The summer of 1969 was a very difficult time in American national life, but for me it was something of a summer of liberation; I had no teaching obligations and had (finally!) finished my dissertation several months earlier. When the summer began, Richard Nixon had been in office for six months; Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, had decided that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable and had started talking about “a negotiated settlement”—although the United States was still bombing not just North Vietnam but also Cambodia. Streets and campuses were in turmoil. In February, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, had called out the National Guard to quell protesters on the Berkeley campus; by May the entire city of Berkeley, not just the campus, was under military control. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the police had forcibly removed Harvard students from university offices, and in Hartford, Connecticut, black youngsters had rioted for three days and nights. The Black Panthers had become a national movement and several dissident members of the group had been murdered. At Cornell, in April, armed black students took over the student union, vowing not to leave until the administration had agreed to set up, of all things, a racially segregated dormitory—and in response, a fair number of faculty members had refused to meet their classes until the administration had removed from the campus every firearm, and every student who had carried a firearm.

In July, Senator Edward Kennedy will drive off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne. A month later Charles Manson and his followers will go on a killing spree in Southern California, hoping to stimulate a race war, and Woodstock will take place. Later, some of the Weathermen, after the failure of the Chicago “Days of Rage,” will go into hiding (only to emerge, a few months later, by blowing themselves up in a Manhattan townhouse). And in the midst of all this carnage and mayhem, John Lennon and Yoko Ono will record “Give Peace a Chance.”

My intellectual adventure as a historian of technology began during and because of that very distressing summer, the summer of our national discontent. A few months earlier, in response to the chaos on the campus at which I was then teaching, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, some junior members of the faculty had come up with the idea that in order to make our courses more “relevant” to our students, we would each teach a freshman seminar on a subject we knew nothing about. We would, in the language of the time, teach a process rather than a subject; that is, we would learn along with our students, thereby teaching them how to learn. This notion now seems ludicrous to me, after more than forty years at the lectern, but at the time I had only been a university instructor for two years, and I took it very seriously.

In the spring, preoccupied with typing and editing, I had chosen a topic for my seminar, “Technological Determinism,” but by the end of June, with my degree now in hand, I was beginning to feel the need to create some sort of syllabus, or, at the very least, some initial reading assignments with which to begin the fall semester. Well, yes, I thought, it was a good thing to learn along with my students, but if I really knew nothing at all about my topic, how was I going to begin? So there I was, sweltering in the magnificent (but un-air-conditioned) South Reading Room of the Research Collections of the New York Public Library, trying to read up, just a little bit, on this subject that I was supposed to know nothing about.

Of course “technological determinism” is not a topic that you suddenly pluck out of thin air, no matter how rarified an academic you happen to be. The term had been bruited about, sometimes dismissively, sometimes surreptitiously, during my graduate education in the history of science. Looking back, I strongly suspect that it was the dismissive and the surreptitious that attracted me to the topic: The summer of our national discontent was going to be the summer of my personal liberation—at least from the structures and strictures of my scholarly training.1 I suppose that I had heard the term first, when I was beginning my graduate studies, because Stephen F. Mason’s A History of the Sciences (which had just come out in 1962) was assigned in a general historiography course. Mason was a Marxist, I remember being told, and therefore a technological determinist—and that is why he worked so hard to demonstrate that artisans made important contributions to the Scientific Revolution. We could skip those chapters, I also remember being told, because Mason’s Marxism was just an ideology; mathematicians and philosophers were responsible for the Scientific Revolution, not masons (!) and lens-grinders. The same message was delivered a few years later, when we were asked to read J. D. Bernal’s Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century (1953), only to be told that Bernal’s tendentious desire to describe the sciences that were connected to technological developments (e.g., thermodynamics) as “progressive” and all the others as “retrogressive” derived from his Marxist convictions about technological determinism, and were therefore not to be taken seriously.

Technological determinism was thus doubly fascinating to me because doubly derided by my professors. It had something to do with technology (which was just the application of science and therefore of no interest to historians of the pure sciences), and it had something do to with Marxism (which was just an ideology and therefore unquestionably wrong). Perfect!

Except for one small problem that was starting to loom large by late July: I could not find a reading selection, neither from Mason nor Bernal, nor anyone else for that matter, that explained, clearly, what technological determinism meant as a theory of history. I had located several paragraphs on the subject from the original primary source, Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, but I deemed these unlikely to start a lively discussion among Stony Brook freshmen, partly because they were written in fairly opaque and convoluted Germanic English, and partly because their historical subject matter ranged from pre-history to the feudal period, subjects of less than minimal interest to the average Long Island teenager.

A month earlier I had already discovered that virtually all the books to be found under the heading “Technology and Social Change” in the New York Public Library (index card) catalog were the works of anthropologists and archaeologists: unlikely to yield readings that could be adapted to my needs. By the end of July, I had also decided that the sole historical work under that subject heading, Lynn White jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962), was entirely unsuitable for my course, not only because of its focus on the Middle Ages, but also because White was about as far from being a Marxist as it was possible to get. (I was not yet sophisticated enough to realize that an anti-Marxist who nonetheless believed that technological changes had helped create the feudal social order would be worth further investigation.)

Because it was so hot in the library, I tended to get drowsy after lunch and in order to keep myself from the embarrassment of falling asleep in public, I usually carried some diversionary reading. One day, in what must have been early August, I had grabbed the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books before leaving my apartment—and when I picked it up after lunch, there, right on the front cover, was the announcement of a special supplement that had something to do with technology. I skimmed it quickly, and snapped wide awake: here was the reading selection I had been searching for! “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” did not quite explain what technological determinism meant as a theory of history, but it was most decidedly not about the Middle Ages; indeed, it was extremely relevant because it was about The War, “defense intellectuals,” and the social impact of very contemporary technology.

The author was someone named John McDermott, who appeared to be a rather newly minted public intellectual. The biographical squib on the table-of-contents page referred to him as “a former editor of Viet-Report, an organizer for the New University Conference . . . [who] will join the Cambridge Institute and MIT in the fall.”2 Although he was not a historian of technology (and apparently never became one), McDermott’s article had a considerable impact on our field. Because his piece has been anthologized many, many times I suspect that I am not alone in recalling “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” as intellectually foundational; indeed, since I delivered the oral version of this essay in 2007, several colleagues my age or maybe a bit younger have confessed to being similarly inspired.

McDermott was clearly a Marxist. Although neither he nor the editors of TNYRB had felt it necessary to use the usually forbidden “M” word, his theoretical stance was broadcast both in his title and in his opening lines: “If religion was formerly the opiate of the masses,” he wrote, “then surely technology is the opiate of the educated public today, or at least of its favorite authors.” What McDermott had written appeared to be a review of The Fourth Annual Report of the Harvard Program on Technology and Society (about which, more below), but it was much longer than most articles in TNYRB because, in addition to reviewing a book, McDermott was articulating an entirely new perspective on modern technology—and, along the way, pillorying not only the Vietnam War, but also the new technologies with which it was being prosecuted, the scientists and engineers who had developed those technologies, and the defense intellectuals who had encouraged their efforts. This new perspective was nothing more nor less than a new dialectic for the twentieth century, replacing, but also building on, the dialectic that Marx had proposed for the nineteenth.

The Vietnam War was being fought, McDermott argued, with technologies that were so advanced and so complicated that ordinary soldiers could not understand them. These military technologies were akin to contemporary consumer technologies in having been developed by scientists and engineers in the employ of big corporations—and these corporations, of course, also had contracts with the overweening federal government. According to McDermott, all of the people in charge of producing these technologies—the managers of those companies and the managers of the government and the technoscientific experts in their employ—had formed a new, twentieth-century elite class, a class which both developed and celebrated advanced technology. This new class, of course, also used advanced technology, just as the predecessor elites of the nineteenth century had tried to do, in order to squelch democracy, to oppress workers, to drown the humanities, to destroy craftsmanship, and to suppress individual creativity.

The nineteenth-century elites had not, however, completely succeeded in controlling the masses, McDermott went on to say, because early industrial technologies had had countervailing, libratory characteristics. Some early industrial technologies, he argued, had actually facilitated the spread of a democratic ethos by extending literacy (the printing press) and, by enlarging the cultural horizons of a larger segment of the population (roads, postal systems, railroads, radios), had thereby both demystified the rule of the religious and governing classes and, simultaneously, provided the means of resistance to that rule. “Social skills and experiences which underlay the monopoly of the upper classes over the processes of law and government were spreading to important segments of the lower orders of society,” McDermott wrote.

For carrying on trade, managing a commercial—not a subsistence— farm, participating in a vestry or workingmen’s guild, or working in an up-to-date manufactory or business, unlike the relatively narrow existence of the medieval serf or artisan, were experiences which contributed to what I would call the social rationality of the lower orders (p. 12).

Unfortunately, according to McDermott, the post–World War II elites were succeeding where their nineteenth-century predecessors had failed. This new elite class did not own the means of production, but it was, in a crucial sense, an even more elite elite because it understood how to produce the now-very-much-more-complicated means of production, knowledge which the owners of the means did not have. To put the matter another way, this new elite was an intellectual elite, rather than a capitalist one. Because of this, McDermott believed, its impact on society was more destructive of humane values than what had come before; because knowledge rather than ownership was its means of control, this new elite had taken over even the not-for-profit sector of society, particularly the universities.

Thus, unlike Marx, McDermott was a technological pessimist. He understood the social effects of the new technology as completely, rather than only partially, oppressive.

The social organization of the new technology, by systematically denying to the general population experiences which are analogous to those of its higher management, contributes very heavily to the growth of social irrationality in our society. . . .

The normal life of men and women in the lower and, I think, middle levels of American society now seems cut off from those experiences in which near social means and distant social ends are balanced and rebalanced, adjusted and readjusted. But it is from such widespread experience with effective balancing and adjusting that social rationality derives. To the degree that it is lacking, social irrationality becomes the norm, and social paranoia a recurring phenomenon (p. 12).

This social irrationality, McDermott went on to argue, means that even those who are now rebelling against the social order have no sensible program for transforming it, no realistic social program with which to combat the central control that the new elites have established. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century rebels had had Marxian socialism—a realistic, rational scientific socialism. The new rebels, despite being better educated than their predecessors, were protesting, yes, but after that they were just turning on and tuning out. As a result, according to McDermott, they were entering “battle under extremely vague symbolic banners,” and unless they wised up about technology, they were, he feared, doomed to fail.

Thus, in McDermott’s view, and despite the title of his long essay, technology was not just the opiate of the intellectuals; it was the opiate of just about everyone in late-twentieth-century society. The new priestly class— scientists and engineers, professors in the universities and senior managers in the government and the corporations—were celebrating the wonders of consumer technology, he argued, in order to obscure the evils that were being wrought in the name of progress, just as the old priestly classes had used religion to obscure the evils being wrought by the bourgeoisie in the name of social order. Humanists and social-scientific intellectuals were being taken in by this con game, and so, he asserted, were “the lower orders.” McDermott believed that everyone in late-twentieth-century America was falling for the comforts of consumer technology in the same way that Marx had believed that everyone had once fallen for the comforts of religion.

I thought my students would love McDermott’s long essay, because he was furious, as they were, about Vietnam, and angry, as they were, about obscurantist faculty members who taught courses on irrelevant subjects. Unfortunately, I turned out to be wrong; my students hated this particular reading. Every time I taught the piece (and I was so enamored of it that I kept trying to use it, semester after semester) I felt as if I was pulling teeth. Sometimes I brushed off the students’ negative reactions as class-based: Many of them were first-generation college students, probably unable to shake off the parental hope that they would become members of precisely the managerial elite that McDermott found so appalling. Other times I told myself that their dislike was evidence that McDermott was right, that these newly affluent youngsters were so addicted to their cars and television sets that they could not, would not, see the extent to which they and their parents were being duped.

Both the passage of time and the growth of our discipline have now convinced me that my students were right and I was wrong. Forty years after the awful summer of 1969, I now see that McDermott’s essay had three fundamental and related problems. The first is that it is empirically empty; there is only one technological system discussed in detail in its twenty-seven pages, and that discussion occupies only a few paragraphs. To put the matter in an Edisonian way: McDermott’s essay is 99 percent ideology and only 1 percent evidence. The second problem is that this example is not nearly as generalizable as McDermott thought it was. The third problem— and the one that my students may have found particularly galling—is that McDermott’s technological pessimism is profoundly snobbish.

The single example on which McDermott built his comprehensive assault on high technology was a computer being used, for the first time, in the Vietnam War. “Intelligence data is gathered from all kinds of sources,” McDermott wrote,

. . . and fed into a computer complex located . . . in Bien Hoa. From this data and using mathematical models developed for the purpose, the computer then assigns probabilities to a range of potential targets, probabilities which represent the likelihood that the latter contain enemy forces or supplies. . . . Again using models developed for the purpose, the computer divides pre-programmed levels of bombardment among those potential targets which have the highest probability of containing actual targets. Following the raids, data provided by further reconnaissance is fed into the computer and conclusions are drawn (usually optimistic ones) on the effectiveness of the raids. This estimate of effectiveness then becomes part of the data governing current and future operations, and so on. (pp. 6–7)

From the point of view of the designers, McDermott argued, this system is very rational, because it doesn’t waste American lives or matériel. Yet there are, he went on to say, two points of view from which it is very irrational: the point of view of the Vietnamese peasants whose lives and livelihoods may be destroyed—and also the point of view of the American servicemen who have no way of understanding the system and are therefore alienated from it. Because they do not understand how this system works, servicemen cannot understand why it is failing. Needing to explain what is happening on their battlefields they invent entirely outrageous explanations for this failure; they cease to pay attention to the real world and become socially irrational, turning on and tuning out.

Even though McDermott believed that the characteristics and social effects of this computer were identical to the characteristics and social effects of all advanced technologies, my students must have sensed that both his conclusion (about alienation) and his convictions (about the generalizability of the example and about the social irrationality that it generates) were incorrect. The students, after all, had brothers and friends and cousins serving in Vietnam and they probably understood (as I did not) that alienation from the computer systems that determined bombing patterns was the least of the problems facing the servicemen and -women in that conflict. In addition, my students’ lives were also embedded in technological systems that they did not regard as in the least bit irrational and from which they did not feel the least bit alienated: the cars that got them back and forth to school, for example, the television sets that brought entertainment to their living quarters, the air conditioners that relieved the oppressive heat of summer, and, maybe best of all, the transistor radios that allowed them to bring their music with them to the beach.

From their perspective, McDermott provided no take-home message about technology that resonated in any way, shape, or form with their own experience of technology or with their own technological praxis. On top of this, my students probably noticed that McDermott was much more exercised about “[p]rofessionals who seek self-realization through creative and autonomous behavior without regard to the defined goals, needs, and channels of their respective departments” than he was about people like themselves and their parents, whom McDermott consistently referred to as “members of the lower orders.”

Interestingly enough, two of these problems—a lack of both concrete and generalizable examples—also plagued the book that had originally occasioned McDermott’s critique. In 1964, the IBM Corporation had given Harvard University several million dollars in order to establish, for ten years, the Harvard University Program on Technology and Society. Emmanuel Mesthene had been appointed as director of the program, and in 1968 he had written and published its Fourth Annual Report, not just for IBM, but for distribution (free) to the general public.3 Mesthene had a Ph.D. in philosophy and had taught for a while at several liberal arts colleges (at one of which, apparently, he had had John McDermott as a student). At some point, Mesthene had become a policy analyst, first as an employee of the RAND Corporation and then at OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. As a result, to use McDermott’s terminology, he had become a member of the scientific-managerial intellectual elite.

At Harvard, Mesthene proceeded to hire several young scholars with various kinds of disciplinary training, and he asked them to explore the relationship between specific technologies and society. The academic goal was, in a sense, to do for the modern world what Lynn White jr. had done for the medieval. In a political sense, the goal was to also develop “action plans” that would ameliorate the social problems that so many people believed technological change to be creating.

In his first report, written two years after the program began operating and published in Technology and Culture, Mesthene confessed that “The Study Group is currently learning to talk.” “An example of the process,” he went on,

. . . is our effort to understand the specific ways in which technological changes and social changes affect each other. We found the standard literature on each too self-contained to be illuminating of the relationship, and most current discussions of the interaction too impressionistic and lacking in conceptual rigor to serve as useful starting points.4

In the next few years, Mesthene and his colleagues published a fair number of research reports (which were most notable for their very extensive bibliographies), but, with one exception, they never improved very much on his original critique of the existing literature: that is to say, they failed to produce either a concrete example of a technology producing a social change or a concrete action plan with which to mitigate the “bad” social effects of a technology, while preserving the “good” ones.5 The Fourth Report, the one that McDermott was reviewing, was a summary of some of those research reports, with a few pages of generalizations from Mesthene by way of introduction. Mesthene subsequently attempted to say a bit more in a short book that he published with Harvard University Press, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society (1970), and the final report of the project, Harvard University Program on Technology and Society, 1964–1972 (1972).

Most of the reviewers of Mesthene’s books and pamphlets found them vacant. Kenneth Boulding, writing in Science, referred to Technological Change as an extended essay (indeed, it was only seventy-five very small pages). “It has the judicious, rather lofty quality of Emerson’s essays, and at the end of it one has the same slight feeling of emptiness.”6 George Basalla, writing in the same journal three years later, called the summary volume an example of “bland and sterile philosophizing.”7 IBM apparently agreed; unhappy with the lack of results, it pulled its funding for the project two years early.

John McDermott’s critique was different. He specifically disapproved of the fact that none of the project research was focused on military technology. But he was also generally unhappy with Mesthene’s frequent assertions that if scientists and engineers were better educated about society they would be able to build technologies that had no negative social effects, or no negative effects that could not be regulated away. As he made repeatedly clear in “The Opiate of the Intellectuals,” McDermott was a Marxist pessimist. He thought that the negative effects of technology were simultaneously inevitable and overwhelming: inevitably negative because of the nature of capitalism, overwhelmingly negative because all attempts to regulate technology were bound to fail unless capitalism was overthrown— and this was unlikely to happen, given what he thought were the inadequacies of his fellow revolutionaries.

Given that their characterizations of technology were so different, it is ironic that both Mesthene and McDermott thought of the entities called “technology” and “society” as unitary abstractions, equally simple and straightforwardly understandable. “Failure of society to respond to the opportunities created by technological change means that much actual or potential technology lies fallow, that is, is not used at all or is not used to its full capacity,” Mesthene wrote in 1970, leaving the reader to wonder how a whole society manages to respond to an opportunity and then how anyone could possibly know when a technology is being wasted.8 “Technology creates its own politics,” McDermott had written a year earlier, “[and the point] of advanced systems is to minimize the incidence of personal or social behavior which is erratic or otherwise not easily classified,” leaving the reader to wonder how an electric power system or a railroad network could possibly lead to a reduction in anarchic behavior. That there might be different kinds of technologies, each of which had different kinds of social effects, or that different elements of society might be affected in different ways by various kinds of technologies seems not to have occurred to either of these two commentators.

McDermott’s essay stimulated my generation of historians of technology because of both its Marxism and its pessimism, most especially his conviction that the contemporary authoritarianism that we found so repellent was actually built into our technologies and might therefore be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to eradicate. In a sense, “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” was a paradigm-shifting work; it replaced optimism-based history of technology with pessimism-based history of technology— and, precisely because it was so lacking in good examples, it opened new doors for research, created new questions to be answered. Ironically (or maybe dialectically would be a better word), as we walked through those doors and set about answering those questions, we also developed a much more subtle, and much less unitary, understanding of both “technology” and “society.” And as we increased the level of evidence, we also decreased the level of ideology because we built up, I believe, a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to label a technology either “good” or “bad.”

Consider, for example, Merritt Roe Smith’s classic 1977 study, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change. Taking up McDermott’s challenge, Smith examined the social impact of a military technology, but by contrasting the introduction of interchangeable-parts arms manufacture in two different armories, Springfield and Harpers Ferry, Smith demonstrated that the same technology can have very different effects, depending on the social character of workplaces. Somewhat routinized but nonetheless skilled jobs were created in the North, but unroutinized skilled jobs were eliminated in the South. Smith also reminded us that while we might join McDermott in yearning nostalgically for some aspects of early-nineteenth-century artisanal culture—devotion to craftsmanship and a respect for the regular alteration of work and leisure—we are perfectly delighted to have put others far behind us: nepotism, violence, feudalistic corruption, and racism. Pace McDermott, technologies, and the cultures in which they are embedded, can be both libratory and authoritarian, both good and bad at the same time.

Similarly, by closely examining yet another military technology, David Mindell has shown us, in War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor (2000), that a single technological system, an ironclad warship, can debase one set of cultural values, military heroism, for one set of people, the men who served onboard, while at the same time enhancing the same set of values for another set of people, the civilians who celebrated its victory. And Janet Abbate has taught us, in Inventing the Internet (1999), that a complex technological system developed to enhance military command and control can—again, pace McDermott—radically decentralize mass communications when adapted by civilians. Contrary to McDermott’s thesis about the relationship between experts in and the owners of advanced technology regimes, Thomas Parke Hughes has taught us, in Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society (1983), that technological and managerial elites are themselves often at the mercy of non-technologically minded investors as well as elected and appointed politicians.

As historians of technology learned to complicate the relationship between technology and society we also learned to temper our pessimism, or at least I did. In the autumn of 1969, stimulated by McDermott (and bored with the subject of my dissertation), I decided to try my hand at a research project that would be both modern (that is, subsequent to industrialization) and relevant to some contemporary social difficulty. After reading a bit about the development of commuter railroads (I had, by that time, moved from Manhattan to Long Island, in order to be closer to my job), I changed my mind about a topic and decided to focus on technologies and social changes with which I was more intimately involved: the technologies of housework, and the rise of second-generation feminism. I set out, in other words, to provide an evidentiary base for what was then received (technological determinist) wisdom, namely that the rise of advanced household technologies had left educated housewives discontented because there was little meaningful work left for them to do inside of homes.

The very first file folder that I opened when I started research about household technology was labeled, therefore, “Resistors,” because I was sure—following McDermott (and E. P. Thompson)—that domestic artisans—women who made butter and cheese, who baked their own bread and canned their own vegetables—would have resisted industrial technology in the same way that English weavers and some American armorers once had, by resisting its incursion into their working lives. My forays into the primary sources about housework were, however, full of surprises. The vast majority of American women, I discovered, were perfectly delighted to have motors ease the drudgery of household labor, and many, especially those who had not been affluent as children, welcomed the improvements in living standards that accompanied what advertisers liked to call the “modernization” of American homes. My “Resistors” file remained very, very thin; by the time what I had originally conceived as a very short project finally reached its end ten years later, there were only three index cards in that file. All of them were about very rich women who had resisted the electrification of their homes because they were unwilling to modernize their servants out of jobs while simultaneously being rich enough to be able to continue to live luxuriously without refrigerators, fans, electric lights, or electric coffeepots.

Thus, by the time I wrote More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1983), I had come to understand that neither the technological pessimists nor the technological optimists were subtle enough in their analyses, which is part of the reason why the subtitle of the book contains the word irony. I had also come to understand that technologies were different from each other—that washing machines are not like assembly lines; that work processes were different from each other; that household work is not like factory work; and that people are different from each other: that women, for example, are socialized differently from men. To put the matter more concretely, I had started to deconstruct the entities “technology” and “society” that both McDermott and Mesthene had thought unitary—and I had ended up discovering that my original hypothesis was almost the opposite of the truth. I had also stopped being a left academic snob.

My most recent research project, summarized in Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (2008) is an exploration of a very different set of technological systems—the ones that screen adults and babies for the mutations that result in genetic diseases—but it has led me along very similar paths to very similar conclusions. My original hypothesis was that genetic screening had been foisted on the public for nefarious (read “eugenic”) reasons; this hypothesis was completely reversed during the course of the investigation. I discovered, to my surprise, that the physician-scientists who undertook the research and then developed the technologies did so in the interests of and under pressure from their own patients. I also discovered that the vast majority of pregnant women were in favor of genetic screening, even when the downsides were carefully explained to them. Were all these women victims of false consciousness (as I once thought industrializing housewives were), or did they understand something about their own interests that I, sitting in my well-appointed ivory tower, had somehow missed? It took ten years of research in primary sources derived from many different kinds of people playing many different kinds of roles in the drama of genetic screening before I finally realized that, once again, snobbism had led me astray: The social meanings of these new technologies were more complicated than my ideology (still Marxist-pessimist) had led me to suspect.

Ironically, had I kept reading The New York Review of Books attentively into the late autumn of 1969, I might have encountered an answer to John McDermott. And, had I known then what I know now, I might have appreciated the answer enough to save myself from some of those false starts. In the 20 November issue, the noted poet, memoirist, and social critic Paul Goodman published an essay entitled “Can Technology Be Humane?” This was, as far as I could tell, the only response to “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” that TNYRB ever published. Goodman’s text was wordfor-word identical to the first chapter of his then-forthcoming book, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, but the fact that either he or an editor regarded it as a positive response to McDermott’s negative is revealed by its title; in the book version the essay is called “Sciences and Professions,” not “Can Technology Be Humane?”9

Goodman was born in 1911, making him several decades older than McDermott. He was one of the so-called New York intellectuals, a writer of novels, poetry, and essays; he became famous after the publication, in 1960, of a work of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. Although he described himself as an anarchist, members of McDermott’s generation might well have thought of him as Old Left; his essays had appeared regularly in such journals as Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, and, of course, The New York Review of Books.10 New Reformation, his twenty-sixth and last book, was intended as a commentary (often personal and impassioned) on the youth movement of the late 1960s, from which, as the subtitle, Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, is meant to suggest, he felt more than a little estranged.11

“Can Technology Be Humane?” begins with a student protest in which McDermott might have been involved and that he certainly would have championed.

On March 4, 1969, there was a “work stoppage” and teach-in initiated by dissenting professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed at thirty other major universities and technical schools across the country, against misdirected scientific research and the abuse of scientific technology. . . . I want to consider this event in a broader context than the professors did, as part of a religious crisis. An attack on the American scientific establishment is an attack on the worldwide system of belief. I think we are on the eve of a new Reformation, and no institution or status will go unaffected.12

Although Goodman could understand the dismay of these dissenters, he thought that their attack was focused on the wrong target. Yes, he went on to say, it is absolutely true that too much money is being funneled through universities to support the wrong kind of research on the wrong kind of subjects. And yes, it is absolutely true that that money could be better spent on projects that would more directly benefit individuals, particularly those who are poor and hungry. But, Goodman continued, science and technology are not to blame; the blame lies with social institutions through which they are currently being funded and developed.

Science and technology are not thoroughly and irrevocably evil, as so many young people seemed to think, because they have additional and countervailing characteristics, redeeming social graces which the young rebels seem to be forgetting. “For three hundred years,” Goodman admonished the dissenters, “science and scientific technology had an unblemished and justified reputation as a wonderful adventure, pouring out practical benefits and liberating spirit from the errors and superstitions of traditional faith.”13 We ought to be rebuilding them, he continued, not destroying them, socially reconstructing them rather than eliminating them. Yes, he concluded, science and technology can be humane; they were in the past and, even if they are not in the present, they can be in the future.

Had I been attracted to this argument, I might have obtained a copy of Goodman’s book—and there, in its second chapter, would have found a counterexample to McDermott’s target calculating computer, an example of what Goodman meant by those complimentary phrases, “wonderful adventure,” “practical benefits,” and “liberating spirit.” “I am writing this chapter in July, 1969,” he begins chapter 2 of New Reformation,

when the two men have just walked on the Moon, and five hundred million televiewers have watched it. Surely this is mankind being great at several of our best things, exploring the unknown, making ingenious contraptions, cooperating with a will to do it, drawing on the accumulation of culture and history, whether we think of the equations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, or of the roving Polynesians, Vikings, Columbus, and Magellan. And we have satisfied our lust to see at a distance: the pictures a second later were as sensational as the voyage.

People do beat all!14

The “wonderful adventure” is, of course, the risky exploration of the unknown; the “practical benefit” is that five hundred million people were able to experience it, not just those who participated, and not just those who could subsequently read a report about it; the “liberating spirit” is the dual inspirations that led to and resulted from this effort to “reach for the stars.”

Much as he approved both of the space program and of the television coverage, Goodman found some things to criticize: the program, because of the secrecy that surrounded it and the nationalism that had initiated it; television in general, because of the gullibility its visual components induced in its audiences. But unlike McDermott, he did not think of either space capsules or television sets as monolithic: they had, in his view, several different moral valences, several different social effects, some good, some bad, some humane, some inhumane. All these effects, he argued, were inseparable from the technology itself, and so the good had to be taken with the bad and if the good were good enough—which in these cases he thought they were—then accepted. One of the features of the space program that bothered him was that success required teamwork and therefore individual creativity had to be suppressed. But, he argued, “[t]he collectivity is inherent in the enterprise, and that is acceptable since the purpose is not stupid and the people are not coerced.”15 Thus, Goodman’s optimism countered McDermott’s pessimism as being too monolithic. At the same time, and perhaps unknowingly, Goodman also countered Mesthene’s faith in the possibilities of technocratic regulation as being too simplistic, as not understanding both that technologies have inherent social characteristics and that they can have many different social effects simultaneously.

Technology, in Goodman’s vision of it, was, thus, neither good nor bad nor neutral. The solution to our current dissatisfactions, he argued, was not to ditch the good because of the bad, but to change the social institutions through which new technologies were being constructed, so that, in the future, the good might outweigh the bad, by being built in from the outset, by having good social effects as the goal rather than as the spinoff.

I would not be surprised to discover that Goodman had been corresponding with Mel Kranzberg, because his solution to the problems of the day could well have come from one of the founding documents of SHOT. “. . . [T]echnology,” Goodman wrote, “is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science. It aims at prudent goods for the commonweal, to provide efficient means for these goods.” At present, he went on to say, “It has no principles of its own,” but is merely treated as a “bastard” subject half in the theoretical sciences and half in the vocational schools. “To remedy this . . . technology must have its proper place on the faculty as a learned profession important in modern society, along with medicine, law, the humanities, and natural philosophy, learning from them and having something to teach them.”16

What Goodman advocated, then, was precisely what the founders of SHOT had in mind and what so many members of subsequent generations have sought to achieve: a body of humanistically inspired, evidence-based scholarship, which treats technology as both morally and socially multifaceted—so that the young can make changes, if they want to, that are, to borrow a concept from McDermott, both technologically and socially rational.

Looking back, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea if we resurrected all these texts—McDermott’s, Mesthene’s, and Goodman’s—as a way of demonstrating how far our field has come in the intervening four decades. Looking forward, I confess that if I were asked to choose just one of them to exemplify my hopes for the future of our discipline, it would surely be the first two chapters of Goodman’s New Reformation: by all means, in the future as in the past, let ideology inspire research, as long as, in the end, evidence trumps ideology.

1. I cannot resist a comment on sociotechnological systems here. I kept typing “strictures” as I was drafting this essay, and Word kept substituting a “u” for an “i”: structures instead of strictures. After being corrected for the third time by some programmer’s dictionary, I decided to honor that person by leaving in what she or he thought I ought to be saying.

2. The piece appeared in the issue of 31 July 1969, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 1–27. It can be accessed online at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11253 (accessed 6 November 2009), but I recommend reading it in its original form or on microfilm, because the advertisements of its time provide crucial historical context. McDermott subsequently wrote The Crisis in the Working Class and Some Arguments for a New Labor Movement (Boston, 1980), and he taught labor studies at SUNY-Old Westbury for many years.

3. [Harvard] Program on Technology and Society: Fourth Annual Report. Actually, it was a pamphlet of ninety-six pages, self-published (1967–68) by the Harvard Program on Technology and Society.

4. Emmanuel G. Mesthene, “An Experiment in Understanding: The Harvard Program Two Years After,” Technology and Culture 7 (October 1966): 479–80.

5. The exception is Renée C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey, The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis (Chicago, 1974). Fox, a medical sociologist, and Swazey, a historian, met under the aegis of the Harvard project, where they began what has turned out to be several decades of fruitful collaboration.

6. Kenneth E. Boulding, “Tools on a Grand Scale,” Science 168 (19 June 1970): 1442.

7. George Basalla, “Addressing a Central Problem,” Science 180 (11 May 1973): 584.

8. Emmanuel G. Mesthene, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 35.

9. Paul Goodman, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York, 1970), 3–23, and “Can Technology be Humane?” TNYRB 13, no. 9 (20 November 1969).

10. A partial bibliography and a biography can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Goodman_(writer) (accessed 6 November 2009).

11. See chapter 3 of New Reformation for Goodman’s discussion of this estrange-
ment.

12. Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?”; Goodman, New Reformation, 3.

13. Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?”; Goodman, New Reformation, 6.

14. Goodman, New Reformation, 24.

15. Ibid., 30–31.

16. Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?”; Goodman, New Reformation, 7–8.

Dr. Cowan is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. This essay is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0623056, SHOT 50th Anniversary Workshop, Washington, D.C.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

The Record

Born in Scotland in 1911, Rae moved to the United States with his family when he was twelve.4 He studied at Brown University, where he received his B.A. in history in 1932, his M.A. in 1934, and his Ph.D. in 1936. His dissertation focused on the history of railroad land grants, but when he took a position at MIT in 1939, he considered himself an economic historian without portfolio. During the war he taught army and navy courses on military and naval history, which nudged him toward the history of technology, but his busy schedule kept him from seriously contemplating his next research steps. After the war he worked with Thomas H. D. Mahoney on a textbook, The United States in World History, which was published in 1949. This project prompted Rae to think more broadly about the role of technology in the development of the United States, as did an early-1950s collaboration with Lynwood Bryant to produce an MIT course reader on the industrial history of Lowell, Massachusetts. By the early 1950s, then, due in part to his work on these classroom texts but also to his everyday experiences teaching and working with engineers at MIT, Rae had very nearly decided to focus his future research on the role of the engineer in economic history.

The clincher came in 1953, when the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard invited him to conduct research on the engineer as entrepreneur. His work at the center—and, notably, his contact there with Hugh Aitken, Arthur Cole, and others working on technological matters— convinced him of the value of the engineer as a subject of historical inquiry. Rae was now certain that he had found his next general area of study, but he still lacked a definite focus. As he later explained, he “was convinced that the best way to proceed was to select a single industry for intensive investigation, one that had a reasonably rapid pace of technological change and could be presumed to have engineers well represented in its management.”5 Notice his dual interest in engineering and management: what Rae was really after was a way to study the relative importance of managerial savvy and technical expertise in the success or failure of industrial enterprises.6 He considered the railroad industry but decided against it after realizing that “every railroad spike in the United States already had at least one book written about it.”7 And so he turned to an area of investigation that was still very much the domain of the amateur enthusiast and largely untouched by serious scholars: the automobile industry.

He published the first of two important articles on the subject, “The Electric Vehicle Company: A Monopoly That Missed,” in Business History Review in 1955. In it he explored the attempt made by the Electric Vehicle Company (EVC) to monopolize the turn-of-the-century automobile industry on the basis of its expertise in electric traction; its considerable knowledge of manufacturing methods, by way of the Pope company; its absorption of electric-vehicle competitors and urban-traction lines; and its de jure, but ultimately not de facto, control of the internal-combustion market through the Selden patent. The EVC was a colossal failure, and Rae placed the bulk of the blame squarely on the shoulders of the firm’s management for committing several “avoidable errors of judgment.”8 Of these, the most important (or at least, the most commented-on in subsequent years) occurred at the firm’s founding in 1899, when its management picked the wrong horse by deciding to focus on electric traction rather than internal combustion or steam. This was an unfortunate but understandable error, according to Rae. For at the time, “the technical future of the horseless carriage was quite uncertain,” and “no one could say with assurance whether steam, electricity, or the internal combustion engine would prove to be the most acceptable substitution for the horse.”9 Electric traction was a viable option in 1899, and no one ought to fault the EVC for having chosen it at that time.

However—and this is the critical point, for Rae—the EVC’s decision to attempt to monopolize the industry on the basis of electric traction at a time of great technical flux, enormous market uncertainty, and minimal barriers to entry was a grave and less forgivable error. And when the internal combustion engine began to demonstrate its superiority to electricity and steam in the early 1900s—both because of its greater range compared with electricity (an important consideration when viewed in the context of an emerging market for personal vehicles based on the expectation of wideranging freedom of movement) and because of its relative simplicity of assembly and ease of maintenance compared with steam—the EVC compounded its electric-monopoly blunder by attempting to use the Selden patent to control the growth of the internal-combustion industry through an ineffective and arguably poorly managed patent pool known as the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers. So for Rae, managerial miscues easily toppled the EVC, for although the firm was blessed with considerable technical expertise, at least on paper, its management lacked a sense of practical and technical balance. Hence its many blunders and its eventual, spectacular collapse.

In 1958, Rae followed up with a brief biographical sketch of William C. Durant.10 Here he momentarily set aside his general interest in the role of technical expertise, using the colorful and controversial career of Durant to explore instead the importance to successful managerial outcomes of a healthy balance between promotional skills and product enthusiasm, on the one hand, and administrative savvy, on the other. (Durant possessed an unhealthy surplus of the former and deficit of the latter.) This insight informed his approach to the larger, book-length project he was working on at the time; so too did the year he spent (1956–1957) as exchange associate professor at the Case Institute of Technology. There he met Mel Kranzberg and became involved in the endeavor to establish an academic society for the fledgling field of the history of technology. Rae, as is often said, had now cast his lot with SHOT. Perhaps more to the point, it was at Case that he completed the bulk of his work on that first monograph, which he finished in 1959 with the assistance of a grant from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. (Shortly thereafter he moved to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, where he would remain for the rest of his career.)

Published by the Chilton Company—best known today for its automobile repair manuals—Rae’s American Automobile Manufacturers was an attempt to understand the technical and managerial dynamics of the early automobile industry in the United States from its origins in the 1890s through the mid-1930s. More specifically, it was an industry-wide case study of entrepreneurship, and Rae’s central concern throughout its 208 densely packed pages was to highlight the importance of a working managerial balance between technical skill, product enthusiasm, and business savvy. Successful automobile companies (the vast majority of the firms founded in the 1890s and 1900s were anything but) were therefore those that were run by entrepreneurs who understood the technology of the automobile but were not obsessed by it—by those, that is, who were able to channel their enthusiasm and their technical expertise toward the creation of vehicles that could actually be produced and sold at a profit. Too much enthusiasm for a particular idea spelled doom for many a company; conversely, business savvy alone was rarely enough to sustain firms founded on anything but a technically solid basis. Put another way, one had to know cars, one had to know how to produce them, and one had to know how to sell them. Although this may not sound like a particularly profound insight, consider the record: of the hundreds (possibly thousands) of firms that entered the business in the 1890s and 1900s, only a tiny percentage survived for more than a few months, let alone years. Those that did not make it, as Rae carefully documents in his text, were those that did not possess the requisite balance of technical accomplishment and good managerial sense.11

To be more precise, nearly all of those that did not make it were run by individuals with plenty of technical expertise and automotive know-how but far too little practical managerial ability—those who would rather have gone broke building cars than become rich doing something else.12 Sufficient technical expertise was nearly universal among the early companies: this was a critical insight, one which raised serious doubts about the role of the mythical, learn-as-you-go tinkerer at the dawn of the automobile age. To support this point, Rae begins his narrative, following an introductory overview, with two detailed chapters painstakingly tracing the origins of literally hundreds of early automobile firms. Most, he demonstrates, were launched by entrepreneurs who were either accomplished technicians or, slightly less commonly, college-educated engineers.

Clever packaging enabled him to present a wealth of material on these firms and their founders without getting bogged down: chapter 2 covers those which began in the bicycle or carriage business and then moved on to cars, while chapter 3 examines those whose founders started off as machinists or engineers before attempting to move into the automobile business. Subsequent chapters carry the story through the mid-1930s, covering the evolution of the early market for cars and the gradual emergence of larger automobile firms, especially in the Midwest; the EVC and the Selden patent (Selden, Rae contends, was not an evildoer looking to bend the rules of patent law to his advantage, but rather an earnest man whose ultimately advantageous patent-issue delay had more to do with his honest inability to perfect his working model than with anything resembling a nefarious sense of good timing); the formation of the first successful combinations; Ford’s development of mass production and the cultivation of a mass automobile market; the industry’s contributions to World War I; the postwar recession and the declining role of smaller, independent firms; the maturation of the mass market and General Motors’s (read: Sloan’s) eclipse of Ford; and the triumph of the Big Three. Throughout, Rae emphasizes the substantial rate of attrition during the industry’s first forty years and the critical role of managerial savvy, as a counterweight to technological enthusiasm, among the leaders of the precious few firms that thrived.

The book was well received, for the most part. Reviewers responded positively to Rae’s detailed research into the backgrounds of so many individuals, to his documentation of the importance of technical and managerial balance, and to the clear and concise manner in which he presented the story of hundreds of men as they entered into the industry via the carriage, bicycle, and machine trades. One reviewer wished that Rae had been able to include more biographical depth on the many figures mentioned in the book, while another believed that Rae should have tried to use his wealth of empirical material to better address the philosophical question of the nature of entrepreneurship. Perhaps most significantly, one also criticized him for failing to do more to cover the role of organized labor and ordinary workers—for having written a book, that is, which focuses far too much attention on the accomplishments of industry leaders and does so in an overly kind and even glorifying manner.13

Indeed, Rae’s take on the early automobile industry and its pioneers is overwhelmingly positive. It is also openly celebratory in its nostalgia for the freewheeling, largely unregulated, pre–New Deal era of automobility it covers. “The growth of motor vehicle manufacturing in the United States,” Rae concludes, represents “as convincing a case for freedom of enterprise as can be found. . . . The most fitting summation seems to be to paraphrase Patrick Henry and say, ‘If this be Capitalism, make the most of it.’”14 Over the next quarter-century Rae would valiantly stick to his guns on this point, defending the automobile industry, the automobile itself, and the system of automobility they spawned against a rising tide of critics.15 Much more so than anything else, his positive attitude toward the car and his consistent defense of it would serve as an underlying, unifying theme in his three subsequent books on the automobile in American life.

Automobility’s critics remained few and far between in 1965, however, when Rae released his second monograph on the car, The American Automobile: A Brief History. Published in Daniel J. Boorstin’s University of Chicago Press series on the history of American civilization, this book built on Rae’s earlier work on the car and expanded it in two key ways. First, it covered a lot more ground, charging through the Great Depression—where his 1959 book ended—and carrying the story of the American automobile industry through the early 1960s. Second, and more significantly, the book dealt not simply with the automobile industry and its internal dynamics, but also with the automobile and its broader context—in the language of the time, the automobile’s “impact” on American society. Rae achieved all of this in a book scarcely fifty pages longer than his first by masterfully condensing his material from 1959 into the new book’s first seven chapters. This reserved the final seven for material on the New Deal; the automobile industry in World War II; the labor-relations and structural problems of the 1940s and 1950s; the postwar boom in road construction, including the interstates; the era of chrome and tailfins; the role of highway policy and automobile use in the reconfiguration of urban and suburban America; and a concise conclusion examining the road ahead.

The American Automobile is replete with talk of the car’s “impact” and “effects” on American life, but the book does not present a simple determinist narrative. Indeed, Rae normally goes to great lengths, even when writing that “modern suburbia is a creation of the automobile” or lamenting that “the automobile brought blight to the inner city,”16 to explain that the car itself does not and cannot do such things. Instead, the automobile is an enabler, and the widespread availability of automobiles has simply made it possible for Americans to indulge a number of behavioral impulses already present in their psyche. “It would be an exaggeration to say that the automobile made Americans a more mobile people,” Rae explains at one point. “It would be more accurate to say that an already mobile people was given the means to travel farther, faster, and more freely.”17 Thus the accelerated growth of suburbia in the age of the car is simply an extension of a much-longer-term trend toward population dispersal that began in the age of the railroad and streetcar.18 Likewise, the automobile did not simply create a demand for improved roads that was gradually met through the efforts of local, state, and federal authorities. Instead, the road and the car evolved in a mutually influential fashion, or so Rae hints on more than one occasion19 (this point would later serve as the interpretive anchor of his 1971 book, The Road and the Car in American Life). In short, the presentday reader who simply skims this text is likely to come away with the false impression that Rae is writing about a one-way street.

What is apparent at a glance is that Rae’s assessment of the automobile and the automobile industry’s impact on American life is nearly always positive. To those who bemoan the advent of Ford’s assembly methods for ushering in an era characterized by the “manufacture in quantity of cheap articles, inferior in quality to the product of handicraft methods and acceptable only because they are lower in price,” for example, Rae answers matter-of-factly that “the alleged sacrifice of quality to quantity is a myth.”20 And to those inclined to complain that suburban life is monotonous and its housing numbingly uniform, Rae explains that the impersonality of big city life is far worse than monotony and that suburbanites have by and large been justified in exchanging their crowded urban tenements for individual dwellings sited on small patches of green.21

Likewise, to those for whom mass automobile-based tourism is a blight rapidly destroying the natural beauty of America’s national parks through litter and excessive tireand footprints, Rae counters by pointing to the inherently democratic appeal of mass access and the implicit elitism of those who wish to eliminate it: “it [is] difficult to deplore the social revolution which opened recreational travel to the many instead of the privileged few.”22 And, finally, to those who by the mid-1960s had begun to contend that public investment in mass transit was a more sensible solution to the problem of urban congestion than the construction of additional highway miles, Rae explains at great length that

the automobile will be an extraordinarily difficult contender [for transit] to eliminate. Its disadvantages as a means of commuting between city and suburb can be freely conceded; nevertheless no existing or proposed system of mass transportation offers any real promise of dissuading the inhabitant of Metropolis from using his car if he possibly can. Whether the trip in town is made to go to work or to shop or for entertainment, the automobile allows flexibility of schedule, it avoids the nuisance of getting to and from stations or bus stops, and it is invariably pleasanter than riding in crowded, uncomfortable, and usually dingy public vehicles.23

Flexible in time and space and individually oriented, the automobile is simply better-suited to go where Americans want to go, and when, than any form of transit. Though he admits it has its flaws, the automobile is for Rae the cornerstone of an American way of life that is on balance worth embracing.

When The American Automobile hit the shelves, the reception was mixed—and indeed, the book’s useful life as a “must read” turned out to be remarkably short. One reviewer complained that Rae was once again too brief in his discussion of labor and too kind in his analysis of industry leaders in what is otherwise a well-researched and notable contribution to the field. Another generally liked the book but believed it would have benefited from a more thorough comparison with developments in Europe, a fair complaint, while another simply noted that the book’s great weakness is that it is too concise. At least one other was much less kind, judging that “by far the greater part of the material presented is entirely lacking in freshness,” that “many of [the book’s] interpretive observations are either trite or truistic,” and that “for the business historian or economist there is very little here.”24 Ouch.

Mixed reviews had very little to do with the book’s short shelf life, though. This was due instead to what in hindsight cannot but be judged a most unfortunate matter of timing. Written in the early-to-mid-1960s and released in 1965, The American Automobile appeared at the very tail end of the 1940s–1960s zenith of American automobility. Against a mid-to-late1960s-and-early-1970s backdrop that featured Ralph Nader’s scathing Unsafe at Any Speed (1965); the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (1966); the advent of mandatory pollution-control devices on vehicles sold in California (1966) and the 49-state market (1968); violent riots (those of 1966–1968, most notably), which took place in the very areas of urban blight Rae attributed to the growth of mass automobility; the federal Clean Air Act (1970); and the OPEC crisis (1973), Rae’s positive appraisal of the automobile as a source of social and economic progress rapidly came to seem far out of step with reality.

Following a brief flirtation with the history of aviation in the late 1960s—begun, he would later explain, under the mistaken impression that the aircraft business was a close technical and managerial relative of the automobile industry25—Rae therefore turned back to the history of the automobile at the end of the 1960s, at least in part to return to its defense. This effort resulted in what is arguably his best-known and certainly his most ambitious book, The Road and the Car in American Life, sponsored by the Automobile Manufacturers Association and published by the MIT Press in 1971. In it Rae broadened the scope of his earlier inquiries into the role of the car in American history by treating the automobile and the highway as a single transportation system. More precisely, his primary goal in this text was to explore the ways in which the state of vehicle technology have influenced the art of road construction—and vice-versa—over time. But this is not a work of co-construction. Instead, Rae leads his readers through a number of historical eras, each characterized by a particular direction of influence in this road–car dialectic: at times the state of road building has spurred innovations in wheeled-vehicle technology, while at others, innovations in the latter sparked improvements in the former. His coverage of this ongoing developmental race between the road and the car begins at the dawn of civilization and runs through ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, and colonial America en route to the late-nineteenthand twentieth-century United States, where the bulk of his tale is set.

The impact of this ongoing race on American development is a central concern of The Road and the Car in American Life. And not surprisingly, Rae’s overall assessment of the social and economic effects of the automobile-highway system is positive—often unapologetically so. He argues that its maturation has been a critical source of economic stimulus and upward mobility in the twentieth century, for example, both because of the expanded opportunities for employment available to a mobile population and because of the greater flexibility in the movement of goods and raw materials associated with shortand long-haul trucking.26 Returning to a theme he addressed in 1965, Rae also praises the road-car system for having opened new possibilities in long-distance tourism and national-park access, for “the growth of such driving for pleasure is certainly a social benefit in that it gives an increasingly urbanized civilization a ready outlet for recreation.”27 Good roads and cheaper, more reliable cars have also transformed rural American life for the better, helping to diminish the rural-urban divide in terms of access to quality health care, education, and broader markets for ideas and goods. Suburban housing, suburbanized industry, and the Interstate Highway System receive glowing coverage as well.28

This is not to suggest that Rae was somehow unaware or unconcerned with what was by 1971 an ever-expanding list of complaints against automobility. On the contrary, The Road and the Car in American Life expands Rae’s earlier coverage of the problems associated with mass tourism and the growing specter of urban blight. It also includes detailed examinations of traffic congestion, air pollution, and other blemishes on his subject’s record. But he wasn’t willing to blame the road-car system for having caused all of these problems, and he certainly wasn’t ready to give up on the system altogether because of those that it had.

Urban congestion, for example, existed long before Model Ts, White trucks, and eight-lane superhighways. If the road-car system has indeed made urban traffic worse, he explains, this has been due not to any fundamental flaw in the theoretical ability of the road and the car to move people and goods efficiently. Instead, it is due to the blunder made by earlytwentieth-century urban officials when many of them, especially in older cities, failed to grasp the revolutionary potential of motorized transport. We would not be in the mess we’re in, that is, “if the nature of automotive transportation had been recognized sooner and if prompter measures had been taken to adapt to it. Instead motor vehicles were expected to merge into existing traffic and transportation patterns and to share the same streets with trolley cars, wagons, bicycles, and pedestrians,” leading to makeshift solutions to regulate the flow of traffic that have prevented us from realizing the full potential of the road-car system.29 This lapse into counterfactual speculation—rare for Rae—does of course beg the question of why metropolitan areas that grew up in the age of the automobile (Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit) aren’t the free-flowing motorized utopias envisioned by the enthusiasts and boosters who laid out their extensive networks of highways and roads.

Rae returns to the question of urban congestion several chapters later to discuss the range of proposed solutions bandied about in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here his analysis is commendably evenhanded. He begins by explaining that, because urban congestion is a problem dating back long before the advent of the automobile,30 one then-popular proposal to ban automobiles from urban areas altogether is likely to do little in the long run to alleviate congestion. It might help alleviate the urban air-pollution problem, but it won’t make getting from point A to point B in and around our cities any easier. Instead, he argues that what we need is a more balanced approach that aims to limit the number of cars entering a central business district on any given day without restricting the flow of cars so much that easy access to the urban core is jeopardized. Public transportation can and should play an important role in this, he explains, especially in older areas where extensive transit infrastructure already exists. And for metropolises built up during the age of the road-car system, he suggests that buses are a better option than rail-bound transit because they are cheaper and better able to meet the transportation needs of a dispersed population. More careful attention to the regulation of automobile traffic is important as well, and here Rae recommends improvements ranging from functionally separated streets to intelligent signals and reversible lanes. Whatever policies we choose to adopt in the years to come, however, Rae cautions that none of these solutions should be forced on an unwilling public. “In a free society, public acceptance of a policy is a vital element.”31

Here he is harking back to a key argument he introduces a few chapters earlier in his discussion of suburban development. Responding to those who criticize suburban America and claim that we would all be better off if tract housing and cul-de-sacs had never materialized, Rae admits that suburbia has its drawbacks in everything from community and aesthetic values to metropolitan-area taxation policies. But he remains convinced that “none of this can alter the plain fact that American suburban life is here, that it is a major and integral part of American society, that this is so because a sufficient number of people prefer suburban existence as a way of life, and that it is a way of life with positive qualities,” particularly when compared with densely packed urban living. His conclusion? “Americans who wish to live in apartment clusters close to public transportation should certainly have the option of doing so,” but the preferences of those who “vote decisively for suburbs” must be respected as well. The key, that is, is to allow for the development of a natural balance in urban policymaking, a balance grounded at all times in individual free choice rather than political manipulation.32

In his concluding chapter, however, Rae’s evenhandedness recedes, and he adopts a bold and decisive stance in defense of mass automobility the likes of which would rarely appear again in academic texts on the subject:

There is nothing automatic about the growth of modern highway transportation. It is neither an inevitable consequence of inexorable, impersonal forces, nor is it the end product of a sequence of unrelated accidents. It is the result of human activity responding to unsatisfied or insufficiently satisfied needs, and its phenomenal growth has been due to the fact that it has filled these needs better than anything else that has appeared so far.33

Returning to the theme of egalitarianism a few pages later to better explain his point, Rae claims that in the automobile’s unique ability to satisfy our transportation needs, “there is more than just convenience” at work.

The mobility conferred by the automobile has benefited ordinary people most. The wealthy could afford coaches and carriages and so had some freedom of movement, . . . [but o]rdinary people seldom ranged any distance from home; if they did, they had to go by some form of public conveyance, provided it was available, or they walked. This is where the automobile has been an instrument of social revolution, first in the United States and now extending throughout the world. Perhaps this social revolution explains the distaste of so many self-appointed “elite” groups for the automobile, or more accurately for automobile ownership by people other than themselves. It is one thing to profess concern for the “common man” but quite another to have to accept him on terms of actual equality
. . . . In this whole general attitude there is a curious affinity between the “old guard” and many of those who identify themselves as “intellectual liberals.” The affinity may well arise from the fact that both groups consider themselves to be elites, better qualified to judge what is good for the common man than the common man himself and therefore entitled to impose this good regardless of how the recipient may feel about it.34

“The individuality of automobile transportation,” he concludes, “is something that Americans, and others, are not going to give up except under a degree of compulsion completely unacceptable in a free society.”35 Like it or not, Americans tend to prefer the road-car system to any of its alternatives. And this, he argues, is a fact with which politicians, academics, and other pundits need to come to terms—assuming, of course, that they actually believe in the democratic values they publicly embrace.

The Road and the Car in American Life was widely received precisely as Rae must have intended: as a controversial slap in the face to automobility’s knee-jerk critics, especially those in the academy. At least one reviewer welcomed the book’s intervention, “at a time when there is a strong tendency to emphasize the adverse features of highway transportation,” for providing “a more balanced view of its benefits, without denying the crucial concerns of the critics of automotive transportation.”36 Others also praised the book’s balance, especially for the way it covers the disasters attributable to the car (urban blight and the deteriorating state of the national parks, most notably) while also demonstrating that the auto-centric world of the early 1970s exists precisely because people have chosen to make it so.37

Others were less convinced that Rae was aiming for balance. In Technology and Culture, Reynold M. Wik pointed out that the book’s origins in an Automobile Manufacturers Association grant were likely to raise doubts about its objectivity. Wik also noted that automobility’s critics would find little of value in Rae’s assessment and recommendations, “which seem to promise more cars, more concrete, more black top, and more Chamber of Commerce speeches”—more of the same. Wik’s review concluded with the observation that the problems associated with mass automobility were far more serious than Rae admits. Solutions “rooted in the political clout of governmental agencies” were therefore likely to remain the demand of a public increasingly fed up with the car and its ill effects, regardless of whether or not that same public also preferred individual mobility.38

James J. Flink’s assessment was more damning. Writing in Business History Review, Flink began by praising Rae for “treating the road and the car . . . as an integral unit, integrating two distinct bodies of historical literature to the mutual benefit of both.”39 He also wrote that Rae is correct in his overall evaluation that “mass automobility has been on balance beneficial,” and that “any viable transportation system for the foreseeable future must be based primarily on the road and the car.”40 But Flink was deeply troubled by Rae’s defense of automobility and his inattention to the arguments of its critics. Too much of Rae’s perspective is based on “traditional, valueladen assumptions,” he wrote, assumptions that ought to be thoroughly questioned, including “the primacy of consumer need” and “the existence of consumer democracy.” That is, even if consumers have freely chosen automobility over its alternatives (and Flink hints strongly that this choice was in fact not made freely), then we still must question whether this preference actually outweighs the need to deal with its unanticipated consequences. More condemning was Flink’s dismissal of one of Rae’s most important critiques of the road-car system’s foes.

Professor Rae . . . seems fairly oblivious to the decimation of the scenic beauty of the American countryside and our free-flowing streams and remaining wilderness areas by the incursions of the road and the car. His lopsided view of the benefits of urban sprawl and his simplistic characterization that people are undemocratic who protest against the threat that uncurbed automobility poses to our national parks illustrate this.41

Flink nevertheless concluded by recommending The Road and the Car in American Life because it promised to “raise the quality of debate over the faults and merits of the American automobile revolution.”42

And for a brief while it did. But in the end, this was a debate that the automobile’s critics were all but destined to win in a decade marked by worsening pollution, reprehensible behavior on the part of the Big Three, economic stagnation, and two major oil crises. The 1970s would belong not to Rae and his optimistic defense of the road and the car, but to those like Flink, whose personally and politically charged condemnation of the automobile, The Car Culture (1975), ended with the suggestion that nothing less than a cultural revolution was necessary if the shackles of the age of the car and all it entailed were ever to be shed. For Flink, the automobile belonged to an era of “self interest, greed, and waste,” whereas the automobile-free society of the future would be one of “true community and expanded democracy, free from . . . privatism, materialism, escapism, and exploitation.”43 Clearly Rae and Flink did not agree on the meaning of the word “democracy,” Rae preferring an interpretation in which individual choices and individual lives are paramount and Flink one valuing community and collective effort instead.

Flink mellowed out a great deal by the time he produced what came to be the first truly long-lived and nearly universally assigned synthesis of American automobility some years later, 1988’s The Automobile Age. Prior to that book’s appearance, though, John Bell Rae took one more crack at the elusive goal of producing an enduring synthesis with The American Automobile Industry, published in Albro Martin’s Twayne series on the evolution of American business in 1984.

With this book, Rae returned to where it all began for him two-and-ahalf decades earlier by producing a volume focusing squarely on the automobile industry. The result is not entirely devoid of social context, but it is demonstrably less ambitious than his contributions of 1965 and 1971. And, unlike his narrowly tailored 1959 examination of the industry’s first forty years, The American Automobile Industry endeavors to carry the story through to what was then the present. Divided into four chronologically oriented sections—the period of origin and growth (chapters 1–5), the period of American dominance (chapters 6–9), the period of governmental regulation and foreign competition (chapters 10–12), and the then-current era of the “international automobile industry” (chapters 13–14)—the book seeks above all else to highlight what Rae saw as the industry’s chief contributions to global business: its techniques of mass production and its innovations in the realm of business organization. The book also revisits some of the major concerns of Rae’s prior work on the industry, most notably its long-term trend toward oligopoly and the importance of individual personalities to its early growth and maturation.

By far the biggest departure from his earlier work evident here, apart from a more ambitious chronological breadth, is the book’s effort to place the American automobile industry within an international context. This was due in part to what Rae learned while writing a history of Nissan’s presence in the United States—a project the firm commissioned on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of its involvement in the North American market in 1980, and which McGraw-Hill published in 1982.44 Thus one finds a great deal more here than in his previous volumes about the early American industry’s growing export trade in the 1920s and its decision to work around German, British, and French import restrictions by establishing or acquiring European subsidiaries (Ford of Europe, for example, and GM’s Vauxhall/Opel).45 One also finds a much more satisfactory discussion of the first American “compacts” of the late 1950s, developed as a half-hearted response to American market-share gains by Volkswagen and Renault, among others, as well as an informative look at the ways in which Japanese brands managed to nudge aside VW as the imported-car leader in the American market in the 1970s.46

Perhaps most intriguing is Rae’s chapter on “the international industry” of the 1980s. Here he recaps the international expansion of Americanbrand production into Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australia during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as similar moves by VW into Latin America, South Africa, and the United States in the 1970s. Beginning with Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee, plant, Japanese manufacturers followed VW’s lead in the early 1980s by establishing plants of their own in the United States. All of this resulted in the emergence of a truly international industry, Rae concludes, one in which the market for cars “has come to transcend national boundaries completely.”47 He explains that this is most clearly evident in the emergence in the 1980s of the so-called “world car,” a philosophy of manufacturing in which a single model of car is designed globally, produced at numerous plants, and sold for use throughout the world. In his discussion of the world car concept, though, his choice of the Ford Escort as an example is unfortunate, for the Escorts sold in North America differed notably (in powertrain and in body design) from those sold elsewhere.

Indeed, this points toward a more substantial shortcoming of Rae’s analysis of the international industry: notably absent here is any real discussion of the many ways in which government regulations and market preferences gave rise to major differences between a given car as sold in the United States and as sold, for example, in Western Europe. This was true even of cars much more similar in their international variations than the Escort, everything from the humble VW Beetle to the exotic Lamborghini Countach. Market-specific differences in these vehicles were many, though the most common were variations in bumper structures and shapes, seat contours, ride heights, headlight configurations, exhaust systems, and engine displacement and tuning. Rae is not alone in overlooking marketspecific variations, of course—the same basic oversight mars Flink’s The Automobile Age, too—but given the importance Rae attributes to the international character of the 1980s automobile industry, it is an unfortunate stumble.48

The American Automobile Industry ends with a return to some of Rae’s trademark arguments regarding the indispensability of the car to American life, including the familiar refrain that “no form of public transportation, existing or in prospect, can compete with the private automobile in economy or . . . door-to-door convenience.”49 But he seems to lack the same sense of conviction that was evident in his earlier monographs.50 Thus, while he clearly reaffirms his belief in the future of our auto-centric society, he also at least hints that the automobile itself is due for a makeover, at least in terms of our choice of fuel.

Twenty-five years and one SUV boom later, a revolution in fuels does at long last appear to be in the offing: electric vehicles are beginning to reappear, and hybrids and clean-diesel power at least seem to promise a future for the automobile not characterized by a gluttonous appetite for liquefied dinosaurs. Interestingly enough, however, our best present-day solution to the problem of battery range—a critical electric-vehicle bottleneck Rae emphasized in his 1955 article on the EVC and also toward the end of The American Automobile Industry twenty-nine years later—appears to be the use of an auxiliary gasoline engine to recharge short-lived electric cells on longer trips (as in the much-ballyhooed and much-delayed Chevrolet Volt). One wonders what Rae might have thought of this and many of the other trends within the present-day industry not evident in the mid-1980s, but in the end, The American Automobile Industry would be his final word on the subject; John Bell Rae passed from this life on 24 October 1988.

The Legacy

While working on this essay I obtained a copy of John Heitmann’s new synthesis, The Automobile and American Life. Reading through its introduction, I was not surprised to find that Heitmann’s goal was to produce a new industry-standard volume to replace James Flink’s long-in-the-tooth The Automobile Age on undergraduate and graduate reading lists. Flink’s text is after all the standard go-to volume, the one book on cars that everyone involved in the business, technological, economic, and cultural history of the United States is likely to have on his/her shelf—and, by extension, the one book most are likely to recommend as a point of departure to students eager to learn more about the history of the car. And this has been the case for more than twenty years. (Gus Giebelhaus and Steve Usselman both recommended Flink’s survey to me when I was cutting my teeth at Georgia Tech in the 1990s.)

What was a bit surprising as I worked my way further into Heitmann’s text is that his first mention of John Rae’s work appears in his twenty-eighth footnote, well past his introductory coverage of the historiography and well into his detailed discussion of the early automobile industry. A quick glance at Heitmann’s bibliography revealed entries for four of Rae’s books—his monographs of 1965, 1971, and 1984, as well as his edited volume on Henry Ford from 1969—and a more thorough examination of his footnotes did reveal a number of nods to Rae’s work. But Heitmann’s references to Rae all deal with matters of detail rather than historiographic significance. And this observation in turn prompted me to wonder what the authors of some of the other volumes and papers on the automobile currently occupying valuable real estate on my office shelves actually have to say about John Rae’s work. What exactly is his legacy?

The shelf- and cabinet-emptying exercise that followed was neither quantitatively precise nor comprehensive. But it did suggest that with a handful of exceptions, most of which date to the 1970s and 1980s, Rae’s body of work on the automobile has by and large been relegated to the status of deep-background reference—it has come to be recommended for its strength as a general starting point, that is, rather than for its specific historiographic contributions. The exceptions largely prove the rule. Flink engages Rae extensively in his first two books, for example.51 Bruce Seely does the same when setting up Building the American Highway System (1987), while Clay McShane, in Down the Asphalt Path (1994), lumps Rae and Flink together as important contributions which nevertheless smack of technological determinism.52 And then of course there’s the work of David A. Kirsch and Gijs Mom on the history of the electric car, work in which they chastise Rae both for characterizing the turn-of-the-century electric car as a technological dead end and for concluding that the EVC was a monopoly that was destined to fail.53 Bruce Epperson takes Rae to task for misreading Albert Pope’s attitude toward electric and gasoline power as well.54 But the vast majority do little more than point to Rae for a bit of background reading here, or for a specific point of fact there.55 Indeed, more than one recent survey fails to mention Rae at all.56 Why this essay, then? Why revisit John Rae’s work as “classic” if its long-term relevance appears to be on the wane? I could opt for the easy way out and simply say that Rae’s work warrants mention among the classics because he got the ball rolling in the realm of automotive history and, in the words of James J. Flink, “legitimiz[ed] automotive history as a specialized field of scholarly inquiry.”57 Or I could simply point once more to Rae’s place among the founding figures of our field. Both, I think, are valid justifications.

But for me it’s the substance of John Rae’s work itself that has earned it a place among the classics. Speaking as one who was raised, literally and intellectually, long after the American automobile’s heyday had come and gone and long after skepticism and on occasion outright disgust had come to be the norm in discussions of the car and all that it has wrought, I must confess that there is something inherently appealing about Rae’s progressive optimism. And I think I know why. Read against the backdrop of more than forty years of negativity, Rae’s work brings a welcome measure of balance to the discussion. This is why I think it’s a shame that Rae’s books aren’t read all that closely anymore. Are they behind the times on more than a few points of fact and interpretation? Certainly, as most works of history in their third, fourth, and fifth decades are apt to be. Are they overly optimistic? Perhaps, if read in isolation. Are they worth the effort required to arrive at a level of historical and sociological imagination sufficient to appreciate them as they were intended? Absolutely.

Call the man’s work what you will—dated, naive, romantic. I call it classic. And if this be scholarly treason, to return to Henry, then I plan to make the most of it.

1. John Bell Rae, American Automobile Manufacturers—A History of the Automobile Industry: The First Forty Years (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1959). Rae’s first book was a joint enterprise—a textbook coauthored with Thomas H. D. Mahoney—that had appeared ten years earlier: The United States in World History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949).

2. On Rae’s role in SHOT’s formative years, see Thomas Hughes, “SHOT Founders’ Themes and Problems,” Technology and Culture 50 (July 2009): 594–99, and Robert C. Post’s essay in this issue of Technology and Culture, “Chance and Contingency: Putting Mel Kranzberg in Context,” 839–72. Rae’s 1959 book was reviewed by K. E. Boulding on pp. 104–5 of the first issue of T&C.

3. In addition to his coauthored work of 1949 and the aforementioned monograph of 1959, Rae published the following books in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s: The American Automobile: A Brief History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); (as editor) Great Lives Observed: Henry Ford (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969); The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); The Development of Railroad Land Subsidy in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1979), which was based on his 1936 dissertation; Nissan/Datsun: A History of Nissan Motor Corporation in U.S.A., 1960–1980 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982); and The American Automobile Industry (Boston: Twayne, 1984). At the time of his death in 1988, Rae was working with Rudi Volti on a history of the engineering profession, which Volti completed and published several years later (Rae and Volti, The Engineer in History [New York: Peter Lang, 1993]). Leaving aside his many reviews and comments, Rae’s contributions to T&C include “The ‘Know-How’ Tradition: Technology in American History,” Technology and Culture 1 (spring 1960): 139–50; “Science and Engineering in the History of Aviation,” Technology and Culture 2 (autumn 1961): 391–99; and “Presidential Address: Engineers Are People,” Technology and Culture 16 (July 1975): 404–18. Significant contributions that appeared in other journals from the early 1950s on include “The Great Northern’s Land Grant,” Journal of Economic History 12 (spring 1952): 140–45; “The Railroad Land-Grant Legend,” Journal of Economic History 15 (March 1955): 112– 13; “Engineering Education as Preparation for Management: A Study of M.I.T. Alumni,” Business History Review 29 (March 1955): 64–74; “The Electric Vehicle Company: A Monopoly That Missed,” Business History Review 29 (December 1955): 298–311; “The Fabulous Billy Durant,” Business History Review 32 (autumn 1958): 255–71; and “Financial Problems of the American Aircraft Industry, 1906–1940,” Business History Review 39 (spring 1965): 99–114.

4. On Rae’s background I am drawing principally on John B. Rae, “John B. Rae: An Intellectual Autobiography,” Technology and Culture 22 (July 1981): 564–69, and James J. Flink, “Memorial: John Bell Rae (1911–1988),” Technology and Culture 30 (July 1989): 718–22.

5. Rae, “An Intellectual Autobiography,” 567.

6. His early publications on the automobile industry, discussed in detail in the pages that follow, bear this out.

7. Rae, “An Intellectual Autobiography,” 567.

8. Rae, “The Electric Vehicle Company,” 298.

9. Ibid.

10. Rae, “The Fabulous Billy Durant” (n. 3 above).

11. Indeed, Rae explains in his introduction (p. 3) that part of what attracted him to the early automobile industry was the fact that records of failed companies are abundant. This, he explains, made it possible to determine not simply what successful firms seemed to share in common, but also what those that failed shared. Failures were extremely common; lowball estimates of the total number of firms that tried to get into the business of automobile production stand at about 750, while highball estimates (such as that which Rae cites in this book, on page 5) stand closer to 2,900. Of these, Rae closely examined the fate of more than 500 in preparing this book.

12. This is a point on which Donald Finlay Davis would later build in his work on the technical and social—as opposed to purely profit-seeking—aspirations of the industry’s early pioneers. See Conspicuous Production: Automobiles and Elites in Detroit, 1899–1933 (Philadelphia, 1988), esp. 2–3.

13. Reviewers included Thomas C. Cochran, who critiqued Rae for failing to include more detail on the hundreds of individuals mentioned in the book (Business History Review 33 [autumn 1959]: 454–55); George Maxcy, who critiqued the book’s inattention to labor and its overly celebratory tone (Economic History Review 12, no. 2 [1959]: 344– 45); A. K. Steigerwalt (Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 [December 1959]: 548); Harold G. Vatter (Journal of Economic History 20 [March 1960]: 137–40); and K. E. Boulding (n. 2 above), who critiqued Rae in T&C for failing to do more to tackle the nature of entrepreneurship.

14. Rae, American Automobile Manufacturers (n. 1 above), 206.

15. He also came to be a consistent (but when appropriate, skeptical) defender of the notion that technological change can and often does lead to material progress; see, for example, his comments on the occasion of SHOT’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1984: “What Did We Expect SHOT to Wrought?” Technology and Culture 25 (October 1984): 731–34.

16. Rae, The American Automobile (n. 3 above), 220 and 226.

17. Ibid., 92.

18. Ibid., 92, 220–21, and 228.

19. Ibid., esp. 107 and 179.

20. Ibid., 53.

21. Ibid., 228.

22. Ibid., 195.

23. Ibid., 225.

24. Reviewers included Glen A. Niemeyer, who complained of its pro-business and anti-labor slant (Journal of American History 53 [June 1966]: 145–46); Asa Briggs, who noted its dearth of international context (English Historical Review 82 [July 1967]: 636– 37); Allan Nevins, who complained that the book was too brief (American Historical Review 71 [July 1966]: 1461–62); and Dwight E. Robinson, author of the scathing review quoted at length here (Business History Review 40 [spring 1966]: 121–24).

25. This flirtation resulted in a critically acclaimed and for many years definitive study of the American aircraft industry, Climb to Greatness (n. 3 above). For Rae’s take on the motivations behind (and the end results of) his brief shift into the world of aviation, see Rae, “An Intellectual Autobiography” (n. 4 above), 568.

26. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life (n. 3 above), chaps. 5 and 6.

27. Ibid., chap. 7 (quote on 141).

28. Ibid., chap. 8 (rural life), chap. 11 (suburban life), chap. 12 (suburbanized industry), and chap. 9 (interstates).

29. Ibid., 207.

30. However weak his aforementioned explanation for the worsening traffic problems of the twentieth century, he is certainly on solid ground on this more basic point.

31. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, 276.

32. Ibid., chap. 11 (quoted material appears on 246–47).

33. Ibid., 359.

34. Ibid., 361–62.

35. Ibid., 371.

36. Harold F. Williamson, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Journal of American History 59 (June 1972): 195.

37. Peter D’A. Jones, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in American Historical Review 77 (December 1972): 1516–17, and S. B. Saul, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Economic History Review 25 (November 1972): 736–37.

38. Reynold M. Wik, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Technology and Culture 14 (April 1973): 310–11.

39. James J. Flink, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Business History Review 46 (spring 1972): 123.

40. Ibid., 124.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. James J. Flink, The Car Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 233. A glance at Flink’s dedication to this 1975 volume reveals why an academic responsible for the evenhanded and well-received America Adopts the Automobile, 1895–1910 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) would turn out such an explosive polemic five years later: his young niece was struck and killed by an automobile on his thirty-ninth birthday.

44. Rae, Nissan/Datsun (n. 3 above).

45. Rae, The American Automobile Industry (n. 3 above), chap. 6.

46. Ibid., chaps. 10 and 12.

47. Ibid., chap. 13 (quote on 175).

48. For Rae’s take on the world car, see ibid., 170–75. Flink’s failure to recognize the importance of international market variations is most apparent on pages 324–26 of The Automobile Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), where I count no less than nine errors of fact in his brief discussion of the Volkswagen Beetle and the Porsche 914 in the American market; each of these errors stems from his use of European-model data.

49. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, 185.

50. At least a couple of reviewers took note of this; see Stuart W. Leslie, review of John B. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, in Technology and Culture 27 (October 1986): 892–93 (esp. 893), and Joel W. Eastman, review of John B. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, in Business History Review 59 (autumn 1985): 503–5 (esp. 505). Charles K. Hyde, on the other hand, believed that Rae’s take in this book remains decidedly optimistic (review of John B. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, in Journal of Economic History 45 [June 1985]: 506–8 [esp. 507]).

51. See Flink, America Adopts the Automobile (n. 43 above), 5 and 296, and especially Flink, The Car Culture (n. 43 above), 158–59 and 212.

52. Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987), 298, and Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York, 1994), xi.

53. See especially Gijs Mom, Geschiedenis van de Auto van Morgen: Cultuur en Techniek van de Elektrische Auto (Deventer, 1997), esp. 165; David A. Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History (New Brunswick, N.J., 2000), 4, 20, and 170; Gijs P. A. Mom and David A. Kirsch, “Technologies in Tension: Horses, Electric Trucks, and the Motorization of American Cities, 1900–1925,” Technology and Culture 42 (July 2001): 489–518 (esp. 490n2); and Gijs P. A. Mom and David A. Kirsch, “Visions of Transportation: The EVC and the Transition from Serviceto Product-Based Mobility,” Business History Review 76 (spring 2002): 75–110 (esp. 75–76).

54. Bruce Epperson, “Failed Colossus: Strategic Error at the Pope Manufacturing Company, 1878–1900,” Technology and Culture 41 (April 2000): 316.

55. Among the many references I found are Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (Baltimore, 1979), which cites Rae’s 1965 and 1971 volumes as deep background; Jean-Pierre Bardou et al., The Automobile Revolution: The Impact of an Industry, trans. James M. Laux (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), which cites Rae’s 1959, 1965, and 1971 contributions in its bibliography but refers directly to his work in but 1 of its 149 (admittedly quite sparse) footnotes; Donald F. Davis, “The Price of Conspicuous Production: The Detroit Elite and the Automobile Industry, 1900–1933,” Journal of Social History 16 (autumn 1982): 21–46, which cites Rae’s work on the Selden patent; T. C. Barker, “The International History of Motor Transport,” Journal of Contemporary History 20 (January 1985): 3–19, which cites Rae’s 1959 and 1965 volumes as important background reading; Carlos A. Schwantes, “The West Adapts the Automobile: Technology, Unemployment, and the Jitney Phenomenon of 1914–1917,” Western Historical Quarterly 16 (July 1985): 307–26, which cites Rae’s 1965 book on a specific matter pertaining to jitneys; I. B. Holley Jr., “A Detroit Dream of Mass-Produced Fighter Aircraft: The XP-75 Fiasco,” Technology and Culture 28 (July 1987): 578–93, which cites Rae’s 1959 and 1965 books as deep background; Davis, Conspicuous Production (as discussed in note 12 above); John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, The Gas Station in America (Baltimore, 1994), which cites Rae’s 1965 and 1971 volumes as important background reading; Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture 37 (October 1996): 763–95, which cites Rae’s 1965 book alongside Flink’s contributions in its coverage of the historiography; Robert Lewis, “Local Production Practices and Chicago’s Automotive Industry, 1900–1930,” Business History Review 77 (winter 2003): 611–38, which cites Rae’s 1959 book as deep-background material; Rudi Volti, Cars and Culture: The Life Story of a Technology (Westport, Conn., 2004), which cites Rae in its bibliography; Kathleen Franz, Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (Philadelphia, 2005), which does not deal with Rae in its introduction but does cite his work on a number of occasions on specific points; Robert C. Post, The SAE Story: One Hundred Years of Mobility (San Diego, 2005), which opens with an epigraph from Rae’s 1965 book; David N. Lucsko, The Business of Speed: The Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915–1990 (Baltimore, 2008), in which I cite Rae’s books as deep-background material and also inadvertently do Rae’s 1965 book a disservice by failing to list it among the handful of academic works that take note of hot rodding (Rae mentions the phenomenon on pp. 215–16); Jeremy Packer, Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship (Durham, N.C., 2008), which cites Rae’s 1971 book as deep background in its bibliography; and Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, 2008), which cites Rae’s 1965 and 1971 books in its introduction and goes on to cite his work on several specific points. Again, let me emphasize that this brief list is by no means intended to be read as anything remotely resembling a comprehensive enumeration of Rae’s footnote appearances over the years. It is instead a qualitative sample intended to hint at (but certainly not to definitively prove) a more general pattern.

56. I cannot locate a single reference to Rae in either Tom McCarthy’s Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (New Haven, Conn., 2007) or Brian Ladd’s Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age (Chicago, 2008).

57. Flink, “Memorial” (n. 4 above), 720.

Dr. Lucsko, managing editor of Technology and Culture, teaches history of technology and transportation history at the University of Detroit Mercy. His book, The Business of Speed: The Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915–1990, appeared in 2008. He thanks Bob Post, John Staudenmaier, and Joe Schultz for encouraging him to undertake this revisit.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Actually, the stool has three legs: First Kranzberg hired at Case, then his founding of SHOT and T&C, and third the publication in 1967 of a two-volume text, Technology in Western Civilization, volume 1 titled The Emergence of Modern Industrial Society, Earliest Times to 1900, and volume 2 titled Technology in the Twentieth Century.3 Even though these volumes appeared almost a decade after the founding of SHOT and the publication of the first issue of T&C, their organization, the range and background of the authors, their contributions, and, above all, the editorial direction provided by Kranzberg and his colleague Carroll Pursell—who joined the Case faculty in 1963—set the character of a society and journal that are now entering their second half-century. For me, returning to those volumes, after years during which they sat, unread and unopened, on my bookshelf, has been a revelation—a revelation of how much Kranzberg and Pursell laid a foundation upon which historians of technology have subsequently built.

Members of SHOT are blessed many times over. Mel Kranzberg was a prolific correspondent and saved copies of nearly all his letters throughout his long career. The result is a detailed picture of the emergence and evolution of our discipline, seen through the eyes of its principal founder. Kranzberg’s papers have been preserved and catalogued by the Archives Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, which made them available to me in the course of writing this essay. From these records we can trace the genesis of the two-volume Kranzberg and Pursell text. The initiative came from the United States Armed Forces Institute (USAFI), a branch of the Defense Department charged with furthering the education of uniformed personnel, many of whom had only a limited college or secondary school education. The USAFI had been founded during World War II for the benefit of Army enlisted men [sic], primarily by means of correspondence courses, no matter where in the world they might be stationed.4

By the 1960s the USAFI’s students included officers as well as enlisted personnel, and, for those stationed in the United States, its correspondence courses were being supplemented by classes offered at local universities. Its charter had also been extended to the other armed services (but did not include the service academies or the National War College, which were administered separately). During World War II the instruction had primarily been at the high school or junior college level, but now college-level courses dominated the curriculum. The headquarters of the USAFI was in Madison, Wisconsin, and it was headed by Edward L. Katzenbach, a former Marine officer.5 The origin of the book project is not completely clear, but obviously there was a growing perception at Defense that the thousands of uniformed personnel needed grounding in the technological basis of the civilization they were being asked to defend.6 At an address to a conference 6 of armed forces educators in Baltimore on 11 December 1962, Norman S. Paul, assistant secretary of defense, asked: “Could we not devote a greater portion of our time and effort to courses devoted to the history of technology so that our young men and women in the Services will at least appreciate science’s impact on the changes wrought in our times? Would it not be possible to develop courses on the impact of technology on politics and on international relations?”7 The contemporary reader will immediately note the term “impact” and its implication of technological determinism, but we shall see that Kranzberg and Pursell, while not avoiding terms such as “impact,” managed to shape a work that was anything but a paean to determinism.

In January 1963 a colleague sent Katzenbach copies of programs from recent annual meetings of SHOT and also a program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science that had included a session on the history of atomic energy. At about the same time, Ripley Sims, the head of the USAFI’s Instruction Division, asked Kranzberg, as secretary of SHOT, for a list of colleges and universities that offered courses in the history of technology. Kranzberg responded in his usual enthusiastic fashion with a detailed letter, and out of this exchange of correspondence there grew an agreement that historians and social scientists would develop a two-semester, freshman-level course.8 With Katzenbach’s support, the project ultimately transformed itself from a freshman syllabus into the two large volumes published in 1967. In a little more than four years, Kranzberg and Pursell solicited contributions from seventy authors, discussed with them the overall approach to their topics, cajoled and pleaded with laggards, and edited the submissions (sometimes drastically). A number of chapters were written by the two editors themselves. They also found a new publisher, rejecting the University of Wisconsin Press in favor of Oxford University Press, which they knew could provide a much wider market. Kranzberg and Pursell had secretarial help, although many of their letters were obviously written on manual typewriters in hunt-and-peck fashion. All this was taking place while both of them held full-time teaching positions, with Pursell moving from Case to the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the middle of the project.

Not long after the initial exchange of letters, in the spring of 1963, a group of historians gathered for a workshop at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where the USAFI was located and where, coincidentally, Thomas Parke Hughes was in residence as a visiting professor.9 The catalyst for this meeting was Paul J. Grogan, chair of the department of engineering at the University of Wisconsin Extension Division, and Grogan would be listed, along with Donald F. Kaiser—who was the publications specialist at Wisconsin’s University Extension—as executive editors for the completed volumes. Led by Hughes, the group surveyed the state of the field and noted that the few texts then in print, particularly the five-volume A History of Technology, edited by Charles Singer and three colleagues, and its abridgement, A Short History of Technology, were ill-suited for the course they were proposing.10 Although based on sound scholarship, neither those works nor any others dealt to any extent with technology developed in the twentieth century. Nor did they look at technology in its cultural context, as Kranzberg, Hughes, and their colleagues emphasized. Although this approach is familiar to today’s practitioners, in the early 1960s the history of technology was either about the invention and design of specific machines, or about the biographies of engineers and inventors. Economists and economic historians had also been writing about the history of technology, but for them it was typically a one-way street, the story of the machine’s impact on society, never the other way around. And whereas the engineers writing history focused on the internal workings of the machines, economists and economic historians often treated technology as a black box, not caring how or why it worked. The participants in the Madison workshop were eager to change that situation, and they found a willing ally at the Armed Forces Institute.11

Thus from the beginning of this project we can see what later would be called Kranzberg’s Laws put into play: whether technology was inherently good or bad, the central place for the history of technology in a liberal education, the complex interplay between invention and the social milieu in which it takes place.12 Also evident at this workshop, and reflected in the two-volume history that resulted, was a tension one still finds among SHOT members who judge submissions to Technology and Culture or papers proposed for SHOT annual meetings. This was an assumption that while technology is synonymous with the emergence of human civilization, the recent history of technology is the most important of all, with everything that happened before 1900 as “prologue” to the advances of the twentieth century (the current version of this notion moves the date forward from 1900 to 1945). The Armed Forces Institute certainly held to this view; after all, its students were being trained to operate and maintain nuclear reactors, radar equipment, jet aircraft, and guided missiles: twentieth-century inventions with little connection to military technology from an earlier age. Partly at Katzenbach’s urging, 1900 was chosen as the date separating the two volumes. Some historians who participated in the workshop resisted, Eugene Ferguson especially, but Kranzberg was not opposed to this divide, and that was how the two volumes ultimately were set apart from one another.

Kranzberg and Pursell recognized that the second volume would have to be framed differently, more as a series of case studies than as surveys of individual topics. As a result, the two volumes are quite different, and yet each one still retains much of value for a present-day reader. The first volume, based on solid scholarship, can be profitably and enjoyably read today as an introduction to the history of technology. While of course dated, its chapters hold up well. I would not hesitate to recommend it to newcomers to the field of the history of technology, or to newly-hired professors looking for an overall framework for a freshman-level course. Even though it is no longer suitable as an assigned text, subsequent attempts to replicate its sweep and level of detail—its “large canvas”—have come up short, in my view, an indication of how difficult such an overview really is. (The original Oxford publication is long out of print. Used copies are available from several on-line book dealers, and the volumes may be accessed electronically from the American Council of Learned Societies.)13

When reading this volume today, and the second volume as well, one has to be mindful of the times in which it was written. Both volumes make exclusive and frequent use of the pronoun “man” when referring to human beings. That may be excused, although it is annoying. The chapters themselves, all written by men, make no acknowledgment of the contributions of women to the history of technology. There is a bias toward Western Europe, with little treatment of technology from Asia or the Middle East. In an otherwise-masterful essay on “Technology in the Middle Ages,” Lynn White jr. writes that “. . . the Muslims, while they borrowed useful skills from other cultures . . . did not make notable contributions, so far as we now know, to mankind’s technical repertory” (p. 67). Neither White nor any other contributor discusses the Islamic world’s role in the transmission of mathematical, medical, and astronomical knowledge to the West. Geographic and gender biases, and the way the volume moves too quickly through antiquity until it arrives at medieval Europe—these are the first volume’s principal weaknesses. Nevertheless, I stand by my recommendation. The reason is the caliber of the contributors, and here again we see a manifestation of Kranzberg’s vision and energy, along with a touch of good luck.

At the start of the project a series of letters were sent to authors and scholars at the very top: to Lewis Mumford, C. P. Snow, Alfred Chandler, Robert Merton, and Jacob Bronowski, among others. Although these letters went out under Paul Grogan’s signature, there could have been no realistic expectation of response without the personal efforts of Mel Kranzberg, almost always a phone call. As has been recounted elsewhere, while at Case Kranzberg did more than build up a program in the history of technology; he cultivated relationships with leading figures in a variety of fields that intersected with his vision.14 When the time came to solicit authors, these contacts proved of immense value. Pursell writes that “no one else could have picked up the phone and recruited most of the leading experts in the field to contribute to a textbook.”15 Even though many of those whom he called and who received letters declined to contribute, nearly everyone responded with a gracious note and only a few never answered at all. Most cited overburdened workloads and other writing commitments they all seemed to be late in fulfilling.16 Among those who turned down a request to contribute was Mumford, who replied in a handwritten note that while he could have written an essay “in 1934,” he could not do so in 1964 because “many tendencies that seemed hopeful to me then have turned out otherwise.”17 But Mumford’s refusal, and that of other senior figures, often turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for Kranzberg was able to solicit a new generation of writers whose views on the contextual analysis of the history of technology meshed with his own, and whose careers were either just beginning or at midpoint, not near an end.18 Had Mumford agreed to contribute and then submitted a pessimistic essay similar to his other writings from the 1960s, Kranzberg might have been forced to reject it. It also seems likely that other eminent writers would have submitted little more than a reworking of ideas that had already appeared in print in many other venues by the mid-1960s.19

Those who did accept, with rare exceptions, pursued new approaches that have well served SHOT to the present day. And the $400 fee they received—equivalent to about $2,500 in today’s dollars—was more welcome to this cohort of scholars than it would have been to the most senior people. Many of them—Lynn White jr., Cyril Stanley Smith, Eugene Ferguson, Carl Condit, Robert Multhauf, Bernard Finn, John Rae, Bern Dibner, and of course Carroll Pursell—were already or soon would be major contributors to Technology and Culture, would serve as officers of SHOT, or would play critical roles in shaping the discipline. (Perhaps most notably missing from the list of authors was Thomas Hughes, who, after helping initiate the project, turned down a request to contribute.)20

The biases of the first volume, mentioned above, were offset by the breadth of the topics covered. Thus there is not just a chapter or two on the Industrial Revolution, but a whole section on “The Background of the Industrial Revolution, 1600–1750,” which keeps the term while setting the “revolution” in economic, political, and social contexts. Other chapters deal with the Industrial Revolution’s social impact (chapter 18 by Eric Lampard), its spread (chapter 30 by Herbert Heaton), and its economic consequences (chapter 31 by Nathan Rosenberg). Chapter 19, “The Invention of Invention,” by John Rae, covers ground that is familiar to historians today, but at the time it was a definite break from typical writings about the role of the inventor that could be found at mid-century. Rae’s chapter further hints at the “systems approach” to the history of technology, an approach that shows the influence of Thomas Hughes even if he was not present in the pages of the book. The systems approach is developed further and indeed becomes a central theme of the second volume.

That volume, Technology in the Twentieth Century, is a different matter altogether from the first. Obviously it is dated. At the time of publication one-third of the twentieth century still lay ahead. There is nothing about the Space Shuttle, the Asian challenge to American manufacturing, or Microsoft, to name a few twentieth-century topics we currently study intensively. Yet precisely for that reason, the second volume is still of interest. Today when one thinks of the mid-1960s one thinks of the cold war and the threat of a devastating exchange of nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union. The authors are all aware of that threat, but what comes across most strongly is a belief that technology, properly managed, can be a source of good. They were writing a short two decades after the cities of Germany and Japan had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombs. By the mid-1960s those countries had not only recovered and rebuilt their cities, but they were also establishing a prosperous economy based on advanced technology. That rapid reconstruction was due to the hard work and sacrifice of their citizens; it was also due to assistance from the United States through entities like the Marshal l Plan and the International Monetary Fund, through which a group of mainly American experts directed the recovery.

The first volume ended with accounts by those who believed that the rapid advances of nineteenth-century technology would usher in an era of world peace and prosperity. Yet everyone knew that such optimism faded quickly after August 1914. The contributors to the second volume could not see into the future, but they shared in a renewed sense of optimism, and in doing so they had no sense of being naive. Furthermore, they saw themselves as agents of change, who would help bring about such a world through the application of their expertise. Although much has been written about the Technocracy movement that flourished in the 1930s, the tone of the second volume reveals a more recent version of a technocratic vision from the 1960s, one that deserves more study.21 This time, economies would be directed not by a “Soviet of Technicians,” as Thorsten Veblen called them, but by an elite (if not a “soviet”) of social scientists and historians of technology. In this context, the alliance between Kranzberg and the U.S. military establishment, which might have caused concern among a later generation of historians of technology, seems natural and appropriate.22

Thus the second volume begins with an optimistic essay by Kranzberg and Pursell on “The Promise of Technology in the Twentieth Century,” followed by an address to mass production and its twin, mass consumption. In chapter 9, Robert Theobald writes of “The Crisis of Abundance,” in which he discusses with some prescience the beneficial effects of automation and the computer—this at a time when computers were programmed with punched cards. Theobald’s argument for a guaranteed income for ever y American, which he calls “Basic Economic Security” (p. 113), is somewhat similar to Great Society welfare plans developed in the 1960s and to income credits now embedded in our tax code and embraced by liberals and conservatives alike. What is interesting is not so much the details of his plan; rather, it is that Theobald is but one of many contributors to the second volume who was not a historian or engineer (his biography on page 745 lists him as a “British socioeconomist who is now an economic consultant in New York City”). Whereas most of the contributors to the first volume were professors of history or engineering, many of those contributing to the second were sociologists, professors at schools of business administration, government economists, and political scientists. This is a cohort that SHOT has unfortunately lost over the past fifty years.23

Volume II of Technology in Western Civilization suggests that the decade in which it was written and published represented a high-water mark for a particular kind of social science, one with which the history of technology was aligned. It was a time when political scientists such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and sociologists such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were moving into high levels of political power in both parties.24 One of the volume’s final essays is on “The ‘ Two Cultures,’” by Kenneth E. Boulding, professor of economics at the University of Michigan. C. P. Snow turned down an offer to write something on this subject, but here again fortune smiled on Kranzberg and Pursell, as Boulding’s star was ascending and would even eclipse Snow’s in my view. The essay that Boulding contributed is one of the finest in the book, even if it does not directly address the history of technology in a narrow sense. After summarizing the Two Cultures debate, he moves quickly into the meat of his essay, a section entitled “The Role of the Social Sciences.” He wastes no time in stating that the “. . . increase and spread of knowledge in the social sciences, of a testable and cumulative kind, can meaningfully affect the decision-making processes of governments, businesses and large organizations, and of individuals and households” (p. 692). For Boulding, and by implication for Mel Kranzberg too, here is the way to harness technology without the horrors of the two technology-intensive world wars that characterized the first half of the twentieth century. Boulding brings up the threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, but he does not despair of a way out.

Boulding’s view has fallen from favor, as has the place for social scientists in positions of influence. But that does not diminish the appeal and interest of his and similar essays in the second volume of Kranzberg and Pursell. This volume reveals something about the history of SHOT that to date has been little discussed: the society’s founders hoped that the history of technology would not just be the most “relevant” history of all, as Kranzberg’s Fifth Law states, but that it would also provide an entrée for historians of technology into policy and decision making at high levels of government. Pertinent to this belief, although not mentioned in these volumes, was Kranzberg’s central role in establishing another organization, ICOHTEC, which he hoped would be as influential in diplomatic circles as SHOT would be in economic and regulatory circles.25

Correspondence in the Kranzberg Papers thins out once the volumes appear in print, but already we can see why that vision was not fulfilled. The reviews were good, and sales were decent although not what Oxford had hoped for.26 The Armed Forces Institute did not follow through on an implied commitment to purchase copies for its coursework, a reversal attributed to the growing unrest over the war in Vietnam.27 When Kranzberg was initially lining up contributors, one or two turned him down because of its military sponsorship, but, had he contacted potential authors in 1967, not 1963, there would have been a lot more refusals.28 By 1967 technology’s dark side was more evident, in spite of efforts to control its effects by those, including Kranzberg, who had seen its horrors first-hand during World War II. In the two decades that followed publication of Kranzberg and Pursell, anti-technology sentiment would grow more intense As it did, SHOT managed to adapt, but rarely again did members of the society set forth the sort of views seen in this 1967 volume.

One final note. In the initial stages of the project, Kranzberg and Pursell had offices adjacent to each other at Case, so there is little in the way of a written record between them; they must have spoken to one another all the time. After Pursell moved to Santa Barbara in the summer of 1965, that changed. Kranzberg was not happy about his coeditor being so far away, but one positive result was that we now have a written record of the details of the book’s editing process. The project was in its final stages by then, but the work of editing the submissions was still substantial. Some of the manuscripts came in clean and needed only minimal attention. Others were less suitable and required a lot of rewriting, work that fell mostly on the shoulders of the junior editor. In correspondence with the contributors, Kranzberg was always gracious, even charming. In correspondence with Pursell he was often candid about work that did not measure up to his expectations.

Some of that correspondence deals with what was to have been the final chapter of the first volume, an overview of technology and culture at the end of the nineteenth century written by Charles L. Sanford, professor of language and literature at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute. Sanford began by describing the marvels of engineering that were transforming the western world at that time, but he quickly moved to a discussion of those who saw the dark side of this transformation, including Henry Adams, William Morris, and above all Friedrich Nietzsche. Kranzberg was not pleased with what Sanford had written, even if he agreed with his analysis of Nietzsche, and he told Donald Kaiser that he could not possibly allow the first volume to end on such a negative assessment of technology. In early 1966, Kranzberg asked Pursell to write an extra chapter. Pursell agreed, and this was published as an epilogue under their coauthorship. The epilogue summarized the first volume briefly, mentioning technology’s critics but ending on a much more positive, though less dramatic, note.29

That correspondence, along with the note from Mumford and other letters exchanged between the editors, reveals something that many members of SHOT assume but seldom question. SHOT members revere Kranzberg’s First Law: “Technology is neither good, nor bad; nor is it neutral”— it has even been printed on a t-shirt and on a poster (a poster that is still available, by the way). It is a serious and profound statement. But Melvin Kranzberg himself, along with most of those involved in a society that is his “lengthening shadow,” believed that technology has done more good than harm. That is the essence of these two volumes, and it is a core belief of SHOT, however much current members are aware of the less beneficial effects of technology. Perhaps the next time the t-shirt or poster are printed, there can be an asterisk, as Major League Baseball did to Roger Maris’s home run record. Better to leave the First Law as it was written, but we should remember the context in which Melvin Kranzberg formulated it. For those wishing to find a clear and comprehensive statement of this belief, there is no better place to look than these two volumes.

1. Bruce E. Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 739–72.

2. Melvin Kranzberg, “At the Start,” Technology and Culture 1 (Winter 1959): 1–10; Melvin Kranzberg, “The Newest History: Science and Technology,” Science 136 (11 May 1962): 463–68.

3. Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization, 2 vols. (The Emergence of Modern Industrial Society, Earliest Times to 1900 and Technology in the Twentieth Century) (New York, 1967).

4. Col. Miles R. Palmer, “The United States Armed Forces Institute,” Public Administration Review 15 (Autumn 1955): 272–74. In this reference, as throughout the Kranzberg and Pursell volumes, the male pronouns are used almost exclusively, although there is no evidence that women in the uniformed services were excluded.

5. Katzenbach was the brother of Nicholas Katzenbach, deputy attorney general from 1962 to 1965 and later President Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general and then undersecretary of state.

6. “You’re In the Classroom Now,” Time, 17 January 1964, 72, copy in the Kranzberg Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Collection 266, Box 301, folder 1.

7. “A Resume of Background Information Concerning Development of a Course on the History of Technology,” 28 January 1964, unsigned, but probably written by Kranzberg, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 2.

8. Ripley S. Sims, USAFI, to Melvin Kranzberg, Society for the History of Technology, 25 January 1963, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 2.

9. Besides Hughes, other participants in the workshop included Cyril S. Smith, Carl W. Condit, Eugene S. Ferguson, Thomas J. Higgins, and John B. Rae.

10. Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and Trevor Williams, eds., A History of Technology, 5 vols. (New York, 1954–1958); T. K. Derry and Trevor Williams, A Short History of Technology from the Earliest Times to 1900 (New York, 1961).

11. “Report on the History of Technology Workshop,” May 24–25, by Thomas P. Hughes, University of Wisconsin-Madison, typescript, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 2.

12. Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27 ( July 1986): 544–60.

13. See http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.online.date.26.html (accessed 17 April 2009).

14. Bob Post, “Chance and Contingency: Mel Kranzberg Before SHOT and ICOHTEC,” keynote address, International Committee for the History of Technology, University of Victoria, British Columbia, 5 August 2008.

15. Carroll Pursell, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995): Case Years,” Technology and Culture 37 ( July 1996): 407–12, quote at 410.

16. Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folders 4 and 5.

17. Mumford to Kranzberg, undated, ca. summer 1964, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 4.

18. Not all senior scholars turned down an opportunity to contribute; Abbott Payson Usher was the author of chapter 14, “The Textile Industry, 1750–1830.” Usher passed away as the volumes were in press.

19. Besides Kranzberg and Pursell, the authors of volume 1 were Silvio A. Bedini, Georg Borgstrom, Lynwood Bryant, Roger Burlingame, Rondo Cameron, Shepard B. Clough, Carl W. Condit, Bern Dibner, Aage Gerhardt Drachmann, Eugene S. Ferguson, James Kip Finch, Robert James Forbes, G. E. Fussell, Anthony N. B. Gar van, Alfred Rupert Hall, Herbert Heaton, Arthur M. Johnson, Eric E. Lampard, Robert Multhauf, Thomas A. Palmer, Derek J. De Solla Price, John B. Rae, Nathan Rosenberg, Charles L. Sanford, Harold I. Sharlin, Cyril Stanley Smith, Thomas M. Smith, Abbott Payson Usher, Sam Bass Warner, Lynn White jr., Harold F. Williamson, and Robert S. Woodbury. Authors of volume 2 were Jack Baranson, Jack Barbash, Georg Borgstrom, Kenneth E. Boulding, James R. Bright, Robert C. Davis, Peter F. Drucker, John A. Duffie, Eugene M. Emme, Eduard Farber, Bernard S. Finn, Leslie H. Fishel Jr., Robert H. Guest, Richard G. Hewlett, Forest G. Hill, Irving Brinton Holley Jr., Aaron J. Ihde, Edward L. Katzenback Jr., W. David Lewis, Roy Lubove, Theodore F. Marburg, Donald N. Michael, Bruce Carlton Netschert, James L. Penick Jr., John B. Rae, Wayne D. Rasmussen, Theodore Ropp, Richard Rosenbloom, Melvin M. Rotsch, Ralph Sanders, Morgan Sherwood, Thomas Malcolm Smith, Donald C. Swain, Robert Theobald, Charles R. Walker, Reynold M. Wik, and Earnest W. Williams Jr.

20. Melvin Kranzberg to Thomas Hughes, 29 July 1964, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 4.

21. On the Technocracy movement of the 1930s, see Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago, 1985), especially chap. 6.

22. One could cite many examples of the changing attitudes toward the U.S. military among younger historians, e.g. Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). Carroll Pursell notes how protests against the war in Vietnam began at Case as he and Kranzberg were working on the project (Pursell, private communication to the author, 22 March 2009). Whatever his personal views were, Kranzberg was always supportive of young scholars, whose work took them in directions not foreseen at the time of SHOT’s founding.

23. The founding of Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) in 1975 has in part compensated for this loss to SHOT, but 4S has evolved in a direction quite different from that implied by the contributors to this book.

24. Among Brzezinski’s writings from that era was Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York, 1970), in which he coined a term that suggests the merger of classical mechanical and electrical technology with the new technologies of electronics and digital computers.

25. ICOHTEC’s website is http://www.icohtec.org (accessed 16 May 2009).

26. Reviews appeared, among other places, in Science 157 (15 September 1967): 1295–96; Isis 59 (Summer 1968): 207–10; Journal of Economic History 29 ( June 1969): 366–68; and Agricultural History 43 ( January 1969): 208–9. The title of this essay is borrowed from R. A. Buchanan’s extended review in Technology and Culture 9 (July 1968): 468–76. Although reviews were favorable, many of them criticized the American-centric bias of the second volume. That is a valid criticism, but it must be understood in the context of the theme of the volume and also in the context of USAFI sponsorship.

27. Byron Hollingshead, Editor-in-Chief, Oxford University Press, to Mel Kranzberg, 27 December 1968, Kranzberg Papers, Box 302, folder 16.

28. One such refusal came from Paul Goodman, who initially agreed to write an essay but later, after repeated queries from Kranzberg about the lateness of his submission, decided not to contribute because of the USAFI’s role. Kranzberg Papers, Box 302, folder 12.

29. Kranzberg to Pursell, 18 January 1966, Kranzberg Papers, Box 307, folder 64. Although the epilogue was published under both editors’ names, Pursell did most of the writing. See also Kranzberg to Donald Kaiser, 12 July 1966, Box 307, folder 63.

Paul Ceruzzi is Curator of Aerospace Electronics and Computing at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. The phrase “a large canvas” is quoted from R. Angus Buchanan’s review in Technology and Culture (n. 26).

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

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

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

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

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.

Howard Segal, professor of history at the University of Maine, wishes to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the university’s reference librarian Mel Johnson. Dr. Segal’s work includes Technology and Utopia, published in 2006 in the SHOT/American Historical Association series Historical Perspectives on Technology, Society, and Culture, and his most recent article, “Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant: A Technological Utopia in Retrospect,” appeared in Maine History 44 (February 2009).

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

Empire and Communications is a seminal book.¹ Its meticulous examination of civilizations from ancient history to the early twentieth century consumed years of Innis’s life, as he looked to support his thesis that media technologies are the critical influences in the rise and fall of empires. He explains that “the concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. . . . Materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those that emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character” (pp. 26–27). Too often, though, students and casual scholars retain the space bias/time bias distinction without following it through to the critical point: that it is essential for both of these biases to be present in any enduring civilization and to function in tandem—for that is where the cultural and economic links that allow empires to prosper are forged. As Innis goes on to explain: “Large-scale political organizations such as empires . . . have tended to flourish under conditions in which civilization reflects the influence of more than one medium and in which the bias of one medium towards decentralization is offset by the bias of another medium towards centralization” (p. 27).

In the case of ancient Egypt, Innis sees scribal power, the development and use of writing systems, checked by religious adherence to oral tradition. He sees Egyptian monarchs as having been extremely powerful internally because of their connectedness to religious beliefs, but he also uses this to account for the nation’s limited success at empire building. His initial contrast is with Babylonia, where secular monarchies and a written code of law kept in check the religious practices of smaller city-states within the empire. The balance was even more apparent in ancient Greece, as Innis writes:

The strength of the oral tradition and the relative simplicity of the alphabet checked the possible development of a highly specialized profession of scribes and the growth of a monopoly of the priesthood over education. A military aristocracy restricted the influence of a priestly class and poets imposed control over public opinion. The Greeks had no Bible with a sacred literature attempting to give reasons and coherence to the scheme of things, making dogmatic assertions and strangling science in infancy. Without a sacred book and a powerful priesthood the ties of religion were weakened and rational philosophy was developed by the ablest minds to answer the demand for generalizations acceptable to everyone (p. 88).

The Greek empire did fall, of course—but not before building a legacy of art and ideas that would leave its mark on cultures the world over until our own day. Innis’s time/space bias concept, developed in later work of which Empire and Communications is the most important statement, makes a fine complement to his earlier nation- or empire-focused “staples theory” of economics, in which control over geographic territory is understood as being gained and held through an unequal balance of trade. In the history of his native Canada, for example, Innis saw that the export-import relationship of unprocessed pelts to finished fur coats had represented a net financial loss for the exporter of the pelts. But in later years, the export-import relationship of pulp and paper to print publications (books, newspapers, magazines) came to represent, in addition to financial loss, a lost opportunity for cultural development, as defining ideas and forms of expression increasingly were brought in from elsewhere. This phenomenon troubled Innis throughout much of his career, and his writings on this subject posed questions for future scholars to apply to media Innis never even knew.

Since his death, and especially since the 1980s, Innis’s work has been reinvigorated by communication scholars who have used it in fashioning both a materialist approach to colonialism and an interdisciplinary approach to the history of media. Scholars in his native Canada have looked to his work for insight into the problem of cultural incursions from the United States. But North American media scholars more generally look to Innis as something of a middle ground between scientific study of the media in the behaviorist tradition that developed here in the mid-twentieth century and the sometimes impenetrable concepts associated with European cultural studies and theories of postmodernism. Innis’s writings may be lengthy and overly detailed, but they prove understandable and applicable in a variety of modern-day contexts, particularly for nations whose identities solidified during the industrial era. One might well claim that the American empire has been Innis’s best theorized, even though he did not live to witness its most revealing manifestations.

Innis and Canada

Before examining what Innis’s theoretical work reveals about the role of empire in the twenty-first century generally, it is important to look briefly at Canada specifically, the nation and cultural context in which his ideas were formed. The view from north of the forty-ninth parallel lent Innis some of his greatest insight into the formation of empires—especially the information empires of Great Britain and the United States, which have dominated modern society.

Innis worked throughout his life, in various capacities, for a variety of government commissions and bureaus, always in the interest of strengthening Canada’s intellectual and cultural backbone. But he avoided what he considered token gestures of patriotism, perhaps seeing them as emulating the commercially supported messages that emanated from the U.S. media empire. As Charles Acland writes, Innis presents a “case for Canada” that, when he begins to discuss culture more explicitly, becomes a critique of lost cultural potential rather than an argument for national partisanship.² Innis shared a common concern that Canada risked losing (or perhaps never attaining) the cultural cohesiveness it needed to function as a nation. Compared with Great Britain and the United States, there was a gap to be filled— perhaps artificially—by public funding.³

Canadian cultural studies scholar Jody Berland explores this theme in a 1995 essay, echoing Innis’s doubt (especially as he expressed it later in his life) whether Canada would be able to escape its history as a staples economy, even in the very different time coming—what came to be called “the information age.” She writes that, with all Canada’s publicly funded cultural institutions, “we are left with a constellation of national bureaucracies that empower an abstract collective identity without necessarily empowering the actual citizens in whose name they speak.”⁴ Berland, like other recent theorists, cites the regional, cultural, and linguistic disparities highlighted by Quebec, indigenous peoples, recent immigrants, and others as posing intractable questions about the nationalist project. Innis and Berland together suggest a Canadian nationalist empire (white, European, Anglophone) that is, itself, subordinate to a much larger U.S. cultural empire.

Addressing and representing cultural diversity by national and international media systems inevitably raises thorny questions around the concept of empire. This idea is underdeveloped in Innis’s writings on the American empire and the role of newer media technologies. But he alludes to it clearly throughout his discussions of earlier empires. The strengths he saw in both Babylonia and Greece, for instance, relate to their maintenance of local cultures through oral tradition and ritual even as they centralized control through codified law and the spread of knowledge via simple written documents. In other words, there are multiple tiers in which Innis’s staples theory applies to information: exporting raw materials (from paper pulp to indigenous stories) and importing them after processing by a more powerful external entity (whether U.S. broadcast networks or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC] itself, as it provides programming to indigenous peoples).

Canada’s commercial producers, thanks perhaps to the “Canadian content” guidelines imposed by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, operate with a deliberate awareness of cultural diversity uncommon in the United States, though the various groups that make up the Canadian population have unequal influence over cultural messages. Furthermore, while Canadian airwaves and cable lines continue to be filled with U.S.–origin content, Canada has assumed a significant role of its own in media production and export. In comparison with the United States, Canada remains a marginal player in the world’s information economy. But as the divide between developed nations and developing nations (including a number of other former colonies) widens, Canada is holding its own.

This owes something to Innis’s having opened the discussion in the first half of the twentieth century. I also credit some of his contemporaries, including early nationalist literary critics such as E. K. Brown, John Sutherland, and, later, Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood. And I credit Canadian artists, notably the Group of Seven, who brought the vivid forms and color of the Canadian landscape into museums, homes, and college classrooms. Acland has pointed out that Innis did not spend much time reading literature or cultivating an appreciation for the arts generally—leaving these interests to his wife, Mary Quayle Innis. So I feel that more recent discussions of Canadian nationalism owe a debt as equal to the broad characterizations of the infrastructure made by Innis and his followers as to those who have been able to describe the country’s unique and concrete attributes.

Innis and North America Writ Large

Although my first encounter with Innis was reading The Bias of Communication (1951) for a graduate course, I was spending more time studying the literary critics at that stage. My understanding of Innis today owes a great deal to two U.S. scholars I encountered after my career shifted to media history: the late James Carey and Daniel Czitrom. Both writers, one a journalism scholar and one a historian, discussed Innis in books published in the 1980s, three decades after he died. Both recognized the importance to Innis’s work of Canada as a specific place. And both understood how Innis uniquely addressed the intersections of geography and communication technologies that shaped civilizations in North America.⁵

Carey credits Innis with a theory of imperialism grounded in real historical circumstances. According to Innis, “There would be no transformation of the great society into the great community by way of disinterested technology but only in terms of the ways in which knowledge and culture were monopolized by particular groups” (p. 152). Carey explains the impact of place on Innis’s intellectual formation—perhaps comprehending it even more than Innis himself had. In an essay subtitled “A Tribute to Innis,” he ponders the influence on Innis’s thought of the years he spent studying at the University of Chicago, especially as he shifted away from the pure staples=based economic theory of his early career.⁶

Chicago communication sociologists including Charles Cooley and Robert Park were early pioneers of the notion that organic societies, wherein individuals held unique and meaningful roles, were giving way to an alienating industrial scenario. They saw the association of industrial society with social progress as a potentially destructive misconception. Carey highlights Innis’s affinity with the Chicago sociologists by noting that “they characterized communication as the entire process whereby a culture is brought into existence, maintained in time, and sedimented into institutions. Therefore, they saw communication in the envelope of art, architecture, custom and ritual, and, above all, politics.”⁷ However, as U.S. sociology (and hence communication studies) acquired a more scientific, functional, and behaviorist bent, the divergence with Innis’s ideas could not be missed. Carey thus tried to shift attention back toward Innis’s status as a Canadian and its influence on his work.

For his part, Czitrom cites the Chicago School sociologists as one influence on Innis, but he focuses more on economist Thorstein Veblen. I would have to agree. While it is likely that exposure to the nascent subfield of communication sociology associated with the Chicago School nudged Innis toward a later awareness of how relevant his economic theories were to the study of communication technologies, other connections are more tenuous. Perhaps Innis took note of the Chicago School’s focus on the effects of industrial technology on human consciousness, but I believe he was more keenly aware of the economic factors that brought those technologies into being and caused them to develop differently in different places.

Veblen’s ideas about social stratification, especially when projected on an international scale, proved a natural draw for Innis. Czitrom points out that “Veblen’s assault on neoclassical economics challenged the notion that economic laws were universal: timeless and true for all places.”⁸ Such a notion would, of course, become manifest in Innis’s Canada-grounded theory of economic history, through which we can see how both older and newer colonial powers relegated those native to the colonized nations (indigenous peoples as well as later-generation immigrants) to an inferior cultural status. This has been true of direct political power as well as of formal efforts to generate appreciation for forms of cultural expression.

Innis and Contemporary Media

Both Carey and Czitrom appreciated Innis’s later work, in which he shifted application of his economic theories from physical commodities (staples) such as furs, cod, and lumber to the more conceptual commodity of information. Thinking about media history as a history of empire building offers a frame—and a justification—for the ways I approach history in my own research. As a television historian whose work has depended heavily on research in local communities, incorporating oral history and archival methods, Innis’s concepts of space and time biases, and the dynamic interplay between them, make a great deal of sense to me. Most established histories of television in North America focus on the major networks (both broadcast and cable) and their technological and economic means of delivering programming to communities or regions. There is a clear emphasis on space bias in this approach. But it is at the local level that viewing habits, preferences, and practices are established and maintained. The local, which leans toward a time bias, plays an essential role in what will define television at a national, continental, or global level as well.

This notion has been put forth in part by several scholars through their conceptualizations of television, which they describe variously as an “electronic hearth” (Cecilia Tichi), a “cultural forum” (Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch), and having a “bardic” role (John Fiske and John Hartley).⁹ All of these suggest a function of television as social mediator or common ground, hearkening back to oral culture traditions. This function has also been identified in some work done under the rubric of reception studies or audience analysis. Innis surely would agree that this role of television speaks to a time bias. Yet seldom does it come across just how much television’s agenda-setting function—which Innis would associate with the space bias—depends on its capacity to be articulated in ways specific to local communities. In other words, for television to contribute to centralizing “monopolies of knowledge,” as it does in powerful ways, it needs to be embedded within local cultures as well. Here, the time and space biases clearly work together—not unlike the religion/government synchrony Innis saw in the enduring empires of past millennia.

Innis had some experience with radio, but he barely knew of television at the time of his death (CBC television broadcasts would arrive a month later). His remarks on radio at the end of Empire and Communications hint at an association of radio with oral culture (p. 196). But, as Czitrom speculates, for Innis radio “presaged a return to oral tradition only in a shallow sense.”¹⁰ In spite of any origins in oral culture,the ease of transporting messages over space—including national borders—subordinates any local traditions that might form around shared listening or viewing experiences. Czitrom further points out, as do other scholars, that the literal selling of units of time centralizes control of any messages at the place where payment is received. Paul Heyer elaborates further in a recent biography of Innis: “What he suggests but does not explore is that such media [as commercial radio and television] exacerbate the spatial-bias inherent in print by extending the influence of metropolitan centers of power, in the guise of providing greater access and democratizing knowledge. They tend to perpetuate modes of domination—especially in the case of the influence of American mass media on smaller nations, such as Canada—that in many ways resemble what took place in previous epochs.”¹¹ However much one might debate claims of television’s biases when giving consideration to its ritual aspects and broadcasting’s roots in oral tradition, television’s sheer colonizing power leaves little doubt as to its space bias. Not only has U.S. television dominated North America for half a century, constantly channeling audiences’ attention toward consumer products, the extremely low marginal costs of its distribution have allowed it to be a forceful cultural presence virtually worldwide—including in places where the existence of some U.S. products otherwise would be superfluous and perhaps unwelcome.

To me, though, there is even less question as to where Innis would place the internet on the time-bias/space-bias media continuum. In discussing newspapers, especially those that arose in the United States during the nineteenth century, he questioned the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment out of concern that its stress on literacy and print-based media would create monopolies of knowledge, in contrast to the more balanced efforts at democracy he saw in the Greek empire. Where many scholars would see the spread of literacy and the rise of the penny press during the nineteenth century as heralding a democratization of information, Innis believed these phenomena took control of information away from communities and delivered it to business interests in large U.S. cities. This surely was exacerbated by the large-scale relocation from farms and rural communities to factories and urban areas—and from a lifestyle determined by family and community needs to one dictated by a time clock. The recent history of news and its various delivery technologies bears out Innis’s notion, but it is epitomized by recent developments with the internet.

The origins of the internet and world wide web parallel those of commercial radio in that both represent a sort of communitarian takeover of technologies first defined for military use. In Inventing American Broadcasting (1987), Susan Douglas has documented the role teenage “amateurs” played in turning radio into a news and entertainment medium, and other scholars have chronicled and theorized ways in which various contemporary facets of the internet arose out of endeavors like Usenet and The WELL during the 1990s. Nonetheless, I believe that if Innis were alive today, he would be calling attention to the shift away from the internet’s short-term boost to oral and communitarian modes of communication. Since at least the mid-1990s, this kind of momentum—with its empowerment of grass-roots organizations and self-publishing individuals—has been steadily giving way to corporate buyouts of successful websites and the various forms of e-commerce (both licit and illicit). As early as 1993, when Mosaic, the first successful graphical web browser, was released, popular internet analyst Clifford Stoll expressed concern that the new medium would be given over to deception and hucksterism.

Of course there is a ritual dimension to the internet even today, just as there has been with newspapers, television, and other media. The chat rooms remain, and a plethora of social networking sites have emerged. And, in a rather different vein, scholars too numerous to list have noted the parallels between modern advertisers and the priests and shamans of other ages and civilizations. Their messages guide our cultural rites, and their brand logos are our totems. Nonetheless these ritual aspects speak to the same cultural goal as they did with earlier media: to channel belief systems toward consumption, which ultimately feeds the space-consuming centers of media influence. As American media messages (and those of other developed nations) grow ever more influential, such false rituals and totems replace more traditional (and time-binding) ones all over the world, helping to build a cultural empire dedicated to commercial goals.

Moreover, as Catherine Frost explains, the predominance of English on the internet ensures that the English-language empire begun by the British and perpetuated by the United States will continue. Frost writes that Innis “worried that reading the written word was an isolating experience.” And of course isolation is antithetical to communitarian goals. She goes on to note that “although it can support instantaneous change, this is not the Internet’s primary use or advantage. By reinforcing the written word in a physically and temporally isolated environment, the Internet displays some of the same alienating tendencies as written media.”¹²

Frost credits the internet with being vast and flexible enough to accommodate alternative uses—certainly more than broadcast or cable television. She credits conventions such as hypertext with the capacity to “break down the linear communications experience necessitated by the written word” into a “user-defined” and “multi-associative” approach to information. She also credits its decentralized form of control with allowing its content to literally be other users. Frost sees the internet as offering a new way of having something to say that is inherently more user-driven than earlier media. But this too is problematic, as she makes clear, in that “not only does it lack physical durability, but it also compounds the modern problem of impermanence. Because it provides a way to constantly update information, the Internet is constantly making the information we have obsolete, and the problem of impermanence that Innis associated with modern media reaches new heights with the Internet.”¹³ It seems that history grows less relevant with each passing day.

In unpacking the term “information superhighway,” coined by former U.S. vice president Al Gore, Heather Menzies suggests that the “transmission model” (or space bias) for the internet probably was inevitable, given its origins in the U.S. media and defense industries. “In the absence of a clear and meaningful policy commitment towards a mixed-model approach to communication in the era of instant digital connectivity . . . it also seems clear that in the late 1990s the commercial, transmission model was poised to enclose the internet as an alternative infrastructure, retooling and/or containing it as a niche within the larger commercial sphere, rather like Community Access Cable.”¹⁴ This sentiment is echoed by Edward Comor when he observes that, in spite of their capacity for counterhegemonic information, “these technologies are being developed and implemented to enable capitalist interests to expand their reach and improve efficiencies.”¹⁵ Rupert Murdoch’s 2005 acquisition of the popular social networking site MySpace is a perfect example of how an internet application intended for interpersonal and group communication has become a way of accessing consumer data and using it to target a broad mass of potential consumers more effectively. Consensus seems to be that the internet is rapidly heading down the same path of commercialism and empire building as its media forebears.

My college students, at least some of them, like to consider themselves “post-television” (they say they don’t have time to watch anymore). They also find discussions of advertising influences tiresome, claiming that we, collectively, chose to be surrounded by commercial messages. And they feel that we have the power to stop those messages at any time—if we really wanted to, that is. They accept the fact of having to put up with advertising messages received via newer networked technologies (including cell phones and certain features of the internet, such as social networking and instant messaging, but not e-mail). And they greatly appreciate that now internet users can subscribe to services that will provide news of current events only within preselected categories. The convenience appeal here is to avoid sifting through ever-increasing amounts of information simply to stay informed. Who could blame them for this? And yet the news cliques emerging in this scenario are buttressed by increasingly narrow consumer target groups.

But my students (again, at least some of them) claim that ads are okay if they are for things they actually need and use. And the students want to be directed through the clutter to access these more desirable messages. Could they be right? Will groups defined by increasingly narrow information-seeking behaviors, and refined by commercial interests, become the “nations” of the future? If this is to be the case, perhaps these “nations” will be more cohesive and involve less identity contestation than those that exist today. It is a frightening prospect to my mind, since discussions of identity necessarily involve efforts to communicate across thorny cultural divisions. In an era of globalization, will we actually be losing our ability to communicate across cultures, even within our own national borders?

The Future of the American Media Empire?

Is it the ultimate triumph of advertisers that young people have grown so blasé about commercially motivated messages? As the German philosopher Goethe is often quoted as saying, “None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.” But are we all just becoming mediated drones? Or are we witnessing the emergence of a generation possessing a degree of control over media influence not seen previously? If the latter, perhaps it indicates a continuing balance of space and time biases that will keep the U.S. media empire in power for a long time to come. What would Innis say?

While our modern technologies can still be rather heavy (television sets, mainframe computers), their messages are weightless. Electronic and digital messages travel over great distances (even through outer space) in split seconds, so by Innis’s definition these media have a space bias and thus are conducive to empire building. And yet they are held in check by a continual emergence of new user-driven behaviors. This is more the case with the internet than with earlier media, because of its lower barriers to entry for those with access to the technology. Yet the hegemonic process through which new internet applications fall out of favor or are bought out by commercial interests is as regular and predictable as ever. It just moves faster.

Who could dispute that first television and now the internet have been major culprits in building and sustaining cultural empires? And why should we be surprised that this is ongoing? One need only think about that gap between developed nations, where most residents have easy access to the latest media technologies, and developing nations, where many residents lack access even to telephones or radios—or literacy, for that matter. By the time the developing world gains access to a technology, it has already been “colonized” by developed nations with information and established practices. Those developed nations, in turn, have moved on to even newer technologies, so the gap can never be closed.

In my lifetime I have witnessed American hubris. The history books I grew up with gave me every reason to forget that the era of U.S. world power really has been a twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon—and that the era of white, European-American hegemony hasn’t existed for much longer in the grand scheme of things. The perspective granted by the lengthy coverage of earlier empires in Empire and Communications is humbling in this regard, since it makes me wonder how long the U.S. empire will endure. If attaining a dynamic interplay between time and space biases is crucial to the success and longevity of civilizations, isn’t this what the United States has accomplished through its commercial media industries in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries? Yet by Innis’s reckoning, the overemphasized space bias will make it relatively short-lived in the end.

1. Empire and Communications was originally published by Oxford University Press in 1950. Edited by Mary Quayle Innis and with an introduction by Marshall McLuhan, it was reissued in 1972 by the University of Toronto Press. An illustrated third edition was published by Press Porcepic in 1986. The fourth and latest edition, which I cite here, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2007.

2. Charles R. Acland, “Histories of Place and Power: Innis in Canadian Cultural Studies,” in Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, ed. Charles R. Acland and William J. Buxton (Montreal, 1999), 243–60 (quote at 251).

3. Kevin Dowler, “The Early Innis and the Post-Massey Era in Canadian Culture,” in Acland and Buxton, 345.

4. Jody Berland, “Marginal Notes on Cultural Studies in Canada,” University of Toronto Quarterly 64 (1995): 517.

5. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (New York, 1989); Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982).

6. Carey.

7. Ibid.

8. Czitrom, 150.

9. Cecelia Tichi, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (New York,1992); Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch, “Television as a Cultural Forum: Implications for Research,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies (summer 1983): 45–55; John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (New York, 1978).

10. Czitrom, 159.

11. Paul Heyer, Harold Innis (Lanham, Md., 2003), 67.

12. Catherine Frost, “How Prometheus Is Bound: Applying the Innis Method of Communications Analysis to the Internet,” Canadian Journal of Communication 28 (2003): 16–17.

13. Ibid., 17, 21–22.

14. Heather Menzies, “The Bias of Space Revisited: The Internet and the Information Highway through Women’s Eyes,” in Acland and Buxton (n. 2 above), 322–38 (quote at 331).

15. Edward Comor, “Harold Innis and the ‘Bias of Communication,’” Information, Communication and Society 4 (2001): 287.

Megan Mullen is associate professor and chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin—Parkside. Her book, Television in the Multichannel Age, was published in 2008.

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

What, then, was the “revolt of the engineers”? Why should the mild reforms of Progressive-Era engineers in the United States be considered a “revolt” when they did not seriously challenge the political and economic order? The question has come up ever since the book was first published in 1971. In his review for Science, Charles Rosenberg wrote, “In the broadest perspective—Layton’s own evidence makes this clear enough—there was no ‘revolt’ of engineers (Layton notes that even at its height the struggle for professionalism was ‘only dimly understood by most engineers’) but rather a series of elitist gestures, sometimes petulant, sometimes earnest, but gestures inevitably.”4 Peter Meiksins critiqued the anatomy of the “revolt” in 1988, describing complex relationships between the engineering establishment, the patrician reformers at the heart of Layton’s study, and rank-and-file engineers who led a “second revolt of the engineers” by pushing bread-and-butter issues.5 In a recent Ph.D. dissertation on engineers and social responsibility in the U.S. during the cold war, Matthew Wisnioski acknowledges a large debt to Layton but refers to the “so-called ‘revolt’” of the Progressive-Era engineers.“Despite the heated rhetoric and the internal dissent within the professional societies, the engineers’ political maneuverings prior to the First World War could hardly be called a ‘revolt.’ Moreover, the only measurable reforms had taken place within the professional societies, again with quite limited reach.”6

In his new preface to the 1986 reprint, Layton explained how “revolt” came to be in the book’s title. Responding to complaints by the original publisher, the Case Western Reserve University Press, that his proposed “title lacked ‘pizzaz,’” Layton “offered the new title, although with some misgivings.” (He had used the phrase “revolt of the engineers” in an earlier essay on the conservationist Frederick Haynes Newell.) “Revolt seemed appropriate because of the radical nature of the challenge to established values and loyalties presented by these reformers.” But Layton also acknowledged in 1986 that “clearly, all the reformers were not radicals. Most of the reforms discussed were far from revolutionary.” At best, it was a “failed” revolution.7

What has made the book a classic, I would argue, does not hinge on the veracity of the rather narrow claim that the actions of engineering reformers from 1900 to 1930 amounted to a “revolt,” but on the book’s rich and insightful account of the struggles between “progressive” and “conservative” engineers to remake the profession of engineering, mostly within engineering societies. In large part, the reformers adhered to a model of professionalism based on autonomy and social responsibility. Moreover, as a graduate student at UCLA in the 1950s, Layton set his social and intellectual history in the broad political and economic contexts of American history as defined at the time. As Samuel Haber observed in his review for Technology and Culture, Layton was “ostensibly” writing about the revolt of engineering progressives who tried to reform engineering organizations and American society. “Both remained unshaken, however; and in order to show why this was so, Layton undertakes a much broader study.”8 This broader scope helps explain the book’s enduring value.9

In explaining the rise and fall of the reform movement, Layton described how engineering was (re)defined as a profession within, and often in opposition to, the national engineering societies in terms of tensions between professional ideals and business demands, and the “‘status-crisis’ theory of progressivism,” then prevalent among American historians (n. 1, p. 101). The main context for these struggles was a shared “ideology of engineering,” which Layton reconstructed chiefly from speeches of engineering leaders. This ideology, a “philosophy of professionalism,” maintained that the engineer, as an applied scientist, was the “agent of all technological change” and a “logical thinker free of bias,” who thus had a special role to play in ensuring the responsible use of technology (p. 57). In the “first wave of engineering reform” beginning about 1900, leaders of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), followed by the American Institute of Mining Engineers, instituted changes in membership standards, enacted codes of ethics, and dealt with policy issues. The initiatives favored business interests, especially on the codes of ethics, and ended by World War I.

A more militant and successful wave of reform, which covered broader social issues, began about 1915 in the fields of civil and mechanical engineering. Central to this movement was Frederick Haynes Newell in the conservation movement and Morris Llewelyn Cooke in scientific management, an “extension and codification of engineering ideology” (p. 140). But despite strenuous efforts, Cooke did not succeed in removing pro-business elements from the code of ethics of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Attempts to unify the engineering profession by establishing a powerful umbrella organization on the lines of the American Medical Association were frustrated at every turn. The American Association of Engineering (AAE, led initially by Newell), the Engineering Council (the national engineering societies’ response to the AAE), and the Federated Association of Engineering Societies (whose first president was Herbert Hoover) were ineffectual; the latter two were short-lived.

Layton attributed the decline of the progressive reforms in engineering to the failure of scientific management to achieve its larger social goals, and to the decline of the broader progressive movement. As noted by Meiksins, Layton laid the blame on the reformers. This was in contrast to David Noble, whose influential America by Design argued that the revolt of the engineers was an anomaly led by corporate liberals; its failure was inevitable because of the corporate control of engineering.10

In reviewing the reprinted edition of The Revolt of the Engineers for Technology and Culture in 1986, I noted its strengths and classic status while criticizing it (rather mildly) for not treating the Great Depression as comprehensively as the other periods. Missing was an account of the work on accreditation and codes of ethics by the Engineers Council for Professional Development, which was established in 1936 and is the forerunner of today’s Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology. I also noted the good work that grew out of Revolt, including Bruce Sinclair’s book on the ASME in 1980, my Ph.D. adviser Terry Reynolds’s book on the American Institute of Chemical Engineering in 1983, and Michal McMahon’s book on the AIEE and its successor organizations in 1984.11 I also drew heavily on Layton in my 1992 biography of Charles Steinmetz, the socialist chief engineer of General Electric and president of the AIEE. In fact, I used a metaphor from an earlier paper by Layton—a “patchwork of compromises between professionalism and organizational loyalty”—to characterize how Steinmetz negotiated conflicts between his notions of professionalism and the demands of his employer.12

None of this scholarship, including my own, questioned Layton’s concept of professionalization. The claim that esoteric knowledge, autonomy, and social responsibility comprised the “professional values adopted by American engineers,” which were the “same as those of other professions” (p. 4), seemed evident to me from reading the American engineering journals published at the turn of the twentieth century. The standard theory of professionalization, which Layton cited in The Revolt of the Engineers (n. 8, p. 20), also supported his claim.

In 1999 this view was successfully challenged by Ruth Oldenziel in her book titled Making Technology Masculine.13 Oldenziel argued convincingly that engineers treated professionalization as a project in masculinization, in a way similar to that shown by Margeret Rossiter for scientists in the United States before World War II.14 In this light, Oldenziel reinterpreted three issues usually discussed separately in the historiography of engineering—shop versus school culture in education, reactions against unionism, and debates about whether or not engineering was an applied science—as cultural conflicts that shaped engineering almost exclusively as a masculine, middle-class, white profession. Oldenziel noted that ideals of genteel masculinity gave way to middle-class notions of masculinity as engineering became less of an elitist profession and more of a mass occupation.

While Layton had seen the enactment of membership standards based on the ability to supervise engineering projects as a reform of engineering societies, Oldenziel saw them as a way to exclude women, mainly because women were thought to be incapable of managing men. Nora Stanton Blatch, the first woman to graduate in civil engineering from Cornell University, for example, sued the American Society of Civil Engineers on this score in 1916 for refusing “to elect her as an associate member because she was a woman.” The lawyer for the ASCE said Blatch did not meet the criterion of having been in “charge of responsible engineering work.”15 While Layton assumed that the social-contract model of professionalism, derived by patrician reformers from medicine and law, was universal in the period under study, Oldenziel placed it alongside two other models of professionalism common at the time: management ideals of command and control, favored by the shop culture; and unionism, a favorite of some rank-and-file engineers. She reinterpreted struggles between these groups as struggles over concepts of professionalism, and the control that entailed, rather than over the progressive reforms themselves. By emphasizing jurisdictional competition among the professions, sociologist Andrew Abbott has also helped change the way historians and sociologists of science and technology think about professionalism.16

Women—who are absent in The Revolt of the Engineers—find a prominent place in Oldenziel’s Making Technology Masculine. In her account, women struggle to gain an engineering education on male-dominated campuses, and they write novels about male engineers as supportive wives and daughters. A few activists like Blatch challenge the professional hierarchy and press for their own reforms. On the other hand, Lillian Gilbreth, a Taylorite, presents an assimilationist face to the early women’s movement in engineering, in which strategies of stoicism and over-qualification help reinforce gender discrimination. The women who found the Society of Women Engineers in 1950 face the dilemma that if they combat sexism too strenuously, they risk alienating female engineers and prospective female students, the vast majority of whom are not feminists.17

The Revolt of the Engineers still holds a prominent place in the historiography of technology and engineering.18 But its interpretation of professionalization has been revised and extended beyond the historiographic concerns of postwar scholarship on the Progressive Era. As noted by Layton in the preface to the 1986 edition of Revolt, the book found favor in the burgeoning area of engineering ethics. Established by moral philosophers and engineering faculty as an academic field during the renewed questioning of technology in the 1970s, engineering ethics was embraced vigorously by activist groups within engineering societies. In 1971, for example, Steve Unger and colleagues founded the forerunner of the present-day Society on Social Implications of Technology within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They soon supported the case of three whistle-blowing engineers who were fired by the Bay Area Rapid-Transit District in 1972 for reporting safety concerns.19 Any reader of recent literature in the field of engineering ethics will find plenty of references to The Revolt of the Engineers.20 By explaining how social responsibility was defined and debated by the American engineering profession in the past, Revolt has become a foundational text in the field of engineering ethics.

For historians of technology, Layton’s book is still an invaluable outsider’s account of the U.S. engineering profession in the Progressive Era. Revolt is also required reading in the related new field of “engineering studies,” which now has its own journal by that name, edited by anthropologists of science and technology Gary Downey and Juan Lucena.21 The presence of almost a dozen historians of technology on its interdisciplinary editorial board, including Atsushi Akera, Ann Johnson, Scott Knowles, Eda Kranakis, Antoine Picon, Bruce Seely, Amy Slaton, Rosalind Williams, Matthew Wisnioski, and myself, should make Layton proud.

1. The Revolt of the Engineers was first published in 1971 by the Press of Case Western Reserve University and reprinted with a new preface by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1986.

2. Edwin T. Layton Jr., “Veblen and the Engineers,” American Quarterly 14 (1962): 64–72; and Layton, “Preface to the 1986 Edition,” pp. vii–xxi, on pp. xiv–xv. The citation for the book’s Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology praised Layton’s use of sociology and psychology. See “The Dexter Prize,” Technology and Culture 13 (1972): 432–33, on p. 433.

3. The relevant work by Veblen is The Engineers and the Price System (New York, 1921), reprinting a 1919 essay; and The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (New York, 1914).

4. Charles Rosenberg,“Rolesand Professions,” Science 174 (1971): 280–81, on p. 280. See also the review by Gene D. Lewis in The Journal of American History 58 (1972): 1037–38.

5. Peter Meiksins, “The ‘Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered,” Technology and Culture 29 (1988): 219–46, quotes on p. 235.

6. Matthew H. Wisnioski, “Engineers and the Intellectual Crisis of Technology,1957–1973” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2005), n. 9, p. 7, quotes on pp. 173 and 176.

7. Layton, “Preface to the 1986 Edition,” pp. vii–viii.

8. Samuel Haber, review of The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession, by Edwin T. Layton Jr., Technology and Culture 13 (1972): 100–104, on p. 101.

9. For example, Wisnioski (pp. 168–76) draws heavily on the book to describe the movement for social responsibility in American engineering before World War II.

10. Meiksins, “The ‘Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered,” 220–21; and David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977).

11. Ronald R. Kline, review of The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession, rev. ed., by Edwin T. Layton Jr., Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 835–36.

12. Ronald R. Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Baltimore, 1992), 174. The phrase comes from Edwin T. Layton Jr., “Science, Business, and American Engineering,” in The Engineers and the Social System, ed. Robert E. Perruci and Joel E. Gerstl (New York, 1969), 51–72, on p. 54. Layton used a similar phrase, “patchwork of compromises between professional ideals and business demands,” in The Revolt of the Engineers (p. 5).

13. Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945 (Amsterdam, 1999).

14. Ronald R. Kline, review of Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America, ed. Roger Horowitz, and Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945, by Ruth Oldenziel, Isis 94 (2003): 775–76; and Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Strategies and Struggles to 1940 (Baltimore, 1980).

15. Oldenziel, 148 and 169, and “Old Men Bar Miss Blatch,” New York Times, 12 January 1916, p. 7 (quotes).

16. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988); Ronald R. Kline, “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Science’: Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1880–1945,” Isis 86 (June 1995): 194–221; and Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundaries of Science,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff et al. (London, 1999), 393–443.

17. Oldenziel, chap. 5.

18. In addition to drawing heavily on the book for the period before World War II, Wisnioski (n. 6 above) observes that the ideology of engineering described by Layton “remained largely intact when discussions of professionalism began anew in the 1960s, despite the fact that the critique confronting engineers had changed substantially” (p. 176).

19. Layton, “Preface to the 1986 Edition,” xv, and Karl D. Stephan, “Notes for a History of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 25, no. 4 (2006): 5–14.

20. See, e.g., Deborah Johnson, “Do Engineers Have Social Responsibility?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 9 (1992): 21–34; Caroline Whitbeck, “Investigating Social Responsibility,” Techné 8 (2004): 79–98; and Joseph Herkert, “Ways of Thinking about and Teaching Ethical Problem Solving: Microethics and Macroethics in Engineering,” Science and Engineering Ethics 11 (2005): 373–85. Even a critic finds it necessary to rebut Layton’s account; see Michael Davis, “Three Myths about Codes of Engineering Ethics,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 20, no. 3 (2000): 8–14.

21. The homepage of engineering studies is (accessed 27 August 2008). For an early statement of the field’s scope, see Gary Downey and Juan Lucena, “Engineering Studies,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 167–88.

Ronald R. Kline is Bovay Professor in History and Ethics of Engineering at Cornell University. He is completing a book on the history of cybernetics, information theory, and information discourse in the United States during the cold war.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Not only did Caro’s monumental volume go through twenty-seven printings by 2000, it won both the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize, awarded to works of history that achieve literary distinction. To the growing number of city dwellers opposed to the meat ax of highway programs slashing through neighborhoods and the bulldozers of urban renewal, it became a sacred text second only to Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Those dedicated to preserving the inherited urban fabric had found their savior in Jacobs; Caro recorded the fall from paradise of their Satan. Together Jacobs and Caro established the Manichaean scenario that has influenced urban policy debates ever since.

The Power Broker’s appearance coincided with a general decline in faith in the public sector. Robert Moses was one of the false gods whose missteps ignited this apostasy.

Caro owed his success in part to fortuitous timing. The Power Broker appeared in the wake of the Watergate scandal, when investigative reporting aimed at toppling the powerful was at high tide. A disenchanted and cynical public was primed to enjoy hatchet attacks on the reputations of public officials. The Power Broker’s publication also coincided with the much-publicized burning and abandonment of the South Bronx and the city’s slide into financial disaster. Rather than blaming themselves for selfishly blocking subway fare increases necessary for improving service, for electing successive amiable but ineffectual mayors, and for advocating a social policy agenda that they could not or would not adequately fund, New Yorkers could, courtesy of Robert Caro, agree on a scapegoat for their city’s problems, targeting an irascible old man who had overstayed his welcome in public office. Instead of recognizing that older central cities across the nation no longer suited the lifestyle of a majority of Americans and that New York City was no longer the preferred mecca for youngsters seeking their fortune, New Yorkers could take solace that their city’s relative fall from grace was an aberration, not an inevitability. It was not preordained by larger social forces, but the product of Robert Moses’ misdeeds. New York City had been stabbed in the back, and Robert Moses was the assassin.

The Power Broker’s appearance also coincided with a general decline in faith in the public sector. Robert Moses was one of the false gods whose missteps ignited this apostasy. During his heyday in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s Moses represented the benevolent efficacy of government. Ahead of schedule and under budget, he created great public beaches, swimming pools, parks, bridges, and parkways, all monumental landmarks to what government could do for the people. Like his enemy Franklin Roosevelt, Moses demonstrated to Americans raised with a laissez-faire bias and a devotion to private enterprise that the public sector and the public bureaucrat could produce great good. The private industrialist Henry Ford manufactured the automobiles, but the public servant Robert Moses produced the pavements and park destinations for motorists eager to enjoy their Fords. By 1974, however, the New Deal–inspired faith in public endeavor had waned and disillusioned Americans were no longer true believers. The Great Society had not been so great, and Lyndon Johnson was the last president who dared to fashion a New Deal–type slogan for his administration and thereby promise the electorate a path to utopia. Given these new doubts about government’s ability to solve problems, Americans were ready and willing to find their villain in the public sector. Wall Street, greedy landlords, and rapacious bankers were no longer the primary targets of those seeking a scapegoat. Instead, Robert Moses, a public-sector bureaucrat who profited little from his works and died a relatively poor man, was the preferred choice of those seeking to personify New York’s decline.

Though the reading public and award committees generally embraced Caro’s work, the book did not initially receive universal plaudits. The 85-year-old Moses issued a lengthy and characteristically biting denunciation of the work. But other more detached figures also expressed reservations. In a New York Times review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt pronounced The Power Broker “vastly entertaining . . . as long as you don’t take it too seriously from the historical point of view.” He claimed that some of Caro’s accusations suggested “nothing so much as vindictiveness” and referred to his “devil theorizing.”{1} In another New York Times review, the distinguished urban historian Richard Wade contended that Caro had “little historical perspective in which to place Moses” and claimed that the master builder’s “great success lay in the fact that he was swimming with the tide of history.” What Moses did conformed to the prevailing American notions of city rebuilding. “Perhaps Moses pioneered” Wade argued, “but the physical shape of urban America would no doubt look very much the same whether Moses had lived or not.” If New York City suffered, the prevailing tides of history were to blame; Moses was just an instrument of the dominant perceptions of his age. Wade further criticized Caro for placing “too much emphasis on interviews and anonymous sources.” Moreover, Wade claimed to have talked to some of those interviewed by Caro and found that “important ones and none who could be described as friends of Moses” were “all generally skeptical about the author’s use of their recollection of events or his description of their views.”{2}

While generally praising The Power Broker, other scholars also noted that it “lacks historical depth” and embraced a great-man theory of history by attributing too much to a single figure rather than presenting him as representative of his generation.{3} One of the preeminent students of New York City government, Herbert Kaufman, complained that “the book is not a balanced appraisal; it is an indictment and a prosecutor’s brief, illuminated by hindsight and motivated by some values that were not abroad a generation ago.” He judged it “an instructive and stimulating book, but it is not the last word on Robert Moses.”{4}

Yet for over three decades Caro’s book was basically the last word on Moses. Caro’s indictment stood, and Moses remained a dirty word in the lexicon of urban scholars and observers. He was the Attila the Hun of urbanity, the symbol of all that was wrong with mid-twentieth-century urban policy. In New York City he was the public-sector bogeyman, a frightening specter haunting the metropolis which continued to suffer from his misdeeds. Caro had assigned him to the pantheon of arch-villains, and most New Yorkers seemed content to leave him there.

In 2007, however, Columbia University professors Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson forced a reconsideration of the master builder, organizing an exhibition titled Robert Moses and the Modern City at three New York museums, conducting a symposium on his legacy, and compiling a book of essays on Moses and his work that included a catalog of Moses’ projects in New York City. As the criticisms from 1974 indicated, the reevaluation was long overdue, but Ballon and Jackson made up for lost time with a stimulating reassessment that raised the ire of many diehard Moses haters. In his opening essay in Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, Jackson quickly reconsiders Moses’ vision and his place in the national context and examines Caro’s claims that Moses was corrupt and racist. Jackson contends that “we should acknowledge that Robert Moses was a dedicated public servant in the best sense of that term” and that “the evidence does not support Caro’s claims that racism was a defining aspect of Moses’s character, so that his actions had a disproportionately negative effect upon African-Americans.” He concludes with a judgment sure to stir the anger of Caro and the true believers of the hate-Moses cult: “Robert Moses will be remembered as a key actor in the rise of New York, not its fall.”{5}

Hilary Ballon’s superb essay, “Robert Moses and Urban Renewal: The Title I Program,” presents a nuanced and informed account of the realities of Title I implementation, a useful corrective to Caro’s black-and-white journalistic morality play.{6} Title I was a classic public-policy debacle. It was hampered by an obstructive federal bureaucracy which seemed to believe that renewal proposals should age like fine wine. Moreover, it was dependent on a partnership between local government and private developers at a time when such public-private alliances were rare and could not benefit from the corrective hand of long experience. Across the nation Title I blighted the careers of public officials, bankrupted private developers, and produced little that is appreciated today. But one of the few figures who could make the program work, a near miracle in itself, was Robert Moses. Ballon accurately records the restraints facing Moses and how he was forced to maneuver around federal policy, local politics, the demands of lending institutions, and the complaints of citizens groups. She makes a good case for the limitations on Moses’s power and demonstrates how these limitations restricted his options. Rather than an unfettered dictator as portrayed by Caro, Moses was an adroit implementer of a program that required an administrator who could dodge the quicksand and land mines lining the path to ultimate success.

It is time, however, to recognize that Moses’ fluctuating reputation is also a product of changing views of democracy and technology. Notions of right and wrong are not static, and the perceived virtues of one age can appear abhorrent to a later generation. Attitudes toward both democracy and technology shifted markedly during the twentieth century, and Robert Moses’ reputation was a casualty of this shift.

Some of the other contributors to the Ballon and Jackson volume are not so supportive of Moses. Urban historian Robert Fishman’s essay “Revolt of the Urbs: Robert Moses and His Critics” discusses those who rose up against the master builder, focusing specifically on opposition to Moses’ proposal to build a roadway through Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Seemingly a reluctant recruit to the Ballon-Jackson reassessment, Fishman concludes: “It would be deeply satisfying to end this essay with the observation that Robert Moses fully merits the obloquy that has become the conventional response whenever his name is mentioned. But perhaps he deserves a brief attempt at fairness that he so seldom accorded to others.”{7}

Fishman’s reluctant admission that perhaps fairness is in order sums up the feelings of many other urban observers. Moses is a man many love to hate, and to yield that reassuring hatred is a difficult and unwanted sacrifice. Caro’s book was a simplistic journalistic account lacking in appropriate historical context. But for many readers it was highly satisfying. When faced with debacle, there is solace in identifying the demon responsible and shifting blame to that convenient figure. Caro’s The Power Broker fits the bill.

Yet the efforts of Ballon and Jackson fit the bill for others viewing Moses from the perspective of the early twenty-first century. Since Moses left the scene, major public-works projects have proceeded slowly if at all. Obstruction and delay seem the order of the day, and Moses’ success in getting things done seems to warrant a reconsideration of his methods and legacy. “In the twenty-first century, after a long period when the city’s infrastructure has been ignored,” Ballon and Jackson explain in their introduction, “the desire for governmental actors that can tame the bureaucracy and overcome the opposition is projected onto Moses, who, we imagine, would have capitalized on the opportunity to rebuild lower Manhattan after 9/11.” For Ballon and Jackson, Moses “has become a symbolic figure in discourse about the future of the city, its capacity to think and build big.”{8} A frustrated Alexander Garvin, past planner for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, expressed much the same sentiment when he asked, “New Yorkers are asking if our city needs another Robert Moses.” “In truth, Moses was not omnipotent,” Garvin correctly observed, “but rather an unusually gifted public servant who had mastered the Art of Getting Things Done. That art deserves attention more than ever.”{9}

Today few people would argue that New York City fell. Abandonment is largely a phenomenon of the past, the population is rising, and the crime rate has plummeted. The city has not become a reservation for the very poor, but rather much of Manhattan is off-limits to any but the wealthy, with the zone of affluence annexing new territory each year. Thus today many are not searching for an answer to why New York City declined; instead they want to know why a city of such wealth and talent cannot realize big projects and accomplish big dreams. Hence the Ballon-Jackson reassessment. Though for many New Yorkers Moses is still a dirty word, for others it is the talisman that might open the door to a greater city.

It is time, however, to recognize that Moses’ fluctuating reputation is also a product of changing views of democracy and technology. Notions of right and wrong are not static, and the perceived virtues of one age can appear abhorrent to a later generation. Attitudes toward both democracy and technology shifted markedly during the twentieth century, and Robert Moses’ reputation was a casualty of this shift.

Moses was the product of the early-twentieth-century Progressive Era and its notions of democratic rule. Progressives rebelled against special-interest politics and emphasized the broader public interest. They hated ward politics and favored at-large representation to ensure that government policy would reflect the will of the people of the city as a whole. Neighborhood nabobs in the form of the ward aldermen were just one more special-interest obstacle in the path of the commonweal. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s a new view of democracy emerged in which activists claiming to speak for a neighborhood or ethnic group became the supposed tribunes of the people battling elected officials and their appointees. Democracy now seemed to mean the right of a fragment of the city to thwart the will of those who represented the majority of the larger electorate.

Under the older view of democracy, Moses was democratic. He was appointed by elected officials and his projects were subject to the approval of the elected members of the city’s Board of Estimate and city council; his authority came from laws approved by the elected lawmakers in the state legislature; much of his funding came from programs authorized by elected representatives in the United States Congress. Though Caro deems Moses a dictator dedicated to usurping power, Ballon and Jackson as well as anyone knowledgeable about the complexities of government know that he acted within the legal and structural constraints imposed by the representative system of American government. He did not force his projects down the throat of an unwilling city. In the late 1920s, before Moses had assumed any city office, the Regional Plan Association drafted the blueprint for proposed highways that Moses would later attempt to implement. Every mayor from the 1930s to the early 1960s was dedicated to realizing that plan, as was every major public official at the state and federal levels. Likewise his slum-clearance efforts enjoyed the mandate of elected representatives at each level of American government.

Under the new concept of democracy of the late twentieth century, however, Moses’ disregard for the will of the fragment as opposed to the people as a whole doomed him to public damnation. Across the nation, at-large election now yielded to schemes for renewed ward representation, and self-chosen “grassroots” spokespersons such as Jane Jacobs became the voice of democracy. Special-interest neighborhood, ethnic, and environmental organizations assumed new legitimacy and a heightened role in decision making.

Similarly, Moses ran afoul of changing views of technology. During the first half of the twentieth century technology was deemed a force for good; the automobile was the greatest advance in the history of human transportation and the ultimate in freedom and mobility. Society embraced speed, streamlining, smooth concrete, and clean, machine-like design. The Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair of 1939 was a dream world of futuristic technology embodying these attributes. For millions of Americans it portrayed a coming paradise. It also accorded with the aesthetic and vision of Robert Moses.

In the late twentieth century, however, an increasing number of Americans lost their faith in the merits of technology and modernism. The automobile now seemed the harbinger of pollution and congestion rather than speed and freedom. Moses’ highways were nightmares rather than dreams. Critics lambasted the unadorned, clean lines of urban renewal architecture as bland and grim. To be machine-like was a virtue in 1939; fifty years later it was villainy. Many New Yorkers embraced Jane Jacobs’s evocative portrait of the small-scale life of the sidewalk in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and eschewed the gigantism of Moses’ soaring bridges and high-rise renewal projects. The small and aged were deemed more attractive than the mammoth and modern.

Basically, Moses was the victim of these changing perceptions. He stayed too long in power and suffered the consequences of his cultural obsolescence. Had he retired in 1953 at the age of 65 he would have been universally proclaimed a hero. Even had he left office at 70 in 1958 he would have stepped down with his reputation intact. But he held power until 1968 when he was almost 80. By that time he was a symbol of a hated recent past. A good performer knows when to leave the stage. In the end Moses suffered from poor timing.

Perhaps in coming years Moses’ reputation will revive further as perceptions of democracy and technology shift yet again. In his essay in the Ballon and Jackson volume, Joel Schwartz seems to lay the groundwork for a critique of the participatory democracy of Jane Jacobs and her ilk. “Was Jane Jacobs a heroine or did she merely give an eloquent voice to Greenwich Village chauvinism, bolstered by reform Democratic politics, which combined into a selfish NIMBYism?”{10} As the selfish “Not in My Backyard” opposition of neighborhood spokespersons paralyzes public policy aimed at enhancing the welfare of the city as a whole, perhaps Moses might seem less of a dictator and more of a democrat. Similarly, as Americans balance the comfort and convenience promised by technology against the preservation of dingy, abandoned factories or the habitat of slimy, obscure snails, perhaps bridges, highways, and slum clearance might win new adherents. Just as changing perceptions of the present state of New York City and its infrastructure underlay the current reassessment of Robert Moses and Caro’s work, so changing notions of democracy and technology might yet redeem the master builder’s reputation and raise new doubts as to the merits of the biography that consigned him to infamy.

{3} Edward N. Saveth, “The Moses Model,” Reviews in American History 4 (1976): 451.

{4} Herbert Kaufman, “Moses: Charismatic Bureaucrat,” Political Science Quarterly 90 (1975): 537–38.

{5} Kenneth T. Jackson, “Robert Moses and the Rise of New York: The Power Broker in Perspective,” in Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, ed. Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson (New York, 2007), 70–71.

{6} Hilary Ballon, “Robert Moses and Urban Renewal: The Title I Program,” in Ballon and Jackson, 94–115.

{7} Robert Fishman, “Revolt of the Urbs: Robert Moses and his Critics,” in Robert Moses and the Modern City, 129.

{8} Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, “Introduction,” in Ballon and Jackson, 66.

{9} As quoted in Erica Pearson, “The Power Broker Revisited,” Gotham Gazette, 18 August 2003, available online at http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/feature-commentary/20030818/202/494 (accessed 16 January 2008).

{10} Joel Schwartz, “Robert Moses and City Planning,” in Ballon and Jackson, 133.

Jon C. Teaford is professor emeritus of history at Purdue University. His most recent book is The American Suburb: The Basics (New York, 2008).

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Condit was a transdisciplinary scholar. After receiving his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Purdue in 1936, he followed with an M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Cincinnati in 1939 and 1941. He taught mathematics and mechanics during World War II and then became an assistant design engineer with the New York Central Railroad’s Building Department in Cincinnati. When the war ended, he was hired by Northwestern to teach English. During the late 1940s, he published several articles, including “The Chicago School and the Modern Movement in Architecture.”{2} Then, in 1951–52, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant that supported him as a postdoctoral fellow in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin. While at Wisconsin on leave from Northwestern, Condit was able to complete The Rise of the Skyscraper.

While it may not have been Condit’s only intention, he popularized Giedion’s usage of “the Chicago School” and thus strengthened the links among Chicago’s commercial buildings, Prairie School architecture, and the modernist work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and other European émigré-architects.

In the years between The Rise of the Skyscraper and The Chicago School, Condit published much else, including his two-volume American Building Art and an article in the very first issue of Technology and Culture.{3} He also inaugurated the history of science program at Northwestern and, as Mel Kranzberg wrote in the special issue of Technology and Culture that I edited in Condit’s honor, “introduced courses in the history of building technology and the history of urban form.” Kranzberg continued: “These were among the first of their kind, if not the very first, at any American university. There were few textbooks and precedents to follow, so Condit’s own research provided much of the substance for the students who took these courses.”{4}

Preservation and Polemics

I have written before about Condit’s contributions to historical scholarship.{5} Here I want to consider the milieu in which The Chicago School was published and some of the ideas that have coalesced since then that have stimulated my own thinking. But first, a few words about the word “polemics” in the heading. Condit used polemics strategically to advance his case that architecture should be an art in which modern structural techniques predominantly shaped form. He defended his strongly held position by using generalizations that often reduced complex situations to either/or stances and by glossing over nuances and distinctions that made these either/or positions difficult to maintain. In the last section of this essay, I introduce some ideas about “performance.” Rather than offering “performance” as a counterpolemic to Condit’s argument, I hope to suggest—in keeping with the performative—that there is room for movement, for shifting interpretations, for recentering our investigations around different constituencies. My stance is polemical to the extent that I firmly believe this recentering is long overdue and urgently needed.

One catalyst for Condit’s revision of The Rise of the Skyscraper was the demolition of so much of Chicago’s commercial architecture in the dozen years between 1952 and 1964. As Condit told the history of tall office buildings in Chicago, he simultaneously noted how many of the buildings had met the wrecking ball since his original publication: seventeen by my count.{6} One strategy to try and prevent further destruction of a historic heritage is to unify threatened buildings into a “school” or other grouping that would amplify the importance of single buildings by categorizing them under a label of significance. To do this, Condit recruited the work of art historian Sigfried Giedion, whose highly polemical and influential Space, Time, and Architecture was published in 1941 and issued in many subsequent editions.{7} Condit adopted a term from Giedion, “the Chicago School,” that had also been used with respect to writers, sociologists, or designers of residential architecture (the latter more commonly known now as the Prairie School).{8}

While it may not have been Condit’s only intention, he popularized Giedion’s usage of “the Chicago School” and thus strengthened the links among Chicago’s commercial buildings, Prairie School architecture, and the modernist work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and other European émigré-architects. It was a clever way to make a declaration of importance. For example, taking off from Giedion, Condit connected the commercial buildings built in the 1890s by the firm of Holabird and Roche to Chicago designs by Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: “An unbroken if irregular line extends from the mature buildings of Holabird and Roche through the concrete structures of Richard Schmidt [Montgomery Ward Warehouse, 1908] and the [1922] Tribune project of Gropius and Meyer to this apartment tower [the Promontory Apartments in Chicago by Mies van der Rohe, 1948–50].” And again, Condit wrote of an 1895 design by D. H. Burnham and Company: “One short step further in the design of the Reliance [Building] and he [chief designer Charles Atwood] would have produced the transparent tower that Mies van der Rohe imagined in his Berlin project of 1919” (TCS, 218, 110).{9}

This argument went both ways. Robert Bruegmann pointed out in his 1991 critique of the term “the Chicago School” that the modernist designs were claimed by critics to be in line with buildings of 1890s Chicago, lending the former a historical pedigree and legitimating them in some circles. Condit, he noted, aligned himself with European critics by making the connections that they did as well: “Throughout the 1920s, pictures of American engineering works and utilitarian buildings, primarily industrial structures but also Chicago office buildings from the 1880s and 1890s, appeared in the pages of the books and magazines published by avant-garde architects.”{10} That a U.S. wholesale store and a French apartment block had different contexts, uses, and ownership did not enter into the argument. Condit asserted: “The new architecture has come full circle, without quite realizing what it was doing, from Chicago through France and Germany and back to its native home” (TCS, 147). This interest in “formal analysis,” an in-depth discussion of the aesthetic qualities of an artifact, was commonplace in art history at mid-century.

In hindsight, Condit’s 1960s writings seem to be a valiant attempt to create a sort of textual utopia, a totalizing explanation that could withstand the “tide of new construction” as well as so many uncertainties of the atomic age. He eloquently argued that “[t]he most destructive consequence of a consumers’ economy resting on a militaristic basis, other than war itself, is that works of art may be consumed like the most ephemeral of material goods”

Throughout The Chicago School, Condit revealed his sympathies with Giedion. Both scholars disdained the eclecticism of much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture in Europe and the United States, dismissing building ornamentation in no uncertain terms. Condit claimed that architect Louis Sullivan had a “capriciously experimental temperament in ornamentation” that obscured the form and “produces an effect of shallowness and indecisiveness” (TCS, 38–39). The firm of Holabird and Roche exhibited a “misguided traditionalism” on the Marquette Building, and its Old Colony Building had a “ridiculous colonnade” (TCS, 122, 124). Several other passages provide evidence of Condit’s modernist preference for austerity: He praised the “inherent power that the unadorned building possessed,” while the Woman’s Temple (Burnham and Root, 1891–92), commissioned by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, was an “excursion into the romantic. . . . It was florid work—arty and feminine, perhaps,” according to Condit (TCS, 101, 103, 104). This was not praise, but a sort of gender essentialism, not surprising in an era when Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had just been published to wide notoriety.

In contrast to Giedion, however, Condit focused on Chicago buildings and was far more specific about construction, patronage, and other contributors to the creation and execution of the buildings. Being a Chicagoan himself, Condit was rather boosterish about his hometown, insisting on the late-nineteenth-century sophistication of his city.{11} Like the anonymous authors of Industrial Chicago (1891), he praised “the structural-utilitarian-aesthetic unity of the best Chicago buildings” (TCS, 12). He also believed at this point in his career that the “transmutation of vernacular building . . . into a genuine architectural style was in part the product of a relatively long theoretical preparation” (TCS, 9). Tracing what he viewed to be the theoretical bases of the Chicago School was another strategy to give the commercial buildings a historical lineage. Condit thus went beyond formal analysis to discuss concepts of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Horatio Greenough, for example.{12}

Condit’s book argued for understanding nineteenth-century vernacular urban commercial buildings because of their role in providing “ultimate meaning for the architecture of our own day” (TCS, v). The effort to link modernist architecture to that of vernacular buildings of the late nineteenth century was two-pronged and reciprocal on Condit’s part: to highlight a neglected and increasingly threatened type of building and to defend the spare, abstract designs of European and U.S. modernism.{13} One part of the historic fabric was sewn to another, if you will, to strengthen both. In hindsight, Condit’s 1960s writings seem to be a valiant attempt to create a sort of textual utopia, a totalizing explanation that could withstand the “tide of new construction” as well as so many uncertainties of the atomic age. He eloquently argued that “[t]he most destructive consequence of a consumers’ economy resting on a militaristic basis, other than war itself, is that works of art may be consumed like the most ephemeral of material goods” (TCS, 134).

Preserving Polemics

Condit seemingly willed Chicago architecture to achieve what he valued: “[Charles] Atwood succeeded in developing almost to its ultimate refinement the modern dematerialized curtain wall and thus made the building a direct forerunner of the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in the 1920’s,” so that architecture, once again, was what he believed it was intended to be: a structural art. (TCS, 110, 2). Condit sought a “true standard in architecture—that is, a basic norm or type exactly developed to fit a particular set of conditions and repeated wherever those conditions exist. Radical deviations for a formula that represents an adequate generalization would be mere caprice or illogicality.” He supported this idea by citing Alfred North Whitehead: “Imagination and individual expression are vital to a living culture, but we should remember with Whitehead that ‘civilization [also] advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.’”{14}

Architects John Wellborn Root and Louis Henri Sullivan did not fit so easily into Condit’s “school.” Condit wrote: “For Sullivan, the potential aesthetic quality of the tall building lay in its unusual height, and it was this that he seized on to provide the expression of his intense personal feeling” (TCS, 128). The same might be said of Condit in the sense that tall buildings for him, too, provided a “technical-aesthetic synthesis that makes it possible for the world of technology to enter into the domain of feeling and morality” (TCS, 4). Of Sullivan writing about the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Condit exhorted:

On a deeper level . . . one is compelled to reflect on the fact that Sullivan identified the Field building with the man who created it [Henry Hobson Richardson in 1887], or transformed it into a man. The imagery is entirely associated with masculine energy and potency, sheer creative vitality in its basic physical sense. When one considers this along with the ascription of a Dionysiac quality to the tall building, the essential meaning becomes inescapable. For Sullivan the creation of a building is equivalent to the biological act of man recreating himself, as he does when he begets a child, the emphasis, however, being exclusively masculine (TCS, 167–68).

While I believe that this analysis contradicts Condit’s commitment to architecture as (solely) a structural art, Condit’s prose is surely a “proud and soaring thing,” to use Sullivan’s phrase.{15}

Despite myself, I admire the certainty and seamlessness of this book. Condit started right out with the claim that “the architectural and technical achievement of the Chicago school marked the establishment of a new style of architecture” that was also “the culmination of structural evolution that extended over” the nineteenth century. “Style in architecture,” he stated,

represents or stands for those essential characteristics of construction, form, ornament and detail that are common to all the important structures of any definable period in history. But it also stands for those technical and aesthetic qualities of the artistic product that grow directly and organically out of the conditions of human existence and out of the aspirations and powers of human beings. We rightly feel that the buildings of a certain style—if it is a genuine style—symbolize in their form the realities of man’s experience and the attempt to master and give adequate emotional expression to those realities. These buildings are constituent facts of man’s history, and their revelation is a part of truth itself (TCS, 1).

Man. Master. Truth. These words sound dated and quaint, I hope, in their self-assurance and use of gendered possessives. But Condit continued: “Within a few years the exploitation of these technical factors [iron framing, fireproofing, vertical transportation] brought about the revolution in form and construction that became the basis of a fully modern architecture, emancipated from the last vestige of dependence on the past” (TCS, 25). Here he seems to contradict his strategy of giving modernism a past; instead he rejects its sources. Condit brought together construction technologies with the forms that they helped make possible, both in the late-nineteenth-century commercial buildings and the postwar modernist structures. By conflating these, he scripted a history that discouraged inquiry into the forms and techniques as independent variables operating in a complex urban environment over time.

The Glasgow-based architect and educator Thomas A. Markus remarked recently on the “fragmentation of architectural discourse.” “There are no inherent connections between form, function and space,” Markus wrote.{16} Again and again in scholarship from the mid-twentieth century—primarily in scholarship of and about modernism—there was a tendency to deduce social and political meanings from form, to posit inherent connections between function (in a broad sense) and form. When Condit wrote that these “buildings of a certain style . . . symbolize in their form the realities of man’s experience,” he assumed too much, reducing history to a single strand. By the 1980s, scholars like Alan Colquhoun were arguing for a conception of “the city as historically as well as spatially continuous—capable of being read as a palimpsest. In the early-twentieth century avant-garde, the city was seen diachronically, as a linear development over time, each period canceling the ones before in the name of the unity of the Zeitgeist.”{17}

In drawing a line, however crooked, between structures that resembled each other stylistically and technically, Condit created an illustrated narrative that ignored the simultaneous existence in the same territory of other layers and other priorities. Assuredly, his interest was the “contradiction in the United States between the aims of commercial enterprise and the values of aesthetic achievement” and in constructing The Chicago School, he attempted to bring these opposites into alignment (TCS, 134). In the final section of this essay, I want to gesture toward some different scholarly goals.

Palimpsest, Performance, and Power

Synchronicity, then (along with the overused “palimpsest”), to an extent has supplanted the “linear development over time” in history-writing that Colquhoun described. Already in 1964, architect Bernard Rudofsky noted that “the discriminative approach of the historian is mostly due to his parochialism. . . . [A]rchitectural history as we know it is equally biased on the social plane. It amounts to little more than a who’s who of architects who commemorated power and wealth; an anthology of buildings of, by, and for the privileged.”{18} Once the boundaries of what should be appreciated and preserved expanded to include the ordinary and the vernacular, historians brought many more players onto the playing field, including contractors, engineers, and real estate agents.

At the same time that Condit attempted to preserve commercial structures, he recognized that his own methods of study—discussing vernacular building, real estate, engineering, and infrastructure along with the architecture—were undermining the priority previously given by historians to Masters and Monuments. “The union of architecture and engineering demanded by the philosophy of the modern movement has achieved the ironic result of contracting the architect’s role to a minority status in the creation of a finished building” (TCS, 51, n. 31). Almost as a way of compensating for the diminished role of the architect and, to some extent, undermining his own argument, Condit elevated Louis Sullivan and John Wellborn Root to masterly status. By examining the works of these men in more depth, he inadvertently suggested new directions for research—precisely those aspects of architecture and urbanism that “the Chicago School” did not adequately accommodate but at which Sullivan and Root excelled—ornament and variation, for example.

In an essay titled “The Politics of Successful Technologies,” John Staudenmaier argued for a “contextual approach to the history of technology . . . [that situates] technical design decisions within the public fabric of societal decision making.”{19} Condit provided a context for the buildings he considered by examining real estate, construction, and infrastructure issues along with the individual architectural works. The context of history has broadened since the mid-1960s, however, along with what is “public.” Staudenmaier noted that “context is under construction every bit as much as the artifact in question.”{20} Thus the historian is challenged to focus on an ever-shifting set of considerations. In Technology’s Storytellers, Staudenmaier elucidated a constituency model that helps analyze technological history: design, maintenance, and impact constituencies are groups affected differently by changes in technology.{21} In brief, the design constituencies are “[t]he people and institutions with access to the venture capital that new technologies always require [and] ordinarily hold cultural hegemony in their society.”{22} Maintenance constituencies include those who “had all come to benefit from and depend upon” a certain new technology, such as automobiles. Finally, there are two segments of the impact constituency: “people and institutions who lose because of the design of the new technology” and “those who share the costs of a technology without receiving its benefits.”{23} Condit primarily examined design constituencies in the history of tall buildings, but he also considered maintenance constituencies, including steelworkers, tenants, and legislators. He minimally recognized impact constituencies.{24} While a focus on impact constituencies is crucial for a fuller understanding of historical change, taking into account impact constituencies also has added new dimensions to our knowledge of design and maintenance constituencies by underscoring the societal costs and the relationships among constituencies.

A few pages back, I wrote that I would turn to the idea of performance toward the end of this essay. Imagine now Carl Condit making a show of opening a door, as he surely did for me and other women when we entered a building together. Metaphorically, Condit’s certainty, I think, opened the door for others to examine his assumptions. How could he be so sure of himself? His polemical stance prodded me (at least) to skepticism. Others, too, have shifted away from Condit’s surefooted storytelling. While some scholars like Bruegmann have been quite polemical themselves, other writers have stressed the communicative aspects of technological activities.

Adapting some of Staudenmaier’s ideas, Bryan Pfaffenberger wrote about “a full range of technological activities, such as user appropriation, user modifications, sabotage, and revolutionary alterations . . . as a process of technological communication.”{25} This communication was “reciprocal and recursive,” with interactions among technological artifacts, people, and value systems producing outcomes.{26} Architectural historian Diane Ghirardo sought to “uncover spaces, spatial practices and histories that concern women above all, with the argument, following from the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, that through social practice, spaces are both configured and acquire meaning.” Further, she argued that this analysis “represents resistance to totalizing interpretations, or metanarratives, and, more specifically, allows us to recover the histories not only of some exceptional buildings, but also, insofar as possible, structures and histories that have not been preserved precisely because of their associations with women.”{27} Historians are investigating reciprocal relationships of space and social relations, since their (our) own contexts have changed.{28}

“The artifact embodies political intentions,” Pfaffenberger wrote, “but these intentions do not come to life in the absence of ritual.” The example he used to explain this activation of an artifact was the Victorian hallway bench and its varied meanings to different constituencies. “[T]he ornate mirror and the hard, plain bench both represented and constructed the Victorian class system” by providing an uncomfortable place for the servant to sit and an elaborate mirror to literally reflect the opulence of the upper-class visitor.{29} I have tried to push my own work in the direction of examining both formalized rituals and performances (broadly construed) of social interactions in and around buildings. By focusing on “in-between conditions”—what happens between bodies and artifacts or buildings—I hope to shed light on some of the reciprocal and recursive ways that people and building technologies produce urban environments.{30} Staudenmaier’s concept of “impact constituencies” has helped frame my considerations of those who have been harmed by (say) skyscraper development. Also crucial to my way of thinking has been feminist theorization of “intersectionality”—the ways in which gender, class, and race intersect.{31}

“Palimpsest,” the word used by Colquhoun to describe “the city as historically as well as spatially continuous,” fails to describe power relationships in the various layers of a city; intersectionality stresses multiple oppressions as well as the varied strategies to resist those oppressions. According to the editors of the book Embodied Utopias, “Spatial boundaries become psychologically coded barriers: walls, gates, one-way and dead-end streets, decaying buildings, parts of the city where ‘you’ (normative subject) ‘don’t go.’”{32} In his essay for Embodied Utopias, Thomas Markus stressed that “[a]ll built space inevitably structures social relationships, by creating ‘insides’ and ‘outsides,’ categories of ‘inhabitants,’ ‘visitors,’ and ‘strangers,’ and it separates those with power from those who lack power.”{33} But in an essay on Hull House in that same volume, Sharon Haar blurred some of these distinctions about urban spaces. In introducing Haar’s article, philosopher Peg Birmingham noted that Hull House reformers “grasp[ed] the public space of the city as a set of myriad, material lived practices with a life of its own, beyond the attempts at rational organization in which everything has its proper place and function.”{34}

Condit’s powerful prose and compelling polemics in The Chicago School have carried effectively across the decades, shaping the history of tall buildings into a myth that has its own shifting history.

In order to capture these “material lived practices” I have used the concept of performance, in all its senses. People’s actions—embodied performances—are constantly shifting and thus affecting the processes of spatial and technological creation as they are also affected by them. The implicit motion—moving toward or away from—animates physical spaces as well as any institutional structures that (attempt to) organize people. New media consultant Jon McKenzie divided performance into three categories: cultural, organizational, and technological. In his words, his book “Perform or Else initiates a challenge, one that links the performances of artists and activists with those of workers and executives, as well as computers and missile systems.”{35} His tripartite definition of performance dovetails with Pfaffenberger’s “technological dramas” that

emphasize the performative nature of technological “statements” and “counterstatements,” which involved the creation of scenes (contexts) in which actors (designers, artifacts, and users) play out their fabricated roles with regard to a set of envisioned purposes (and before an audience), and it is also to emphasize that discourse involved is not the argumentative and academic discourse of a text but the symbolic media of myth (in which skepticism is suspended) and ritual (in which human actions are mythically patterned in controlled social spaces).{36}

In other words, Pfaffenberger tried to dramatize technological change by providing contexts for the varied constituencies that individually and collectively animated the settings and the artifacts under consideration. This “animation” takes place on several levels, including myth and ritual, but also in less formalized ways.

It is clear that Carl Condit recognized and described aspects of urban drama. For example, he imbued some of the buildings he analyzed with multisensory qualities. About Sullivan’s design for the Carson, Pirie, Scott store, Condit noted that its “thrust and counterthrust, tension and compression, give rise to powerful kinesthetic images in the observer” (TCS, 165).{37} But Condit was unable to reconcile this embodied response with his then-modernist predilections. Instead he belittled it, feminized it, and dismissed it. That he did so made him a man of a particular social and historic location. It is hardly a crime to be of one’s time and place, and Condit did it so well and so seamlessly that his midcentury interpretations have been frustratingly long-lived. The myth of the Chicago School continues, most recently in the two-volume work The Skyscraper and the City, where William Le Baron Jenney is still referred to as the “father of the skyscraper.”{38} Condit’s powerful prose and compelling polemics in The Chicago School have carried effectively across the decades, shaping the history of tall buildings into a myth that has its own shifting history.

Roberta Moudry’s edited volume and the forthcoming book by Joanna Merwood-Salisbury are excellent contributions to the history of tall buildings, promising new frameworks.{39} The essays compiled by Moudry explore “the engagement of the skyscraper with the experience and meaning of city life.”{40} Both Moudry and Merwood-Salisbury honor historians like Condit who have gone before by moving beyond them, asking different questions—putting issues of racialization and gender at the center of their inquiries, for example. Condit’s hesitant and tepid investigations into kinesthetics and emotions have been invigorated by this recent scholarship. The sooner we recognize “that we [must] constantly shift the center of analysis to multiple perspectives to ensure that we are developing a holistic strategy,” writes Andrea Smith, the sooner we will write histories that include more people’s lives.{41} Staudenmaier’s “impact constituencies” need to tell their own stories, and to add their histories to those of the design and maintenance constituencies. I think Condit would agree: in addition to being an influential scholar, he was a generous man.

{3} American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century (New York, 1960); American Building Art: The Twentieth Century (New York, 1961); “Sullivan’s Skyscrapers as the Expression of Nineteenth Century Technology,” Technology and Culture 1 (Winter 1959): 78–83. Condit was one of the founders of the Society for the History of Technology, serving on the Executive Council from 1959 to 1963. Between 1962 and 1970, he served as coeditor with Eugene Ferguson of Technology and Culture. In 1968 he was awarded the Abbott Payson Usher Prize, and in 1973 the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. Between 1966 and 1972 he was professor of art and history of science at Northwestern, and then, after that, professor of history, art history, and urban affairs. On Condit’s role in SHOT, see Robert C. Post, “Missionary: An Interview with Melvin Kranzberg,” Invention and Technology 4 (Winter 1989): 34–39, and “Looking Back: Primary Sources” at http://shotnews.net/fiftieth (accessed 26 October 2007). In the index to Technology and Culture’s first twenty-five volumes, Condit’s entries take up nearly four entire columns, the longest by far of anybody who ever published in the journal. Robert Post has been indefatigable in documenting the early history of SHOT and Technology and Culture; thanks to him for adding many of the details here.

{4} Melvin Kranzberg, “A Tribute to Carl W. Condit,” Technology and Culture 30 (April 1989): 256.

{5} Sharon Irish, “Essays in Honor of Carl W. Condit,” Technology and Culture 30 (April 1989): 249–54; and Irish, “Memorial: Carl W. Condit (1914–1997),” Technology and Culture 38 (October 1997): 1026–30.

{6} These buildings discussed by Condit were demolished in the following years: the Bailey and Born buildings (1952–53); Walker Warehouse (1953); the Lakota (1959); Phoenix Building (1959); Cable Building (1960–61); Unitarian Church of Evanston (1960); Dexter Building (1961); Great Northern Theater (1961); Majestic Hotel (1961); Republic Building (1961); Garrick Theater/Schiller Building (1961); Victoria Hotel (1961); Bauer and Black Building (1962); Hyde Park Hotel (1963); Lind Block (1963). Hull House was threatened with demolition in 1961; after extensive protests, the house itself was preserved, but nine other buildings in the complex were torn down. See The Chicago School, 206–07.

{7} Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th edition, revised and enlarged (Cambridge, Mass., 1967 [1941]). See Arthur P. Molella, “Classics Revisited—Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command,” Technology and Culture 43 (April 2002): 374–89 (thanks to Robert Post for alerting me to Molella’s essay).

{8} All these are discussed in Robert Bruegmann’s article, “Myth of the Chicago School,” first published in 1991, but recently reprinted in Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, ed. Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi Ray (Chicago, 2005), 15–29. According to Bruegmann, William Dean Howells used the phrase “Chicago school” in 1903 to describe certain writers. The Chicago school of sociology centered around Robert Park and Ernest Burgess at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century, and architect Thomas Tallmadge applied the term in 1908 to residential designs by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and George Maher. Another source for the historiography of the term is H. Allen Brooks, “Chicago School: Metamorphosis of a Term,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 25 (May 1966): 115–18.

{9} Giedion previously had made the same Reliance/Miesian glass tower comparison in Space, Time, and Architecture, 386–87.

{10} Bruegmann, “Myth of the Chicago School,” 16.

{11} In The Chicago School (p. 95), Condit wrote that: “The last decade of the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary flowering of the civic and cultural spirit in Chicago. It was marked by creative public enterprise on the highest and most effective level, and it led to an intellectual and civic renaissance unparalleled in the history of American municipalities.”

{12} Giedion pointed the way in this, referencing Viollet-le-Duc as a theoretical father of the skyscraper. See Space, Time, and Architecture, 206.

{13} In another example of this linkage, in The Chicago School (p. 139), Condit wrote of the Prudential Building (Adler and Sullivan, 1895): “The cylindrical column envelopes of the first story and the bay-wide windows of the second open the base to such an extent as to suggest an anticipation of Le Corbusier’s pilotis.”

{14} Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (New York, 1948), 42, quoted in The Chicago School, 126. On type, see an important essay by Georges Teyssot, “Norm and Type: Variations on a Theme,” in Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, eds. Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte (New York, 2003).

{15} Of the tall office building, Sullivan declared in 1896: “It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing.” Louis H. Sullivan, “The Tall Building Artistically Considered,” Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York, 1979), 206.

{16} Thomas A. Markus, “Is There a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopias?” in Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach (London and New York, 2002), 17.

{17} Alan Colquhoun, “Twentieth Century Concepts of Urban Space,” Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays, 1980–1987 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 232–33. This essay was originally published in 1985.

{18} Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (Garden City, N.Y., 1964), [n.p., but on first page of preface].

{19} John M. Staudenmaier, “The Politics of Successful Technologies,” in In Context: History and the History of Technology—Essays in Honor of Melvin Kranzberg, ed. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989), 151.

{20} John M. Staudenmaier, “Problematic Stimulation: Historians and Sociologists Constructing Technology Studies,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 15 (1995), 97. John Staudenmaier has been a generous correspondent over the years, sending me copies of the invaluable article cited here as well as the one in note 19, among others.

{21} John M. Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 192–201.

{22} Staudenmaier, “Politics of Successful Technologies,” 154.

{23} Ibid., 156.

{24} In The Chicago School, labor is mentioned, but race is invisible, and women nearly so. Condit does mention child care (p. 151), department store shopping (p. 164), and the architect Marion Mahony (pp. 203, 210), as well as Jane Addams (p. 206).

{25} Bryan Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 17 (Summer 1992): 285. I am grateful to Rayvon Fouché for alerting me to this article, as well as another one that considers the “performance of technoscience”: Warwick Anderson, “Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience,” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 5/6 (2002): 644.

{26} Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas,” 288 and 290.

{27} Diane Ghirardo, “Cherchez la Femme: Where Are the Women in Architectural Studies?” in Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender, and the Interdisciplinary, ed. Katerina Rüedi, Sarah Wigglesworth, and Duncan McCorquodale (London, 1996), 159.

{28} Certainly I have been influenced by the work of Henri Lefebvre, especially The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, Mass., 1991 [1974, 1984]), and Edward W. Soja’s publications, such as Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, Mass., 1996). About the time that I first read Carl Condit’s work (1978), I also read Michel Foucault for the first time: Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” trans. Mark Seem, Semiotext(e) 3:2 (1978), 6–19.

{29} Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas,” 294.

{30} My book manuscript, Spaces Between: The Art of Suzanne Lacy, is currently under consideration. Articles that explore aspects of this performative approach include Nicholas Brown, Ryan Griffis, Kevin Hamilton, Sharon Irish, and Sarah Kanouse, “What Makes Justice Spatial? What Makes Spaces Just? Three Interviews on the Concept of Spatial Justice,” Critical Planning 14 (Summer 2007), 6–28; and Sharon Irish, “Shadows in the Garden: ‘The Dark Madonna’ Project by Suzanne Lacy,” Landscape Journal 26 (Spring 2007): 98–115.

{31} Joan Kelly, “The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” Women, History, Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), 1–18. Foundational texts about intersectionality include: “The Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York, 1978), 362–72; and Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Radical Teacher 7 (March 1978), 20–27. Another more recent work by María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, Md., 2003), is a vital contribution on intersectionality.

{32} Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach, “Embodied Utopia: Introduction,” Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach (London and New York, 2002), 4.

{33} Markus, “Is There a Built Form?” (n. 16 above).

{34} Peg Birmingham, “At Home in Public,” in Embodied Utopias, 95.

{35} Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London, 2001), 3.

{36} Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas” (n. 25 above), 286.

{37} David Van Zanten examined several facets of Louis Sullivan—architectural, biographical, and poetic—in his book Sullivan’s City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan (New York, 2000), and suggested “a parallel conception of ornament evolved as an honest emancipation of the material and structure of the surfaces it articulated” (p. 9). According to Van Zanten, the “three cities” of Sullivan were, first, “the Chicago of 1890”; second, “the city in which Sullivan around 1900 documented his presence, when his ornament left the building surfaces and proclaimed itself as the reflection of a separate, powerful personality. . . . The third, secret city of his last years appeared when ornament and plan combined” (p. 153).

{38} Lynn S. Beedle, Mir Ali, and Paul Armstrong, The Skyscraper and the City: Design, Technology, and Innovation (Lewiston, N.Y., 2007), 118.

{39} Roberta Moudry, ed., The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (New York, 2005); Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper as Urban Solution (Chicago, 2009).

{40} Moudry, 3.

{41} Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 153.

Dr. Irish is research scholar in the School of Architecture, and project coordinator for the Community Informatics Initiative, School of Library and Information Science, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology

The Transportation Revolution appeared as volume 4 in a series, The Economic History of the United States, edited by Henry David, Harold Faulkner, Louis Hacker, Curtis Nettels, and Fred Shannon. Eight of the nine volumes originally projected were published, and several served the precise purpose of the editors—namely, that of synthesizing the existing scholarship on the developing American economy. At least two other titles in the series were widely read and exercised significant influence on multiple generations of students and scholars: Paul Gates’s The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860, and Edward Kirkland’s Industry Comes of Age: Business, Labor, and Public Policy, 1860–1897.{2} These three volumes reflected the intense interest among postwar economic historians in nineteenth-century American economic growth. Prime evidence of this is Harvard’s Center for Research in Entrepreneurial History, which flourished through the efforts of such scholars as Arthur Cole, Joseph Schumpeter, Fritz Redlich, and Hugh Aitken.{3} But Taylor’s approach in The Transportation Revolution is especially emblematic.

Born in the small central Wisconsin town of Beaver Dam, Taylor earned his initial degree in economics at the University of Chicago in 1921. His first position at Earlham College in 1923 was followed a year later by an appointment at Amherst. He earned his doctorate at Chicago in 1929 with a thesis on agrarian discontent in the Mississippi Valley preceding the war of 1812, and he spent nearly his entire career at Amherst, the last twenty-six years as George D. Olds Professor. His research included the role of tariffs and the development of banking, and he also edited the Problems in American Civilization series that Amherst’s American civilization department developed and that Heath published and distributed widely. In 1965, he moved to the position of senior resident scholar at the Eleutherian Mills– Hagley Foundation. While there, he published a seminal two-part article on “The Beginnings of Mass Transportation in Urban America” and edited, with Lucius Ellsworth, a compilation of papers titled Approaches to American Economic History.{4}

Yet, all his other work notwithstanding, Taylor’s reputation rests upon The Transportation Revolution. This 400-page study manages to cover a complicated era of economic and technological development with wonderful ease and beautifully clear writing. After opening with a short chapter on the nature of merchant capitalism in the young republic, he devoted six chapters to transportation: five examined roads and bridges, canals, steamboats, railroads, and the merchant marine, with another reviewing the changes in cost and speed of transportation. But these took Taylor less than halfway through his study. The next two chapters focused on domestic trade (surveying not just the patterns and volume of trade, but also the comparative advantages of the different modes of transportation) and foreign trade. Then Taylor turned to manufacturing for two chapters, one of which was devoted to the factory system; and then to workers for another two chapters, in which he discussed the emergence of wage labor. The final chapters covered banks and financial institutions, money and prices, and the role of government. A concluding section reviewed the national economy that had begun to develop by 1860. Taylor noted that the economic axis of the country exhibited a “new orientation,” one in which “the great cities of the East no longer faced the sea and gave their chief attention to shipping and foreign trade. Their commerce centered increasingly now at the railroad stations rather than at the docks . . .” (p. 398). A fully national structure was not completely in place, but huge strides had been taken in all key areas of the economy.

The Transportation Revolution is clearly the work of an economic historian, as evidenced by the appendix of statistics on various aspects of economic activity—and many of the subjects Taylor dealt with remain central concerns for those working in these fields. Yet it is also apparent that Taylor was interested in questions of wider interest to other sorts of historians, including those studying technology. In that sense, this book demonstrates one of the principal academic influences that helped shape the history of technology as it formally emerged after 1955: scholarship in economic history. Taylor was more interested in the consequences of technology than in its origins, and he measured many of those consequences in economic terms, using very solid research. Yet we do not find a deterministic account in Taylor. And his book seems to recognize the significance of technological change as a subject worthy of attention.{5}

For historians of technology, Taylor’s discussion of transportation, and the priority he ascribes to it, best reflects this outlook. His decision to structure the book as he did sent a signal that reached beyond the ranks of specialists in transportation history. Indeed, this emphasis on transportation constituted an important and original contribution by Taylor to the literature on economic and (as it would turn out) technological history. He set forth the argument that the economic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century were tied to the development of internal transport, and then he demonstrated the revolutionary or transformational consequences of those changes. While he examined the basic technological developments related to the growth of each mode of transport, his main goal was to show how newfound capabilities for moving people and goods proved pivotal for the development of the economy.

This idea hardly seems earth-shattering now—and it was not completely unknown before Taylor—but neither was it self-evident. In a review in Pennsylvania History, for example, historian Louis Hunter observed that

the distinctive feature of Professor Taylor’s treatment is the emphasis on the development of transportation, to which approximately one-third of the text is devoted. In his preface the author defends this emphasis on the grounds that “transportation developments were so revolutionary and . . . so fundamental to the economic growth of the country.” Yet one can argue with equal force that developments in manufacturing during these decades were hardly less revolution-ary and fundamental. To have allotted six chapters to the one theme and but two to the other seems to me a little extreme, but since Professor Taylor handles the two on manufacturing with such skill I shall not press my complaint unduly.{6}

The point is, however, that Taylor believed that the changes in transportation were the key feature of economic development during this forty-five-year period, thereby elevating the significance of technology in accounts of economic change. It is important to realize that Taylor’s book appeared before publication of many of the specialized studies that raised our estimation of the role of transportation in the history of economic and technological development. True, Taylor could draw upon the handful of solid histories of individual railroad companies by authors such as Edward Hungerford, Paul Gates, and Edward Mott; he also had Robert Albion’s works on maritime history and Hunter’s own classic account, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technical History (Taylor thanked Hunter in the acknowledgments).{7} And as the notes and bibliography demonstrate, Taylor utilized a solid base of books and articles by many others. But many now-standard works had not yet been written: John Stover’s and Robert Fogel’s studies of railroads, Carter Goodrich’s on canals, Harry Scheiber’s books and articles on internal improvements, and Alfred Chandler’s initial articles and book on the role of railroads in the nation’s business and economic history all were in the future.{8} Certainly, Taylor’s argument concerning the essential importance of transportation to economic growth provided a necessary foundation for the many scholarly studies of transportation that emerged from the mid-1950s onward.

Hunter’s comment also draws attention to the portions of Taylor’s study that were not focused on transportation. It is easy to forget that Taylor opened his book with chapters on transportation in order to emphasize his point, but then explored topics that moved in other directions; he was interested in the much wider question of the overall pattern of economic development during these early decades of the U.S. industrial revolution. And several points can be made about his efforts. First, he sought to highlight patterns and connections. Thus Taylor was concerned not only with the interrelatedness of transportation and manufacturing, but also with the interconnection of capital and workers and with the overall linkage of the government with the economy. He made the last point in a number of places throughout the book by highlighting the ways in which government activities shaped all manner of economic activities. For those who harbored a nostalgic affection for a time when government did not interfere with business, he noted that “the following pages which describe the actual practice of governmental intervention lend no support to those who place the heyday of laissez faire in the United States during the period of this study” (p. 354).

The Transportation Revolution also foreshadowed the ways in which historians of technology would eventually attempt to analyze and understand the changes taking place in the United States after 1800. This is most apparent in Taylor’s discussion of the factory system. His account is perhaps not as nuanced as we would now offer, given several generations of additional scholarship. Not surprisingly, he adopted the classic account of Eli Whitney’s role in the American system of manufactures—Robert Woodbury’s correction came later.{9} And in his discussion of labor, he followed John R. Commons’s approach to workers and unions. Today, we would be more inclined to ask about those who used the technology—factory workers as well as those citizens who relied upon the transportation system—and less inclined to focus on the supply of innovations. But in more general terms, Taylor’s analysis of the factory system and of most of his other subjects stands the test of time. Subsequent scholars have fleshed out the details, but the outline still holds.

Without intending to do so, Taylor presented aspects of the process of economic development between 1815 and 1860 in ways that set the stage for the central concerns of historians of technology. This is not surprising, perhaps, since he examined those pivotal years in which the momentum of industrial and technological change grew into a process that was seemingly permanent. And within that process, transport and manufacturing became two of the enduring issues for technological historians. Agriculture only was not addressed in Taylor’s volume, but that omission is a product of the structure of the series itself, which featured a separate volume on the subject. Thus we find in Taylor’s book attention to the factory, to innovations in textile technology, and to the workforce—topics that under the umbrella of the American system of manufactures animated so many of SHOT’s members and so much of Technology and Culture‘s audience during the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, one also finds in Taylor’s work comments and analysis that align with later scholarly developments; for example, his attention to the role of public policy resonates as an increasingly significant thematic focus among present-day historians of technology. Taylor’s reference to alternative ways of organizing corporate manufacturing enterprises foreshadowed the findings of Philip Scranton, while his discussion of the importance of state and local governments in the development of transportation opened the door for the ideas developed by Colleen Dunlavy and William Childs.{10}

But perhaps most importantly, Taylor presented his analysis of transportation and economic development against a broader context that included social as well as economic factors. As he described the nation’s situation in his final chapter,

Americans of that age, especially in the northern states, met the rapidly developing opportunities for material gain with unusual energy and enthusiasm. The spirit of adventure, aggressiveness, and willingness to make sacrifices in the hope of economic advantage, which characterized American merchants in the foreign trade and drove settlers to develop the West so rapidly despite all obstacles and uncertainties, also dominated the businessmen who played so active a part in planning, organizing, financing, and managing the new ventures in transportation and manufacturing. (p. 394)

This description is not only reminiscent of the views of nineteenth-century America developed by economic historian Thomas Cochran and social historian Daniel Boorstin, but it also anticipated Eugene Ferguson’s discussion of the technological community of the mid-Atlantic region during these years. All of these scholars shared an interest in the way that values and outlooks helped drive economic and technological developments.{11}

Overall, Taylor’s analysis has held up amazingly well; in fact, few historical studies have possessed such staying power. The durability of this book merits special recognition, as others have also noted. In another retrospective essay published in Business History Review thirty years ago, Harry Scheiber and Stephen Salsbury—themselves noted scholars of American transportation history—correctly remarked that “few scholarly works have defined an era and provided a conceptual framework for its analysis more successfully than Taylor’s The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860.”{12} This still holds true. One reason is Taylor’s impressively accurate and careful research and his grasp of the literature of his field as of 1950. Writing in American Economic Review, John Hutchins remarked that he had “found very few statements of fact or of interpretation with which to quarrel.”{13} Certainly, recent scholarship has altered some of Taylor’s interpretations, refined some of his statistical analysis, and clarified certain of the events he examined, yet the general conclusions underlying his study remain impressively useful. Indeed, a review of Taylor’s fifty-page bibliography and careful footnotes helps us to appreciate both the volume and the type of research that had already touched upon technological topics at mid-century, and upon which the modern historiography of technology would build after 1960. Taylor’s work, in the end, laid out many of the topics that would attract the attention of historians of technology during SHOT’s formative period. For this and many other reasons, it remains a classic in our field.

13. John G. B. Hutchins, review of The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860, by George Rogers Taylor, American Economic Review 42 (1952): 622–23.

Dr. Seely, professor of history and chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University, is a former secretary of SHOT. His scholarly interests have included American transportation and the history of engineering education.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology

Dupree never really stipulates what he means by “science,” although he appears to favor a very broad-stroke definition: “Science, thus unspecialized in intent as well as in fields of knowledge, was at the same time useful and ornamental, specific and universal.”{3} He is rather more precise about the elites who would be the major participants in it: “As in Europe, the new United States found a knowledge of the natural world residing in an organized form largely within its upper classes. As in Europe, ideas stemming from science, in particular the ideas of Isaac Newton, were tremendously influential in shaping the mental outlook of cultivated men” (p. 6). So much for “knowledge of the natural world” by anyone else, like the Indians, and the slaves, and the servant classes, and, of course, all the women altogether. Since much of the project of history in the last half century has been to put these excluded people back into the story, and rather central to it in fact, what can still be gained from Dupree’s contribution to the vast parade of histories of Dead White Males?

Dupree’s saving grace is a formidable intelligence coupled to a deep sympathy for ordinary people in history. Arising from that is a commitment to discerning the relation between the history of American science and American democracy, both considered in messy and contradictory practice. The voluminous source materials that Dupree and his staff assimilated for the project were dominated by the records of the leaderships of scientific societies and government bureaus and the Congress, and the volume reflects that concentration. Because of these men, and despite them too, the slaves were freed, Indians were not annihilated entirely, women’s participation in society and science changed utterly, and a great literate and scientifically knowledgeable middle class developed in a large and prosperous country. Dupree is particularly acute to the creative mobilizations set off by war and other political crises and the ways these transformed government scientific agencies, which in turn affected the people, often in counterintuitive ways.

But much recent history has emphasized the counterintuitive. Why read Science in the Federal Government now? I can think of two reasons. First, it has never been surpassed as a one-volume summary of the early history of all the major American government scientific bureaus and their contentious relations to other scientific enterprises, presidents, and the Congress. Second, Dupree is one of the best writers in the history of the field, magisterial yet democratic. The book’s chapters proceed chronologically, picking up new scientific problems and government bureaus and areas of the world as they are enfolded in U.S. history. A major part of the scientific democratization that Dupree discerns comes from a momentous double movement: as scientists and scientifically trained government personnel rose in stature and influence during the nineteenth century, the determination of national science policy descended from the highest political strata and came to concentrate at the level of professional bureau heads—paradigmatically Alexander Dallas Bache of the Coast Survey, Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, and Charles Henry Davis of the scientific branch of the United States Navy.

The Civil War was a particularly transformative period—though all American wars are transformative to Dupree—and here Dupree sets the relationships of science and technology in a frame that will resonate with readers of this journal:

It was the war and the peculiarly public and centralized nature of military problems that ineluctably forced the government into the business of using experimental science to evaluate technology. In these research efforts, spasmodic and on the fringes of the war, a consistent relation between science and technology appears for the first time. This new union, of course, far exceeds the bounds of the war effort, because it was one of the most significant changes of the nineteenth century—the one which in the popular mind eventually linked science with the production of material wealth and with the enormous addictions to the power of man over his environment” (pp. 121–22).

The postwar landscape was populated with government bureaus specializing in new disciplines, meteorology, fisheries, agriculture, and the like, based on the same model of power exercised from the same seats. The postwar era saw as well the rise of two new players: well-endowed private research institutes, such as the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and modern, German-influenced but state-centered universities, which Dupree formalized as “estates of science,” whose relations to the government bureaus would change profoundly in the twentieth century under the influence of that century’s great wars and their aftermaths. Throughout there is the constant competition for funds and responsibilities, which brings in the U.S. Congress as a complex and problematic player, shiftingly involved with every other.

Dupree can forge words as in an arsenal and dispatch them like Grant commanding the Army of the Potomac. His summary assessments of complex matters convey a confident ring of truth. The final paragraphs of each chapter in the book are essays in miniature and springboards for fresh ideas in other arenas, as lucid writing may be. Dupree also had an eminent advisory committee, which insured both breadth and depth in treatment of all government science agencies.{4} The book’s chronology and bibliographic note remain particularly excellent resources, even half a century after their initial publication.

Ostensibly the book ends at 1940, with the reasonable argument that science in the government changed so much in World War II and its aftermath as to become another story. But Dupree was in fact summoning prewar arguments to skirmishes he and his companions were fighting in the 1950s.

Dupree’s tome has had no successor in part because the American government allowed no one to succeed him. When the legislative compromise establishing the National Science Foundation (NSF) finally passed in 1951, certain specific scientific disciplines to be funded were named in the act, but the entire lot of the social sciences and history were excluded unless they could be slipped in under the catchall phrase “and other sciences.” They paid a heavy price to belong. What became Science in the Federal Government was one of several historical research initiatives advanced by Alan T. Waterman, the first NSF director, and Charles G. Gant, head of the Program Analysis Office, to demonstrate by example the contributions that historical analysis might make to contemporary scientific projects. The shift toward the past was a way to deflect the present. Waterman had resisted the attempts by the Executive Office of the President for the nascent NSF to take an active role in shaping science policy for the entire federal government. He knew the inevitable fate of a small new fish in a pond full of very old pike. But by the time the research for Science in the Federal Government was finished the original NSF officers were gone, and no initiatives of similar scope ever occurred again. Dupree’s achievement is both a first and a last. The National Science Foundation decided to fund history of science as an enterprise severed from the rest of the discipline of history but coupled to philosophy of science. Scholarship has followed funding; first the History of Science Society and then the Society for the History of Technology have booked rooms in the lesser tier of conference hotels ever since.

But even Foucault’s pendulum may swing many times in half a century. Major social and intellectual upheavals in the 1960s (and, of course, another war, this time in Vietnam) wrought their changes. Challenges arose to the postwar arrangement of “a plural system of scientific disciplines in a plural system of research universities, supported by a plural system of government granting agencies, [which] seemed at the heart of the most successful science policy structure of all times” (p. xii). The political consensus necessary to such an accord frayed under the strains of the cold war and shifts in funding sources and funding mechanisms.

By 1986, Dupree, apparently ever the optimist, saw signs that the marginalization of the history of science from science as such was decreasing in response to societal changes and new congressional mandates. In a new preface to the Johns Hopkins edition of Science in the Federal Government, he noted: “But somewhere, perhaps in the hesitant beginnings of the technology assessment movement, under that or another name, a set of practices will be accepted by which every research project, no matter how narrowly focused on physical hardware, will have an environmental and a social science evaluation built into it” (p. xvii). Alas, little of this has transpired, and we live with the consequences. Environmental evaluations of government programs and government-funded research have evolved to a system largely dependent on actual or threatened litigation from without to trigger effective review. Social science evaluations of research projects are virtually nonexistent or, worse yet, are window-dressings for decisions already made. Most government scientific agencies have rudimentary history programs at best; the exception is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and NASA history is scarcely distinguishable from NASA public relations.

Meanwhile we are at war against an abstract noun and mired in extremely tangible conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the convergence of tax cuts for the rich and the post–9/11 mobilizations, the only increasing source of discretionary spending in the U.S. government has been funding for Homeland Security, and it has been quite striking to see how research institutes and academic departments have realigned themselves and their research topics accordingly. The Homeland is where you find it—or fund it.

So was Dupree hopelessly unrealistic in ending his magnum opus with the conclusion that “during a century and a half, science has not only contributed to the power of the government but to the ability of the people to maintain their freedom” (p. 381)? Well, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. Anyone who has read his book through will have noted the myriad of government programs, good and bad, that originated as riders attached to a bill in the middle of the night. Half a century after its publication, Science in the Federal Government still speaks to the present.

{1} The original edition, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences under a grant from the National Science Foundation and published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, is out of print, as is the first paperback edition, published in 1964 as a Harper Torchbook. With a new preface by Dupree, the book was republished as a paperback in 1986 by the John Hopkins University Press.

{2} Dupree, 1957 edition, v.

{3} Dupree, 1986 edition, 8. All further references are to this edition and are cited in the text parenthetically.

{4} I. Bernard Cohen (chair), Edward C. Kirkland, William F. Ogburn, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., and Richard H. Shryock.

At the time of writing John Cloud was working under contract to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to research and write the modern part of the history of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. He is now willing to research and write for food.

Volume 48 Number 3 (July 2007) | Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology