Allen H. Eaton

{{Short description|American crafts scholar}}

{{Infobox politician

| name = Allen Hendershott Eaton

| birth_date = 10 May 1878

| birth_place = Union, Oregon

| death_date = 7 December 1962 (aged 84)

| death_place = New York City

| occupation = teacher; politician; writer; art historian

| party=Republican

| alma_mater = University of Oregon

|spouse = {{marriage|Cecile Dorris|1903|1962}}

|children = Elizabeth and Martha

}}

Allen H. Eaton (1881–1970) was an American crafts scholar and politician who became a staff member of the Department of Surveys and Exhibits of the Russell Sage Foundation.[http://www.russellsage.org Russell Sage Foundation]

He studied at the University of Oregon where he joined the faculty in 1915.[https://www.wcu.edu/library/DigitalCollections/CraftRevival/people/alleneaton.html Allen Eaton] in the digital collections of Western Carolina University He was elected to the Oregon State legislature and curated the Oregon Art Room for the 1915 international Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.[https://archive.org/details/allenheatondeano0000vand/page/17/mode/1up Oregon pavilion photo] in Eaton's biography In 1917 he was expelled from the faculty of the university for being a pacifist, something that Upton Sinclair later wrote about in his defense.[https://archive.org/details/goosestepstudyof00sinc/page/171/mode/1up Allen Eaton vs. the University of Oregon] in Sinclair's The Goose-Step, 1923 The scandal caused him to lose his reelection in 1918 as a representative for Eugene.

He left Oregon for New York City "the next day" and got a position with the American Federation of Arts. His 1919 Buffalo, New York exhibition Arts and Crafts of the Homelands drew almost fifty thousand visitors. After the death of John C. Campbell in 1919 he took his place as field secretary for the Russell Sage Foundation, which resulted later in his Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands in 1937. In 1942 he was shocked at the treatment of Japanese-Americans through Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, and resolved to do something to help the internees remind themselves and the rest of America of their contributions. He had already written about the group in his 1932 Immigrant Gifts to American Life.[https://www.nytimes.com/1932/09/25/archives/immigrant-culture-immigrant-gifts-to-american-life-some-experiments.html New York Times review] of Immigrant Gifts to American Life, 25 September, 1932[https://archive.org/details/allenheatondeano0000vand/page/55/mode/1up Immigrant Gifts to American Life] in Eaton's biography His vision during the war was to have exhibitions on American arts and crafts travel from relocation center to relocation center, but he could not find sponsors for such an undertaking. He was determined to survey them for his work on American crafts however and visited several centers himself, impressed especially by miniature "gardens" and "home" decorations made from scrap and other local materials. This work resulted in his "Beauty behind Barbed Wire".[https://archive.org/details/allenheatondeano0000vand/page/125/mode/1up Beauty behind Barbed Wire] in Eaton's biography During the project he was gifted many articles for use in a large permanent exhibition that never transpired.[https://www.janm.org/exhibits/contested-histories Works now recovered] and in the possession of the Japanese American National Museum Among the artefacts was work by artist Estelle Peck Ishigo.[https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2018-06-01/artwork-from-japanese-american-internment-camp-returns-home Artwork From Japanese-American Internment Camp Returns Home], article on Wyoming Public Radio website, 2018

He was acknowledged as an early collector and admirer of Grandma Moses by her agent Otto Kallir.* Otto Kallir, Grandma Moses, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1975, page 5 At the end of his life, Eaton was working on a book about Moses and her farming subjects. In 1951 he had helped organize an exhibition of 25 works by her which included a catalog and an essay he wrote about her work. The year before Eaton died in 1961, the centenarian artist gifted him a double-sided painting showing scenes of a "Flax Farm", after having given a painting of a colonial-style farm called "Home Sweet Home" to his daughter Martha the year before. Eaton claimed he had known Grandma Moses "before she got famous" and had previously purchased a "Thanksgiving Turkey" painting by her in 1942.[https://archive.org/details/allenheatondeano0000vand/page/180/mode/1up Eaton's biography] on his and his daughter Martha's work with Grandma Moses moving her old one-room schoolhouse to the Bennington Museum