Places Journal: Churches and States

Many commentators have looked to precedents that could offer some solace, especially to the histories of great buildings that had been rebuilt after fire. (On the day of the fire, the Teatro La Fenice, in Venice, tweeted in solidarity: “We burnt twice but twice we have risen from our ashes stronger. We are at your side, friends, so fear not!” 2) Here I would like to offer a largely forgotten yet remarkably suggestive historical parallel: the accidental fire that in July 1823 destroyed the immense early Christian basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura (Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls). 3 Like Notre-Dame, the fourth-century San Paolo, just south of Rome, was a holy site of the highest stature: the burial place of Saint Paul and, with St. Peter’s and the Lateran basilica, one of the three most important churches in Rome. San Paolo was also, before the fire, the biggest and best preserved church to have survived from the heroic era when Christianity, formerly outlawed, became the state religion of the late Roman Empire. [...]

The debates and commentaries that followed the two fires strike similar notes. The fire at San Paolo also occurred during a period of crisis — a long via crucis of occupation, humiliation, insult, and upheaval that had threatened the very survival of the Roman Catholic Church. The crisis had begun three decades earlier, in France, when an atheistic Revolution transformed the country traditionally known as the Church’s “eldest daughter” into its mortal enemy. In the tumultuous years that followed, Rome would endure two desecrating occupations, one pope would die in a French prison, another would be bullied into a series of enfeebling international agreements, and many church buildings in the city would be damaged or even demolished. After the fall of Napoléon, in 1814, Church leaders confronted what seemed an unrecognizable social, political, religious, and economic landscape. Catholic observance was in decline across Europe; political liberalism was ascendant; rights and privileges the Church had long enjoyed abroad were truncated or gone. The Church was collapsing financially, while the Pontifical State had become little more than a stagnant welfare state — a feudal relic surrounded by neighbors transitioning to industrial capitalism. The fire at the Roman basilica could scarcely have avoided being perceived as a supercharged metaphor. [...]

Opposition to this plan arose immediately among clerics and scholars who argued instead for an exact reconstruction of the old basilica, which came to be known as the in pristinum solution. At the time this was unprecedented. In earlier centuries new buildings had sometimes made formal references to older ones, while repairs or extensions sometimes sought to preserve harmony with an existing building. But a complete replica of a destroyed building was unheard of. 24 Valadier’s response was blunt: You cannot resuscitate the past. What is lost is lost. What had been most valuable about the old basilica, in his view, was the patina, the aura of antiquity, and that was irretrievably gone. All you could reconstitute were the mere physical forms, and these he regarded — as had most historians for centuries — as self-evidently inferior to any new design rooted in the Vitruvian classical tradition. Far better, Valadier wrote, to memorialize the destroyed basilica with a scale model, and to mount its surviving antique columns along the interior walls of a modern design that would “do honor to the 19th century.” 25 [...]

The key difference now was that the faithful would have to be persuaded to donate voluntarily to San Paolo. Accordingly, the in pristinum faction argued that a replica reconstruction would appeal far more to the ordinary faithful than would a tasteful church in the modern style. This point proved decisive for Leo XII, who longed to launch a popular Catholic revival that might heal the wounds of recent years. The fundraising drive for San Paolo became a centerpiece of that revival: an international crusade calling for obedience, sacrifice, and a cheerful spirit of Pauline devotion. Letters were circulated from Rome to be used by the clergy in making appeals at Sunday masses. What resulted was the first global fundraising drive in history. For several years, the Church collected money not only throughout Europe but also in the United States, Canada, China, the Philippines, Brazil, and Latin America. Lists of donors were published every six months in the Diario di Roma, and these were then reported in local papers from Baltimore to Tasmania — a publicity circuit which in turn fueled more donations. 48 With authority centralized in Rome and outreach extended to the hinterlands, this effort would prove to be one of the wellsprings of the great Catholic cultural and political revival that marked the second half of the 19th century. For it helped compel Rome finally to accept popular religiosity, which opened the way to the great upsurge of Marian devotion marked by the pilgrimages inaugurated at La Salette and Lourdes; the Catholic press soon expanded all over Europe, Pope Pius IX became the focus of a personality cult, and Catholic political movements gathered momentum. Catholics, in short, felt empowered as members of their Church as never before. 49

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Places Journal: The Accidental Planners

The buildings were supposed to be torn down and replaced with private apartments and offices, following the fate of other state-owned properties. But here a handful of artists staged a remarkable intervention. What began as an effort to protest Berlin’s lack of affordable housing turned into a serious plan to save the Haus der Statistik and adapt it to community needs, backed by €140 million in state funding. Now the artists are working directly with public officials, planners, and architects to lead a participatory process that will transform the area around Alexanderplatz. “It’s a huge statement about the future of development in Berlin,” said organizer Harry Sachs. If it works, it will be a model for bottom-up city-making — and a lesson in how outsiders can claim political power. [...]

The project did not actually exist, of course, but the conditions it proposed to solve were real. Teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Berlin’s government had sold off state-owned housing companies and estates to international investors. More than 110,000 public apartments went private. 3 In the years since, rising rents had forced artists and other vulnerable tenants out of their homes and workspaces. According to one tally, 350 artist studios were lost in 2014; another 500 were in danger. As evictions rippled through the city, artists formed the Alliance of Threatened Berlin Studio Houses, which agitated for tenant protections. [...]

About half of the square footage would be set aside for housing — for seniors, refugees, young families, and students. A quarter would be converted to live-work and studio spaces for artists. The rest would be dedicated to education and other cultural uses, including a new town hall for the district government. This all played out against a backdrop of social change and political turmoil, as Berliners fought to define the soul of the city. Germany was on pace to take in more than one million refugees in 2015. Activists argued that luxury real estate development was incompatible with a free and independent city that welcomed people of all generations, classes, and ethnicities. Meanwhile, rents continued to rise, and longtime residents kept getting evicted. 7 ZUsammenKUNFT spoke to a wide range of social concerns. “We were shaping it in such a way that it was difficult for a politician to say no, basically,” Sachs said. “Almost impossible. You would be saying no to public housing, no to administration, no to education, no to social infrastructure.” [...]

Opening up these spaces while planning is ongoing might seem premature, but there’s a political motivation. The project has gotten as far as it is has with the backing of the Berlin Senate, which is controlled by a coalition of the Social Democrats, Greens, and the Left Party. The next government might not be so sympathetic to this model of “co-produced city development,” Sachs said. Construction of the new buildings is expected to start in 2022, but there are elections in fall 2021, and if they go the other way, Sachs said, “It could all collapse.”

Places Journal: Confucius and Mao at the Mall

State-sponsored public art has long been woven into the urban fabric of the People’s Republic of China, but such works have proliferated in recent decades as the country has embarked on the greatest city-building binge in human history. For residents of cities like Chongqing and Shanghai, propagandistic political imagery like that in Zhang Xiang’s An Bing series has become as ubiquitous as capitalist advertisements — in fact, the two often alternate in the ads that flash across flat-screen TVs in every subway car and city bus. One minute a smiling animated sheep is beckoning viewers to dine at a local hotpot chain; the next, a computer-graphics montage shows shiny molten metal pouring into a mold and emerging as a mighty hammer and sickle that rises triumphantly over the city. At first glance, the figure on the billboard looks like a happy little boy rendered in trendy kawaii style. Look again, and he is revealed to be rosy-cheeked Lei Feng, the model soldier of Maoist propaganda, wearing his trademark winter hat with ear-flaps and toting an automatic weapon.

Mao regarded his revolution as an historic rupture. But the Party now presents its regime as a restoration, returning China to its traditional place as the world’s largest economy and most powerful state. In the last fifteen years or so, official edicts have elevated numerous philosophers and statesmen from the ages of the emperors — including Confucius and An Bing — to secular sainthood, part of a growing pre-Communist pantheon that emphasizes parallels between the wealthy and powerful Middle Kingdom that endured for millennia before Western imperialism, and the nation eclipsing the West today. The government has an ambitious ideological agenda to push and full coffers from the state-capitalist boom. For China’s artists, there’s never been more money to be made in Communist art. [...]

China’s state-backed real-estate boom and concomitant public-art boom have attained a magnitude that is difficult to fathom: Consider that between 2011 and 2013, mainland China poured more concrete than the U.S. poured in the entire 20th century. 2 And even such stunning factoids fail to capture what it’s like on the ground, firsthand. Local and regional governments are spending lavishly to establish a new kind of public space in China, marked by a disorienting hybridization of Communist, nationalist, and capitalist symbols and functions that is, by turns, futuristic and nostalgic. Even the most pedestrian-hostile, neo-Corbusian developments include some officially-zoned walkable area, typically a shopping plaza, and here developers pay de facto in-kind kickbacks to officials in the form of sycophantic public monuments. Public spaces like parks are dotted with nationalistic art sponsored by flush municipal bureaus. The aim is to unify an ever-wealthier yet increasingly unequal society, as well as to exert the soft power of unelected authorities both Communist and capitalist.[...]

So much publicly-funded art has been produced since the turn of the last century that the nation is scrambling for places to put it all; a significant portion of all that freshly-poured concrete has gone to build new palaces of culture. In 2002, China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage announced that, by 2015, it would build one thousand museums. In classic Stakhanovite fashion, this audacious central-planning goal was met — and exceeded — ahead of schedule, and by 2013, China had founded nearly fifteen hundred new galleries. At the peak of the campaign, a new museum, invariably stuffed with Socialist Realist oil paintings, was opening every single day. 5 Among the most acclaimed is the China Art Museum in Shanghai, housed in the Chinese national pavilion from Expo 2010, a massive showplace along the Huangpu river.

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Places Journal: A Fortuitous Shadow

Regionalism has long been a difficult topic, provoking ambivalence and anxiety, inextricably bound up with controversial notions of the peripheral, provincial, and parochial. This was especially true for American architects of Yeon’s generation (he was born in 1910), schooled in Emersonian self-reliance and mindful of their country’s emergence as a global superpower, yet shaped by longstanding beliefs in European cultural supremacy. Even as late as the 1950s, Americans tended to weigh their nation’s art and architecture against that of Europe, leading some to lament its derivativeness and mediocrity and others to make exaggerated claims for its originality and importance. Never was this more true than in the decades between the world wars, when tensions over the definitions and national origins of “modern architecture” became a significant part of the American intellectual atmosphere. [...]

But the internationalist impulse would prove short-lived. Consolidating its power as a cultural pace-setter, MOMA again signaled a shift when, in 1936, Holger Cahill, former acting director of the museum and new director of the Federal Art Project, announced that American artists and arts institutions were “declaring a moratorium on [their] debts to Europe and returning to cultivate [their] own garden.” One year later, MOMA trustee Nelson Rockefeller wrote to Henry-Russell Hitchcock, urging him to support more shows on American architecture. Indeed, between 1938 and 1941, 18 of the 22 exhibitions organized by the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design focused on American topics. 9 In making this shift, MOMA was reflecting and appealing to a sensibility spreading rapidly across the nation, one visible in everything from the popularization of terms like “the American Dream” and ‘”the American way of life” to the passage, in 1940, of the Alien Registration Act and the eventual detention of Japanese-American citizens in internment camps. In a turbulent era that saw multitudes grappling with economic depression and unemployment, with communism, fascism, and foreign imperialism, and with the coming of war, the U.S., like other nations, grew increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic. These attitudes quickly entered the artworld and were amplified by it. [...]

It’s notable — as the examples above suggest — that the new regionalist architecture of mid-century America was limited almost exclusively to a single building type: the free-standing, private house. Yeon’s and Belluschi’s Portland houses of the late 1930s and ’40s, for example, were called regionalist, but Belluschi’s larger-scaled skyscraper and office designs — such as the much-lauded Equitable Building of 1944 — were not. Precisely because the single-family house serves a small user group and limited range of functions, it is a prime vehicle for expressions of identity and place, freighted with cultural associations and symbolic potential. [...]

In other words, regionalist modernism was bounded more by time than by geography: it was the architecture of an era first, and of a place only second. After all, the regionalist ethos was emerging not in 1840, when months of perilous travel separated the east and west coasts and when regional distinctions were undeniable and profound, but in 1940, when the country was connected by near-instantaneous communications and ever-more rapid transportation and distribution networks. And when regionalist modernism was becoming a national “style,” a geographically broad-ranging, historically situated mode of thinking and practice.

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Places Journal: Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City

Growthmanship spread abroad, too, along with the internationalization of production, and soon growth in GDP became the most important yardstick for nations in the advanced or developing world. Slowing growth rates provoked concern, while falling numbers indicated that something was awry and that close scrutiny, even intervention, from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund was in the offing. Those who believed otherwise were not wrong; they were simply treated as dropouts from modernity. So entrenched was this orthodoxy that The Limits to Growth, the momentous 1972 Club of Rome report that concluded that current rates of industrial growth could not be sustained ecologically in the long term, was received among business and policy elites as a genuinely heretical document that had to be publicly pilloried. [...]

Top-level resistance to absorbing and acting on this information has been profound, and is often compared, with some reason, to the force of religious dogma. Looking back on decades of widely publicized and verified warnings, Dennis Meadows (one of the authors of Limits to Growth) reflected on why they “did not prompt any fundamental changes in the policies that govern growth in population or industrial activity and that are driving this planet to major ecological disruptions.” Breaking with the growth gospel, he concluded, has been equivalent to overturning a deeply rooted belief system: “Think of the Catholic Church condemning Galileo to life imprisonment for his suggestion that the universe does not revolve around the earth.” 3 [...]

Nor, despite the improvements in environmental policymaking it introduced, did the Obama administration come close to pushing an alternative to carbon-based GDP growth as the lodestone of economic policymaking. Larger federal investments in clean energy, mass transit and smart grids were dwarfed by the subsidies handed out to high-carbon industries; nor was climate change legislation accorded priority attention, not even during the long nightmare of British Petroleum’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — surely an optimal moment for any president to sue for divorce from fossil-fuel dependency. The time could not have been riper to reset industrial policy, but the will to do so was up against the stronger (and easier) belief that a return to positive short-term growth figures would be the panacea for the recession’s ills. And feeding the GDP beast meant turning away from the dictates of healthy living — good health actually equates with negative GDP because it does not lead to medical expenditures that show up as monetary exchanges. 4 [...]

In truth, and as many historians have noted, the free enterprises continued to rely on federal funding. 15 The money just flowed less directly, and, most importantly, it was channeled into and through the large corporations that used Phoenix’s secure federal ties to make it a profitable branch town. The major firms that built plants in Phoenix in the postwar era — Motorola, Honeywell, Sperry Rand, General Electric, Kaiser, Unidynamics, and AiResearch — subsisted on Cold War defense contracts, and their decisions to locate in the region were shaped by the Pentagon’s policy of decentralizing military production away from the more vulnerable East Coast population centers. In this respect, their arrival was simply an extension of the wartime production programs that had drawn Goodyear, Alcoa, and others to Phoenix’s arsenals, ordnance plants and flight training facilities in the 1940s. These firms were pillars of the military-industrial complex, and the Sunbelt, or “Gunbelt” as Ann Markusen labeled it, became its homeland. 16 At the height of the Cold War, federal income for Arizona amounted to between 16 percent and 24 percent of the state’s economy, after which there were sizable upswings during the Vietnam War and the rearmament of the Reagan years. 17

Places Journal: Socialism and Nationalism on the Danube

The Social Democrats may not have been radical but they were embattled. Even today this is evident in the architecture of the apartment blocks — the Gemeindebauten, or “municipally built” housing— that were constructed from the mid 1920s to the mid ’30s. These were not simply tenements: they were monumental tenements, stretching over entire city blocks, following the local model of the Hof-Haus, or perimeter block. In fact the Gemeindebauten were a response not only to the housing crisis but also to a more existential dilemma. What would be the identity of the city, now that it no longer ruled an immense land empire that extended from Trieste on the Adriatic to Lviv beyond the Carpathians? To the Social Democrats the answer was clear: Vienna would be a metropolis dedicated to the welfare and edification of its inhabitants, particularly the long-neglected working classes. And so over more than a decade they proceeded, through various means, especially massive taxation of the wealthy, to transform the imperial capital into a socialist city: Red Vienna.

In this light the Hofs can be understood as not merely practical but ideological. No less than Gothic churches, they are absolutely loaded with rhetoric: massive mid-rise superblocks articulated with towers, archways, loggias, and bays; embellished with bas-reliefs, tiles, metalwork, and sculptures depicting workers and worker families. The labor-intensive construction was itself an integral part of the program: a means of employing as many workers as possible. The most famous of the Gemeindebauten, Karl-Marx-Hof, looks like the architectural equivalent of a mass demonstration, with its series of arched entryways and flagpole-topped towers seeming to step arm in arm into a glorious future. Designed by Karl Ehn (a student of Otto Wagner) and opened in 1930, the building is immense — comprising 1.6 million square feet, with the main facade running for three-quarters of a mile — and accommodates an astonishing 5,000 tenants in 1,400 apartments. Yet Karl-Marx-Hof was only the largest of the 400 apartment blocks constructed by the Social Democrats during their relatively brief period in power. The clarity of purpose is powerfully evident in the focus on the collective: in the provision of generous and open courtyards and a remarkable range of shared facilities. [...]

This was surely the case in the last decades the 20th century. Although many observers argued that the fall of communism would lead to increasing convergences among the nations once divided by the Iron Curtain, in Hungary the major architectural trend of the 1990s stressed not global solidarity but national difference. That decade saw the growing prominence of the self-described school of “Organic Architects,” led by the guru-like Imre Makovecz. Starting to practice in the 1960s, but receiving few commissions until the 1980s, Makovecz, a devout Catholic, was equally anti-Soviet and anti-globalist. (He died in 2011.) He is best known for designing tent-like structures inspired by speculation about what the yurts of the Magyars, who traveled from Central Asia to Hungary sometime in the medieval era, might possibly have looked like. Over the years he created a fascinating and deeply odd style characterized by swelling, maternal domes, phallic protrusions, and anthropomorphic face-like elements. Obsessed by trees, Makovecz disdained industrial fabrication and preferred to build in wood; his celebrated design for the Hungarian pavilion at the 1992 Seville Expo, constructed in timber and containing an actual tree whose roots were visible through a glass floor, was described at the time as a “dizzy fantasy.” But above all Makovecz and his followers were driven by nationalist visions of Hungarian uniqueness; they favored an “authentic” and rural Hungary and expressed distrust for urbane and cosmopolitan Budapest. It was all clearly a reversion back to the imaginary worlds of Hungarian form that so excited Lechner and his protégés at the start of the century.

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Places Journal: The Demagogue Takes the Stage

We live today in an artwork that follows the principle of reality television, which is not that it depicts reality, but that it becomes reality. As if watching in slow motion, we see this happening as it happens. The artifice entailed, the conceit, the ruse — all are on full display. Forthright disclosure, intercut with meta-commentary by the participants, adds a mocking twist to the old avant-garde technique of breaching the “fourth wall” separating audience and actors. What results is not awakening but rather sociopathic dissociation. For if reality is what comes afterwards rather than before, then whatever remains of the distinction between art and everything else melts into air. In the all-encompassing artwork, all facts are “alternative facts” subject to the free play of imaginative association, and all truth is “fake” before its deadly blow is felt. [...]

In order to function properly, this power must stand on ground that has been made sacred as a stage. In today’s United States, this is the ground of white nationalist patriarchy, or what its stage managers euphemistically call “economic nationalism.” Its jargon includes “alt-right” code words like “tradition” and “neo-traditionalism,” often accompanied by qualifiers like “Judeo-Christian” or “European.” This is the nativist jargon of a pseudo-philosophy peddled by self-promoting, anti-intellectual imposters. As such it fortifies a mythic, white “people” against their imagined enemies, both political and economic, and implies a gendered division of labor where men produce and women reproduce. As toxic common sense, this jargon helps to construct a socio-technical theater of power that authorizes and enables patriarchal, demagogic speech acts in the first place. [...]

To access this process, we must approach Ground Zero through its most sacred building. This is not the 9/11 National Memorial, which shrunk the “sacred ground” of commemoration to a bare minimum so that profit could be maximized, or the adjacent 9/11 National Museum, which relegated public memory to a series of underground exhibition spaces; rather it is the shopping mall, or “the Oculus,” that rises above the adjacent commuter subway station. Designed by Santiago Calatrava for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Westfield Corporation, the Oculus synthesizes secular-religious tensions by honoring its Gothic sources in the breach. Its massive, top-lit nave with a see-through structural ribcage barely sublimates the architecture of the Gothic cathedral — and with it crusading Christian piety — in an orgy of consumerist branding. This apotheosis of kitsch reveals the aesthetic and political program for the entire site, which is to generate a surfeit of theological “meaning” in order that business might proceed as usual, including the business of developing real estate and the business of securing the homeland. [...]

The “economic nationalism” now emanating from the White House attempts to compensate for this perceived disenchantment by calling forth capitalism’s sublimated “spirit,” or soul. That is the function of the presidential tweet or executive order as performative speech act: to reaffirm the sanctity of the homeland and, in the process, to secure the role of the master builder who restores meaning to the desolate landscapes of imperial decline. Preeminently, neoliberalism — understood as an economic, political, and cultural system — assigns this role the real estate developer. At Ground Zero, it was the lessee of the World Trade Center, Larry Silverstein, a relatively minor New York player whose unrelenting effort to turn tragedy into profit by “rebuilding” a sacred site was recast as an epic struggle with public authorities, insurance companies, and potential tenants. On the national stage, it was another minor player in New York real estate who cast himself as an artist — or better, an architect — charged with rebuilding the nation as sacred ground: “Make America Great Again.”

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Places Journal: The Anti-Cairo

The new capital of Egypt has no residents. It doesn’t have a local source of water. It just lost a major developer, the Chinese state company that had agreed to build the first phase. You might say the planned city in the desert 45 kilometers east of Cairo doesn’t have a reason to exist. Urban planner David Sims told the Wall Street Journal, “Egypt needs a new capital like a hole in the head.”

What the project has going for it is a president who likes to talk big. Five million inhabitants big. An amusement park “four times the size of Disneyland” big. Seven hundred hospitals and clinics, 1,200 mosques and churches, 40,000 hotel rooms, 2,000 schools — that kind of big. 2 Yes, and fast, too. Standing with the Emir of Dubai beside a model of the new city, in March 2015, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi declared that construction would proceed immediately. “What are you talking about, ten years?” He turned to his housing minister. “I’m serious. We don’t work that way. Not ten years, not seven years. No way.”  [...]

The project gained momentum last fall when two Chinese state companies stepped in to replace Emirati developers who had backed out the year before. Now one of the Chinese deals has fallen through, which means the financial risk falls to the Egyptian government and local contractors. 5 That’s a heavy burden for a country on the brink of economic collapse, propped up by foreign aid from gulf states and stringent loans from the International Monetary Fund. 6 And yet, plans for the new capital are advancing, shrouded in bombast and uncertainty. TV reports show pipe being laid, earth moved, apartment blocks rising on the windswept desert. The housing ministry says more than 17,000 units are nearly finished and sales will start next month. 7 [...]

The unofficial truth is that the government finds it easier to finance blank-slate development and promote real-estate speculation in the desert than to invest in infrastructure that would serve the urban majority. There are no plans to build new metro lines or extend services to the city’s informal neighborhoods, the ashwaiyat where more than half the population lives, in tightly-packed brick buildings separated by dirt alleys. Instead, there are PowerPoint presentations of spacious, green, “modern” neighborhoods from which all of Cairo’s governance problems — and most of its population — have been scrubbed clean. [...]

As Mohamed Elshahed wrote in Places in the midst of that revolution, Egyptians discovered “that their fight for democracy [was] inseparably linked to their ability to assemble in urban space.” 15 But if the people knew this, the authorities knew it too. As protests continued after Mubarak’s ouster, the military surrounded Tahrir with barriers and checkpoints, enormous cinder-block walls that cut off entire streets. The subway station was closed for years. After Sisi came to power, there was a fierce crackdown on public expression throughout the capital. Authorities forbid demonstrations, shut down street theater and outdoor concerts, erased graffiti, raided cafés, and harassed cultural venues such as art galleries and publishing houses — anywhere that people (particularly young people) might congregate.

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Places Journal: Hitler at Home

It was in the spring of 1932, in the midst of presidential elections, that the National Socialists discovered the publicity value of Adolf Hitler’s private life. The electoral campaign pitted Hitler, then leader of the second-largest political party in Germany, against Paul von Hindenburg, the elderly incumbent revered by Germans as the war hero of Tannenberg, and the Communist leader Ernst Thälmann. On March 13, German voters returned a strong lead of over seven million votes for Hindenburg, throwing the National Socialists, who had expected Hitler to be swept into the presidency, into despair. 1 Hindenburg’s failure to win an absolute majority, however, led to a runoff election the following month, and in the period between the two presidential elections the Nazis seized on a new representational strategy. 2 Although Hitler would lose the next round, the campaign, along with the worsening economic crisis, increased his support among the German people by over two million votes, to a third of the electorate. 3 Having proved its broad appeal, the image of the private Führer would become a staple of National Socialist propaganda until the start of World War II.

The coming out of the Führer’s personal life marked a distinct departure from earlier National Socialist publicity, which had focused on Hitler’s role as agitator of the masses and leader of a militant political movement. In the runoff election, the need to cast a wider net pushed Nazi Party propaganda toward a celebration of their candidate’s personal attributes. Hitler’s youth and dynamism, epitomized by his much-advertised campaign flights across Germany, became a selling point. Against the aura of aristocratic dignity that clung to the remote, eighty-four-year-old Hindenburg, the Nazis offered the modernity and glamour of a candidate who took to the skies to meet face-to-face with the German people. More daringly, Nazi publicists brought Hitler’s private life into the limelight to emphasize his moral and human character and thereby win over the bourgeois voters and women who earlier had overwhelmingly supported Hindenburg. [...]

Germans knew that Hitler was an extreme anti-Semite, convicted traitor, and leader of a paramilitary force of violent street brawlers. How, then, did Schirach and Hoffmann manage their remarkable reinvention? In short, with an appeal to values rather than to ideology. Hitler was described as a man of Spartan habits and great self-discipline: “It is hardly known that Hitler is a NON-DRINKER, NON-SMOKER, and VEGETARIAN,” Schirach exclaimed in the foreword. “Without imposing his ways in the slightest on others, including those in his immediate circle, he adheres strictly to his own rules for living.” 8 Schirach reinforced this in his captions. “This is how the ‘fat cat’ lives!,” one declared sarcastically under an image of a tired-looking Hitler at the end of a seemingly modest meal. “Marxist liars,” it continued, “tell workers that Hitler revels in champagne and beautiful women. In reality, Hitler does not drink a drop of alcohol! (Hitler is also a nonsmoker.)”

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Places Journal: What If, America

Artist and urban planner Neil Freeman has been redrawing the United States for years. His “Electoral College Reform Map” imagined 50 states with equal population, where a vote in Mendocino counts the same as a vote in Muskogee. Last month, he released “Random States of America,” a bonkers tool that generates a new electoral map each time you click, mashing up actual voting results with arbitrary state borders. On some maps, Hillary Clinton wins with 320 electors; on others, she loses with 220. Randomness reigns. If you need further persuasion that we should elect a president by national popular vote, you’ll find it here.

But let’s not get too far from reality. I reached out to Freeman and asked him to calculate who would win the 2016 election if the states were redrawn under plausible scenarios. Call it the Random-But-Realistic-(Hey-This-Kinda-Makes-Sense!) States of America. For inspiration, we looked at maps that use big data like phone calls and commute flows to draw state borders that reflect the way Americans live today.

Here are the electoral colleges that could have been.

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