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C HAPT ER FIVE Weaving the New into the Old T EXTILE INDU STRIES OF NEW JERSEY, 1916 Ibelievethattheancienttraditionsofapeopleareitsballast....Youmust knit the new into the old. You cannot put a new patch on an old garment without ruining it; it must not be a patch, but something woven into the old fabric, of practically the same pattern, of the same texture and intention. If I did not believe that to be progressive was to preserve the essentials of our institutions, I for one could not be a progressive. — Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (1913) In February 1916, when the Newark Museum opened Textile Industries of New Jersey exhibition, the display of silk tapestry and felt hats, hand-embroidered shirts, and machine-knit socks realized John Dewey’s claim that “you can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of the flax, cotton , and wool fibers into clothing.”1 Among Progressive educators, textiles were influential didactic devices suggestive of vocational and spiritual continuity between the handcrafted past and industrialized present. The Newark Museum, like President Wilson, seized upon textiles as an allegory for the condition of the immigrant and his adoptive homeland, and the fluid social relations between the individual and collective.2 In the same period, William James described education as akin to weaving: “The shuttle of interest will shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a lively and entertaining way.”3 Although clothing was increasingly replaceable and cheap, the 1916 exhibition held onto its potent symbolic implications. Cloth could carry biblical references and signify economic and social distinctions. Like Wilson’s figurative patch and James’s shuttle, the exhibition championed simultaneous cultural preservation and social change. As in the clay show of 1915, the museum explained that material refinement was a metaphor for the integration of society’s constituent parts. The museum proposed that both handicraft and machine production could be exemplary “object lessons,” thereby sustaining the relativism in James’s subtitle for Pragmatism (1907), “a new name for some old ways of thinking.” The attempt to synthesize ancient 189 190 m a de i n n e wa r k and modern artifacts in Newark accommodated ethnic difference and boosted nostalgia for the American colonial era. Most significantly, for the first time the museum represented the symbolic body of Newark’s laboring citizen as a woman. The announcement for the Textile Industries exhibit, sent out to manufacturers in November 1915, promised it would be an educational and commercial survey of “cloth making, knitting, embroidery, rug weaving, felt hat making and allied industries”; on the cover of the brown pamphlet was an image of the representative face of the contemporary textile industry, a seated young woman in a red beret energetically reaching into her loom (plate 9). Finally, a woman had joined Seth Boyden in Newark’s pantheon of mythical labor. The planar style of the two-color print disposes of details that would conclusively prove the worker to be a woman or at a hand loom, but the numerous red bobbins overhead, spools of thread, imply high-quality refined production as much as her body language suggests the necessity of manual dexterity. She tends the shed, the area where the upper and lower warp threads are open and the shuttle plies the weft. Her animated gesture suggests that she is a thinking worker, no mere attendant. She is quite unlike the women in Paterson’s silk mills, each responsible for a dozen power looms, who were not valued for their artisanal skill and rushed about monitoring but not guiding the automatic machinery. Articulatingthemuseum’scelebrationofhandicraftwithablockprintwas apt, as Arthur Wesley Dow and Ernest Fenollosa were Americanizing ukiyo-e into widespread practice and encouraging a revival of the handicraft. The use of Cheltenham typeface inside the pamphlet indicates that the museum had printed the text in its own printing plant. Ever thrifty, the museum used the technology within its grasp, the same technique as to make Dana’s print plate (see plate 4). The squat, compressed lettering and its architectonic integration into the composition, as well as the use of the brown paper for its middle tone, were sophisticated aesthetic choices, and would have been admired by connoisseurs who knew the modern German Sachplakat (object poster) popularized by Lucian Bernhard. If the lettering was fiercely avant-garde, the red beret endowed the worker with the romantic aura of a medieval or renaissance artisan. The pamphlet presaged that Newark’s exhibition...

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