The Making of Home Page 18
The feeling that houses – homes – needed to be preserved in an age of industrialization was one that was, like self-consciously archaic building styles, shared across many of the home countries at this time. Initially, the first house preservation groups were less concerned with the everyday, and more with conserving buildings that had once housed the great. In 1850, George Washington’s headquarters on the Hudson, the Hasbrouck House, in Newburgh, New York, was opened to the public, followed by other houses belonging to presidents or great men, or houses with Revolutionary or, in time, Civil War connections. The purpose of these buildings was to serve as three-dimensional history lessons. In 1929, Henry Ford virtually industrialized the process, acquiring eighty-three houses with historic connections, re-siting them from their original locations to Greenfield Village, next to the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, to create a venue where visitors could walk through a single narrative of America’s great men. Here the house where Noah Webster wrote his dictionary was conveniently hard by Thomas Edison’s workshop, which was not far from the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln had practised as a lawyer, and so on.
But it was Hazelius’s elevation of the everyday, not Ford’s bricks-and-mortar hymn to Great Men, that came to dominate home-as-history museums, reflecting as it did the widespread perception that industrialization was steam-rollering the past. In Germany, in particular, the urban middle classes studied and collected aspects of the rural past as a way of allaying their fears about the urban present. Now the organizers of new Heimat museums adopted the methods of the emerging scholarly discipline of art history to attribute, classify and authenticate the impedimenta of home life. The Museum für deutsche Volkstrachten und Erzeugnisse des Hausgewerbes (Museum of German National Dress and Handicrafts, now part of the Museum of European Culture), which opened in Berlin in 1889, aimed to display everything connected to houses and their occupants – furniture and furnishings, clothes, food and kitchenware, as well as items of art, craft and trade. The same trend saw Britain’s National Trust, originally established to preserve landscapes, acquire its first building in 1896: not a stately home, but a fourteenth-century farmer’s modest hall-and-parlour house.
The struggle, which continues, was not whether small houses were worth displaying – there was, and is, universal acceptance that they are. Rather, it was, and is, how to display them. What can practically be displayed in a museum commonly takes precedence over what is accurate, or even what is ‘suitable’. The frequently messy multiple realities of history have often been, and often still are, rejected as too crude for the more genteel showcases of heritage. One early Heimat museum exhibited what it labelled as a copy of a peasant house from German north Friesland, but added that an ‘accurate’ copy could not be shown, ‘since such a house was hardly suitable for exhibition purposes’. Nineteenth-century, and some twentieth- and twenty-first-century, organizers of exhibitions in the USA found it difficult to accept the tiny size and multi-purpose rooms of the colonial era. Imaginary spaces such as ‘borning-rooms’, where women retired to give birth, were conjured up, the reality of the one-roomed house apparently more beyond comprehension than a room used, at most, once every eighteen months. Heritage had become an outpost of home nostalgia, a commercial, institutional packaging of an emotion.
This is not a problem confined to the nineteenth century. Today’s sometimes almost fanatical desire for authenticity can itself, paradoxically, lead to inauthenticity, as it did with William Morris. Period-room displays might carefully confine themselves to items from a single region, or date, even though the contents of real homes have always been gathered over decades if not centuries, while trade routes from the sixteenth century onwards enabled goods to arrive from across the world, not solely the district in which a house is located. Even where houses or their contents are entirely authentic, the display may not necessarily be so. In many museums, décor and furniture are collected from numerous sources and locations to tell a story, whether a historical, an ethnographical or a decorative one. The National Trust furnishes the houses in its care from its central stores, not necessarily from the house to hand; it then places items where they can best be seen by visitors, or where they won’t impede circulation, or contravene fire regulations, rather than where they might have originally been located. In the early twentieth century, English country-house style, a creation of a number of early-twentieth-century interior decorators (several of the most prominent of them American), leavened eighteenth-century upper-class domestic décor with the requirements of twentieth-century middle-class living. The success of this style was so far-reaching that by the end of the twentieth century it was treated as though it were a genuine representation of historical domestic arrangements, and houses and period displays that did not conform were condemned for historical inaccuracy.
Even the most careful modern scholarship has not entirely solved the dilemmas of authenticity. In 1990, with the help of the architect herself, the Museum für angewandte Kunst Wien (Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts) displayed a reproduction of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s famous Frankfurt kitchen, discussed more fully in Chapter 7. Although what was on display was clearly marked as a copy, it was, and is, not quite clear what it is a copy of. The Frankfurt kitchens of the 1920s, although theoretically mass-produced, were often handmade, each kitchen starting off fractionally different from the others; their owners then adapted them further over the decades, adding to them, adjusting the design to suit themselves. Had the museum chosen to show a ‘real’ Frankfurt kitchen, removed from one of these apartments, altered by time and its owners, counter-intuitively, it would not have been authentic either.
The most artificial – and it must be admitted, the most popular – heritage sites are the historic towns and villages that were ‘preserved’ in the twentieth century in America. Colonial Williamsburg is a replica of the capital of Virginia as it would have appeared in the 1770s, was established by John D. Rockefeller in 1926; Plimoth Plantation (note the carefully olde-worlde spelling) in Massachusetts was founded in 1947 as a re-creation of the original Plymouth settlement. (As we have seen, none of Plymouth’s original houses survived.) Colonial Williamsburg has a few surviving pre-Revolutionary buildings, from which all post-1776 additions have since been removed; these are supplemented by many more reconstructions. Yet the highlights – the Capitol building, the Governor’s Palace and the College of William and Mary’s earliest building, dating from the 1720s – are far from typical of everyday buildings of the period. And so the overall impression is that eighteenth-century Williamsburg was very much grander than it actually was. Some effort has been made to acknowledge the town’s historical reliance on slave labour, but the story that is visible remains one of elegance, not poverty, of sunlight, not shadow, of relentless good cheer, presenting the classical, clean, upper-class housing of the elite as though it can stand in for the reality of the remaining 99 per cent.
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The word ‘nostalgia’ was coined in the seventeenth century, when it was defined as a physical ailment to which Swiss soldiers fighting abroad were particularly vulnerable.* The recommended treatment was opium, an application of leeches and a visit to the Alps. Then, with the arrival of the Romantic movement in the early nineteenth century, this physical ailment was reinterpreted as a spiritual affliction: nostalgia became an indicator of a person’s sensibility, their engagement with what a historian of the emotion has dubbed the ‘romance with the past’. As industrialization spread, this past, reimagined as a slower, gentler place, a world of tight-knit communities, social cohesion and charming rural pastimes, was contrasted to the present’s new, fractured, urban style of living. Nostalgia became not a longing for a lost place, but for a lost time, either of the nostalgic’s own childhood, when things had been less complicated, or, more broadly, of society’s childhood, an imaginary past.
And this past often centred on ideas of home and family, whether real or imagined. In 1950, more than ten thousand American families wer
e asked to describe their hoped-for futures. The majority of answers comprised a nostalgic reimagining of traditional living, most frequently finding expression in the desire for a Cape Cod house.* At the same time, most also acknowledged that really a Cape Cod was not at all practical: they were too small, the layout was not suitable for family life, or even for modern household technology. What the respondents desired, it became clear, was the emotional resonance that they attached to the style. As the nineteenth century found inspiration in Tudor buildings, or Dutch Golden Age art, or Dürer, to evoke the emotional resonances of the warmth and comfort of the ideal home, so in the twentieth century it was preconceptions of ‘past times’, an interweaving of motifs from history, and from newspaper and magazine descriptions of the homes of the famous, past or present.
In the USA, these sources combined to produce perhaps the most resonant example of mythic housing, fixing it so firmly in the nation’s consciousness that dislodging it would be both impossible and unpatriotic: the log cabin. In 1857, the 250th anniversary celebrations of the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, were announced to have been held exactly on the spot where ‘the first log cabin was built’. In reality, Jamestown’s 1607 founders built with the methods they had known in England, and the settlement’s earliest permanent houses were made of ‘strong boards’ – that is, sawn timber boards. The first use of the term log cabin can be traced back only to 1750.
For the log cabin was first brought to the new world by settlers from Sweden, where it was a traditional housing style. From 1655, these Swedes (many of whom came from areas that are today Finland) settled on the Delaware and around Maryland’s tidewater region. And it is here that the first contemporary references to houses built of logs appear. A court record in 1662 mentions a ‘loged hows’ that had existed four years earlier.* In 1679, a Dutchman stayed in a log house in what is now New Jersey, built, he said, ‘according to the Swedish mode … being nothing else than entire trees, split through the middle … and placed in the form of a square, upon each other.’ These and subsequent references to log cabins appeared always in areas with Swedish settlers.
One of those areas was what would become Pennsylvania, and by the time William Penn himself arrived, in 1682, there were already numerous log cabins in the region. Penn’s English followers copied them, believing them to be the indigenous style, as did Scottish and Irish immigrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who saw them on their way south and west. (Today Pennsylvania Dutch architecture refers, as so often, to the stone houses of the wealthiest, another instance of the small house rendered invisible by the survival of the large.) Pennsylvania also drew immigrants from Moravia, the Black Forest, the German and Swiss Alpine regions and Bohemia, places where log housing was familiar, while at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a new group of German immigrants settled in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. This second wave of immigration grafted German elements on to the earlier Swedish ones, and a third wave of log-house-building immigrants, the Norwegians, who settled in the Midwest, particularly Minnesota, brought still more small changes and modifications, even as they reinforced the basic formula.
As with so much new-world housing, log cabins were regarded at the time as temporary and makeshift. They were built by pioneers with little or no cash, out of materials readily to hand – the wood came from the forests that the settlers were clearing for agriculture anyway, and they required few, or no, nails, a rare commodity in the colonies. The expectation was that as soon as the crops from the first harvest on the newly cleared land were sold, the cabins would be demolished and replaced with houses of timber boards. Even that great mythologizer of the west, James Fenimore Cooper, considered that a settlement was permanent once stone houses replaced the original log cabins.
It was in the 1840s, the heyday of nostalgic housing styles throughout the home countries, that the log-cabin myth took definitive form. When William Henry Harrison ran for president in 1840, his opponents mocked his supposedly humble background by sneering that he lived in a log cabin. The canny Harrison embraced the caricature as the embodiment of his man-of-the-people roots. His supporters marched with banners depicting symbols of pioneer life – log cabins, ploughs and canoes – and floats built in the shape of log cabins. Daniel Webster, a constitutional lawyer and long-time politician, couched his endorsement of Harrison in the same terms: ‘I was not myself born in [a log cabin], but my elder brothers and sisters were – in the cabin … which at the close of the Revolutionary War … my father erected on the extreme frontiers of New Hampshire … In this humble cabin amid the snow-drifts of New England, that father strove [sic], by honest labor, to acquire the means for giving to his children a better education, and elevating them to a higher condition than his own’. It’s all there: the frontier, New England self-sufficiency, the War of Independence, social mobility and of course the log cabin. (Harrison was no more a child of hardship than Webster: contrary to his detractors’ claims, he had been born in a mansion in Virginia; his sole connection to a log cabin was a house he had bought in Ohio, which had once been a one-room cabin, although by the time Harrison was finished with it it had sixteen rooms.) Within a year, the symbol had already made an appearance in literature: Natty Bumppo, the hero of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (the best-known of which is The Last of the Mohicans), although raised by Delaware Indians, lives in ‘a rough cabin of logs’. With this, the log cabin was well on its way to becoming a symbol of the American spirit itself, essential, indigenous and simple.
Twenty years later its resonance only increased, becoming impervious to any incursions of reality, with the election of Abraham Lincoln and the rise of a real log-cabin dweller to the presidency. With Lincoln’s murder in 1865, the log cabin came to represent the lost Eden that was pre-Civil War America. And this was only reinforced as, postwar, urbanization and industrialization swept across the eastern seaboard. The wilderness that Cooper had written about might have vanished, but the mythic log cabin not only survived, but flourished. Lincoln’s log-cabin birthplace is on show in the Memorial Building at the Lincoln Birthplace Historic Site in Kentucky (see plate section, no. 18). Except that it isn’t. The original cabin, like most buildings of the type, was demolished long before Lincoln became famous. Some of the logs may have been reused to build a neighbouring house. That house too was demolished, and a new house, which in turn may or may not have used some of the original logs, was built in its place. It was this third building that in the 1890s was toured around fairs and exhibitions as Lincoln’s birthplace (and at this point some of the logs from that already-compromised building also vanished), before being installed at the Lincoln Birthplace site.* From such fairs and exhibitions, the log-cabin symbol seeped into the everyday life of twentieth-century suburban domesticity: 1916 saw the production of Lincoln Logs, children’s building blocks in the shape of logs (designed by the son of modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and a century later still sold); tins of Log Cabin maple syrup, named in the 1880s for Lincoln’s birthplace, bore a picture of a log cabin at least until the 1960s. (Its current squeezy bottle continues to gesture, if ever more vaguely, to the shape of logs.)
The log cabin, in common with other patriotic styles of architecture, represented not so much physical as emotional and psychological comfort, a national symbol of domestic belonging, of a shared heritage. It was less important that the buildings that provoked these emotions were artificial constructs. No English cottager of the sixteenth century would have recognized the warmth or plumbing or upholstery of a nineteenth-century English country cottage, any more than the Puritans would recognize these log cabins, nor the specific possessions attributed to them by their descendants.
Other key symbols of Americana – the spinning wheel and the patchwork quilt – are similarly mythological. In 1858, Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish presents the prototypical Puritan maiden, Priscilla Mullins, sitting ‘beside her wheel … the carded wool lik
e a snow-drift / Piled at her knee, her white hands feeding the ravenous spindle’. In reality, the evidence suggests that in the early days of the colony, only about one family in six owned a spinning wheel. Even fewer wove. Most cloth, from the earliest days, was purchased. For those householders who did spin, it was one task among many, and many who were heroically productive still did not spin nor weave. Spinning was simply not time-efficient: one wheel could produce only enough yarn to knit an average family’s stockings. Mary Cooper, on a farm in Long Island in the 1760s, grew fruit and vegetables, made preserves and pickles, selling the excess to her neighbours, salted beef, kept bees, made the family’s wine, candles, soap and clothes, and even combed flax, but she did no spinning. It was the Revolution first, then the War of 1812, with their economic boycotts of British goods, that turned spinning and weaving into activities with patriotic resonance. Thereafter homespun fabrics came to signify the self-sufficiency of the new nation. By the 1820s, northern citizens were once more relying on industrially manufactured textiles, whether made abroad or locally, but in the south and the frontier territories, homespun survived longer, as the availability of slave labour made its production more viable in the south, and the west’s low- to no-cash economy made it essential. It was, according to Frederick Law Olmsted, the co-designer of Central Park, the clothing of ‘half the white population of Mississippi’ in the 1850s.
The proportion of the population who relied heavily on homespun therefore suggests that the supposedly common homemade patchwork quilt must in reality have been a rare object in American houses before the nineteenth century. Patchwork is a product of surplus, of textiles which are abundant enough that large remnants are routinely available – large enough and routinely enough that they can be used to make another large item entirely. If the output of a single spinning wheel could only keep a family in stockings, how much more work was needed to spin enough to be able to weave a family’s clothes, and still have more left over for scrap, to ‘tear … into bits for the sake of arranging it anew’? In Britain quilts began to be seen in quantity once less expensive textiles from India became available in the eighteenth century. But in the USA, this was not the case. Throughout the nineteenth century, clothing for everyone except a minority of urban, cash-paid workers continued to be square-cut, precisely so as to utilize every scrap of what was valuable material. More fashionable patterns might leave more offcuts, but at a period when the majority of people owned one, or at most two, sets of clothing, daily and ‘best’, it would take years to gather enough offcuts to make a quilt. Patchwork was not a product of pioneer life, but of the industrial world, and with the spread of inexpensive textiles, new business opportunities were grasped: in Britain from the nineteenth century, pre-cut fabric squares were packaged up by manufacturers and sold as the raw material for quilts. Of course, basic quilts could also be made from scraps, or from a single, repurposed, worn-out item, or a combination of purchased and repurposed fabrics. But until there was plenty, and a textile industry, quilting was confined to the cash-rich.