At Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration on January 20, 2009, in front of television cameras broadcasting to an audience of millions, the French-born Chinese American cellist Yo-Yo Ma led a quartet performing John Williams’s “Air and Simple Gifts.” Composed specifically for the occasion, this piece featured variations on the melody of a nineteenth-century Shaker song written by Joseph Brackett, Jr., of Alfred, Maine. The celebrity quartet, which Ma assembled, featured Itzhak Perlman on violin, Gabriela Montero on piano, and Anthony McGill on clarinet. The ensemble was artfully balanced to represent the cross-generational, gender-inclusive, racially diverse, multicultural coalition that the new president believed would characterize the nation he would lead.1 One newspaper account of the event reported that the performance was meant to “demonstrate the message of inclusion that President Barack Obama conveys.”2

The familiar melody, which Ma’s quartet played to usher in what many hoped would be a new chapter in America’s national story, had been introduced to the public’s ears more than six decades earlier. In 1944, Aaron Copland, a Jewish composer seeking to create a modern music rooted in the nation’s culture, had appropriated the Shaker song for use as a score of a ballet choreographed by Martha Graham.3 Copland, whom the national press repeatedly identified as Obama’s favorite composer, subsequently reworked this material into Appalachian Spring, an orchestral suite that ultimately gained broad popularity and became his best-known composition.4

In organizing this twenty-first-century inaugural celebration, Obama’s team had charged Williams with revisiting the melody of a sacred song created within a marginal American religious sect. Yet, in the hands of a twentieth-century composer, it had been transformed into a melody closely identified with national identity. Many Americans who watched the inauguration probably recognized the tune, introduced by McGill’s clarinet, as reprising Copland’s beloved work, redolent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal optimism; some subset of that group presumably understood its Shaker origins. By using this musical theme, the inauguration’s organizers celebrated America’s diverse heritage but also signaled to the cognoscenti ideas concerning pious labor, modest self-sacrifice, honorable communal effort, and elegant yet humble artistic production, all attributes popularly associated with the Shakers.5 For Obama’s reformist Democratic administration, this Shaker melody provided an evocative signifier of a shared political vision.

The inauguration’s organizers drew on a national understanding of the Shakers that had been established in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Between 1925 and 1965, a wide range of Americans experienced what one participant termed “Shaker fever.”6 Sufferers of this malady became fascinated with the sect, its theology and practices, and its cultural products. Victims of this fixation included local history buffs, government bureaucrats, museum professionals, artists, writers, and choreographers. Shaker fever spread across the nation but was experienced most fervently in geographic areas surrounding former Shaker villages in eastern New York State, western Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Kentucky. Although the fascination gripped a gamut of individuals, members of liberal Protestant denominations including Unitarians and Congregationalists were particularly susceptible, as were individuals influenced by the Progressive educational philosophies and practices of John Dewey and John Cotton Dana. An individual’s association with the nascent American Studies movement within American institutions of higher learning, including Smith College, the University of Michigan, and Yale University, also tended to affect the intensity of the enthusiasm.

In the second third of the twentieth century, Americans who had caught Shaker fever radically reshaped the nation’s understanding of the sect and its history, music, and material culture. Prior to this moment, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, as the group was known more formally, functioned as a pietistic communitarian religious organization little recognized beyond the immediate geographic vicinities of its villages. When individuals outside these areas were aware of the Shakers, they primarily perceived them to be either bizarre religious fanatics following heretical familial and sexual practices or producers of quality consumer commodities including seeds, patent medicines, chairs, brooms, collegiate letter sweaters, and ladies’ cloaks. By 1965, however, the Shakers were viewed widely as quintessentially American, personifying the nation’s finest qualities of piety, ingenuity, simplicity, sobriety, and self-denial.7 Shaker material culture, in particular, was broadly appropriated to embody such elevated ideals. In the middle of the twentieth century, public and private collections dedicated to Shaker objects were established, images of Shaker items were published broadly in both popular and scholarly contexts, Shaker villages were preserved as pilgrimage sites, and household furnishings based on Shaker antecedents were featured in ladies’ magazines and marketed in department stores.

This book documents and analyzes the transformation in America’s understanding of the Shakers within the context of twentieth-century American social and cultural history. The six chapters of this volume argue that the taste for “things Shaker” must be understood in the context of midcentury nationalism, modernist artistic movements, and the politics of the Cold War. This study’s period is bracketed by the first serious interest in the Shakers by Charles C. Adams, the innovative director of the New York State Museum in Albany, New York, and the opening of Shaker villages in Massachusetts, Kentucky, and New Hampshire as tourist attractions in the 1960s.

Established in North America at the end of the eighteenth century, the Shakers were a religious society with historical roots in the British Isles. Under the leadership of the charismatic prophet Mother Ann Lee and her successor, Joseph Meacham, the group congregated in celibate, communitarian villages and lived according to a set of strictures, known as the “Millennial Laws,” which guided both public and private behavior. According to these codes, all economic resources were shared, individuals worked for the common good, and pairs of male and female leaders attempted to steer the community to spiritual perfection and economic self-sufficiency. The Millennial Laws, grounded in Protestant avoidance of temptation and abhorrence of excess, also guided believers in their material life, leading to architecture and furniture that tended away from extravagant design and ornamentation.

Following the Second Great Awakening, and as a result of thoughtful and deliberate missionary efforts, the society grew to comprise eighteen villages located from Maine to Kentucky. Within these communities, the Shakers organized themselves into families composed of individuals who were biologically unrelated. Men and women who espoused, and attempted to practice, celibacy slept in chambers in sexually segregated areas of communal dwellings but ate, socialized, and worshipped together. Ecstatic and inspired trembling and shaking during worship, from which the group’s popular name was derived, developed into a ritualized liturgical dance practiced by the community as a whole during Sabbath religious services. The group’s emphasis on communal labor as an expression of religious devotion led to prosperity in many communities, as well as to innovative agricultural and manufacturing processes. Shaker villages produced packaged seeds, medicinal compounds, furniture, clothing, and agricultural equipment, including wooden buckets and other containers, which were sold in the regions surrounding their settlements. The sect reached its largest membership of more than four thousand members in the 1840s and subsequently declined.8

Shaker fever, as expressed in the resultant twentieth-century American popular reevaluation of Shakerism and the Shaker legacy, coincided with a painful and prolonged collapse within the institution itself.9 Journalists frequently predicted the sect’s demise. In 1922, a newspaperman reporting on the closing of the Shaker village in South Union, Kentucky, commented that the “picturesque colony of Shakers, that unusual religious sect which takes its name from the peculiar motion they manifest when wrought up to religious ecstasy, at South Union . . . will soon be but a memory. Most of the quaint and deeply religious people who once made up the colony have died.”10 Similarly, in describing the end of the Shaker settlement in Alfred, Maine, Karl Schriftgiesser of the Boston Evening Transcript wrote in 1931, “Their buildings will be deserted, their farms let go to seed, and an even more deathly silence than usual will settle over their little community where they have worked so hard and lived so long.”11 Schriftgiesser’s prediction proved accurate: by 1951, only three active communities remained, containing a total of just forty members of the faith.12 This collapse has continued until, at the time of this writing, there are only two individuals who self-identify as Shakers residing at the village in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.13

This book, however, is not about the lives, labors, and beliefs of the Shakers. Rather it is about the individuals who celebrated them, collected their furniture, reveled in their music, and were inspired by their history. Shaker Fever examines the various ways in which nonbelievers found meaning and value in Shakerism and its legacy. It explores and explains how twentieth-century individuals from the profane world outside the boundaries of the Shaker villages refashioned the Shaker experience to make sense of it for themselves and to share their insights with others.

The decline of Shakerism during these years also coincided with a more general surge of interest in American history and material culture. Collectors such as Henry Mercer in Pennsylvania and Edna Hilburn Greenwood in Massachusetts, Electra Havemeyer Webb in Vermont, and many others gathered artifacts that spoke to them of the country’s past, and preservationists, including William Sumner Appleton of Boston and Reverend William A. R. Godwin of Williamsburg, Virginia, organized to protect buildings and sites that could be used to educate the public about America’s history.14 The celebration of the Shakers, their history, their music, and their theology chronicled in this book interweaves intricately with the broader investigation of American national identity taking place in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Shaker fever was experienced within the interrelated contexts of the Colonial Revival, the New Deal’s embrace of the common man, regionalism in both art and literature, the folk music revival, and the burgeoning popularity of historic preservation.

Interpreters wrestled with the conflicting ideas that the Shakers represented what was praiseworthy in American culture and that they existed outside the national mainstream. Paradoxically, the Shakers could serve as both icons of Americanism and as critiques of national shortcomings. Interpretations of the Shakers proved problematic in that the group could be appropriated to argue for American exceptionalism, but in doing so interpreters celebrated individuals who rejected many foundational aspects of the nation’s common culture, including individualism, monogamy, and property ownership. Because of this dichotomy, Shaker fever struck a varied group. Some like David Potter, a conservative consensus-school American historian who taught at Yale University, and John S. Williams, a wealthy stock broker who established the Shaker Museum at Old Chatham, were drawn to the sect because they believed it manifested the Anglo-Saxon Protestant work ethic and fostered religiously motivated entrepreneurs. Simultaneously, individuals such as Miriam Cramer, a Unitarian choreographer from Cleveland, Ohio, and Jerome Count, a left-leaning educator, embraced the group’s communalism, pacifism, and heretical worship practices. Celebrants from the entire political spectrum embraced the Shakers’ perfectionism while finding it difficult to reconcile themselves to the ideology of celibacy.

Twentieth-century Americans’ fascination with the Shakers assumed many forms across various media.15 Museum directors and curators formed collections of Shaker objects and mounted exhibitions about the believers. Artists and photographers created two-dimensional representations. Choreographers and pageant organizers produced living three-dimensional enactments of Shaker worship and historical events. Authors wrote books and pamphlets meant for both popular and scholarly audiences. Choral directors and composers created musical performances and, ultimately, audio recordings of music both written by and inspired by the sect. Designers, furniture manufacturers, and milliners created consumable Shaker-inspired goods for American consumers. Each of these cultural products contained coded messages concerning the group, their beliefs, national identity, and the existential dilemmas of human life.

Recent historical and art historical analyses of the early twentieth-century fascination with Shaker material culture have largely credited Faith and Edward (Ted) Deming Andrews, authors and antique dealers from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with shaping public reception of the Shakers in these decades. Hugh Howard and Jerry V. Grant, for example, claim, “Almost by themselves, Ted and Faith Andrews . . . secured for the Shakers . . . honored places in the pantheon of American art.”16 Similarly, Kory Rogers, a curator at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, has credited the Andrewses almost exclusively for linking Shaker furniture to modernism.17 In a less hyperbolic mode, the historian Stephen J. Stein writes, “[Edward] Andrews was a leading force in the revival of interest in the Shakers and deserves to be recognized as the most significant scholar of the twentieth century.”18

Although the Andrewses were indisputably important disseminators of Shaker fever, their role has been overemphasized at the expense of other actors, in part because the Andrewses were inveterate self-promoters and jealously guarded their status as experts on all topics relating to the Shakers.19 The couple went so far as to refer to themselves as “the only recognized authorities in this . . . field.”20 On another occasion, they described themselves as “instruments” divinely chosen to promote and interpret the Shaker heritage.21 Historian Mario S. De Pillis characterizes the couple, with whom he was acquainted, as “proselytizers.”22 Less sympathetically, in the early 1960s, Robert F. W. Meader, director of the Shaker Museum in Old Chatham, New York, expressed his antipathy toward Ted Andrews’s self-proclaimed expertise by mockingly referring to the collector as “the G. A.” or “the Great Authority.”23

Throughout their careers together, Faith and Edward Deming Andrews established a pattern of currying favor from those in positions to assist them in publicizing, celebrating, and marketing the sect’s cultural materials before ultimately, like apostates, turning against these same associates and decrying them as polluters, exploiters, or adulterators of the Shaker tradition. The Andrewses’ self-regard frequently led to conflict with those around them and hampered them from reaching desired goals. The scholarly literature’s historiographic emphasis on this couple has resulted in the activities of other figures of the same period being overlooked, thus creating a skewed and inaccurate representation of how Americans came to understand the Shakers and their legacy. One goal of the present work is to recognize the contributions of individuals whom this pair systematically attempted to push out of the spotlight.

This work is meant to be interpretive and stimulating rather than encyclopedic. I have not attempted to include every artist who created images of the Shakers and their villages, every author who published a book about the Shakers, every composer who worked with a Shaker theme, or every preservationist who valued Shaker buildings and landscapes. Shaker fever’s contagious quality during this time period would make it foolhardy to pursue such a goal.24 Similarly, this work is not meant to be an exhaustive survey of the Andrewses’ career and publications. Rather, this volume examines the primary modes through which culture workers introduced the Shakers to the American public while also explicating the interpretive tropes linked to their methods.

My approach is essentially semiotic. During the period of this study, the Shakers, their practices, and their material culture had symbolic relevance for many Americans. This work attempts to untangle the Geertzian “webs of significance” in which midcentury enthusiasts entangled the believers.25 Folklorist Henry Glassie warns us that, while interpreting culture forms the very center of humanistic study, meaning remains elusive. In his poetic phrase, it is “the unverifiable issue of unknowable intention with unknowable response.”26 While heeding that warning, by presenting historically contextualized thick descriptions of photographs, museum exhibitions, pageants, musical scores, preserved villages, and other cultural texts, this study attempts to sketch the varied meanings projected on the Shakers by the diverse group of individuals who presented the sect in these decades. Understanding how twentieth-century participants interpreted the Shakers provides insights concerning how these individuals understood their role in the world and the existential dilemmas that they faced.27

The process of attempting to comprehend the enigmatic meanings inscribed into the artistic, literary, and cultural performances of these historic figures necessarily renders a group biography of those who experienced Shaker fever. Glassie asserts that “biography is the epistemic entrance for the historian.”28 Understanding the fascination that Shakerism held for these individuals frequently requires delving into their formative experiences and cultural training, including examining their religious, educational, familial, and professional backgrounds. In doing so, we begin to understand why these individuals living in the profane world of twentieth-century America found themselves drawn to a millennialist, communitarian faith to which they did not subscribe. While these diverse individuals cannot easily be described as constituting a movement, embedded together in a particular national and historical reality they used their various talents, resources, and perspectives to create a lasting understanding of the Shakers that continues to influence American civic discourse.

This interdisciplinary examination of the rich and varied corpus of materials inspired by the Shakers in this period is organized into six chapters and a postscript arranged both chronologically and thematically. The initial chapter examines the first significant exhibits of Shaker materials mounted by museums between 1925 and 1935. In creating a collection at the New York State Museum and supporting a seminal exhibition with accompanying publication, the ecologist Charles C. Adams brought together Ted Andrews with William F. Winter, Jr., an industrial photographer who lived in Schenectady, New York, and worked for General Electric. Andrews and Winter subsequently were both involved in Shaker exhibitions at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and at the Whitney Museum in New York City. Almost a century later, these individuals’ activities profoundly impact how Americans understand the Shakers and the objects they created. This chapter also offers a detailed analysis of the photographs of Shaker objects and spaces Winter created before his premature death from cancer.

The activities of the Index of American Design, a New Deal government agency, are central to the second chapter. Under the leadership of Holger Cahill, an influential arts administrator, and Ruth Reeves, a textile designer who found herself underemployed because of the Great Depression’s downturn in manufacturing, this federally funded bureaucracy undertook to create a record of the nation’s artistic heritage. Because of modernist aesthetics and nationalist ideologies, the agency found Shaker material culture particularly appealing. Artists on the federal payroll created numerous watercolor paintings and photographs of Shaker objects in collections from Kentucky to Maine. These images subsequently were exhibited across the country, influenced popular conceptions of the Shakers, and inspired artists, furniture designers, milliners, and other aesthetes.

The third chapter moves from visual and material culture representations of the sect to study the efforts of four women who produced choreographic and theatrical presentations between 1930 and 1950. Doris Humphrey, Miriam Cramer, Marguerite Melcher, and Clarice Carr were all educated, middle-class women who had been raised in the liberal Congregational and Unitarian denominations. These advocates, some of whom defined themselves as dancers and others who thought of themselves as writers and educators, separately used their diverse talents to educate Americans about the Shaker faith by convincing individuals to don costumes and give public performances interpreting Shaker history and worship. In venues that ranged from Broadway theaters to Midwestern college campuses, and from folk festivals to New York experimental drama workshops, these women situated a small, eccentric regional religious sect as worthy of international attention, while simultaneously working to further their own artistic ambitions and expand the boundaries of the sphere of activity dictated by their class and gender.

Chapter 4 compares and contrasts two midcentury attempts to establish institutions that would steward permanent collections of Shaker artifacts so that they would be available to scholars and the general public. John Williams, the scion of a prominent New York mercantile family, had both the financial strength and the social connections to successfully establish a nonprofit institution to maintain and interpret his private collection of Shaker artifacts. In stark contrast, after promising negotiations, Faith and Ted Andrews, were unable to convince Yale University to commit to permanently accession their holdings and validate their status as erudite scholars of this American faith. This chapter illuminates varying understandings of the Shakers during this time but also examines the impact of wealthy donors and collectors on the practice of American Studies, an intellectual field of study that was expanding both inside and outside universities in the decades following World War II.

The fifth chapter returns again to Shaker music, this time with a focus on Shaker musical productions and pageantry between 1950 and 1965. In these years, as one manifestation of a national folk music revival, increasing numbers of Americans, many of them teenagers or college students, dressed in supposedly Shaker garb and performed the faith’s dances and music. These musical performances and pageants frequently were linked to individuals attempting to restore and interpret Shaker villages in New York State, Massachusetts, and Kentucky. Jerome Count introduced generations of teenagers to Shaker music at his Shaker Village Work Camp, a liberal summer educational institution located in the South Family compound of New York’s Mount Lebanon Shaker Village. In the winter of 1961, Shaker Community, Inc., the nonprofit corporation founded to preserve Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts, worked with the Smith College Art Museum to present a Shaker pageant on that college’s campus. Similarly, Julia Neal and Deedy Hall, the founders of the Shaker Museum in Auburn, Kentucky, cooperated with faculty from Western Kentucky State College to produce an annual pageant entitled Shakertown Revisited. Each of these efforts resulted in audio recordings of Shaker music, making the sect’s musical repertoire available to a broad popular audience for the first time. The recordings these groups made under the influence of Shaker fever, some still commercially available today, have had a profound impact on subsequent treatments of Shaker music.

The final chapter discusses and analyzes the efforts to transform Shaker villages into educational, cultural tourism sites in the years between 1955 and 1965, focusing on Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts, Pleasant Hill Shaker Village in Kentucky, and Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire. It demonstrates that these compounds underwent distinct historical processes of preservation and thus present visitors with slightly varying interpretations. Hancock, located near aesthetically sophisticated urban audiences, followed the lead of seminal curators and presented Shaker architecture and material culture as antecedents to American modernism. Because of a local tradition of treating history and cultural heritage as an economic driver, Pleasant Hill in Kentucky presented the village as a premodern, agrarian resort serving as a respite from the cares and tribulations of the present. Canterbury, which Shaker associates transformed into a museum while still housing members of the faith, benefited from offering visitors the chance to interact with living exemplars of the disappearing sect. Each of the villages in their own ways manifested messages carved into the landscape by both the Shakers who inhabited the compounds and by the administrators who preserved them and opened them to the public.

The postscript examines the persistent impact of Shaker fever on American arts and culture in the decades surrounding the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. In these years, although the flurry of innovative and transformative activity of the earlier period had subsided, the American public continued to purchase Shaker inspired furniture, attend performances of music and dance derived from Shaker traditions, and visit preserved Shaker compounds. The meaning of these works, however, was transformed by the nation’s continuing economic and cultural histories.

As a whole, this volume documents the efforts of women and men who lived in the middle of the twentieth century and valued, collected, interpreted, and preserved the Shakers’ legacy. These individuals, from Charles Adams to Doris Humphrey, and from John Williams to Jerome Count, deserve to be recognized. While acting individually and without coordination, as a group they brought the Shaker experience to the attention of Americans and individuals around the globe, they offered the Shaker faith and way of life as an alternative to the alienated existence lived by many Americans under the thrall of materialism and an unreliable capitalist economy, and they created an astounding body of Shaker-inspired cultural works. Their enthusiasm for this American, millennialist, communitarian, celibate sect made it possible for Obama’s inauguration organizers in the first decade of the twenty-first century to appropriate the melody of a nineteenth-century Shaker hymn as a nonverbal signifier of a reformist vision of an inclusive, egalitarian, caring nation built on consecrated labor and combined effort.

Simultaneously, this text also seeks to contextualize and problematize the understanding of the Shakers that this cohort bequeathed to us. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, when modernism and nationalism formed lenses to transform the ways in which Americans viewed the world, the humanity of individual Shakers and the complexity of their communities became obscured. Shaker fever led to a multifaceted, romantic, nostalgic understanding of the celibate, perfectionist, millennialist believers. Enthusiasts in this period created an understanding of the past that was useful for the era in which they lived.

In the present, when the global economy and international migration has called nationalism into question and when modernism itself is a subject of antiquarian interest and museum study, we can appreciate the artifice of the figures who created the works chronicled in this volume, but we may also wish to move beyond their constructs to seek more nuanced historical representations of the men and women who followed the teachings of Mother Ann Lee. By more fully understanding the sect’s representation that we have inherited from the twentieth century, perhaps our generation will forge a new synthesis that more accurately represents the concerns of the Shakers while speaking to the anxieties and biases of the twenty-first century.