Page "Arts and Crafts movement" Paragraph 18

While the Europeans tried to recreate the virtuous crafts were being replaced by industrialisation, Americans tried to establish a new type of virtue to replace heroic craft production: well-decorated middle-class homes.

They claimed that the simple but refined aesthetics of Arts and Crafts decorative arts would ennoble the new experience of industrial consumerism, making individuals more rational and society more harmonious.

The American Arts and Crafts movement was the aesthetic counterpart of its contemporary political philosophy, progressivism.

Characteristically, when the Arts and Crafts Society began in October 1897 in Chicago, it was at Hull House, one of the first American settlement houses for social reform.