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‘There is no dirt in heaven’
The Shaker sect has almost died out, but the goods it produced are still admired for their design, says Hugh Rayment-Pickard
 Settlement: map of a Shaker community in Alfred, Maine, 1845, from Shaker Design: Out of this worldlibrary of congress LIBRARY OF CONGRESS |
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IN THE mid-19th century, there were 19 thriving Shaker communities in New England, in the United States. They had 6000 members, and were successful producers of a range of consumer goods — from domestic furniture to seeds and foodstuffs. Now, 150 years later, with only three surviving members, the Shakers are all but extinct. But, as the Shaker way of life has disappeared, the principles and values of Shaker design have not only survived but flourished. In homes throughout the West, people with no knowledge of the religious basis of Shakerism are proudly installing “Shaker-style” kitchen units, or sitting on “Shaker-inspired” ladder-back chairs, hanging their jackets on distinctive Shaker wall pegs, or storing items in Shaker-designed storage boxes. It is fascinating that the Shaker design brand has succeeded as surely as the Shaker religion has failed. A new book, Shaker Design: Out of this world, edited by Jean M. Burks, and an exhibition of the same name in New York explore the curious history of the Shaker movement and its legacy. The story of the Shakers began in Manchester, England, in the mid-18th century, with Ann Lee, a “prophetess”. Lee joined a splinter group of Quakers who went by the colourful title “The shaking Quakers”. They practised an ecstatic form of worship — hence the “shaking” and “quaking” — and believed in purity and simplicity of living. During one of her periods of imprisonment for disturbing the peace, it was mystically revealed to Lee that humanity could be saved only through celibacy, and the public confession of all lustful sins. Her church adopted her as its leader, and she became known as Mother Ann. In a further vision, she believed that she had been instructed by God to establish a new Shaker Church in America.The Shakers were one of many groups who left Europe to build the New Jerusalem in America, which offered religious freedom and fresh soil in which to plant a new kind of Christian community. Mother Ann and the eight original Shakers left Manchester in May 1774 and settled near New York. |
 Shaker seeds |
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THE SHAKERS designed their communities and their homes as earthly reflections of the City of God. Living spaces were open and simple, like the airy vaults of heaven. In general, there were no locks on doors or drawers, just as there are no secret places in God’s kingdom. Everything was spotlessly clean, because, as Mother Ann said, “there is no dirt in heaven.” The roads were lined with immaculate stone walls, and the meeting house in each Shaker village was painted a brilliant white. The Shakers followed a design called “the gospel order”, and applied it to everything from buildings to clothing, from the landscape to personal conduct.
These villages impressed their neighbours. The Shaker phenomenon attracted numerous tourists, including Charles Dickens. In 1828, James Fenimore Cooper wrote: “I have never seen, in any country, villages so neat and so perfectly beautiful, as to order and arrangement . . . as those of the Shakers.”
The Shakers positioned their most impressive buildings near public roads, where they could act as advertisements for the Shaker way of life.
The successful development of Shaker communities in the late-18th and early-19th centuries is all the more remarkable because the Shakers were entirely celibate. New members were either recruited as adult converts, or came as orphans needing care.
It was precisely this sexual ethic that required a continuous flow of new craftsmen into Shaker life. Shaker design emerges from the fusion of the Shaker value of simplicity, and the skills that new converts brought to the Church. Shaker cabinet-makers had learned their trade in what Shakers called “the world”: they adapted the neo-classical traditions of a so-called “federal style”, and simplified them to conform to the ethic of “plainness” and functionality.
The quest to model their lives on the perfection of heaven meant that Shakers’ produce was always of the highest standard, turning the “Shaker” label into a powerful marketing brand guaranteeing quality of manufacture. This is one of the many paradoxes of Shaker history: on the one hand, the Shakers rejected private property and regarded the outside world with suspicion; on the other, they readily exploited the economic value of Shaker branding with an impressive range of consumer goods — all prominently boasting the word “Shaker” on the label — including seeds, wine, and an innovative washing machine designed by Brother David Parker.
By the 1860s, the Shakers were using assembly-line methods to mass-produce the chairs that were originally intended for their own simple lifestyle. Shaker design had struck a chord with the American domestic market. The Shaker chair was now more than an expression of a religious dream: it was an icon of modern consumerism.
THE DEVELOPMENT of branding and mass production were not the only aspects of Shaker life which anticipated the modern world.
The Shaker concern with order and efficiency inspired them to produce ingenious methods of domestic storage. Free-standing furniture takes up valuable indoor floor spaces; so the chairs were designed to fit snugly under tables or to be hung on walls to allow rooms to perform multiple functions. Drop-leaf tables could be easily stowed, but could also be opened up as work surfaces or for dining. Shaker chests were designed to maximise practicality, combining deep and shallow, and broad and narrow drawers. Shaker wooden boxes could nest inside each other like Russian dolls when not being used.
The Shakers’ belief in utility never persuaded them to produce anything that was ugly. Heaven would be full of light, honesty, and simplicity, but it would also be a place of beauty. Shaker designs were therefore plain, but elegant in their proportions. |
 Side chair with tilters, c.1850 from Mount Lebanon, New York |
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Although ornamentation was forbidden as a “fancy” affectation of the outside world, table legs would still be exquisitely tapered, and the grain would be laid to pleasing effect. Furniture would be painted in solid pigments of chrome-yellow, brick-red, Russian-blue, and apple-green. The form and proportions of furnishings and buildings also aspired to reflect the celestial geometry of God’s heavenly kingdom.
Shaker furniture applied the principle that “form follows function”, decades before it became a mantra of modernist design. A century before Terence Conran’s launch of Habitat in 1964, or the birth of IKEA, the Shakers were already exemplifying the values of modernist domestic aesthetics: simplicity, functionality, beauty, and affordability.
The Shakers also pioneered another modernist invention: female religious leadership. Mother Ann established the principle that the Shaker communities should be governed by Mothers as well as Fathers. The question of women as leaders was often contested within the Shakers, but the right of women to govern in religious affairs was never removed. |
 Communal productivity: Shaker branding was even on a wide range of consumer goods such as this can of string beans |
| Here, as elsewhere in their history, the Shakers displayed an admirable pragmatism. As a good biblical fundamentalist, Mother Ann taught that men should indeed be the head of the household. But, where a man was not present (as in her own situation, when she was deserted by her husband), then the headship of the church family could rightfully fall to a woman. A fine example of pragmatic hermeneutics. DESPITE their mostly fundamentalist religious beliefs, the Shakers lived by values that were not only modern, but prophetic of the emerging Enlightenment age. The Enlightenment belief, perhaps best expressed by Immanuel Kant, was that human history is “the realisation of a hidden plan of nature to bring about [a] . . . perfect political constitution as the only possible state within which all natural capacities of mankind can be developed completely”. The Shaker belief in the possibility of an ideal human community was entirely congruent with the Enlightenment creed of human perfectibility. In 1848, Elder Joseph Brackett wrote a hymn whose words reflect the Shaker religious dream: ’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free, ’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, ’Twill be in the valley of love and delight. The Shaker faith in an innocent “valley of love and delight” was arguably too other-worldly ever to weather the brutality of the American Civil War, let alone “the valley of the shadow of death” of the two World Wars. Yet the Shaker ideals are still strangely inspiring and uplifting in a world where cynicism and hopelessness often hold sway. Shaker Design: Out of this world, edited by Jean M. Burks, is published on 8 May (Yale University Press, £50; 978-0-300-13728-6). The exhibition “Shaker Design” is at Bard Graduate Center, 18 West 86th Street, New York, until 15 June. www.bard.edu The Revd Dr Hugh Rayment-Pickard is Vicar of St Clement’s, Notting Dale, and St James’s, Norlands, in London. |
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