Word: shakers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...equality of the sexes combined with absolute celibacy, and simplicity and directness in all things. "Be hand-minded," she would urge. "Put your hands to work and your hearts to God." Soon there were 19 self-contained communities scattered through New England, New York, Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. Every Shaker practiced a craft with particular diligence, producing everything except babies. They have now almost died out for lack of new recruits...
...Shakers at their height were sternly anti-esthetic, considering beauty a snare. Yet their interest to the world is emphatically esthetic. The Shaker Museum at Old Chatham, N.Y., founded just nine years ago in recognition of the Shakers' unique contribution to American culture, already gets close to 9,000 visitors a season, sends them away charmed by the clean, consecrated ingenuity of Shaker crafts. Some 8,000 objects, crammed into the museum's six sizable buildings, show that despite themselves the Shakers created and lived in beauty...
...Shakers distrusted the ornamental; they avoided both "carpenter Gothic" and Victorian arabesques. Their furniture is functional to a T, and yet their tools are subtly shaped to charm the eye and hand. The Shaker wheelbarrow opposite, for example, looks as elegantly clean-lined as a Ferrari...
...their dedicated isolation, Shaker communities hit on a host of new forms and techniques that have become commonplace. Before the Civil War, Shakers invented a flat broom, a wheel-driven washing machine, a circular saw, a tilt-back chair (on ball-and-sockets) and, a century before its use in medicine, electric shock therapy, using a primitive static-electricity generator...
...with so much modern design, even the best Shaker products are sometimes a bit chill. But their merging of severity and grace is unparalleled...