Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

Together with Tiffany and de Forest, she started a decorating firm that furnished some of the grandest interiors in the country, including Mark Twain’s home in Hartford, several rooms in the White House, and the Veterans Room at the Park Avenue Armory, still intact today and described on its opening as “undoubtedly the most magnificent apartment of the kind in this country.”18

Boards were quartersawn, a way of cutting a log that exposes a striking pattern of rays and flecks, a sort of naturally occurring ornament.

“Think of it, Alice—tomorrow the headlines will say, Elbert Hubbard killed on the Lusitania!”

Byrdcliffe was particularly inviting to women, who found a creative freedom there unimaginable in most of America at the time. Zulma Steele, a creative polymath who mastered the skills of painting, pottery, printmaking, and furniture, collaborated with her long-term romantic partner, Edna Walker, on a ceramic line called “Zedware” (derived from their first names, just as “Byrdcliffe” was derived from its founders’ middle names). They inserted carved and painted panels into simple cabinets and chairs that Whitehead had designed—an approach similar to that used for Rookwood’s conventionally shaped but lushly painted vases, quite literally “applied art.” Unfortunately, the colony proved short-lived. Whitehead and McCall lacked Hubbard’s flair for promotion; having only the couple’s patronage to support it, Byrdcliffe began to break apart in 1907 in a blaze of recriminations. Several of the artists involved remained in the area, however, and their bohemian imprint would echo down all the way to the 1960s, when Woodstock became synonymous with the counterculture.36

Mary Ware Dennett, a leading light of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston. She stands at the opposite end of the Arts and Crafts spectrum from Hubbard: If he approached the movement basically as a marketing opportunity, for Dennett it was a deadly serious business. The Society of Arts and Crafts, founded in 1897 and still in existence today, was among the first and most ambitious organizations associated with the movement. Its primary activity, following the lead of London’s Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, was to present its members’ work in group shows. It also produced a journal entitled Handicraft, comparable to Stickley’s Craftsman, to which Dennett was a frequent contributor. Though she supported the society’s overall goals, she was soon disillusioned by its emphasis on display. “Something is wrong when the members are busy mainly at making the trifles and extras of life, rather than the important first necessities,” Dennett wrote. She pointed out that in a holistic, craft-based economy, the makers would also have to be the consumers. But in practice, society members often could not afford one another’s work, and instead sold their products up the social ladder. This seemed to her an obviously untenable model, for it could never expand beyond its narrow base of philanthropic clientele.

Dennett gave up on convincing her colleagues of this. Instead, she focused on women’s rights, advocating for birth control and against prostitution and joining a Woman’s Peace Party when the First World War came.37

Thorstein Veblen, originator of the theory of conspicuous consumption, who derided the craft revival as sentimental, “romanticism with a smear of lackadaisical aestheticism across its face.”38 But Dennett was especially clear-sighted in highlighting the tension between products and process—on the one hand, “things,” aesthetically gratifying but politically inert; and on the other, political reform leading to a more just society. The Arts and Crafts movement, in all its variety and intermittent splendor, focused primarily on the first of these. It never paid more than lip service to the project of empowering the skilled worker. But there was another movement abroad in the Progressive Era that did just that: the cause of organized labor.

They called her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Mary Harris Jones was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1837, and emigrated with her family during the Great Famine that ravaged the countryside. Safely in North America, she and her relations led itinerant lives, first in Canada, then in Michigan, then Memphis. Harris supported herself as a seamstress, having learned the craft at a convent school. She married a man named George Jones, a skilled metalworker who was also an organizer for the International Union of Iron Molders (its motto: “Equal and exact justice to all Men, of whatever state or persuasion”). Then tragedy struck. The family lived on low-lying land in the fork of a bayou, ideal conditions for the spread of yellow fever. In 1867, the disease claimed the lives of Harris’s husband and all four of their children. She herself was spared, though, and moved on to Chicago, where she opened a dressmaking shop, only for yet another unthinkable calamity to befall her four years later. The city was consumed in flames—the Great Fire of Chicago—and her business with it. Jones was luckier than some, though; her skills permitted her to find work with some of Chicago’s wealthiest families. “I had ample opportunity to observe the luxury and extravagance of their lives,” she recalled in her autobiography. “Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificence on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wre...

1903. A massive strike of 75,000 workers, about equally divided by gender, was under way in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, then a center for the American textile industry. Among their grievances were the use of underage labor and extraordinarily dangerous working conditions—a horrific combination. “Every day,” Jones said, “little children came into Union Headquarters, some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle.” She assembled a group of them to parade together through industrial districts. Everywhere they went, massive crowds turned out in support. Jones brought the young factory workers up on platforms to display their mutilated limbs: “Philadelphia’s mansions,” she cried, “were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children.” She marched them up to New York City, and in Coney Island, she went so far as to display them in animal cages as a metaphor for their treatment at the hands of their employers. Then she pressed on to Long Island, to the summer home of Theodore Roosevelt. She would show him what the “strenuous life” really looked like.40

Yet she and her fellow labor activists did think seriously about questions of skill. And these were difficult questions. The Knights of Labor, the pioneering union that formed the context for Jones’s early activism, was the descendant of earlier fraternal organizations, as its medieval-sounding name suggests. Founded in 1869 as a secret brotherhood, it grew into a nationwide movement representing “producers” of all types, whose interests were juxtaposed to “non-producers” such as bankers and lawyers. It sought goals that would be beneficial to all its members, both skilled and unskilled: a legislated eight-hour workday, the end of child labor, and greater safety regulations. The Knights also pushed for equal pay between men and women, and they admitted African Americans into their ranks. This solidarity was not to last, however. The labor movement suffered a series of setbacks, including the dramatic events that occurred in Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886. During a strike at the local McCormick Reaper plant, union protestors clashed with police, with loss of life on both sides. Public opinion turned against the bomb-throwing “anarchists” who were believed to be at fault, turning the tide in the war of words between management and unions.

American Federation of Labor (AFL) was formed to pursue a different strategy, which ultimately came to be known as “craft unionism.” It was not necessarily more conciliatory in its methods than the Knights had been—strikes nationwide nearly tripled in the 1890s, partly as a result of an economic depression that settled over the country in the middle of the decade.41 But instead of the centralized, big-tent approach of the Knights of Labor, the AFL was structured as a coalition of trade-specific unions, which restricted their membership based on standards of skill. This approach proved effective for those it protected, but left other workers exposed. In 1889, for example, an AFL affiliate called the Journeymen Tailors’ Union of America staged a successful strike to protest reduced wages and domestic outsourcing. The union position was that a tailor should “sit among men and make work,” and that the home should not be used as a workshop. The victory maintained income for male workers, but it effectively sidelined female pieceworkers. The AFL presided over a similar marginalization of African American and Chinese American interests. In the railroad industry, labor was organized narrowly according to specialization, with thirteen separate unions (electricians, blacksmiths, oilers, boilermakers, carpet layers, and so forth) by 1901. These skilled workers had terrific leverage because they could shut down so much economic activity with a strike. Yet they did nothing to help manu...

These things a good cigarmaker learned to do more or less mechanically, which left us free to think, talk, listen, or sing.” One among the crew was often selected to read aloud to the others, and given a share of the cigars as a form of payment: “I had earned the mind-freedom that accompanied skill as a craftsman.”

Eugene Debs, the most widely recognized socialist in America, responded in kind: “We have to educate and organize the workers industrially and politically, but not along the zigzag craft lines laid down by Gompers, who through all of his career has favored the master class. You never hear the capitalist press speak of him nowadays except in praise and adulation.”44

The first step in Taylorism was “selection,” getting the right worker for the job (classified by endurance, strength, and skill level) and then holding them to their maximum output. (The next steps were “repetition, obedience and reward.”)

In fact, about all that Taylorism and Fordism had in common was an obsession with efficiency and a complete disregard for workers’ quality of life. There was no manager with a stopwatch standing over Ford’s employees, because there didn’t need to be. The pace of labor was controlled by the assembly line, about which there is nothing “scientific.”

In the first year of the assembly line, so many workers walked out of the Ford plant in disgust that more than 52,000 had to be hired just to maintain a constant labor force of 14,000.

Famously, he raised wages to five dollars per day, far above the industry norm, just to keep workers on the job. Later this was spun as a brilliant maneuver to help his own employees afford Model Ts, turning them into consumers. It was actually a means of coping with a self-inflicted management crisis. In any case, Ford did not have to pay these high wages for long. As the entire industry shifted to the assembly line—and then other sectors of the economy followed suit—workers had little choice but to submit to the new manufacturing techniques.

work. The Bundy Manufacturing Company, founded in 1889, was so successful that it had offices nationwide by the turn of the century. Over time, it merged with other businesses in the time-recorder industry, then branched out into calculators and other punched-card technology. Eventually, it was rebranded as International Business Machines, better known as IBM.

The puddler’s job is to refine pig iron (hauled over, presumably, by a handler like Schmidt) from the blast furnace into workable wrought iron. Individual “pigs” of the unrefined metal (so named because they have a rounded shape, which could be seen as porcine given sufficient imagination) are melted in a furnace. This liquid mass is then manipulated with a long iron rod, as the puddler pushes bits of pure iron to the bottom, where they gradually accumulate into a mass. The impurities are poured off as waste slag, and the iron is shaped into rough balls, which are hoisted out with tongs. Other workers then refine the metal further by working it with rollers, removing more slag and getting it into a workable flat bar. This is as difficult as it sounds. James J. Davis, a Welsh immigrant who began his work life as a teenage puddler’s assistant in Pittsburgh, recalled the importance of tacit knowledge in his training: “None of us ever went to school and learned the chemistry of it from books. We learned the trick by doing it, standing with our faces in the scorching heat while our hands puddled the metal in its glaring bath.”53 Davis became a union organizer and, later, secretary of labor in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Even then, he was known as “Puddler Jim.”

Magarac, it turns out, means “jackass” in Croatian.

“You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert first thing in the morning.”55 This is how Jane Addams, looking back over a life of philanthropy, pictured herself as a young girl.

She found her model in London’s East End, in Toynbee Hall, an early and influential “settlement house.” The term referred to university students and other middle-class volunteers who would temporarily settle there—“city missionaries,” Addams called them—and conduct charitable works among the poor.

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 ...

Though the church remained, the local industries were now set up as a private firm called Amana Society Inc. The following year, Prohibition was repealed, and spotting an opportunity, a man called George C. Foerstner started making beverage coolers in the corner of one of the local furniture shops. The Amana Society purchased his company, and he built it into one of America’s most successful appliance manufacturers. In 1965 it was purchased by Raytheon, and today it is part of the Whirlpool Corporation.

ancient Puebloans of the American Southwest (then typically referred to as the Anasazi) who made their homes in rock architecture. Puebloan artifacts had been prominently featured at the Chicago Exposition in 1893, attracting much interest. The club called its meeting room atop Orchestra Hall the “kiva,” after the ceremonial space at the heart of Puebloan culture.

This cult of authenticity brought about a dramatic shift in attitudes toward Native Americans. The same year that Jarvie made his close copy of an Anasazi pot, Gustav Stickley’s magazine, the Craftsman, proclaimed, “The only handicraft this country knows [is] that of the Indian.” Every other aspect of American culture had been imported from somewhere or other. Only Native traditions had sprung from this soil, this land. And only in Native communities, undisturbed by industry and the other trappings of modernity, was craft still intrinsic to everyday life. Already in 1904, Stickley had visited an Indian School at Fort Yuma, California, where he urged instructors not to impose “the white man’s way” on the children and to respect traditional Native skills such as basketry and pottery.3

The about-face was bitterly ironic, too, for it was only now, after doing their very best to destroy and displace the Native cultural universe, that whites made a fetish of

The Dakota author and physician Ohiyesa, also known as Charles Eastman, wrote in 1902 that it was already too late.

Yet Native artisans, sizing up the situation, strategically embraced the idea of authenticity, as a way of both articulating their own identity and positioning their work in new markets. Among the first and most prominent makers to adopt this complex position was the potter Nampeyo (Nung-beh-yong, translated as “Sand Snake” or “Harmless Snake”). She was born in about 1860 to a Hopi father and a Tewa mother, in what is now the state of Arizona. The Hopi, along with the Zuni and Acoma peoples, consider the ancient Puebloans to be their ancestors. And Nampeyo was indeed an inheritor of tradition. She learned to make pottery from her paternal grandmother, and already at the age of fifteen she was photographed at her home on First Mesa by visiting geographical surveyors—the first of many times that her image would be captured and reproduced as an emblem of Hopi culture.

He asked the Hopi artisans nearby to make commercial versions of tithu, popularly known among whites as “kachina dolls,” figures carved in cottonwood root representing deities, the katsinam.

Edward Curtis, Nampeyo Decorating Pottery, c. 1900. Edward S. Curtis Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-48396.

Keam, the first to sell Pueblo and Native products to the tourist trade, remained the most influential of the early merchants. He and an assistant had discovered shards of ancient pottery at a ruin called Sikyátki, at the base of First Mesa. The fragments they found probably date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and are distinguished for their polychrome decoration. Keam showed them to the Pueblo potters, including Nampeyo, and encouraged them to make contemporary versions for sale. In 1895 a formal excavation was conducted at Sikyátki, under the auspices of the Smithsonian, and Nampeyo’s husband was on the crew. Through these connections, she had ample opportunity to study the ancient pots, which she treated as an aesthetic quarry for her own innovations.

For the most part, Nampeyo retained the techniques she had learned in her youth. Her earthenware pots, coiled rather than thrown, were coated in a thin white kaolin slip, which she calibrated to the clay body to avoid surface cracking. Once it was fired, she decorated the pot using mineral pigments, in a visual language of her own creation. Nampeyo borrowed motifs from those she saw on Sikyátki shards and from other contemporaneous Pueblo potters such as the Zuni. Over time, her compositions departed from the interlocking geometries conventional to the tradition. She placed stylized bird forms on the shoulders of her forms, crisply delineated swirls floating on an off-white ground. Nampeyo also made technically challenging shapes such as a seed jar, compressed downward so that its upper register is nearly flat, extremely difficult to achieve by coiling.8

It was a part many Native people found themselves playing. The dynamic had been in place at least since the 1880s, when the nation’s capital witnessed demonstrations on the loom by We’Wha, a Zuni lhamana (two-spirit person, born with male sex characteristics but living as a woman). Born in 1849, We’Wha was a skilled potter as well as a weaver. On her visit to Washington, D.C., she was received in grand style as a “Zuni princess,” and met with President Grover Cleveland. She made a series of blankets on the National Mall, then donated them to the Smithsonian. A surviving photograph shows her holding a handwoven basket of her own manufacture, as if offering it to the viewer; a curtain behind her reinforces the sense that she is playing a role, a tableau vivant with only one performer.

In later years, the famed potters Maria and Julian Martinez, of the Tewa-speaking pueblo at San Ildefonso, were much in demand as demonstrators. They first performed at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, and spent a whole year at the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego in 1915, bringing sacks of sand and clay to use. In 1934 the ceramic manufacturer Haeger Potteries brought them to the Chicago Century of Progress International Exposition, making an explicit juxtaposition between their “primitive” craft and modern industrial techniques. Like Nampeyo, the Martinezes drew inspiration from shards found in archaeological digs. They had initially made polychrome wares, not very different from those of other Pueblo potters, with Maria forming the pots and Julian decorating them. The iconic blackware so strongly associated with them today began as research experiments meant to determine how certain historic pots were achieved. The answer lay in a “smothered” reduction firing that smoked the surface, turning the red clay black, a process they discovered in 1910. The effect was further refined through the addition of volcanic ash to the clay body and through selective scraping and polishing.

Martinez family was as modern as any other American family. When the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb began at Los Alamos, near San Ildefonso, both Julian and their son, Popovi Da, worked there as machinists. Nonetheless, an invincible aura of traditionalism has continued to surround them. Julian’s death in 1943, combined with Maria’s longevity—she lived until 1980, when she was ninety-three—has further tended to artificially isolate her as a figure of genius. She was the first Native artisan to be the subject of a full-length biography, published by the anthropologist Alice Lee Marriott in 1948.

Over the course of the late nineteenth century, the Navajo developed a whole vocabulary for jewelry and other metalwork articulated with cold chisel and stamp work. This was quite different from the lapidary techniques (cutting and polishing stone and shell) that previous generations had practiced. The Navajo even developed entirely new formats, such as the concho belt: flat disks hammered from coin metal ingots and strung on a leather thong. The necessary tools for silversmithing were either handmade from recycled metal or acquired through trade; in turn, local markets also provided a ready outlet for selling wares.

At the same time, a parallel situation was unfolding more than sixteen hundred miles east of the Pueblos, near the intersection of Hamlin Road and U.S. Highway 17 in South Carolina. On this spot today stands another historic marker, not unlike the one near Maria Martinez’s home in San Ildefonso. This one reads, SWEETGRASS BASKETS. It explains that in this general vicinity, a craft has been HANDED DOWN IN CERTAIN FAMILIES SINCE THE 1700s, making it ONE OF THE OLDEST WEST AFRICAN ART FORMS IN AMERICA. The marker also relates a more specific, and more recent, history. In 1930, a woman named Lottie Moultrie Swinton set up a chair right at the edge of the highway and began to sell her baskets to passersby. It was simple but smart marketing. A bridge had just opened connecting this rural area, known as Mount Pleasant, to nearby Charleston. Just as the train brought tourists to Nampeyo, cars brought prospective buyers to Lottie Swinton. Others in the community followed suit and set up more permanent stands to display their baskets. Eventually, the road would be known as the “Gullah Highway.”16

craft in the area was facing difficulties. The same automobiles that constituted such a good business opportunity for basket makers were disrupting the blacksmithing trade. The disappearance of horse-drawn vehicles and wooden wagons meant a sudden drop in business: no horseshoes to make, no saddle and bridle fittings to repair, no rims for wooden wheels to fit. Across the country, artisans made a difficult transition, turning their forges into auto body shops—a transition memorably captured in Buster Keaton’s 1922 short film The Blacksmith.

The best-documented example of this shift in the Charleston area is a shop that had been established prior to the Civil War by Guy Simmons, an enslaved artisan. After emancipation, his son Peter Simmons inherited the shop, and eventually moved it to downtown Charleston. In 1925, Peter took on a thirteen-year-old apprentice named Philip Simmons (no relation). Just as Philip began learning the trade, it all but disappeared. He responded creatively, shifting from the carriage trade to more skill-intensive architectural metalwork: decorative gates, railings, and window grills. He became a self-taught specialist in the techniques and styles of the historic city. “You got to study this thing,” he told a later interviewer. “Put a lot of time in studyin’ it. Just like you get books on Charleston—study the wrought iron—I walk around here and see what the other man got.” At a time when American decorative art history was in its infancy, restoration artisans like Simmons were the most expert authorities on their subjects. Over the course of his career he worked on hundreds of metalwork elements on buildings all over town—in many cases, replacing or repairing the handwork of enslaved artisans of past generations. By the 1950s, he was the one and only blacksmith registered in the city directory.18

Mercer Museum is a New Bedford harpooning boat, shown alongside implements for cutting blubber and even an enormous try pot straight out of Melville’s Moby-Dick.

That history was totally whitewashed: no Queequegs, all Ishmaels.

Henry Francis du Pont, who built one of America’s finest collections of early decorative art and, between 1928 and 1931, an enormous mansion to house it (today’s Winterthur Museum, in Delaware), derived his wealth from his family’s gunpowder and chemicals business.

Henry Ford also was an avid collector of Americana. (He visited Henry Chapman Mercer at Fonthill and sometimes competed with him for purchases, to Mercer’s annoyance.) In 1933, Ford opened to the public a museum to show his collection and an associated historic site called Greenfield Village, located in Dearborn, Michigan, with the goal of re-creating Colonial times. It was just a few miles from his enormous River Rouge automotive plant. The juxtaposition was perplexing.

An editor at the New York Times, after touring the village in Ford’s company, mused, “It was a strange sensation to pass old wagons while walking with one who had rendered them obsolete. The Dearborn collection of spinning wheels, Dutch ovens, covered bridges and other relics of an early American past is the work of a man whose life mission has been to take us away from that past as quickly as might be.”44 Ford explained this seeming contradiction by appealing to a narrative of progress. From his perspective, early craftsmanship was important not in and of itself, but as a moral lesson about the American drive to improve. A pamphlet circulated by Greenfield Village in its early days, entitled Looking Forward Through the Past, suggested that visitors should measure the technical achievements of the present day in relation to past handicraft and s...

As the involvement of men like these suggests, the tendency at Williamsburg was to rely on people with modern know-how, and encourage them to act a historical part. This was not wholly unlike the situation in the Highlands, where the industrially trained Edward Worst was considered the authority on weaving. But the narrative was very different from that at Penland. Rather than trying to preserve historic craft as a living tradition, Rockefeller was interested only in its outward appearance. For his patriotic purposes, all that was needed was a compelling evocation of America’s supposedly simpler past.

“Let us acknowledge the excellence of the metal flowing white hot to us from other lands,” Frank Cody, the superintendent of Detroit schools, said in 1921, “and seek by intelligent effort to direct it into the American mold.”57 Nor was this idle talk. In cities like Detroit, the educational system was transformed into a tool of acculturation, with night classes in English and civics offered to adult learners. Immigrants were met with a homogenous American ideal wherever they looked: in the factory, the museum, and the school alike.

As African American voting rights in the South were eradicated through a combination of violence and Jim Crow laws, white suffragists worried that welding themselves to another civil rights movement would impede their own progress. Black women were typically excluded from suffragist pageants. On one occasion, the pioneering African American campaigner Ida B. Wells had to refuse point-blank a request to march at the rear of a women’s rights parade, as if she were boarding the back of a bus. This racial divide was typical of women’s organizations at the time. The Daughters of the American Revolution is one example. It had strong connections to the suffrage movement—Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul were both members—and followed the Hull-House model by opening an immigrants’ craft shop in Chicago, in the hope of “making a bond between new Americans and the old, old stock.”67 Yet the DAR did not allow Black women to join its ranks. In keeping with the general tendency of the Colonial Revival, it painted a picture of the nation’s founding in just one color.

Racism also shadows the early years of the Girl Scouts of America, another women’s organization that was formed in this era. It was founded by Juliette Gordon Low in 1912, two years after the Boy Scouts, and like its male counterpart, it initially had a policy of racial segregation. Though neither explicitly restricted membership to white children—an independently run scout troop for African American boys was set up in North Carolina almost immediately, in 1911, and a social worker named Josephine Holloway created one for girls in Nashville, in 1924—the leadership of both organizations stubbornly resisted Black participation until well after World War II. The scouting movement also had at its very center a problematic appropriation of Native American culture, which has survived right down to the present day. This aspect of the movement had its roots in an organization called the Woodcraft Indians (later renamed the Woodcraft Rangers), founded in 1902 by Ernest Thompson Seton. His thinking was right in line with Theodore Roosevelt’s worship of the “strenuous life,” ideally lived out of doors. Seton’s innovation was to adopt Native American society (as he imagined it) as a template for preparedness.

Yet, despite its unapologetic racism, its authoritarian tendencies, and its quasi-militaristic imposition of discipline, the scouting movement could be a liberating force for the young people who participated in it. This was especially true for Girl Scouts. Though they were instructed to learn “homemaking” skills that were not expected of boys, they also were constantly reminded of the importance of self-sufficiency and were encouraged to acquire as much competency as they could—messages that girls rarely heard in those years. Measured in terms of sheer participation, the organization may have been the most influential vehicle for women’s empowerment through craft that America had yet seen.