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Graceland Cemetery and the Getty tomb remind us of the responsibility the living bear to the dead—and to our democratic inheritance.

The philanthropists and barons of industry who helped make Chicago the jewel of America’s Gilded Age are buried in Graceland Cemetery. A few blocks west of Lake Michigan, just north of Wrigley Field, and beneath the groan of elevated train tracks, this cemetery is a 120-acre oasis where the public may walk among the tombs of those dead whose personal vision and private wealth once turned a sleepy prairie settlement into a thriving hub for business and culture.

As urban populations increased in the early 19th century, traditional church graveyards exceeded capacity. Inspired by the English garden movement, American urban planners designed garden cemeteries like Graceland as civic institutions for public enjoyment. Upon obtaining its first charter in 1837, Chicago adopted a motto: urbs in horto, or a “city in a garden.” Graceland, founded in 1860, might be considered hortus in urbo, or a “garden in a city.” Today, Graceland remains a faithfully maintained arboretum and historic landmark.

The august architectural composition of the graves recalls the stature of the lives they commemorate. Impressive tombs of varying style and scale memorialize impressive contributions to the city. The layout of the cemetery is like a microcosm of Chicago’s cityscape.

Some residents have the equivalent of apartments: modest yet sturdy headstones grounded in the earth. Others have town houses: rows of mausoleums built into hillsides or tucked into a cul-de-sac. Obelisks rise like skyscrapers here and there, while the Palmers—moguls of merchandising, real estate, and art patronage—occupy stately waterfront property. Sheltered beneath a classical sepulcher supported by twenty-four ionic columns, Potter and Beatrice Palmer’s twin sarcophagi overlook Willomere Lake from the crest of a grassy knoll. Across a wooden bridge, beaux-art architect and city planner Daniel Burnham and family rest on a private island. At dusk, resident foxes leave their dens to prance across the bridge and lap at placid waves.

Many of these mausoleums emit an austere aura of “approach me—if you dare!” However, one tomb vibrates with a warm invitation for each visitor to draw near and to marvel. This is the Getty Tomb.

Built in 1890, the family tomb was commissioned by lumber baron Henry Harrison Getty for the burial of his wife, Carrie Eliza Getty. The architect charged with the work was Louis Henri Sullivan. Sullivan’s student Frank Llyod Wright dubbed the tomb “entirely Sullivan’s own, a piece of sculpture, a statue, a great poem.”

Even without internalizing the geographical layout of the cemetery, upon arriving at the Getty Tomb, the pedestrian is overcome with a sense of arriving at the apex of his journey. Set apart on its own plot of earth triangulated between intersecting paths, the tomb exudes confidence amid opposing forces. Stately yet modest, ornate without being ostentatious, both classical and cutting-edge, the tomb is alive with the spirit of democracy arrived freshly to the Great Plains.

Octagonal stars dapple the face of the mausoleum. A squat and sturdy arch rests atop bronze gates of lacey metalwork that combine powerful curves with fractal foliage. What could have simply been a hulking limestone rhombohedron is rather an expression of firm yet delicate proportion and ornament. “Form ever follows function,” was the “universal truth” which governed Sullivan’s work.

Sullivan saw a correlation between the spirit of democracy and the “national style” of the American people. The ascendant designer had been a student of steel architects and engineers Henry Hobson Richardson, Dankmar Adler, and William LeBaron Jenney (a trustee of Graceland). Sullivan, who went on to start his own firm, pioneered an American style of architecture for skyscrapers and commercial department stores. While the correspondence between form and function is universal, that of an industrial building differs from that of the tomb of an industrialist.

Given the sensitive nature of Sullivan’s personal writings and public speeches, it is not difficult to imagine the practical engineer guiding his work on the Getty Tomb with such philosophical questions as: What responsibility do the living have to the dead? How can art reflect a life well-lived? In what way does a philanthropic American life help to fulfill the greater project of democracy?

It is, however, difficult to imagine an architect today posing such nebulous questions before a professional audience. Sullivan was a heterodox thinker in his own time. Before the Western Association of Architects, he presented a series of prose poems from his collection, “Nature and Poet.” In his book Kindergarten Chats Sullivan taught elemental lessons of architecture to a fictionalized pupil through a didactic dialogue reminiscent of Rousseau’s Emile. Like Rousseau, Sullivan emphasized the primacy of nature. Beginning Sullivan’s discourse with a reference to Walt Whitman, the teacher announces to his pupil:

“The ‘good gray poet’ says: ‘Nature neither hastens nor delays.’ So let us neither hasten nor delay, but go forward little by little, step by step. I shall not seek to instruct you or reconstruct you. I shall seek, only, to persuade the faculties which nature gave you at birth, and which, now are partly shriveled, to revivify, to send out new roots, to grow, to expand, and to bring forth as nature intended.”

The potency of nature’s connection with art is reflected in Sullivan’s memoir The Autobiography of an Idea, in which he recounts a childhood spent outdoors experimenting with hydroengineering by making dams and discerning the order of the universe by admiring the sunrise above hilly slopes.

As Sullivan’s ideas matured, he developed the conviction that art bears a responsibility to democracy. Through his work, Sullivan sought to reflect and embolden the spirit of democratic inheritance. In an 1894 address to the American Institute of Architects titled “Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual, A Study in Subjective and Objective,” Sullivan encouraged and chided his peers: 

“Think, as we stand here, no, in a new land, a Promised Land that at last is ours, think how passionately latent, how marvelous to contemplate is America, our country. Think that here destiny has decreed there shall be enacted the final part in the drama of man’s emancipation — the redemption of his soul! […] Summoned to answer before an enlightened judgment seat, how shall we now give other, alas, than a wretched accounting of our stewardship?”

If Sullivan was disappointed with the stewardship of art as a means of invigorating democracy in his time, it is humbling to imagine his likely assessment of our present state of affairs. Today, the creation of public institutions like Graceland that use art to consecrate history and to inspire future works is too often a neglected priority. Commemorative edifices under construction today, such as the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, lack the elegant combination of tradition and innovation of the Getty Tomb, but instead emulate a utilitarian brutalism evocative of some genuine conviction which has crept into today’s national outlook.

Defining a national style, acknowledged Sullivan in his 1885 in speech “Characteristics and Tendencies of American Architecture,” consists of a give-and-take between artists and the general public:

“On us rests partially the responsibility, and partially on the public. We have at times individually sought to lead the public, when we more wisely should have followed it; and have, as a body, often followed, when, with beneficent results we could have led. While we may compromise for a time, through a process of local adaptation, no architectural style can become a finality, that runs counter to popular feeling. The desire at once to follow and to lead the public should be the initial attitude of our profession toward the formation of a national style.”

This entreaty invites us to examine the responsibility of the public today toward refining the national style. And, in turn, to examine the responsibility of not only architects of buildings and artifacts, but also that responsibility of the philanthropists and entrepreneurs who are the architects of social institutions and culture.

As for the public, the common trend is to blame rather than exalt those who use their personal vision and private wealth to invest in society. A stringent anti-capitalist strain leads some to assume that if an individual has the means to promote his own vision, that he must have acquired those means through exploitation or repression of others. Granted, behind every executive is a team of workers whose contributions must be acknowledged. For every Philip Armour, the Chicago meatpacking executive responsible for the city’s reputation as “hog butcher for the world,” there are slaughterhouses full of unnamed butchers whose labor ought to be remembered. Yet, if our culture hesitates to have high expectations for the praise and honor of philanthropists of renown, how much lower are our expectations for the everyman?

In 21st century America there has been an unprecedented preference for cremation, including a trending interest in having one’s remains become fertilizer for trees, reports anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy. Whatever one determines the appropriate burial for oneself or one’s loved ones, these trends suggest a cultural shift in the American outlook towards the significance of death and how we remember the dead.

In Sophocles’ 5th century tragedy Antigone, the heroine is sentenced to death by tyrant Creon for performing sacred burial rites on her deceased brother whom Creon outlawed from burial after declaring him a traitor to the regime. Antigone proclaims at line 450 that it would be better for her to die than to leave her own brother without proper burial:

“[The laws of the gods, unwritten and unshakable]

Are not for now and yesterday, but live

Forever; no one knows when they appeared. […]
I say that meeting with this death will bring

No pain at all to me. But if I let my brother,

born of my mother, lie dead and unburied, that

would cause me pain, but this does not.
And if you think I’ve acted foolishly,
maybe I’m being charged with folly by a fool.”

From Antigone’s plea, there is a lesson for philanthropists: invest in the remembrance of the dead and of history as a duty to oneself and one’s fellow members of society. Civic institutions like Graceland Cemetery are an enduring reminder of our responsibility toward invigorating our national style and of our democratic inheritance.