Doug Winiarski

But in the 20th century, Shakerism was rediscovered as a style by an art collector and early scholar, a guy named Edward Deming Andrews, who in the 1920s and 30s began collecting Shaker antiques.

As many of those Shaker communities were closing in upstate New York and western Massachusetts, Andrews went around collecting Shaker chairs and tables.

And there were a series of exhibitions of Shaker art at major New York galleries, like the Whitney Museum in New York, where Shaker clean lines and especially their visionary art of the era manifestations became popular.

thought to be elements of a new kind of modernist aesthetic that was taking hold in America in the early 20th century.

And that's where this sort of shaker chic emerges.

And so ever since Edward Deming Andrews came along in the 1920s and 30s, there's been a strong market for shaker antiques and collecting, shaker pageants, singing shaker songs.

One scholar calls it shaker fever in the 19th century.

And it goes hand in hand with other things that are going on in American history at the time, the colonial revival, the emergence of Colonial Williamsburg, the emergence of living history museums.

Shaker villages were thought to be those kinds of places where Americans could get in touch with their early roots, but in a way that seems strangely modern to them.

Well, as I said before, there's a new Shaker member at Sabbath Day Lake.

And I think as long as people are fascinated with the Shakers' alternative spirituality, with the idea of a kind of ascetic life, a life set apart from the busyness and the commercialism and the consumerism of American life, as long as there are people that are fascinated by that idea,

impulse, that communitarian impulse in American history, the Shakers will do just fine.

Keep in mind that the Shakers were never a large group.

I mean, 25,000 sounds like a lot of people over the course of the 19th century, and a couple of dozen villages scattered from Maine to Indiana sounds like a lot.

But in truth, the Shakers have always been a tiny minority.

They've always been that alternative voice calling Americans back to alternative values, pacifism, racial justice, gender equality.

All of those things are what Brother Arnold would call the life of the Christ spirit, right?

And as long as people are interested in that, there will be shakers.

Your listeners can find me on the web at DouglasWiniorski.com.

They can find lots of my articles and essays on Shakerism there.