The Historian of Technology and Her True Country
The title of my talk today, “the historian of technology and her true country,” is inspired by a writer of fiction, Flannery O’Connor.1 Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, this remarkable young woman had by the late 1950s—the time of SHOT’s founding—already attained distinction as one of her nation’s foremost producers of short fiction. Her stories regularly appeared in prestigious magazines and anthologies. Several garnered respected awards. A first novel and a collection of her stories had been translated into French.2
Perhaps the surest marker of her success, however, came when one of these stories was dramatized for presentation on that remarkable new medium of the day, American commercial television. O’Connor, who lived quietly on her mother’s dairy farm in rural Georgia along the Oconee River (you will hear reference to this river several times in my talk), had to borrow a set in order to watch the production. The drama traced the exploits of a drifter who takes work at a dairy farm and eventually marries the owner’s mentally impaired daughter in order to gain possession of an automobile. To O’Connor’s chagrin (but characteristic bemusement), the role of the drifter was played by the esteemed song-and-dance man Gene Kelly. (This foray into drama made no one forget American in Paris, another characteristic Hollywood product of the time.) Still more to her chagrin (but no bemusement), the producers altered the ending of her story. The Kelly character, after temporarily abandoning his new bride at a roadside café, thinks better of the situation and returns to pick up the girl. In the written version, the drifter does not return. He takes the car but not the girl.3
With plots like this, it is perhaps not surprising that O’Connor occasionally felt compelled to explain herself. About once a year—she was on crutches and had limited mobility—she traveled to college campuses, where she gave lectures and led workshops on the nature and aim of fiction. The essays she prepared for these occasions were later collected in a small volume. Its title, Mystery and Manners, aptly conveys what O’Connor saw as the central challenge of the serious writer of fiction: to glimpse the universal mysteries common to all human experience by observing as accurately as possible the manners and customs of lives in a particular place. A good character in a story, she once explained, is of interest “because he shares in the general human condition and in some specific human situation.”4
In many of these talks, O’Connor used as a jumping-off point an editorial published in Life magazine, the iconic publication of Henry Luce’s vast empire at Time, Incorporated. Luce had famously proclaimed the postwar era to be the American Century, and his editors at Life wanted to know why American novelists had not embraced his idea. Why did so many fiction writers dwell on the poor underside of American culture, the editors asked, when in fact Americans were living through a wholly remarkable period of national power marked by democratic principles made manifest by unprecedented material affluence for a vast middle class, as epitomized by the swaths of suburban houses with cars in every drive? In overlooking such beneficent scenes, the editors complained, writers failed to grasp that most universal of human concerns and experiences, “the joy of life itself.”5
Now here was a gauntlet few serious fiction writers could ignore. For O’Connor, the challenge was especially severe. Not only did she insist upon writing about the poor, she wrote about the southern rural poor, a people distinguished not only by their material poverty, but by their enduring resistance to the democratic secularism that Luce and his colleagues embraced so fully—a resistance that found expression in both the religion and the racism of her region. Further complicating matters for O’Connor were her own deep religious convictions. For she was, as the title of one of her essays put it, “A Catholic [capital C] Novelist in the Protestant South,” and the mysteries she ultimately strove to reveal were those she associated with her God and her faith.6
It was with this deep sense of alienation from the prevailing spirit of her times that O’Connor responded to the likes of Henry Luce and explained the plight of the fiction writer. Characteristically, she chose her words carefully, and I want to take you through them carefully:
What is such a writer going to take his “country” to be? The word usually used by literary folk in this connection would be “world,” but the word “country” will do; in fact, being homely, it will do better, for it suggests more. It suggests everything from the actual countryside that the novelist describes, on to and through the peculiar characteristics of his region and his nation, and on, through, and under all of these to his true country, which the writer with Christian convictions will consider to be what is eternal and absolute. This covers considerable territory, and if one were talking of any other kind of writing than the writing of fiction [as we will be], one would perhaps have to say “countries,” but it is the peculiar burden of the fiction writer that he has to make one country do for all and that he has to evoke that one country through the concrete particulars of a life that he can make believable.
This is first of all a matter of vocation, and a vocation is a limiting factor which extends even to the kind of material that the writer is able to apprehend imaginatively. The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.7
On another occasion, O’Connor told a gathering of local authors:
To call yourself a Georgia writer is certainly to declare a limitation, but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to reality.8
And then there is this tidbit, particularly tantalizing for those of us assembled here:
There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene. For him, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima affects life on the Oconee River, and there’s not anything he can do about it.9
Such passages are what I have in mind when I ponder what might be the true country of the historian of technology. Historians of technology are not, strictly speaking, fiction writers. Yet as the title of John Staudenmaier’s now midpoint reflections on our discipline reminds us, we are storytellers.10 More than any other practitioners among the humanities and social sciences, historians practice the art of narrative, and in doing so we face many of the same challenges as the fiction writer. Like novelists, historians must immerse themselves in the manners and customs of a time and place, in hopes they might glimpse something of the larger mystery of human affairs. We, too, seek to connect the local to the universal, to speak to the largest of concerns through the most accurate rendering of reality. And though we need not share O’Connor’s particular way of seeing, each of us who aspires to narrate the past must make a commitment to our own mode of vision. We must have a point of view—not a preconceived opinion, necessarily, but a commitment to a way of seeing and a willingness to trust that the perspective we bring will reveal some insight into the human condition.
Just as O’Connor’s vision was at once deeply personal yet also connected to a larger theological tradition and community, so must our individual points of view derive from our belonging to a larger community, or a nexus of communities. For me, and I trust for many of you, SHOT and the discipline it supports provides such a community. Now of course the larger concerns that occupy us as historians of technology may not be “what is eternal and absolute” in the sense O’Connor used that phrase. Yet our concerns do possess a transcendent quality. Through our narratives (and here I would include exhibits and films and other media, in addition to works for the printed page), we hope to reveal something at once deeper and broader than what appears on the surface of the events we describe. We wish to contribute insights about, for lack of a better phrase, technology and culture. And in our shared commitment to that objective, we develop axioms and habits of mind that influence how we see. One of my prime objectives this evening is to reflect upon what being a part of this community has enabled me to see. I cannot speak for all of us; I can only share my own experience, and trust it resonates in some way with yours.
In seeking to glimpse the universal through the particular, the historian of technology must, like the fiction writer, navigate the particulars of region or country, as that term is commonly understood. Most of us, like most historians, stake some claim to knowing a particular place—a nation, or continent, or region—which may or may not be the place we know through felt experience. I am, in the prevailing usage, “an Americanist” (with apologies to my neighbors north and south) and also an American (subspecies Californian, or Westerner, now pretty thoroughly steeped in the South, though still, as students and neighbors regularly remind me, “not from there”). When we call ourselves historians of technology, we uproot ourselves from these geographic moorings and travel to some different country. Where have we gone? What have we put ourselves in position to see, and what have we given up in the process?
Is it, in fact, appropriate to disassociate technology from nation? Can technology ever be freed from nation? Or, conversely, is it ever not?
From its earliest days, such questions have loomed large within SHOT. The technologies of Flannery O’Connor’s day—mass production, television, space flight, centralized electronic computing, The Bomb—were often interpreted through the lens of an overarching ideological conflict between competing systems of social organization. In the pages of Technology and Culture, Lewis Mumford wrote of authoritarian and democratic techniques.11 In other forums, public intellectuals such as John Kouwenhoven could embrace mass production and the Model T as the ultimate expression of the values and culture of the United States—the manifestation of Luce’s American Century.12 Time would reveal this remarkable accretion of U.S. productive capacity as a passing phenomenon, the product of a particular constellation of events. American productive techniques circulated through other settings, where they melded with cultural routines and local governance structures. The resultant productive systems were at once recognizable heirs to the American antecedents yet distinctive products of their local environs. Now, today, as the world experiences another profound episode of globalization, in which technology appears to facilitate the rapid breaking down of national barriers while also losing what distinctive national character it might once have possessed, such questions again loom large.13
What O’Connor felt on the banks of the Oconee was the sort of global leveling or convergence that so many people perceive to be happening in our own time. All around her, O’Connor saw the forces encapsulated in Luce’s evocation of the American Century as advancing inexorably into her region.14 They showed up in the form of widened highways and strip malls brought literally to the edge of her farm.15 She found evidence of them as well in a set of stories written by students at the local college. “They might all have originated in some synthetic place that could have been anywhere or nowhere,” she complained. “These stories hadn’t been influenced by the outside world at all, only by television. It was a grim view of the future.”16 (She was, in fact, an admirer of Marshall McLuhan.17)
Like many people who perceive their identities to be threatened in this manner, O’Connor found some refuge in history. She confessed sheepishly to a friend that she was “reading of all things a history of Georgia written by a professor at the local college.” She found it fascinating. “It is full of eye-gougers and duelists,” she enthused.18 (Like many of us, she had learned to smile grimly at the local manners.)
O’Connor admired the great southern historian C. Vann Woodward, whose works were widely read at the time.19Woodward suggested the South suffered from a sense of loss—of failed promise—which hung upon the region and kept it from embracing change. Woodward associated the loss most explicitly with the American Civil War. O’Connor begged to differ. The real burden hanging over the South, as she saw things, came not from the lost war but from the institution of slavery.20 This was the South’s Original Sin; it was, in her memorable phrase, what left the place a “Christ-haunted region.”21
O’Connor lived in creative tension with this legacy. Slavery and segregation were sins, yet precisely because of this, southerners had “gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence— as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of our country.”22
In her lectures, O’Connor could state the differences in outlook between regions quite baldly, in terms we would not at all be surprised to hear at a SHOT meeting. I must quote her here: “Since the eighteenth century,” she told one audience, “the popular spirit of each succeeding age has tended more and more to the view that the ills and mysteries of life will eventually fall before the scientific advances of man, a belief that is still going strong even though this is the first generation to face total extinction because of these advances.”23 Yet as a fiction writer, she understood that such bald pronouncements, while perhaps revealing of one’s deepest sympathies, could never capture the full complexity of a situation. “Fiction writing is seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things,” she explained.24 “You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”25 (A sentiment I never quite grasped until I moved to a storytelling region.)
Some of the most memorable of O’Connor’s stories present situations where rationalism, commercialism, and modernization intrude on the established cultural relations of the South. In one of her most revealing stories, these forces show up in the form of a displaced person, a Hungarian refugee, saved from the gulag and brought to rural Georgia by a Catholic priest.26 (Here is the bomb resonating on the Oconee.) The immigrant finds employment at a local farm, managed by a widow who hopes his exemplary work ethic might rub off on the local hired hands. The experiment has some of the desired effect but ultimately goes terribly awry, from the point of view of the widow, when the immigrant violates a local taboo by arranging for one of the black workers to marry a relative who is looking to emigrate from Hungary. At the end, the widow conspires with her white tenants to crush the immigrant under a tractor. The tractor stays, but the old order persists as well—though only through resort to murder.27
In her refusal to accept that the transforming forces of global modernization must, or could, simply sweep aside everything in their path, O’Connor brings to mind (well, to my mind, anyway) another distinctive voice in American letters, that of Abraham Lincoln. In the mid-nineteenth century, as the United States launched military expeditions into Mexico (in the name of democracy, of course) and supported efforts to build transcontinental railroads and lay an underwater cable linking its commercial and political capitals with those of imperial Britain, the nay-saying Lincoln struggled to articulate an alternative vision of the future. One could not, Lincoln insisted, pursue such a course without first coming to grips with the profound moral issues of the day: the fate of independent, freeholding citizens and, above all, the abomination of slavery, which ate like a cancerous growth on the soul of the United States and undermined its moral influence in the world. This was the essence of the position Lincoln took in his famed debates with Douglas, which occurred precisely one hundred and fifty years ago as I speak.28
It may seem odd to join the name of Lincoln with a southern writer who lived a century later in a house adjacent to the mansion where the Confederate governor of Georgia once resided. What ties the two, I think, is that both insisted that the powers that be must be held—and must ultimately hold themselves—to a more complex system of accounts. They must not be allowed to reduce human progress to a simplistic measure that obliterates all other dimensions of human value and obscures the nuanced ways those values find expression in local contexts. Without shunning progress entirely—indeed, both Lincoln and O’Connor embraced it as an irresistible and in many respects salutary phenomenon—they looked to complicate its course, to stem its tide and direct its force in ways that served a larger purpose than its own ends.
Such are my stories, anyway—and I stand by them.
So, how have I come by these stories?
In certain respects, the answer is personal and idiosyncratic. (I will spare you the details.29) Yet whatever their roots in my own peculiar interests and experiences, I am absolutely certain that these brief interpretative narratives would never have come together in this fashion, or come into being at all, without my having been associated with SHOT and the history of technology.
I first encountered this intellectual community in the late seventies, when a part-time instructor at UC San Diego assigned a book containing essays from Technology and Culture—the T&C of the Mel Kranzberg era. It included the likes of Peter Drucker and Lewis Mumford, whose ideas I lapped up with the enthusiasm of a new convert. But the piece that really caught my fancy was—brace yourself—John Burke’s “Bursting Boilers and the Federal Power.”30 That one got in me and has never got out. (A technical challenge, which compels a rearrangement of governance structures along federal lines—you can see the appeal.)
When I showed up at a SHOT meeting a couple years later (having come East to discover America), I sensed immediately that I was among like-minded people. Here were folks who liked trains but held their own enthusiasm suspect. (Fill in your own technology of interest, and try that out as a working definition of SHOT’s culture.) These were scholars who were intrigued by technology, who were fully capable of grasping its appeal and were absolutely convinced of its importance, yet who retained a healthy dose of skepticism toward it.
While I found many brethren within SHOT, two works written by scholars who identified the Society as their primary intellectual home loomed especially large for me. One was Roe Smith’s Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology; the other was Tom Hughes’s Networks of Power.31 At their core, these two works seemed to me to be concerned above all with governance. Smith and Hughes were convinced that humans governed much of what mattered in their affairs through their encounters with technologies.
In some instances, the act of governance took the form of their enthusiasm in creating technologies—an enthusiasm derived both from these technicians’ satisfaction in achieving practical effects (and financial rewards), but also at times from broader ideological considerations such as the appeal of order or the association of their accomplishments with the fulfillment of religious ideals or national ambitions. In other cases, the act of governance took the form of a deep and heartfelt resistance to the changes those technologies seemed capable of forcing upon people. (A resistance that, in the case of Harpers Ferry, found expression in an act of violence worthy of O’Connor’s fiction, when the leader of a local junta shot dead a superintendent too intent on imposing Yankee discipline.)
In each case, moreover, the authors of these books felt compelled to situate their actors within a larger frame of nation and region, frames which they established in terms that we might today characterize as political economy. Such a viewpoint might acknowledge the grand ideological claims asserted by the likes of Kouwenhoven, but tempered them severely with close attention to political and economic structure. While sensitive to larger ideals that ultimately impinged upon the situations they described, Smith and Hughes were attentive above all to actual practice. They showed great respect for the practical difficulties involved in governing technologies, both for the enthusiasts and for those who might resist them.
It is this deep respect for practice, I think, that ties many of us to this particular intellectual community. An appreciation for practice is the stuff which runs through our veins. More than anything else, it is what enables us—well, me, at least—to drift comfortably among sessions devoted to various technologies, times, and places. We may differ in how much emphasis we place upon it, but we almost always consider it worth taking into account, and in that we often distinguish ourselves from other historians.32 It is certainly one place where many of us find our true country.
The legacy of the approach epitomized by Smith and Hughes—and I want to emphasize that they were exemplars, especially noteworthy products of an intellectual milieu that had taken wide root within SHOT during the first half of its existence (I feel compelled here to also mention Bruce Sinclair, whose works were extremely influential on my thinking33)—remains very vital within our Society today. Indeed, these works may have even more vibrancy today than they did a decade ago. Flip through the program for this meeting, and you will see a remarkable number of sessions and papers that echo with the touchstones of Smith, Hughes, and their ilk. One can find numerous examples of concepts applied to new frontiers—to new locales, I am pleased to see, but also to technological frontiers (such as computing and the internet) that had barely appeared on the horizon when these works were published.
This is not meant to imply that historians of technology have simply been treading water over the past quarter century, or that SHOT has spent the past twenty-five years merely exporting its established way of seeing to new domains. Of course we have continued to cultivate new concerns and new perspectives. Most impressively, I think, are the ways we have expanded our consideration of matters pertaining to identity. By the early seventies, emphasis had already shifted from grand, national identities toward consideration of the professions. Since then, SHOT members have complicated our understanding of professional authority while also exploring entirely new dimensions of cultural identity. As in most branches of history, the pioneers here were feminist scholars who brought gender analysis to the fore.34 More recently, additional veins have opened, including significant efforts to bring race and ethnicity into sharper focus. Perhaps nothing testifies so clearly to the growing sophistication with which we engage questions of identity than the pronounced anthropological turn taking place within our discipline. Surely, such perspectives are vital if we wish to explore a wider array of countries and regions and secure a place at the table in contemporary discussions of globalization.35 And if we are looking for of just how we can contribute, we need look no further than a recent issue of Technology and Culture, which shows how all these intellectual strands—older and newer—have come together in a new and distinctive approach to the subject.36
SHOT has shown considerably less enthusiasm for new perspectives opened by economics and economic historians. We have been too quick, I think, to dismiss such perspectives, perhaps because we have so readily associated them with the doctrine of progress. There is some cause for this. When the World Bank imposes market mechanisms as a one-size-fits-all approach to growth or economists hold technologies to be optimal outcomes of competitive processes, skepticism is in order. Yet in being so quick to unleash our nay-saying instincts, we have neglected more subtle approaches that have a great deal to offer us. Economic historians, in particular, have a great deal to say about the ways in which historical trajectories influence markets, and how market mechanisms can through historical happenstance arrive at very different equilibria (as they would call them, or outcomes, as we would say).
In my studies of technology in America, I have found it impossible—impossible—to make sense of things without taking account of this sort of work. For better or worse, Americans have leaned heavily upon market mechanisms in governing their technologies, and in governing themselves. 37 (As we are being reminded of on a daily basis at present, as we experience the crisis in financial markets.)
A wonderful example of the utility of this approach can be found in the work of Gavin Wright, an economic historian who has written widely on two subjects of particular relevance here: the American South, and the distinctiveness of American technology. Much of his work highlights the ways in which nations and regions can gravitate toward distinctive technological regimes that persist across time, when we might expect them to converge on a common store of techniques and processes.38 Wright shows us, for example, that from the Civil War until O’Connor’s day, the South remained a low-wage region in a high-wage nation, so that the distinctive technologies developed for the high-wage, mineral-rich North and West offered little advantage to the region.39 In another work, Wright confronts the question of why industrial countries did not converge rapidly on a common set of technologies in the middle decades of the twentieth century.40
In explaining the stickiness of national and regional differences, scholars such as Wright exhibit a rich understanding of concepts and evidence generated by historians of technology. They exhibit great respect for the sort of learning technologists derive from actual practice.41 Unlike many historians of technology, however, these historians are willing to assess the magnitude of such phenomena and to situate developments in historical time.
Perhaps one reason we have been slow to embrace such scholarship has been our relentless pursuit of the concept of social construction. As our field grew more diverse, this concept emerged as our most transcendent universal principle, a means of linking our various and sundry stories. This was an admirable aim, driven by the best of intentions, and there is no question that it yielded real benefits. Certainly it is very evident in my own work. But as O’Connor would tell us, it was also limiting. Ironically, our insistence on demonstrating social construction often bred a new internalism, for it encouraged us to focus ultimately on the technological outcome rather than the social one. In attempting to situate our stories within an evolving shared discourse among historians of technology, we extract from them abstract concepts pertaining to a universal process of technical change. In so doing, we uproot them from time and place—from their particular historical contexts.42
This state of affairs reflects the inherent tendencies of all disciplines to grow ever more specialized and inward-looking. Still, we would do well to guard against them. For in tracing this arc, we run the risk of removing technology fromhistory.43We lose track of the scale of phenomenon we are considering, and we neglect the fundamental truth that most people experience most technologies not through a process characterized by construction but through something more akin to challenge and response—with technology posing the challenge rather than providing the response. (Roe Smith, you might recall, subtitled his book “the challenge of change.”) Indeed, the response typically is quite constrained by the technology. The bomb falls, and it is felt on the banks of the Oconee. The fact that the bomb was socially constructed within a political economy that included those folks along the Oconee should not keep us from recognizing it as an exogenous event in their lives.44
Now, what I am suggesting here will strike many among you as anathema. It smacks of determinism, of technology driving history. For a few of you, it might also seem incongruent with my own scholarship. I don’t find it so. When my publisher insisted on inserting the word “railroad” between “regulating” and “innovation” in the title of my book, I sacrificed the intended double meaning—“Regulating Innovation.” For in my mind, the question was entirely open as to whether railroad technology and innovation were being regulated or doing the regulating. I saw my study as an extended meditation upon this issue, as an exercise in comprehending precisely what was negotiable (within the United States) about the course of change associated with railroading. The same objective has animated my studies of computing and information processing across the twentieth century. And in each case, I find anything but a blank slate.
But now, I have slipped deep into declarative statements. I am saying, not showing. Stories take time, and I have taken enough of yours already.
Besides, sometimes it is good to generalize. It is the historian’s equivalent to O’Connor’s resort to violence in her fiction. We may need to shout to be heard, and generalization is a form of shouting. (Thick description, we would do well to remember, can be as off-putting as many other forms of expression.)
Such generalization is of course a personal statement. I am not speaking for the Society. Generalizations from the collective, I suspect, will grow ever more difficult to formulate as we achieve the internationalization and other forms of diversity we desire. This is a good and healthy thing. But as individuals, we should not shy away from staking broad claims. After fifty years of truly impressive intellectual accomplishment, surely our sense of manners can allow for engaged dispute—if not for actual duels and eye-gouging— in full confidence that the elusive mystery of our commonality will long persist. For as Flannery O’Connor once explained to a friend who wondered how she could endure the South: “It is good to be at home in a region, even this one.”45
1. This essay was prepared for oral delivery at the fiftieth annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Lisbon, Portugal, on 12 October 2008. The text reproduced here is a nearly verbatim transcript of that talk. Its frequent italics and parentheses are intended to assist readers in discerning the pace and tone of my spoken remarks. For this printed version, I have also incorporated extensive footnotes. Some notes merely provide bibliographical references, while others offer more substantial elaborations. All of the material in these notes is drawn from actual drafts of my address; the passages included here informed what I had to say even if they did not survive the cuts required to fit the time allotted for my talk.
2. The novel was Wise Blood (New York, 1952). The story collection was A Good Man Is Hard to Find (New York, 1955). In 1960, O’Connor would publish a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (New York, 1960). A second collection of stories, Everything that Rises Must Converge (New York, 1965), appeared the year after she died, of complications from lupus, at age thirty-nine.
3. The story was “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” from A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 47–62.On the television production, which appeared as an episode of the Schlitz Playhouse of Stars on 1 March 1957, see “Writing Short Stories,” from Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1969), 94–95, and letters from O’Connor to Elizabeth Fenwick Way (13 September 1956), to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (10 December 1956), to Elizabeth Hester (28 December 1956), and to Mrs. Rumsey Haynes (3 March 1957), all of which are reproduced in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (New York, 1979). Later in 1957, Schlitz Playhouse of Stars presented “The Lonely Wizard,” a biopic of Charles Steinmetz (played by Rod Steiger) that won an Emmy for writing and a directorial award from the Directors Guild of America.
4. O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” 90.
5. O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” in Mystery and Manners, 26. O’Connor presented this essay at the University of Notre Dame in April 1957 and contributed it to a book edited by Granville Hicks, The Living Novel: A Symposium (New York, 1957). For further reaction to the editorial in Life, see O’Connor to Elizabeth Hester (8 September 1956), in The Habit of Being.
6. Presented at Georgetown University on 18 October 1963, it eventually appeared in the university’s magazine, Viewpoint, and can be found in Mystery and Manners, 191–209.
7. O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” 27 (emphasis added).
8. O’Connor, “The Regional Writer,” in Mystery and Manners, 51–59 (quote on 54).
9. O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners, 63–86 (quote on 77). The editors assembled this essay from notes O’Connor made for occasional lectures.
10. John M. Staudenmaier, S. J., Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
11. Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5 (1964): 1–8.
12. John A. Kouwenhoven, The Beer Can by the Highway: Essays on What’s American about America (New York, 1961). This book was reviewed by Hidetoshi Kato in Technology and Culture 4 (1963): 116–17. The essay “What’s American about America,” which discusses the Model T, appeared in the July 1956 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
13. The notion was advanced most forcefully by Thomas L. Friedman in The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (New York, 2005). It is explored with far greater subtlety in Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, 3 vols., (Malden, Mass., 1996, 1997, and 1998), which has appeared in several subsequent editions.
14. “The writers of the editorial in question suggested that our anguish is a result of our isolation from the rest of the country. I feel this would be news to most Southern writers,” O’Connor wrote in response to the editors at Life. “The anguish that most of us have observed for some time now has been caused not by the fact that the South is alienated from the rest of the country, but by the fact that it is not alienated enough, that every day we are getting more and more like the rest of the country, that we are being forced not only out of our many sins, but out of our few virtues. This may be unholy anguish but it is anguish nevertheless.” O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country” (n. 5 above), 28–29.
15. This farm, called Andalusia, is maintained as a historic site and is well worth a visit. One enters the farm via a nondescript dirt drive opening directly onto Georgia Highway 441, a major north-south artery lined with fast food outlets, motels, and retailers such as Wal-Mart. One of O’Connor’s stories, originally published in the fall of 1957, depicts the tempestuous relationship between an old man and his feisty granddaughter, who pass time watching a giant earthmover as it digs a pond and the foundation of a modern gas station in what had been the family cow pasture. “‘Any fool that would let a cow pasture interfere with progress is not on my books,’” crows the old man, hoping to catch his granddaughter’s attention. “But the child did not have eyes for anything but the machine. She sat on the hood, looking down into the red pit, watching the big disembodied gullet gorge itself on the clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up. Her pale eyes behind her spectacles followed the repeated motion of it again and again and her face—a small replica of the old man’s—never lost its look of complete absorption.” The story ends with the pair dead at each other’s hands, and a vision of the “huge yellow monster . . . gorging itself on clay” flashing before the man’s mind. O’Connor, “A View of the Woods,” in Everything that Rises Must Converge (n. 2 above), 54–81 (quotes on 55 and 81).
16. O’Connor, “The Regional Writer” (n. 8 above), 56.
17. To a friend whom she believed had misconstrued McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride, O’Connor wrote: “No mam [sic], it isn’t comic or meant to be and it isn’t sociology or written by a sociologist. To be understood, it has to be read completely and slowly, as McLuhan has a packed style. I will admit that occasionally he says something crudely funny—as when he calls the hero of the ad ‘Big Barnsmell’—this seems just right to me I must admit but it’s not why I appreciate the book. Also you can omit the little captions by the pictures. The meat is in the text and has to be read carefully.” O’Connor to Elizabeth Hester (8 September 1956), in The Habit of Being (n. 3 above), 173–74. In this letter and one to Ben Griffith (3 March 1954), O’Connor also praised an essay McLuhan had published on southern writers in the Southern Vanguard. She referred back to this essay in 1963 when assessing the state of race relations in the South during an interview with Jubilee magazine, which is excerpted in the appendix of Mystery and Manners (n. 3 above), 233–34.
18. O’Connor to Elizabeth Hester (25 October 1958), in The Habit of Being. “It is a very fine thing and very good for getting your sense of continuity established,” O’Connor observed of the history.
19. C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955) and The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1960) each received considerable public notoriety.
20. O’Connor took great joy in ridiculing southern remembrances of what she often referred to as “The Wah Between the States.” An early story, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” (A Good Man Is Hard to Find [n. 2 above], 153–66), lampooned one such commemorative event. When her town of Milledgeville staged a parade and pageant to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Georgia’s secession from the Union, she could hardly contain herself. “There is no wound, my girl,” she wrote to a friend; “this is merely a gorgeous way to make money.” O’Connor to Elizabeth Hester (4 February 1961). The “pageant was such a smashing success that the Chamber of Commerce hopes to put it on during the season and make this another Wm’burg,” she explained to another. “The Civil War is just beginning to pay off its investment.” O’Connor to Maryat Lee (14 February 1961).
21. “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered,” she told an audience at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, on 28 October 1960, “it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature.” The remarks were published as part of the essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” which appears in Mystery and Manners, 36–50 (quote on 44–45). The connection with the shadow of slavery is conveyed most profoundly for me in several of her stories, perhaps most powerfully of all in “The Artificial Nigger,” which appeared in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 98–126. The provocative title comes from an uneducated rural character’s exclamation upon encountering a lawn ornament in suburban Atlanta; the narrator never uses the offensive word. “There is nothing that screams out the tragedy of the South like what my uncle calls ‘nigger statuary,’” she wrote when explaining to a friend why the story was her favorite. O’Connor to Elizabeth Hester (6 September 1955). “What I had in mind to suggest with the artificial nigger,” she told another correspondent, “is the redemptive quality of the Negro’s suffering for us all.” O’Connor to Ben Griffith (4 May 1955).
22. O’Connor, “The Regional Writer” (n. 8 above), 59.
23. O’Connor, “Grotesque in Southern Fiction, ”Mystery and Manners (n. 3 above), 41.
24. O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories” (n. 3 above), 93.
25. O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” 96.
26. Flannery O’Connor, “The Displaced Person,” from A Good Man Is Hard to Find (n. 2 above), 197–251.
27. O’Connor’s imagined confrontations often ended in such violence—a violence intended to shatter the hubris of those who swelled with pride, whether that pride be derived from their smug racist superiority or their unqualified belief in the doctrine of progress. For a highly perceptive treatment of this theme in O’Connor’s work, see Robert Coles, Flannery O’Connor’s South (Baton Rouge, 1980). Coles entitled one of his three lectures on O’Connor “Stalking Pride.” In explaining the frequent resort to violence in her fiction, O’Connor once wrote: “The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take evermore violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country” (n. 5 above), 33–34.
28. On Lincoln and technology, see Steven W. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics, 1840–1920 (Cambridge, 2002), chap. 1.
29. Here in print I will lay my cards on the table. My father’s great-grandparents, German immigrants, were contemporaries of Lincoln who farmed and taught school on the Illinois prairie south of Springfield; they might well have attended one of his debates with Douglas. My mother, like me a native Californian, received her naval training at a women’s college in Milledgeville, Georgia, where Flannery O’Connor was a student; throughout the fall of 1944, the two of them regularly attended mass together in the small Catholic church there (a fact I never knew while my mother was alive). In tracing the lives of Lincoln and O’Connor, then, I have pursued a trail that courses deeply through my own life and helps me come to grips with the region in which I reside, as something of a resident alien myself. Such personal attachments, I suspect, inform many of the stories we tell, even if most of us are usually loathe to fess up to them so forthrightly.
30. John G. Burke, “Bursting Boilers and the Federal Power,” Technology and Culture 7 (1966): 1–23. The essay was reprinted in Melvin Kranzberg and William H. Davenport, eds., Technology and Culture: An Anthology (New York, 1972; paperback, 1975), 93–118.
31. Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977) and Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, 1983).
32. I was very encouraged a couple of years ago when the distinguished historian Richard White, in a column written in his capacity as president of the Organization of American Historians, issued a plea for all historians to shift their attention from ideology to practice, both in their choice of topics and the interpretations they offer. During his presidency, White reached out to historians of technology (as well as to business historians), groups he sees as exemplars of the type of scholarship he endorses. While I would not take White as representative of the larger historical profession, I do believe he speaks for a significant contingent that is ready to embrace a more pragmatic turn. We have much to offer them.
33. Of particular influence were his “At the Turn of a Screw: William Sellers, the Franklin Institute, and a Standard American Screw Thread,” Technology and Culture 10 (1969): 20–34, and his A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1880–1980 (Toronto, 1980).
34. For a sampling, see Nina E. Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen P. Mohun, eds., Gender and Technology: A Reader (Baltimore, 2003).
35. For a stimulating introduction, see Castells, The Information Age (n. 13 above), esp. vol. 2, The Power of Identity (London, 1997; 2d ed., 2004). On the subject of regional and national identity, Flannery O’Connor offered this sage advice: “An identity is not to be found on the surface; it is not accessible to the poll-taker; it is not something that can become a cliché. It is not made from the mean or the average or the typical, but from the hidden and often the most extreme. It is not made from what passes, but from those qualities that endure, regardless of what passes.” O’Connor, “The Regional Writer” (n. 8 above), 57–58.
36. The issue, vol. 49, no. 3 (July 2008), creatively engages the highly influential work of James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998). Scott’s ideas have resonated with many of us within SHOT, I believe, precisely because he utilizes the concept of metis, a notion grounded in an appreciation for the subtleties of actual practice on the ground. Scott contrasts this approach explicitly with the designs of engineers, whom he chides for pursuing highly idealized approaches that are derived from abstract principles, based on data of insufficiently fine grain, and tinged with ideologies of control. In his introduction to this issue, Martin Reuss critiques Scott by suggesting that the case studies presented in the issue reveal engineers acting in a manner far more respectful of practice than Scott would lead us to believe.
37. While I appreciated the high praise of John Larson in the pages of this journal, I was a tad chagrined to see my work on railroads presented as being in such stark opposition to that of economists. John Lauritz Larson, “Demythologizing Innovation: Steven Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation,” Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 159–61. When an economist such as Robert Fogel asks whether Americans really needed to make such a wholesale commitment to transcontinental railroads as they did in the nineteenth century, he is pursuing a question entirely congruent with my approach and with the ideas of social construction. For an effort to situate my research in the framework of economic history, see Steven W. Usselman, “Patents, Engineering Professionals, and the Pipelines of Innovation: The Internalization of Technical Discovery by Nineteenth-Century American Railroads,” in Naomi R. Lamoreaux et al., eds., Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries (Chicago, 1999), 61–91.
38. Like much of the best work in economic history, Wright creatively blends microeconomic analysis—focused on the behaviors of individuals and firms as they make choices regarding matters such as which crops to plant or machines to use—with a subtle understanding of the larger macroeconomic environment in which they operate. Wright appreciates, moreover, that the macroeconomic environment has evolved in historically specific ways, though not necessarily as the result of specific intent on the part of any individual or influential party. This notion that historical outcomes may not reflect the intent of any of the contesting parties may seem hopelessly forlorn. For some, it reeks of fatalism. I see it differently. In acknowledging that larger forces shape outcomes, we better grasp the extent of meaningful action we do possess. We put ourselves in position to reach more reasoned assessments of what is possible. For further elaboration, see Steven W. Usselman, “Still Visible: Alfred D. Chandler’s The Visible Hand,” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 584–96.
39. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986). As O’Connor sensed, the situation changed drastically (though not completely) with new policies and conditions brought by the New Deal and World War II.
40. Richard R. Nelson and Gavin Wright, “The Rise and Fall of American Technological Leadership: The Postwar Era in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Economic Literature 30 (1992): 1931–64. Across his extraordinarily productive career, Nelson and his collaborators have produced many works of utility to historians of technology. These include his National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis (New York, 1993), a collection with particular relevance to this address; Sources of Industrial Leadership (Cambridge, 1999), which he edited with David C. Mowery; and Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), a foundation stone of an important body of historically minded explorations of technology and innovation, many of which can be found in the journals Industrial and Corporate Change and Research Policy.
41. In this respect, their work brings to mind Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002), another work written by an economic historian.
42. My critique of social construction bears some resemblance to that offered by David Edgerton in his recent provocative book, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (New York, 2007). Edgerton chides historians of technology for being preoccupied with creation stories. Though I think he overstates the case and presents a caricature of the history of technology that fails to capture the richness of the field (a richness his own treatment reflects), I admire Edgerton for insisting that we consider the magnitude of the phenomena we study and for emphasizing that we consider technologies in use. For further elaboration, see Steven W. Usselman, “Material World,” Reviews in American History 35 (2007): 580–89. For a recent forum on the importance of users, see JoAnne Yates, “How Business Enterprises Use Technology: Extending the Demand-Side Turn,” Enterprise and Society 7 (2006): 422–55, and comments.
43. Our turn to STS and anthropology, while offering useful insights, heightens that risk.
44. If a secret military project of such monumental proportions strikes you as exceptional, consider the movies. Among the observers who experienced the transformative force of moving pictures in the late teens and twenties was Carl Sandburg, the famed poet and biographer. While struggling to make his way as a young writer, Sandburg supplemented his income by reviewing films for a Chicago newspaper. Asked to justify why he would devote so much time to what many literati considered a crass phenomenon, Sandburg pointed out that film was already the fifth largest industry in the United States. “The movies are,” he concluded, and one can find in his reviews numerous trenchant observations about how the mere fact of their existence—of people crowding into dark spaces several times each week to view world events and watch faces in close-up transform upon the screen—was fundamentally altering the emotional basis of the American polity and the temper of modern life. Carl Sandburg, “The Movies Are,” 18 December 1926, quoted in Arnie Bernstein, ed., “The Movies Are”: Carl Sandburg’s Film Reviews and Essays, 1920–1928 (Chicago, 2000), vii. The bomb drops; the movies are; the internet is— and in each case, lives change profoundly, and the course of history alters, in ways that are far from obvious and beg for further exploration.
45. O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins (22 February 1959), in The Habit of Being (n. 3 above).
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