The Furniture Industry in the 1890s (United States)

Hard times came to the American furniture industry early in the 1890s. A financial crisis—the Panic of 1893—hit the United States economy that year and led to severe recession. From 1894 through 1898 unemployment remained at a very high level—above 10 percent. This downturn permeated all areas of commercial activity, with a halting recovery beginning in 1897 and 1898, after five difficult years. Sales of household furniture declined as Americans curtailed expenditures for such “consumer durables,” and housing construction dramatically slowed. The country’s strained economy and the drop in furniture sales were constant trade journal topics in these years. According to an 1899 editorial in Furniture Trade Review, “The five years previous to the present season... were hard ones for manufacturers and retailers alike... Depression prevailed.” Along with other trade journals, it chronicled the erratic return to normal business conditions, saying in early 1898, “The holiday business was very fair, a noticeable result of hard times.” That spring, the Review’s editors worried about imminent war with Spain, but U.S. naval and land victories led to a swift conclusion of the Spanish-American War and brightened the industry’s optimism. Through the fall and winter of 1898, the editors of Furniture Trade Review stayed hopeful about trade conditions, and in March 1899, they reported that manufacturers were “enjoying a season of prosperity that they have not experienced since 1892. [Because of] improved financial conditions in the country, confidence has been restored...[and] general prosperity reigns supreme.” Though sales patterns were uneven through the remainder of the year, trade journal editorials began to be consistently positive, and in May 1900, one announced that April had been “the biggest month that the trade has ever enjoyed.” In 1900, times were good, consumers had cash to spend, and they were willing to spend it on good-quality furniture. Though manufacturers may have puzzled over exactly what the public wanted, the trade journals predicted that the revived economy would create “demand for better goods.”

David Cathers, "'The Moment'—Gustav Stickley from 1898 to 1990," in Gustav Stickley and the American Arts & Crafts Movement, ed. Kevin Tucker (Dallas, Texas: Dallas Museum of Art; New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010), 20. 

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