the corner.I would be glad to give you all the help I can on this, but please do notuse my name.4741 Stephanie Barron, ed., Exiles and Emigrés.42 The following information on FBI activity relating to Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius isexcerpted from their files.See the appendix, above in this volume, for more extensive excerpts.Not all pages of the Moholy-Nagy files were released by the FBI under the Freedom of Informa-tion Act; 1943 is the earliest filing date that could be identified by the author.43 FBI file on Mies van der Rohe.The omissions in the text indicate the portions that have beenblackened out in the publicly available FBI documents.44 Information communicated by George Danforth to Dirk Lohan, late November 1991.Forwardedto the author by Lohan Associates Inc., Chicago, 21 November 1991.45 The Land Ordinance of 1785 stipulated that the territories northwest of the Ohio be laid out ona grid system with a basic unit of 6 by 6 miles.Each unit was then subdivided into 36 sections ofone square mile each.46 The identification of the people involved was made with the help of Dirk Lohan, Mies s grandsonand his successor in his Chicago office.Author s telephone conversations with Dirk Lohan on 21November 1991.Following Lohan s confirmation of his identifications with George Danforth, thepossibility was considered that the person whom Lohan had taken to be Hilberseimer could havebeen John Barney Rogers.The FBI files offer no answers to these questions: all names havebeen blackened out.47 FBI files, Walter Gropius. 182 CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING BAUHAUS ARCHITECTUREApproximately three months later, a man, again anonymously, called the same FBIoffice and stated that he had received information on an ultra-modern house in Lin-coln, near Mrs.James Storrow.Munitions, machine guns, and bombs were apparentlybeing stored in the house s cellar.The house in question, as confirmed by later policeinvestigation, belonged to Ise and Walter Gropius.The agent on duty considered the caller more or less crazy and recommendedin his report to the FBI headquarters in Washington that the matter be left alone.TheFBI director J.Edgar Hoover, however, had already received an anonymous letter ac-cusing Gropius of spying for the Third Reich while enjoying refugee status.Hooverdelegated the case to the Massachusetts State Police for further investigation.He ad-vised his Boston office to inform him, should the accusations against Gropius provetrue.The Gropius case was no longer classified as a matter of espionage but of internalsecurity. In January 1941, Boston responded to Washington with a four-page reportthat recommended closing the case on the basis of its findings.Walter Gropius, as thereport stated, was not amicably disposed toward the Axis; he and his wife were law-abiding citizens.The fact that many American-born neighbors looked on them withsuspicion was probably explained by the fact that they had little to do with other peo-ple, did not participate in the town s social life, and were responsible for the buildingof four modern houses in an old town that clung to tradition and a simpler life.Finally,their nationality made any suspicion natural.48These FBI reports reveal new prejudices against aliens. One implication isthat their otherness was not only embodied in their person, their language, and theirnationality, but also in the architecture of their house.Gropius s simple, anti-symbolicmodern house in Lincoln was ironically enough seen as representing the same NationalSocialist regime which a short time before had condemned modern architecture asun-Germanic.Measured against the indigenous American tradition, the house stoodfor cultural inferiority in the eyes of its neighbors.Their disapprobation led them toequate nationality and architectural expression, and thus to reject the person andthing as one.Once begun, both FBI files remained open, as did that of Moholy-Nagy.Fromthe mid-forties on, however, the Bauhaus immigrants were no longer placed in theNazi camp but, by a strange twist of political perceptions, came under surveillancebecause of supposed communist tendencies.49 They were thought, especially Gropius,to engage in un-American activities. Thus, in a bizarre repetition of the ThirdReich s arbitrary accusations of Bolshevism against the Bauhaus leaders, both Miesand Gropius again became targets of extreme political forces
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