At age 26, he collaborated in curating MoMA’s landmark 1932 show, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922.” This groundbreaking exhibition introduced Americans to masters of modern European architectural style, such as Walter Gropius and Berlin’s Bauhaus school and the French master Le Corbusier, along with a few American practitioners, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and Raymond Hood. His way of speaking, of thinking-that quickness and vibration” brought him many friends, wide attention, and early success.Ĭonsumed by the idea then foreign to most Americans that architecture and design were fine arts in their own right, he used his personal funds to establish the new Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture, making it the first major American museum to exhibit contemporary architecture and design. He was wildly impatient, could not sit down. Margaret Scolari Barr, the wife of the influential art historian Alfred Barr, Johnson’s mentor and the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, recalled him in the period as “handsome, always cheerful, pulsating with new ideas and hopes. He had a coruscating, arrogant wit, and relished table talk and wicked gossip about art and ideas and the people who made them. “Crescendo and Climax”Īrticulate and passionate about anything modern, new, artful, and monumental, Johnson was stunningly creative, socially incandescent, and passionately opinionated on all matters of taste. He had thrown himself wholly into the Fascist cause. His reactions were as different from Shirer’s as night from day: Shirer’s nightmare scene was, for Johnson, a Utopian fantasy come true. He had encountered Hitler’s spellbinding rhetoric even before Hitler became Germany’s leader. Like Shirer, he had watched the Third Reich rise as a relentlessly aggressive military power. began keeping on Johnson, which traced his activities throughout the 1930s in some detail, “From a source considered reliable, it was reported that Johnson was feted by the German authorities in charge of the press correspondents visiting the Polish front, and that the Germans were quite solicitous about his welfare.”įor Philip Johnson, following the German army as it wiped out the last resisters in Poland seemed like living within a dream-in his case, a very happy dream.

According to a memo in the dossier the F.B.I. They had reason to fear this flighty, off-putting American who seemed uncomfortably close to their German Propaganda Ministry minders. The reporters in the pool felt an intense dislike for the talkative and frenetic Johnson, already among the most prominent evangelizers for modernism in architecture, though not yet among the most famous architects in the world. Despite the two men’s similar ages and American pasts, their shared love for Europe, and the overseas camaraderie war reporters might normally enjoy, “none of us can stand the fellow,” Shirer noted in a diary entry. The German Propaganda Ministry had forced him to share a room with another American correspondent, Philip Cortelyou Johnson. Although normally most at ease in the company of his many reporter friends, Shirer was dismayed by his assigned traveling companion.

But something about the press pool he was traveling with disturbed him in a different way. Shirer was sickened and horrified by what he saw. He had refused the offer of a German helmet, he wrote in his secret notes, finding it “repellent” and “symbolic of brute German force.” The battle was too far off to spot individual fighters, but he could see the Polish positions and that the Germans had surrounded them on three sides and cut off escape with their artillery fire on the fourth. Shirer surveyed the front along a ridge two miles distant-“where the killing was going on,” he told American listeners in a broadcast a few days later.

From the German command post on a Gdansk hilltop, the journalist William L. In early September 1939, the press contingent racing after the German army as it invaded Poland reached the final battleground on the Baltic Sea.

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