One hundred years ago last week, members of the just-constituted Chicago Arts and Crafts Society gathered at Hull-House to listen to “Mr. Frank B. Wright,” who was presenting a paper on “The Use of Machinery.” The Hull-House Bulletin can be forgiven for misidentifying Frank Lloyd–he was not so well-known at the time–but it accurately captured a debate that would define the future of the Arts and Crafts movement.
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Its members sought to end the distinction between fine and decorative art through a commitment to handicraft. By elevating the importance of utilitarian objects, they hoped to improve the living conditions of industrial workers and perhaps end the domination of people by machines.
Central to the Chicago movement was Hull-House, located in what were then the west-side slums. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr had opened it in 1889 in the radical belief that the rich needed the poor as much as (or more than) the poor needed them. The settlement house was based on Toynbee Hall in London’s East End. Reproductions of great art hung on the walls there, and reproductions were hung on the walls of Hull-House. But Starr and Addams eventually decided that showing art to people was not enough. Shortly after the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society was founded, they hired neighborhood artisans–people who’d worked with their hands in the old country–to run workshops in silversmithing, weaving, and other handicrafts, training other people to practice these arts.
