American Ideas
This section considers three themes that help describe the origin, progress, and ideals of the United States of America. The Revolution and The Manifesto; Self-Government and the Collective; Freedom and Individualism: these themes are reflected in the origins and histories of the artist collectives discussed in the following section.
The Revolution and The Manifesto
The Declaration of Independence, our founding document, with its proud language and long list of signers, evokes a sense of solidarity and just purpose. At the same time, it suggests how difficult it is to unify individuals and groups with diverse interests. While famously expressing the right of "all men" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the Declaration is not a treatise on the best conditions for the pursuit of happiness but, mostly, a catalog of insults caused by British rule of the American colonies. 2 The Declaration demonstrates how much easier it is to consolidate a collective around specific complaints than to define its specific common goals. Nevertheless, the formality of creating a document to state a revolution's purpose, with signatures attached, demands a commitment on the part of the revolutionaries. The Declaration calls for attention from the world—"a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation" 3—and for a place in history for the United States of America.
Self-Government and the Collective
Cooperation for survival and collectivity had been a way of life in colonial America. Settlers cooperated to build houses, fences, and barns. Mutual aid events to clear land, pare apples, make quilts, or perform other large tasks served to solidify the community of settlers. 4
In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that American government occurred first at the local level, echoing a natural, "spontaneous" pattern of civilization whereby people tend to settle together in groups: "[t]he local institutions of New England," he wrote, "...owe their strength not only to law but even more to custom." 5 As opposed to European traditions of rigid hierarchy and strong central government, the strength of the United States of America comes from the practice of being a voluntary collective. Tocqueville wrote,
The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds... 6
In 1731 in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin organized fifty of his neighbors and friends to start the first subscription library in America. Each paid forty shillings to start the collection. In 1736, Franklin and four friends organized the first volunteer fire fighting company, which became a prototype for many others in the new land. 7 In 1783, the Preseverance Benefit and Mutual Aid Association, founded in New Orleans, was the first recorded benevolent association among free blacks. The Free African Society (FAS) of Philadelphia was "particularly noted for its work with victims of yellow fever in the epidemic of 1793." 8 It seems a part of American character and culture for groups of all kinds to form institutions to formally engage their communities.
As early as the 1830s, as part of the nascent labor movement in the United States, skilled craftsmen and artisans formed cooperatives. In 1836, the National Trades' Union supported cooperatives as an alternative to strikes against employers over wages and working conditions. 9 Later, after the Civil War, deflation and the growing American market increased competition among manufacturers. 1 0
Since traditional methods of production persisted well into the 1870s and the introduction of machinery did not necessarily foster economies of scale, small factories could be as, or more efficient than larger ones. If the capital requirements remained low enough, cooperators could enter a market and compete successfully...[T]heir objectives had as much to do with stability and efforts to create community [as]...with a will to preserve craft skills. 1 1
In the 1860s and early 1870s, many American artisan cooperatives (such as shoemakers, carpenters, machinists, clothing workers, cigar makers, and printers) modeled themselves after a British weavers' cooperative called Rochdale, in which individual members were entitled to one vote, bought shares and earned a fixed dividend of 5% or less on their investment. These cooperatives were financially stable, and they were able to price their goods at market rates and return profits to their members. 1 2 Cooperatives were democratic associations that provided practical benefit to artisans: helping perpetuate threatened handcraft skills; allowing artisans to create a market presence with the capital power of a group; and thereby making possible a livelihood through free labor.
Eliminating "wage slavery" was an important principle of utopian socialist societies that formed before the Civil War.
Genuine freedom required the abolition of private property, thereby eliminating the distinction between employer and employee...[For some Americans,] joining a community like New Harmony, Brook Farm, or Oneida offered the way to personal freedom through rejection of the market economy." 1 3
By eliminating property rights, these experimental communities expressed an intention to create a system that was both free and equal for their inhabitants, but many utopian communities "practiced great austerity while adhering to exacting rules laid down by a charismatic religious or secular leader." 1 4 In practice, these un-democratic collectives were neither free nor equal. Because most Americans, then as now, viewed property as the basis of liberty, the appeal of these communities was limited. Still, the utopian socialist ideals of being free to live outside an oppressive wage system and of doing work that, in some ways, seems removed from the demands of the common marketplace are found in the dream of being an independent fine artist in America in the twentieth century.
Freedom and Individualism
The Revolution's promise of freedom in America is complicated by conflicting interpretations of freedom and the question of who is promised to enjoy it. The Puritan settlers of colonial Massachusetts believed in a spiritual definition of freedom. John Winthrop, the colony's governor, distinguished sharply between "natural liberty," which suggested "a liberty to evil," and "moral liberty...a liberty to do only what is good." 1 5
Because one was expected to direct one's beliefs and behavior to comply with rigid community standards, Puritan liberty hardly resembles the kind of individual latitude of action and expression that today most would call freedom.
In colonial times, most commentators shared the view that independent means were a qualification for freedom, including the right to vote. 1 6 The logic of this view is that persons who did not control their own lives—servants, enslaved persons, women, and children—were not capable of making knowledgeable, independent decisions about their government. Property, therefore, was a prerequisite of freedom. 1 7
The Revolution, however, was such a powerful repudiation of the traditional structure and apportionment of power that "many Americans also rejected the very idea of human inequality and the society of privilege, patronage, [aristocracy]...and fixed status...
In the egalitarian atmosphere of revolutionary America, long-accepted relations of dependency and forms of unfreedom suddenly appeared illegitimate. Abigail Adams's plea to her husband to "remember the ladies," her reminder that women, no less than men, ought not to be "bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation," is widely remembered today. 1 8
After the Civil War, the importance of property to freedom reasserted itself. Lincoln's successor Andrew Jackson gave white Southerners the right to control the terms of Reconstruction, and they chose to preserve plantation culture: former slaves were "free, but free only to labor." 1 9 During Reconstruction, the dominant understanding of economic freedom was "as self-ownership and the right to compete in the labor market, rather than propertied independence." 2 0 A free citizen could be a dependent laborer—a "juxtaposition of political equality and economic inequality...[which has become] the American way." 2 1 The conflict of these two circumstances corresponds to the key motive for American artists to form collectives in the 20th century: they have the freedom to express themselves but not the cultural status to have their work seen as fine art.
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