Chapter 5:1 Background Information, Useful for Understanding Developments in
Woodworking
Back to
Chapter 5
An Era of Challenge and Change
The Democratization of Taste, The Domestication of Culture
It was during the thirties that the idea of culture was domesticated, with important consequences. While we always had "culture", Americans began thinking in terms of patterns of behavior and belief, values and life-styles, symbols and meanings. During the 1930s, we find, for the first time, frequent reference to "An American Way of Life". (In 1933, for one example, the noted culture critic, Horace M Kallen's Individualism was subtitled, An American Way of Life. In 1940, discussing Agricultural extension work, United States Extension Service Reviewpage 156, opined,
"Our American unity, freely imposed, will demand hardship and sacrifice, ... the
fulfillment of our dream for an American way of life dedicated to life, ...".
Naturally the concept has its darker side: on the place of crime in American life (and American ... especially Chapter 7, "Crime as an American Way of Life," is from the 1960 book, The End of the Ideology, by the sociologist, Daniel Bell. Richard Guy Wilson, et al, The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941, 1986, page 310:
"It was during this period that we find, for the first time, frequent references to an 'American Way of Life.' The phrase "The American Dream" came into ..."
The phrase "The American Dream" came into common use; it meant something shared collectively by all Americans, yet something different than the vision of an American Mission, the function of the organized nation itself.
Sources: Warren I. Susman, "The Culture of the Thirties," in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century New York: Pantheon, 1984, page 154; Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, page 4.
Between 1920 and 1945, the social, economic,
and political climate in America was affected by emergence from World
War I,
the Great Depression, and the gathering storm before World War
II. World War I, the Great Depression, and the gathering storm
before World
War II and World War II itself.
This was an era of challenge and change:
agriculture suffered extreme droughts, while urban populations had to
endure difficulties provoked
by the
1929 Stock Market Crash, and subsequent unemployment. In the 1930s,
the promise of the New Deal and the rise of unions
gave hope to the out-of-work factory worker.
The
Great Depression and World War II define the
quarter century that began in 1920. The economic
collapse of the Depression wrought much
physical
suffering and psychological damage. For historian Caroline Bird,
the impact of thee Great Depression was for America -- chillingly -- an
"invisible scar"
Source: Caroline Bird, The Invisible Scar New York: David
McKay, 1966.
To find a formula for extracting the nation
from the throes of economic chaos, in 1929, President Hoover
commissioned a large two-volume study of the nation's problems.
Published four years later in 1933 -- its title Recent
Social Trends.
Ever since, historians and
other scholars have mined the set as an incomparably rich source of
information about the pre-Depression period packed with data
about all aspects of American life. It ranges from an inventory of
mineral resources to analyses of crime and punishment, the arts, health
and medical practice, the status of women, blacks, and ethnic
minorities, the changing characteristics of the labor force, the impact
of new technologies
on productivity and leisure, and the roles of federal, state, and
local governments.
Housing
For this history it is particularly useful
for data on housing of Americans, especially housing for Americans that
might be amateur woodworkers. (For an account of how home-ownership factors into amateur woodworking, click here.) Below is a fragment from the set's
"Introduction":
A REVIEW OF
FINDINGS
BY THE
PRESIDENT'S RESEARCH COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL TRENDS
INTRODUCTION
... The first third of the twentieth century has been filled with
epoch-making events and crowded with problems of great variety and
complexity. The World War, the inflation and deflation of agriculture
and business, our emergence as a creditor nation, the spectacular
increase in efficiency and productivity and the tragic spread of
unemployment and business distress, the experiment of prohibition,
birth control, race riots, stoppage of immigration, women's suffrage,
the struggles of the Progressive and the Farmer Labor parties,
governmental corruption, crime and racketeering, the sprawl of great
cities, the decadence of rural government, the birth of the League of
Nations, the expansion of education, the rise and weakening of
organized labor, the growth of spectacular fortunes, the advance of
medical science, the emphasis on sports and recreation, the renewed
interest in child welfare?these are a few of the many happenings which
have marked one of the most eventful periods of our history.
With these events have come national problems urgently demanding
attention on many fronts. Even a casual glance at some of these points
of tension in our national life reveals a wide range of puzzling
questions....
Source: Recent Social Trends, 1933
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Impact of the Depression
The passage reprinted below is a famous polemic by the literary-social
critic, Edmund Wilson, writing in the liberal weekly, the New Republic
.
The impact of the Depression was causing many Americans to loose faith
in capitalistic democracy, and encouraging them to look to other
political systems for potential solutions. Briefly, Wilson flirted with
Communism, but soon dismissed that solution as unrealistic.
Writing in the early 1930s, Wilson's sharp incite captures as well as
anyone of the era the desolate prospect of recovery of an earlier
buoyancy about the promise of democratic capitalism.
Source:
Edmund Wilson
New Republic, January 14,1931, pages 235-238.; reprinted
in The
Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties 1952,
2007 New York: Library of America "An Appeal to Progressives" pages
426-430.
[under construction]
...In any case, American optimism has
taken a serious beating; the national
morale is weak. The energy and the faith for a fresh start seem
now not to be forthcoming: a dreadful
apathy, unsureness and discouragement is felt to have fallen upon us.
It is as if we were afraid to go on with what we were doing before or
as if we had no longer the heart for it. I
want to suggest that the present depression may be nothing less than
one of the turning-points in our history, our first real crisis since
the Civil War. The Americans at the present time seem to be
experiencing not merely an economic breakdown but a distinct psychological change.
From the time of the Civil War on, all our enthusiasm and creative
energy went into the development of our tremendous resources. This development had two aspects: one was the exploration of the
continent and the engineering feats involved in reclaiming it; the
other [the second]
the amassing of gigantic fortunes. Today the discoveries have all been
made: we no longer look toward the West, as the Europeans once looked
to America, as to a world of untold treasures and wonders?and the
excitement of mastering new seacoasts, new rivers, forests, prairies
and mountains seems now completely spent. This was already true at the
time of the European War [World War I]
(when, incidentally, we were running into a business depression), but
the war gave us a new objective?new discoveries, the discovery of
Europe; new heroic stunts of engineering, the transportation of our
army to France. Since the end of the war, however, we have, as a
people, had nothing to carry us along except the momentum of
money-making. We have been trying still to find in it the exhilaration
of the moneymaking of our earlier period, which had been largely the
exhilaration of the wildness and size of the continent?the breaking it
in to the harness of the railroads, the stumbling upon sudden riches.
But during these last years our hope
and our faith have all been put behind the speed of mass production,
behind stupendous campaigns of advertising, behind cyclones of
salesmanship. Our buoyancy had been becoming hysterical. And the
reaction from an hysterical exhilaration is a slump into despondency
and inertia. What we have lost is, it may be, not merely our way in the
economic labyrinth but our conviction of the value of what we were
doing.
Money-making
and the
kind of advantages which a money-making society provides for money to
buy are not enough to satisfy humanity?neither is a system like
ours in which everyone is out for himself and devil take the hindmost,
with no common purpose and little common culture to give life stability
and sense. Our idolization of our aviators?our extravagant excitement
over Lindbergh and our romantic admiration (now beginning to cool off)
for Byrd?has been like a last desperate burst of American idealism, a
last impulse to dissociate our national soul from a precipitate
progress that was taking us from automobiles and radios straight
through electric refrigerators to Tom Thumb golf-courses.
The
old American ideal and legend of the poor boy who gets to be a
millionaire, which gradually came to take the place of the poor boy who
got to be President, has today lost almost all its glamor. Not
only do people not hope to be Hoover?they do not even hope so often as
they did to be Carnegie or Henry Ford. The romance of the legend of the
poor boy was the romance of the old democratic chance, of the career
open to the talents?but the realities of a millionaire society have
turned out to be the monstrosities of capitalism: the children of the
successful poor boy get lazy and sick on their father's money, and the
poor boys who afterwards arrive on the scene discover that?with the
crippling of the grain market, the elimination of the factory worker by
the development of the machine and the decimation of the white-collar
class, even though sometimes apparently well on their way to getting in
on the big money themselves, by enormous business mergers?the
career is no longer open to the extent that had originally been hoped. What
began as the libertarian adventure of eighteenth-century middle-class
democracy seems to have ended in the cul de sac of an antiquated
economic system. And capitalist-minded as the Americans have now
become, they seem to feel they are in a cul de sac. It is as if they
did not dare to go on. In spite of the fundamental absurdity of so much
of what we have lately been doing, we are considerably better educated
and more intelligent than we once were, and since the war we have been
closer to Europe. The Buicks and Cadillacs, the bad gin and Scotch, the
radio concerts interrupted by advertizing talks, the golf and bridge of
the suburban household, which the bond salesman can get for his money,
can hardly compensate him for daily work of a kind in which it is
utterly impossible to imagine a normal human being taking satisfaction
or pride?and the bond salesman is the type of the whole urban office
class. The brokers and bankers who
are shooting themselves and jumping out of windows have been
disheartened by the precariousness of their profession, "but would they
be killing themselves if they loved it"? Who today, in fact, in
the United States, can really love our meaningless life, where the
manufacturer raises the workers wages only in order to create a demand
for the gadgets which for better or worse he happens to have an
interest in selling them, while agriculture goes hang, and science and
art are left to be exploited by the commercial laboratories, the market
for commercial art illustration and the New York publishers' racket, or
to be fed in a haphazard way by a dole from the fortunes of rich men
who have been conscience-stricken or simply overpowered at finding
themselves at the end of their careers with enough money on their hands
to buy out an old-fashioned empire?
We liberals have professed
not to love it, yet we have tried to believe in it, none the less. In a
country where money changes hands so often and social position
fluctuates so easily, where the minds of the working class have seemed
largely to have been absorbed into the psychology of the middle class,
we have been unable to believe in the Marxist doctrine that capitalism
must eventually give rise to class warfare, and we have perhaps never
taken sufficiently seriously Karl Marx's prediction that for many years
to come the stupid automatic acquisitive instinct of humanity would
still be so far ahead of its capacity for intelligent and disinterested
behavior that the system of private enterprise would never even be able
to run itself with foresight enough to avoid a wreck. It used to be
pointed out that in America our support of this system was
indestructible, since the stock market made it possible for anybody who
had been able to save a little money to become a capitalist himself,
with interests presumably identical with those of J. P. Morgan and
Charlie Schwab. But can we expect that to be true in the future??and
even if people persist in aspiring to be stockmarket capitalists,
should they be encouraged in this or even left to their luck? Should
they not rather be shown that their interests are incompatible with
capitalism itself?
Yet the truth is that we liberals and
progressives have been betting on capitalism?and that most of our
heroes and allies, heterodox professors like Dewey and Beard, survivors
of the old republican tradition like Woodrow Wilson and Justice Holmes,
able and well-educated labor organizers like the officers of the
Amalgamated, intelligent journalists like Lippmann and Chase, though
all sincere and outspoken democrats, have been betting on capitalism,
too. And now, in the abyss of
starvation and bankruptcy into which the country has fallen, with no
sign of any political leadership which will be able to pull us out, our
liberalism seems to have little to offer beyond a discreet
recommendation of public ownership of water power and certain other
public utilities, a cordial feeling that labor ought to organize in a
non-social-revolutionary way and a protest, invariably ineffective,
against a few of the more obviously atrocious of the jailings,
beatings-up and murders with which the industrialists have been trying
to keep the working class docile.
Doesn't this program
today seem rather inadequate? We liberals have always insisted on the
desirability of a planned society?the phrase "social control" has been
our blessed Mesopotamian word. If this means anything, does it not mean
socialism? And should we not do well to make this plain? It may be said
that at the present time it is utopian in America to talk about
socialism; but with the kind of administrations that the country has
lately been getting, do not all our progressive proposals, however
reasonable or modest, seem utopian? Is it not obvious, as was lately
made plain by an article in this magazine [ New Republic],
that a government like our present one is incapable of acting in good
faith in even the simple matter of preserving the water power which is
supposed to be operated for the general benefit from being exploited by
private profiteers? Our society has finally produced in its specialized
professional politicians one of the most useless and obnoxious groups
which has perhaps ever disgraced human history?a group that seems
unique among governing classes in having managed to be corrupt,
uncultivated and incompetent all at once. We know that we are not even
able to depend on them today to protect us against the frankly
disreputable race of blackmailers, thieves and assassins who dominate
our municipal life. We know that we cannot even complain that the
racketeers are breaking the laws which are supposed to be guaranteed by
the government, because the government differs little from the
racketeers. How can we expect them, then, to check the relatively
respectable scoundrels who merely rob us of the public utilities by
more or less legalistic means?
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WWI brought death, left visible marks and deformities, and took an emotional
toll on survivors of the battlefield, but also relatives and
acquaintances of the countless who perished or disappeared.
Nonetheless, while the Depression and the
War rear significantly, it is incorrect -- especially in amateur
woodworking, as refracted through a prism of composed of
electrification, technological development, mass production, worker
alienation, and so forth -- to see the 1920s decade as less
important.
The 1920s, together with the 1950s, emerge as the decades of the greatest social, economic and political impact for America in the twentieth century.
As material culture historian, Harvey Green
notes when analyzing the "crafts" -- professional, not amateur --
the "revolutionary" changes in design,
production, marketing and so forth -- of the crafts in the United
States during the Depression and World War II originated in the 1920s
and earlier.
(Sources: Harvey
Green's "Americans
and the Craft Revival: Culture and Crisis" in
Revivals! Diverse Traditions,
1920-1945: The History of 20th Century American Craft,
Janet Kardon,
ed.,
New York: Abrams, 1995. pp 31-40; Harvey
Green, "Popular Science and Political Thought Converge:
Colonial Survival Becomes Colonial Revival, 1830-1910, Journal
of American Culture, 6, no. 4 Winter 1983, pages
3-24.)
The Contrast of Affluence and Poverty
Throughout the era, poverty contrasted
with conspicuous affluence, perhaps most dramatically exemplified by
the austere life in the poverty belt of the Appalachians and the
self-indulgent society of the speakeasy.
Conspicuous affluence of the era is
perhaps best chronicled in books, and -- perhaps -- the titles that
stand out are novels by F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
and This Side of Paradise. Among muck-raking
nonfiction critical of indulgent affluence are Upton Sinclair, Lincoln
Steffens, Mark Sullivan, and Ida Tarbell.
On the left is an image of
an "affluent" woodworker, featured in the first article in the
initial issue of Popular Homecraft, May
1930. For more info see Chapter
5:2
With
this image and the one below, I want to show contrast between
social groups engaging in amateur woodworking. Some -- the more
fortunate ? enjoy it for leisure; others ? not so fortunate ? engage in
woodworking, but are driven by other motives.
Noted books that chronicle poverty
during this era include Studs Terkel's Hard Times ,
and two by John Steinbeck: The Harvest Gypsies
and The Grapes of Wrath. I am
using James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ,
a classic polemic that documents Appalachian poverty in the Depression
era with photos and text.
(For a
reflective analysis of the social, political, social and
aesthetic background of this era, see Harvey
Green's "Americans and the Craft Revival: Culture and Crisis" in Revivals! Diverse
Traditions, 1920-1945: The
History of 20th Century American Craft, Janet
Kardon, ed., New York: Abrams, 1995. pp 31-40; Miles Orvell, The
Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, The American Historical Review Vol. 96, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 615-616"
addresses these same questions. Because Green is himself an
accomplished woodworker, he brings to his discourse an "insider's
eye".)
The
Harvest Gypsies was originally published as a series of seven
articles in the San Francisco News, October 5-12, 1936.
When told that some migrant workers objected to the term "harvest
gypsies," Steinbeck responded in a letter to the News:
The
title was used ironically, since it is ironical that a huge group of
workers should, through the injustice and bad planning of our
agricultural system, be forced into a gypsy life. Certainly I had no
intention of insulting a people who are already insulted beyond
endurance.
John Steinbeck. [letter] San Francisco News 1936
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The articles were subsequently issued in
1938 as a pamphlet by the Simon J. Lubin Society, with the title Their
Blood Is Strong .
Steinbeck began work on the manuscript
of what would become The Grapes of Wrath at
the end of May 1938 and completed the book by the beginning of December
1938. The book was published in April 1939 in a first printing of
50,000 copies, and it became a tremendous bestseller.
I am using James
Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
a classic polemic that documents Appalachian poverty in the Depression
era with photos and text.
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In the image on the left -- somewhere
in Arkansas -- an unidentified woodworker canes
chairs. "Unidentified Man Caning a Chair, 1930s"/Courtesy of
the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History/Arkansas State Publicity Department
Collection (S-89-140-65)
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Agee
and the photographer Walker Evans spent three weeks in 1936 living in
Hale County, Alabama, on assignment for Fortune
magazine, documenting the lives of three tenant families: George
Gudger, Thomas Woods, Fred Ricketts.
The collaboration between writer and photographer was extremely
fruitful, and the project became much more ambitious than the magazine
had envisioned.
Fortune rejected the article
about the tenant families that Agee submitted in 1936 and later granted
him permission to use the material gathered on his assignment for use
in a book of his own.
In 1937 Harper & Brothers gave him an advance for the proposed
book, tentatively entitled Three Tenant Families,
but when he submitted it in summer 1939 it was rejected.
The following year the work, now called
Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men, was
accepted by Houghton Mifflin.
Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men was published by Houghton
Mifflin on August 19, 1941.
Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men
opened with a selection of 31 photographs Evans had taken on their 1936
trip; both Evans' and Agee's names appeared on the title page. In 1960,
five years after Agee's death, Houghton Mifflin published a second
edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
for which Evans
added 37 and removed 6 photographs from the selection that appeared at
the beginning of the 1941 edition. He also contributed a brief
foreword, "James Agee in 1936."
This is a fragment
from the Agee-Evans' Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men. It concerns the finances that each of
these families were confronted with.
MONEY
"Some
Findings and Comments"
from part two of
Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men,
WOODS
and Ricketts work for Michael and T.
Hudson Margraves, two brothers, in partnership, who live in Cookstown.
Gudger worked for the Margraves for three years; he now (1936) works
for Chester Boles, who lives two miles south of Cookstown.
Gudger
has no home, no land,
no mule; none of the more important farming implements. He must get all
these of his landlord. Boles, for his share of the corn and cotton,
also advances him rations money during four months of the year, March
through June, and his fertilizer.
Gudger pays him
back with his labor and with the labor of his tinnily.
At
the end of the season he pays him back further: with half his corn;
with half his cotton; with half his cottonseed. Out of his own half of
these crops he also pays him back the rations money, plus interest, and
his share of the fertilizer, plus interest, and such other debts, plus
interest, as he may have incurred.
What is left,
once doctors' bills and other debts have been deducted, is his year's
earnings.
Gudger is a straight half-cropper, or
sharecropper.
Woods and Ricketts own no home and no
land, but Woods owns one mule and Ricketts owns two, and they own their
farming implements. Since they do not have to rent these tools and
animals, they work under a slightly different arrangement. They give
over to the landlord only a third of their cotton and a fourth of their
corn. Out of their own parts of the crop, however, they owe him the
price of two thirds of their cotton
fertilizer and three
fourths of their corn fertilizer, plus interest; and, plus interest,
the same debts on rations money.
Woods and Ricketts
arc tenants: they work on third and fourth.
A very
few tenants pay cash rent: but these two types of arrangement, with
local variants (company stores; food instead of rations money; slightly
different divisions of the crops) are basic to cotton tenantry all over
the South.
From March through June, while the cotton
is being cultivated, they live on the rations money.
From
July through to late August, while the cotton is making, they live
however they can.
From late August through October
or into November, during the picking and ginning season, they live on
the money from their share. of the cottonseed.
From then on
until March, they live on whatever they have earned in the year; or
however they can.
During six to seven months of each
year, then ? that is, during exactly such time as their labor
with the cotton is of absolute necessity to the landlord ?
they can he sure of what-ever living is possible in rations advances
and in cottonseed money.
During five to six months
of the
year, of which three are the hardest months of any year, with the worst
of weather, the least adequacy of shelter, the worst and least of food,
the worst of health, quite normal and inevitable, they can count on
nothing except that they may hope least of all for any help from their
landlords.
Gudger ? a family of six
? lives on ten dollars a month rations money during four
months of the year. He has lived on eight, and on six. Woods
? a family of six ? until this year was unable to
get better than eight a month during the same period; this year he
managed to get it up to ten. Ricketts ? a family of nine
? lives on ten dollars a month during this spring and early
summer period.
This debt is paid back in the fall at
eight per cent interest.Eight per cent is charged also on the
fertilizer and on all other debts which tenants incur in this vicinity.
At
the normal price, a half-sharing tenant gets about six dollars a bale
from his share of the cottonseed. A one-mule, half-sharing tenant makes
on the average three bales. This half-cropper, then, Gudger, can count
on eighteen dollars, more or less, to live on during the picking and
ginning: though he gets nothing until his first bale is ginned.
Working
on third and fourth, a tenant gets the money from two thirds of the
cottonseed of each bale: nine dollars to the bale. Woods with one mule,
makes three bales, and gets twenty-seven dollars. Ricketts, with two
mules, makes and gets twice that, to live on during the late summer and
fall.
What is earned at the end of a given year is
never to be depended on and, even late in a season, is never
predictable. It can be enough to tide through the dead months of the
winter, sometimes even better: it can be enough, spread very thin, to
take through two months, and a sickness, or six weeks, or a month: it
can be little enough to be completely meaningless: it can be nothing:
it can be enough less than nothing to insure a tenant only of an
equally hopeless lack of money at the end of his next year's work: and
whatever one year may bring in the way of good luck, there is never any
reason to hope that that luck will be repeated in the next year or the
year after that.
The best that Woods has ever
cleared was
$1300 during a war year. During the teens and twenties he fairly often
cleared as much as $300; he fairly often cleared $5o and less; two or
three times he ended the year in debt. During the depression years he
has more often cleared $50 and less; last year he cleared $150, but
serious illness during the winter ate it up rapidly.
The
best that Gudger has ever cleared is $I25. That was in the plow-under
year. He felt exceedingly hopeful and bought a mule: but when his
landlord warned him of how he was coming out the next year, he sold it.
Most years he has not made more than $25 to $30; and about one year in
three he has ended in debt. Year before last he wound up $8o in debt;
last year, $12; of Boles, his new landlord, the first thing he had to
do was borrow $15 to get through the winter until rations advances
should begin.
Years ago the Ricketts were,
relatively speaking, almost prosperous. Besides their cotton farming
they had ten cows and sold the milk, and they lived near a good stream
and had all the fish they wanted. Ricketts went $400 into debt on a
fine young pair of mules. One of the mules died before it had made its
first crop; the other died the year after; against his fear, amounting
to full horror, of sinking to the half-crop level where nothing is
owned, Ricketts went into debt for other, inferior mules; his cows went
one by one into debts and desperate ex-changes and by sickness; he got
congestive chills; his wife got pellagra; a number of his children
died; he got appendicitis and lay for days on end under the ice cap;
his wife's pellagra got into her brain; for ten consecutive years now,
though they have lived on so little rations money, and have turned
nearly all their cottonseed money toward their debts, they have not
cleared or had any hope of clearing a cent at the end of the year.
It
is not often, then, at the end of the season, that a tenant clears
enough money to tide him through the winter, or even an appreciable
part of it. More generally he can count on it that, during most of the
four months between settlement time in the fall and the beginning of
work and resumption of rations advances in the early spring, he will
have no money and can expect none, nor any help, from his landlord: and
of having no money during the six midsummer weeks of laying by, he can
be still more sure. Four to six months of each year, in other words, he
is much more likely than not to have nothing whatever, and during these
months he must take care for himself: he is no responsibility of the
landlord's. All he can hope to do is find work. This is hard, because
there are a good many chronically unemployed in the towns, and they are
more convenient to most openings for work and can at all times be
counted on if they are needed; also there is no increase, during these
two dead farming seasons, of other kinds of work to do. And so, with no
more jobs open than at any other time of year, and with plenty of men
already convenient to take them, the whole tenant population, hundreds
and thousands in any locality, are desperately in need of work.
A
landlord saves up certain odd jobs for these times of year: they go, at
less than he would have to pay others, to those of his tenants who
happen to live nearest or to those he thinks best of; and even at best
they don't amount to much.
When there is wooded land
on the farm, a landlord ordinarily permits a tenant to cut and sell
firewood for what he can get. About the best a tenant gets of this is a
dollar a load, but more often (for the market is glutted, so many are
trying to sell wood) he can get no better than half that and less, and
often enough, at the end of a hard day's peddling, miles from home, he
will let it go for a quarter or fifteen cents rather than haul it all
the way home again: so it doesn't amount to much. Then, too, by no
means everyone has wood to cut and sell: in the whole southern half of
the county we were working mainly in, there was so little wood that the
negroes, during the hard winter of 1935-36, were burning parts of their
fences, out-buildings, furniture and houses, and were dying off in
great and not seriously counted numbers, of pneumonia and other
afflictions of the lungs.
WPA work is available to
very few tenants: they are, technically, employed, and thus have no
right to it: and if by chance they manage to get it, landlords are more
likely than not to intervene. They feel it spoils a tenant to be paid
wages, even for a little while. A tenant who so much as tries to get
such work is under disapproval.
There is not enough direct
relief even for the widows and the old of the county.
Gudger
and Ricketts, during this year, were exceedingly lucky. After they, and
Woods, had been turned away from government work, they found work in a
sawmill. They were given the work on condition that they stay with it
until the mill was moved, and subject strictly to their landlords'
permission: and their employer wouldn't so much as hint how long the
work might last. Their landlords quite grudgingly gave them
per-mission, on condition that they pay for whatever help was needed in
their absence during the picking season.
Gudger
hired a hand, at eight dollars a month and board. Ricketts did not need
to: his family is large enough. They got a dollar and a quarter a day
five days a week, and seventy-five cents on Saturday, seven dollars a
week, ten hours' work a day. Woods did not even try for this work: he
was too old and too sick.
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A Technological Revolution
On
the positive side, America underwent a technological revolution: the
machine upstaged the
hand. In mass production, in travel on or above the ground, tempo
became a social force.
Transportation and communication networks exploded?it was the
era of the ocean liner, air travel,
the family car, railroad vacations
to the Southwest, the radio, and the telephone.
Mass
production of the
automobile had an enormous influence on road systems, homes, and other
design spheres.
New appliances enhanced domestic life, enough to be dubbed "The
Industrial Revolution in the Kitchen". New designs were created to
house them, and were made with new materials.
Beginning perhaps with the turn-of-the-century Mission furniture vogue and early manifestoes of the "new" architecture, and spreading gradually to appliances, apparel, and machinery, "formalist" and "functionalist" canons of design were promulgated, crediting styles congenial to mass-production techniques with "classical" beauty, and consigning diversely decorated alternatives to the limbo of an outdated romanticism (Pulos 1983; Meikle 1979; "Tendencies in Mill Work" 1907, 19).
By the 1920s, the industrial aesthetic of the first machine age, a rich and highly spiced stylistic stew expressive of batch manufacturing's prowess, had been supplanted by a new American Standard whose smooth sheen aptly captured the technical capacities of mass production. With the triumph of bulk manufacture came a great forgetting, a recoding of the past to fit the new assumptions. The extent to which mass-production imagery of modernism dominated business and aesthetic discourse before the Great Depression (Hounshell 1984, chap. 8) is suggested by the keynote speaker at the American Management Association's 1929 convention:
"There was a time when our best things were hand-made, our poorest made in mass production. Cheap, nasty, poor taste things were turned out by the machine. The reverse seems to be beginning to be true today"(Pulos 1983, 330).
Source: Philip Scranton, "The Politcs of Production" Science in Context 8, No 2 1995 , page 376.
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Oppression
in Europe Drives Artistic Talents to America
For
the arts and crafts in Europe, the
years between the wars
were strained and sinister, coming from the oppressive policies against
freedom of artistic expression and other forms of creativity that did
not match the political ideologies invoked by two European despots:
Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler in Germany. In 1921,
the Communist Party took official control of artistic expression in
Russia and the satellite nations in the Soviet's sphere of control.
Although he didn't ascend to power in Germany until 1933, in
1920, at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich, Hitler announced his Twenty-Five-Point
Program.
Assuming power in 1933, Hitler ordered "degenerate" abstract art
removed from the walls of museums throughout Germany, and the Bauhaus
was disbanded. By this time, hundreds of artists had immigrated from
Europe to America ? authors, architects, designers, painters,
sculptors, musicians, and artists working in clay, fiber, glass, metal,
and wood.
Growth in
Popularity of Amateur
Woodworking
For amateur
woodworking, two books
published in New York in 1930 are, today,
interesting in
several ways: The Home Workshop Manual and
Things
to make in your home workshop. Specifically
designed for the homeworkshop -- especially National
Homeworkshop Guild members -- both books
are edited by Arthur Wakeling, an editor at the Popular
Science Monthly, and both feature
contributions by distinguished Industrial Arts instructors.
Mysteries about these books abound,
though. What is the
chemistry that resulted in their publication?
Using
the limited
evidence I have discovered about these events I explore these issues
further in Arthur
Wakeling and the Formation of the
National Homeworkshop Guild in the 1930s
and
Popular
Homecraft volume 1, number 1, 1930 "The
Growing Popularity of Homecraft Workshops" ;
however, more background information is needed to fill out
missing details about the forces leading to the growth of the numbers
of homeworkshops -- according to the first article in the first issue
of Popular Homecraft linked
above, 77,000 power-driven home workshops exist nationwide in 1930.
Apart
from mention the existence of the NHG
in the 1938 Preface, additional
evidence exists in two locations. Naturally, the NHG was not in
existence in 1930, so its Preface makes not mention of it. But the
pagination of the main part of the 1930 and the 1938 books is
identical:
- in the book's front matter, including
the the list of contributors and the Introduction, "On Becoming a
Handyman" and
- pages
of the Popular Science Monthly
of the 1930s
Thus
there is this problem: Is the Industrial Arts
Program: The Homeworkshop Movement
a portent of the growth in interest on several fronts of amateur
wooddworking? Otherwise, how can we explain the reasons for
this
convergence
of the following?
1. An Industrial Arts
Program: The Homeworkshop Movement -- an
event that
spanned across the 1920s into the 1940s of America's Industrial Arts
programs.
During that period, Chelsea Fraser, Eric E Ericson,
George A. Willoughby
and Duane G.
Chamberlain, William H. Johnson and Louis V. Newkirk -- all
authors of woodworking manuals that, in one way or another,
advocate homeworkshop for boys enrolled in high school woodworking
courses. Willoughby and Chamberlain, for example, in the second of
three editions of their woodworker's manual, 1944? -- the first and
third, respectively, 1936 and 1958 -- follows the same theme as the
textbooks designed for industrial education by Emanuel E Ericson --
four eds for 1930 through 1976 -- the inclusion of the homeworkshop
component for boys. (What is different about Willoughby and Chamberlain
is that not until 1958 is any attention given power tools in the
textbook's contents.) Chapter 10 of the 1946 edition of Johnson and
Newkirk is "The Home Workshop"
2.
The National
Homeworkshop Guild -- the
publication in 1930 of the
books under the umbrella of the New York-based periodical, Popular
Science: The Home Workshop Manual and
Things to make in your home
workshop, both books under the editorship of Arthur
Wakeling, but with significant contributions from several Inustrial
Arts people.
The verso of the title page
also shows 14 reprintings, starting in 1930, and stretching to 1939, or
about 35,000 copies ? my calculations are 2500 copies per reprinting.
However,
Wakeling,
writing the
?preface? in 1938, acknowledges his ?five
years of directing the National Homeworkshop Guild,
... a nonprofit organization -- [that originated in 1933 ] -- of about 300
home workshop clubs in
forty-four states, the District of Columbia, and Canada.?
3. The Formation of the Leisure
League of America
in 1935 --
(For more on
the LLA, click
here: Working
With Tools, 1935, a pamphlet produced by
Harry Hobbs, editor of Home Craftsman,
a magazine begun by the Walker-Turner Company, one of the major
manufacturers of power tools for the home workshop.)
4. The
Emergence of New Handicraft Magazines with Woodworking a Central Feature
Along
with the Home Craftsman, two
other magazines with content directed toward amateur woodworker emerged
in the very early 1930s: the Deltagram,
an organ designed to promote Delta woodworking tools, and the
independent, Popular Homecraft.
I doubt if I will ever be able to do
what really is necessary
to determine the details of this convergence: examine the public and
private papers of the major players. I work on my own dime for this
project, and looking at those papers would involve expensive,
labor-intensive trips to New York, Chicago, and several places in
between. Such problems, though, are the
"nuts and bolts" of writing history.
The latest
reprinting is March,
1939. Also in 1930, under the imprint of both Grosset and Dunlap and
Popular Science Monthly,
portions of this
book are republished as Things to Make in Your
Workshop. Its original 502 pages are reduced to
255. The verso of the 1930 title page shows that it is copyright, 1930,
by Popular Science Monthly.
5. Finally, any recap
of developments
in the homeworkshop
movement from the 1920s -- chapter
4 -- at this time must recall the impacts of
electrification and the development of small scale woodworking power
tools.
Sources:
Janet
Kardon, Craft
in the Machine Age,
New York: H.N. Abrams, in association with the American Craft Museum,
1995, especially Kate Carmel's
chapter "Against the Grain: Modern American Woodwork", page
74+; Noel Riley, ed., Elements of Design: A
Practical Encyclopedia of the Decorative Arts From the Renaissance to
the Present new York:
free press,
2003, page 378.
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The Modern Age Confronts Leisure
The
text below in the pinkish box is serving until I find something better,
something that fits the context I wish to capture: the utter boredom of
assembly line labor.
Evidently,
ineffective use of spare time was viewed as a major international
problem,
because in 1935, in Budapest, Hungary,
a
conference, International Conference on Workers?
Spare Time,
was convened.
When
I encountered this passage, it struck immediately that while the author
was speaking of conditons that prevail in Europe in the 1920s and
1930s, his characterization of the deadening impact of assembly line
work, regardless of the location, has the universal ring of
truth:
"If your work is boring,
repetitive, treadmill-like, your work is unsatisfying, and
unfulfilling".
In
my own experience, in a summer between university sessions, I worked in
a brick factory. It was hard work, yes, but my body soon adjusted to
the physical effort required to stack heavy concrete buildding blocks
on pallets; my brain, however, could not adjust to the utter
unfulfilling boredom of the task.
In
his conference paper, J. E. Vojka, "Two Aspects: The Family and the Young Worker", of
the Workshop School at Budapest, looked
at such ?psychologoical reactions?, as the human
requirement that "life must have a meaning", with the obvious
implication that
"leisure interests" are
significant.
Vojka
cites a decade and a half study on use of spare time by young factory
workers:
...
There is no need to dwell
at length here on the harmful effects of
mechanised work. It is obvious that processes which
require the worker to repeat continuously a single
movement at a speed demanding
complete concentration must produce nervous tension and a dulling,
if
not an actual paralysis, of mental
processes. That is the essential point. In the past, it was
the physique
of the worker that was subjected to
overstrain; now the harmful effects of his work are
psychological. His leisure time must be used to
satisfy
the mental needs that appear as a result of this state of affairs.
Some brief
analysis must be given here of the psychological effects of
modern industrial work. The chief complaint of the worker is
that his
work lacks organic completeness.
His labour is regulated by the hour and does not lead to any
final
result; the accompanying tension is
suddenly broken, but there is no natural relaxation. Even workers of
little intelligence suffer from this
situation, although unconsciously. The result is a longing
for some
sort of " active " effort ? if one may be
permitted to apply the term " passive " to the effort required for
mechanical work. ...
...
It is not simply the nature of his toil that makes life so hard for a
young worker; there is also a moral, even a sentimental, side to the
question. The young worker feels that a
slight is being cast on his dignity as a human being. He
suffers
because his existence seems of so little
importance, the part he plays so insignificant. The life of an
apprentice in bygone days was far from
easy; apprentices' agreements have been handed down that prescribed a
16-hour day. But at least the
apprentice had certain compensations: he had an opportunity of
realising his own importance in the scheme of
things; he was master of a craft of which he could be proud as of an
art; he knew the value of that craft; he belonged to a powerful guild
that often exerted a considerable
influence in the affairs of the community.
All these were precious possessions for an eager youth on the threshold
of life.
The factory
hand, who rarely sees the finished product to which he
contributes, despite his toil, such a tiny fraction, whose
relationship
with the industry for which he works
consists in a single movement repeated a given number of times in a
specified number of hours, cannot acquire
this sense of his personal importance ? not even
indirectly
through the undertaking in
which he works, for he often remains quite ignorant of its
extent and
ramifications. His mental needs, even if
unconscious, are left unsatisfied; his sense of
dignity becomes
atrophied. ...
Source:
J. E.
Vojka, "Two Aspects: The Family and the Young
Worker", Recreation and Education; International Labour Office Studies and Reports
Series G (Housing and Welfare) No. 4; Reports presented to the
International Conference on Workers' Spare Time,
Brussels, 15-17 June 1935,
GENEVA, 1936 pages 23-25
Back
to Chapter 5
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