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March 20, 2018

These horrifying ‘human zoos’ delighted American
audiences at the turn of the 20th century

timeline.com/human-zoo-worlds-fair-7ef0d0951035

Shoshi Parks
Anthropologist turned freelance writer on history, travel and culture.
http://www.shoshiparks.net

Mar 19

‘Specimens’ were acquired from Africa, Asia, and the Americas
by deceptive human traffickers

A group of Philippine “Head-Hunters” on display at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. (Jessie
Tarbox Beals/Missouri Historical Society)

More than 20 million people attended the 1904 World’s Fair. They came to St. Louis to see

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https://timeline.com/human-zoo-worlds-fair-7ef0d0951035

https://timeline.com/@shoshiparks?source=post_header_lockup

https://timeline.com/@shoshiparks?source=post_header_lockup

electricity for the first time, to hear the first telephone, and to witness around 3,000 “savages”
from Africa, Asia, and the Americas living in “displays” that resembled their native villages. In
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Western world was desperate to see the “savage,”
“primitive” peoples described by explorers and adventurers scouting out new lands for colonial
exploitation. To feed the frenzy, thousands of indigenous individuals from Africa, Asia, and the
Americas were brought to the United States and Europe, often under dubious circumstances,
to be put on display in a quasi-captive life in “human zoos.”

These indigenous men, women, and children were brought to the fair to perform their
“backwards,” “primitive” culture for eager American masses who could leave feeling a renewed
sense of racial superiority. Due to poor record-keeping, backroom dealing, and the huge
number of colonial governments involved, it’s impossible to know the exact number of those
who participated in “human zoos,” but it’s not small. In his 1908 autobiography, Carl
Hagenbeck, a human rarities agent, bragged that during a ten-year period, he — alone — 
brought more than 900 indigenous people to the U.S. and Europe for exhibition.

timeline.com
At the fair, the indigenous people on display faced a number of challenges over the eight long
months of their stay. African tribal members were required to wear traditional clothing intended
for the equatorial heat, even in freezing December temperatures, and Filipino villagers were
made to perform a seasonal dog-eating ritual over and over to shock the audience. A lack of
drinking water and appalling sanitary conditions led to rampant dysentery and other illnesses.
Two “performers” died on the fairgrounds that season, Filipinos whose bodies still reside at the
Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. Others, including kindergartners from Arizona’s
Pima Indian tribe, were shipped home at the first sign of sickness — what happened after their
return was not the fair’s concern.

In most cases, there were no bars to keep those in human zoos from escaping, but the vast
majority, especially those brought from foreign continents, had nowhere else to go. Set up in
mock “ethnic villages,” indigenous people were asked to perform typical daily tasks, show off
“primitive” skills like making stone tools, and pantomime rituals. In some shows, indigenous
performers engaged in fake battles or tests of strength.

Human rarities agents, the men who acquired human “specimens” for circuses, expositions,
and other events in the West, were essential middlemen feeding this popular form of
entertainment. Some agents were religious men who had begun their work as missionaries, or
early anthropologists who lived in and studied distant communities. Others were entrepreneurs
who sought to capitalize on the public’s desire to gawk and objectify. All, to some degree, were
human traffickers.

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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15908856-human-zoos

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011596958

https://timeline.com/help-us-tell-historys-neglected-stories-and-create-a-better-future-c35768541798

Carl Hagenbeck was a prominent supplier of human specimens. (Library of
Congress)

Human zoos were most prevalent between the 1870s and World War I, but the
practice began soon after the invention of the modern circus in London in the
1770s. By the 1830s and ’40s, there was an increasing “preoccupation with man
being placed in a threatening position,” Fred Dahlinger Jr., curator of circus history at the John
and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, told Timeline. Like the inclusion of rare beasts from foreign
lands, human zoos and other displays of indigenous peoples offered audiences a hierarchical
narrative of race where the West triumphed over “uncivilized” cultures. Lion tamers
overpowered big cats — and white men wrangled dark-skinned, “primitive” people who could be
labeled as cannibals or vicious savages to clueless Americans encountering them for the first
time.

Hagenbeck, as well as Barnum & Bailey Circus recruiter Robert A. Cunningham,
anthropologist Frederick Starr, and, perhaps most famously, South Carolina minister turned
trafficker Samuel Phillips Verner, created lucrative careers trafficking in “savages” for human
zoos.

Despite questionable practices, however, not all of the men and women who performed in
human zoos and traveling shows were coerced. Some participated willingly, even zealously, in
theatrical and cultural performances. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, for example, provided
Lakota Sioux activists like Chief Sitting Bull and Luther Standing Bear with the opportunity to
appeal directly to American and European audiences regarding the oppression of their
communities. The introductions to world leaders and international acclaim that Standing Bear
achieved in his travels with Buffalo Bill eventually led to his participation in the passage of the
Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which emphasized Indian self-determination over the
plundering and assimilation of Indian lands and communities advocated by the 1887 Dawes
Act.

Most indigenous people brought to the West, in fact, would have had some agency in their
decision, University of Missouri at St. Louis professor of anthropology Susan Brownell told
Timeline. By the late 19th century, slavery was illegal, and most colonial governments would
have been wary of anything that recalled the practice. “On the surface it all looked legal,” she
says, though it’s unlikely that future performers fully understood what would be expected of
them across the ocean.

“Some of the agents were scrupulous, and some of them were real shits and left people,” says
Nancy Parezo, American Indian studies professor at the University of Arizona. Agents would
have promised money and the opportunity to see the world, but many “performers” never got
either.

And there is no doubt that agents, at times, flat-out lied to or even abducted their targets. In
2010, the Chilean government apologized for being complicit in the 1881 kidnapping of a group
of Kawesqar Indians by Hagenbeck, who brought them to Europe to perform in human zoos.

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https://centerofthewest.org/learn/western-essays/wild-west-shows/

http://aghca.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/indianreorganizationact

https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=50

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8455638.stm

Only five of the men made it home alive; the bones of five others were discovered in Zurich
more than 100 years after their abduction. (An 11th man died on the return trip to Chile.) One
of nine Australian Aboriginals from the Wulguru clan who were (at worst) abducted or (at best)
severely misled by Barnum & Bailey’s Cunningham to perform in the touring show in 1883 died
of illness less than a year after his arrival. Instead of being repatriated to his community, his
embalmed body was put on permanent display in Drew’s Dime Museum, in Cleveland. The
man, who had been called Tambo, could be seen by visitors until 1920. When the museum
closed down, his body was passed among funeral parlors until, in 1993, a Cleveland
undertaker told the Australian ambassador’s office about his existence and Tambo was finally
returned home.

Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. Benga was one of 12 Congolese pygmies
trafficked to the U.S. for the 1904 World’s Fair. (Bain News Service/Library of
Congress)

Maybe the most shocking example of human trafficking during this period was
perpetrated by Samuel Phillips Verner, a Presbyterian minister from South
Carolina. The first men Verner brought to the United States were not technically intended for
display. He met Kassongo and Kondola, two young men from a region near the Upper Congo
River in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while stationed there as a
preacher. When his mission was complete, Verner sailed home with a ship loaded with plants,
parrots, monkeys, and the two young men, who were promised an education and a better life
in the United States.

But once they reached the U.S., Verner’s primary goal appeared to be to make a buck off
them. After unsuccessfully attempting to “rent” them to the Smithsonian Institution along with
the other “pieces” of his collection, Verner eventually deposited Kassongo and Kondola in
1901 at the Stillman Institute, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which at the time operated a middle
school and high school. Just a year later, Kassongo was killed in a stampede that broke out
after a fight during a Booker T. Washington speech in Birmingham, Alabama.

Word of the spoils Verner brought from Congo got around, and in 1903 he was hired to
“acquire” 12 “pygmies” (among them an adult woman, two infants, a patriarch, and a priest or
healer), four “Red Africans,” including one “fine type,” and two other natives of a “distinct ethnic
type” for display at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Ota Benga, one of the Mbuti “Pygmies” Verner procured, became one of the event’s more
popular characters. When the fair was over, Werner continued to capitalize on Benga,
displaying him in a touring show that lasted until 1906. Later that year, when their tour ended,
Verner transferred his care to William Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo, where he was
caged at the Monkey House. A sign posted at the exhibit read: “The African Pigmy, ‘Ota
Benga.’ Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai
River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each
afternoon during September.”

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The strange tale of Aboriginal circus performers

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/3194311/man_and_monkey_show_disapproved_by/

Though he was not the only indigenous individual to reside in an actual zoo intended for wild
animals (Hagenbeck brought a group of Sami reindeer herders to live alongside a herd of
reindeer at the Hamburg Zoo in 1875), Benga’s display in the Bronx stirred up controversy.
After only ten days as a resident of the Monkey House, he was removed from the zoo and sent
to an orphanage. Benga never made it back to Congo. In 1916, after more than a decade in
the United States, at the age of 32, he shot himself.

In the end, it wasn’t outrage over the subjugation of humans that put an end to human zoos. In
the years leading up to World War II and beyond, the public’s time and attention was drawn
away from frivolity and toward geopolitical conflict and economic collapse. By the middle of the
20th century, television replaced circuses and traveling “zoos” — human or otherwise — as the
preferred mode of entertainment, and the display of indigenous people for entertainment fell
out of fashion.

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• These horrifying ‘human zoos’ delighted American audiences at the turn of the 20th century

‘Specimens’ were acquired from Africa, Asia, and the Americas by deceptive human traffickers

ARCHITECTURE AND HISTORY
BY WILLIAM MORRIS

We of this Society at least know the beauty of the weathered and time-worn surface of an
ancient building, and have all of us felt the grief of seeing this surface disappear under the
hands of a “restorer;” but though we all feel this deeply enough, some of us perhaps may be
puzzled to explain to the outside world the full value of this ancient surface. It is not merely
that it is in itself picturesque and beautiful, though that is a great deal; neither is it only that
there is a sentiment attaching to the very face which the original builders gave their work, but
dimly conscious all the while of the many generations which should gaze on it; it is only a
part of its value that the stones are felt to be, as Mr. Ruskin beautifully puts it, speaking of
some historic French building, now probably changed into an academic model of its real self,
that they are felt to be “the very stones which the eyes of St. Louis saw lifted into their
places.” That sentiment is much, but it is not all; nay, it is but a part of the especial value to
which I wish to-day to call your attention, which value briefly is, that the untouched surface of
ancient architecture bears witness to the development of man’s ideas, to the continuity of
history, and, so doing, affords never-ceasing instruction, nay education, to the passing
generations, not only telling us what were the aspirations of men passed away, but also what
we may hope for in the time to come.

You all know what a different sprit has animated history in these latter days from that which
used to be thought enough to give it interest to thinking men. Time was, and not so long ago,
when the clever essay writer (rather than historian) made his history surrounded by books
whose value he weighed rather by the degree in which they conformed to an arbitrary
standard of literary excellence, than by any indications they might give of being able to afford
a glimpse into the past. So treated, the very books were not capable of yielding the vast stores
of knowledge of history which they really possessed, if dealt with by the historical method. It
is true that for the most part these books were generally written for other purposes than that
of giving simple information to those to come after; at their honestest the writers were
compelled to look on life through the spectacles thrust on them by the conventional morality
of their own times; at their dishonestest, they were servile flatterers in the pay of the powers
that were. Nevertheless, though the art of lying has always been sedulously cultivated by the
world, and especially by that part of it which lives on the labour of others, it is an art which
few people attain to in its perfection, and the honest man by the use of sufficient diligence can
generally manage to see through the veil of sophistry into the genuine life which exists in
those written records of the past; nay, the very lies themselves, being for the most part of a
rough and simple nature, can often be dissolved and precipitated, so to say, into historical
substance, into negative evidence of facts.

But the academical historians of whom I have spoken were not fitted for the task; they
themselves were cursed with a fatal though unconscious dishonesty; the world of history
which they pictured to themselves was an unreal one; to them there were but two periods of
continuous order, of organised life: the period of Greek and Roman classical history was one,
the time from the development of the retrospection into that period till their own days was

the other; all else to them was mere accidental confusion, strange tribes and clans with whom
they had no relation, jostling against one another for no purpose save that of a herd of bisons;
all the thousands of years devoid of creation, laden only with mere obstruction, and out of
that, as I said, two periods of perfection, leaping fully equipped like Pallas from the brain of
Zeus. A strange conception, truly, of the history of the “famous men and our fathers that
begat us,” but one which could not hold out long against the natural developmentof
knowledge and society. The mists of pedantry slowly lifted and showed a different picture;
inchoate order in the remotest times, varying indeed among different races and countries, but
swayed always by the same laws, moving forward ever towards something that seems the very
opposite of that which it started from, and yet the earlier order never dead but living in the
new, and slowly moulding it to a recreation of its former self. How different a spirit such a
view of history must create it is not difficult to see. No longer shallow mockery at the failures
and follies of the past, from a standpoint of so-called civilisation, but deep sympathy with its
half-conscious aims, from amidst the difficulties and shortcomings that we are only too sadly
conscious of to-day; that is the new spirit of history; knowledge I would fain think has
brought us humility, and humility hope of that perfection which we are obviously so far short
of.

Now, further, as to the instruments of this new knowledge of history, were they not chiefly
two: study of language and study of archaeology? that is, of the expression of men’s ideas by
means of speech, and by means of handiwork, in other words the record of man’s creative
deeds. Of the first of these instruments, deeply as I am interested in it, and especially on the
side which, tending towards comparative mythology, proclaims so clearly the unity of
mankind, of this I lack the knowledge to speak, even if I had the time; on the second,
archaeology, I am bound to speak, as it is above all things the function of our Society to keep
before people’s eyes its importance as an instrument of the study of history, which does in
very truth lead us towards the solution of all the social and political problems over which
men’s minds are busied.

I am all the more bound to speak on this subject because, in spite of the ascendency which
the new spirit of history has over cultivated minds, we must not forget that many minds are
uncultivated, and in them the pedantic spirit still bears sway; and you will understand that
when I speak of uncultivated minds, I am not thinking of the lower classes, as we civilly, but
too truly, call them, but of many of those who are in responsible positions, and responsible
especially as to the guardianship of our ancient buildings; indeed, to meet one conceivable
objection, I can understand a man saying that the half-ignorant, half-instructed, and wholly
pedantic way of dealing with an ancient building is historical also, and I can admit some logic
in the objection; destruction is, alas! one of the forms of growth; indeed those pedantic
historians I have been speaking of had their share also in history, and it is a curious question,
which I cannot follow at present, as to how far their destructive pedantry was a sign of
strength as compared with our reasonable research and timidity; I say that I cannot follow
this question up, though I think it would lead to conclusions astonishing to some people, and
so will content myself with saying that if the narrowness, the vulgarity of mind (I know no
other word), which deals with our ancient monuments, as if Art had no past and is to have no
future, be an historical development (and I don’t gainsay it), so also is the spirit which
animates us to resist that vulgarity – “for this among the rest was I ordained.”

Now, I am sure that, so far I have carried you with me as members of our Society; you cannot

doubt that in one way or other the surface of an ancient building, the handling of the old
handicraftsman that is, is most valuable and worthy of preservation, and I am sure also that
we all feel instinctively that it cannot be reproduced at the present day; that the attempt at
reproduction not only deprives us of a monument of history, but also of a work of art. In what
follows I have to attempt the task of showing you that this impossibility of reproduction is not
accidental, but is essential to the conditions of life at the present day; that it is caused by the
results of all past history, and not by a passing taste or fashion of the time; and that
consequently no man, and no body of men, however learned they may be in ancient art,
whatever skill in design or love of beauty they may have, can persuade, or bribe,or force our
workmen of to-day to do their work in the same way as the workmen of King Edward I. did
theirs. Wake up Theoderic the Goth from his sleep of centuries, and place him on the throne
of Italy; turn our modern House of Commons into the Witenagemote (or meeting of the wise
men) of King Alfred the Great; no less a feat is the restoration of an ancient building.

Now, in order to show you that this is necessary and inevitable, I am compelled very briefly to
touch upon the conditions under which handiwork has been produced from the classical times
onward; in doing so I cannot avoid touching on certain social problems, on the solution of
which some of you may differ from me. In that case I ask you to remember that though the
Committee has ordered me to read this paper to you, it cannot be held responsible for any
opinions outside the principles advocated in its published documents. The Society should not
be regarded as dangerous, except, perhaps, to the amusement of certain country parsons and
squires, and their wives and daughters.

Well, it must be admitted that every architectural work is a work of co-operation. The very
designer, be he never so original, pays his debt to this necessity in being in some form or
another under the influence of tradition; dead men guide his hand even when he forgets that
they ever existed. But, furthermore, he must get his ideas carried out by other men; no man
can build a building with his own hands; every one of those men depends for the possibility of
even beginning his work on someone else; each one is but part of a machine; the parts may be
but machines themselves, or they may be intelligent, but in either case must work in
subordination to the general body. It is clear that men so working must be influenced in their
work by their conditions of life, and the man who organises their labour must make up his
mind that he can only get labour of a kind which those conditions have bred. To expect
enthusiasm for good workmanship from men who for two generations have been accustomed
by the pressure of circumstances to work slovenly would be absurd; to expect consciousness of
beauty from men who for ten generations have not be allowed to produce beauty, more
absurd still. The workmanship of every piece of co-operative work must belong to its period,
and be characteristic of it. Understand this clearly, which I now put in another form: all
architectural work must be co-operative; in all co-operative work the finished wares can be no
better in quality than the lowest, or simplest, or widest grade, which is also the most essential,
will allow them to be. The kind and quality of that work, the work of the ordinary
handicraftsman, is determined by the social conditions under which he lives, which differ
much from age to age.

Let us then try to see how they have differed, and glance at the results to Art of that
difference; during which inquiry we shall have much more to do with the developed Middle
Ages, with the work of which our Society is chiefly concerned, than with any other period.

In the classical period industrial production was chiefly carried on by slaves, whose persons
and work alike belonged to their employers, and who were sustained at just such standard of
life as suited the interests of the said employers. It was natural that under these
circumstances industrialism should be despised, but under Greek civilisation, at least,
ordinary life for the free citizens, the aristocracy in fact, was simple, the climate was not
exacting of elaborate work for the purposes of clothing and shelter, the race was yet young,
vigorous, and physically beautiful. The aristocracy, therefore, freed from the necessity of
rough and exhausting work by their possession of chattel slaves, who did all that for them,
and little oppressed with anxieties for their livelihood, had, in spite of the constant brawling
and piracy which forms their external history, both inclination and leisure to cultivate the
higher intellectual arts within the limits which their natural love of matter of fact and hatred
of romance prescribed to them; the lesser arts, meantime, being kept in rigid, and indeed
slavish subordination to them as was natural. May I break off here to ask you to consider,in
case any Athenian gentleman had attempted to build a Gothic cathedral in the days of
Pericles, what sort of help he would have had from the slave labour of the day, and what kind
of Gothic they would have produced for him?

Well, the ideal of art established by the intellect of the Greeks with such splendid and
overwhelming success lasted throughout the whole Roman period also, in spite of the
invention and use of the arch in architecture, or rather in building; and side by side with it
chattel slavery, under somewhat changed conditions, produced the ordinary wares of life; the
open-mouthed contempt for the results of industrial production expressed by the pedant
Pliny, whether it were genuine or artificially deduced from the conventionalities of
philosophy, well illustrates the condition of the slave-produced lesser arts of the later classical
period.

Meantime, and while Pliny was alive, the intellectual arts of classical times had long fallen
from their zenith, and had to wade through weary centuries of academicalism, from which
they were at last redeemed by no recurrence of individual genius to the earlier and human
period, but by the break-up of classical society itself; which involved the change of chattel
slavery, the foundation of classical society, into serfdom or villeinage, on which the feudal
system was based. The period of barbarism or disorder between the two periods of order was
long doubtless, but the new order rose out of it at last bright and clear; and in place of the
system of aristocratic citizen and chattel slave without rights, dominated by the worship of the
city, which was the ideal, the religion of classic society, was formed a system of personal
duties and rights, personal service and protection in subordination to a priori ideas of
mankind’s duties to and claims from the unseen powers of the universe. No doubt, as was
natural in this hierarchical system, the religious houses, whose distinct duty it was to hold the
hierarchical ideal up as a banner amongst imperfect men, fulfilled towards the arts in the
earlier Middle Ages, amidst the field-serfs and their lords, the function which in classical
times the cultivated Greek free man fulfilled amidst his crowd of enslaved menials. But the
serf was in a very different condition from the chattel slave; for, certain definite duties being
performed for his lord, he was (in theory at least) at liberty to earn his living as he best could
within the limits of his manor. The chattel slave, as an individual, had the hope of
manumission, but collectively there was no hope for him but in the complete and mechanical
overturn of the society which was founded on his subjection. The serf, on the other hand, was,
by the conditions of his labour, forced to strive to better himself as an individual, and
collectively soon began to acquire rights amidst the clashing rights of king, lord, and burgher.

Also, quite early in the Middle Ages, a new and mighty force began to germinate for the help
of labour, the first signs of secular combination among free men, producers, and distributors.

The guilds, whose first beginning in England dates from before the Norman Conquest,
although they fully recognised the hierarchical conditions of society, and were indeed often in
early times mainly religious in their aims, did not spring from ecclesiasticism, nay, in all
probability, had their roots in that part of the European race which had not known of Rome
and her institutions in the days of her temporal domination. England and Denmark were the
foremost countries in the development of the guilds, which took root latest and most feebly in
the Latinised countries.

The spirit of combination spread; the guilds, which at first had been rather benefit societies or
clubs than anything else, soon developed into bodies for the protection and freedom of
commerce, and rapidly became powerful under the name of merchant guilds; in the height of
their power there formed under them another set of guilds, whose object was the regulation
and practice of the crafts in freedom from feudal exactions. The older merchants guilds
resisted these newer institutions; so much so that in Germany there was bloody and desperate
war between them; the great revolt of Ghent, you will remember as anillustration of this
hostility, was furthered by the lesser crafts, as Froissart calls them; and again remember that
Ghent, the producing city, was revolutionary, Bruges, the commercial one, reactionary. In
England the merchant guilds changed in a more peaceable manner, and became in the main
the corporations of the towns, and the craft-guilds took their definite place as regulators and
protectors of all handicrafts. By the beginning of the fourteenth century the supremacy of the
craft-guilds was complete, and at that period at least their constitution was thoroughly
democratic; mere journeymen there were none, the apprentices were sure, as a matter of
course, to take their places as masters of their craft when they learned it.

Now before we go on to consider the decline and fall of the guilds, let us look at the way in
which the craftsmen worked at that period: and first a word as to his conditions of life: for I
must tell you very briefly that he lived, however roughly, yet at least far easier than his
successor does now. He worked for no master save the public, he made his wares from
beginning to end himself, and sold them himself to the man who was going to use them. This
was the case at least with nearly all, if not all, the goods made in England; some of the rarer
goods, such as silk cloth, did come into the chaffering market, which had to be the case all the
more for this, that the materials of any country were chiefly wrought into goods close to their
birthplace. But even in the cases of these rarer goods they were made primarily for home
consumption, and only the overplus came into the hands of the merchant; concerning which
latter you must also remember that he was not a mere gambler in the haphazard of supply
and demand as he is today, but an indispensable distributor of goods; he was paid for his
trouble in bringing goods from a place where there was more than was needed of them to a
country where there was not enough, and that was all; the laws against forestallers and
regraters give an idea of how this matter of commerce was looked on in the Middle Ages, as
commerce, viz, not profitmongering. A forestaller was a man who bought up produce to hold
it for a rise, a regrater, a man who bought and sold in the same market or within five miles of
it. On the advantages of the forestaller to the community it is scarcely necessary to dwell, I
think: as to the regrater, it was the view of the benighted people of the Middle Ages that a
man who bought, say, a hundred-weight of cheese for 2d. a pound at nine in the morning and
sold it at eleven for 3d. was not a specially useful citizen. I confess I am sufficiently old-

fashioned and conservative to agree with them on that head, although I cannot help
perceiving that all “business,” properly so called, is now forestalling and regrating, and that
we are all the slaves of those delightful and simple professions – so that the criminals of one
age have become the benevolent masters of the next.

Well, anyhow, it followed from this direct intercourse between the maker and the consumer of
goods, that the public in general were good judges of manufactured wares, and, in
consequence, that the art, or religion rather, of adulteration was scarcely know; at least, it was
easy to win the fame of a confessor, if not a martyr, of that noble creed.

Now, as to the manner of work, there was little or no division of labour in each craft; that I
think is some mitigation of the evil – for I look upon it as such, of a man being bound down to
one craft for his life long (as he is now also) – some mitigation, because, after all, there was
plenty of variety in the work of a man who made the whole of a piece of goods himself,
instead of making always one little piece of a piece. Also you must note that the freemen of
the guilds had their share in the pasture lands of the country, as every free man at least had.
Port Meadow, at Oxford, for instance, was the communal pasture of the freemen of that city.

These were the conditions of life and work of the English craftsmen of the fourteenth century.
I suppose most of us have declined to accept the picture of him which we have had presented
to us by the half ignorant and wholly misleading pedants of whom I have spokenbefore. We
who have studied the remains of his handicrafts have been, without any further research, long
instinctively sure that he was no priest-ridden, down-trodden savage, but a thoughtful and
vigorous man, and in some sense, at least, free. That instinct had been abundantly confirmed
by painstaking collectors of facts, like Mr. Thorold Rogers, and we now know that the guild
craftsman led the sort of life in work and play that we should have expected from the art he
produced. He worked, not for the profit of a master, but for his own livelihood, which, I
repeat, he did not find it difficult to earn, so that he had a good deal of leisure, and being
master of his time, his tools, and his material, was not bound to turn out his work shabbily,
but could afford to amuse himself by giving it artistic finish; how different that is from [the]
mechanical or trade finish some of us, at least, have learned – maybe, by the way of Weeping
Cross. Well, that artistic finish or ornament was not venal, it was given freely to the public,
who, I rather think, paid for it by interest in and sympathy for the work itself, which, indeed,
I consider a good payment in times when a man could live otherwise without payment more
gross and material. For here I must make the confession that what is called in modern slang
the “wages of genius,” were much neglected by the builders of our ancient buildings; for art,
as Mr. Thorold Rogers justly says, was widespread; the possession of some skill in it was the
rule and not the exception. As a rule, those who could afford to pay for a building, were able
to do the necessary planning and designing, obviously because they would naturally find help
and harmonious intelligence among the men they had to employ. For instance, the tower of
Merton College Chapel at Oxford was carried out by ordinary masons, under the
superintendence of the Fellows of the College. Well, judging from the wretched tinkering that
the present Fellows have allowed to be perpetuated on their beautiful succursal house, St.
Albans’ Hall, I would not venture to trust the present most respectable Fellows of that ancient
House with such a job now.

So it followed from this widespread skill in the arts, that those poor wretches who had skill
and taste beyond their fellow-workmen, and who in consequence had pleasanter work than

they, had to put up with a very moderate additional wage, and in some cases with nothing
additional; it seems they could not make good the claim now preferred for that much sinned
against – and much sinning – company, men of genius, that the conformation of their
stomachs and the make of their skin is different from that of other men, and that
consequently they want more to eat and drink and different raiment from their fellows. In
most sober earnest, when we hear it said, as it often is said, that extra money payment is
necessary under all circumstances to produce great works of art, and that men of special
talent will not use those talents without being bribed by mere gross material advantages, we, I
say, shall know what to reply. We can appeal to the witness of those lovely works still left us,
whose unknown, unnamed creators were content to give them to the world, with little more
extra wages than what their pleasure in their work and their sense of usefulness in it might
bestow on them.

Well, I must now say that it seems to me that a body of artificers, so living as we have seen,
and so working, with simple machines or instruments, of which they were complete masters,
had very great advantages for the production of architectural art, using that word at its
widest; and that one would, reasoning a priori, expect to find in their work that
thoughtfulness and fertility of resource that blended freedom and harmonious co-operation,
which, as a matter of fact, we do find in it. Nevertheless, in spite of this free intelligence of the
medieval workman, or even because of it, he was still compelled to work only as a tradition
would allow him to do. If it could ever have occurred to any man’s mind to build some
Parthenon or Erectheum by the banks of [the] Thames, or Warfe, or Wensum, in the
fourteenth century, how far do you think his fellow-workman’s skill would have been able to
second his folly?

But we must leave the fourteenth century awhile, and hurry on in our tale of the workman’s
lot. I have said that the constitution of the craft guild was at first thoroughly democratic or
fraternal, but it did not long remain so. As the towns grew bigger and population flowed to
them from the enfranchised field-serfs and other sources, the old craftsmen began to form a
separate and privileged class in the guilds with their privileged apprentices, and the
journeyman at last made his appearance. After a while the journeymen attempted to form
guilds under the master crafts, as the latter had done under the merchant guilds; but the
economic conditions of the time tended now more and more towards manufacturing for a
profit, beat them, and they failed. Nevertheless, the conditions of work did not change much,
the masters were checked by laws in favour of the journeymen, and wages rather rose than fell
all through the fifteenth century; nor did division of labour begin till much later; everywhere
the artisan was still an artist.

The beginning of the great change came with the Tudors in the first quarter of the sixteenth
century, during which time England, from being a country of tillage cultivated for livelihood,
became a grazing country farmed for profit. He who runs may read the tale of this change and
its miseries in the writings of More and Latimer. All I need say about it here is, that it had a
very direct influence upon the conditions of life and manner of work of the artisans, for the
crafts were now flooded by the crowds of landless men, who had nothing but the force of their
bodies to live upon, and were obliged to sell that force day by day for what those would give
them who certainly would not buy the article labour unless they could make a profit by it. The
brutal rapine with which the change of religion in England was carried out; the wanton
destruction of our public buildings which accompanied the stealing of our public lands,

doubtless played its part in degrading what art was still possible under the new conditions of
labour.

But the Reformation itself was but one of the aspects of the new spirit of the time produced by
great economical changes, and which dealt with art and its creator, labour, for more
completely than any series of accidents could do, however momentous they might be. The
change in the conditions of labour went on speedily, though there was still a good deal of
what may be called domestic manufacture: the workmen in the towns got to be more
dependent on their employers, more and more mere journeymen, and a great change was
coming over the manner of their work; the mere collection of them into big workshops under
one master, in itself merely gave economy of space, rent, fire, lighting, and the rest, but it was
the prelude to a much greater change; division of labour now began, and speedily gained
head. Under the old medieval conditions the unit of labour was a master craftsman who knew
his business from beginning to end; such help as he had was from mere apprentices who were
learning their business, and were not doomed to life-long service. But with the new system of
master and men came this change, that the unit of production was a group, each member of
which depended on every one of the others, and was helpless without them. Under this
system, called the division of labour system, a man may be, and often is, condemned for the
whole of his life to make the insignificant portion of an insignificant article of the market. I
use the present tense, because this system of division of labour is still going on side by side
with the last development of manufacturing for profit, of which more anon.

Now, it is necessary for you to understand that the birth and growth of this division of labour
system was no mere accident, was not the result, I mean, of some passing and inexplicable
fashion which caused men to desire the kind of work which could be done by such means; it
was caused by the economical changes which forced men to produce no longer for a livelihood
as they used to do, but for a profit. Almost all goods, all except those made in the most
domestic way, had now got to go through the market before they reached theusers’ hands.
They were made for sale, not primarily for use, and when I say “they,” I mean the whole of
them; the art in them as well as their mere obvious utility was now become a marketable
article, doled out according to the necessities of the capitalist who employed both machine-
workman and designer, fettered by the needs of profit; for by this time, you understand, the
division of labour had so worked, that instead of all workmen being artists, as they once were,
they were divided into workmen who were not artists, and artists who were not workmen.

This change was complete, or nearly so, by the middle of the eighteenth century: it is not
necessary for me to trace the gradual degradation of the arts from the fifteenth century to this
point. Suffice it to say that it was steady and certain; only where men were more or less
outside the great stream of civilisation, where life was rude, and production wholly domestic,
did the art produced retain any signs of human pleasure: elsewhere pedantry reigned
supreme. The picture-painters who were wont to show us, as through windows opened by
them, the longings and lives of the saints and heroes, nay, the very heavens and city of God
hanging over the earthly city of their love, were turned, what few of them were aught else than
pretentious daubers, into courtly flatterers of ill-favoured fine ladies and stupid supercilious
lords. As for the architectural arts, what could you expect to get of them from a set of human
machines, co-operating indeed, but only for speed and precision of production, and designed
for at best by pedants who despised the life of man, and at worst by mechanical drudges, little
better in any way than the luckless workmen? Whatever might be expected, nothing was got

but that mass of foolish toys and costly ministrations to luxury and ostentation, which has
since those days been most worthily contemned under the name of upholstery.

Is that the end of the story of the degradation of the arts? No, there is another act to the
drama; worse or better according as to whether you are contented to accept it as final, or have
been stimulated to discontent, that is, hope for something better. I have told you how the
workman was reduced to a machine, I have still to tell you how he has been pushed down
from even that giddy eminence of self-respect.

At the close of the eighteenth century England was a country that manufactured among other
countries that manufactured: her manufactures were still secondary to her merely country
life, and were mixed up with it; in fifty years all that was changed, and England was the
manufacturing country of the world – the workshop of the world, often so called with much
pride by her patriotic sons. Now this strange and most momentous revolution was brought
about by the machinery which the chances and changes of the world, too long a tale even to
hint at here, forced on our population. You must think of this great machine industry as
though on the one hand merely the full development of the effects of producing for profit
instead of livelihood, which began in Sir Thomas More’s time, yet on the other as a
revolutionary change from that of the mere division of labour. The exigencies of my own work
have driven me to dig pretty deeply into the strata of the eighteenth-century workshop
system, and I could clearly see how very different it is from the factory system of to-day, with
which it is commonly confounded; therefore it was with a ready sympathy that I read the full
explanation of the change and its tendencies in the writings of a man, I will say a great man,
whom, I suppose, I ought not to name in this company, and who cleared my mind on several
points (also unmentionable here) relating to this subject of labour and its products. But this
at least I must say, that whereas under the eighteenth-century division of labour system, a
man was compelled to work for ever at a trifling piece of work in a base mechanical way,
which, also, in that base way he understood, under the system of the factory and almost
automatic machine under which we now live, he may change his work often enough, may be
shifted from machine to machine, and scarcely know that he isproducing anything at all: in
other words, under the eighteenth-century system he was reduced to a machine; under that of
the present day he is the slave of a machine. It is the machine which bids him what to do on
pain of death by starvation. Yes, and by no means metaphorically so; the machine, for
instance, can, if it pleases, if it chooses to hurry, make him walk thirty miles a day instead of
twenty, and send him to the workhouse if he refuses.

Now if you ask me (’tis a by question) which is the worst off, the machine workman of the
eighteenth century or the slave to the machine of the nineteenth, I am bound to say that I
think the former is. If I gave you my reasons, few of you would agree with me, and I am not
sure that you would allow me to finish this discourse: at any rate they are somewhat
complicated. But the question as to which set of workmen produced the better work can be
answered with little complication. The machine workman had to be well skilled in his
contemptible task at least, the slave to the machine needs but little skill, and, as a matter of
fact, his place has been taken by women and children, and what skill is needed in the work
goes in the overlooking of the labours of these latter. In short, the present system of the
factory and its dominating machine tends to doing away with skilled labour altogether.

Here, then, is a strange contrast, which I most seriously invite you to consider, between the

craftsman of the Middle Ages and him of to-day. The medieval man sets to work at his own
time, in his own house; probably makes his tool, instrument, or simple machine himself, even
before he gets on to his web, or his lump of clay, or what not. What ornament there shall be
on his finished work he himself determines, and his mind and hand designs it and carries it
out; tradition, that is to say the minds and thoughts of all workmen gone before, this, in its
concrete form of the custom of his craft, does indeed guide and help him; otherwise he is free.
Nor must we forget that even if he lives in a town, the fields and sweet country come close up
to his house, and he at whiles occupies himself in working in them, and more than once or
twice in his life he has had to take the bow or brown-bill from the wall, and run his chance of
meeting the great secret face to face in the ranks of battle; oftenest, indeed, in other men’s
quarrels, yet sometimes in his own, nor wholly unsuccessfully then.

But he who has taken his place, how does he work and live? Something of that we all know.
There he has to be at the factory-gates by the time the bell rings, or he is fined or “sent to
grass.” Nay, not always will the factory-gate open to him; unless the master, controlled
himself by a market of which he knows little and the hand nothing, allows him space to work
in and a machine to work at, he must turn back and knock about the streets, as many
thousands are doing to-day in England. But suppose him there, happy before his machine; up
and down he has to follow it, day in, day out, and what thoughts he has must be given to
something else than his work. I repeat, ’tis as much as he can do to know what thing the
machine (not he) is making. Design and ornament, what has he to do with that? Why, he may
be tending a machine, which makes a decent piece of work, or, on the other hand, may be an
accomplice (a very small one) in turning out a blatant piece of knavery and imposture; he will
get as much wages for one as the other, nor will one or other be in the least degree within his
control. All the religion, morality, philanthropy, and freedom of the nineteenth century, will
not help him to escape that disgrace. Need I say how and where he lives? Lodged in a
sweltering dog-hole, with miles and miles of similar dog-holes between him and the fair fields
of the country, which in grim mockery is called “his.” Sometimes on holidays, bundled out by
train to have a look at it, to be bundled into his grimy hell again in the evening. Poor wretch!

Tell me, then, at what period of this man’s working life will you pick him up and set him to
imitating the work of the free crafts-guildsman of the fourteenth century, and expect him to
turn out work like his in quality?

Well, not to weaken my argument by exaggeration, I admit that though a huge quantity of
would-be artistic work is done by this slave of the machine at the bidding of some ridiculous
market or other, the crafts relating to building have not reached that point in the industrial
revolution; they are an example of my assertion that the eighteenth-century division of labour
system still exists, and works side by side with the great factory and machine system. Yet,
here, too, the progress of the degradation is obvious enough, since the similar craftsmen of
the eighteenth century still had lingering among them scraps of tradition from the times of art
now lost. while now in those crafts the division of labour system has eaten deep from the
architect to the hod-man, and, moreover, the standard of excellence, so far from its bearing
any relation to that of the free workman of the guilds, has sunk far below that of the man
enslaved by division of labour in the eighteenth century, and is not a whit better than that of
the shoddy-maker of the great industries; in short, the workman of the great machine
industry is the type of labour to-day.

Surely it is a curious thing that while we are ready to laugh at the idea of the possibility of the
Greek workman turning out a Gothic building, or a Gothic workman turning out a Greek one,
we see nothing preposterous in the Victorian workman producing a Gothic one. And this,
although we have any amount of specimens of the work of the Renaissance period, whose
workmen, under the pedantic and retrospective direction of the times, were theoretically
supposed to be able to imitate the ancient classical work, which imitation, as a matter of fact,
turned out obstinately characteristic of their own period, and derived all the merit it had from
those characteristics – a curious thing, and perhaps of all the signs of weakness of art at the
present day one of the most discouraging. I may be told, perhaps, that the very historical
knowledge, of which I have spoken above, and which the pedantry of the Renaissance and
eighteenth century lacked, has enabled us to perform that miracle of raising the dead
centuries to life again; but to my mind it is a strange view to take of historical knowledge and
insight, that it should set us on the adventure of trying to retrace our steps towards the past,
rather than give us some glimmer of insight into the future; a strange view of the continuity of
history, that it should make us ignore the very changes which are the essence of that
continuity. In truth, the art of the past cycle, that of the Renaissance, which flickered out at
last in the feeble twaddle of the dilettantism of the latter Georges, had about it, as I hinted
above, a supercilious confidence in itself, which entirely forbade it to accept any imitation of
style but one, as desirable, which one was that which it regarded as part of itself. It could
make no more choice in style than Greek or Gothic art could; it fully, if tacitly, admitted the
evolution of history, accepted the division-of-labour workman, and so, indeed, did its best,
and had a kind of life about it, dreary as that life was, and expressive enough of the stupid but
fearless middle class domination which was the essence of the period.

But we, I say, we refuse to admit the evolution of history. We set our slave to the machine to
do the work of the free medieval workman or of the man of the transition period indifferently.
We, if no age else, have learnt the trick of masquerading in other men’s cast-off clothes, and
carry on a strange hypocritical theatrical performance, rather with timid stolidity than with
haughty confidence, determined to shut our eyes to everything seriously disagreeable, nor
heeding the silent movement of real history which is still going on around and underneath
our raree show.

Surely such a state of things is a token of change – of change, speedy perhaps, complete
certainly; of the visible end of one cycle and the beginning of another. For, strange to say,
here is a society which on its cultivated surface has no distinct characteristics of its own, but
floats, part of it hither, part thither – this set of minds drifting toward the beauty of the past,
that toward the logic of the future, each tacitly at least believing that theyneed but count of
heads on their side to establish a convention of many, which should rule the world, despite of
history and logic, ignoring necessity which has made even their blind feebleness what it is.
And all the while beneath this cultivated surface works the great commercial system, which
the cultivated look on as their servant and the bond of society, but which really is their master
and the breaker-up of society; for it is in itself and in its essence a war, and can only change
its character with its death: man against man, class against class, with this motto, What I gain
you lose, that war must go on till the great change comes whose end is peace and not war.

And what are we, who are met together here after seven years of humble striving for
existence, for leave to do something? Mere straws in that ocean of half-conscious hypocrisy
which is called cultivated society? Nay, I hope not. At least, we do not turn round on history

and say, That is bad and that is good; I like this and I don’t like that; but rather we say, This
was life, and these, the works of our fathers, are material signs of it. That life lives in you,
though you have forgotten it; those material signs of it, though you do not heed them, will one
day be sought for: and that necessity which is even now forming the society of the time to be,
and shall one day make it manifest, has amongst other things forced us to do our best to
treasure them, these tokens of life past and present. The society of to-day, anarchical as it is,
is nevertheless forming a new order of which we in common with all those who, I will say it,
have courage to accept realities and reject shams, are and must be, a part; so that in the long
run our work, hopeless as it must sometimes seem to us, will not be utterly lost. For, after all,
what is it that we are contending for? The reality of art, that is to say, of the pleasure of the
human race. The tendency of the commercial or competitive society, which has been
developing for more than 300 years, has been towards the destruction of the pleasure of life.
But that competitive society has at last developed itself so far that, as I have said, its own
change and death is approaching, and as one token of the change the destruction of the
pleasure of life is beginning to seem to many of us no longer a necessity but a thing to be
striven against. On the genuineness and reality of that hope the existence, the reason for
existence of our Society depends. Believe me, it will not be possible for a small knot of
cultivated people to keep alive an interest in the art and records of the past amidst the
present conditions of a sordid and heart-breaking struggle for existence for the many, and a
languid sauntering through life for the few. But when society is so reconstituted that all
citizens will have a chance of leading a life made up of due leisure and reasonable work, then
will all society, and not our “Society” only, resolve to protect ancient buildings from all
damage, wanton or accidental, for then at last they will begin to understand that they are part
of their present lives, and part of themselves. That will come when the time is ripe for it; for
at present even if they knew of their loss they could not prevent it, since they are living in a
state of war, that is to say, of blind waste.

Surely we of this Society have had the truth driven home practically often enough, have often
had to confess that if the destruction or brutification of an ancient monument of art and
history was “a matter of money,” it was hopeless striving against it. Do not let us be so feeble
or cowardly as to refuse to face this fact, for, for us also, although our function in forming the
future of society may be a humble one, there is no compromise. Let us admit that we are
living in the time of barbarism betwixt two periods of order, the order of the past and the
order of the future, and then, though there may be some of us who think (as I do) that the end
of that barbarism is drawing near, and others that it is far distant, yet we can both of us, I the
hopeful and you the unhopeful, work together to preserve what relics of the old order are yet
left us for the instruction, the pleasure, the hope of the new. So may the times of present war
be less disastrous, if but a little – the times of coming peace more fruitful.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

TITLE

Architecture and History (1884).

DELIVERIES

1. 1 July 1884: Before SPAB at the Annual Meeting held at the Society of Arts, Adelphi Street,
Adelphi, London. The Hon R. C. Grosvenor was chairman.

REVIEW

1. `Between the Past and the Future’, The Architect, 12 July 1884, pp. 15-16.

PUBLICATION

1. As `Paper Read by Mr. Morris’, SPAB Report, 1884, (London 1884), 49-76.

2. [Portions] as `Medieval and Modern Craftsmanship’, The Architect, 13 September 1884,
pp. 171-73.

3. [Portions] in The Clarion, October 1884.

4. As Architecture and History and Westminster Abbey, (London: Chiswick Press 1900), pp.
1-33. This was printed using the Golden Type.

5. [Dutch translation] in Kunst en Maatschappij, (Rotterdam 1903), pp. 1-30.

5. The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris, (London: Longman, Green & Co.
1910-15), Vol. XXII, pp. 296-317.

6. As `Paper Read at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the SPAB, 1 July, 1884′, William Morris:
Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1936), Vol. I, pp. 124-45.

7. William Morris on Architecture, ed. Chris Miele, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press
1996), pp. 99-121.

The reference to this piece of work in the Chronology

http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/chrono.htm#date-1884-08-01

Ideas and Objects: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain
Author(s): Alan Crawford
Source: Design Issues, Vol. 13, No. 1, Designing the Modern Experience, 1885-1945 (Spring,
1997), pp. 15-26
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511584

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Ideas and Ob jects:
The Arts and Crafts Movement
in Britain
Alan Crawford

Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things,
the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred
of modern civilization.’

The speaker is William Morris, the leading figure of the Arts and

Crafts movement in Britain. The sentiment in this quotation is nega-
tive and perhaps even shocking; but it represents my subject. I want

to suggest that the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain was

inspired by the desire to produce beautiful things and by a hatred of

modern civilization.

The Wolfsonian’s inaugural exhibition, and the book which

accompanies it, convey two arguments with admirable clarity. One

is the general argument that design serves to express ideas, and that

it shifts our perceptions of the world. The other is that design in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was preoccupied with

the experience of modernity.

The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain fits well into these

arguments. Not since the Gothic Revival earlier in the century,
whose idealism was derived from a powerful religious movement,
had the designing and making of things carried such serious mean-

ings. Arts and Crafts people had ambitious ideas about the nature

of work and the improvement of design, and they were always, if

obliquely, concerned with modernity. What is more, the Arts and

Crafts movement was linked with politics, for some of the most

important figures in the movement were also part of the early

Socialist movement in Britain.
In this paper, I will concentrate on the general point that

design serves to express ideas; I will take up the themes of moder-

nity and politics at the end. My argument goes in two directions. It
starts with ideas and goes towards objects, asking what effect these
ideas had on design. Then it turns round, starting with objects and
listing their typical qualities, in order to discover the spirit in which
they were designed.

Both approaches are necessary, for the relationship between
ideas and objects in the Arts and Crafts movement is not always
straightforward. Sometimes you cannot move directly from idea to
object, as from plan to execution. Sometimes the objects contradict

1 May Morris, ed., The Collected Works
of William Morris, vol. 23, (London:
Longmans Green and Company,
1910-15), 279.

( Copyright 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Design Issues: Volume 13, Number 1 Spring 1997 15

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Figure 1
72-3 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London,

by C. R. Ashbee, 1896-97.

Elevation and cutaway drawing.

Drawing by Sutton Webster.

I

_~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ F

Scale
0 5 10 20 30 Fcet _______

the ideas they appear to illustrate. The free disposition of the

windows on the elevation of 72-3 Cheyne Walk, London (figure 1)

seems to be a clear statement of a free plan, an example of the Arts

and Crafts idea that buildings and objects should express their func-

tional and structural character without pretense, that they should be

“honest.” But if you compare the elevation with the cutaway draw-

ing, you will see that it does not express the internal arrangement at

all; if anything it belies it. I do not say that honesty has no bearing

on this design. Ashbee meant you to read the front as honest. But

you cannot read this design as a straightforward example of Arts

and Crafts honesty. It is complex and contradictory, what children

would call “pretend” honesty.

The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain was animated by

three principal ideas. The first was “the Unity of Art,” Arts and

Crafts people opposed the hierarchy in which the arts were

arranged in late-Victorian Britain: painting and sculpture at the top
as fine arts; architecture somewhere in the middle, less artistic but

still with high professional status; and the decorative arts at the

bottom, their status low both artistically and professionally. They

argued that, in the Middle Ages, this hierarchy had not existed; and

that in their own day, painters, sculptors, architects, and decorative

artists should be on an equal footing again.
Two narratives will show the bearing of this idea. In 1884, a

group of progressive architects established the Art Workers’ Guild
in London under the banner of the Unity of Art. They believed that
architecture should be seen as an art, not as the profession into
which modernization was shaping it. They set up the Guild as a

private club where they could associate with painters, sculptors,
and decorative artists; and talk about Donatello or bronze-casting.
They did not want to associate with lawyers and quantity survey-

ors, and local government officers, or to talk about drains.

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Figure 2
Ernest Gimson and Sidney and Ernest
Barnsley with their families at Pinbury Park,
Gloucestershire, c.1 896.
Archive photograph, Cheltenham Art Gallery A,
and Museum.

About ten years later, three architects made a rather different
move, but in the same spirit. Ernest Gimson and Ernest and Sidney
Barnsley went to live in the Cotswolds, then a fairly remote rural
area. They wore soft collars, corduroys, and big boots, as if they
were farmers (figure 2). They hoped that, by moving to the country,
they could get away from paperwork and professionalism. And
they were not disappointed. They were intimately involved in the
few buildings they designed, mostly locally and, alongside their
building work, they set up the workshops which produced plaster-
work, metalwork, and particularly furniture. The architects of the
Art Workers’ Guild associated themselves with artists; Ernest
Gimson and the Barnsley brothers associated themselves with
craftsmen.

The “Unity of Art” shaped the story of the Arts and Crafts
movement in this way-the Art Workers’ Guild becam’e the central
Arts and Crafts organization in London. But it did not have a great
effect on the design of buildings or objects. There were a number of
building schemes in which architects, artists, and craftsmen worked
together in its name; Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street, London,
designed by J. D. Sedding and embellished by a group of distin-
guished artist-craftsmen between 1888 and 1892, is the best known.
But the designers of the Arts and Crafts movement were always
individualists, and though the artist-craftsmen thought and talked
a good deal about the Unity of Art, it is hard to see what difference
this made to their work here, or in other places. Holy Trinity is
simply a church decorated by various designers, working in sympa-
thy but following their own preferences.

The second idea was “Joy in Labor.” The idea was that the
ordinary experience of work can become a source of pleasure
through the play of imagination. Like so much of the Arts and
Crafts movement, this idea was rooted in a Romantic sense of the

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past, and specifically in a long passage called “The Nature of

Gothic” in the second volume of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice,

published in 1853. Ruskin read the history of Venice in its buildings,

and when he looked at the carved detail of Venetian Gothic build-
ings, he imagined the workmen to be ordinary workmen of their
time. Left to their own imaginations, he thought, they produced
carvings which were rough, vivid, and imaginative.

For Ruskin, the freedom of this Gothic work was a stinging
indictment of work as he imagined it to be in modern factories. He
wrote:

Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle,

slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense,
and the best sense, free. [He is thinking of the Middle Ages:
political tyranny and creative freedom.] But to smother

their souls with them [he is thinking of modern factories],
to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling

branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and

skin which, after the worm’s work on it, is to see God, into

leathern thongs to yoke machinery with, this is to be slave-
masters indeed.’

This is as fierce a piece of antimodernism as you could hope
to find, fixing its anger on the image of the factory, but sweeping the

whole rationalist temper of the nineteenth century with its savage
rhetoric. And note Ruskin’s political language: he taunts his readers
with the thought that, if they cannot achieve creative freedom, then
all their precious nineteenth-century rights, their votes, their demo-
cratic freedoms, are worse than medieval slavery.

When William Morris set up his own printing press in the

1890s, he published “The Nature of Gothic” as a small book, and
wrote in the preface:

The lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is that art is the

expression of man’s pleasure in labor; that it is possible for
man to rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us

today, there have been times when he did rejoice in it.3

This joy in work, this creative freedom, was equated with
handwork by the Arts and Crafts movement, and we can see the

impact of this idea on Arts and Crafts objects whose appearance
declares that they are handmade-the hammer marks on metal-
work, the fluid, irregular contours of some pottery and glass, and
the marks of the adze or chisel on wood or stone. But though details
like this are very common on Arts and Crafts objects, they are only
details. The real importance of joy in labor in the Arts and Crafts,
and of its dark twin, the drudgery of machine-minding, was not
that they guided the act of designing, but that they served as myths
of personal endeavor. In the fitful light of Ruskin’s prose, Arts and
Crafts people saw dark factories, men losing their souls in day after

2 E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn,
eds., The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 10,
(London: George Allen and Co., 1903-12),
193.

3 John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic: A
Chapter of the Stones of Venice (London:
Kelmscott Press, 1892), i.

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day of minding machines. That made it feel good to stitch a binding

by hand, or to mix a new batch of enamels. And it is noticeable that,

though the idea of joy in labor really applied to all people who

worked in factories, the Arts and Crafts did not address themselves

to those trades where factory production was most advanced. They

addressed themselves to architecture, furniture, metalwork, textiles,

pottery, stained glass, and certain kinds of printing. This is not a list

of industrialized trades as such, it is a list of the decorative arts. Joy

in labor begins to look less like an Arts and Crafts program for

changing society, and more like a banner under which decorative

artists could do what they would have done anyway.
The third idea was “Design Reform,” that is, a movement to

improve the design of objects consumed by the public. Unlike the

previous two ideas, it was not peculiar to the Arts and Crafts move-

ment. The archetypal design reformers were the mid-Victorians

Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave. It was they who set up a

national system of art education in Britain, which became known as

“the South Kensington system,” in order to improve standards of

design in British manufacturing.

The Arts and Crafts movement inherited much of this

approach. Arts and Crafts designers were generally high-minded

people and they talked about their work in terms “honesty,”

“1simplicity,” and “the nature of materials.” Though words like these

could be embodied in Arts and Crafts designs in complex and

contradictory ways, as Ashbee’s house on Cheyne Walk shows, they

did encourage Arts and Crafts people to feel that they had a mission

to improve public taste. And in schools of art, in particular, design

reform and the Arts and Crafts served a single program: the

simplicity of working by hand lent itself to educational purposes

while, at the same time, national and local government used the

schools to improve the standard of design in local trades as a way of

improving economic performance. In the 1880s and 1890s, many

schools started classes in decorative arts relevant to local trades. In

Birmingham, for example, where the city’s economy was heavily

dependent on decorative metalwork and jewelry, the city council

established the Birmingham Municipal School of Art in 1885.

Birmingham’s progressive policies were shaped by the city’s elite,

and the School of Art satisfied the advocates of Arts and Crafts

ideals as well as the commercial concerns of the Birmingham coun-

cil.

We have reached the halfway stage in looking at the rela-

tionship between Arts and Crafts ideas and Arts and Crafts objects.
I do not think that ideas have taken us very far towards an under-

standing of the objects. In fact, they seem to have had more to do
with how Arts and Crafts people felt about themselves-as artists,
as happy, as reformers-than with their work. It is as if their minds
were focused not so much on the design of objects as on the experi-
ence of designing and making them. This is crucial to my argument.

Design Issues: Volume 13, Number 1 Spring 1997 19

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Once one accepts that the primary focus of Arts and Crafts ideas
was not so much objects as personal experience, a lot of things fall
into place. The Unity of Art (artists and craftsmen working
together), Joy in Labor (the creative satisfaction of ordinary work),
Design Reform (making manufactured objects better), all three can
be seen as facets of a single idea which I take to be at the heart of the
Arts and Crafts movement. That is the idea that creativity can be
part of the daily experience of ordinary people at work; that it is not
something special, not the preserve of fine artists and geniuses. That
was the idea which was in Ruskin’s mind when he studied the
details of Venetian architecture. The hope of the Arts and Crafts
movement was that experience might become general. I will come
back to this idea at the end.

I am now going to turn around and look at Arts and Crafts
objects, in the hope of getting a clearer sense of the spirit in which
they were designed. I am going to list the qualities which I think
characterize them. Not all of these qualities will be found on all
objects, but I think almost any Arts and Crafts object will have more
than one of them. They do not amount to an Arts and Crafts style,
for Arts and Crafts objects are too varied visually for that. But they
do amount to a common visual language.

There is no single English word for my first quality. I want a
word which means that the design of the object reflects its nature
and purpose; it does not embellish it unduly or make it look like
something else. So I am going to invent one, “thinginess.” Members
of the Arts and Crafts movement used to admire this quality in
products which they thought had escaped the attentions of the
decorative artist, such as sports equipment and cooking utensils.
(Nowadays, of course, design and consumption are having a field
day in just these two areas.) The three objects in figure 3 were made
by a workshop called the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft in the
1890s, and seeing them together provides a neat illustration of
thinginess. They are objects of different status: the flowerpot and the

Figure 3
Brass- and copper-wares, probably designed
by Arthur Dixon, and made by the Birmingham
Guild of Handicraft in the mid-1890s.
Photograph: Alan Crawford. Objects in the
collections of the Victoria and Albert
Museum.

4k

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Figure 4
Part of the fifth exhibition of the Arts and
Crafts Exhibition Society in London, 1896.
Archive photograph, National Art Library,
London. Pressmark RC.LL.41, 57.

l y ~~~il

|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.. . … ..

.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. . … …. ….E f X < .,.

table lamp belong in the drawing room, and the kettle belongs in
the kitchen. Yet they look much the same. Thinginess has overrid-
den middle-class propriety, and the drawing room objects emulate
the simplicity of the kitchen. When words such as “simplicity” and
“honesty” occur in Arts and Crafts writing, as they often do, they
usually refer to this kind of plainness.

Which brings me to the second quality of Arts and Crafts

objects, and that is almost exactly the opposite of the first. Walter
Crane once wrote:

The great advantage and charm of the Morrisian method is
that it lends itself either to simplicity or to splendor. You
might be almost plain enough to please Thoreau, with a
rush-bottomed chair, piece of matting, and oaken trestle

table; or you might have gold and lustre (the choice ware of
William De Morgan) gleaming from the sideboard, and
jeweled light in your windows, and walls hung with rich
arras tapestry.4

Elaborate ornament was just as important in the Arts and
Crafts as plainness, as the view of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in

figure 4 shows. A plain cabinet in the foreground is surrounded by
the sumptuous tapestries of Burne-Jones and Morris and Company.
If this taste for elaboration seems to contradict the first quality,
thinginess, remember that we are looking at objects and investigat-
ing taste. If we were still in the first part of this paper, there would
be a contradiction, because we would be talking about abstract
ideas, “Simplicity” and “Splendor.” But here we are dealing with

taste, which is more subtle and more generous than ideas. It is

perfectly possible-perhaps even necessary-to enjoy the simple
and the splendid aspects of the Arts and Crafts.

4 William Morris to Whistler: Papers and
Addresses on Art and Craft and the
Commonweal(London: George Bell and
Sons, 1911), 54-5.

Design Issues: Volume 13, Number 1 Spring 1997 21

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Figure 5
71-5 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London,
by C. R. Ashbee, 1896-1913.
Photograph: Anthony Kersting.

<.. <.>.’.o .9…..

… .. .. …. .. .. … .. . ee5?s_

*:: :::}: }::.e; .}:: ….. :: .:i 8×8:’S;. _ 1 | R …… s I 3 _t g ?5,>- –…… . . ……. ……..

4. II~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.. ….

The third quality is association. It is normal in Arts and
Crafts objects for some aspect of the design, often but not always the
ornament, to be associated with, or refer to, something else. So
when you are trying to understand the object, you are looking at its
construction, use, and formal qualities; and at its associations. This
all sounds very technical, but it is a familiar part of decorative art.

Arts and Crafts objects usually spread their field of associa-
tion over two areas. One was nature and the other was the past.
Nature in Arts and Crafts designs was typically both stylized and
realistic. In the handbook Silverwork and Jewellery by the leading
designer Henry Wilson, there is a section on how to make a pendant
in the form of a nightingale. It begins, “First go and watch one
singing. “‘ Designs like this were meant to carry the mind out into
the countryside. It was a Romantic approach, and very different
from that of such mid-Victorian design refor mers as Henry Cole and

Christopher Dresser, who argued that ornament should be
abstracted from nature, so that it looked more like geometry and
less like things.

Figure 5 shows a group of houses by C. R. Ashbee in Cheyne
Walk, Chelsea, London, including that shown in figure 1. T’he
picturesque details and jumbled facades recall the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century streetscape of English country towns. We natu-
rally think of this streetscape as the “source” of Ashbee’s designs,
where he went for inspiration. But we should also think of it as the
“/association” of his designs: he thought of Chelsea as a kind of
urban village, growing through history, and he wanted to convey

5 Henry Wilson, Silverworkand Jewellery
(London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd.,
1903), 127.

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Figure 6
Necklace and pendant by Fred Partridge,
c.1906-1O0.
Photograph: Sotheby’s, London.

that sense in his houses. Here, as in most Arts and Crafts contexts,
the past is a source both of inspiration and of association.

The last item in this catalog of Arts and Crafts taste is that it
was reactionary, or antithetical. I mean that it reacted against the
prevailing middle-class taste of its day. Arts and Crafts designers
looked at what was in the shops and then went away and designed
the opposite. The fashion in late-Victorian trade jewelry was for
diamonds, which were discovered in large quantities in South
Africa in 1868, and which became a symbol of wealth. They usually
were mounted in fine gold settings with other pale stones, in
designs which mimicked nature closely and whimsically-horses’
heads, shamrocks, and so on. Figure 6 shows a necklace by the Arts
and Crafts jeweler Fred Partridge. The design includes not
diamonds but a mixture of semiprecious stones; not fine gold

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settings but a setting of silver; not pale stones but color; and not

mimicking of nature, but evocation. We can only understand this

necklace fully when we put it in its antithetical context. It as much

as statement as a necklace. It says, “I am not about money. I am

about color, and craftsmanship, and art.”
Now that we have traveled in both directions, what can we

conclude? I cannot claim to have given you a coherent picture of the
Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. I cannot reconcile splendor
and simplicity for you, or explain why collaborative attempts at the
Unity of Art did not come to much. I can only give you an interpre-
tation of parts of this, to me, too rich and too loose phenomenon.
But if there is a leitmotif running through what I have said, it is the
sense of the Arts and Crafts as marking itself off, underlining its
separateness from the world about it. We have seen this just now in
the association of Arts and Crafts objects with the Romantic dream
worlds of nature and the past, and in the antithetical approach. It
also was implied in the big ideas at the beginning. It was an impor-
tant part of the Unity of Art to be against professionalism. It was an

important part of Joy in Labor to be against that dark, mythical,

soul-destroying factory. And it was an important part of design
reform to be against current commercial taste.

Up until now, I have concentrated on the basic premise of the
Wolfsonian’s inaugural exhibition, that design expresses ideas. But
as it has turned out, I have also been discussing the central theme of
the exhibition, modernity. You may wonder at my saying that, for I
have not mentioned the word “modernity” since the beginning.
That is because I have been talking about it in a negative sense. I
have been talking about antimodernism, for that is, I think, the best

general word for the inspiration which lay behind the turning away
of the Arts and Crafts movement.

I see the Arts and Crafts movement as a late episode in the
history of Romanticism. It upholds the imagination over reason,

feeling over intellect, and the organic over the mechanical. Instead
of the libertarian politics of a Rousseau or a Shelley, it tries to bring
Romantic values to bear on the daily life of the working man. Now
Romanticism was one, if not the principal, current of nineteenth-
century antimodernism. Its values challenged the modernization of

society in the nineteenth century-a developing economy, industri-

alization, the growth of cities, the dominance of the urban bour-
geoisie, and secularism. Even democracy which it had originally
championed it came to despise-in the London of Morris’s News
from Nowhere, the Houses of Parliament have become a dung heap.
I would go further and say that Romanticism was antithetical to
modernity; that it embodied values which were a necessary oppo-
site to the rationalizing of society in Victorian Britain, as opposite
and as necessary as sleep is to waking. Romanticism and modernity
hate each other and need each other. Remember the quotation from
William Morris with which I started. The Arts and Crafts movement

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in Britain was simply a brave and slightly foolish application of the

spirit of Romanticism to the everyday world of work, and it too was

made up of hating and needing.

There remains the question of politics. I referred at the begin-

ning to the link between the Arts and Crafts movement and social-

ism. Examples can be cited easily enough. William Morris, the
leading member of the Arts and Crafts movement was a leading

Socialist in the 1880s and early 1890s. A good number of his Arts

and Crafts friends and associates were also Socialists, notably Philip

Webb, the most revered Arts and Crafts architect. Walter Crane

devoted his talents as an illustrator to the Socialist cause. And C. R.

Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft was a brave and sustained attempt to

create Ruskinian freedom in the workshop, inspired by Ashbee’s

concern for working men.

Does this mean that the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain

was aligned with Socialism, that it was in some way left wing? That

would be interesting for, if modern craft movements have had polit-

ical affiliations, they usually have been with nationalism, as in

Eastern Europe and Scandinavia at the turn of the century, or with

the right wing, as in Germany and Italy in the early twentieth

century.

I think that there was a sense of social responsibility in the

Arts and Crafts movement, a sense of designing and making things
in a spirit which did not take profit as its motive. But that is too

vague a spirit to be identified with socialism. And the specific links

with politics are not as close as they may seem at first sight. Morris’s

socialism was very real, and intimately linked with his work as a

designer, but it was not the cause of that work. If anything, it was

his work as a designer and the joy it brought him which led to his

socialism. It would be truer to say that his politics was design

inspired than that his design was politically inspired. And though

Ashbee brought his social beliefs and his design work together in an

impressive way, his links with political socialism were, at most,

loose. His friend, Alec Miller, recalled “I know that he never was a
member of any socialist group or organization, and I doubt if he

ever gave a vote for Labor in a party election.”6

And for every left-wing element in the Arts and Crafts we
can cite a right-wing one. Against the profound socialism of Morris

we can weigh the equally profound right-wing sentiments of

Ruskin. The opening words of Ruskin’s autobiography are: “I am,

and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old School.”7
Philip Webb’s greatest building was a large country house called
“Clouds.” It was built for an aristocrat, Percy Wyndham, who made
it a gathering place for right-wing politicians and intellectuals. In

assessing the Arts and Crafts movement, should we not give as
much weight to the Tory client as to the Socialist architect? And

against the Romantic socialism of an Ashbee we can weigh the
conservative individualism of a Voysey, who gave up reading one of

6 In a letter to Nikolaus Pevsner, March 10,
1957; seen by the writer among Sir
Nikolaus’s papers in 1968.

7 John Ruskin, Praeterita (London: Rupert
Hart-Davis, 1949), 5.

Design Issues: Volume 13, Number 1 Spring 1997 25

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Ashbee’s books in disgust because its call for state protection of the

crafts irritated him so much.8

I do not cite these right-wing examples in order to give you

the impression that the Arts and Crafts movement was politically

bland, indifferently right or left wing. It had a potential for political

extremism: Morris the Marxist and Ruskin the furious Tory were

both its mentors. And I think we can understand why this should

be. The inspiration of the Arts and Crafts movement lay in the

Romantic critique of industrial society, that is, in antimodernism. At

its heart was the conviction that creativity can be a part of the lives

of ordinary people. There was nowhere on the face of mainstream

politics in the late nineteenth century where this critique, this

conviction could take hold. The Arts and Crafts movement repre-

sented values for which politics had no place. It has no place for

them today. But if you care about these things, the Arts and Crafts

movement remains of abiding interest.

8 In a letter, c.1910, to Arthur W. Simpson,
in the possession of John Brandon-
Jones.

26 Design Issues: Volume 13, Number 1 Spring 1997

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• Article Contents

p. 15
p. 16
p. 17
p. 18
p. 19
p. 20
p. 21
p. 22
p. 23
p. 24
p. 25
p. 26

• Issue Table of Contents

Design Issues, Vol. 13, No. 1, Designing the Modern Experience, 1885-1945 (Spring, 1997), pp. i-ii+1-92
Front Matter [pp. i-ii]
Introduction [pp. 1-4]
A Matter of Give and Take: Peasant Crafts and Their Revival in Late Imperial Russia [pp. 5-14]
Ideas and Objects: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain [pp. 15-26]
“New Buildings Create New People”: The Pavilion Schools of Weimar Frankfurt as a Model of Pedagogical Reform [pp. 27-38]
In the Shadow of the Fasces: Political Design in Fascist Italy [pp. 39-52]
Toward an Iconography of American Labor: Work, Workers, and the Work Ethic in American Art, 1930-1945 [pp. 53-66]
Micky Wolfson’s Cabinet of Wonders: From Private Passion to Public Purpose [pp. 67-81]
Paul Rand 1914-1996 [p. 82]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 83-86]
Books Received [pp. 87-92]
Back Matter

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Robert Morris, Architecture, and the Scientific Cast of Mind in Early Eighteenth-Century
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Author(s): Tanis Hinchcliffe
Source: Architectural History, Vol. 47 (2004), pp. 127-138
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• Article Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Architectural History, Vol. 47 (2004), pp. i-vi+1-396
Front Matter [pp. i-vi]
Tomb Architecture of Dynastic China: Old and New Questions [pp. 1-24]
Fit for a King? The Architecture of the Beauchamp Chapel [pp. 25-52]
The Kynges New Haull: A Response to Jonathan Foyle’s ‘Reconstruction of Thomas Wolsey’s Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace’ [pp. 53-76]
Functionality, Commemoration and Civic Competition: A Study of Early Seventeenth-Century Workhouse Design and Building in Reading and Newbury [pp. 77-112]
Robert Hooke’s Collection of Architectural Books and Prints [pp. 113-125]
Robert Morris, Architecture, and the Scientific Cast of Mind in Early Eighteenth-Century England [pp. 127-138]
The Romanesque Revival in Britain, 1800-1840: William Gunn, William Whewell, and Edmund Sharpe [pp. 139-158]
Inside outside: Changing Attitudes Towards Architectural Models in the Museums at South Kensington [pp. 159-200]
Clarity or Camouflage? The Development of Constructional Polychromy in the 1850s and Early 1860s [pp. 201-226]
The Industry Palace of the 1873 World’s Fair: Karl von Hasenauer, John Scott Russell, and New Technology in Nineteenth-Century Vienna [pp. 227-250]
‘Imperial Monumental Halls and Tower’: Westminster Abbey and the Commemoration of Empire, 1854-1904 [pp. 251-282]
Emily Meynell Ingram and Holy Angels, Hoar Cross, Staffordshire: A Study in Patronage [pp. 283-328]
Basil Oliver and the End of the Arts and Crafts Movement [pp. 329-360]
Modern Architecture in Post-Colonial Ghana and Nigeria [pp. 361-392]
Back Matter [pp. 393-396]

1/1/14Anxious Youth, Then and Now – NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/opinion/anxious-youth-then-and-now.html?hp&rref=opinion&pagewanted=print 1/3

December 31, 2013

Anxious Youth, Then and Now
By JON GRINSPAN

FOR years now, we’ve heard the gripes by and about millennials, the offspring of the Great Recession, caught between
childhood and adulthood. Their plight seems so very 21st century: the unstable careers, the confusion of technologies, the
delayed romance, parenthood and maturity.

Many of the same concerns and challenges faced the children of the industrial revolution, as the booms and busts of America’s
wild 19th century tore apart the accepted order.

Each New Year’s, young men and women filled their diaries with worries that seem very familiar today: They found living with
their parents “humiliating indeed” and felt “qualified for nothing.” Others moaned: “I am twenty-five and not in love yet.”
Gathering over beer or cigars, they complained about how far they were from marriage, how often they switched jobs.

The idea that millennials are uniquely “stuck” is nonsense. Young Victorians grasped for maturity as well, embarrassed by the
distance between their lives and society’s expectations.

These Americans were born into an earthquake. During the 1800s America’s population exploded from 5 million to 75
million. By 1900 nearly as many people lived in New York City as had lived in the entire country during the Revolution. The
nation went from a rural backwater to an industrial behemoth — producing more than Britain, Germany and France combined
— but every decade the economy crashed. America saw the kind of wild change we see today in China, and in a new society
with little to stabilize it.

For rootless 20-somethings, each national shock felt intimate, rattling their love lives and careers. Many young adults could
not accept that their personal struggles were just ripples of a large-scale social dislocation. So each New Year’s, they blamed
themselves. In a Jan. 1, 1859, entry in her journal, 19-year-old Mollie Sanford, stuck on a Nebraska homestead in the middle of

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1/1/14 Anxious Youth, Then and Now – NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/opinion/anxious-youth-then-and-now.html?hp&rref=opinion&pagewanted=print 2/3

a recession, castigated herself for not being “any better than I was one year ago.”

Romance worried them above all. Today some fret about the changing institution of marriage, but we are used to such
adjustments; 19th-century Americans were blindsided when the average age of marriage rose precipitously, to 26 — a level
America didn’t return to until 1990. In a world where life expectancy hovered below age 50, delaying marriage until 26 was
revolutionary.

Cities brimmed with bachelors and unmarried ladies in their mid-20s, once a rare sight. In their New Year’s reflections, men
and women noted that their parents had had children by their age. One typical Union Army soldier wrote home wondering,
“Do you think I will be married before I am thirty?”

This social change brought personal turmoil, especially for young women. Marriage meant love and family, but in a society
that discouraged ladies from working, young women were dependent on their husbands. Remaining single meant economic
and legal instability, and the perception of childishness. When the mother of one diarist, Emily Gillespie, scolded the
Midwestern farm girl by saying, “you are twenty years old and not married yet,” it hardly mattered that Emily was in line with
her generation.

While some looked for love, others looked for jobs. Before the modern era, young people found work within family networks,
laboring at home or on a farm, pausing for “elevenses” (a late-morning whiskey break) or an afternoon nap. The industrial
economy changed that.

The good news was that there were more jobs; the bad news was that they were isolating and temporary. Work now meant
small factories or lumber camps or railroad crews of strangers. They were monitored like machines, with pressure to increase
productivity replacing the slower pace of preindustrial labor.

For young people this meant chronic instability. A young man might brag about his new job one week and find himself begging
for money from his father the next. Frustrated youths worried that their jobs did not reflect their age or ability: One brilliant
young speaker complained about working in a cramped Philadelphia boot factory, nailing soles when he should have been
climbing a soapbox.

While 19th-century young adults faced many of the anxieties that trouble 23-year-olds today, they found novel solutions. The

1/1/14 Anxious Youth, Then and Now – NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/opinion/anxious-youth-then-and-now.html?hp&rref=opinion&pagewanted=print 3/3

first was to move. Young men and women were notoriously transient, heading out on “wander years” when life at home
seemed stalled. In one Wisconsin county, 90 percent of those present in 1870 were gone by 1880. Most set out with no plan,
few connections and a small carpetbag of personal possessions.

Another solution was to find like-minded young adults, to share, as one later put it in his memoir, their “baffling
discouragements and buoyant hopes.” Nineteenth-century young people were compulsive joiners. Political movements,
literary societies, religious organizations, dancing clubs and even gangs proliferated. The men and women who joined cared
about the stated cause, but also craved the community these groups created. They realized that while instability was
inevitable, isolation was voluntary.

Today’s young adults are constantly rebuked for not following the life cycle popular in 1960. But a quick look at earlier eras
shows just how unusual mid-20th-century young people were. A society in which people married out of high school and held
the same job for 50 years is the historical outlier. Some of that era’s achievements were enviable, but they were not the norm.

The anxieties that 19th-century young people poured into their New Year’s diary entries are more common. Americans
considered young adulthood the most dangerous part of life, and struggled to find a path to maturity. Those who did best
tended to accept change, not to berate themselves for breaking with tradition. Young adults might do the same today. Stop
worrying about how they appear from the skewed perspective of the mid-20th century and find a new home, a new stability
and a new community in the new year.

Jon Grinspan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, is writing a book on young people and 19th­century American
politics.