Shakers at Prayer
Most Americans viewed the Shakers with a mixture of fascination and suspicion. They feared the sect’s radical aspects, such as a commitment to celibacy and communal property, and considered the Shakers’ dancing more an invitation to debauchery than a form of prayer. Those apprehensions surfaced in this engraving, The Shakers of New Lebanon (New York), which expresses both the powerful intensity and the menacing character of this Shaker spiritual ritual. The work of the journalist-engraver Joseph Becker, the picture appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1873. © Bettmann.