Craft: An American History
This week’s book was a random find while browsing a bookstore, Craft: An American History by Glenn Adamson.
I am not sure what I expected from this book. Let’s see if I can break this down into the good and the bad.
It is a history book, a history of America book, drawn from the perspective of the craftsmen and women who made contributions to the building of America. Adamson uses the broadest possible definition of craft: an activity involving skill in making things by hand. Accordingly, who he picks as craftsmen is very broad indeed.
He starts with the obvious, Paul Revere, known silversmith and famous for his ride, and certainly one of the founding fathers of the country. He covers the early system of indentured servitude, and how the craft guilds from Europe didn’t find much headway in America because if an apprentice disliked their master, they could literally just run away to another state….which we learned about with the book on Andrew Johnson back in 2022. He was an apprenticed tailor but disliked his master so left. The only real consequence is he was legally prohibited from practicing his trade in the same state as his master.
And he covered the hundreds, no doubt thousands, of craftsmen who were slaves, including Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Keckley, Booker T Washington, and Dave the Potter. Douglass, Keckley, and Washington are quite well known, but Dave the Potter is not, and while Douglass, Keckley, and Washington are well known and revered for having been born in slavery and risen well above that status to make a difference and tell their stories, Dave the Potter was born a slave, trained as a potter, and the only reason we even know he existed is that he marked every piece of pottery he made with his name, date, and a pithy saying.
All of this is a tragic part of American history, that Douglass had to make his way north to Freedom, that Washington was a slave until Union soldiers freed him during the War, that Keckley had to buy her own freedom from what she earned as a seamstress. That the only thing we really know about Dave the Potter is that at one point in his history, he was owned by Lewis Miles.
Adamson, using that very broad definition of craft, includes as craftsmen Henry Ford’s production line and the building of unions in America. Which actually struck me as a little nebulous at first, but if you look at as unions taking the place of European artisans guilds it makes a bit more sense.
And that’s basically the book, American history by way of American craftsmen. Which concept I am fine with. However…The author is a white man. Which I have no problem with. But it didn’t take me long to google him and learn that he graduated from Cornell and Yale, ultimately earning a PhD in Art History from Yale in 2001. And he lives in New York and London, working in museums. And all of that bleeds through in his writing and became quite obvious early on, when I’d be embroiled in the story and suddenly, for no apparent reason, Adamson would throw in that “For the white middle class, prosperity seemed to be there for the taking…” X was a white man. White people spoke but failed because “for all the good intentions, these projects still involved white people speaking on behalf of indigenous people.”
All of these points contribute nothing to the narrative, and were thrown in almost as a mia culpa…Adamson is a white man, telling a story that, for political reasons, he feels should be told by someone who is NOT a white man. Like a lesbian black woman who is half native American and possibly two-spirited. Because it is absolute anathema that a white man might be able to tell this story simply because it’s a good story, without apologizing for his interest in the topic.
Adamson has definite problems with the American concept of the self-made man, calling out Henry David Thorough’s Walden and how Thorough was not as self-made and isolated as history would have us believe. But here’s the thing…American history is literally riddled with the self-made man, including Andrew Johnson, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln…I mean good lord, how many presidents have I read their story and said yeah, they were dirt poor when they were born, and worked their way up to being President of the United States. I was actually a little surprised he DIDN’T include the Tailor President in his story, since Johnson was a literal craftsman who became president. But then again, Johnson was problematic on several fronts. He was, obviously, a fan of keeping black people subservient, hence why his presidency was such a mess…also, he kind of proved the point of the self-made man narrative, which Adamson claims is absolute poppycock.
There was other misleading narrative in the story, the one that really stood out was when he pegged the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943 as purely the result of racism, while America looked the other way as white women embraced Dior’s New Look. Here’s the problem I have for this, and seriously, this is just to provide some context because as someone who was once heavily embroiled in costuming and fashion history, I was genuinely irritated by this misrepresentation.
First off, it would be disingenuous to claim race had nothing to do with the Zoot Suit Riots. It did, I am not going to deny that. For those who don’t know, in the 1940’s, during the height of World War II, Zoot Suits were the fashionable trend for Mexican American’s. Zoot Suits used an enormous amount of fabric, at a time when America was rationing…heavily…all fabric, to better support the war effort. In June 1943, some American Service Men attacked Latino and Mexican-American contingents who were wearing these Zoot Suits, which sparked several days rioting. Adamson paints it as they were attacked because they were supposed to be the poor and down trodden yet here they are wearing these expensive suits. No. They were attacked because the country was rationing fabric, and their suits used an enormous amount of it. Social class had nothing to do with it, it was seen as un-American.
Now, for the second half of this complaint, the passage in question reads “The incident reflected existing tensions between whites and Latino war workers, yet it also shows how provocative the style was, as a demonstration of conspicuous consumption by people expected to be poor and deferential. Seemingly at the far end of the cultural spectrum from the zoot suit was the poodle skirt, an emblem of the respectable, white, middle-class girlhood.”
Ok….the poodle skirt was a decade later, well after the war had ended. Christian Dior’s New Look became popular in 1947…also after the war…and was embraced as an indication that the war was over, and a return to extravagance was allowed. So it’s really the timing of the Zoot Suit that caused the problem, not the race of the people who liked the fashion. So framing these two fashion trends as allowed or not allowed as a matter of race was disingenuous at best.
Look, American history is not easy. But then again, neither is WORLD history. No country, no people on this planet, has had a completely clean history, where everything was utopian and perfect. Largely because utopia does not and has never existed. The word literally means “no place.” Because it’s fictional and made up.
Adamson naturally mentions the gender divide in learning craft, how women were taught to sew in home ec going back to the 19th century and men were taught wood working. Except from a book I read many years ago, The Lost Art of Dress by Linda Przybyszewski, which I have not reviewed for this channel but will probably re-read and do so, home economics was very much a 20th century invention, and did not just teach sewing, it literally taught women how to run a house, including budgeting, meal planning, cooking, and yes sewing.
Adamson also decries how the feminine crafts of weaving are looked down on by the white male artisans because it is traditionally feminine, without ever acknowledging the historical and evolutionary reasons why weaving was traditionally feminine. Another book I’ll have to re-read to provide a review on is Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s Women’s Work: The First 20,000 years, where she provides the evolutionary reasons why weaving is traditionally a feminine craft. It all has to do with homesteading: Weaving allows a woman to stay in the house and raise the babies. There is not a damn thing wrong with this.
Nor is it wrong that men would learn woodworking for the same reason, namely that they were the ones with the strength to cut down and transport wood. Because wood is heavy. I know, I’ve done woodworking. And moving whole damn trees to trim down for making furniture in a time without benefit of band saws and power drills would have required muscle power, and not having kids under foot, lest you drop a log on a child, resulting in death.
So claiming that choice in teaching sewing to women and woodworking to men is gender biased completely bypasses millions of years of evolutionary reasons for these choices.
Now, to give some good credit, for all the proselytizing on how evil white people are and always have been, the book is surprisingly apolitical, there is no democrat good, republican bad ethos being inherently touted. He does mention how in the south, black shop owners would also own slaves, which was a shock to me that he’d go there. And he is outraged by how craft items are rarely seen as artistic in their own right, despite having rather large showings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other museums, which he mentions. And on the plus side, he currently and has worked for museums, so it’s possible he’s trying to rectify that. He does blame white men for why craft is not seen as art, but he’s a white man trying to correct that, so I guess that’s fair.
But, he also points out that by and large, craft is functional, and it’s just as likely that it’s functionality is what precludes it from being elevated to the status of art. Which is also a fair point.
While I was confused at first by how broadly he defined craft, I also appreciated how he finds artistic merit where others might not, finding beauty in hot rods and low riders, and in tributary art pieces like the AIDS quilt.
By the end of the book, I found myself almost feeling sorry for Adamson. Clearly he is deeply passionate about art and finding beauty in the world around him. But he’s surrounded daily by people who no doubt tell him he’s wrong because he is a white man. And I almost think he felt compelled to include all the jabs about the evil’s of whiteness BECAUSE he is a white man trying desperately to prove that he’s one of the “good ones,” not one of the mansplainers. When really, taken to it’s logical conclusion, any book written by the dominant white patriarchy is mansplaining whatever the topic of the book is.
This book was a seriously mixed bag for me. Some of it was fine. Some of it was roll your eyes irritating. But his love for the topic of craft as art, worthy of being identified as such, is certainly clear with every page.
