Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

Barela was received as a revelation. He was featured in Time magazine. Critics compared his work to that of European modernists such as Brancusi, Modigliani, and Picasso, to early medieval stonework, to African ceremonial masks, to ancient American steles. Russell Vernon Hunter, who headed the Federal Art Project in New Mexico and had nominated Barela for the New Horizons exhibition, said that his works “are closely related to the simple patterns of his daily life, but there is in them always a search for the universal.”2 Who was this Everyman, and what did his work really mean?

He is thought to have remained illiterate. The year 1931 found him back in Taos working as a teamster, having begun his carving. After Barela was hired on to the Federal Art Project, he did make sculpture full time for a few years. But his government pay was so little—less than he earned as a laborer—that he left the program and headed up to Colorado to harvest potatoes. He kept making sculpture, despite failing eyesight in his later years, until his death in 1964 in an accidental fire in his own studio. His life had been hard, but fiercely independent.

Latino and Latina artists of the Southwest had not received anything like the attention that Native Americans did in the 1910s and ’20s, but they did have some champions. Foremost among them were the charismatic arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan and the suffragist and author Mary Hunter Austin. Luhan was known for her sparkling salons, her avant-garde connections, and her decision to marry a Tewa man from the Pueblo—prompting headlines like WHY BOHEMIA’S QUEEN MARRIED AN INDIAN CHIEF.4 She was a collector of santos and Spanish Colonial antiques, among many other things, and is known to have encouraged Patrociño Barela in his carving. With her husband she built an adobe residence—named “Los Gallos” for the rooster-shaped ceramic totems mounted on its roof.5 The home became a pilgrimage site for writers and artists, among them D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Thornton Wilder, Ansel Adams, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Her very first guest there, though, was Mary Austin.

and in the Japanese mingei (“folk craft”) movement, which embraced peasant crafts for their unselfconscious beauty.10

the 1930s, alongside recent currents in abstraction, cubism, and surrealism, MoMA regularly showed American folk art, presenting it as proof of humanity’s inherent creative powers. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a leading patron of the museum, was one of several collectors who defined this new category. It included paintings and

The most influential proponent of this new view of craft was a man named Holger Cahill. Born in 1887 in Iceland, nearly at the Arctic Circle—his birth name was Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarson—he was still a toddler when his parents immigrated to Canada in search of a better life. They didn’t find it.

Dorothy Liebes on the set of a television show, 1940s. Dorothy Liebes papers, 1850–1973, bulk, 1922–1970, Archives of American Art. By 1939, Liebes was a well-known name in textile design, particularly for her use of metallic threads, which helped project an image of luxurious modernism, and her incorporation of reeds, bamboo, and rattans, sourced from San Francisco’s Chinatown. She delighted in her image as a flexible experimentalist able to break through industry’s self-imposed rules. “The only reason I am not a frustrated woman,” she liked to say, “is that weavers do not frustrate easily.”

As in San Francisco, Native artisans were invited to present in live demonstrations at MoMA during the run of the show. One was the silversmith Dooley Shorty, who would soon achieve fame as the leader of the Navajo “code talkers” during the Second World War. Fred Kabotie, a Hopi sand painter who demonstrated his sacred art form in the museum galleries, later recalled his experience at the exhibition opening—all noise and flashbulbs—and the experience of meeting Mrs. Roosevelt. “She seemed like a wonderful person,” he said. “I wished we could have gotten together for a quiet visit.”34

You would never know from the MoMA presentation that the most modern architecture in New York City, just blocks away, was being made by Mohawk ironworkers from Canada—the famous “Skywalkers” who had helped construct the Empire State Building, among other skyscrapers and bridges. By the 1930s, a community of these skilled riveters and fitters had settled in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. They would contribute to the city’s skyline for decades, earning a reputation for fearlessness that was tinged with romanticism. As late as 2002, the ironworker Kyle Karonhiaktatie Beauvais remarked, “A lot of people think Mohawks aren’t afraid of heights; that’s not true. We have as much fear as the next guy. The difference is that we deal with it better.”36

You know her as Rosie the Riveter, but her real name was Naomi Parker. She was twenty-one years old in 1942 when a photographer captured her at an aircraft plant in Alameda, California. Standing at her workstation operating a grinding wheel, Parker is in overalls, her hair protected by a bandana. The picture was not remarkable in itself, just one of countless similar press images taken in America’s wartime factories. But it happened to be printed in a Pittsburgh newspaper, where it caught the eye of an illustrator named J. Howard Miller. The following year, his poster of a similarly attired woman was put up on the walls of the local Westinghouse plant. Miller showed his worker literally rolling up her sleeve, a company identification badge on her collar. Above her head floats a blue speech bubble: WE CAN DO IT!

Hardly anyone saw this now-iconic image during the Second World War: It was shown in only one factory for only a few weeks.40 But it was rediscovered in the 1980s and appropriated as a feminist emblem; the poster’s slogan was sufficiently open in its phrasing that it could be understood to refer to lots of things besides making tank guns and jet engines. In fact, neither Miller’s archetypal worker nor Naomi Parker in the Alameda photograph is riveting anything. The character of Rosie, with whom they later became associated, actually began life in song, a bit of propagandistic doggerel that would likely have been forgotten had the most beloved artist of the era, Norman Rockwell, not immortalized the character on one of his covers for the Saturday Evening Post. Published in May 1943, it shows a distinctly working-class woman, ham sandwich in hand, feet firmly planted on a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Her pneumatic riveting gun lies across her lap, along with her lunchbox, and a halo floats above her head.41

It was Rockwell’s picture, rather than Miller’s poster, that permanently fixed Rosie the Riveter in American mythology.

There was a permanent increase in the gender equity of the workforce, but it was only modest in scale. Partly this was thanks to the baby boom—at a time when pregnancy often led immediately to job loss—but mostly, it was the result of unrelenting pressure from unions, management, and the media for women to reassume their domestic duties.

The aircraft manufacturer Boeing, to take just one example, had its peak year of efficiency and production in 1944, when it also had its maximum number of newly trained female employees.

For her, war work had been the ticket to a middle-class life. “It was Hitler,” she dryly observed, “that got black women out of the white folks’ kitchen.”46

Ruth Clement Bond. Born in 1904 to a minister’s family in Louisville, she had managed to study English to master’s level—rare for a Black woman at the time—and by the early 1930s was department head at Kentucky State College. When her husband was appointed as the TVA’s highest-ranking African American official, however, the couple moved down to Alabama so that he could direct construction projects there. Bond launched into a parallel effort focused on home improvement. Dismayed that former sharecroppers “were buying things they didn’t need, yet weren’t fixing up their houses,” she helped local women make curtains from dyed feed sacks and rugs woven from corn husks.51 Many of Bond’s new acquaintances were quilters, so she also made patterns for them to execute, cutting out templates in brown paper. To some extent, her designs resemble standard posters promoting New Deal values of progress and modernization. But they also have a stylistic affinity with art of the Harlem Renaissance and are thematically focused on African American uplift. Because one of the key goals of the TVA was to build a hydroelectric dam, she created a quilt (now lost) depicting a full-length figure with his hands upstretched, clasping a lightning bolt—“instead of the banjo he would normally hold,” as she put it—and another (which does survive) showing a Black fist grasping red lightning, with an American flag and a shining sun above. When students assigned to the TVA from Fisk and Tennessee State saw t...

Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt was facing up to this reality. In June 1941, under pressure from Black labor leaders, he signed Executive Order No. 8802, banning racial discrimination in war-related industries. It was the first time in U.S. history that the government attempted to enforce equal employment for Black workers.

soldiers. The civil rights advocate Roy Wilkins said that African Americans wanted a “new world which not only shall contain no Hitler, but no Hitlerism … That means a fight for a world in which lynching, brutality, terror, humiliation and degradation through segregation and discrimination shall have no place—either here or there.” An editorial in the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper put it somewhat more bluntly: “We cannot march against enemy planes and tanks and challenge warships armed only with a whiskbroom and a wide grin.”55

Maya Angelou vividly recalled her own experience in the Bay Area: “As the Japanese disappeared, soundlessly and without protest, the Negros entered with their loud jukeboxes, their just-released animosities, and the relief of escape from Southern bonds. The Japanese area became San Francisco’s Harlem in a matter of months.”

Eaton’s book does indeed provide a valuable window into the life of the camps and the struggle and ingenuity that went into remaking them. Supplies of everything were short, so tools had to be made from worn-down saw blades and automobile springs. Patterned rugs were woven from the unraveled strands of onion sacks. People hunted for driftwood and stones that suggested animal forms, then tactically carved and polished them to enhance the resemblance. Flowers, so symbolically important in Japanese culture, were initially absent where the camps had been situated, so artificial ones were made instead, using bits of paper, cloth clippings, and shells on armatures of wire salvaged from the ragged edges of window screens.63

At one camp, a wood carver named Yutaka Suzuki trained twenty others; in another, a professional embroiderer named Mr. Nagahama taught classes to as many as 650 students, distributing thread he had unpicked from silk fabrics.

George Nakashima, born in 1905 in Spokane, arrived at the camps as a highly trained designer with international experience, including a period working in Japan under the architect Antonin Raymond, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. As a consequence, he had some exposure to Japanese joinery techniques, but it was not until he was interned and sent to the Minidoka Relocation Center, in Idaho, that he had the time and opportunity to study with a master. This was Gentaro Kenneth Hikogawa, a carpenter about Nakashima’s age who had been traditionally trained in Japan before immigrating to Tacoma, Washington. When these two highly skilled men were thrown together in the camp, they immediately set about collaborating, first in a general improvement of the barracks. To maximize the use of the tiny living spaces, Nakashima designed folding tables and seating that doubled as coal storage. Hikogawa created more refined furniture out of packing crates and greasewood, a desert scrub plant.

A climactic moment came in one Senate hearing when the crafts made by internees were cited by Sen. Sam Hayakawa as proof that the camps had been “trouble-free and relatively happy.” He was immediately shouted down by the audience in attendance.67 They knew better: Craft is most vital when you live in a whole world of trouble.

The U.S. military distributed to soldiers and sailors more than four hundred thousand Handicraft Kits, which included materials for leatherwork, metal and plastic forming, clay modeling, and wood carving. They were particularly valued by men who were stationed in isolation, such as antiaircraft gunners or the crew of transport ships. One officer said of the program that “the soldier who lacks a hobby is the man who tends to break down on D-Day.”69 This activity was mirrored on the home front. As factories were converted to military purposes and rationing set in, magazines encouraged their readers to “wave a magic wand (plus a little elbow grease)” to modernize their old furniture rather than buying new.70

Dorothy Liebes sat on the board of an Arts and Skills Corps for the Red Cross, advising on programs for their patients; it was surprisingly ambitious, with provision for ceramics, woodwork, basket weaving, and even macramé.

The G.I. Bill was an unprecedented windfall for the education sector, taking up fully 15 percent of the entire federal budget by 1948.

During the war, Marianne Strengell, originally from Finland, had become department head for textiles at Cranbrook Academy of Art, just outside Detroit, an outpost of Scandinavian modernism in the Midwest.

Certainly there were some success stories, like Jack Lenor Larsen, who studied at Cranbrook with Marianne Strengell and then went on to a stellar career as a fabric designer. Larsen inherited Liebes’s mantle as Webb’s staunchest ally, exemplifying and promoting the “designer-craftsman” ideal both at home and abroad. Yet the experience of his classmate Ed Rossbach was far more typical. Rossbach later looked back on his student years at Cranbrook in total bemusement. He made one small sample after another, delving deeply into the language of weave structure. Upon graduating, he had a terrific portfolio, but no corporate clients. Companies did need to invest in a certain amount of product development, but they had the capability to do this in-house, and had no motivation to work with artistically inclined free spirits. Rossbach took up a teaching job out in California, where he eventually started pursuing much more expressive work in basketry and collage, never again concerning himself with design for industry. “That whole phase of things,” he recalled.

Almost all of these materials were standardized—it’s in this period, for example, that the modern 2-by-4 was codified. (It’s actually 1½ by 3½ after drying and planing.)

The word itself was new, coined in the 1920s, and became common parlance only during the war.

Home dressmaking, marginalized in economic terms because of the cheapness of factory-produced garments, was pursued primarily for pleasure rather than income. The craft became so wholly the province of teenage girls that Singer, the sewing machine manufacturer that had pioneered mass marketing a hundred years earlier, focused its advertising primarily on this audience, through publications like Seventeen (launched in 1944 and often credited with molding the mainstream image of the teenage girl). Singer’s promotions presented sewing as a means of attainment, recalling the “domestic accomplishments” of earlier periods in America, but now in modern guise. Even the most intellectual pursuits were packaged in terms of personal appearance and male approval. One ad, run in Seventeen in 1950, relates the tale of a girl on the debate team. Facing a big competition, she prepares by making a “sensational dress.” She wins, of course, and even gets a date “with a wonderful-looking boy on the opposing team.”20

The most famous is the zoot suit, which first found popularity among African Americans and Mexican Americans during the war.

(The term “killer diller,” like “reet pleat” and “zoot suit” itself, was an example of rhyming slang common among Black teenagers at midcentury.)

rebuild them; the 1932 Ford, or “Deuce,” which featured a reinforced all-steel body, was a favored option. Amateur builders in Los Angeles were especially ambitious, putting powerful V8 engines into their cars and redesigning the bodies to make them lower and faster. They competed in speed trials, held on dry lakes outside town, and in drag races on public streets. An aesthetic for the cars soon emerged, low and sleek, with a sloping “fastback” to the rear. The roof of the classic hot rod was lowered, or “chopped,” a major metalworking project in which sections of the pillars and window frames were cut down and re-welded. The whole body was “channeled,” lowered with respect to its frame.

Teen hot-rodders might not be spending their money on “Detroit iron,” as they derisively called new cars, but they did buy specialist gear such as turbochargers, which were obtained from dedicated “speed shops.” As the hobby grew, so, too, did these suppliers. By 1961, they were selling $36 million worth of parts per year—a parallel to the mass marketing of materials for adult home improvement.29

Detroit borrowed many ideas from hot-rodders and integrated them into its mass-produced vehicles, among them tailfins, twin headlights, and the general principle of a low-slung body. (The so-called muscle cars of the 1960s, like the Pontiac GTO, marked the culmination of this appropriation of grassroots style.) Meanwhile, the denizens of the custom car scene held themselves proudly independent. They would not dream of going to work in Detroit as stylists; that would “be like René Magritte or somebody going on the payroll of Continental Can.” Yet Barris and other leading builders also welcomed the attention from the big auto companies, participating in spectacles such as General Motors’s Parade of Progress and Ford’s Custom Car Caravan,

young Latinos in East Los Angeles: the distinctive “lowrider.” This custom style is similar to that for other hot rods and was developed concurrently, in the 1940s and ’50s, though as its name implies, a lowrider is dropped down closer to the ground, so that its running boards almost scrape the pavement. In its early years, it differed from the hot rod also in its make; rather than historic Fords, big new Chevrolets were preferred. Somewhat like the zoot suits worn by Latino men in the 1940s, the lowrider is purposefully, voluptuously impractical. Exteriors are sheathed in immaculate custom paint jobs. Interiors might be lined with thick carpet and outfitted with bucket seats and smaller-than-usual steering wheels, allowing the driver to sit even lower. Smaller-than-usual tires might be fitted to the car, too, with chromed rims to complete the look. These cars are not for racing, but the contrary: moving as slowly as possible down a boulevard, for purposes of admiration. One owner, quoted in a 1975 study, explained the aesthetic like this: “You want a car that’s built long and low and sexy, so that like if you was to take a picture of you and your broad standing beside it, you’d see one long line.”32

Jade Snow Wong, for example, was raised in Chinatown, San Francisco, by immigrant parents who operated an overalls factory. She said that it was only when she discovered ceramics at Mills College and began selling her pots out of a storefront—“a woman in the window, her legs astride a potter’s wheel, her hair in braids, her hands perpetually messy with sticky California clay”—that she felt contentment.36 Her autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter, was so successful that, in 1953, she was sponsored by the U.S. State Department to travel through Asia to help counteract concerns about anti-Chinese prejudice in America.

Pupul Jayakar, a reformer from India (who played a role there somewhat akin to Webb’s in America), noted that in her country, there were three million handlooms in operation, supporting the livelihoods of seven million people. This population of makers had stood at the heart of Mahatma Gandhi’s swadeshi movement, which promoted the artisan manufacture of homespun textiles and garments, a rejection of the colonial imports that had devastated the country’s historic craft economy. Gandhi knew well that spinning wheels and handlooms were inefficient in comparison to British factories. He nonetheless argued that a slow and sustainable approach would be better in the long term; and in the short term, it would disrupt the financial calculus of empire and help bring about independence for India.

Parks’s famous act of protest was no snap decision. Earlier that year, she had attended a strategy session on racial desegregation at the Highlander Folk School, in Grundy County, Tennessee. The school had been founded in 1932, right at the peak of the Appalachian craft revival, but Highlander had pursued a different path from the John C. Campbell Folk School or the Penland School of Craft. Its founder, a white Tennessean named Myles Horton, had been to Denmark and was inspired by the Scandinavian folkehojskøler he saw there, just like Olive Campbell. And the school did offer instruction in pottery, dressmaking, wood carving, and other crafts. But Horton was extremely politically progressive: an ardent integrationist and supporter of the labor movement. To run the workshops at Highlander, he hired Septima Poinsette Clark, an African American teacher from South Carolina who had been a fieldworker for the NAACP. Under her guidance, Blacks and whites attended and learned together. While a “workshop” at Highlander might involve making things at a bench, it could also be a union planning session. In its early days, the school was frequently used as an organizational base for coal mining strikes.

In 1953, Highlander began hosting similar assemblies for the nascent civil rights movement. Talks and group discussions about tactics (boycotts and sit-ins) were accompanied by folk songs and spirituals. It was at Highlander that an old hymn was recast into the powerful anthem “We Shall Overcome.” Literacy and citizenship classes for African Americans were offered both on-site and in sponsored programs elsewhere in the South. For Parks, the school was an invaluable entryway to a network of allies. She is reputed to have said, “The only reason I don’t hate every white man alive is Highlander and Myles Horton.”

Martin Luther King Jr. himself visited Highlander, in 1957, in recognition of the role it had played in the formation of the civil rights movement. With Parks sitting in the audience, he declared, “It is ultimately more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation.” He noted the importance of the recent Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which mandated the integration of schools and, by extension, other public institutions. He decried the recent resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and predicted a long struggle ahead. But he also imparted a message of solidarity: “Organized labor has proved to be one of the most powerful forces in removing the blight of segregation and discrimination from our nation,” King said. “Labor leaders wisely realize that the forces that are anti-Negro are usually antilabor, and vice versa. And so organized labor is one of the Negro’s strongest allies in the struggle for freedom.”50

Roosevelt’s New Deal administration had been very pro-union, seeing organized labor as a key plank of recovery from the Depression. The year 1935 saw passage of the Wagner Act, which strengthened the right to engage in collective bargaining. This resulted in an immediate increase in union membership and also emboldened more politically radical working-class activists. A new federation called the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was formed to compete with the long-established American Federation of Labor (AFL), Samuel Gompers’s organization. Compared to the AFL, which was still organized into skill-intensive craft unions, the CIO was more politically progressive, more confrontational, and also more inclusive. It welcomed women, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities into its ranks. Tactically speaking, it abandoned the idea that workers’ skills were their best form of leverage; instead, it concentrated on cohesion across multiple trades within a given industry.

Labor’s most important failure in the late 1940s, however, was its inability to push into the South, a strategy the CIO leadership called Operation Dixie.

Union membership peaked in 1954, representing about one third of all American workers.

When King was imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963—the occasion on which he wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” calling for nonviolent resistance, and confidently predicting that “one day the South will recognize its real heroes”—it was Walter Reuther, the head of the United Automobile Workers, who paid his bail.

The ILGWU is probably best known today for its catchphrase “Look for the Union Label.” Americans of a certain age will remember TV commercials featuring a song by that title, with worker choruses of whites, Blacks, and Latinos, men and women, all singing together, as diverse as the nation itself:

Among these activists was an Episcopal priest named Francis X. Walter. Unlike many white civil rights workers, he had been raised in the South; he was originally from Mobile, Alabama. In December 1965, he and a colleague were canvassing for Black voters in a small town called Possum Bend, Alabama. Walter spotted three beautiful quilts hanging on a clothesline outside a cabin. He wanted to find out who had made them, but nobody was home. (He later learned that their maker, Ora McDaniels, had simply fled when she saw two white men approaching her home, which gives a good sense of the racial dynamic in the region at the time.) Seeing them, though, gave him an idea. He started buying up locally made quilts with the intention of selling them up north, to raise funds for the community. The project quickly turned into a cooperative, led by Father Walter, in partnership with Estelle Witherspoon, the wife of a retired sharecropper. By the following March, sixty craftswomen were involved, calling themselves the Freedom Quilting Bee. Witherspoon coordinated the production and collection of the quilts out of her home in Rehobeth, but some of the most adept makers were from another Alabama community, called Gee’s Bend. They would attain nationwide fame in later decades, when their quilts made of work clothes and other reclaimed fabrics were rediscovered by collectors and museum curators. At first, the results of the bee’s handiwork were sold at small auctions in New York City for about...

politics, it was the so-called Hard Hat Riot of May 8, 1970.

Whatever the truth of these allegations, the basic facts were the same. In the twentieth century, the hard hat had replaced the leather apron as the emblem of America’s skilled working class. Now it had been used as a weapon against unarmed civilians.