Shakers

posted to www.marxmail.org on December 24, 2002

Although I am extremely critical of the kind of utopian socialism that exists in academia today, which consists mainly of professors vying with each other over who has the best plan for a future society if they were submitting proposals for a new World Trade Center or something, I do strongly identify with pre-Marxist attempts to create alternative communal societies. These experiments were often religiously inspired and really did not project themselves as anything more than as little pockets of morality and sanity in a corrupt and materialistic world. What we gain from them, however, is a sense of the feasibility of a different kind of life more geared to human needs than private profit. One such experiment was the Shakers, a religious sect that had about 6000 adherents at its peak.

The Shakers were the subject of a 60 minute Ken Burns documentary on PBS last night (12/23/02) and USA'ers who missed it can look forward to a repeat, since Burns's documentaries tend to be relentless recycled. I also recommend the website at: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/shakers/, which has lots of interesting information including interview clips with a couple of members of this virtually extinct group. Originally shown in 1985, it has fewer of Burns's stylistic mannerisms that have grown increasingly aggravating over the years.

Although their proper name was the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, their ecstatic dancing earned them the name Shakers. An illiterate English factory worker named Ann Lee launched the sect in England. Fleeing persecution, she and eight co-religionists came to the USA in 1774. Like all millenarian sects, they were fixated on the prospects of an Apocalypse. With the deprivations being visited daily on their fellow workers in England and the USA, it is no surprise that religious people would think in terms of deliverance from the world as they knew it.

They believed that Christ had indeed been reincarnated in their leader Ann Lee but also believed that he was present in every Shaker within whom "Christ consciousness" had been awakened. As the PBS website states and as Burns film amply illustrated, "It was therefore the duty of each believer to live purely in 'the kingdom come' and to strive for perfection in everything he or she did."

In terms of praxis, this meant that Shaker communities stressed celibacy and hard work, especially in farming and handicrafts. Shaker furniture turned out in workshops exemplified a kind of simplicity that want against the kind of ornate and garish over-decoration characteristic of furniture in a bourgeois household. It anticipated the design principles of the Bauhaus and Swedish Modern, whose founders were committed to socialism although on a secular and scientific basis.

Shaker values also went against the grain of American society in their egalitarianism and repudiation of all sexual and racial privilege. On Shaker retreats, men and women lived in full equality. Furthermore, by 1817 the Shakers’ southern societies were freeing slaves belonging to members. They also began buying black believers out of slavery.

The opening chapter titled "Green Dreamers" in Paul Buhle and Edmund B. Sullivan's "Images of American Radicalism" treats the Shakers and other millenarian sects from the standpoint of how they saw the New World. Unlike the acquisitive capitalist class and their small proprietor shock troops, they saw the new country as a paradise given in trust by a Higher Power rather than as raw material to be converted into commodities. To one extent or another, they also repudiated capitalism, slavery and marriage. Unlike those imbued with the Puritan spirit, they did not regard the forest as a hostile fort to be conquered, nor did they harbor an ethnocentric hatred toward the indigenous peoples who co-existed with nature rather than striving to conquer it.

This passage from Buhle and Sullivan's book fills in some details missing in Burns's narrative:

Establishing their villages, Shakers carefully chose good land with reliable water sources. They became famed for their orchards and for their gardens which provided the food for villagers and also supplied the basis for herbal medicines which they packaged for sale to the outside world. Although Shakers used hides for boots and other necessities, eating meat created as a byproduct, they sought as much as possible to avoid cruelty to animals. (A song related: "Remember: He -who made the brute/Who gave the speech and reason, found him mute; He can't complain; but God's omniscient eye/Beholds his cruelty. He hears his cry.") Humane mousetraps in Shaker barns captured rodents without injuring them.

Their famous textiles and furniture designs closely reflected their world-view, and the look of the heaven they expected to enter. Shakers believed that their domestic environment, their work, its products and even the tools used to produce them should all reflect the moral order. The simplicity of surroundings, the absence of knickknacks, and the variety of useful self-invented folding devices like serving tables provided great open space, in exceptionally airy and light rooms. Their patterns showed perfectly straight lines quite unlike the medieval bent of the Ephratans, furniture constructed with almost mathematical precision that carpenters believed to be the precise expression of their own religious commitment. Great effort went into perfecting each object, aged members often assisting in small ways. Clothing used the least quantity of material necessary and cooks measured out exact amounts. Long before architect Louis Sullivan proclaimed "form follows function," the Shakers had found their own way to this truth.

Above all, the Shakers had created a society or mini-society without waste. Space, talent, fruit, animal, all belonged to God, on loan only temporarily to Man's care. Continued recycling of buildings and various materials was not only proof of their adaptive genius, but of their faith. As an elder wrote, "if we were extravagant or wasted any useful thing, it was a loss to the Consecrated and in proportion to its value would prove a spiritual loss to our souls." Children were trained to pick up any useful item, needle, cloth, bit of thread, kernel of corn, offering anything extra as charity to the poor. Shakers felt similarly to everything that grew. While their neighbors consigned felled tree limbs and scraps to the fire, Shakers turned its branches into workboxes through a complex process of shredding wood while frozen in winter and weaving strips like cloth. They eagerly learned from nearby Indian tribes how to weave baskets from grass and how to make herbal medicines from bark.