Shaker Fever

America's Twentieth-Century Fascination with a Communitarian Sect

William D. Moore

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781613767573
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Americans were enthralled by the Shakers in the years between 1925 and 1965. They bought Shaker furniture, saw Shaker worship services enacted on Broadway, sang Shaker songs, dressed in Shaker-inspired garb, collected Shaker artifacts, and restored Shaker villages. William D. Moore analyzes the activities of scholars, composers, collectors, folklorists, photographers, writers, choreographers, and museum staff who drove the national interest in this dwindling regional religious group.This interdisciplinary study places the activities of individuals—including Doris Humphrey, Charles Sheeler, Laura Bragg, Juliana Force, and Edward Deming Andrews—within the larger cultural and historical contexts of nationalism, modernism, and cultural resource management. Taking up previously unexamined primary sources and cultural productions that include the first scholarly studies of the faith, material culture and visual arts, stage performances, and museum exhibitions, Shaker Fever compels a reconsideration of this religious group and its place within American memory. It is sure to delight enthusiasts, public historians, museum professionals, furniture collectors, and anyone interested in the dynamics of cultural appropriation and stewardship.

Chapter 1

Visualizing the Shakers

The Early Museum Exhibits at the New York State Museum, the Berkshire Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art

The American people initially became aware of the Shakers largely as the result of a series of three seminal museum exhibitions held between 1930 and 1935. Mounted by the New York State Museum in Albany, New York; the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, these landmark exhibits featured the photographs of William F. Winter, Jr., and the collection of Faith and Edward Deming Andrews. By the time the exhibition at the Whitney closed in December 1935, the various actors involved with these exhibitions had created an aesthetically appealing and visually compelling vision of Shaker material culture and thus of the sect’s identity. More than eighty years later, this constructed vision endures and continues to inform the public’s understanding.

The few scholars who have addressed these exhibitions have treated them as essentially analogous and interchangeable since they all took place between 1930 and 1935, contained many of the same materials, and featured apparently similar installations.1 Their historiography has also tended to privilege the roles that Faith and Edward Deming Andrews played in mounting them. Understanding these installations as the homogenous intellectual output of the Andrewses, however, ignores the organizational histories of the sponsoring institutions and fails to recognize others’ contributions. In each case, rather than being the dynamic force and creative auteurs behind the exhibitions, the Andrewses were contractors brought in to promote an administrator’s vision. Thus, instead of being pure expressions of the Andrewses’ interpretation of the Shakers, these shows must be understood as complex undertakings created collaboratively by individuals with multifaceted motivations.

This chapter offers a detailed historical account of these three early exhibitions, created in the years following the onset of the Great Depression, while recognizing the contributions of Charles C. Adams, the director of the New York State Museum; Laura Bragg, the director of the Berkshire Museum; and Juliana Force, the director of the Whitney Museum. These remarkable individuals all offered the Andrewses opportunities to contribute to exhibitions about the Shakers in their galleries. However, each of these administrators had their own professional and ideological objectives in sponsoring the installations and thus contributed to both the sect’s institutional interpretation and its public reception. These exhibitions reflected the intellectual backgrounds and professional experiences of the institutions’ directors: Adams as an ecologist interested in geography, Bragg as a Progressive educator, and Force as an art impresario.

None of these figures, it is worth noting, was a theologian or particularly religious. Therefore, the Shakers’ faith was not central to their interests. Adams was concerned with how the sect functioned economically within New York’s cultural and physical environment. Bragg promoted Shaker artifacts as products of the region surrounding her institution. Force saw the Shakers as purveyors of a distinctly American aesthetic and as artistic precursors to the work of early twentieth-century modernists. Shaker religion was of interest to these individuals only in as much as it caused the membership to create particular physical forms.

This chapter also foregrounds William Winter, a remarkable figure whose creative contributions the Andrewses sought to marginalize. Following their lead, other chroniclers have chosen to understand this reserved man, who died prematurely, as a product of the Andrewses’ enthusiasm.2 By close examination of Winter’s photographic oeuvre and an expansion of his biography, this chapter argues that his talent and vision were central to the creation of a canonical “Shaker style” during this time. Winter’s influential images were the product of his professional identity as a photographer for General Electric as well as his desire to transcend the limitations of his professional identity.

Understanding these Shaker exhibitions within their institutional contexts also provides insights into patterns within the Andrewses’ careers. The manner in which they gained, and later rejected, the patronage of first Adams, then Bragg, and then sequentially Force foreshadows their later interactions with the Index of American Design, Yale University, and eventually Amy Bess Miller, the founding president of Shaker Community, Inc., the nonprofit that preserved Hancock Shaker Village. In each instance, the collectors opportunistically sought institutional backing that would advantageously showcase their ever-changing collection of Shaker artifacts and promote their careers as experts with specialized knowledge of the Shakers. As they worked with, and learned from, Adams, Bragg, and Force, over time Faith and Edward Deming Andrews cemented their status as Shaker experts and increased the monetary value of their holdings.

Charles C. Adams and the New York State Museum

When in 1926 the New York State commissioner of education appointed Charles C. Adams to serve as the director of the New York State Museum in Albany, the institution, located on the top floor of the State Education Building near the state capitol, was largely a scientific enterprise that held zoologic, botanic, and geologic specimens.3 An influential ecologist, having earned a B.S. from Illinois Wesleyan in 1895, an M.S. from Harvard University in 1899, and a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1908, Adams was well qualified for this position.4 He had previously served from 1903 to 1906 as museum curator at the University of Michigan and as director of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History from 1908 to 1914.5 Immediately before taking the post in Albany, he had served on the faculty of the New York State College of Forestry in Syracuse.

Adams was a prolific scholar with an impressive publication record. His Guide to the Study of Animal Ecology, published in 1913, was particularly influential.6 In 1956, the respected zoologist Ralph S. Palmer observed that this volume ranked “among the most important pioneer ecological treatises done in North America.”7 Adams focused particularly on zoogeography, the scholarly investigation of the spatial location of animals. One of his most important studies examined distribution patterns of different varieties of snails within the Io genus, which lived in the waterways feeding into the Tennessee River in Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama.8 He was similarly the lead author (possibly because his last name began with A) of an extensive article, appearing in three parts in the first volume of the journal Ecology, which addresses the plants and animals of New York’s Mount Marcy.9 In this article, Adams and his coauthors explained that they endeavored to “learn more of the relation of plants and animals to their environment.”10 Adams’s interdisciplinary approach to scholarship is indicated by the fact that he was a founding member, and later president, of the Ecological Society of America; an active contributor to the Association of American Geographers; and a charter participant in the American Association of Museums.11

When he arrived at the New York State Museum, Adams found the institution’s historical and archeological collections disappointing. Although Theodore Roosevelt had asserted in 1916, at the opening of the museum’s new space, that it should be a “museum of arts and letters as well as a museum of natural history” and that the collections should offer “a full representation of American history since the time when New York cast off its provincial character and became an integral portion of the American republic,” Adams communicated in his first report as director that “these collections have not grown . . . as their merit would lead one to expect.”12 The historical collections languished at least in part because the museum budget did not provide funds for acquisitions or to pay for a staff member dedicated to the state’s heritage.13 Much of the historical material the museum held had been transferred to the institution in 1901 by the New York State Fair Commission and was composed of artifacts collected by the New York State Agricultural Society for a museum that was later suspended. Since the institution did not have staff dedicated to either history or art, Chris A. Hartnagel, the assistant state geologist, voluntarily oversaw the historical collection when he could spare time from his other duties.14

During the spring of 1927, as part of the recognition of the sesquicentennial of the Revolutionary War, New York State legislators began to advocate for an alternative and separate state-sponsored historic institution that would assume responsibility for the museum’s historical collections. As an administrator, Adams rightfully saw this as a threat to the future of his institution. He indicated that such a plan, if it had succeeded, would have “seriously injured the Museum.”15 To reinforce his museum’s position and secure its future as the repository for the state’s historical artifacts, Adams began to build collections and pursue more robustly that aspect of the institution’s mission. He hoped that the celebration of the nation’s sesquicentennial would arouse the public’s interest in the past and secure the museum’s stability as a repository for the state’s heritage.

Within a few months, Adams was presented with a remarkable opportunity to build a noteworthy collection of artifacts and thus stave off this threat to his institution. Dr. A. C. Flick, the state historian, shared with Adams a letter written by Caroline Mallary Marvin Spicer that had been printed in the Troy Record. She bemoaned that no proper authority was managing the records belonging to the Shaker village of Watervliet, just outside of Albany, which was closing down and being repurposed by the county.16 Adams read Spicer’s complaint as a call to action and an opportunity that would allow him to fulfill the museum’s mission of collecting and interpreting the state’s history while strategically improving the institution’s holdings of artifacts.17

Albany County had acquired portions of the declining Watervliet Shaker Village in 1924 so that the real estate could be used as a charitable home and regional airport.18 Adams contacted Leo M. Doody, the county commissioner of charities, who was responsible for managing the property. Doody understood the materials in the Shaker village to be excess goods cluttering up buildings that he was about to demolish.19 Adams thus deputized Hartnagel to gather artifacts.20 Almost from the beginning, Adams envisioned presenting this material to the public. In July 1927, he wrote, “At some future time, a good exhibit could be prepared.”21 Between July and November 1927, the museum repeatedly dispatched trucks to Watervliet to “harvest” Shaker materials and “place [them] under lock.”22 During these months Adams similarly instructed Edwin J. Stein, the museum’s photographer, to record the compound and its contents.23 As the fall progressed, Adams became increasingly aware that he was involved in an important undertaking. In November he wrote to William Thompson, the museum’s regent, “The more we see of this, the more we are impressed with its real importance as an industrial exhibit.”24

Individuals including John Patterson McClean of Ohio, Wallace Cathcart of the Western Reserve Historical Society, and Clara Endicott Sears, a wealthy resident of Massachusetts, collected Shaker materials before Adams. McClean and Cathcart both focused on published and textual material...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index