Tin Men, and: Torching the Fink Books and Other Essays on Vernacular Culture (review)

Intended for both scholarly audiences and working people, Archie Green's Tin Men provides a straightforward investigation of human figures fashioned from sheet metal. A fine, elementary book for students of material culture, the text is particularly valuable because of the wide range of people—tinsmiths, their relatives, union members, folklorists, collectors, and museum curators—that the author has drawn on in his research. Despite his admirable networking, Green insists on the incompleteness of the documentary record on this topic and on our imperfect understanding of workingman artists' meanings and intentions. Moreover, he warns, "We are not always sensitive about meddling in the lives of those from whom we draw strength" (p. 71). His book, then, raises more questions than it answers. Yet the one-hundredand one mostly photographic illustrations of these curious metal men provide a feast for the eyes and the fancy.

Green begins by narrating his own curious encounter with two tin men at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum. As he pursues more information about the figures, he encounters a wealth of possible family relatives, both trade signs and "final projects" from apprenticeship programs. After exploring sources for tin man imagery in medieval trade banners and armor, figures on weathervanes, and finally, the first U.S. tin shop sign (a coffee pot from 1858), he turns briefly to the Tin Woodsman of Oz, pointing out both the figure's enduring influence and its status as only one among many models for sheet metal sculpture.

Green first considers tin men as toys, then focuses more narrowly on those tin men who continue to function as three dimensional shop signs. He also offers a few vignettes of exceptionally gifted tin man creators: Rene Latour of Florida, the Heaphy family's shopmen, and A. O. Doughty. Moving from a focus on individual craftsmen to the importance of unions and trade schools in fostering the tradition, Green documents group displays of tin men at parades and other celebratory events. The act of collecting and exhibiting tin men as "folk art" also receives sustained attention. Identifying the social distance between skilled sheet metal workers and those inhabiting the art domain, Green nevertheless points out that artists, architects, museum curators, and sheet metal workers occasionally collaborate, and he goes on to describe some of the results of such projects.

Throughout his survey, Green hints at absences—historical lacunae, lost tin men, the largely undocumented lives of tinsmiths themselves. He concludes by calling on unions to attend to workers' aesthetic and creative needs, as well as to the bread-and-butter economic issues. One wishes that Green had provided more personal narratives of craftsmen to further our understanding of industrial workers' expressive culture. Still, Tin Men provides an initial foray into this fascinating corner of American industrial culture.

Torching the Fink Books and Other Essays on Vernacular Culture is a selection of essays from Green's long and distinguished career as a public and academic folklorist. Robert Cantwell's introduction provides a fine portrait of Green's life trajectory, which underscores his earned reputation as a true working-class intellectual. Cantwell also provides a dynamic definition of folk culture as imagination in motion, recognized only by the traces it leaves in its wake. He identifies Green's special contributions to folklore studies in his insistent focus upon issues of transmission, his mastery of ephemeral and esoteric sources, and his unrelenting sense of inquiry. Cantwell describes Green's writing style as efficient and workmanlike and concludes that "we will absorb what is finally the most consistent of messages in Archie's use of language, which is that the resources of the world, natural or cultural, are precious and finite, and that it is incumbent upon us...