Revolutionary War, American (1775-83)

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    The Revolutionary Power of a Skein of Yarn

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    Not long ago, Michelle Obama posted a black-and-white photo of herself on Instagram, cozy in an armchair, a nearby side table displaying an adorable baby pic of Malia and Sasha. She is barefoot, dressed in wide-legged jeans and a satin shirt, smiling widely as she looks down … at her knitting. “Every time I tell people how much I love to knit,” she writes in the caption, “They seem so surprised!”And I thought, why?I suspect it’s because knitters, unlike Mrs. Obama, are presumed to be aging ungracefully: prim, elderly (probably white) ladies rocking away on the porch in cultural irrelevance. Before I refute that — yarn lovers come in all ages, genders, sexualities and races — I want to ask, even if it were true, so what? The dismissal, the reflexive derision of women from midlife onward — especially if we stop chasing social media standards of beauty — is a nasty form of ageist sexism.Besides, that imagined innocuousness can be a strength, even a superpower. Knitting is considered a “craft,” one you begin by “casting on,” evoking spells and witchery, a kind of practical magic. What greater sorcery is there, really, than making something, whether turning raw fiber to thread or raw flour to bread or engaging in the ultimate creative act: conjuring new humans from nowhere at all?Our needles have also been a sharp political tool, wielded to fight injustice, to express both patriotism and protest, especially when other outlets were forbidden. No matter how you ended up feeling about those pink pussyhats, it was no accident that women’s first collective act of dissent after the election of President Donald Trump was to knit.Back in the days of the American Revolution, women’s boycotts of British cloth in favor of “homespun,” and their defiant public “spinning bees” were at least as instrumental in the fight for independence as the spilling of all that tea. Molly “Old Mom” Rinker, one of the era’s fabled spies, reportedly tucked bits of information about British troop movements into balls of yarn. Who would suspect an aging matron, placidly knitting socks at a scenic overlook, of tossing message-laced skeins to the patriots? Knitting’s benign reputation allowed her to subvert the very conventions she appeared to uphold.The French had their “tricoteuses,” which translates to women knitters (they have a word for that!), particularly those who, during the Reign of Terror, sat before the guillotines bearing grim witness to public executions. You may recall Madame Defarge from “A Tale of Two Cities,” whose stitches formed a Reaper’s roster of the condemned. Her real-life counterparts were equally complex, a mix of feminist hero and vengeful villain. Many (presumably savoring l’ironie) were said to knit liberty caps as the heads rolled: those red, conical hats with the point folded forward that represented freedom from tyranny. Marianne, a national symbol of France, is often depicted in a liberty cap. So, for reasons I cannot determine, is Papa Smurf.Sojourner Truth offered a different twist on yarn and femininity during the Civil War, posing for photographs with her knitting, a nod to her belief that education and industry were the key to her community’s advancement. Decades later, when troops in World War I were dying by the tens of thousands from an epidemic of trench foot, caused by persistently wet toes, it was knitters to the rescue. The best defense was to change your socks — a lot — but factories of the time couldn’t handle the load, so home crafters produced them. I’m not saying we won that war because of women’s knitting, but I’m not sure we would’ve won without it.Another activist first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, was rarely without her knitting and began the Knit for Defense campaign during World War II. Similarly to Old Mom Rinker, female spies of the time used knitting as cover, one even parachuting behind enemy lines, then using her needles to transport secret code.Today’s public knitters — and crocheters — are arguably more radical, perhaps in part because making something with your own hands almost by definition pushes back against dehumanizing technology and consumer culture. Knitters have mobilized against nuclear proliferation and the decimation of coral reefs. They have made blankets to welcome refugees; crafted tiny sweaters to save oil spill-damaged penguins; knit “temperature scarves” whose rows and colors document climate change; stitched for racial justice; sent handmade uteri to Congress in support of abortion rights (an especially apt political statement, since knitting needles were notoriously used, to women’s peril, in back-alley abortions). During the second Iraq war, a knitter in Denmark swathed a tank in a massive, homey knit blanket. The Russian feminist punk group Pussy Riot famously masked their identities beneath brightly colored, knit balaclavas while performing songs such as “Putin’s Pissed Himself” and “Kill the Sexist.”Do such acts of “craftivism” ultimately make a difference? I can’t say. But I do believe that change starts with personal reflection, followed by connection to like-minded others, and, finally, engagement in repeated, targeted collective action. The conversations our projects inspire can jump-start that process, one stitch at a time.In that spirit, I’d like to see knitters, perhaps led by Mrs. Obama, next aim their needles at the fashion industry, pushing for the kind of large-scale overhaul here that is beginning in the European Union: an unprecedented series of measures addressing the catastrophic environmental and social impact involved in the making and disposal of our clothing. The goal by 2030 is for all textiles sold in that market to be, among other things, reparable, recyclable, often made from recycled fibers that are free from hazardous chemicals and produced with respect for labor rights.It’s a necessary start. Fashion is responsible for more greenhouse gasses than international flights and maritime shipping combined, not to mention a fifth of global plastics and trillions of microfibers: tiny plastic threads shed by clothing when laundered that have become one of the biggest threats to the ocean. Treatment of the industry’s largely female work force in Asia, long a human rights concern, has deteriorated so badly since the pandemic that some activists now refer to it as the “garment industrial trauma complex.” Not so pretty.This would be a natural fit for those who value the materials, skill and care that go into our garments. Besides, people who think about the ethics and planetary cost of what they put into their bodies ought to extend that “omnivore’s dilemma” to what they put onto them.Knitters might consider yarn-bombing the New York State Legislature (we like a little levity with our lobbying), where the recently-amended Fashion Act aims to hold large companies accountable for their environmental and labor practices. Or perhaps support the FABRIC Act, sponsored by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, which includes increased safety and wage protections for American piece workers, for whom handicraft is decidedly not a luxury.So yes, knitting can be meditative, it can be relaxing, it may reduce vulnerability to dementia, anxiety and high blood pressure. It also results (if you’re lucky) in some pretty nice stuff. And maybe the demographic does still skew toward the older and the female. But why not embrace that?Because Michelle and the rest of us aging ladies? We don’t have to just sit and rock; we can rock it.Peggy Orenstein (@peggyorenstein) is the author of “Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Soul of America

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      Second only to how much the this country accomplished in two decades — no set of colonies had ever liberated itself, nor since Rome had anyone designed a republic that could endure — was how much the founders quarreled among themselves.There were petty feuds, lifelong feuds, intermittent feuds, inexplicable feuds, deadly feuds. Those who lived and worked closely together quarreled. Those who spent little time in the same room quarreled. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson fell out. Jefferson and John Adams fell out. So did Adams and Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine and George Washington, Washington and Jefferson. When John Adams sailed to France to negotiate a treaty of peace at the end of the war, Jefferson wondered with whom he would side. Adams hated both the French and the British. He also hated his colleagues, Franklin and John Jay.The language could be rich — and brutal. The most peevish, John Adams, naturally proved the most quotable. He found Franklin’s life “one continued insult to good manners and decency.” He called Hamilton “a bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” — three times, in three different letters, over 10 years. He deemed Washington “illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station.” Thomas Paine was to his mind “a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf.” There was ample reason Jefferson should compare John Adams — with whom he ultimately reconciled, a decade before their deaths — to “a poisonous weed.”The collisions tell us a great deal about the personalities at play; a straight-spined, word-spewing John Adams was never going to fare well with a supple, silent Thomas Jefferson. But the collisions also reveal deep-seated, warring strains in the national character.Nowhere was that more apparent than in the ill-starred friendship of John Hancock and Samuel Adams. The two spent the most hair-raising hours of their lives in each other’s company. They worked side by side over nearly three decades. But they did so intermittently, as for much of that time they were not on speaking terms.Colleagues in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Adams and Hancock colluded to undermine and oust a royal governor. Together they conspired to publish his private letters. Together they patrolled a Boston wharf over several critical evenings in December 1773, when they collaborated in plotting the destruction of East India Company tea. The two most wanted men in Massachusetts, they shared a Lexington bedroom on the night of April 18, 1775. Together they heard, from Paul Revere, of their imminent arrest. At dawn, as British soldiers and British colonists fired at each other for the first time, Hancock and Adams huddled together, several miles away, in a swamp. Which did not make of them natural companions.Having inherited one of New England’s greatest fortunes at a young age, Hancock was an early American plutocrat. He lived and entertained, reported one neighbor, “like a prince.” In modern terms Hancock was the billionaire philanthropist who never met a naming opportunity he could resist. He gave Boston a fire engine, a bandstand, streetlights, trees, a library, a church bell. (There were no media companies in those days.) He liked to be thanked and got his money’s worth; his name was everywhere bandied about. The common people, a minister noted, would support Hancock even if they knew nothing of his character. There was reason one Boston visitor called him “the king of the rabble.”Fifteen years Hancock’s senior, Adams was a principled, penniless political operator, an unwavering republican who trusted that once colonial tempers calmed, the clock would reset itself, and piety, education and virtue would among them save the American day.An expert reader of men, Adams had early on encouraged Hancock’s political ambitions. He guessed that the attention would please the young man, whose fortune would please the party. Adams remained on hand to soothe a petulant Hancock when wayward comments left him bruised. He coaxed him back to the fold when Hancock attempted to skulk off. He directed him to the spotlight, Hancock’s preferred address.It made for an uneasy pairing. One man was all preening and extravagance, the other all austerity and ideals. Hancock displayed in his mansion the magnificent John Singleton Copley portrait of Adams that today hangs in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, a portrait Hancock most likely commissioned. But at various junctures he also attempted to distance himself from his mentor. Crown officials compared Adams’s recruiting of Hancock with the devil’s seduction of Eve. Every time the younger man attempted to liberate himself, Adams would — like a squid — “discharge his muddy liquid,” disorienting Hancock all over again.Early in the 1770s, Hancock finally succumbed to the blandishments of the royal governor, who reminded him of the toll Adams and his radical politics were taking on Hancock’s private affairs. He bought off Hancock with a corps of ceremonial cadets; Hancock threw himself into ordering musical instruments and uniforms, outfitting his men in scarlet coats and beaver hats. He swore off all connection with Adams, whom he hoped never to see again. He then started a campaign to oust Adams from the Massachusetts House, proposing an inquiry into his finances. (They were a morass.) Hancock managed to detach nearly a third of Boston voters from Adams, who was forced to run about town, defending himself against comments he had never made.Ultimately friends reconciled the two, though the relationship limped along from slight to recrimination and back again. One man was all steadfast starch, the other “flattered by ideas of his own consequence,” as a contemporary put it. At the same time, there were no illusions about who was directing whom. As one Crown officer saw it, Hancock was “a poor contemptible fool, led about by Adams.”The two arrived together at the second Continental Congress but would fall out spectacularly on that larger stage. Adams was particularly disgusted by Hancock’s attempt to arrange for a formal farewell ceremony before a Philadelphia departure; it was the kind of ostentation that Adams abhorred in a nascent republic. Hancock traveled north with a troop of light horse and liveried servants that left the country people gaping in awe. Adams quietly made the same trip several weeks later. Tavern keepers along the way complained: Hancock and his enormous retinue had neglected to settle their bills.Back in Boston, Hancock lost no time in maligning Adams. He nursed a rumor that Adams had participated in the Conway Cabal, a shadowy plot against General Washington. Adams could only stutter in disbelief. He did his best to ignore the slight, but it stung. To any and all he insisted that though Hancock considered him his enemy, he considered Hancock a friend.The two disagreed violently about Shays’ Rebellion in 1786, when western Massachusetts farmers rose up in armed revolt against new taxes. Adams saw the ringleaders as a threat to a legitimately elected government. He believed they should hang. As governor, Hancock pardoned them.Though the two reconciled briefly before Hancock’s death, their ghosts continued to fight it out in the press, precisely as their spirits do today.We have landed at the very intersection where the founders parted ways, tax cuts leading in one direction, Medicare and Social Security in the other. With mere days to go before the midterms, we appear to be agreed that, once again, it’s the economy, stupid. But beyond inflation and unemployment looms a far more ominous concern. Can democracy survive a stampede of billionaires? Can a capitalist country remain a country of equals?Some two centuries later, those questions may haunt us more than any other issue that divided the founders, who — for all their differences — could never have envisioned so much wealth so firmly concentrated in so few hands. To the 18th- century merchant elite, the demands of the people endangered the nation’s prosperity. Wall Street makes the same case today when it argues in favor of trickle-down economics. To Adams’s mind, the greater danger came from the elite calling the shots. Privilege, he believed, should step aside, to make room for opportunity and industry.His vote was for progress and prosperity across the board, for what matured into the American dream. He could not have imagined that torrents of money might one day spill noiselessly into elections, any more than he could have imagined that — appropriate though it might be — he was to live on as a beer, John Hancock as an insurance company.Stacy Schiff, recipient of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography, is the author, most recently, of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” from which this essay is adapted.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More