One thing we know about Donald Trump: He has no patience with little plans.
“Most people think small,” he wrote in “Art of the Deal” with co-author Tony Schwartz, “because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning.”
Trump also wrote: “I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”
Arguably, Trump’s approach to just about everything hangs on four personal convictions: Create (and broadcast) your own reality; always show toughness; never back down; and — perhaps most importantly — always go big.
Well, maybe. Nothing wrong with pursuing big ideas, but perhaps Trump could learn a thing or two from looking at the example of one of Chicago’s premier architects and city planners of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Daniel Burnham.
Burnham’s big thinking transformed the built environment of our city and reshaped land and cityscapes across the country and around the world, from the National Mall in Washington to a summer capital in the Philippines.
In fact, it was Burnham who first, and most memorably, gave us the credo that has inspired Trumpian big thinkers everywhere. “Make no little plans,” he’s reported to have said. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
He said this in the context of his Plan of Chicago, the landmark document that represented one of the earliest attempts to make comprehensive city planning — with lots of bulldozing and demolishing and rebuilding and reshaping — an accepted part of governance in the modern American city.
Many grand plans ‘will not be realized’
So Trump could easily look to Burnham as a kindred spirit in the realm of making big things happen, full speed ahead.
But not so fast. What else does Burnham say right after his most famous quote? He says many of those grand not-so-little plans “probably themselves will not be realized.”
What? But Mr. Burnham, if the plans won’t be realized, why make them?
It turns out that Burnham had plenty of modesty and restraint in his clarion call for thinking big. It’s just that for over 100 years people didn’t fully understand what he meant by making “no little plans.”
For a long time, scholars struggled to find a definitive source for the statement. In the 1950s, Henry H. Saylor, an eminent editor of architectural publications, even wrote an academic journal article titled “ ’Make No Little Plans’: Daniel Burnham Thought It, But Did He Say It?”
The conclusion? Maybe he said it, but who knows where and in what context? The most likely source was a speech given in London in 1910, but in the official transcript, “make no little plans” was nowhere to be seen.
Then, in 2019, Chicago tour guide and history buff Adam Selzer found a transcription of several key segments of the speech in a 1910 issue of the Chicago Record-Herald. The piece was titled “Stirred by Burnham, Democracy Champion.” And, sure enough, Burnham did say the famous phrase. And more.
Think big, seek agreement
As the headline indicates, the speech itself was not just about refusing to settle for little plans; it was about making significant change in a democracy, specifically — in city planner Burnham’s case — how to actively reimagine “a city of the future under a Democratic government.” The only way to do it? Actively seek agreement and public buy-in. Emphasize the “demos” in democracy.
Once Burnham’s big plans were crystallized in the Plan of Chicago, he knew many parts of the plan would lie dormant for years, decades or longer. But there they would be, waiting to be reawakened and reinvigorated when the time might be right and the public felt the need or the benefit. He wasn’t in a hurry. He would take what he could get.
And the results were impressive. After Burnham’s death in 1912, his friends and associates managed to accomplish a great deal with public support — building the DuSable Bridge, widening and extending North Michigan Avenue into today’s Magnificent Mile, building the double-decker Wacker Drive, expanding and refining green spaces around the city, to name just a few.
To this day, many parts of the plan remain undone, incomplete, replaced or forever out of the mix.
The lesson for Trump? Take the wins. Listen to stakeholders. Seek public support, patiently and deliberately. Absorb the losses, comforting yourself with the possibility that, if your plans really are good and beneficial, they may be revived long after you have vanished from the scene. Make no little plans, sure, but make good ones — democratically — that the public will actually embrace, now or in the future.
Trygve Thoreson is an emeritus professor of English and humanities at Harper College in Palatine. He is the author of the recently published book “Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan: Personal Histories of Two Icons of American Architecture.”