Arts and Crafts Movement, 1895-1920.

ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT, 1895-1920. In the United States, the movement drew inspiration from the British example, particularly the work of socialist William Morris (1834-1896). Morris, preceded by philanthropist and art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), believed that the processes of industrialization, particularly the mechanization of production, degraded human labor. This development not only alienated workers from their labor, he believed, but also resulted in a diminished aesthetic quality of life. Morris therefore rejected the modern, industrialized division of labor and spurred a restoration of handicraft. In 1884, he endorsed “International Revolutionary Socialism,” founded the Socialist League, and began to lecture widely to working-class audiences throughout England and Scotland. In the United States, the Morrisian socialist underpinnings remained less pronounced than his aesthetic contributions to art and design, but nevertheless inspired a small movement among left-leaning designers and developers.

By the late 1890s, arts and crafts societies had formed alongside small enterprises of furniture manufacturers, home builders, and potters. Associated with social reform as well as a distinctive anti-Victorian design philosophy, the movement found allies among settlement workers. The Chicago society organized in 1897 at Hull House, which added a craftsman-style dining room in1905 to the original Italianate structure. Elsewhere, pioneers established utopian communities and aspired to promote handcraft skills to working-class participants. Architect William Lightfoot Price, a single-tax advocate, helped to establish Rose Valley in Pennsylvania in 1901. Building on the remains of an old textile mill town, he introduced the principles of arts and crafts aesthetics into new homes and provided housing and space for craft workers. Around the same time, Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead and her spouse Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead spearheaded the formation of the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York, an artists-in-residence colony that continue to sponsor programs for artists into the twenty-first century.

Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915), who described himself as anarchist and a socialist, founded Roycroft, an arts and crafts community in East Aurora, New York, in 1895. He published a credo to explain: “I believe John Ruskin, William Morris, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoy to be Prophets of God, and they should rank in mental and Spiritual insight with Elijah, Hosea, Ezekiel and Isaiah.” Hubbard later published an anti-war pamphlet, “Jesus was an Anarchist” using the printing press and bindery he maintained that was inspired by Morris’s Kelmscott Press. He also published two iconoclastic magazines, The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest (1895-1915) and The Fra: Journal of Affirmation. Mainly, the Roycrofters produced fine leather, hammered copper goods, and mission-style handcrafted furniture. The large settlement, around 500 artisans at its peak in 1910, flourished. An inn, managed by Alice Moore Hubbard (1861-1915), his second wife and prominent suffragist, hosted many guests, radicals and freethinkers. Hubbard himself drifted away from socialism, and in 1915 he and Alice perished aboard the RMS Lusitania. Roycroft was taken over by his son, Bert, who kept it going until filing for bankruptcy in 1938. The campus, featuring a museum, remained into the twenty-first century the largest, most preserved craft colony sites in the United States.

The renowned and highly successful arts-and-crafts practitioner, Gustav Stickley (1858-1942), never professed socialist ideals and concluded that such a transformation impossible in the United States. He nevertheless firmly believed in the dignity of all labor and experimented with profit sharing with his employees. Ultimately, he insisted, the laboring classes were destined to come into their own.

Born to German immigrants in Osceola, Wisconsin, Stickley learned to build furniture from his uncle in Brandt, Pennsylvania, and in 1898 formed the Gustav Stickley Company that offered customers his “New Furniture,” including the popular Morris chair. He also began to promote the Arts and Crafts movement through the pages of his new magazine, The Craftsman, (1901-1916). During the early years, Irene Sargent (1852-1932), a self-trained art historian, served as editor and wrote more than eighty articles, including pieces on the socialistic strains in such luminaries as Morris, Kropotkin, Robert Owen, and Walt Whitman. Stickley meanwhile moved on to design and promote the Craftsman house, the iconic bungalow, as an affordable yet elegant option for middle- and working-class families. The Craftsman published architectural plans that could be ordered from the magazine. Its final issue, devoted to Christmas 1916, underscored the arts and crafts message: “Peace and contentment are always represented as dwelling in a vine covered cottage, never in a palace.”

Boris, Eileen. Art and Labor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

Thompson, E. P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011.

The Craftsman, 1901-1916. Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture. University of Wisconsin Libraries. http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/DLDecArts/DLDecArts-idx?type=browse&scope=DLDecArts.HomeDesign

Website: Roycroft Campus, A National Historic Landmark. https://www.roycroftcampuscorporation.com