THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 67
their past. “The United States has be
come disconnected from the history of
its own making,” Adamson writes. In
America, Noah Webster wrote in 1785,
“every man is in some measure an art
ist.” And every woman, too. At the time
of the nation’s founding, American
households had all kinds of ties to mar
kets, even to far distant markets, but
Americans also made their own clothes
and houses and furniture; they made
their own bedding, their own bread and
beer; they made their own music. If
hardly anyone made everything—be
cause people also traded and swapped
and bought and sold—nearly everyone
made some things.
“A man is no worse metaphysician
for knowing how to drive a nail home
without splitting the board,” Ralph
Waldo Emerson said in 1837, a few years
before his friend Henry David Thoreau
set about building a cabin on Walden
Pond. Nineteenthcentury American
writers celebrated the making of things,
none more than Whitman:
House-building, measuring, sawing the
boards,
Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making,
coopering, tin-roofing, shingle-dressing,
Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing,
flagging of sidewalks by flaggers,
The pump, the pile-driver, the great der-
rick, the coal-kiln and brick-kiln,
Coal-mines and all that is down there,
the lamps in the darkness, echoes,
songs,what meditations, what vast na-
tive thoughts looking through smutch’d
faces,...
Flour-works, grinding of wheat, rye, maize,
rice, the barrels and the half and quarter
barrels, the loaded barges, the high piles
on wharves and levees,
The men and the work of the men on ferries,
railroads, coasters, fish-boats, canals;
The hourly routine of your own or any man’s
life, the shop, yard, store, or factory,
These shows all near you by day and night—
workman! whoever you are, your daily
life!
During the decades when Emerson
and Thoreau and Whitman were writ
ing, factories were bringing all kinds of
work out of the household and the ar
tisan’s shop and into the factory through
the division of labor, breaking down the
work of making something into doz
ens of tiny steps, each to be done by a
different man or machine. The shop
work of the cordwainer became the ma
chine labor of the factory employee.
Both artisans and factory workers
therefore fought for fewer hours and
higher wages. The gains they extracted
from governments were hardwon, and
stinting. In 1819, the British Parliament
passed a Factory Act that barred the
employment of children under the age
of nine in cotton mills. An 1833 law
capped the number of mill hours worked
by children between thirteen and eigh
teen at twelve per day.
Finally, by the second half of the
nineteenth century, some of the eco
nomic rewards of this sys
tem reached the workers
themselves; goods were
vastly cheaper. Still, indus
trial people were people
cleaved by class, suffering
from alienation, and wor
ried that their work had be
come meaningless. “Craft,”
meanwhile, became suffused
with meaning, romantic and
nostalgic, gendered and ra
cialized. “The only real handicraft this
country knows,” according to an article
in Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman, at
the height of the Arts and Crafts move
ment in America, is “that of the Indian.”
Suzman argues that the aimlessness
Émile Durkheim believed to be an often
fleeting consequence of the process of
industrialization is, instead, a character
istic of modern life: “As energy capture
rates have surged, new technologies have
come online and our cities have con
tinued to swell, constant and unpredict
able change has become the new normal
everywhere, and anomie looks increas
ingly like the permanent condition of
the modern age.”
Anomie is one thing, poverty an
other. In the United States and the
United Kingdom, the labor movement
grew in strength and achieved an as
tonishing set of gains. In 1877, railroad
workers across America went on strike.
In 1882, in New York, Americans held
the first Labor Day parade. The labor
movement’s call for shorter hours, in
an era whose watchwords were “scien
tific management” and “efficiency,” was
largely won in the nineteenteens and
twenties under what became known as
“the Fordist bargain,” when Henry Ford
began implementing an eighthour
workday and a fiveday workweek in
exchange for higher productivity and
less turnover. In both the U.K. and theU.S., according to some estimates, the
average number of hours worked per
week fell from about sixty, in 1880, to
below fifty, by 1930. John Maynard
Keynes predicted that, a hundred years
in the future, the problem for workers
would be too much leisure, since they
would work no more than fifteen hours
a week. Everyone would suffer from
boredom. “There is no country and no
people, I think, who can look forward
to the age of leisure and of abundance
without a dread,” Keynes
wrote. “It is a fearful prob
lem for the ordinary per
son, with no special talents,
to occupy himself.”
In stepped heritage tour
ism and the hobby industry.
Crafts, in an age of mass
produced consumer goods,
became collectibles. Cura
tors began collecting Amer
icana, handforged tools,
and handstitched gowns. During the
Colonial Revival, industrialists built mu
seums to hold the remains of the age of
the artisan. In the nineteenthirties, the
Museum of Modern Art mounted an
exhibit called “American Folk Art: The
Art of the Common Man in America:
1750 1900”; John D. Rockefeller funded
the restoration of Colonial Williams
burg, in Williamsburg, Virginia; Henry
Ford opened Greenfield Village, in Dear
born, Michigan. “It was a strange sen
sation to pass old wagons while walk
ing with one who had rendered them
obsolete,” a New York Times reporter
who toured Greenfield with Ford wrote.
Another Times writer noted, “The un
paralleled Dearborn collection of spin
ning wheels, Dutch ovens, covered
bridges and other relics of an early Amer
ican past is the work of a man whose
life mission has been to take us away
from that past as quickly as might be.”
The doityourself movement, a craft
craze, took off in the nineteenfifties.
In the new, postwar suburbs, white
middle class suburban men built work
shops, places where, after a long day at
the office or the factory, they could make
things by hand. “Millions have taken to
heart Thoreau’s example,” one commen
tator wrote, “withdrawing to their base
ment and garage workshops to find there
a temporary Walden.” C.Wright Mills,
the famed author of the 1951 classic