Praying For The Porcelain God

BRIAN: Well before interchangeable parts were a twinkle in Eli Whitney’s eye, another item inspired visions of a brighter future.

ED: Here’s the situation. In British North America, colonists enjoyed luxury goods courtesy of the sprawling British empire– tea and spices from India, sugar from the Caribbean, and finished goods like glass, paper, and fine furniture made in London. There was just one catch. Colonists could only buy these goods from British merchants, often at a substantial markup. This forced dependence on England was a source of mounting tension. Frustrated colonists took to smuggling overpriced goods like tea. They also began to manufacture their own versions of imported luxuries, and this simple act helped pave the way for American independence. In some ways, it set the table.

PETER: Which brings us to our next manufactured object– porcelain. Most of us probably have a porcelain cup or two in our kitchen. For American colonists, porcelain was as coveted and valuable as sterling silver.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: It’s about refinement and the Americans were eager to live a refined lifestyle.

PETER: This is Alexandra Kirtley, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She says to understand why early Americans were so enamored of imported porcelain, you’d have to compare to the earthenware pottery manufactured in the colonies. Earthenware was the opposite of refinement. It was rough, thick, heavy, and easily broken.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: Porcelain is different from earthenware. It’s harder. It’s also translucent, so when you put it up to light, light shines through it. So how– how wonderful that you have this material that is, at once, stronger, yet light transmits through it.

PETER: Right, so all the senses were engaged. This is the Enlightenment sensorium, as historians call it– the Enlightenment in a teacup, you might say.

[LAUGHTER]

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: Yes, that’s a nice way of putting it. And in America, there was not only the desire to have this porcelain and to use this porcelain, but to make it. So if the Americans or the colonists could produce their own porcelain, why, the world was their oyster. Because that was the ultimate in luxuryware production.

PETER: Kirtley says that by the mid-18th century, colonists could produce their own porcelain. They had discover rich deposits of kaolin– that’s the clay used to make porcelain– in the American South. And they had a seemingly limitless supply of wood to keep fires burning in porcelain kilns. They even had craftsmen who could build the kilns and keep them going. By 1770, there were two known American manufactories of fine porcelain, in Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina.

The goal was, in the words of one potter, to make every kind of earthenware that is usually imported from England. These factories produced everything, from finely decorated plates and pitchers to pickle stands, to the delight of the colonists who could afford them. You could say this local porcelain inspired the colonies’ first “buy local” movement.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: There was a lot of support at the top. Ben Franklin himself, when he was in London, his wife sent him some porcelain made at the porcelain works here in Philadelphia, and he replied back to her and said, go on in encouraging the manufacturers at the china works.

PETER: But not everyone was happy that the colonists had cracked the porcelain ceiling.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: The Brits would have been quite nervous that the Americans were able to do this, that the Americans were actually able to produce luxury manufactures. You know, the American colonies were established by the British with the goal of providing raw materials to the mother country.

PETER: The whole point of the colonies was not to manufacture but to provide raw materials for manufacturing on the other side of the ocean.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: That’s correct. That’s correct. Americans continued to be not only a source of the raw materials, but also a market for those manufactured goods. However, the American colonists, as they were able to become more proficient in local manufactures, became more of a threat to that mercantile system that the British created and were thriving on. If colonial Americans were producing, were manufacturing their own products, then the whole system would break down.

PETER: All of which helps explain what happened next.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: Back in jolly old England, the manufacturers there heard about this, and they cut their prices.

PETER: Ow.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: Yes.

PETER: Yeah. So this is a kind of commercial warfare that anticipates the Revolution itself, you might say, like dumping porcelain in America to eliminate potential competition?

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: That’s correct.

PETER: Those British price cuts crushed the tiny American porcelain industry. But Kirtley says experience making porcelain fired Americans’ imaginations about their future.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: It was sort of wind in the sails that we were able to boast of making porcelain in America. It really was a great badge of honor for us. And part of that was sort of the alchemy that was reflected in the production of porcelain– using the earth, using materials that were naturally occurring, combining them, adding heat to them, and coming up with a completely new substance.

PETER: You might say, Alexandra, that if you could transform the earth, as you do with porcelain, you could transform the country and make the land into a new country.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: That’s actually a wonderful analogy. I mean, you could. There was something that was inspirational about being able to create something magical, exotic, and perhaps also that regular people could throw off the powers of the mother country.

PETER: This is why visions of the future are so important to Americans at this time.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: That’s correct.

PETER: Of course, they’re proving something to the Brits. But more important than that, they’re proving something to themselves. Because provincial Americans would have doubts about their capacities, about their civility, about their refinement, and this was a definitive answer. Because they look at the growing wealth of the colonies and say, yeah, one day, we could be England.

ALEXANDRA KIRTLEY: That’s correct, too. It provided– it was a source of pride that they were going to be able to do this. The Great Experiment was going to be able to take hold. If they could produce that, if they could manufacture that, then we really didn’t need to be connected to Britain. They saw themselves playing on a world field. They saw themselves being able to participate like England, France, Germany, Italy.

PETER: Alexandra Kirtley is a curator of American decorative arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And if you want to see some of that fine American porcelain for yourself, head to our website, backstoryradio.org.