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Winter, 2008
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RICHARD S. CHRISTEN

Julia Hoffman and the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland

An Aesthetic Response to Industrialization

ON OCTOBER 9, 1907, NEARLY 150 people met at the Portland Art Museum to adopt a constitution, elect officers, and enlist members for a new organization: the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland.1 Among those present was Julia Hoffman, one of Portland's leading citizens and perhaps its most avid craftsperson. More than any other individual, Hoffman had generated an interest in handicrafts in the city. She also helped draft the new society's constitution and by-laws and, as one of its original trustees, its second president, and its primary spokesperson for nearly thirty years, infused the institution with her vision of the arts and crafts. Despite her responsibility for its existence, the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland was more than Julia Hoffman's personal creation. Like similar groups that appeared in cities across the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Portland society was part of an arts and crafts movement that flourished from the 1880s to the 1920s in England, the United States, and to a lesser degree, the European continent. 1


 
Figure 1
    Tom Hardy, Flying Together, 1990, on the plaza at the Oregon Historical Society.

    OHS neg., bb004283, Evan Schneider, photographer
 


 
      At its core, the arts and crafts movement was a response to industrialization — a loose network of individuals and institutions committed not so much to a specific artistic style or method as to an attitude and sensibility that something was amiss in the modern, industrial world.2 Attacks leveled by English designer, poet, and socialist William Morris against the nineteenth-century industrial revolution originally inspired the movement. Machines had undoubtedly increased efficiency, freed humans from much drudgery, and multiplied the quantity of consumer goods, but according to Morris, the cost had been unacceptable. Product quality and beauty had declined as cheap, poorly designed objects flooded the market. The shift from craftsperson to machine operator drained industrial workers of creativity and separated them from their materials, products, and customers. Laborers took little pride or pleasure in demeaning toil and suffered dramatic losses in social and financial status.3 Building on the insights of John Ruskin and other Romantics, Morris countered industrialization's harmful effects with what historian Eileen Boris refers to as "the craftsman ideal."4 This archetype fused two particular notions that Morris believed had been trampled by the factory system: first, an aesthetic ideal — that natural beauty, simplicity, and usefulness should characterize all objects and permeate everyday life; and second, a theory of labor — a commitment to work that brings joy, dignity, and personal satisfaction to laborers. Morris believed pre-industrial artisans had embodied both notions. Because their work combined design and creation, he argued, it was stimulating, pleasurable, and respected within the community; their products, created for specific purposes and people, were original, practical, and the epitome of elegant beauty. Hoping to return to these conditions, Morris's answer to industrialization looked backward rather than forward. His was a reactionary conviction that attention to pre-industrial tools, processes, and design would reverse two of the most nefarious effects of the factory system. He was convinced that, if freed from the slavery of machines, laborers would again make beautiful things and perform work "worth doing ... of itself pleasant to do, and ... done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious."5 2


 
Figure 2
    In its early years, the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland often held classes, like this one photographed by Julia Hoffman, in the homes of its mostly middle class and affluent patrons. The society eventually opened a school downtown.

    Courtesy of the Oregon College of Art and Craft
 


 


 
Figure 3
    Julia Hoffman was the driving force behind the arts and crafts movement in early twentieth-century Portland. She created this self-portrait in 1885, a few years after her move to Portland from Salt Lake City.

    Courtesy of the Oregon College of Art and Craft
 


 
      Hoffman and other leaders of the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland possessed Morris's desire to cultivate an appreciation for craftsmanship and handicrafts, but they had little of his enthusiasm for fundamental economic and social change. Like that of its counterparts in Boston and other American cities, the Portland society's goal was aesthetic rather than social or economic; they wished to counter the unsightliness of the city's commercial and industrial growth without slowing its growth or challenging the status quo. To achieve this aim, the society promoted the appreciation and acquisition of beautifully crafted, everyday objects and the use of leisure time to make things with one's hands. A private foil to the city's public schools, which primarily focused on preparing pupils for professions in the industrial economy, Hoffman and her society taught amateur craftspeople how to decorate their homes with well-made things and brighten their personal lives with self-actualizing hobbies. The Arts and Crafts Society of Portland's domestic and aesthetic curriculum could benefit anyone, Hoffman proclaimed. Yet, in practice, it reached Portland's elites and middle classes almost exclusively. The organization taught privileged individuals how to construct a personal and emotional sphere that would offset the harshness of industrialization and its workplaces, but its policies were ambivalent toward artisanship as an alternative to industrial work. For the laboring classes — the original targets of the Morris-inspired arts and crafts movement — the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland did little.

 3
BORN IN GUNNISON, Utah, in 1856, Julia Christianson moved in 1881 to Portland, where she met and married Lee Hoffman, a young engineer and contractor who would figure prominently in the development of late nineteenth-century Portland.6 Lee went on to amass a substantial fortune by building public works such as the water pipeline from the Bull Run aquifer to Portland and the Morrison Bridge, the first bridge to span the Willamette River in the Portland area. Julia, who had been interested in the arts since childhood and had attended painting school in Salt Lake City, became an avid amateur photographer, an enthusiastic collector of Native American baskets and other folk arts, and an accomplished sculptor and metalworker.7 4


 
Figure 4
    Lee Hoffman was a successful engineer and contractor in late nineteenth-century Portland. After his tragic death in a gun accident, Julia Hoffman moved with her children to Boston, the early center of the American arts and crafts movement.

    OHS org. lot 95, bb004291. B.C. Towne, photographer
 


 
      In July 1895, Lee Hoffman died in a gun accident while picnicking with family and friends. A year later, Julia Hoffman moved to Boston, ostensibly to provide her children Hawley and Margery with an East Coast education.8 She quickly plunged into her new home's vigorous arts community. According to friend Sally Cross Bill, Hoffman "missed nothing that happened in Boston or Cambridge ... she wished to see, hear and know and investigate everything pertaining to culture." She frequently attended the symphony and opera, took classes at the Grundemann Studios of the Boston Art Students' Association, and studied with George Gebelein, one of the nation's foremost silversmiths. She was also active in the Copley Society, the Folk Lore Society, where she became known as "the lady with the Indian Baskets," and as a "craftsman" member in Boston's newly founded Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston (SACB).9 One of the first arts and crafts societies in the United States and arguably the most influential, the SACB was part of a widespread effort to institutionalize Morris's aesthetic and social principles. 5


 
Figure 5
    An avid collector of Native American artifacts, Julia Hoffman was known within the Boston arts and crafts community for her collection of Indian baskets.

    Courtesy of the Oregon College of Art and Craft
 


 
      The son of a stockbroker, Morris inherited enough wealth to test his theories, and in the late 1850s, in concert with an artistic circle that included the pre-Raphaelite painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones and the architect Philip Webb, he used traditional crafts techniques to decorate Red House, his new family residence in Kent.10 Buoyed by the results, Morris founded an interior design firm where craftspeople drafted and produced wallpaper, glass, furniture, and other decorative objects using traditional tools, processes, and patterns. The company and its products quickly became vogue among professionals and the well-to-do, generating widespread interest in traditional handicrafts and support for Morris's assertion that "beauty is a marketable quality, and that the better the work is all round ... the more likely it is to find favour with the public."11 Although significant, Morris's artistic achievements fell short of the craftsman ideal. He produced elegant household objects and fostered a greater appreciation of beauty in everyday life, but, paradoxically, he was never able to make that loveliness affordable to the masses or to have much effect on general labor conditions. While the craftspeople at Morris's Merton Abbey workshop worked in a garden setting, used machines only to do the most onerous tasks, and were given some room for individual expression, the mindlessness and manipulation that filled the days of most English laborers remained unchanged.12 6
      Recognizing this deficiency, Morris plunged into politics. He formally allied with socialism in 1883 and, during the following two decades, gave hundreds of public lectures pressing for a society of professional craftspeople living and working in small units. Such egalitarian communities, he insisted, would be sites where the worker "made his wares from beginning to end himself, and sold them himself to the man who was going to use them." Morris realized that the Victorian craze for the handmade was a far cry from the reconstituted society he envisioned. Nevertheless, he was optimistic that consumer demand for well-crafted objects would compel manufacturers to provide better conditions and more autonomy to workers and lead, eventually, to a system of production dominated by craftspeople rather than machine operators. A revived interest in purchasing handicrafts, although "contemptible on the surface in the face of the gigantic fabric of commercialism," was slowly moving society toward the reconstruction of labor. "As a protest against intellectual tyranny, and a token for change which is transforming civilization into socialism," he concluded, "it is both noteworthy and encouraging."13 7
      Organizations inspired by Morris began to appear in England as early as the mid 1880s and a decade later in the United States. In England, where many of the early arts and crafts leaders were associates of Morris, the groups typically retained his commitment to improving both work conditions and aesthetics.14 In the United States, the arts and crafts were part of the Progressive movement, a broad and diverse set of responses to the disorienting and often destructive effects of post–Civil War industrialization. As Eileen Boris convincingly argues, the links between art and labor — between the promotion of craftsmanship and the desire to restructure the nature of work — were much weaker in American organizations such as the SACB and Hoffman's Arts and Crafts Society of Portland. Most American socialists and union leaders, Boris points out, had little interest in Morris, who they viewed as regressive, or in the handcrafted goods and methods he hoped to revive. Like their British counterparts, they attacked the insecurity, long hours, and detestable work conditions of the industrial model; but most American labor activists also praised industrialization's ability to produce affordable consumer goods in unprecedented numbers and, hoping to preserve that benefit for workers, sought to regulate rather than reverse industrialization. They fought not for a return to handwork but for higher wages, fewer hours, and improved conditions within the industrial workplace.15 8
      Conversely, most arts and crafts advocates in the United States, including Hoffman, saw themselves as educators, not as labor radicals. There were exceptions, of course, most notably a scattering of radical handicraft communes patterned after English architect and socialist C.R. Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft in the Cotswolds. Rose Valley in Pennsylvania, New Clairvaux in Massachusetts, and other crafts communes brought together established artisans and eager beginners in bucolic settings where, at least in theory, favorable work conditions would spawn beautiful objects.16 Inspired by these utopian communities, University of Chicago professor and socialist Oscar Lovell Triggs conceptualized a "new industrialism" that would expand the model, replacing factory floors with crafts workshops based on the principles of "voluntary cooperative individualism."17 9
      Hoffman's arts and crafts society and those that appeared in Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and other American cities beginning in the 1890s, however, tended to pay more attention to objects and consumers than to workers. Patterned after London's Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which sponsored periodic crafts shows, demonstrations, panels, and other events, these American groups functioned primarily as educational organizations that promoted the handicraft aesthetic. There was support for both principles of Morris's craftsman ideal — an emphasis on beauty in everyday objects and a commitment to meaningful, satisfying work — in most if not all of America's early arts and crafts societies. But these aims, which had been inseparable for Morris, often functioned as competing platforms within the infant institutions.18 For some, the societies' exhibitions, lectures, and classes were intended to build a cadre of craftspeople who could make a living outside the factory and, over time, would lead to significant changes in the way people worked. For others, the primary purpose of an arts and crafts society was to promote the appreciation, production, and consumption of well-designed goods. The later faction — labeled by Boris as the "tastemakers" — typically gained the upper hand in America's arts and crafts societies and forced those interested in labor reform to move to other venues.19 10
      A case in point was the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston, which Hoffman joined in the late 1890s. Boston's cultural elite — led by Charles Eliot Norton, a Harvard art historian with close ties to John Ruskin — was instrumental in founding the SACB in 1897 and held most of its leadership positions. Averse to social change, this group of architects, journalists, museum trustees, professors, and other prominent Bostonians used the society's public exhibits, social gatherings, and lectures to promote what one member described as "?'good taste' or the fitness of things in matters of decorative art."20 Typical of these events was the Annual Arts and Crafts Exhibition, which displayed both the work of master craftspeople and well-designed manufactured objects. The society's leaders aimed the displays at both members and non-members, hoping they would build a critical mass of educated consumers who would buy well-crafted goods and pressure craftspeople and manufacturers to produce more of them. 11
      A small faction within the early SACB wanted the organization to take a more labor-oriented direction, in the words of leathermaker and governing council member Mary Ware Dennett, "to work, first of all, for the industrial independence of [the] craftsman." Led by Ware Dennett and Arthur Astor Carey, president of the SACB from 1899 to 1903, the faction lobbied for a cooperative workshop and a salesroom where craftspeople could make beautiful, useful products and sell them unencumbered by middlemen. The society did establish a salesroom in 1900, but its governing board insisted on the organization taking commissions from the artists, making it difficult for the craftspeople to make a profit. After several years of battling with officers more interested in shaping consumer taste than in nurturing self-supporting craftspeople, Ware Dennett resigned from society's governing council. The primary interest of the movement, she grumbled, had become the appreciation and acquisition of beautiful "things" rather than "the man — his freedom — his industrial independence."21 12
      Hoffman helped found the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland less than two years after Ware Dennett's resignation, and although there is no evidence that she took a side during the SACB's power struggles, Hoffman undoubtedly steered the Portland society onto the aesthetic path taken by its Boston predecessor.22 The SACB was Hoffman's model and inspiration, but it was a specific event in Portland — the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905 — that set the stage for her society's birth. In 1900, a group of Portland civic leaders and businessmen, many of whom had been close associates of Lee Hoffman, began planning a fair aimed, according to urban historian Carl Abbott, toward the dual goals of "historic commemoration and regional boosterism."23 Promoters were convinced that the exposition would advertise the city as a logical gateway to increased influence in the Pacific Rim — the motto "westward the course of empire takes its way" was emblazoned on the stately colonnade framing the fair's main entrance — and provide financial opportunities for enterprising entrepreneurs such as themselves. 13
      By all accounts, the exposition was a great financial success. With 2.5 million visitors, the fair pumped roughly $8 million into the local economy and launched an unprecedented six-year economic boom in Portland.24 The economic growth brought fortunes to many, including a number of the exposition's organizers. It also provided an entrée into Portland for an aesthetic response to the unsightly, unpleasant affects of industrial growth — the arts and crafts movement. Handicrafts were present at the fair, but they did not appear in its fine arts building. Fine arts director Frank DuMond rebuffed a request by Portland Art Museum curator Henrietta Failing to have "the applied arts" displayed in his building, bluntly replying that "so few really good things are being done in Arts and Crafts that it is, in my opinion, almost impossible to make an interesting showing."25 Other exposition organizers, however, were eager to expose visitors to cutting edge design approaches, including arts and crafts methods consistent with Morris's anti-machine ideology as well as modern, industrial techniques. The giant log Forestry Building reflected the art movement's appreciation of simplicity and practical materials, for example, and the Manufactures, Liberal Arts, and Varied Industries building, which promoted new production processes and goods, placed booths featuring handcrafted products alongside those emphasizing industry.26 14
      Hoffman, who kept close ties to the Portland arts scene while in Boston and returned to the city at least once a year, attended the fair several times.27 She sensed support for the arts and crafts in booming Portland and, soon after her return to Boston in December 1905, began lobbying the Portland Art Museum to bring eastern craftspeople and objects to the Pacific Northwest.28 "What do you think would be the feeling of the art museum people in regard to having a summer school in connection to or under the auspices of the museum," she wrote to Failing in April 1906. A metalwork course taught by Boston copper and enamel artist L.H. Martin would be perfect for Portland, Hoffman advised; when Martin later backed out, she recommended Cleveland silversmith Mildred Watkins.29 15
      Hoffman again made Portland her permanent residence in the summer of 1906, and she began working with Failing to arrange an exhibition of top-flight craftwork.30 The result was the ambitious Exhibition of Applied Art, which ran at the Portland Art Museum for three weeks, from April 30, to May 18, 1907. The exhibit was an immense undertaking that required persistent negotiations and, in Hoffman's case, several-months in Boston to arrange for packing, insuring, and shipping objects to Portland. It was also a huge success.31 Featuring handicrafts from the Boston arts and crafts society's 1907 exhibition at Copley Hall as well as from local collectors, the display exposed large crowds of Portlanders to work by many of America's most successful and respected crafts artists. It was, according to the Spectator (a Portland weekly that focused on society and culture), "the most interesting and instructive exhibit ever given at the [Portland Art] museum."32 16
      By displaying quality handiwork from area collections, including several well-received pieces by two local artists, the Portland Art Museum's 1907 exhibition demonstrated that the arts and crafts had a foothold in Portland.33 At the same time, it lifted interest to a new level. Less than two weeks after the close of the show, Watkins began teaching the summer metalwork course that Hoffman and Failing had discussed more than a year earlier, and in September, the Spectator announced that "a meeting of the people of Portland who are interested in the finer things of life will be held in the near future ... when organization will be effected and plans made for taking up arts and crafts work at once."34 Less than a month later, on October 9, 1907, the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland became a reality. That evening, Hoffman expressed well-deserved satisfaction when writing to her daughter Margery. "I have been busy on the Arts and Crafts," she remarked. "Today we had our big meeting — adopting a constitution, electing officers, and getting names for membership — 85 signed for membership — It is a most gratifying outcome."35 17


 
Figure 6
    Visitors to the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905 responded enthusiastically to the handcrafted objects displayed in the fair's Manufactures, Liberal Arts and Varied Industries building.

    OHS photo file no. 652-C, bc003271
 


 
      During the following three decades, Hoffman and others in the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland sponsored dozens of events and regularly pledged allegiance to the legacy of William Morris. Their policies and actions, however, embodied a less than complete commitment to the British artist-socialist's vision. Like their comrades in Boston and other American cities, they enacted one part of Morris's craftsman ideal — his pledge to extend beauty through the handicrafts — but not his passion for social and economic transformation. The Lewis and Clark Exposition's juxtaposition of handicrafts with industrial techniques and products was a precursor to this approach. Recoiling from the aesthetic affects of industrialization but espousing its material potential, Hoffman and her peers embraced Morris's love of handicrafts while distancing themselves from his anti-modernist position. They staked out a middle ground, akin to what historian Robert Crunden refers to as an "innovative nostalgia," and adopted an artistic position that would beautify Portland but not slow the city's growth.36 18


 
Figure 7
    This is an invitation to the Portland Art Museum's Exhibition of Applied Art, held in April 1907. Featuring work by some of America's best-known craftspeople, the exhibit paved the way for the founding of the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland six months later.

    Courtesy of the Portland Art Museum
 


 
      This perspective is not surprising given the early Arts and Crafts Society of Portland's membership, described by Hoffman in a letter to her daughter Margery as "people of taste and means."37 Hoffman was one of Portland's social and economic elites, and it was natural for her to promote handicrafts to her friends and peers. As a result, many of those who joined the Portland society in October 1907 and most of the early organization's officers were wealthy and socially connected. The list of over eighty charter members published in the Spectator includes individuals from many of Portland's most prominent families, while the 1910 Board of Trustees identified in the Sunday Oregonian included a judge, an architect, the owner of a successful dry goods firm, and the wives and daughters of attorneys, legislators, and successful businessmen.38 The involvement of the affluent and powerful was nothing new to the arts and crafts movement; Morris, after all, was a wealthy Englishman with an exclusive circle of friends. Nevertheless, while Morris reached beyond his class to embrace the needs of laborers, the Portland society's privileged leaders had limited interest in nurturing professional craftspeople as a substitute for machine operators. 19
      The Arts and Crafts Society of Portland's ambivalence about the needs of self-supporting artisans was not readily apparent in the organization's original constitution and by-laws. Borrowing heavily from Boston's charter documents, the Portland constitution set both aesthetic and professional goals for the society. The first object — "to encourage and develop higher artistic standards in the handicrafts" — articulated Morris's fundamental aesthetic aim; those that follow — "to open and maintain a permanent exhibition; to hold occasional exhibitions ... of various crafts; to equip a workshop for the use of members; and to further the cause of handicraft in every manner" — aimed to both raise aesthetic standards and make it possible for craftspeople to support themselves.39 Membership categories established in the constitution were also comprehensive. As in Boston, two of the three classes were for practitioners: "craftsmen," a juried designation for those actively working in "some branch of the applied arts," and "masters," a designation for craft workers considered by the trustees to have made extraordinary contributions to their field or to the society. A third class — "associates" — was for persons interested in handicrafts and aesthetic standards "but not habitually employed as designers or craftsmen." The founding papers elaborated on these three categories in a section labeled "Membership and Benefits." The document stated that the advantages to craftspeople "of a large society whose sole object is to awaken an interest in and an appreciation of [their] work are many and apparent." Although they are not specifically identified, it is reasonable to assume those benefits would include an increased ability to sell creative work. The organization's constitution also listed benefits to associates, including "the opportunity to purchase such articles as they might wish at a material discount" and "the pleasure of the exhibitions and frequent addresses."40 20
      Consistent with the organization's constitution and by-laws, the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland aimed to educate both tasteful consumers and skilled makers through its events and activities. Lectures taught the craftsmanship principles needed by each of these groups, classes didactically and experientially reinforced those principles, and exhibitions both displayed beautiful objects and provided venues for consumers to buy and craftspeople to sell. Opened in 1908, the society's sales shop was another site that, in Hoffman's words, brought "the public and the artist together."41 Eventually, the space also functioned as a regular gathering place for craftspeople interested in discussing and critiquing each other's work. Harry Wentz, the artist who chaired those meetings, recalled their activities in a 1951 letter:
In the middle 20s Mrs. Hoffman suggested that a group be formed to meet at a regular time (once a month) with various craft workers, who were on their own, for discussion and help ... workers brought their things and their problems ... good examples of old and new crafts were shown ... workmanship, design, and quality were important [topics].42
The artist gatherings were essential, according to Hoffman, and she proudly claimed to "know of quite a number of groups of people ... who meet regularly and ply their crafts. In this way they create an environment without which ... genius and talent cannot flourish."43 In the 1930s, after the sales shop had been shuttered for good, Hoffman opened up the workshops on her Barnes Road property as a venue for artists to work and interact.44		 21
      Despite the efforts of its members, the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland did not have much success in building a significant pool of local craftspeople able to make a living from their work. In a 1912 meeting notice, Hoffman and the society's other directors acknowledged that eastern artists continued to dominate the organization's exhibits and its sales shop, and they called for a discussion of ways to increase local participation. "The exhibition in December was a thoroughly artistic success," they wrote, "but this was due more to the generous consignments from the East than to the showing made by local members, who, unfortunately took little interest in the exhibition, although it was the desire and intention of the Society to have the work of local craftsmen predominate." The sales shop was also struggling due to a lack of involvement by local artists: "The Salesroom will have to be given up, just as the exhibitions must be discontinued if the craftsworkers show no interest in them."45 Three years later, the situation had changed little. In a 1915 letter to trustees and local consignors, sales shop director Florence Knowlton announced that the sales of non-local, non-member consignors had more than doubled those of society members in 1914. "As it is in the local work that the management is most keenly interested," Knowlton wrote, "a most hearty co-operation with the Crafts-members is pledged in bringing the sales of their work to an amount equal to that of the non-local consignors."46 22
      The Arts and Crafts Society of Portland's sales shop policies were inconsistent with Knowlton's rhetoric, however, and they help explain the lukewarm interest among local artists. Erroneously described in an early society history as a "protective selling agency for the craftsman," the shop demanded commissions for its sales, sold well-designed manufactured products — "the best examples of industrial art available" — alongside its handicrafts, and attempted to force its craftspeople into exclusive sales agreements.47 At least one artist, John Nelson Wisner, resisted these restrictive contracts. A metal worker from Oregon City, Wisner had been active in the Portland arts and crafts scene from the beginning and was one of the most respected artists in the region. He taught local classes, was a board member for the society, regularly displayed his work — which frequently earned praise in the Spectator and Oregonian— and even crafted the hand-beaten silver punch bowl that was Margery Hoffman's wedding gift to her brother Hawley.48 "I cannot believe that [an exclusive sales agreement] follows out the ideas of the society," Wisner wrote to treasurer C.F. Swigert in September 1908. "This would be unfair in that it would tend to destroy competition ... [and] interfere with private sales on the part of local workers." The society's contract to exhibit and sell an artist's work should be non-exclusive, Wisner argued, and the sales shop should guarantee "preference in ideas and pushing sales" for local workers.49 23
      Wisner's conflict with the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland underscored the organization's tepid commitment to independent, self-supporting craftspeople.50 Hoffman drafted an essay in the 1930s that offers a revealing rationale for this ambivalence. By that time in her seventies and reflecting on the movement and organization that had meant so much to her, Hoffman identified three aims — aesthetic, educational, and economic — as essential for any arts and crafts society. The aesthetic and educational objectives were inseparable because, she wrote, "standards of taste have fallen so low that people have to be educated to appreciate beauty — to be trained to distinguish good from bad." Without such education, the arts and crafts movement will not achieve its central aesthetic goal — "the creation of articles which are in themselves beautiful." The economic aim she described, helping craftspeople "to live by their art — to bring their work to a market place and then to bring purchasers to this marketplace," most resembled Morris's conception of the arts and crafts as a vehicle for labor reform.51 But that goal was also the one that Hoffman was most willing to abandon. Echoing Frank Lloyd Wright's predictions regarding the aesthetic potential of the machine, Hoffman saw the gap between industrial design and the craftsman aesthetic rapidly closing.52 The "advance & progress in manufactured goods," she observed, was increasing the availability of "lovely things ... as were formally found only at arts and crafts places" and, in the process, was eliminating one of Morris's arguments for a craftsperson-based economy. If machines could make beautiful goods, professional artists would never be more than peripheral figures, Hoffman reasoned. Accordingly, she shifted her vision of the arts and crafts to "less an economic ideal," seeing crafts as a leisure activity rather than a means to make a living — an "educational avocation instead of vocation."53 24
      Hoffman's reminiscences illustrate two key aspects of her vision for the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland: first, that she regarded aesthetic education, not support for independent craftspeople, as the organization's primary purpose; and second, that teaching individuals how to make handicrafts as a hobby rather than as a livelihood was an object of this aesthetic education, perhaps its most significant one. A devoted practitioner, Hoffman exalted amateur creating because it enabled craftspeople to produce beautiful objects for their own homes, reducing or even replacing the need to purchase crafts. Hobbyists could also sell their creations to generate extra income, Hoffman maintained, since they "could afford to sell [their] work more reasonably if it were not the sole source of [their] income."54 Most importantly, Hoffman believed that handwork provided emotional benefits: relaxing recreation, a creative outlet, and above all, an inner transformation. "In all of us there is a divine spark of creative energy," Hoffman wrote, "[and] no man is so happy as when he finds a means of expressing himself in it." The making of objects unlocks this creative force, she contended, allowing each individual no matter how talented to express himself or herself: "Great artists and musicians we can not [all] be but we can put the stamp of individuality on simple things and find therein a vast fund of enjoyment and satisfaction."55 Writing two years after her mother's death, daughter Margery echoed these sentiments in a letter to the dean of the Oregon Medical School. "Your great contribution is to make bodies strong," she wrote. "We would like to make the souls fit the bodies."56 In the same vein, a history of the Portland society written a few years later suggests that the greatest significance of the arts and crafts movement lay "in giving careful training to a great number of people and to offer to them a period of aesthetic and spiritual regeneration and much needed release toward beauty."57

 25
LEISURE TIME WAS GROWING for most early twentieth-century Americans, and Hoffman, like many other Progressive Era reformers, hoped to fill this time with valuable activities. Craftsmaking's three possible benefits — supplementary income, a source of affordable domestic wares, and personal renewal — made it an ideal hobby, according to Hoffman.58 On a trip to Russia in 1911, Hoffman and her daughter Margery observed many Russian farmers making handicrafts for both recreation and extra income, a model that she later promoted through the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland. The Russian system of amateur craftsmen was superior to the American professional system, where the craftsperson "usually pursues his one craft and nothing else," Hoffman wrote. Most Americans not only missed opportunities for self-expression and entertainment under their specialist system, they also lost the chance to supplement the income from their primary occupation with crafts profits. "How much better if our busy business men and women could have a craft to pursue out of business hours," Hoffman enthused, "a hobby that would hold their interest, be a diversion, a relaxation, and also a source of additional income."59 26
      Many progressive reformers shared Hoffman's concern for businesspeople. Immersed in balance sheets and reports, stripped of autonomy, and anxious about promotion or layoffs, early twentieth-century white-collar and professional workers experienced "a crisis of self-control," according to historian James B. Gilbert.60 They also found the traditional American work ethic — a devotion to labor rooted in a range of perceived benefits such as financial reward, class mobility, self-discovery, pleasure, moral growth, and a just social order — increasingly irrelevant. As a result, progressive social critic Randolph S. Bourne wrote in 1914, the typical office clerk viewed his working hours "as an empty waste in his life."61 Hoffman did not propose the arts and crafts as a replacement for the stultifying work life of the typical businessperson, but she did believe that a craft hobby could mollify the ensuing malaise. Creative handwork outside of one's occupation was a perfect antidote to the routine, regimented work of salaried managers, office workers, salesmen, designers, and others in the corporate workplace. 27
      Progressives understood that industrialization had also ravaged the lives of the working classes, and many worked relentlessly to bring political and economic power to laborers and to improve conditions at their industrial workplaces. Nevertheless, while immigrant and working women often participated in unions and political movements, affluent and middle class women like Hoffman tended to focus more on the domestic sphere. Representing what historian Sara Evans describes as a "politicized domesticity," they used voluntary organizations such as women's clubs, consumer leagues, temperance societies, and settlement houses to work for a dizzying array of reforms aimed at reversing the new economic order's disruption of working class families, homes, and neighborhoods — reforms ranging from healthier conditions for mothers and infants to food and medicine regulations, from better housing to higher standards for clothing.62 28
      Hoffman viewed the arts and crafts society as another such tool for improving the domestic lives of blue-collar workers and their families. From the beginning, her Portland society sponsored activities at fairs, schools, libraries, department stores, and other venues accessible to a wide audience.63 Hoffman believed those events enabled all Portlanders, including laborers and their families, to become craftspeople. Smith recalled her mother's commitment to the working classes in a 1952 Christmas letter to her children. "[My mother] felt strongly that there is a creative impulse in all human beings that needs outlet," Smith wrote. "She felt that for such impulses to be expressed was essential for the well-being of the individual [and she] ... was particularly anxious that people of lesser privilege have this opportunity." In addition to providing a creative outlet that would help the working classes "find release from the tensions and monotony of their daily lives," Hoffman believed widespread crafts hobbies would allow them to "acquire objects of beauty which would be out of their financial ability to own."64 As one of the Arts and Crafts Society's major supporters after her mother's death, Smith worked hard to keep the organization faithful to her mother's goals.65 "We want not only to conduct classes for those who can afford to pay for them," she wrote in 1936, two years after Julia Hoffman's death, "but also to carry on adult education among the poorer people — to spread the intelligent use of leisure time among the less affluent." The beauty of this goal, she continued, "is that it not only gives people an outlet for self-expression but they learn to do and make things for practical daily use, and which can even be a source of income."66 29
      Hoffman, although well intentioned, was naïve about working class time or resource constraints, and there is no evidence that her arts and crafts society engaged many laborers.67 Still, her desire to open craftsmaking to the working classes was noteworthy, especially given the uneasy tension among American arts and crafts advocates regarding access and quality. This strain, art historian Wendy Kaplan notes, pitted those who saw well-crafted objects as the ultimate aim of the arts and crafts against those who favored widespread involvement in handicrafts. Hoffman's position was unequivocal. Like C.R. Ashbee, she believed that "the real thing is the life" — that the emotional benefits handmaking would bring to hobbyists of all classes far outweighed the risk that wide participation might lower quality.68 To some extent, Hoffman's concern for "the life" of the maker reconnected her and her organization to Morris's original motives. Recognizing that industry, technology, and commercial growth had stripped many laborers of joy, dignity, and autonomy, both Morris and Hoffman sought ways to heal this dislocation. Whereas the English socialist posited transformed working conditions as the solution, Hoffman's strategy was personal and therapeutic — to foster an interior change that would counter the negative affects of industrialization without altering social or economic structures. The revolution advocated by Morris was not necessary, according to Hoffman, because satisfaction could be found outside of work. Everyone, even those with demeaning jobs, could improve their non-work lives by taking up crafts. 30


 
Figure 8
    A nineteenth-century critic of the industrial revolution, English artist, writer, and socialist William Morris (shown here in 1877) promoted the arts and crafts as a way to improve labor conditions as well as aesthetics.

    Courtesy of the William Morris Gallery. London, photograph by Elliott & Fry
 


 
      This stance was a logical extension of the economic and social position that Hoffman and many of the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland's members and leaders enjoyed. Those individuals were the beneficiaries of Portland's economic growth, and like the boosters of the Lewis and Clark Exposition and the founders of the Boston arts and crafts society, they were deeply invested in the existing order. Hoffman and her peers might trumpet Morris's statements on the importance of beauty in everyday life and mimic his compassion for the laborer. They might even be willing, as Hoffman was, to make their leisure activities available to the less privileged. But they had little enthusiasm for fundamental change in the nature of work or the status of workers, rejecting Morris's vision of a transformed system of labor and production and replacing it with the promise of lovely possessions and spiritual regeneration. By straddling this middle ground, Hoffman and the Portland elites involved in the city's arts and crafts society promoted beauty and individual transformation while, at the same time, preserving the economic and social status quo.69 31
      Two events in the early 1930s confirm the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland's commitment to Hoffman's dream of a community filled with part-time craftspeople, a place where all used their leisure time to nurture their inner creative spark and to make aesthetically pleasing objects for daily life. In 1930, the organization closed its salesroom. A wide range of reasons were given in a 1938 Works Projects Administration (WPA) report on the society: increasing deficits resulting from the economic depression, declining consignments and work quality, high prices due to artist "mark-up," insufficient advertising, and the public's lack of interest in the crafts.70 Whatever the cause, the closing reflected the organization's sagging interest in professional craftspeople. In 1934, only months before Hoffman's death in an auto accident, the Portland arts and crafts society opened a permanent school. From its beginning, the society had sponsored regular crafts classes and summer workshops in spaces such as the Portland Art Museum and members' homes, but with no centralized site, they lacked a dependable meeting place or schedule. The new school offered a regular slate of classes in metal work, pottery, sculpture, and weaving at its downtown site in the Ainsworth Building, and enrollment shot up dramatically, with an average of 100 students enrolling on a consistent basis.71 The school's goals were "to teach the intelligent use of leisure time which is one of the problems [of] modern times, for all classes," with secondary aims "to make beauty more readily available and to give a supplementary source of income."72 Despite periodic expressions of pride when a student made crafts his or her profession, the classes catered almost exclusively to hobbyists, with low tuition rates (thirty-six hours of instruction for seven dollars) that made them affordable.73 32


 
Figure 9
    Julia Hoffman remained active in the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland until her death in an auto accident in 1934. The society continued to flourish, with its school serving as many as four hundred students during the 1970s. The school — now the Oregon College of Art and Craft — moved to its current location in Portland's West Hills in 1979.

    OHS org. lot 126, bb004324
 


 
      The Arts and Crafts Society of Portland's school moved the organization into the city's educational mainstream, coupling nicely with its largest educational institution, the Portland Public Schools (PPS). The Arts and Crafts Society School and PPS supported Portland's commercial and industrial growth in complementary ways: the crafts classroom emphasized domestic and interior life within an industrial world while the schools took on the task of vocational preparation. From John Dewey to Franklin Bobbitt to George Counts, Progressive Era educators sought to link schools to needs created by the new and often puzzling urban-industrial society. Many promoted child-centered, experiential pedagogies; others focused on social justice. In the end, efforts to make schools efficient and functional — educating students for the specific roles they would play in family, community, and most importantly, the workplace — had the most lasting impact on school organization and curriculum.74 There were many examples of arts and crafts programs and activities in Portland's public schools and in those across the nation, but the city's school leaders increasingly viewed job preparation as a primary responsibility.75 "An Industrial Trade School would be a great benefit to the young men and women of this country, and especially the City of Portland," the Portland Public School's annual report of 1908 states, and by the end of the year, such a school — the School of Trades, eventually known as Benson Polytechnic School — opened its doors. The school offered a three-year program that balanced traditional academic subjects with practical shop work, a curriculum with the principal object of "furnish[ing] instruction that would fit for life work those youths of the city who were trade-minded."76 33
      With an educational niche alongside PPS, the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland continued to be an influential educational force in the city after Hoffman's death. The school expanded rapidly, serving as many as four hundred students by the 1970s. Renamed the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts, it moved to a seven-acre site on the western edge of Portland in 1979 and, in 1994, added an undergraduate degree program. An accompanying name change to the Oregon College of Art and Craft signified a new mission for the school, a move away from the adult hobbyist model that Hoffman had promoted. The school maintained a vibrant continuing education program, however, suggesting a persistence of the original goals articulated in the statement that adorned the society's schedule of classes in Fall 1968: "We believe in the creative spirit, the intelligent use of leisure time, beauty in articles of daily use. By creating we share; by sharing we develop."77 34
      The Arts and Crafts Society of Portland's creed veered significantly from the ideology espoused by William Morris in the last half of the nineteenth century. Hoffman and her society rejected Morris's dream of replacing industrial labor with professional craftswork and did little to improve the often stultifying and dehumanizing jobs of Portland's businesspeople and laborers. Those workers, Hoffman argued, would use the arts and crafts to transcend rather than change their work; the arts and crafts would be an aesthetic and spiritual escape that infused their personal lives with beauty and creative expression. Portland's arts and crafts organization was the ideal complement for the economic boosterism and commercial-industrial expansion that dominated the city during the early twentieth century. Alongside the public school classroom, which focused on preparing students to labor within industrialization, Hoffman and her society helped individuals overcome industrialization's often-onerous affects and create a satisfying inner and domestic life outside of work. Given the formidable threat that industrialization posed to beauty and human dignity, finding a middle ground was no small achievement. Still, the compromise came with costs: the tenuous position of the independent craftsperson and the acceptance that, for most, daily labor would be artless. By working to fill homes with elegant objects and leisure time with joy, creativity, and meaning, the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland helped some of the city's residents overcome the often harsh realities of the modern economy, especially the split that industrialization had rendered between beauty and labor; but it did little for the working classes and nothing to bridge the art-labor chasm. 35


NOTES

1. Oregon Spectator, October 12, 1907.

2.  Richard Guy Wilson, "?'Divine Excellence': The Arts and Crafts in California," in The Arts and Crafts Movement in California: Living the Good Life, ed. Kenneth R. Trapp (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993), 16. See also Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991).

3.  May Morris, ed., The Collected Works of William Morris (London: Longmans, 1910–15), 23:20–21, 176–81, 197–98. For an argument that Morris rejected the aesthetic possibilities of machinery but was not completely against machine production, see Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 11.

4.  Boris, Art and Labor, xi.

5.  Morris, Works, 22:342–74, 375–90, 23:175–77, 194.

6.  For a description of Lee Hoffman's role in early Portland, see E. Kimbark MacColl, The Shaping of a City: Business and Politics in Portland, Oregon 1885–1915 (Portland, Ore.: The Georgian Press Company, 1976). For biographical information on Julia Hoffman, see foreword in Julia E. Hoffman: A Family Album (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1978); History of Julia Hoffman, unpublished, in Margery Hoffman Smith Papers, MSS 2660 [hereafter Smith Papers], box 2 folder 22, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland [hereafter OHS Research Library]; and In Memoriam: Julia E. Hoffman, 1856–1934 (1945), available at OHS Research Library.

7.  At a time when photography was still exceptional, especially for women, Julia Hoffman set up a dark room in her home and snapped highly regarded shots of her family, domestic life, and vacation sights. Her photos were featured in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1987. See Julia E. Hoffman: A Family Album.

8.  Picnicking with family and friends, Lee stood on a log while shooting his 22-caliber rifle at targets and fell backwards. The rifle discharged, with the bullet entering the neck, lodging in the brain, and killing Lee immediately. Rumors of suicide led to an inquest, which concluded that the death was accidental. "Mr. Hoffman's Death," Oregonian, July 23, 1895. See also History of Julia Hoffman, Smith Papers, box 2, folder 22.

9.  Sally Cross Bill, undated recollection, Smith Papers, box 2, folder 22.

10.  For accounts of Morris's life, see J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 2 vols. (reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1963); and E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1977). For a detailed discussion of Red House, see Edward Hollamby, Red House: Bexleyheath 1859, Philip Webb (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991).

11.  William Morris, "Testimony Before the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction, March 1882," in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 1:290. For a discussion of Morris's many design accomplishments, see Gillian Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 96–112.

12.  For a description of Merton Abbey, see Mackail, Life of Morris, 2:32–37.

13.  Morris, Works, 22:304, 341.

14.  Descriptions of the early British arts and crafts movement can be found in "The Lamp of British Precedent: An Introduction to the Arts and Crafts Movement," in 'The Art That Is Life': The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920, ed. Wendy Kaplan (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 52–60; and Edward Lucie-Smith, The Craftsman's Role in Society (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981), 211–15.

15.  Eileen Boris, "?'Dreams of Brotherhood and Beauty': The Social Ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement" in ed., Kaplan, "The Art That Is Life," 208–22.

16.  Kaplan, "The Lamp," 56–57. See also W. Scott Braznell, "The Influence of C.R. Ashbee and His Guild of Handicraft on American Silver, Other Metalwork, and Jewelry," in The Substance of Style: Perspectives on the American Arts and Crafts Movement, ed. Brent Denker (Hanover and London: University Press of New England), 25–46.

17.  See Boris, "Dreams of Brotherhood," 214–15.

18.  Boris, Art and Labor, 32–52.

19.  Ibid., 31, 46–47.

20.  William Hagerman Graves, "Pottery: Its Limitations and Possibilities," Handicraft vol. 2 (Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston: March 1904): 253–54. For a discussion of the class-based goals of the SACB, see Edward S. Cooke, Jr., "Talking or Working: The Conundrum of Moral Aesthetics in Boston's Arts and Crafts Movement," in Inspiring Reform: Boston's Arts and Crafts Movement, Consulting Curator Marilee Boyd Meyer (New York : Harry N. Abrams, 1997). For the organization and membership of the SACB, see Beverly K. Brandt, "?'All Workmen, Artists, and Lovers of Arts': The Organizational Structure of the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston," in Meyer, Inspiring Reform.

21.  Mary Ware Dennett to the Chairman of the Council, January 27, 1905, in BSAC Papers, roll 300, 446–50, cited in Boris, "Dreams of Brotherhood," 213; Art and Labor, 40.

22.  Several of Julia Hoffman's membership cards for the SACB can be found in Scrapbook, 1902–29, Oregon School of Arts and Crafts Papers, MSS 2983 [hereafter Oregon School of Arts and Crafts Papers], box 18, folder 1, OHS Research Library.

23.  Carl Abbott, The Great Extravaganza: Portland and the Lewis and Clark Exposition (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1996), 14.

24.  The Lewis and Clark Exposition's profits exceeded the total salaries and wages paid to all of Portland's factory and trade workers during 1905. Abbott, The Great Extravaganza, 63–69.

25.  Henrietta Failing to Frank DuMond, February 20, 1905, and DuMond to Failing, April 11, 2005, Portland Art Museum Archives, box 2. For a more detailed description of the Failing-DuMond exchange, see Lawrence Kreisman and Glenn Mason, The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest (Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 2007), 66–68.

26.  Arts and Crafts exhibitors in the Manufactures, Liberal Arts, and Varied Industries building included the S.W. Weller and J.B. Owens pottery companies of Zanesville, Ohio; Teco Art Pottery created at Gates Potteries of Chicago and Terre Cotta, Illinois; Joseph Jarzynsky, a Chicago wood carver; Chris Miller, an Indian basket maker from North Yakima, Washington; and the Arts and Crafts Shop of Buffalo, New York. The Official Catalogue of the Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair (Portland, Ore.: 1905).

27.  In 1902, Julia became the first lifetime member of the Portland Art Association. Foreword, Julia E. Hoffman: A Family Album.

28.  Julia and her son Hawley relocated to Portland in fall 1904 and lived on a model dairy farm near the Columbia Slough, where they brought the first electric milking machine into Oregon. They returned to Boston in December 1905. Foreword, Julia E. Hoffman: A Family Album; History of Julia Hoffman, unpublished, in Smith Papers, box 2, folder 22.

29.  Hoffman to Failing, April 30, 1906, May 5, 1906, January 28, 1907, February 14, 1907, and February 16, 1907, Portland Art Museum Archives, box 2.

30.  An undated history of the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland claims that Hoffman recruited Cleveland silversmith Mildred Watkins to demonstrate her skill and to sell her work in a booth at the Lewis and Clark Exposition. It was the success of Watkins, according to this narrative, that encouraged Hoffman to spearhead a major arts and crafts exhibition at the Portland Art Museum and, later, to found the Arts and Crafts Society. The history confused the chronology of events (Watkins taught in Portland in the summer of 1907, two years after the fair) but its central message, that the fair encouraged Hoffman to push for arts and crafts activities in Portland, was accurate. History of the Arts and Crafts Society, unpublished, in Oregon School of Arts and Crafts Papers, box 12, folder 1.

31.  For examples of the correspondence between Julia Hoffman and Henrietta Failing regarding the Portland Art Museum exhibition, see Hoffman to Failing, May 5, 1906, January 28, 1907, February 14, 1907, and February 16, 1907, Portland Art Museum Archives, box 2.

32. Oregon Spectator, May 4, 1907; Oregonian, May 1, 1907.

33.  Portland artists Florence Knowlton and John Nelson Wisner exhibited several metalwork pieces. Kreisman and Mason, The Arts and Crafts Movement, 70.

34. Oregon Spectator, May 18, 1907, May 25, 1907, June 1, 1907, June 15, 1907, July 6, 2006, and September 21, 1907.

35.  Julia Hoffman to Margery Hoffman Smith, October 9, 1907, in Smith Papers, box 1, folder 5. See also Julia Hoffman diary, October 9, 1907, in Smith Papers, box 2, folder 10; Julia Hoffman to Margery Hoffman Smith, October 5, 1907, in Smith Papers, box 1, folder 5; and Spectator, October 12, 1907.

36.  Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982). For a perspective that places the American arts and crafts movement within an anti-modernist response to industrial-urban change, see T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).

37.  Julia Hoffman to Margery Hoffman Smith, March 1908, Smith Papers, box 1, folder 5. The Arts and Crafts Movement was also beginning to have an influence on architecture in Portland. Trained at London's Central School for Arts and Crafts, architect Wade Hampton Pipes returned to Portland in 1911 and began to build Arts and Crafts–influenced homes that challenged the dominance of Victorian neoclassical and Renaissance buildings in the city. See Ann Brewster Clarke, Wade Hampton Pipes: Arts and Crafts Architect in Portland, Oregon (Portland, Ore.: Binford and Mort, 1986).

38. Spectator, October 12, 1907; Sunday Oregonian, November 13, 1907.

39.  Arts and Crafts Society of Portland, Oregon: Constitution, By-Laws & Prospectus, October 1907, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

40.  Ibid.

41.  Julia Hoffman, essay, undated in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

42.  Harry Wentz to Mrs. Holbrook, April 12, 1951, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

43.  Julia Hoffman, speech draft, undated, in ibid.

44.  Kreisman and Mason, The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest, 75.

45.  Arts and Crafts Society of Portland Meeting Notice, April 1912, Oregon School of Arts and Crafts Papers, Scrapbook, 1902–29, box 18, folder 20.

46.  Florence Knowlton to Trustees & Local Consigners, June 18, 1915, Oregon School of Arts and Crafts Papers, Scrapbook, 1902–29, box 18.

47.  History of the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland, 1935, Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

48.  For information on Wisner, see Kreisman and Mason, The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest, 251–52. The Spectator praises "two beautiful silver bowls with small base and flaring top" displayed by Wisner in conjunction with Mildred Watkins' summer 1907 metal work class, and the Oregonian mentions "a hammered punch bowl" that Wisner displayed in the Portland Art Museum's first arts and crafts exhibition. Spectator, August 3, 1907; Oregonian May 3, 1907.

49.  John Nelson Wisner to G.F. Swigert, September 13, 1908, in Smith Papers, box 2, folder 19.

50.  Wisner and the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland eventually reached a compromise. The exact nature of this deal is not known, but three weeks after his initial complaint, Wisner indicated in a letter to Hoffman that his concerns had been addressed. John Nelson Wisner to Julia Hoffman, October 6, 1908, in Smith Papers, box 2, folder 19.

51.  Julia Hoffman, essay, undated, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

52.  For Frank Lloyd Wright's ideas on the machine, see "The Arts and Crafts of the Machine," in Frank Lloyd Wright, Writings and Buildings, ed. Edgar Kaufmann and Ben Raeburn (New York: New American Library, 1960), 55–73.

53.  Julia Hoffman, essay, undated, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

54.  Julia Hoffman, undated speech draft, in ibid.

55.  Ibid.

56.  Margery Hoffman Smith to Dr. Dillehunt, February 17, 1936, in ibid.

57.  History of the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland, undated, in ibid.

58.  For example, see Lawrence M. Lipin, "'Cast Aside the Automobile Enthusiast:' Class Conflict, Tax Policy, and the Preservation of Nature in Progressive-Era Oregon," Oregon Historical Quarterly 107:2 (Summer 2006): 166–95; and Works Progress Administration and Robert A. Graham, Leisure-Time Leadership. WPA Recreation Projects (Washington D.C.: 1938).

59.  Julia Hoffman, undated speech draft, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

60.  James B. Gilbert, Work Without Salvation: America's Intellectuals and Industrial Alienation, 1880–1910 (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 3–13.

61.  Randolph Bourne, "In the Mind of the Worker," Atlantic Monthly 113 (1914): 375–82. Cited in Gilbert, Work Without Salvation, 6. For discussions of the worker in early twentieth-century America, see Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York & London: Monthly Review Press, 1974). For an overview of American industrialization, see Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4–18.

62.  Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 145–63. See also Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 138–58.

63.  History of the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland, undated and 1938, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

64.  Margery Hoffman Smith to her children, December 6, 1952, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 20.

65.  Margery Hoffman Smith was an assistant director of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) in Oregon during the 1930s and directed the interior design of Timberline Lodge. See Margery Hoffman Smith interview by Lewis Fefberache for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, April 10, 1964. Available at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/oralhistory/smith64apr.htm (accessed October 15, 2008).

66.  Margery Hoffman Smith to Dr. Dillehunt, February 17, 1936, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

67.  Membership lists from the 1930s and 1940s indicate mostly married female members, which implies a middle class and affluent membership. Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19; Oregon School of Arts and Crafts Papers, 2983:2. For a discussion of the importance of upper- and middle-class women in the arts and crafts movement, see Eileen Boris, "Crossing Boundaries: The Gendered Meaning of the Arts and Crafts" in The Ideal Home, 1900–1920: The History of Twentieth Century-American Craft, ed. Janet Kardon (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 32–45.

68.  Ashbee made this statement when asked about the non-professional work produced in the metal shop at Evlerhöj Colony in New York State. Cited in Kaplan, "The Lamp of British Precedent," 58.

69.  This commitment to the status quo can be seen in two instances where Hoffman's elite peers were lukewarm to public leisure initiatives that, unlike private craftsmaking, would have affected them economically and socially. In one case, the boosters behind the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905 did not support a proposal to turn the fair's Guild Lake site into a permanent public park. The land, E. Kimbarck MacColl notes, was "too valuable as private investment property to be sacrificed to public use." Similarly, historian Larry Lipin points out that affluent Oregonians spearheaded the Columbia River Scenic Highway in 1916, a time when automobiles were still out of reach for most consumers. When cars became affordable to the working classes in the 1920s, elites shifted their advocacy from scenic road building to roadless wilderness areas — sites accessible primarily to those with substantial resources. For more on the development of the Guild Lake area, see MacColl, The Shaping of a City, 266–72; Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1917 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 206, 423–31, 448–9; and Arthur D. McVoy, "A History of City Planning in Portland," Oregon Historical Quarterly 46:1 (March 1945): 3–21. For a discussion of scenic road building and environmental policy in early twentieth-century Oregon, see Lawrence M. Lipin, Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910–30 (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

70.  WPA Report on the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland, September 19, 1938, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

71.  Ibid. When the new space opened, attendance shot up dramatically, with an average of one hundred students consistently enrolled.

72.  History of the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland, 1935, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

73.  One history of the society proclaimed that at least two of these artists practiced their craft as a full-time profession, with "their own work shop and a staff of workers." History of the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland, undated, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19. Tuition and mission described in the WPA Report on the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland, September 19, 1938, in Smith Papers, box 6, folder 19.

74.  Herbert M. Kliebard has identified four general curriculum approaches that characterized progressive education: humanistic, child-centered, social efficiency, and social reconstructionist. The social efficiency movement, which sought to match curriculum to the specific needs of specific social groups and society at large, emerged as dominant, according to Kliebard. David Tyack identifies a similar efficiency trend in school administration and organization. Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1974).

75.  Kliebard connects the arts and crafts movement to the manual arts movement in American schools. Industrial arts and other expressions of these movements did find their way into the schools, Kliebard admits, but he argues that they were on "the periphery of the curriculum." Herbert M. Kliebard, Schooled to Work: Vocationalism and the American Curriculum, 1876–1946 (New York & London: Teachers College Press, 1999), 22–23. For other discussions of the arts and crafts in the schools, see Boris, Art and Labor, 82–98; Wendy Kaplan, "Spreading the Crafts: The Role of the Schools," in Wendy Kaplan, ed., "'The Art That Is Life': The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 298–307.

76.  Alfred Powers and Howard McKinley, eds., History of Education in Portland (Portland, Ore.: WPA Adult Education Project, 1937), 80–81.

77.  The creed was written by Margery Hoffman Smith. Arts and Crafts Society Schedule of Classes, Fall 1968, Smith Papers, box 6, folder 20.

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