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The Shakers, Pt. 2: Afterlife
36 Plays3 years ago
In 1750, a millenarian religious movement, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming, arose in England. More commonly known as the Shakers for their ecstatic dance, today this movement can claim only two living exponents. But the legacy of Shakerism—ideals such as equality between the sexes and among races, sublime music, and simple furniture that seems to prefigure modernism—lives on. In the second and final part of Curious Objects’ exploration of Shakerism, host Benjamin Miller interrogates the myths that have arisen around this movement in the 150-odd years since its heyday.
Feat. Brother Arnold Hadd of Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, Shaker scholar Glendyne Wergland, John Keith Russell of the eponymous antiques dealership, and his associate Sarah Margolis-Pineo.
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Transcript
Introduction to Curious Objects
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Curious Objects.
00:00:02
Speaker
Behind every made object, there's an idea.
00:00:26
Speaker
Or maybe it's more accurate to say a hundred ideas.
00:00:30
Speaker
The way it looks, the way it's shaped, the materials it's made from, how big it is.
00:00:35
Speaker
None of these ideas spring forth fully formed out of the ether.
00:00:39
Speaker
There is no platonic form of a chair.
00:00:42
Speaker
There are only chairs made by people for people's needs and people's desires.
00:00:49
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And so the history of objects is in a sense a history of ideas.
00:00:55
Speaker
But sometimes one of these ideas can grow so large that it subsumes all the others.
00:01:03
Speaker
So powerful and persuasive, so central to a people's identity, that the object itself can almost be described as an idea.
00:01:16
Speaker
For the Magazine Antiques, I'm Ben Miller.
Exploring Shaker Craftsmanship
00:01:45
Speaker
Last episode, we started to explore the story of the Shakers, the 18th century religious movement that has become synonymous in our popular imagination with perfection, especially in the realm of craft, and especially with regard to furniture making.
00:02:05
Speaker
We learned about one particular shaker sewing desk from the Enfield community in New Hampshire, using it as a guide for delving into the shaker system of belief and how that dovetails with their extraordinary skills as makers.
00:02:21
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We heard from one of the last living shakers.
00:02:25
Speaker
And by the way, I said last time that there are three living shakers, but I've been informed that the true number is now two.
00:02:36
Speaker
Today, we're going to flip the whole story upside down because even as the Shaker communities across the country started to shut their doors, outsiders began to take an interest in the Shaker craft tradition.
00:02:53
Speaker
And that meant whole new ways of thinking about these objects.
00:02:58
Speaker
The people they were made by and for were less and less a part of that conversation.
00:03:04
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Instead, as time went on, the community of collectors and enthusiasts and scholars grew up around these objects and transformed them from everyday objects of labor and devotion into revered artifacts and collectibles.
00:03:32
Speaker
The interest in shaker material followed the collecting of Americana and other antiques by a number of years.
00:03:41
Speaker
It was only in the 1920s when some of the villages were closing and material became available.
Rise of Shaker Collectors
00:03:49
Speaker
That's John Keith Russell of the eponymous John Keith Russell Antiques.
00:03:54
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The original collectors were made up of Friends of the Shakers, such as Robert and Hazel Belfort, dealers and academics, Edward Deming and Faith Andrews, and contemporary artists, Charles Sheeler.
00:04:10
Speaker
You know, and by extension to Scheler, you had Juliana Force, who was the first director of the Whitney Museum of Art and also a neighbor of Scheler's.
00:04:22
Speaker
She held an exhibition of Shaker material at the Whitney in 1935, which sort of made for its unveiling or debut to the art world.
00:04:39
Speaker
Julianna Forrest subsequently became a Shaker collector, purchasing many items from Edward Andrews for her home here in South Salem, New York, which she named Shaker Hollow.
00:04:53
Speaker
A significant amount of Shaker furniture was also purchased by individuals looking to simply furnish their lake houses in New England, their cabins in the Adirondacks, or beach houses along the coast.
00:05:08
Speaker
And to them, this was just inexpensive, well-made secondhand furniture.
00:05:15
Speaker
An aside or an example would be a young law professor at Russell Sage College by the name of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who later became our revered senator here in New York.
00:05:30
Speaker
And he, at the suggestion of his head of department, John Upton, went to meet with the Shakers at Hancock in 1953 and purchased a truckload of Shaker furniture for 300 and some dollars, which was all he could afford for his first home.
00:05:49
Speaker
Okay, but hold on for a second.
Challenges Facing Shaker Communities
00:05:52
Speaker
Why were the Shakers in a state of decline anyway?
00:05:55
Speaker
They had been doing just fine since the mid-1700s.
00:05:58
Speaker
Why in the 1930s were people starting to look at them as relics?
00:06:03
Speaker
I asked Brother Arnold Hod of the Sabbath Day Lake Shaker community in Maine.
00:06:09
Speaker
That's a complicated question.
00:06:13
Speaker
The Shakers here at Sabbath Day Lake peaked in the 1780s.
00:06:18
Speaker
So that was Revival.
00:06:20
Speaker
Revival brought them in, they couldn't sustain it.
00:06:23
Speaker
And so we went from 187 people down to about 90.
00:06:28
Speaker
And then that drops down again to about 50 to 60.
00:06:32
Speaker
And it's pretty steady here, 50 to 60, up until the 1940s.
00:06:37
Speaker
And then it's definite decline from there on.
00:06:40
Speaker
And part of that is we play demographics as well as anybody could.
00:06:47
Speaker
So you can say there's 70 people in this family.
00:06:50
Speaker
Right, but let's take a look at what that breakdown is.
00:06:53
Speaker
And usually it was only probably 20% of those were adults.
00:06:57
Speaker
So you get 80% of them are kids.
00:07:00
Speaker
And statistically speaking, kids don't stay.
00:07:03
Speaker
So this is your hope.
00:07:06
Speaker
But you may come back 10 years later and say, how many people are?
00:07:09
Speaker
And they say, there's 70.
00:07:11
Speaker
That's because 60 of the kids got to the maturity and left.
00:07:15
Speaker
And we just picked up 60 more kids.
00:07:18
Speaker
And so that's how that worked.
00:07:20
Speaker
So they continued this shell game in the hopes that they were going to get more members out of it.
00:07:28
Speaker
Sorry to interrupt, but where were these kids all coming from?
00:07:31
Speaker
Well, two places.
00:07:32
Speaker
One thing is that everybody thinks they were just from an orphanage.
00:07:35
Speaker
But it isn't just from orphanages.
00:07:38
Speaker
In fact, most likely they came from a single-parent household.
00:07:42
Speaker
So these are people who lived in the area who could get here, right here.
00:07:46
Speaker
You couldn't, as a single parent, survive.
00:07:50
Speaker
If you were a woman, you had no income.
00:07:52
Speaker
So you went to your family, you tried to find sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles who needed a kid on the farm, and that's where you'd go.
00:07:59
Speaker
If not, you went to a place like the Shakers to raise your kids for you.
00:08:03
Speaker
And if you were a man, you're
00:08:07
Speaker
So likewise, they did the same thing.
00:08:10
Speaker
So that's where most of the kids came from.
00:08:13
Speaker
And then after the Civil War, there were a lot of orphans.
00:08:17
Speaker
And the Shakers started to adopt in even larger numbers from orphanages,
00:08:23
Speaker
So then after the Civil War and as we move into the 20th century, I mean, you said that Sabbath day Lake, the sort of most dramatic decline was after 1940.
00:08:33
Speaker
Right, World War II.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, so what was happening there?
00:08:40
Speaker
What was happening everywhere?
00:08:43
Speaker
This is the decade where you see people leaving farms and city life more than ever to get into the, I mean, country life to go to the city.
00:08:53
Speaker
because you only had to work five days a week, 40 hours.
00:08:57
Speaker
Great.
00:08:58
Speaker
When you're on a farm, you don't get a day off.
00:09:00
Speaker
And it's a hard life.
00:09:01
Speaker
It's an unusual life.
00:09:03
Speaker
And so if you didn't have a real vocation to stay, you left.
00:09:08
Speaker
And the kids here were no different than anyone else.
00:09:10
Speaker
And it seemed very glamorous to be in the city, very glamorous to have another lifestyle that wasn't quiet and orderly like the Shakers were.
00:09:17
Speaker
So if you hadn't been imbued with faith, there was no reason to stay.
00:09:21
Speaker
And they didn't.
00:09:23
Speaker
And then what happens is that shortly thereafter, there's a lot of changes in how social agencies started dealing with religious communities and about placing kids here.
00:09:35
Speaker
So children that Shakers were able to get here in the 1950s and 60s were deeply troubled children.
00:09:42
Speaker
And the sisters had no training.
00:09:43
Speaker
They just had been kids who were raised at the Shakers and thought they could do the same thing.
00:09:48
Speaker
Well, they couldn't anymore.
00:09:49
Speaker
Life had changed.
00:09:51
Speaker
So the last child we had here left in 1966.
00:09:56
Speaker
And really, from the 1960s, they finally went back to looking to adults to come in to convert.
00:10:04
Speaker
It might seem a little counterintuitive, but ascetic religious orders can be quite prosperous.
00:10:10
Speaker
And the Shakers were
Impact of Industrialization on Shakers
00:10:11
Speaker
no exception.
00:10:11
Speaker
Their business in agriculture and textiles and other trades was extremely profitable.
00:10:18
Speaker
And maybe that shouldn't be surprising given their work ethic.
00:10:23
Speaker
One of the draws for prospective members was surely the economic stability and quality of life.
00:10:29
Speaker
But industrialization and urbanization took the wind out of those sails.
00:10:36
Speaker
And Chakra communities found it harder and harder to maintain their membership numbers.
00:10:41
Speaker
Which is interesting because if we're to discuss the sewing desk,
00:10:50
Speaker
which is a very interesting and quite possibly unique shaker form.
00:10:58
Speaker
These desks, for the most part, were made in that period after 1860.
00:11:05
Speaker
And, you know, at that time, you had a change of, of,
00:11:16
Speaker
of need within the Shaker community.
00:11:20
Speaker
The number of brethren were diminishing, and the financial needs of the community were, for the most part, being turned over to the sisters.
00:11:35
Speaker
And the main source of revenue for the Shakers at that time were the fancy goods stores.
00:11:43
Speaker
You know, and I can, in my mind, see this scenario work out where, you know, a shaker sister says to a basically out-of-work shaker cabinetmaker, you know, gee, if I only had a workstation, I could be more productive in turning out the goods we need for our stores.
00:12:08
Speaker
And I could see these cabinet makers just tripping over each other to make these workstations.
00:12:16
Speaker
I've always had this thought with the sewing desk, so these really clever, skilled, highly skilled artisans really, with nothing to do.
00:12:28
Speaker
There was no need for creation of anything that demanded their skills.
00:12:36
Speaker
So, you know, when a sister said, hey, I could use a workstation here, you know, it's like, let's get to work.
00:12:44
Speaker
So this culture that the Shakers had developed, rooted in their fastidious labor, which had fostered their survival and prosperity for over a century, the material value of that culture and that labor was shifting.
00:12:59
Speaker
Music
00:13:08
Speaker
It wasn't enough anymore to work hard at agriculture.
00:13:12
Speaker
And by the 1920s and 30s, these once bustling Shaker villages started to look more and more like living museums.
00:13:23
Speaker
And like museums, they started to attract visitors.
00:13:27
Speaker
Here's John again.
00:13:29
Speaker
Well, you really had a number of visitors.
00:13:33
Speaker
motivations.
00:13:34
Speaker
I mean if you were friendly with the Shakers and
00:13:41
Speaker
they were looking to divest of materials, perhaps you would help them out.
00:13:49
Speaker
If you were a merchant and the best known of Shaker collectors, Edward Andrews was originally a dealer of
00:14:05
Speaker
English and American fine furniture who converted to the business of buying and selling Shaker and by extension became, you know, the leading author and author.
00:14:22
Speaker
expert in the field of of shaker Shaker material culture Then you had on the you know, then you had a group of individuals that were drawn to shaker material for aesthetic purposes and the best known of those was Charles Sheeler the the the artist
00:14:46
Speaker
some called the father of modernism.
00:14:49
Speaker
And he collected Shaker along these times in the 1920s.
00:14:58
Speaker
And, you know, it was his relationship with Juliana Force that saw to the
00:15:10
Speaker
the original showing of Shaker material in New York City at the Whitney Museum of Art.
00:15:16
Speaker
I think that the early collectors viewed the Shakers in a very positive way.
00:15:23
Speaker
I mean, these were kindly people living the Christian ethic.
00:15:29
Speaker
But I think that it was their material culture and the aesthetic of it that really drove them to acquire it, preserve it, promote it, study it.
00:15:44
Speaker
write about it, exhibit it, because none of those writings or exhibitions really went into great detail about the Shakers and their history.
00:15:59
Speaker
You know, I believe that as time has passed,
00:16:10
Speaker
and there has been an evolution of the interest in Shaker, that today there is a far greater interest in the Shakers and what they accomplished.
00:16:26
Speaker
If you think about the fact that the people looking
00:16:33
Speaker
at the material in the 1920s were looking at it cold.
00:16:38
Speaker
There was no real source of history afforded them of the Shakers.
00:16:46
Speaker
This was something that was accomplished in the decades that followed and continues to this day.
00:16:51
Speaker
And here's the thing about collecting.
00:16:55
Speaker
You don't just collect.
00:16:58
Speaker
You narrate.
00:17:01
Speaker
You learn what you can about an object, a maker, a style, a movement, or a period.
00:17:07
Speaker
And then you take that knowledge and you make a story out of it.
Cultural Significance of Shaker Objects
00:17:13
Speaker
For early collectors of Shaker furniture, the story around that furniture was everything.
00:17:19
Speaker
And that's still true today.
00:17:21
Speaker
So when I think about what I have learned through Shaker history, the lessons that I glean about our world today are about, for example, the value of work, the sense of purpose and accomplishment and connection that work can give us to ourselves and to each other.
00:17:40
Speaker
That's Sarah Margolis-Pineo, associate at John Keith Russell Antiques.
00:17:44
Speaker
And this idea that everyone, despite their race, gender, background, experience, perceived like quote unquote limitations, has something to offer the greater good, this larger human project, whatever that may be.
00:17:55
Speaker
We are these ritualistic creatures and we need space to consider and connect with larger ideas.
00:18:01
Speaker
whether it be through an established religious practice or yoga or using psychedelics.
00:18:06
Speaker
I mean, to each their own.
00:18:08
Speaker
I just know that there are aspects of the shaker routine and way of living and living together that are very meaningful and can teach us about cultivating meaning in daily life.
00:18:21
Speaker
So for an object like the Enfield sewing desk, between the time it was made and the time it left the Enfield community some 60 years later, its role in the world had completely transformed.
00:18:36
Speaker
It had gone from a working quotidian object crafted with care to fulfill the specific needs of a religious order to an artifact of that same order and a symbol of the values that order represents.
00:18:59
Speaker
But here's the thing.
00:19:01
Speaker
That religious order still existed.
00:19:05
Speaker
And it still exists now.
Shaker Views on Material Culture
00:19:08
Speaker
And what the outside world imputes about that sewing desk might be quite different from how the Shakers themselves thought about it, or at least from how they think about it today.
00:19:20
Speaker
I asked Brother Arnold whether he would consider the sewing desk or any piece of historic Shaker furniture to embody Shaker principles or beliefs.
00:19:32
Speaker
Not really.
00:19:35
Speaker
I say not really because there is certainly something.
00:19:37
Speaker
That is to say, we didn't want it to be ornate.
00:19:40
Speaker
We didn't want it to be worldly.
00:19:41
Speaker
We wanted it to be functional.
00:19:44
Speaker
And that takes on a very different look wherever you might be because of the quality of the craftsman who lived in that community.
00:19:51
Speaker
Most people were not identified as being a carpenter.
00:19:55
Speaker
They were many, many things, and they just did...
00:19:59
Speaker
whatever furniture that needed to be done on the side.
00:20:01
Speaker
It was mostly being a farming community.
00:20:03
Speaker
That was a winter work of producing things.
00:20:08
Speaker
Lebanon, which is sort of an anomaly, you have people that are set aside because they had so many people.
00:20:14
Speaker
They had much greater need than most of us.
00:20:16
Speaker
And, you know, you can't see it, Ben, but we're in our music room and you look around and you are seeing lots of different things.
00:20:23
Speaker
And the reason you are is because when the communities formed, they didn't have a furniture factory.
00:20:29
Speaker
So when the conference came, they brought a bed, they brought a chair, they brought a table.
00:20:33
Speaker
Those became incorporated into the communal whole.
00:20:37
Speaker
And as they went on, they were passed on.
00:20:39
Speaker
And as we had needs for other things, specific things would be made.
00:20:44
Speaker
So we've always been consumers.
00:20:47
Speaker
We've never thought that if we could buy something more cheaply that way or it was better use of our time, that's what we did, because we had other things to do.
00:20:54
Speaker
And primarily what we have to remember here is we're not really concerned with a material culture.
00:20:59
Speaker
Unfortunately, we were very successful at it.
00:21:02
Speaker
And I always said that because it sort of acts as a,
00:21:05
Speaker
an anti-Shaker thing, because we are here because we are trying to find eternal salvation.
00:21:12
Speaker
This is a life of self-denial, it is the life of Christ taking upon ourselves that life in repentance, in penitence, and trying to find perfection.
00:21:22
Speaker
So, yay, to some degree you can say that comes through in a piece of furniture, but it's only as well as your skill can be.
00:21:29
Speaker
Shakers believe in progressive perfection.
00:21:32
Speaker
If I do something today as perfectly as I can, God willing, in five years, I'm doing it even better because I understand it more fully because I keep doing it.
00:21:41
Speaker
And so you can never, and that's our spiritual life, that's all wrapped up into the same thing, that we are progressing over and over again trying to find ourselves in a better place.
00:21:51
Speaker
But primarily, our life is not about the things around us.
00:21:55
Speaker
Our life is about heaven on earth.
00:21:57
Speaker
It's about preparing for the kingdom of God.
00:22:01
Speaker
So again, that's where it goes wrong.
00:22:04
Speaker
You know, when we see furniture up as, you know, when you put it out as a piece of sculpture instead of a chair that you're supposed to sit on, that's really not right.
00:22:16
Speaker
I know you can admire it.
00:22:18
Speaker
I understand it.
00:22:18
Speaker
I see it.
00:22:20
Speaker
I get it.
00:22:21
Speaker
But it's still perverse, you know, when you're really talking.
00:22:25
Speaker
Yeah, well, this is so interesting because I think the idea of perfection is certainly something that in outside popular culture is often associated with shaker furniture, the notion being that these makers were guided to want to make perfect objects and therefore they excelled and they eventually made perfect objects.
00:22:52
Speaker
But what you're saying is that
00:22:55
Speaker
that wasn't really the goal from the beginning to become very good furniture makers, that in fact, furniture of much lower quality were available and functional and would serve the purpose that you needed it to serve, that there would be no problem using that even if it's sort of appearance or its aesthetic ideas were very different from- You see, that's a problem, Ben.
00:23:22
Speaker
Shakers aren't aesthetics that way at all.
00:23:25
Speaker
We don't have our feng shui rooms.
00:23:28
Speaker
In fact, no one should actually ever see my office to know that that is not a place that anyone should be.
00:23:35
Speaker
And even I'm ashamed of it.
00:23:36
Speaker
But, you know, we have...
00:23:39
Speaker
We have five Boston rocking chairs made in the 1950s in here.
00:23:44
Speaker
Sister Miller bought those for the TV room so everybody had a place to sit.
00:23:48
Speaker
We have Brother Ted's grandmother's chair.
00:23:50
Speaker
We have two chairs that were owned by Aldous Herriot that were made in around 1900 or so.
00:23:57
Speaker
And then we've got some shaker furniture in here.
00:23:59
Speaker
We have
00:24:00
Speaker
uh these wonderful little back chairs that somebody gave us with Norman Rockwell scenes on them and harbor scenes you know it fits it works it's good um and another thing that's a disservice those and you were right that about and I'm not going to play down your your concept about if we are trying for progression we're trying it in all things that is true
00:24:22
Speaker
But what's a disservice is the 100 pieces that are carted out every time shows you only the very best pieces.
00:24:28
Speaker
It doesn't show you 99% of what was made, which was not so perfect.
00:24:35
Speaker
And there's very few furniture makers in the Shaker Life who reach that level.
00:24:40
Speaker
So that's the way that is.
00:24:43
Speaker
It's just kind of not represented perhaps from a very truthful side, rather it was from a collector's side.
00:24:51
Speaker
And most of these early people were not just collectors, they were dealers.
00:24:55
Speaker
So they had a real vested interest in this stuff and how to market it and sell it and make a living off of it too.
00:25:03
Speaker
See, Brother Arnold has a shaker perspective.
00:25:07
Speaker
That's John Keith Russell once more.
00:25:09
Speaker
I mean, he has a 20th or 21st century vision of what this is.
00:25:17
Speaker
I'm not aware that any other collector or any collector would have that perspective, you know, because they're looking at the objects in many ways without the...
00:25:38
Speaker
you know, the spiritual experience that Brother Arnold and other Shakers have gone through.
00:25:47
Speaker
You know, it's a lay person looking at all of this material.
00:25:54
Speaker
And, you know, if it's the opinion of those that are looking at this material that it is different and special
00:26:08
Speaker
you know, that's just a perspective that we have come to, whereas the Shakers, it was normal.
Evolution of Shaker Furniture Styles
00:26:23
Speaker
You know, this was that kind of material that they lived with, they existed with, they developed.
00:26:31
Speaker
And though Brother Arnold
00:26:36
Speaker
spoke about the ladder objects that the Shakers made.
00:26:42
Speaker
We that have embraced Shaker material look at different stages of its manufacture.
00:26:54
Speaker
Now we are we are oftentimes able to tell
00:26:59
Speaker
Through styles and through even notes made on the furniture itself by the shakers when and where it was made.
00:27:13
Speaker
And there was a group of furniture that was made between 1790 and, say, 1820 that relied heavily on what we would call colonial influence.
00:27:31
Speaker
You know, the early shakers that were cabinet makers had their own styles that they brought to the shakers.
00:27:38
Speaker
They were used to making, you know, panel doors with a heavy raised panel, for instance.
00:27:44
Speaker
And so this was embodied into some of the work that they did.
00:27:50
Speaker
There's a period of time between 1820 and 1860, which we consider the high watermark of Shaker design, where they sort of went out on their own, if you will, and created what we honor the most today.
00:28:10
Speaker
And then after 1860, perhaps as they looked at their dwindling numbers and their lack of relevancy, they looked outside of their community for inspiration.
00:28:46
Speaker
So what happened with the collectors was they started to sort of invent their own stories, whatever that might be or not.
00:28:55
Speaker
And they started to produce a market.
00:28:59
Speaker
And the market drove itself and it drives itself really independent of the Shakers themselves.
00:29:05
Speaker
So we were like taken out of the equation.
00:29:09
Speaker
And if you think like Andrews who writes The People Called Shakers,
00:29:13
Speaker
in the 1950s, he like stops talking about the Shakers after the Civil War because what they produced was nothing he was interested in.
00:29:21
Speaker
And he saw it all through a material culture.
00:29:24
Speaker
So his history is, you know, lame to say the very least, but produced a great deal of ire in the Shaker communities.
00:29:31
Speaker
Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass., they sent somebody over to Hancock
00:29:35
Speaker
to talk to the Shakers about what they thought about the new book.
00:29:38
Speaker
And Brother Ricardo said, I don't like it.
00:29:41
Speaker
And he said, well, what don't you like about it?
00:29:43
Speaker
He said, I don't know, I haven't read it.
00:29:44
Speaker
And he said, well, how can you not like it?
00:29:46
Speaker
Because he's not a Shaker.
00:29:47
Speaker
And if you're not a Shaker, you don't understand this at all.
00:29:50
Speaker
And he's actually quite right.
00:29:51
Speaker
It's very hard for an outsider to understand how the life is.
00:29:57
Speaker
And in fact, we were able to get...
00:30:01
Speaker
a letter that Brother Ricardo had written to the publishers about how outraged he was about them calling him a shaker expert when he wasn't even a shaker.
00:30:11
Speaker
But shaker voices in the 20th century became quite muted and experts instead became the voice of what the shakers were all about, their material culture and their history and very little did they talk about their beliefs.
00:30:28
Speaker
You mentioned that
00:30:31
Speaker
it's very difficult to understand if you're not a shaker.
00:30:37
Speaker
What is that?
00:30:37
Speaker
What's difficult to understand?
00:30:41
Speaker
What could you try to tell me as an outsider that would help me to understand what we outsiders don't understand?
00:30:50
Speaker
I can't really, well, I mean, I can tell you, but you don't get it.
00:30:53
Speaker
It's a life of self-denial.
00:30:55
Speaker
It's this constant...
00:30:57
Speaker
walk with Christ that is unique to each of us and yet similar because as Christ calls us differently, we hear the voice differently and we act upon it in our own ability to understand it.
00:31:10
Speaker
But it is an antithesis of the world.
00:31:14
Speaker
It is not about possession and it is not about collecting.
00:31:18
Speaker
It is total surrender of yourself and your will to God.
00:31:22
Speaker
And in this particular place, in this particular manner,
00:31:27
Speaker
It looks nice from the outside.
00:31:30
Speaker
And it, Sister Elizabeth used to say, it's a great life if you don't weaken, and if you do, it's still okay.
00:31:38
Speaker
But the truth of it is, is this, that it is not an easy life, and it's not meant to be an easy life.
00:31:43
Speaker
It becomes easier as you get older, as you understand it, and you practice it more and more and more, but that's still not it.
00:31:50
Speaker
Sister Miller got up in meetings, she was 90 years old, and she said, I think I've just made a beginning.
00:31:56
Speaker
And she had been with the Shaker since she was seven.
00:31:58
Speaker
I was like, well, there's no hope for me.
00:32:01
Speaker
And it took me years to figure out what she was talking about.
00:32:03
Speaker
But now that I'm 65, I get what she's saying.
00:32:06
Speaker
I really do.
00:32:08
Speaker
As we begin to understand how much more work there is to do, that we can honestly say, I've just started.
00:32:16
Speaker
I'm really, you know, I haven't got this far as I had hoped so.
00:32:19
Speaker
But...
00:32:22
Speaker
It still brings, this is where you're meant to be.
00:32:24
Speaker
It still brings you an inner joy that can't be really experienced unless you're in that place.
00:32:41
Speaker
So, you know, one of the quotes that I've heard all of my adult life is the
00:32:51
Speaker
Beauty of a shaker chair is that it was designed so that an angel might come and sit on it.
00:32:59
Speaker
That was not said by a shaker.
00:33:00
Speaker
That was said by Thomas Merton, who is a Trappist monk.
00:33:04
Speaker
And Brother Ted, who was over 300 pounds, in response to that said, yay, because an angel's the only one who would feel comfortable on one of them.
00:33:15
Speaker
But the thing of it is, is that, you know, a chair is a chair.
00:33:18
Speaker
In shaker life, a chair is a chair.
00:33:21
Speaker
And there are some chairs that say, you're too heavy, you can't sit on it.
00:33:24
Speaker
Or what that might be too.
00:33:27
Speaker
And we have examples of that where people have gone through caning in some of these chairs, et cetera.
00:33:32
Speaker
But I don't think the Shakers themselves are ever gonna start feeling like this is something close to being holy or venerated or we've gotta do something special.
00:33:58
Speaker
It's really easy, I think, to romanticize the Shakers and the beautiful villages that they created.
00:34:04
Speaker
And that's certainly what I did initially and what I continue to do because I can't help it when you step onto these very otherworldly campuses.
00:34:15
Speaker
But to me, what the Shakers demonstrate, I think, foremost is this very human capacity to build worlds for ourselves to live in.
00:34:22
Speaker
and imagine our lives otherwise.
00:34:25
Speaker
And especially right now, that is an appealing and perhaps really urgent thing to consider.
00:34:31
Speaker
The Shakers were just this group of ordinary humans who got together and somehow conceived and built and lived in these extraordinary material landscapes.
00:34:42
Speaker
So much about doing that is just utterly unconceivable.
00:34:46
Speaker
They literally moved mountains.
00:34:48
Speaker
I have no idea how they did it.
00:34:50
Speaker
And so the Shaker Village, when we look at it today, it's truly, it's a total work of art.
00:34:55
Speaker
It's a machine for living.
00:34:56
Speaker
It's all these things.
00:34:58
Speaker
And I think their relevance today is to send up to remind us that alternative systems of living exist.
00:35:05
Speaker
are possible.
00:35:06
Speaker
And if the Shakers could do it 250 years ago, we can certainly build more meaningful and beautiful ways of living today together in large ways and small.
00:35:15
Speaker
And I mean, we just, we just need the purpose behind it.
00:35:18
Speaker
So that's what's ultimately, I think, meaningful about the Shaker legacy for me personally.
00:35:25
Speaker
You know, when you think about an antique object, maybe it's an impressionist painting or an Egyptian sculpture or a medieval helmet, there is this impulse to think of it as a time traveler.
00:35:40
Speaker
as something that was made at one moment and then appears to us in this other moment.
00:35:46
Speaker
But the truth is, there's been a lifetime in between, or many, many lifetimes.
00:35:53
Speaker
And sometimes the object itself has changed through those lifetimes.
00:35:57
Speaker
It's been altered or damaged or restored.
00:36:00
Speaker
But the way people have thought about that object, the meaning they gave it, the interpretation they concocted, the power they ascribed to it,
00:36:11
Speaker
That always changes.
00:36:14
Speaker
And the power of this sewing desk is in part to open our eyes to this alien and radical world that produced it.
00:36:24
Speaker
But in part, it's to make us think, why am I seeing this object now with these eyes, with these interpretations?
00:36:34
Speaker
Why did someone else in the past or even the present see it with different eyes?
00:36:41
Speaker
What does a shaker see in it?
00:36:44
Speaker
We're happy to have that collection and we're proud to show it and let other people enjoy it.
00:36:50
Speaker
But to us, that's not really the point of it.
00:36:53
Speaker
we try to always contextualize it.
00:36:56
Speaker
So, you know, it's in this room, right?
00:36:57
Speaker
But why is it in this room?
00:36:58
Speaker
Because this is what everybody had to have a chair to sit on.
00:37:01
Speaker
Everyone had a bed.
00:37:02
Speaker
Everyone this, that kind of thing.
00:37:04
Speaker
But just put it in the context of the daily life of a certain time period.
00:37:08
Speaker
So maybe if I see anything that people can start to see that is a part of the life of a particular time, it wasn't something that was engraved and had to be there and everybody had to have a straight chair that was uncomfortable and
00:37:22
Speaker
that kind of thing, but rather you can see the progression that the material culture just followed the time period.
00:37:27
Speaker
It was adapted to its time and need.
00:37:30
Speaker
Just as shakerism has to be adapted to its time and need.
Conclusion and Credits
00:37:35
Speaker
You've been listening to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:37:40
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:37:45
Speaker
Our social media and web support is by Sarah Bellotta.
00:37:48
Speaker
Mateo Solis Prada is our digital media assistant.
00:37:52
Speaker
Our theme song is by Trap Rabbit.
00:37:54
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.