Mom is in town, and yesterday we went to the Arts & Crafts exhibit at the de Young.
One of the wall placards says, “The problems caused by free trade and the Industrial Revolution had been recognized since the 1830s . . . .”
The part about free trade is easy to debunk: the first triumph of the British free trade movement was the repeal in 1846 (motivated in part by the Irish famine) of the protectionist Corn Laws.
The plight of the working classes before that is familiar from Oliver Twist (1837–9) and A Christmas Carol (1843), but since I can’t see how industrialization itself could cause it, I prefer to blame the Inclosure Acts which dispossessed small landholders and thus depressed wages (while the Corn Laws kept food prices high). The new industrialists naturally took advantage of cheap labor, but one cannot reduce wages by offering employment.
The main problem caused by free trade and the industrial revolution is, of course, that people now have long healthy lives free of hunger, cold, etc.
Clearly, all of this violates god’s plan, or is it gaia’s plan. I can never keep ’em straight.
I saw the same exhibit and placard recently. In the context of the exhibit the problems referred to were for traditional craftspeople and craftswork. I don’t think there’s anything there to debunk. It makes perfect sense that competition from industrial processes and abroad would lead to a decline in traditional crafts.
A placard on the opposite wall said something like “The industrial revolution brought many benefits — a middle class, unimagined wealth, … — but also problems …”
I thought the placards and exhibit were as fair as could be expected, and historically accruate. The “problems” of industry and trade were recognized early. That recognition was doubtless overwhelmingly wrongheaded, but it did (and does) exist.
A correct exhibit from my perspective would’ve said it was great that people could afford to indulge in finely made traditional crafts due to the tremendous wealth created by industry in the decades before, but I’d also have to note that is certainly not what most arts&crafts people were thinking…
Thanks, Mike, evidently I jerked the knee without looking closely enough.