The People Who Turn the World Upside Down
At a settlement called Sabbathday Lake in rural Maine, a venerable religious sect is threatened with extinction. Members of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing — always known as Shakers — have been a fixture of America for 250 years. They represent our longest-lived and most influential utopian project. Today, only two Shakers are left.
Our impression of these believers is anchored by two facts: they made elegant furniture and were celibate. But at their peak, the Shakers were inflammatory. They rejected the patriarchal God, recognized the equality of women, condemned slavery, preached the nearness of the millennium, and deliberately turned their backs on the acquisitive society that was taking hold of America.
Although they were always outsiders, their story is quintessentially American. The intensity of their religious beliefs and the austerity of their way of living limited their numbers, but their unbending beliefs increased their impact on our culture.
The Shakers formed a model for communal movements throughout American history, from the Mormons and the Oneida Community of the 1800s to the counterculture communes of the 1960s. Friedrich Engels, who helped write the Communist Manifesto, saw the Shakers as living proof that communism was practical. They had found a way to live together and to own everything in common. “How they manage with their combs and toothbrushes,” an early visitor observed, “I did not presume to ask.”
The Shakers were devoted to simplicity in all things. They shunned what was unnecessary, frivolous, or only decorative. Shaker furniture and architecture were admired because of the care and attention that went into every detail. Their ideas have had a deep influence on American design.
The Shakers’ practicality made them ingenious. They invented the clothes pin, the flat broom, the circular saw and condensed milk. They improved plows, harrows, stoves, and apple corers. They were the first to package and sell garden seeds.
The sect was founded by a woman — Ann Lee was born in 1736 in Manchester, England, the daughter of a blacksmith. She fell under the influence of the Shaking Quakers, whose “operations of the spirit” induced violent trembling and writhing. The death of four successive infant children convinced her that “the marriage of the flesh is a covenant with death.” She saw visions.
Lee attracted a band of followers and led them to America. They arrived in 1774, just before the outbreak of the American Revolution.
They were not welcomed. Protestant ministers railed against Mother Ann, as she was called, accusing her of witchcraft. They harassed her followers. In Petersham, Massachusetts, a mob dragged Lee from her horse, beat her, tore her clothing to see if she was really a woman, and sent her to prison for six months.
Yet, as one follower noted, “When she rejoiced her joy was unspeakable . . . when she wept, it was enough to melt the heart of a stone.” The organization lived on after Ann’s death in 1784. They created their first settlement outside Albany, NY. They pursued pacifism, bought slaves to free them, took in orphans, and provided the homeless with winter shelter. They made no excuses. “We are the people who turn the world upside down,” the Shakers proclaimed.
In their services, Shakers liked to dance and sing in a manner that observers found bizarre. They would “whisk around with greatest rapidity, like so many dervishes.” But in organizing their self-sustaining communities, which stretched from New England to Indiana and Kentucky, they were eminently practical.
Members mastered the various crafts needed to sustain their lives and to grow their sustenance. They rotated jobs to learn more skills. But their well-built barns and houses and their graceful furniture were emblems of something much deeper. The Shakers’ goal was to live “in the eye of eternity.”
A key tenet of Shaker beliefs was the sanctity of work. Pounding a horseshoe or rolling out a pie crust was an act of worship. It focused attention and formed a connection to the divine. This put believers at odds with the burgeoning industrial revolution, in which labor was becoming a commodity and most workers were alienated from the tasks at which they spent their lives.
Things important to the outside world — the acquisition of material goods, financial security, and political power —were to Shakers dross, or worse, occasions of sin. They refused to compromise with secular notions. They understood, as Emily Dickinson would declare, that “All — is the price of All.”
Shakers saw a gradual decline during the years after the Civil War. No one knows if the believers at Sabbathday Lake will be the last of their breed. But they represent, as they always have, a utopian strain of decency, sincerity, and rational priorities that has long contributed to American thought. It is an attitude that might be heeded today in a world increasingly given to distraction and frenzied consumerism.
Utopia literally means “no place.” But, as Oscar Wilde noted, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at . . . Progress is the realization of Utopias.”
You can read more about the Shakers and their influence HERE
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I remember a lot about the Shakers from Heaven's Ditch(a very good read). I first thought they were similar to the Amish with staying with their beliefs and not budging and I like simple and always have. Makes like so much easier and better. Love your column Jack.
I’m reminded of all I learned from Heaven’s Ditch. Yes, the Shakers had extremely strange rituals and beliefs. But how could they have reached those devine heights without the separation from secularity those beliefs created?
The respect for the glory of performing simple tasks is attractive to me. It’s reflected in Joseph Campbell’s work. It was this line of thinking that led me to become a dancer, where my body became my temple.