Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

This democratic impulse coursed through every aspect of Hull-House. It was located in the midst of a densely populated Italian American neighborhood, but as the organization’s programming expanded, it reached immigrants from Greece, Poland, Russia, Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere. In the 1920s it would become a northern outpost of craft-based Mexican identity politics, or mexicanidad, as migrant potters came to work at the Hull-House Kilns.57 For this polyglot community it served as an all-purpose school, fitness center, orphanage, theater, and hospital, providing services in response to needs. And craft was right at the center of it. Far from insisting on assimilation, as was frequently the case when Progressive Era reformers sought to help immigrants, Addams was concerned that her constituents’ children, embarrassed by Old Country ways, were losing touch with their cultural inheritance. She saw traditional artisan techniques—particularly what she called “women’s primitive activities”—as a valuable corrective. In 1900 a Labor Museum opened at Hull-House, offering classes and public demonstrations in textiles, bookbinding, and metalworking. An extraordinary miscellany of equipment was put on display: spinning wheels from Colonial America, but also Syria; not just industrial weaving equipment, but also Navajo, Hindu, and Japanese handlooms. Immigrant women were invited to participate, not as passive students force-fed a diet of Americanism, but as teachers passing on their ...