So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaslessly into the past

Magazine Antiques, July, 2001

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925

The great international fair, or Centennial Exposition, held in Philadelphia in 1876 demonstrated how insistently mechanization was modifying the daily habits of the American people. At every turn visitors were confronted by some new or improved machine or appliance. The symbol of the country's expanding industrial prowess was the giant Corliss steam engine, the most powerful and probably the most handsome machine that had ever been constructed by man. Made of highly refined metals, shaped to enormous size yet to precise detail, it had two cylinders bored to a diameter of forty inches, a flywheel thirty feet in diameter, and great piston rods of great speed and efficiency. The seven-hundred-ton engine performed with the quiet perfection of a watch as it produced up to twenty-five hundred horsepower. Seeing it, in the words of the editors of Godey's Lady's Book, was "simply stupendous."

But for all their mechanical ingenuity, Americans had not yet successfully married the machine to the arts. While the best exhibits of American furniture, silverware, and other household accessories could challenge anything shown by European exhibitors, one disenchanted reporter complained that the American department at the Centennial Exposition "was largely crowded with badly-designed, tawdry, and vulgar work, only fit, at the best, for the drawing room of a parvenu, or the glittering saloon of a North River steamboat." The Centennial aroused a poignant nostalgia for the early American past and inspired the native-born elite who visited the exposition in part to explore the social and domestic life of colonial America. The colonial revival emerged in the "New England Kitchen" restaurants at the exposition; in the renewed interest in colonial architecture (termed the Queen Anne style); in spinning wheels and open hearths; in crafts organizations and commemorative events in pageant form; and in popular art, novels, and guidebooks, such as Alice Morse Earle's Home Life in Colonial Days, published at the turn of the century.

This looking backward and preference for bygone days involved more than nostalgic or homesick longings. Implicit in these expressions was a dissatisfaction with contemporary life, or antimodernism. By the time of the Centennial, the nation had grown vastly, and the colonial past recalled the wholesome simplicities of life in an earlier age. Again and again in American history, during peaks of popular faith in the idea of progress and ebullient optimism, important segments of the population have desired to do nothing more than remain where they stood, to keep old ways familiar, even to flee from the present, ignore the future, and take refuge in a golden yesteryear:

The concluding decades of the nineteenth century were defined by frightening specters of disintegration. Labor issues, the protests of women against their inferior status, the nature of the developing monopoly system, and the decline of the family farm were all matters that demanded public attention. And numerous voices were raised against the direction American culture was heading: religion was being stifled by evolutionary science, philosophy was losing coherence, ethnic diversity and female assertiveness threatened the premises of culture and education, and materialism and conspicuous consumption were debasing the spirit. In reaction, some people were propelled toward colonial revivalism, which included a growing passion for collecting American antiques. Their desire to hold on to the past was reflected by writers such as Mark Twain, in Old Times on the Mississippi, and Sarah Orne Jewett, in The Country of the Pointed Firs, who voiced powerful criticisms of America's direction at this time, and for the fi rst time raised the specter that American life might require, and even be founded upon, the pitiless extinction of the past. However, other voices were much more optimistic about the new directions in social values and academic disciplines, and many intellectuals perceived an imperative to be modern. Their favorite notion was to cut out a middle ground between what they perceived to be the comforting but weakening assumptions of Victorianism and the exciting but frightening implications of modernity. Thus the American people of this volcanic era were reluctant modernists, attempting to synthesize the traditions and ideals of their past with the possibilities of modernist streams of thought.

It lies within our power to recognize the historic importance of nostalgia for understanding the moods and motives of Americans. It is necessary and proper that a place be reserved for the spirit of nostalgia, alongside the idea of progress, in any sophisticated structure designed to contain a history of the American experience. It will become us to do so, as together, like the god Janus, we face the future by facing the past.

Wendell Garrett