Not everyone is going global. Not everyone is scrambling to do more with less, and faster. Innovation can mean looking backward. "Labor," Congress decreed without abiding consequence back in 1914, "is not a commodity."
By example we have Randy Merrell. The important things in life, as he sees it, are family, faith and comfortable feet. In his Quonset hut workshop that smells of leather and wax, the three become one.He leans over a table and wields a blade that is something of the knife and something of the scalpel, extracting mysterious patterns out of a chocolate-colored hide of water buffalo calf. His movements are exact and just quicker than the eye can follow. It is as quiet here as he wants it to be, and he interrupts himself to speak.
"I don't see that our country is," he pauses, "well, it's not whole. But, but I think there is something grass-roots going on. . . . "
What is going on, if we pull back from one rock-cliff farming valley in Eastern Utah, is the resurgence of the American craftsman.
From this supple hide, Merrell is creating a pair of custom-fitted cowboy boots. In two or three weeks he will finish and present them to a customer who has waited a year on a back-order list. Maker and wearer share a breathtaking expectation. These boots will fit, endure and satisfy like no others.
Merrell and his wife, and perhaps someday his four sons, are alone in the enterprise. But they are hardly unique in the desire to produce something by hand for reward of the soul.
While making boots, Merrell is also teaching boot making. In a year, 30 or so eager men and women will be introduced to the craft during two-week sessions of the Merrell Institute of Bootmaking. That's about as many boot makers as existed in all of America just a generation ago.
Cutlery, bread, jewelry, furniture, glassware, ceramic tile, bicycles, confections, clothing, surf boards, beer, backpacks, cigars, spices, wrought iron, snowshoes, bound journals, mustards, musical instruments, briefcases, liqueurs, barbecue sauces, carpets, cheeses, wooden rowing dinghies, to name just some - all are coming to market in growing amounts from the hands of artisans, often at gratifying levels of quality, sometimes dazzlingly so. Just look at the expanding scores of specialty magazines on news racks.
"More people are going back to work with their hands than ever before. There has been a growing renaissance in the crafts for quite a few years," said the much-honored dean of America's craft movement, Sam Maloof.
Maloof has spent almost half a century building wooden furniture, piece by glorious piece. In his small workshop in a citrus grove of the Southern California city of Alta Loma, craftsmanship has reached such sublime refinement that Maloof was awarded a "genius" grant of $375,000 from the MacArthur Foundation.
American craftsmen and women never disappeared entirely, of course. But the assembly line claimed a heavy toll in their numbers and social relevance.
In the 1960s, those who took up crafts were called dropouts. Today they are portrayed as individual curiosities. The collective vigor of their revival remains obscured by the din of promotion for mass-marketed internationally produced goods, discount retailing and "image" advertising that so reign over daily commerce.
True, today's craftsmen and women of America, even by broadest definition, barely register as an economic force. Or so say the marketing experts.
But consider beer. At the turn of the century, practically every American city of any size had a local brewery. Each brew master was a craftsman with a personalized understanding of how beer should taste.
Prohibition killed all but a handful of regional breweries and the well-known industrial giants. Generations since have come to know American beer as a uniform, thin and aggressively carbonated lager.
Then, in recent years, craft returned to beer, beginning with the microbreweries in Northern California. By 1996, the Beverage Marketing Corp. counted 400 U.S. microbreweries and 650 brewpubs, where specialty beer is made and sold on the premises. The variety and craftsmanship of some of these ales, pilseners, stouts, porters, meads and lambics is noble.
Specialty beers still account for less than 3 percent of the American market. But that represents a one-year growth of nearly a third. And about two-thirds of a gallon of specialty beer is consumed for every adult in America, up fivefold in just five years.
The industrial titans of beer responded with their own so-called specialty brands. They formed partnerships with the most prosperous of microbreweries.
Market share, however, offers but the coldest appraisal of the artisan. There are subterranean urges to draw women and men out of factories and offices and push them toward the workbench or recipe cabinet.
"People want something that's real and personal. They come here from all over the country to study. And they all say the same thing. They seem to be feeling almost an urgency to build something of value and worth. It seems to be coming from way down in their souls."
Speaking is Randy Merrell's wife and partner in boot making, Lou-Ann. She does the decorative stitching, the signet of Western boots.
"Today, seniority and loyalty mean nothing in the workplace. Our students come here not wanting to trust their life anymore to someone else."
During two weeks in Utah with Merrell, students learn the basics by making boots for their own feet. One man undertook his studies with uncommon diligence, laboring nights, and walked away with seven pairs.
Some artisans work with every tool technology can offer, and others work in steadfast defiance of it. Either way, craftsmanship is costly.
"The only kind of labor which gives the workingman a title to all its fruits is that which he does as his own master," Pope Pious XI observed in 1930.
Only for some, though, is the harvest bountiful. The consumer's relative thinking about price and value does not favor the individual and the workbench.
Furniture maker Maloof commands five-figure prices for his chairs and can never make enough to answer demand. For others, the balance between satisfaction and survival is more delicate. Even if you decide that success is not entirely about money, it is (still) about money.
Cowboy boot maker Merrell has seen the question from two sides. If his name seems slightly familiar, perhaps you are a backpacker. After specializing in Western boots for half a dozen years, producing about 75 pairs in a boom year, Merrell was challenged by a friend during a trek into Utah's red rock canyon country.
"He asked, `Do you make hiking boots?' I said, `I don't know,' " Mer-rell recalls.
Thus began the revolution in lightweight hiking boots. Merrell also pioneered the use of Velcro instead of laces. For five years, he was a globe-trotter, president of a company bearing his name that consigned manufacturing to European assembly lines.
The experience emptied his spirits even as it promised riches. He was producing boots that sold well but did not wear well. Throwaway mentality sunk in. Next year, customers will want a new color. Expansion, financing, deals, debt - a familiar story.
Merrell left the enterprise and returned to the serenity of the workbench.
"A one-person business is really a life form," he said.
Merrell tells the students at each of his seminars that it will be a hard, slow sell. "There are few people willing to pay a craftsman."
There are some who will, however. And the price tag is not always so big.