0 Nonconformity and New England Conscience
1Fuller is temperamentally as well as intellectually a nonconformist, although he would maintain, perhaps soundly, that his apparent revolts are genuine conformities—but to broader patterns than those standardized in schools, politics, and industry. It would never occur to him to criticize the law of gravity, or to assume that the angles of a Euclidean triangle added up to more or less than 180°. But the world into which he was born appeared to him to lack this logical validity. And in such a world, like Robin Hood, his childhood hero, he has been traditionally against the impracticality of shortsighted, ‘‘practical’’ tradition.
2 An exception, perhaps, is his feeling about his ancestry. For many generations his ancestors were New England nonconformists, so much so that within the Fuller family it is conformity itself which is nonconformist.
3 Fuller’s great, great, great, great grandfather, Lt. Thomas Fuller of the British Navy, was born on the Isle of Wight and, in 1630, came to this country on a furlough, his curiosity piqued by the Puritan excitement. In New England he was infected by the freedom fever; and there he remained. His grandson, the Rev. Timothy Fuller, Harvard Class of 1760, was a Massachusetts delegate to the Federal Constitutional Assembly. He refused to vote for ratification because the drafted Constitution did not prohibit slavery, as he felt it should.
4 His son, the Hon. Timothy, bom in 1778, was a founder of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club. As a penalty for his part in a student revolt, he was graduated second, instead of first, in the Harvard class of 1801.
5 Fuller’s grandfather, the Rev. Arthur Buckminster Fuller, Harvard, Class of 1840, was an ardent abolitionist. Although he was minister of the First Unitarian Church of Boston and Chaplain of the Fifth Massachusetts Regiment, in the Civil War he led a successful Union charge across the bridge of boats at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and in this combat was shot dead. Fuller’s father, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Sr., Harvard, Class of 1883, was a Boston merchant-importer, the only Fuller in eight generations who had not been either minister or lawyer.
6 His great-aunt, Margaret Fuller, was the famous feminist, author, editor, and conversationalist, sometimes listed in histories as the ‘‘high priestess of Transcendentalism.’’ She was a pioneer champion of women’s rights. She was a friend of Emerson’s, and with him founded The Dial, the literary journal she edited, and which first published the work of Emerson and Thoreau. When Horace Greeley established the New York Tribune, she became the Tribune’s literary editor. Her column, always centrally positioned on the paper’s first page, was a catalytic American force. In it, Margaret Fuller consistently disparaged the tendency of Americans to imitate European creative styles; she championed genius of expression wherever it was to be found. Always an individualist, she stood aloof from the cooperative social experiment of her friend, Bronson Alcott, the community organization known as Brook Farm. ‘‘Why bind oneself to a doctrine?’’ she asked. ‘‘A man should stand unpledged, unbound.’’
7 Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jr., was bom in Milton, Mass., in 1895. He went to public school in Milton, later to Milton Academy. Ultimately he was enrolled at Harvard, representing the fifth generation of Fullers, in direct father-to-son line, to be listed in the college’s rosters.
8 He learned at an early age that the teachers lacked satisfactory answers to all the questions he had to ask. One day, for example, the geometry teacher attempted to explain the basic definitions. She put a point on the blackboard, then rubbed it out. ‘‘A point,’’ she said, ‘‘does not exist—it has no dimensions.’’ She then drew a line. ‘‘A line,’’ she continued, ‘‘is made up of points but there are no lines.’’ Bucky looked at her wide-eyed as she defined a plane in terms of parallel lines. His eyes opened wider when she announced that no planes exist. The final blow was her presentation of the cube. ‘‘A cube,’’ she said, ‘‘is a solid stack of square planes whose edges are equal.’’
9 ‘‘I have some questions,’’ Fuller said, raising his hand. ‘‘How long has the cube been there? How long is it going to be there? How much does it weigh? And what is its temperature?’’
10 For a short space Fuller was at Harvard. In the middle of his freshman year, when time came for the mid-year exam, he felt he had enough. He cut his exams, took a train to New York, looked up a girl he knew in the chorus of the current show at the Winter Garden. He also looked at the chorus line from backstage. Then with the gesture of a suave boulevardier he said, ‘‘I would like all of you to be my guests for dinner.’’
11 He entertained lavishly at Churchill’s, then one of New York’s most fashionable and expensive restaurants. When the waiter presented the check, which ran into bankers’ figures, Fuller signed his name with a grand flourish and said, authoritatively, ‘‘Charge this to my family’s account.’’
12 When Fuller returner to Cambridge, he found that his presence at the university was somewhat less than grata. The following week the Fuller family made arrangements to have Bucky work as an apprentice millwright in a cotton mill at Sherbrooke, Quebec.
13 Bucky was contrite. He plunged deep into the world of machines and mechanics, studied well, taking what he called ‘‘a self-tutored course of engineering exploration.’’ He emerged an enthusiastic technician.
14 The following year, 1914, an appeased family succeeded in having him re-admitted to Harvard. But Fuller was still an unregenerate anti-academician. After a short period he was again dismissed, this time for what was called ‘‘continued irresponsibility and lack of interest in the formal curriculum of the college.’’ He then went to work for Armour and Company in New York, starting as a meat lugger. In two years he had become an assistant cashier. Meanwhile World War I had begun. Fuller made several attempts to enlist in the Army and was rejected because of his eyesight. In 1917, however, he found the Navy less critical; he was accepted and immediately assigned to active service. A few months later he married Anne Hewlett, the eldest daughter of James Monroe Hewlett, a well-known architect and mural painter, later a director of the American Academy at Rome.
15 The Navy years for Fuller were both strenuous and pivotal. They gave him a first-hand experience with problems of survival, with the uncompromising terms of the sea, the cold, and the wind; they gave him a glimpse of the technology required to keep men alive in the face of a hostile environment. The dangers, in turn, provided a challenge to his ingenuity. His first action was as commander of a crash-boat flotilla; and while on this assignment he was witness to deaths which occurred to seaplane pilots when the planes, coming in for a landing at sea, porpoised and tripped over their own pontoons, pinning the belted-in pilot, head downward, to drown. Fuller’s first invention to see service was a combination mast, boom and grappling gear which, installed on his crash boats, made lightning rescue possible. Seaplanes were hoisted from the sea while their pilots were still alive.
16 As a reward for this contribution to the service’s technology, Fuller was given a special appointment to the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he continued his limited formal education.
17 Fuller found no resistance in his mind to Naval studies for the simple reason that to him ships and shipping were in direct contact with realities. A ship at sea does not survive unless it is designed to meet forces as they are; and the study of these forces was to Fuller a discipline that justified itself. (‘‘Every ship designer knows what it means to shunt winds, tides, tension and compression to human advantage.’’)
18 When the war ended, Fuller returned to Armour and Company as assistant export manager (1919--1922). There was a brief stint as national account sales manager of the Kelley-Springfield Truck Company, which went out of business. Then, still in 1922, Fuller, with his father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett, founded the Stockade Building System, a company manufacturing a new fibrous building block formed from a material later acquired by the Celotex Company and manufactured by them as Soundex, a flat- packed fibrous acoustical wall material. Fuller’s Stockade organization eventually operated five factories and constructed 240 buildings. The walls of the Field Building at the University of Illinois are made of Fuller’s blocks.
19 ‘‘That was when I really learned the building business,’’ he claims. ‘‘And the experience made me realize that craft building—in which each house is a pilot model for a design which never has any runs—is an art which belongs in the middle ages. The decisions in craft-built undertakings are for the most part emotional—and are based on methodical ignorance.’’
20 In 1922, the year the company was started, Fuller’s first daughter, Alexandra, died at the age of four—after suffering in sequence influenza, polio, and spinal meningitis, illnesses which were epidemic during the war. Her death brought on a crisis in Fuller’s life. He sank into a depression. He lost all taste for ordinary living, all interest in ordinary values. It seemed to him then, as today, that money cannot buy anything of basic importance, and that conventional success has no meaning except as a sop to vanity.
21 In time, however, he lost control of the management of the company. Fuller had been a minority stockholder; when Hewlett, faced with financial problems, in 1927, found it necessary’ to sell his stock, the buyers set up a new management. ‘‘Mr. Fuller,’’ the management said, ‘‘we find your services no longer essential.’’ The same year, Allegra, a second daughter, was born.
22 Fuller was stranded in Chicago, without income, dismayed, confused. His illusions about the logic and reasonableness of business operations were dispelled; the business men he had dealt with seemed unconcerned about the values he regarded as fundamental. ‘‘I was dismayed at the corruptibility and contradiction of the complex dogma that I had coped with,’’ he said, ‘‘under the inspiration that a better construction system would, if industrially developed and demonstrated, thereby induce a spontaneous and simple acceptance. But what I had learned was that the advantages are dissipated in a multitude of windmill battles with contiguous inertias, ignorance, and irrelevant ambitions.’’ He decided, however, to make a final effort to hold his ground in both place and principle. He moved with his wife and new baby to a cheap, Northwest Side Chicago tenement.
23 It is characteristic of Fuller, when in distress, to focus critically on his own behavior patterns, rather than on the behavior of others. To blame others for difficulties or for failures, no matter how much the blame may seem to be warranted by fact, he regards as a dissipation of creative and critical activity, a negative gesture. His own ways could be analyzed, amended, redirected; the ways of others were constants given by the environment; over these he had no direct control. In this 1927 moment he was overwhelmed by what he considered his ‘‘manifold ineptitudes.’’ He had been blindly enthusiastic in his special credo; he had been naive in his assumption that his business associates were also shareholders in his dedication. ‘‘I looked in dismay,’’ he said, ‘‘at my pattern of vulnerability. I had not been vicious; yet, even to myself, I appeared, in retrospect, a black, horrendous mess. I had wanted to give, not take, but I seemed to have converted the opportunities to give into negative waste.’’
24 In the tenement district where the Fullers now lived their next door neighbor was an Al Capone trigger man. When Mrs. Fuller carried trash to the incinerator, he gallantly assisted with the load, guns ever bristling from his armpit holsters. The environment symbolized Fuller’s mood. This was a lower depths period; the surroundings were in harmony with desperation. Fuller weighed the thought of sending his wife and child back to New York to stay with his or her family. If he did this, he could quietly do away with himself. He felt himself close to suicide. He concluded, finally, that there was only one reason not to. ‘‘Bucky,’’ he said to himself, ‘‘you’ve had many more industrial, scientific and social experiences than most of your steadier contemporaries. And if these experiences are put in order, they might be of use to others. Through them you might be able to discern and design environment controlling mechanics and structures that would provide spontaneously travelled bridges for mankind, which completely span the canyons of pain into which you have gropingly fallen. Whether you care to be or not, you are the custodian of a vital resource.’’
25 Yet Fuller was aware that ideas and conclusions have no social importance unless they are transformed into tangible entities. ‘‘I realize then,’’ he said, ‘‘that if I were going to turn these experiences to account, I must utilize them. They had to be organized, translated into forms people could see, feel, operate, and understand; they had to be realized technically. And the translation was for me a mortal affair.’’