The People Called Shakers: A Search for the Perfect Society (review)

Book Reviews49 Woodbrooke during the first World War and the ways in which these were met and overcome. One is impressed by the fortitude and adaptability of students, lecturers, and staff during this war period. Also during this time the decision was made to add to the established courses on Bible Study, Church and Quaker History, and Economics, a course on "The Christian in his Relation to Modern Social and International Problems." The remaining ten chapters of this 191-page book were each written by a different individual. This variety of authorship has resulted in some repetition of historic events, especially relating to the establishment and work of the Selly Oak Colleges. However, the variety in style and emphasis , which is inevitable when so many authors are involved, gives an added interest, especially as these writers are well-known and loved by many old Woodbrookers. The book is of interest not only to those who have been privileged to spend some time at Woodbrooke but it has value for all who from time to time feel the need to withdraw to some place where, in a homelike environment with friendly persons of both sexes and various nationalities, one can seek through prayer, meditation, study, work, and play to find the reality of a God of love, in whose service is found the enduring incentive to a happy and fruitful life. Swarthmore, PennsylvaniaAnna Griscom Elkinton The People Called Shakers: A Search for the Perfect Society. By Edward Deming Andrews. New York: Oxford University Press. 1953. xvi, 309 pages. $6.00. "If I had never known the faith of the Quakers, I might have been more satisfied with the faith of the Shakers," wrote Thomas Brown, by turns a Quaker, Methodist, Shaker and apostate, in 1812. Friends will be interested in this story not because the Wardleys, who converted Mother Ann Lee, had been Friends, or because a few Friends later joined, but because of common characteristics in the two religious societies: the "peculiat" testimonies of peace, unity, and simplicity; dependence on the gift of the Spirit to any believer; faith in the possibility of a divine-human society—even similar patterns of growth and decay. What enabled the faith of the eight who landed at New York in 1774 to spread to 6,000 by the 1850's? In the period of maximum diaspora, individualism, and awakening to the "menace" of industrial enterprise, Shakerism offered a settled, communal order based on farming and handicrafts. To rugged Protestants it offered monasticism and ceremonialism in their own vernacular. In a period of active adventism, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing (in the person of Mother Ann) pointed to an accomplishment rather than a hope. Thirty years' sympathetic study, not only in Shaker sources but in those of related movements, has enabled Edward Andrews to produce this marvel of brevity and balance. In ninety pages he narrates developments to 1830; 50Bulletin of Friends Historical Association in a hundred and thirty he describes the whole Society at its height; then summarizes reasons for its decline. Appended are the hitherto unpublished "Millennial Laws" of 1845, an estimate of Shaker population, a selected bibliography (omitting the author's other works), and a careful index. This undocumented but reliable account sacrifices the individuality of each Family and the dynamics of later periods for the sake of a general, topical picture. The discussion of basic tenets is underdeveloped. The thirty-three contemporary illustrations are unidentified. There is more to be written about Shakers, but few will write so well. Earlham CollegeThomas Bassett The Sea-Hunters: The New England Whalemen During Two Centuries, 1635-1835. By Edouard A. Stackpole. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company. 1953. 510 pages. $7.50. For two centuries whaling was largely a Quaker enterprise. In 1775, one learns from Edouard Stackpole's Sea-Hunters, 128 out of 132 vessels engaged in the industry were Quaker-owned. The beadroll of their skippers—Gardners, Husseys, Rotches, Barneys, Swains, Macys, Rodmans, Coffins, Folgers—reads like the membership list of Nantucket Monthly Meeting. One wonders what it meant to the life of the meeting to have its weightiest members, its "pillar Friends," dispersed, as they were...