Pioneer in the Hardware of Culture: Roger Burlingame’s March of the Iron Men and Engines of Democracy
In teaching the history of technology I have often distributed to my students the appendixes from Roger Burlingame’s March of the Iron Men: A Social History of Union through Invention and its sequel, Engines of Democracy: Inventions and Society in Mature America, books published in 1938 and 1940, respectively. There are two columns, the one on the left headed “Events” and the one on the right headed “Inventions.” March’s initial Event is the “1630 Settlement of Massachusetts Bay Colony,” and the first Invention is the “1634 Sawmill (first American), Maine.” March’s final Events are “1865 Lincoln’s 2d term, Lincoln assassinated, and Lee surrenders,” while the last Invention is the “1865 Web printing press, William Bullock, Pennsylvania.” For Engines, the first and last Events are the “1866 Civil Rights Act” and the “1929 Stock Market collapse”; the first and last Inventions are the “1866 Atlantic cable, Cyrus W. Field, New York; Compressed air rock drill, Charles Burleigh, Massachusetts; and Iron tank cars, Pennsylvania,” and the “1929 Polaroid, Edwin H. Land, Massachusetts.”1 In his preface to March, Burlingame claims to have included “as complete a list of American inventions [and inventors] as has been possible.” Any errors of omission and commission derive from his admittedly not being among either “professional historians” or “professional technicians.” Engines omits such remarks but offers comparable materials, with the disclaimer of Burlingame having “had to meet the increased difficulties of the technics themselves with an untechnical mind.” Each book, moreover, offers not just an extensive and sometimes annotated bibliography (eighteen and twenty-three pages, respectively) but also a separate “classified index” listing specific fields of invention and individual inventors.
I always praise the pioneering approach of these books in connecting political, economic, diplomatic, and military developments with technological developments of the same years. In their day, they had few if any rivals for use in high schools and colleges or with the general public. Despite Burlingame’s disavowal of being a professional historian, Robert C. Post recently reminded us that Mel Kranzberg suggested that he become SHOT’s first president, presumably an affirmation of his respect for Burlingame’s writings on the history of technology.2 Indeed, Mel induced Burlingame to contribute what became the lead article to the very first issue of Technology and Culture, “The Hardware of Culture.” In semiautobiographical style Burlingame recounted themes elaborated on in his histories, noting both the limited number of secondary works available in the 1930s and the special utility of Abbott Payson Usher’s History of Mechanical Inventions (1929) and Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934), “which did what I hoped to do, but on a world scale.” Burlingame concluded that the field was still “relatively empty,” but that it offered “wide opportunity.” “The tools for this all-embracing historiography are rapidly multiplying.”3
Altogether, Burlingame published quite a lot on technology, and not just on American technology. Besides March and Engines, he also wrote the broadly conceived Backgrounds of Power: The Human Story of Mass Production (1949), covering technological developments as far back as ancient Egypt—which he listed in “The Hardware of Culture” as the last of a trilogy along with March and Engines—and Machines That Built America (1953), which summarizes much of those first two volumes. There were also Inventors Behind Inventors (1947) and the complementary Scientist Behind the Inventors (1960); Dictator Clock: 5000 Years of Telling Time (1966); four biographical studies—Whittling Boy: The Story of Eli Whitney (1941), General Billy Mitchell: Champion of Air Defense (1952), Henry Ford: A Great Life in Brief (1955), and Out of Silence: The Life of Alexander Graham Bell (1964); and Mosquitoes in the Big Ditch (1952), a history of the Panama Canal for juveniles. And there were histories of both the Scribner (1946) and McGraw-Hill (1959) publishing firms which discussed technological as well as editorial, managerial, and financial developments.4
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Born in New York City in 1889 to the son of the longtime editor of Scribner’s Magazine—part of the prestigious Scribner publishing empire— Burlingame graduated from Harvard in 1913. His desire to become an editor or writer himself was actively discouraged by his domineering father, who knew and brought home many writers, some of them famous but nevertheless impoverished or unhappy or both, and who also knew that editing and writing were hardly the romantic pursuits his son envisioned. As Burlingame recounted in his interesting autobiography, I Have Known Many Worlds: The Informal Reminiscences of a Writer (1959), his father “regarded any serious literary attempt by any of us much as a father might regard . . . alcoholism in his children.” At his father’s insistence, Burlingame initially majored in engineering at Harvard until a failing grade in “a demon named Integral and Differential Calculus” ended his family’s dream of his becoming the “great engineer, inventor and designer of a fabulous mechanical future.” His father then accepted his son’s desperate need to switch majors to literature. From 1914 until 1926 Burlingame worked in various capacities at the Scribner firm in New York City and published two novels before he left for Italy where, for the next few years, he lived and wrote more novels. In his autobiography, he poses a rhetorical question about his “long books about the social consequences of technology on which I have spent more than fifteen years—could I have composed those without the glimpse into applied science that two years of pre-engineering at Harvard gave me?”5 Burlingame also concedes that he came to that broad topic after publishing the last of his several novels, Three Bags Full (1936), covering five generations of a family in upstate New York.
The novel sold reasonably well, fulfilling the prediction of Burlingame’s Scribner’s editor that “Someday you will write a historical novel.” That editor was the legendary Maxwell Perkins, the mentor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, among others. Coincidentally, three years earlier Burlingame had married the woman who at the time was the nation’s “leading literary agent.”6 Three Bags Full included some “dramatic incidents against the background” of the settlement of central New York State, the building of the Erie Canal, and the Civil War. Writing it gave Burlingame “the itch for historical exploration.” Perkins then repeated an earlier assessment that Burlingame, alas, “was not a novelist” and suggested that he instead pursue the topic of “invention.” When Burlingame responded that “there are thousands of books on invention. And they’re dull as dishwater except for little boys,” Perkins advised him to write “a kind of history of the United States. But what they call social history.”7
After getting over the shock of Perkins’s suggestion, Burlingame slowly realized why he had initially reacted so negatively:
The history that had scared me off it was concerned with wars, dynasties, political movements and conflicts, economic trends, philosophies of government, the making and amending of constitutions, and legislative enactments. I was now abruptly aware that history had treated these things with little or no regard for the physical foundations beneath them. The result was that many concrete facts [no pun!] had to be handled as abstractions. The events had happened on earth, but there was nothing about the earth; in America, a nation had emerged from a wilderness, but there was nothing about the wilderness; legislation had arisen out of a conflict between agriculture and industry, but there was nothing about either agriculture or industry; . . . hardly a chapter in any history book I had seen was devoted to iron, steel, gold, manufacture, machinery, or invention.8
As Burlingame sought material for his new subject, he “found great difficulty in unearthing the resources.” Existing books “were useless except when a footnote might lead me into a chain of references.” Books were usually “about the ‘romance’ of invention. They stressed accidental, haphazard discoveries.” The handful of works not “aimed at the twelve-year old mind” were “unreadable except by scholars.” Moreover, as he put it in March, the “older textbooks give us a rosy picture” of the new nation’s overall history that has “little to do with the truth” and is itself “fancifully invented”—a significant statement of his concept of his own book as in part a “textbook” and a nicely ironic use of “invention.”9
At first, Burlingame had expected to write just a single volume. But he eventually found so much material that, under Perkins’s guidance, he decided to write a second and separate—and separately titled—volume, in order to garner more publicity and sales than a mere sequel. This made good sense to Burlingame, who had worked at Scribner’s from 1914 to 1917 as a “publicity manager.” As Burlingame recalled about March, “The book had a reception that temporarily consoled me for departing from fiction. A few critics thought I had ridden my thesis too hard; others, of course, found errors. But in general I was hailed as a pioneer and most of the reviewers welcomed me as a brand-new author—for it was obviously dubious that the same man could write both fiction and ‘straight’ history!”10 For Engines Burlingame happily employed a new Yale graduate who helped him interview people involved with contemporary industries. They learned far more from “the hardheaded superintendents or foremen or even detached workers to whom I was eventually turned over” than from pompous and shallow executives and public-relations flacks. Burlingame later wrote that he thought that Engines was “a better book than March, but it had only a quarter of the sales. The earlier book seemed to have its appeal in its antiquarian material—or perhaps because it was a ‘pioneer.’”11
Burlingame got reviews in major newspapers, including the New York Times, and in highbrow magazines like the New Yorker and Saturday Review of Literature. This is suggestive of a popular desire for readable but serious works about technology, and yet Burlingame recalled that Scribner’s did not know how to advertise March. The frustrated head of the sales department sighed that “I can’t even say, ‘Here is another Waldemar Kaempffert,’ because it’s entirely different from his history of invention.’” Kaempffert was the New York Times’s first full-time science writer and the editor of A Popular History of American Invention (1924), also published by Scribner’s. A work like Kaempffert’s was just what Burlingame had said he wanted to avoid: a shallow “record of inventions—Goodyear spilling melted rubber on a hot stove, Morse tapping out What Hath God Wrought—[that] was almost nauseating to me.”12
Nevertheless, Burlingame’s own generally positive assessments of technology might suggest a somewhat simpleminded technological determinist. And this indeed is how both George Daniels and Edwin Layton characterized his work in their often-cited 1970 exchange on “The Big Questions in the History of American Technology.”13 Discussing his overall approach in his autobiography, Burlingame wrote that “my emphasis, as always, was on the effects [of technology] on people and on civilization” rather than on the technology in itself.14 But many, though hardly all, of his analyses are more complex and pay heed to the impact of politics, economics, culture, values, psychology, warfare, and much else on American technology’s evolution—thereby partly explaining his books’ appendixes. When writing his histories of technology Burlingame gradually became “aware that historic events are caused by human currents—currents which have common emotional sources, regardless of time and place.” As ahistorical—as applicable to any “time and place”—as this comment might appear to be, it does reflect a healthy refusal to accept technological omnipotence. In fact, early in March Burlingame boldly stated that “We must try to visualize a world empty of inventions because society had not insisted upon them.” No technological determinism here! Yet at the end of that book he concluded that “American society as we know it was formed, largely, by the technological factors of the first half of the nineteenth century,” and that readers should “go back and stand upon the point [i.e., roughly 1865] where technology was leading the way and leading it with such speed and violence that society could not resist it.” Inconsistencies like these pervade both books.15
Burlingame begins March with this somewhat vague statement:
This book is the history of the evolution of that social pattern which produced a nation from the United States. It is told in terms of the factor which I believe was of first importance in that evolution, the factor of technological invention. It is therefore neither a complete history of the United States nor a complete history of invention, but rather a narrative of the formation of trends. . . . I have tried to show first a picture of the groups of people whose every gregarious effort was thwarted by the savage continent which confronted them; next of the demand of these people for whatever inventions would aid them in the conquest of that continent; and then of how those inventions bred others of such force and magnitude that they established a pattern of union to which the people must finally conform.16
March elaborates on these basic points in its discussion of farms, railroads and clipper ships and steamships, weapons, printing presses and telegraphs, mechanics and artisans and engineers, iron, farms, the English Industrial Revolution, “The Emancipation of Women”—especially the sewing machine and its use in factories—and the first important American inventor, Benjamin Franklin. More than 100 illustrations complement the readable, sometimes lyrical, 500-page text. Burlingame’s sophistication is also reflected in his refusal to romanticize colonial Americans’ inventiveness to the degree that one finds in, say, Daniel Boorstin’s works. For Burlingame, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “‘Invention-consciousness,’ as a modern American would phrase it, was low.” He further contends that the period’s leading invention (and invented in England) was the indentured servant or “temporary white slave.”17
Burlingame’s notion of invention varies, but one of his major points concerned the transition from “trial-and-error methods” to “scientific experiment,” or the “transition from art to science.” His principal example was Oliver Evans and Thomas Ellicott’s The Young Mill-Wright and Miller’s Guide (1795), which, in addition to its technical analyses and scientific statements, had a vision that Burlingame alluded to but did not elaborate on: a vision of the new nation with potentially limitless abundance rather than, as in earlier times, limited abundance.18
Another of Burlingame’s major points is that, contrary to the conventional wisdom about necessity being the mother of invention, invention can give birth to necessity. Burlingame’s favorite example was the cotton gin, which at once saved labor and increased the number of slaves. This was because, he argues, there was an increased desire for cotton goods as a result of cotton being made cheaper, thanks to Whitney’s invention that cleaned the cotton mechanically. Hence, additional slaves were needed in the fields.19
Burlingame’s third major point is that—again contrary to common beliefs—the ideas that lead to successful inventions do not necessarily pop into the inventor’s head like the proverbial lightbulb suddenly going on. He did repeat the legend of Whitney’s pioneering interchangeable parts for his government contract—the legend that was shredded by historian Robert Woodbury in the third issue of Technology and Culture.20 But Burlingame acknowledged that “To imagine that the idea never occurred to any one before Whitney would be absurd” and added that “We still have only a vague understanding of the operation of genius in the human mind.” Perhaps, he speculated, Whitney’s “subconsciousness” compensated for his guilt over inventing the cotton gin and led him to invent interchangeable parts to defend the new nation.21
Related to this is Burlingame’s fourth major point—as exemplified by the “long . . . complicated and slow” story of the invention of the steamboat—that credit for inventions must often be shared. Burlingame was saying part of what historian Louis Hunter did in his classic article of 1943. But he did not take the next step and “invent” the notion of what might be called the “anonymous” history of invention, as Hunter so perceptively did. For whatever reasons, Henry Shreve—the foil for Hunter because of the once common substitution of Shreve as the replacement hero for Robert Fulton—is not mentioned in March (or in Engines either).22
Burlingame’s fifth and final major point is that the seemingly most popular inventions are not always accepted or understood at first, as per his comments in March about the eventual reliance on and celebration of the telegraph: “It appears, looking back, that these things happened overnight. We should be mistaken in believing this appearance. In reality the public was slow in understanding the telegraph. People feared and suspected it. They did not know what the wires were for, they cut them down, used them for various purposes. . . . Many people believed they could send packages over the wires.”23
As Burlingame recounts in the preface to Engines, his earlier book tried to show that, by 1865—and notwithstanding the Civil War—the country “found itself organized into a nation.” What he meant was that the United States had “been shaped, dispersed, and reshaped up to that point not by wars, treaties, or what is called political science but by invention.” Burlingame’s notion of “invention” was broad and included “the Federation [the Articles of Confederation] which began our pattern” of national organization “as well as the cotton gin and the steamboat.” But his emphasis, to repeat, is “on physical things.” Starting with the earliest seventeenth-century settlements, Burlingame saw “three movements: first a huddling together in small communities in a desperate effort to transplant an old-world culture; second, a wide, fanlike dispersion; third, a drawing together of all the parts into a new whole, quite different from the first dream.” From building and agriculture through transportation and communication, various inventions, in his account, became the “instruments of our eventual union” by 1865. These developments were complemented by “an industrial revolution imposed upon us by European conflict” dating to the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, when it became painfully clear that the new nation required its own manufacturing facilities. In further curious language, given his 1865 ending date, he claimed that “union [was] a fact before, politically, it was recognized.”24
Toward the end of March Burlingame focused on printing and news (or “the news-press”) as the “immediate cause” of the Civil War. If the “deep underlying factors were climate, soil, means of livelihood, and old economic traditions aided by new inventions,” the cotton gin and “Slater’s mills were remote causes.” Printing was “essential to democracy,” but by this Burlingame meant that the publication of ideas and opinions united the North and the South respectively.25
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By contrast, Engines, even though it follows in the chronological sequence, is a different history, a “history of what, in effect, is a different nation, though the old political pattern because of its wide adaptability still applied to it.” The basic movements from 1865 on were “collective” and consolidating as the western frontier was extended and settled and as the nation absorbed millions of immigrants. More interestingly, in terms of interpretation, “Events did not follow one another in orderly sequence,” as in the period up to 1865. Instead, they occurred in different places at the same time. So Burlingame told how he had “to adopt a horizontal rather than a vertical plan, showing the inventions or technologies which developed under a wide variety of social impulses, all moving . . . toward what seems to be a final cohesion.” More than in the earlier book, he “concentrated on social rather than technical aspects”—while simultaneously noting that the “technical aspects” were still harder to grasp than in Machines.26
Engines discusses telephones, underwater cables, expanding railroads, steel, waterworks and hydroelectric power, skyscrapers, urban sanitation and lighting, dynamos, more modern printing presses, more modern photography, phonographs, movies, radios, electric railways, automobiles, improved roads, and research labs. As with the earlier book, more than 100 illustrations complement the readable, again sometimes lyrical, text (here, more than 600 pages). Curiously, Burlingame never explains why he stops in 1929. He does explain why he declined to discuss television, an “invention nearly as old as radio” but one that, unlike radio, “is still, largely, in an experimental stage as far as society is concerned.” Furthermore, he also states, correctly, that television as of 1940 was so far devoid of any “social effect.”27
When Burlingame detailed how technologies contributed to the “collective impulse,” he stopped short of saying that “technology caused Americans to become collective”—again, he’s no simpleminded technological determinist. Rather, “it is probably just to say that man is, by nature, collective.” So when these developments took place most Americans “were probably glad of it in their hearts.” One could read his comments about countless political, social, economic, cultural, and sports organizations as constituting the same framework that, according to Robert Putnam’s influential Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), has disappeared from American life in recent years. Not surprisingly, Burlingame connected the collective impulse to “centralization” and “consolidation,” as reflected in railroads, factories, offices, skyscrapers, telephones, and the large cities containing all of them.28
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As Burlingame further recalls, his “real education” came not “in the accumulation of facts” but “in the arrangement and interpretation of the facts; the recognition of their relationship to one another, to society, and to ways of life.”29 A turning point in that education came in his recognition of what, in his Inventors Behind Inventors, he explicitly calls the “Social Inventor to distinguish him from the Technological Inventor.” The social inventor “does not invent machines or technical processes. His concern is with people and society, . . . and his job is to invent ways for people to use machines and processes for their welfare and for the general good of the human race.” Burlingame’s examples of social invention are “democracy, the city, the library, the hospital, the park, the fire department, baseball, the army, and the club. Most of these make use of technological inventions,” and some, “like the theater or the highway commission, the navy or a power-and-conservation development such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, are close combinations” of social and technological inventions. The embodiment of that combination was Benjamin Franklin.30
In March Burlingame calls these “cultural inventions” as well as social inventions, but he neither defines nor details them as extensively as in Inventors Behind Inventors. In Engines he also uses both terms and goes so far as to suggest the need for limits on technological inventions: “how can society be expected to adapt itself instantly to each new technological step? It cannot, and it should not try.” In fact, he suggests that there be new inventions precisely “to satisfy every true human necessity,” in which case there would be an unprecedented need for social inventors.31
As helpful as Inventors Behind Inventors is in clarifying Burlingame’s notion of the “Social Inventor,” it touches only briefly on one of the most significant aspects of both March and Engines: the incorporation, just hinted at, of the arguments of sociologist William Fielding Ogburn concerning a so-called “cultural lag,” the gap between technological developments and society’s ability to absorb and accommodate them. Burlingame repeatedly laments this increasingly pervasive fact of American life. Although he terms it a social lag, it is actually the same point as Ogburn was making. As he puts it near the end of March,
At the moment . . . social invention has lagged . . . far behind technological invention. . . . Invention as we have seen depends upon the capacity of society to absorb it. As the world becomes more and more crowded with new applications of science, technology is certain to slow down much as the traffic of a city reduces its speed as the vehicles multiply. A saturation point is rapidly approaching in society at which inventions will no longer be held in solution. When it arrives there may be disastrous precipitation: financial and industrial debacle or, possibly, the concentration of technology upon the machines of war, but the disaster will probably be temporary and with a happy outcome, for whatever happens, an interval will appear in which social invention can catch up.32
Inventors Behind Inventors explicitly states what those earlier books do not: “Much of the misery in the world today [1947] is caused by the absence of social inventors.”33 Writing just after World War II had ended, Burlingame appreciated the ways in which various technological developments with positive civilian uses, from assembly lines to airplanes, were retooled for destructive military purposes. The war—in which Burlingame had several noncombat roles, one of them being an air force correspondent on the European and Mediterranean battlefronts—no doubt contributed to his enhanced international perspective on invention. That in turn resulted in his Backgrounds of Power. Early in 1947 Burlingame had contracted with his editor Perkins to write a book on “the human story of mass production.” When Perkins died suddenly soon afterward, Burlingame felt “as if I could write no more, but then the momentum of his [Perkins’s] inspiration carried me on.” Rejecting the argument of his friend, distinguished Barnard College scholar John Kouwenhoven, that the technology of mass production “is as indigenous to the United States as the husking bee,” Burlingame traced its origins, as noted above, as far back as ancient Egypt.34
In March and Engines Burlingame also lamented the replacement of America’s allegedly traditional “rugged individualism” by mass, impersonal bureaucratic structures—“the group.” In March, he argued that the years after the mid-nineteenth-century California gold rush “developed an apex of individualism perhaps never before and certainly never since attained in the world’s history.”35 As he put it in 1959, this was the “most significant quality American society in general has acquired during my lifetime.” He maintained this stance in the face of his general endorsement of large corporations and of the rising standard of living that they had, he believed, provided most Americans. “We rarely hear the name of an inventor; there are no popular heroes such as Edison or Bell or Fulton.” Nowadays, inventions derive from “A.T. & T., R.C.A., G.E., Dow, or Du Pont. They evolve from teamwork in an industrial laboratory.”36 Indeed, Burlingame’s Inventors was written primarily to promote individual inventors whose contributions had, for various reasons, been overshadowed or left completely anonymous within those industrial laboratories.
Saying this at a time of general interest in “the organization man” put Burlingame in the shadow of William H. Whyte’s influential 1956 book with that title, a book that was also critical of corporate conformity but, as with Burlingame, not of corporations per se. “Anonymity was spread by mass production,” Burlingame asserted in his autobiography. Interestingly, he admired Charles Lindbergh’s “fine individualistic feat” of 1927 for having transcended that, but of course the very success of Lindbergh’s flight was based on strong organizational skills.37
Burlingame never advocates a return to the “good old days,” despite recounting his youthful Christmas vacations and other holidays spent at an uncle’s upstate New York farm with few technological amenities. He enjoyed watching early biplanes at the nearby Syracuse State Fair just a few years after the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk flights. This interest in flight may account for his statement that “Of all the advances made during my lifetime, none has had an impact on me like that of man’s conquest of space.” By this he meant “not only flying but communication—talking and pictures.” In a manner akin in tone though not in arrogance to some of the visionaries David F. Noble discusses in The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (1997), Burlingame writes further that “The First American earth satellite has just . . . been shot into orbit. Only God, I thought, could make a moon, but that was many worlds ago. Now moons are about to be put into mass production. No wonder many men no longer believe in God, having learned that they are gods themselves.”38
Burlingame claimed on the dust jacket that his autobiography, I Have Known Many Worlds, was written “in the tradition of The Education of Henry Adams.” But its tone—like the tone of his histories of technology— is hardly a lament for the past in the spirit of Adams’s melancholy for the world the elitist Adams and his illustrious family had lost, nor an anxiety-filled vision of a future out of control, a world in which the material power of the dynamo is painfully put on the same plane as the spiritual power of the Virgin Mary. By contrast, as Burlingame conceded in 1959 about the “backwater” but otherwise up-to-date Danbury, Connecticut, his home in later life: “God forbid, of course, that the power [temporarily off ] stay off or the sleigh bells and gaslight [of his childhood] come back. I have devoted most of my time and effort the past twenty years to extolling the triumphs of technology, American in particular. Often when I flick a switch I am struck anew with the marvel of it—an impact that younger persons do not encounter.”39 Similarly, Burlingame admits that his fondest memories as an adult are of ocean voyages on steamships where he has had limited contact with the outside world—though with ship-to-shore telephones for emergencies—and no management responsibilities.
If Adams worried intensely about the world possibly spinning out of control—what one historian called “cataclysmic thought”—Burlingame never did. Even when, toward the end of March, he invoked “the Frankenstein myth” of a manmade, unnamed giant creature whom Victor Frankenstein abandons at “birth” coming back to destroy his creator and others, he did not conclude that “the machine will destroy him.” The misplaced belief that “men are the [new] gods” will nevertheless result in “a happy outcome,” to repeat the words cited above. He elaborated on this basic point in Engines, devoting an entire chapter to “The Frankenstein Delusion”: not that machines will displace and overpower people and that “technological unemployment” will result, but precisely the opposite.40 Although the Great Depression had not yet ended when Engines was published, Burlingame refused to accept the notion that people no longer control led machines and that those machines which remained in operation were enslaving or dehumanizing:
The machines along the assembly lines may be stultifying, but the reaper or the thresher or the automatic electric pressure pump which delivers water to the bathroom are not stultifying. These devices relieve men of back-breaking labor and give the spirit a chance. . . . In any case, social attitude is fundamentally to blame. That men released by mechanisms should find themselves without occupation for their newly freed spirits shows a profound failure in social invention. . . . Man is not . . . simple. He is differentiated from lower forms of life not only by his ability to use tools. He has other qualities such as kindness, pity, tolerance, a sense of beauty, the capacity for abstract thought, the ability to plan, imagine, forecast, and envision, which are not evident in the lesser animals. Nor can he teach these things to the machine. The machine, therefore, can never dominate him. Only his attitude toward it can hurt, hinder, or destroy his society.41
Roger Burlingame’s optimism may seem naive and romantic to us today, but it was based on, for its time, sophisticated research and reflection. Even Mumford’s early works on the history of technology, published in the same period, were infused with a similarly upbeat outlook. Ironically, Mumford’s Technics and Human Development, the first of his more pessimistic two-volume The Myth of the Machine, appeared in 1967, the year that Burlingame died.42 On March 20 of that year, Burlingame received a substantial obituary in the New York Times that took note of his writings on technology. As Technology and Culture observes its fiftieth anniversary, it is fitting to rescue Burlingame from comparative obscurity and acknowledge his pioneering contributions to both the journal and the field—or, in his apt words, to “the Hardware of Culture.”
1. Roger Burlingame, March of the Iron Men: A Social History of Union through Invention (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 468, 476; Roger Burlingame, Engines of Democracy: Inventions and Society in Mature America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 573, 577. The appendixes are, respectively, nine and five pages long, although Engines is more than 100 pages longer than
March. The title Engines of Democracy has subsequently been given to several other books.
2. Robert C. Post, “The Bridge at Mackinac Straits: Another Fiftieth Anniversary,” Technology and Culture 49 ( July 2008): 754.
3. Roger Burlingame, “The Hardware of Culture,” Technology and Culture 1 (winter 1959): 18. Among writers contributing to “the trend toward making the history of technology an inherent part of all history,” Burlingame mentioned William F. Ogburn, Peter Drucker, Howard Mumford Jones, Dirk Struik, and John Kouwenhoven. On Burlingame as a contemporary of Mumford, among other nonacademic popularizers of the history of technology in the 1920s and 1930s, see Arthur P. Molella, “Mumford in Historiographical Context,” in Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual, ed. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (New York, 1990), 35. Burlingame cites several of Mumford’s books in his writings and probably learned much from them—especially placing technological developments in cultural and other nonmechanical contexts.
4. Burlingame’s history of Charles Scribner’s Sons was reprinted in 1996 by Penn State University Press in its Studies of the History of the Book series.
5. Roger Burlingame, I Have Known Many Worlds: The Informal Reminiscences of a Writer (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 23, 54, 56; italics mine.
6. Ibid., 194, 24. Literary agent was a profession his father had also warned Burlingame to avoid.
7. Ibid., 200, 200, 137, 201.
8. Ibid., 202–3. Burlingame served in World War I and witnessed the death of comrades and enemies alike. This may explain his aversion to writing about war. Yet it did not undermine his basic lifelong optimism about technology.
9. Ibid., 205; March, 153.
10. Burlingame, I Have Known, 206.
11. Ibid., 208, 210.
12. Ibid., 136 (Burlingame’s italics), 202. Burlingame’s comments are somewhat unfair, as the two-volume A Popular History of American Invention (New York, 1924) is richly detailed, more technical than sentimental in style and content, and replete with hundreds of excellent illustrations. There is, however, little historical context.
13. See George H. Daniels, “The Big Questions in the History of American Technology,” Technology and Culture 11 ( January 1970): 2–6, 12–13, 19–21; and Edwin Layton, “Comment: The Interaction of Technology and Society,” Technology and Culture 11 (January 1970): 27–29. To be sure, both acknowledge the scholarly wilderness in which Burlingame researched and wrote and the absence of any professional historians of technology.
14. Burlingame, I Have Known (n. 5 above), 270. Burlingame referred specifically here to his Backgrounds of Power, but with an application to all of his relevant writings.
15. Burlingame, I Have Known, 200; March, 16, 441, 442. Such inconsistencies also pervade his later books. See, for example, Roger Burlingame, Machines That Built America (New York, 1953), 14–18, 183, 187, 201–5, regarding the degree to which mass production from Eli Whitney through Henry Ford supposedly unified and shaped the growing nation and the degree to which nontechnological values like individualism and mobility also allegedly proved decisive.
16. March, vii.
17. Ibid., 64.
18. Ibid., 151–52, 142, 152–53. On Evans and Ellicott’s vision of abundance for the new nation, see Alan I Marcus and Howard P. Segal, Technology in America: A Brief History (Belmont, Calif., 1999), 41.
19. See March, 176–77.
20. See Robert S. Woodbury, “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts,” Technology and Culture 1 (summer 1960): 235–53. Roger Burlingame’s Whittling Boy: The Story of Eli Whitney (New York, 1941) was favorably reviewed, among other places, in Time and Journal of Southern History. The book concentrated on Whitney’s alleged contributions to “the development of the assembly line in mass production” (Ralph B. Flanders, review in Journal of Southern History 8 [May 1942]: 269). Yet both reviewers noted Burlingame’s inability to use Whitney family papers, the absence of much published scholarship, and the author’s consequent resort to “invented” dialogue. See the illuminating discussion of Burlingame’s and related works in Carolyn C. Cooper, “Myth, Rumor, and History: The Yankee Whittling Boy as Hero and Villain,” Technology and Culture 44 ( January 2003): 82–96.
21. March, 190, 186.
22. Ibid., 214. See Louis C. Hunter, “The Invention of the Western Steamboat,” Journal of Economic History 3 (November 1943): 201–20, and also John K. Brown, “Classics Revisited: Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers,” Technology and Culture 44 (October 2003): 786–93.
23. March, 291–92.
24. Engines, vii. On the Civil War as a common experience for all American participants, both North and South, see Marcus and Segal (n. 18 above), 106–7. As did Burlingame, Marcus and Segal also include the government in their conception of technology—on pages 1–2, 4–8, 29–30, and 33–37, for example.
25. March, 399, 399, 398. As Burlingame elaborated on his title of 1940, “Democracy is explained by declarations, constitutions, bills of right and representation in Congress, but [alas] rarely by printing presses, bathtubs, automobiles, and radio” (Engines, 376–77).
26. Engines, vii, viii, viii. As he noted in March, “The technology was not, necessarily, collective in itself but where it was not—where it offered separatist opportunity—it was adapted as quickly as possible to a society whose collective impulse was already irresistible” (p. 437).
27. Engines, 460.
28. Ibid., 5, 72.
29. Burlingame, I Have Known (n. 5 above), 137.
30. Roger Burlingame, Inventors Behind Inventors (New York, 1947), 12, 13–14.
31. March, 83, 410, 425; Engines, 217, 530, 537, 530, 530.
32. March, 410; Burlingame cites Ogburn, Living with Machines (Chicago, 1933), 15, but no other Ogburn writings. For similar comments in Engines, see 8, 26–27, 377, 402– 3, 520, and chapters 23–25. Here Burlingame does not cite Ogburn directly, but his bibliography, 560–61, lists four of Ogburn’s other books on this topic. On Burlingame and Ogburn, see also Daniels (n. 13 above), 1–21; Layton (n. 13 above), 27–31; and H. J. Eisenman, “Seminar: Technology, Society, and Values in 20th-Century America: The UCLA 1973 Summer Seminar,” Technology and Culture 16 (April 1975): 185; on Ogburn, see Rudi Volti, “Classics Revisited: William F. Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature,” Technology and Culture 45 (April 2004): 396–405.
33. Burlingame, Inventors Behind Inventors, 12.
34. Burlingame, I Have Known, 270.
35. March, 313. Burlingame’s prior sentence is confusing: “In many ways the very mid-century events which combined for union were violently individualistic in their nature.”
36. Burlingame, I Have Known (n. 5 above), 157.
37. Ibid., 158, 159. Writing like the left-wing critic he definitely was not, Burlingame criticized Frederick Winslow Taylor’s dehumanizing scientific management, Henry Ford’s deskilling and mind-dulling assembly lines, and radio’s appeal “to the lowest common listener” (p. 158). On Lindbergh, see John William Ward, “The Meaning of Lindbergh’s Flight,” American Quarterly 10 (spring 1958): 3–16.
38. Burlingame, I Have Known, 30, 51.
39. Ibid., 17. Reviewing the book quite favorably in the New York Times Book Review, 11 October 1959, the eminent Joseph Wood Krutch thus misread its basic viewpoint: “Like so many others concerned in one way or another with Progress, he prefers to live where there isn’t too much of it.”
40. March, 410; Engines, 536, also 4–5. See also Frederick Cople Jaher, Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885–1918 (New York, 1964).
41. Engines, 535–36, 541. As Amy Sue Bix has shown, during the Great Depression American workers and their unions did not wish to oppose technological progress—and so risk being scorned as “un-American”—and sought only their fair share of economic benefits from mechanization and reduced costs or, as necessary, unemployment or retraining assistance. This position has generally remained the same ever since. See Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981 (Baltimore, 2000).
42. Mumford’s two-volume Myth of the Machine is not as starkly pessimistic as is often assumed. See Howard Segal, “Lewis Mumford’s Alternatives to the Megamachine: Critical Utopianism, Regionalism, and Decentralization,” in Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America (Amherst, Mass., 1994), 147–59.
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