Now I Sit Me Down (13 page)

Ladder-back, rush-bottom rocking chair

The first rocking chairs were used by nursing mothers, and were also considered suitable for the elderly and the infirm. However, as people realized that such chairs were an inexpensive alternative to upholstered easy chairs, their popularity grew, and by 1750, rush-bottom rocking chairs had spread from Pennsylvania to New England. Before the turn of the century, rockers were being attached to Windsor chairs. A Windsor rocker cost about twice as much as a rush-bottom rocker, but with its carved seat, ample width, and sloping back it was considerably more comfortable.

By the 1820s, rocking chairs had become a national fad; every American home had at least one. They were as likely to be found in the parlor as in the bedroom or kitchen. Or on the porch—porches facing the street were a distinctive feature of American houses, and rocking chairs were tailor-made for people-watching. One of the most popular rocking chairs was the Boston rocker, a comb-back Windsor chair with a tall back surmounted by a broad top rail that provided comfortable support for the head—and a convenient location for decoration, usually stenciled floral motifs. The spindles of the back were sometimes gently curved in an S shape, and the arms were generally heavy and ended in scrolls. Some Boston rockers had elaborate seats that curved down at the front and up at the rear.

Foreigners were struck—and amused—by the American habit of rocking back and forth. The writer Frances Trollope described women living in a Philadelphia boardinghouse: “As to what they do … it is not very easy to say; but I believe they clear-starch a little, and iron a little, and sit in a rocking-chair and sew a great deal.” Another nineteenth-century British visitor described the rocking chair as “of exclusive American contrivance and use,” and commented on the “comfort and luxurious ease of these wooden narcotics.” Philip Schaff, a Swiss theologian who spent most of his life in the United States, went further and considered the rocking chair to be a reflection of national character. “Even when seated, [Americans] push themselves to and fro in their rocking chairs,” he wrote in 1854; “they live in a state of perpetual excitement in their business, their politics, and their religion…”

Boston rocker

Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the 1830s, had nothing to say about rockers but he did record an insight that bears on chairs. Always on the lookout for differences between America and France, he pointed out that in aristocratic France an accomplished artisan could sell his skills to the elite at a high price, whereas in a democracy the mass market required vastly reduced prices. “But there are only two ways of lowering the price of commodities,” he wrote. “The first is to discover some better, shorter, and more ingenious method of producing them; the second is to manufacture a larger quantity of goods, nearly similar, but of less value.” Tocqueville was certainly correct about what drove the difference between a
fauteuil
à
la reine
and a sack-back Windsor chair, but reducing prices is not the only way to attract buyers in a mass market. Another is novelty. No sooner did the rocking chair become popular than chairmakers began offering unusual options: a rocking chair for invalids with a superstructure frame over which a protective blanket could be draped, turning it into an improvised wing chair; baby rockers for children and medium-size rockers for youths; settee rockers for two; a settee rocker with a fence insert that transformed the space next to the mother into a cradle. Samuel May of Sterling, Massachusetts, patented a rocker in which the seat and one arm slid sideways to make the chair wider, and the removable headpiece was inserted into the front of the seat, converting the rocking chair into a baby's cradle.

The line between chairmaker and chair inventor was often blurred. Samuel Gragg was an enterprising joiner who learned how to steam-bend wood while making continuous-arm Windsor chairs as an apprentice in New York City. After he opened his own furniture shop in Boston in 1801, he made Windsor chairs and rocking chairs with delicate S-shaped back splats (which would influence the design of Boston rockers). He also experimented with steam-bending, and in 1808 patented a chair made entirely out of extremely thin pieces of bent wood. It is a remarkable design: the front legs curve up to form the edge of the seat, and curve again to form the back support; the back splats and the seat are made of continuous pieces. He called it the Elastic Chair. Although a few dozen examples survive in museums today, the chair was not a commercial success. “The Elastic Chair was simply too labor and skill intensive to be financially successful,” Michael Podmaniczky, a Delaware chairmaker and restorer, who is an authority on Gragg, wrote to me in an e-mail. Podmaniczky has built several Elastic Chairs, both for exhibitions and for his own use, and I asked him what the delicate-looking chairs were like to sit in. “They are as comfortable as a solid wood chair can be. As for their strength, they are superior to most.” Is the chair really elastic? “No. It's actually quite stiff,” he answered. “Gragg was thinking of the pliable wood after steaming when he named it.” As we shall see in the following chapter, it would be left to another inventor to perfect a chair made out of bentwood.

Elastic Chair (Samuel Gragg)

The rocking chair took many forms: Windsor chair, Boston rocker, rush-bottomed chair, rattan and wicker chair. Early in the nineteenth century, fully upholstered parlor rockers appeared, with tufted backs, padded armrests, and mahogany frames. It was in such a chair that President Lincoln was assassinated in Ford's Theatre.

The rocking chair never went out of fashion, but the homely rocker acquired an unexpected glamor in the 1960s, thanks to President Kennedy. As a senator, Kennedy had chronic back pain, and his doctor prescribed sitting in a rocking chair. The chair alleviated Kennedy's lower-back tension by contracting and relaxing the muscles—a wooden narcotic, indeed. The particular model the doctor recommended to the president was—and is—manufactured by a small company in North Carolina. The traditional high-back design, which dates from the late 1920s, uses an oak frame to support a woven cane seat and has a distinctive caned backrest. President Kennedy had fourteen of these chairs, and used them in the Oval Office, the White House bedroom, Camp David, his summer house at Hyannis Port, and even on Air Force One.

The rocking chair, like touch football, became a popular symbol of the Kennedy presidency, not least because it was perceived—correctly—to be quintessentially American. The rocker is a chair that is equally at home on the front porch of a cabin in the Ozarks and on the balcony of the White House.
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Like the klismos, which it doesn't resemble in the least, it is a democratic chair.

 

SEVEN

The Henry Ford of Chairs

One of the first chairs you need, when furnishing a new home, is a dining chair. You can make do with cushions on the floor instead of an easy chair, as I did in my first apartment, and you can read a book or watch television lying in bed, but if you are going to eat at a table you need something to sit on. Early in our marriage and shortly after we had finished building our house, my wife and I decided to replace our collection of beat-up side chairs, accumulated separately over the years, with proper dining chairs. I knew what I wanted. I had a bentwood-and-cane chair in my university office. I had used it for several years so I knew it was comfortable, and I liked the way it looked.

We visited a furniture distributor in the east end of Montreal who carried bentwood chairs. The one I wanted turned out to be pricier than we expected—or could afford—so we looked at other models that were on display in the showroom. We were attracted to a bentwood chair with a curved hoop for the back, thin slats, a circular bentwood leg brace, all stained black. It was not quite as elegant as our first choice, and the padded seat was not as pretty as woven cane, but I knew from experience that cane would eventually sag and need to be replaced. This armless side chair was affordable, and equally important, with a taller back it offered better support and was actually more comfortable. The dealer offered a reduced price if we took eight of them, so we did. More than thirty years later they continue to serve.

Our dining chairs are stamped
MADE IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA
on the underside of the frame. Czechoslovakia has been associated with bentwood furniture since the mid-nineteenth century, when bentwood chair factories appeared in the beechwood forests of Moravia (today a part of the Czech Republic but then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). The man responsible for these factories looms large in the history of the chair. He transformed furniture-making, from a craft practiced by individual cabinetmakers in workshops, to an industry operating on a world scale.

Michael Thonet was born in 1796 in Boppard, a small town in the Palatinate, a border region of France but soon to become a part of Prussia. He came from a modest background—his father was a tanner—and as a boy he was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker.
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Eventually, he opened his own shop in Boppard, making furniture by hand in the time-tested way. Thonet was ambitious and inventive, and he began experimenting with laminated veneers, cutting wood into thin strips, boiling bundles of strips in glue, and bending them in molds. His earliest applications were curved headboards, baseboards for sofas, and back rails for chairs; his first large commission was cartwheels for the Prussian military. By 1836 he was making entire chairs out of bent veneer. Bentwood chairs required less material and labor and were cheaper to produce than hand-carved chairs, and because laminated wood was stronger they could be extremely light and graceful.

Thonet was not the first to explore bending laminated wood. Samuel Gragg had produced the Elastic Chair almost thirty years earlier, and Jean-Joseph Chapuis of Brussels, a Paris-trained master joiner, developed a technique for steam-bending laminated wood at about the same time. Chapuis served an exclusive clientele—he furnished the royal castle of Laeken in Brussels—and his delicate neoclassical chairs of laminated mahogany and beech are very beautiful; the curved legs recall those of a curule chair. It is unlikely that Thonet, a provincial cabinetmaker, would have known of Chapuis's work, any more than he would have heard of Gragg in far-off Boston. The Boppard craftsman seems to have arrived at the technique on his own.

In 1841, a display of Thonet's unusual furniture at a craft fair in Koblenz caught the eye of Prince Klemens von Metternich, chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Impressed by Thonet's handiwork, the noted statesman invited the cabinetmaker to his nearby country estate—Thonet showed up with several bentwood samples: a chair, a cartwheel, and a walking stick. Metternich convinced his guest to visit Vienna, where, with the chancellor's support, Thonet received a furniture order from Emperor Franz Josef. More important, Thonet was granted an Austrian patent for his wood-bending process.

Back in Boppard, things were not going well. Thonet had borrowed heavily to finance patent applications in Britain, France, and Belgium, and his impatient creditors forced him into bankruptcy. Finally, the penniless cabinetmaker and his large family—he had five sons and six daughters—immigrated to Vienna. It took Thonet several years to get back on his feet. While working for a Viennese furniture maker, he produced laminated wood flooring and exquisitely delicate laminated wood chairs for wealthy clients. But his real aim was to develop a light, inexpensive chair for a very different market: the growing number of restaurants and coffeehouses in the city.

When he was finally in a position to reopen his own workshop, his first customer was the fashionable Café Daum in Vienna, which he supplied with side chairs and coat stands. This was followed by an order for five hundred chairs from a Budapest hotel. Thonet's café chairs were exceedingly simple in design: round caned seats, independent front legs, and a single curved piece forming the rear legs and the backrest. The pieces were made of veneered mahogany—four veneers for the back and legs and five for the seat ring. By now Thonet had refined his technique, and the wood strips were first boiled in water, bent and allowed to dry, then glued together. A commercial chair takes a lot of punishment, and perhaps the greatest testament to Thonet's process is that the Café Daum chairs are said to have remained in continuous use for thirty years.