| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Gustav Stickley's Craftsman Farms: The Quest for an Arts and Crafts Utopia. By Mark Alan Hewitt. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. xx, 248 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8156-0689-3.)

The arts and crafts movement flourished in the United States from the 1890s to the 1910s. Its story and that of its various participants, whether architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, ceramicists such as the Rookwood Pottery in Cincinnati, or furniture makers such as Gustav Stickley, has been a publishing growth industry in recent years. Many of the books tend toward a fawning admiration for the beauty of the objects and the message implied therein. Some of this writing is scholarship, some of it is journalism, but almost all the commentators tend toward a polemical treatment that views these designers and craftspeople as envisioning and achieving a new and different life in which the house and its objects reconnected the occupants to nature, truth, and the simple life. The American arts and crafters inherited the rabid anti-industrialism of John Ruskin and William Morris, and according to their interpreters mercantile capitalism was momentarily challenged before it continued its inexorable march to dominance. This sentimentalized and romantic view of the arts and crafts movement comes from reading the polemics of the participants while not looking very closely at the actuality of their achievements beyond exquisite houses, vases, and chairs. . . .

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