Craft: An American History

Glenn Adamson is a distinguished writer in a relatively new field: craft history and criticism. He is the author of several books presenting his views on the history and development of craft, for example, Fewer, Better Things (2018); The Invention of Craft (2013); and The Craft Reader (2010). He is a founding editor of the Journal of Modern Craft, a peer-reviewed academic journal in England that focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on studio crafts. Those impressive credentials demand his acknowledgment as an important voice on the topic of this new volume: Craft: An American History.This work is a social history of America with a craft overlay. As such, it presents as a well-documented chronological ramble through the main periods of American history, beginning with the colonial period (chapter 1, entitled “The Artisan Republic”). In eight more chapters, Adamson moves through subsequent eras, each bearing a descriptive chapter title: the antebellum nineteenth century (chapter 2: “A Self-Made Nation”); the Civil War and Reconstruction (chapter 3: “Learn Trades or Die”); the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (chapter 4: “A More Perfect Union”); the prewar years (chapter 5: “Americana”); the era of World War II (chapter 6: “Making War”); the post-World War II era (chapter 7: “Declarations of Independence”); the late twentieth century (chapter 8: “Cut and Paste”); and a contemplative overview from the perspective of 2020 (chapter 9: “Can Craft Save America?”).In answering the question posed by his final chapter title, Adamson notes that in our divisive present day, craft endures as a “shared undertaking” (301). He asserts that craft retains “the potential to bring together people of all backgrounds” (306), in part by refusing a “false choice between individualism and community” (316), through the tolerance and compromise that inhere in all craft production.Despite its many fascinations, a key problem with this work is Adamson's flexible and broad—arguably too broad—definition of craft; at the very beginning of the book, he proclaims that “whenever a skilled person makes something using their hands, that's craft” (2–3). By defining “craft” as skilled labor, Adamson encompasses many things—perhaps too many things—made by hand. By including virtually all skilled or artisanal labor as craft, he forgoes the labeling used by previous writers about crafts to define movements and to identify categories of crafts within the greater crafts community.A positive consequence of this approach is that Adamson avoids academic quagmires in deep discussions of crafts: the “art vs. craft” controversy, and the sorts of distinct differences between fine and domestic crafts. He neglects to deal with questions of quality and evaluative standards at all, although such issues are particularly important in the studio crafts movement. In the book, Adamson touches only tangentially on the studio crafts movement. The book also is surprisingly short on photos and illustrations.While filled with endless specific and often enlightening examples, the book reveals the problematic way in which Adamson generalizes from individual cases. He often invokes the idea of crafts or skilled industrial trade work in an unfocused manner. Sometimes, for Adamson, “craft” seems to be almost any form of industrial trade occupation to which a prominent individual could be temporarily connected. For example, Frederick Douglass, as was the case for many Black people of his period, learned and found employment via a manual skill; in his case, ship caulking. But Adamson fails to demonstrate how practicing a craft affected Douglass's future career as an abolitionist, other than that he learned to be organized. Readers may be similarly surprised to find Mother Jones included here. While she started as a seamstress, at a time when most clothes were sewn by hand, Adamson fails to connect her craft occupation with her later efforts at labor organizing in the mountains—particularly how she became interested in the plight of the coal miners. The connection between craft and the lives of these widely known historical figures is fascinating, but Adamson never builds much meaning into it beyond the level of “fun fact.”Of special interest to readers of this journal, perhaps, is Adamson's overview in chapter 5 (“Americana”) of the promotion of crafts in the Southern Highlands as a cultural movement, rather than from the perspective of a single individual profile. President William Goodell Frost at Berea College in Kentucky, for instance, had the goal of proving that Appalachian people were worthy of help. Frost pointed to their skilled craft work as a means of demonstrating that they were not lazy and shiftless. Early on, he presented coverlets to donors as an example of the expertise and foresight it took to make them. Frost defended the crafts programs—part of the student industries program at Berea College—because they encouraged skill and planning. While Berea's craft programs began with textiles, they rapidly expanded to other areas like woodworking. Other schools in the mountains followed Frost's example and started their own crafts programs.Adamson notes the contradictory impulse among settlement school founders and other reformers: to glorify crafts and yet to rescue those trapped within them. For the Appalachian reformers who emerged from outside the region, the desire to find traditional authenticity often led to innovation. Highlights of this part of the history include accounts of Frances Louisa Goodrich and Allanstand Cottage Industries where textile and other craft work (quilts, brooms, baskets, chairs, dolls) were marketed as genuine folk art; the parallel effort at Berea College's Fireside Industries, with the marketing of ladder-back chairs and coverlets; the 1925 establishment of the John C. Campbell Folk School by Olive Dame Campbell; and Lucy Calista Morgan and the creation of the Penland School of Handicrafts in 1929. Adamson gives special attention to Allen H. Eaton, whom he terms “the Highlands craft revival's principal spokesman,” since Eaton advanced the idea that American craft was under threat and in need of urgent protection (168). A concrete consequence of that perspective was the formation in 1930 of the Southern Handicrafts Guild.Craft: An American History never quite deals with the sorts of criteria that many modern American craftspersons use, implicitly or explicitly, to evaluate the designs and the quality of their products. Though often fascinating, the book is occasionally frustrating; its too-broad definition of “crafts” suggests that it might have more accurately, if untidily, been called something like “Skilled Artisanal Work: An American History.” Nonetheless, Adamson's latest book certainly presents an interesting new lens with which to view American history, and it is worthy of being included in the libraries of all those with more than a passing interest in crafts.