Two years later, now removed to the East, I read The Visible Hand itself for the first time. The occasion was a graduate seminar taught by Glenn Porter, one of Chandler’s star pupils at Johns Hopkins. Porter had accompanied his mentor to the Harvard Business School before settling in at the Hagley Museum and Library and the University of Delaware. There he provided a vital link among an emerging community of scholars running along an axis from Baltimore through Philadelphia and extending on up to the vital satellite location in Cambridge.

A cluster of students at Hopkins training under Louis Galambos included Naomi Lamoreaux, Lenny Reich, and Ken Lipartito (a Delaware undergrad). Reich relocated to Rutgers, where Reese Jenkins had begun editing the Edison Papers. His book on Eastman Kodak and photographic innovation had won SHOT’s Dexter Prize in 1978. At Penn, where Thomas Hughes was completing Networks of Power, one could find Jeffrey Sturchio, Bernard Carlson, and Tom Misa.{4} The latter had been sent south from MIT by Merritt Roe Smith, whose work on Harpers Ferry appeared the same year as Chandler’s. Smith had spent the 1977–78 academic year at Hagley as a visiting scholar and had interacted regularly with my future Delaware colleagues Stuart Leslie and Bruce Seely.{5} A year later, John Kenly Smith and I arrived, along with our young mentor, David Hounshell. Soon Phil Scranton began spending more time at Hagley. For a time we even opened an outlet to the southwest in Blacksburg, where Porter’s coauthor Harold Livesay chaired the history department at Virginia Tech. Each summer he brought one of us in to teach Richard Hirsh’s courses in the history of technology. Hirsh, too, caught the bug. Like several of the others mentioned above, he ventured up to Cambridge to hold the Newcomen Fellowship at the Harvard Business School, with its business history group headed by Chandler.

Any visit to The Visible Hand—and I have made too many to keep track of over the years—necessarily brings to mind these many fine scholars who accompanied me on that initial journey and have traveled with me ever since. Clearly, something unusual was at work at that time and place, and somehow Chandler’s ideas were at the center of it. They drew us in yet did not rest easy with us. We labored in creative tension with them. In returning to their source once more, one of my hopes was to recapture that moment and to comprehend why the book evoked such strong and enduring interest from so many of us. To aid in this endeavor, I brought along my own captive audience of current graduate students. Perhaps their reactions would rekindle some memories of my own, while also alerting me to how the book had stood the test of time.

One of the first things to jump out from this exercise was that it had taken us farther back in time than the 1970s. For in many respects, The Visible Hand belongs to a still more distant era. As Chandler explained in his brief preface, the book originated in 1962, when the Sloan Foundation approached him and the distinguished historians Arthur Cole and Thomas Cochran about writing a comprehensive history of American business. The three divided the task. Cole would address the organization and administration of the American business system, while Cochran would situate business in the larger social and cultural life of the nation.{6} For his part, Chandler would home in on the managerial dimension. He would examine what business managers actually did on the job, at the level of the individual firm. He would search for patterns prevailing across economic sectors and explicate a body of collective knowledge and practices that together constituted what was then becoming known as management science.

The exercise Chandler embarked on was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times. This was the height of the so-called American Century, an era of international hegemony attained in the eyes of many observers through the widespread application of modern administrative techniques to both the public and the private affairs of the nation. Building on the extraordinary accomplishments of World War II, which had married private productive capacity with national security on a scale never contemplated, this pervasive trust in the powers of administration only strengthened amid the mounting material affluence of the cold war era. Voices from across the political spectrum shared an abiding faith in management and organization. They differed only in their relative emphasis between public and private.

Liberal Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, in his influential 1958 book The Affluent Society, pondered whether the private might eventually give way to the public. Dwight Eisenhower, the army general who had coordinated the invasion of Europe and as president had launched the massive interstate highway project, ultimately asserted the primacy of private enterprise. His successor in the White House, looking to close an alleged missile gap exposed by Sputnik, turned to none other than Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford Motor Company and current Harvard Business School professor. McNamara had come to prominence as a World War II Whiz Kid applying advanced statistical techniques to Allied bombing runs. Such methods had lodged at perhaps the most characteristic institution of the era, the RAND Corporation. Experts there now advanced the latest brand of management studies under the rubric systems engineering. Embracing opportunities opened by electronic computing, they explored ways of managing the most complex problems of the day.

Chandler was thoroughly immersed in this world of modern administration. Though not part of McNamara’s group of Whiz Kids, he had also spent the war years in Cambridge helping to plot and evaluate strategic bombing efforts. Later, as a professor at MIT’s Sloan School, he interacted with important pioneers of the new administrative science such as Kenneth Arrow. Chandler preferred to ground his own thinking on the subject in a deep historical empiricism derived from close study of particular firms. In 1962, he brought out his first masterwork of this ilk, Strategy and Structure. Still in print today, this book developed four extended case studies in an effort to explain the emergence of the modern multidivisional form of business organization, as exemplified by General Motors. While completing this study Chandler lent ample assistance to GM’s famed architect, Alfred P. Sloan, in preparing his insightful memoir. It appeared in 1963. Chandler then headed south for Johns Hopkins, where he would edit Eisenhower’s papers while pursuing his interests in business history.

As Chandler set his sights on the prehistory of the modern corporate enterprise, he drew heavily on two works he had completed while still employed in Cambridge. One was his biography of the railroad editor Henry Varnum Poor. A revision of his doctoral dissertation, it had alerted Chandler to the centrality of the railroad industry. By opening national markets, railroads had paved the path for the emergence of large-scale enterprise and in the process had nurtured the first generation of managers skilled in operating businesses of vast extent and complexity. The other was that 1959 essay entitled “The Beginnings of Big Business.” In it, Chandler had developed a typology of late-nineteenth-century enterprise. He identified patterns of consolidation across the economy. Firms in the producers’ goods sector typically grew large initially through vertical integration. Those selling consumer goods, by contrast, generally first passed through a period of horizontal combination.

To a considerable degree, The Visible Hand constituted an extended elaboration on these early insights, now fleshed out with prodigious historical empiricism. After surveying the “traditional” owner-operated business enterprises of the pre-railroad era and discussing the few examples of early centralized production, Chandler launched into a remarkably thorough history of the railroads, then added an extended treatment of the telegraph. From there he moved on to consider the patterns of growth and consolidation in various sectors of production and distribution, culminating with their thorough integration during the opening decades of the twentieth century. A series of detailed case studies illustrated the common managerial practices brought forth by these fundamental changes in the organization and conduct of enterprise. We end where Strategy and Structure began, with the multidivisional enterprises of Sears, DuPont, and General Motors, described in a section labeled “Perfecting the Structure.”

A glance through the extensive footnotes further reveals the book’s debt to an earlier age. For while Chandler drew heavily on a few valuable studies recently completed by his students and other collaborators, much of his evidence came from the wealth of materials assembled by an earlier generation of scholars who had thoroughly documented the growth of enterprise and industry. Chandler mined this vast literature, much as William Cronon would later do in his comparably monumental history of nineteenth-century Chicago and the Great Plains, sifting out the nuggets he desired and assembling them in a simple yet powerful analytical frame.

Chandler drove home that analysis in a brief introduction, where he set down with startling directness eight linked “propositions” regarding the rise of modern management. The gist of these was that the modern large-scale enterprise had emerged and thrived because it permitted greater productivity, lower costs, and higher profits. The “managerial class” thus did not impose itself on the United States. Rather, that class developed out of the need to coordinate the large enterprises that arose to take advantage of the national markets and productive techniques available in the late nineteenth century. The process fed back on itself, as coordination by expert managers became the primary determinant of economic performance. This ability to achieve efficiency through coordination, not some deviant exercise in market power as presumed by the legions of antitrust economists, explained the high levels of concentration in modern American industry.

The package was—and still is—imposing. The weighty detail of the evidence commands respect; the sweep and disarming forthrightness of the analysis take one’s breath away. The combination impressed contemporaries sufficiently to earn the book both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. Most reviewers recognized it as a major contribution, a synthesis of the highest order. Considered purely as an example of the historical craft, it is surely no less impressive today, though the balance Chandler struck between evidence (ample and dense) and interpretation (brief and direct) clearly differentiates the work from much of the most fashionable current scholarship. Whatever the merits of its arguments and propositions, as a work of history, the book exhibits timeless virtues sufficient to deem it an enduring classic.

What keeps the book so alive in contemporary scholarly discourse, however, is undoubtedly those bold propositions laid out so forcefully at the start. While a visit such as this is not the occasion for a full-blown assessment of their merits, one simply cannot return to Chandler without considering these issues. Above all, for the historian of technology, looms that great bugaboo, the specter of technological determinism.{7} For in seeking out the causal mechanisms driving the processes of organizational change, Chandler leaned heavily on the apparently autonomous emergence of a core set of mechanical technologies: the telegraph and telephone in the realm of communications; the railroad in the realm of transport; and an array of energy-intensive, coal-fired heavy equipment in manufacturing and materials processing. This aspect of the book stuck in the craw of my seminar students, just as it had with those of us entering the field in the late seventies. Could we really attribute so much to technology? And could we embrace its influence so unproblematically?

For those of us encountering The Visible Hand in the late seventies, this seemed a tall order indeed. By then, the American Century was but a distant memory. The twin ordeals of Watergate and Vietnam still hung heavy over the nation. Stagflation gripped the economy. Business pages filled with stories of Japanese miracles. The U.S. president, soon ensconced in self-imposed White House exile while dealing with the Iran hostage crisis, spoke of limits and malaise. A month before I relocated to Baltimore, in anticipation of starting my graduate education, my fiancée called from Maryland to report that an incident at some nuclear facility called Three Mile Island threatened the city with possible evacuation. When I made my own exit—departing from LAX via World Airways, a recent offspring of the burgeoning deregulation movement—gasoline lines had again sprung up across the Southland. None of this inspired confidence in the power of American management or fueled faith in the emancipative qualities of modern large-scale technology.

The pervading skepticism of the times permeated the academy. Communities of scholars across a startling range of disciplines chafed against what they perceived as the stultifying influence of large-scale technologies and bureaucratized administrative systems. Such voices emanated from virtually every corner of campus, from emergent scientific disciplines such as environmental biology and computer science to the professional schools of law and public policy. In my own newfound home in the humanities and social sciences, they took wing through such works as Gabriel Kolko’s stinging New Left critique, which implicated big government itself in the rise of corporate capitalism. Put forth just at the time Chandler had begun The Visible Hand, such ideas had infused many subsequent works, most notably David Noble’s America by Design, which fortuitously appeared the very same year as Chandler’s opus.{8} By then, of course, most historians had abandoned business and politics entirely, preferring instead to build a new version of history from the bottom up, through the study of workers and other subaltern groups. Those few who retained more than a passing interest in economics and business were still reeling from the methodological sea change we have come to call the econometric revolution.{9}

Few places in the academy had felt the shifting winds of the sixties and seventies more strongly than my own chosen niche, the history of technology. Formally organized at the height of the American Century, when technology seemed essential to national prowess and survival, the discipline had acquired a decidedly more critical cast. To the dismay of some of its founders, including Mel Kranzberg, a dark tone had crept into much of its analysis. The once ready association of innovation and democracy gave way to worries about the totalitarian nature of technics. Studies of engineering practice, an early staple of the discipline, exchanged their Whiggish triumphalism for a mounting skepticism about the beneficence of technology. Scholars did not yet speak of social construction, and the STS movement was still a shadow of what it would become.{10} But no one who spent much time with someone such as Eugene Ferguson, one of my mentors at Delaware, could fail to grasp something of the critical edge suffusing the field. Surely we all knew better than to leave unexamined the notion that technology simply bequeathed progress.

These profound changes within the academy and in the broader society beyond somehow seemed to have washed past Professor Chandler without registering. No methodological breakthroughs here, as he forthrightly acknowledged at the start. Not a whiff of malaise, either; not a shadow of a doubt regarding the essential beneficence of the processes of corporate consolidation he had described. No fretting over the fate of workers or the tumult of industrial-era politics. When Chandler paused at the end to reflect on the broader lessons his work held for our understanding of American history and culture, we got not an engagement with Kolko, but a meditation on distinctiveness that harkened back to Richard Hofstadter. Chandler already had set his sights on the next project—a comparative analysis of industrial organization across the advanced capitalist democracies, in which he would essentially hold up the American experience as the pure type.{11} And finally, of special note for the young historian of technology, no hemming and hawing about the apparent technological determinism at the core of his historical model.

Chandler’s imperviousness to the winds of change seems no less striking a quarter century later. If anything, his trademark myopia, as a shrewd observer once characterized it, stands out for me in even more graphic relief. Still a novice to history during that first encounter, I hardly knew what was missing. Looking back from a distance, now that many of the social and intellectual movements of the sixties and seventies have run their course and secured their own places in history, one wonders all the more about their absence. My students posed many of the same questions we had a quarter-century earlier. What about labor? What about society? What about politics?

Yet these anachronistic, myopic qualities also lend Chandler’s work an aura of transcendence. Out of step with its own times and presenting an interpretation that can seem oddly detached from the historical period it documents, the book floats almost independently of time, like a work of philosophy. We study Chandler as we study Adam Smith, and not just because of the evocative title. Something about the work invites us to ask whether the core economic principles it advances have prevailed in other contexts. Chandler’s own subsequent willingness to apply many of his basic propositions to other times and places has hardly discouraged the practice.

This appeal to the universal keeps The Visible Hand, and the version of history it narrates, very much alive in our contemporary conversations about business, technology, and the economy. When we contemplate its historical narrative, more is at stake than an account of the United States in the late nineteenth century. We are really considering the nature of modern capitalism. It is no surprise that much of the most serious ongoing engagement with Chandler comes from fields such as organizational economics, political economy, and economic sociology. And it is perhaps inevitable that in reading him at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves filtering his account of the past through the recent experiences of the American economy.

Those recent experiences, at least those up to the dot-com crash and the events triggered by 9/11, have transported us far from the malaise of the late seventies. Troubles persist, of course, some growing more evident with every passing day. Environmental issues loom larger than ever. Wealth and income distributions worry many among us. China has replaced Japan as an international threat to American hegemony. But the economy that seemed so stagnant and incapable of escaping the suffocating bonds of its own organizational structures has undergone a remarkable resurgence. Growth rates regularly reach levels that most economic experts of the seventies considered no longer attainable. Enduring large firms have broken apart or disappeared entirely from view. New ones rise with startling frequency, many of them exhibiting a far different character than the tightly integrated firms of the late nineteenth century. Analysts speak now of loose networks and flat hierarchies. Capital assets exist in the form of brands, reputations, and proprietary knowledge. Observers celebrate American flexibility, responsiveness, and creativity. They flock to Silicon Valley to decipher its secrets, including the mysteries of venture capital and intellectual property law. Some even raise the specter of a New American Century. And underlying it all, somehow, is a new wave of technological change epitomized by the networked personal computer and the worldwide web.{12}

These startling developments inescapably color any reengagement with The Visible Hand. We come to the book primed with renewed interest in the relationship between technology, organization, and economic performance and quick to draw historical analogies with our own times. New books identify the telegraph as “The Victorian Internet” and compare the business practices of the meatpacker G. F. Swift—a classic Chandlerian enterprise—with that of Dell Computer.{13} Much to my astonishment, my own book on nineteenth-century railroading was touted in the pages of Wired magazine, of all places, by the chief legal officer of Microsoft Corporation, of all people. He thought it had something to say about current developments in networked telecommunications. Just months before my seminar convened, a leading journal in business history, its cover sporting a shadowy portrait of Professor Chandler, featured an extended exchange among leading lights debating whether the experience of the late twentieth century is an essentially different phenomenon than that of a century before.{14} (Much to my delight, Chandler weighed in with his response not more than a week or two after we discussed his book in class; his answer—no, it is not—was precisely what I had anticipated.{15})

This presentism cuts both ways. We look for past analogies to help make sense of our own times, but in the course of the exercise we also cast on Chandler an acute critical gaze sharpened by those more recent experiences. In my own case, for instance, I found myself pondering anew how little attention Chandler gives in The Visible Hand to patents and intellectual property rights. Many of the enterprises he features leveraged patent rights and other proprietary assets quite effectively.{16} In minimizing the importance of such assets, Chandler betrays his general tendency to downplay the asymmetrical power firms frequently brought to market exchanges. In the eyes of some scholars of a neo-Marxist persuasion, such neglect has exposed Chandler to thoroughgoing rebuttal.{17} Those of a less revisionist bent have asked more modestly whether networks and trade associations and other forms of exchange and alliance among firms, which seem so prominent in our own time, might not have played a larger role than Chandler surmises in the late nineteenth century.{18} And if so, others add, might not we need to pay a bit more attention to the political framework that governed such exchanges and alliances?

Lurking behind such inquiry is the question that ultimately occupied much of our seminar: If tightly organized coordinating mechanisms served enterprises and society so well, why have they subsequently diminished? The answer most cordial to Chandler is that they have not diminished. This is what he wrote in response to the forum.{19} The answer most damaging to Chandler is that they never served society well. This is the position taken by critics who interpret the rise of the large corporation as the distorted product of abused power. Between these extremes are numerous variants claiming, essentially, that tight coordination prevails under certain conditions, that those conditions arise and subside at various times in various places, and that their effect varies substantially across different economic sectors in any given time and place.

When I return to Chandler, and look hard at what he says about the emergence of big business in America, I find just this sort of measured analysis. The breadth and forcefulness of his propositions, and the single-mindedness with which he pursues them, can be disorienting. It is at once alluring and unsettling to see so much of human affairs ordered in this fashion. One can easily lose sight of the fact that Chandler’s claims are actually quite circumscribed. He purports to explain why large-scale, professionally managed enterprises emerged in certain segments of the American economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those segments, admittedly, are substantial: mass production and mass distribution. But they are hardly all-encompassing. Chandler himself acknowledged that vast swaths of economic activity, including virtually the entire primary production of American farms, remained firmly grounded in the practices of proprietary capitalism. Even within manufacturing and distribution, as scholars such as Philip Scranton and Jonathan Zeitlin have now amply confirmed, firms in certain sectors were largely unaffected by the changes occurring in the core industries emphasized by Chandler.

More troubling, perhaps, is what Chandler has to say about the core. Here we cannot escape the specter of technological determinism. When we search for causal mechanisms—for the forces creating the conditions that enabled and rewarded tight coordination—Chandler directs our attention to those underlying technological changes that triggered new opportunities and exerted powerful influences over the particular nature of the response. Politics provided a framework by supporting a capitalist system in which these forces and processes could work themselves out to their fullest. But politics as such produced no crucial triggering events of comparable importance to those occurring in the realm of technology; it was technological innovation that generated the profound departures in business practice.

Many of us have resisted these propositions. I certainly have. But it is important to realize that for those of us encountering Chandler in the late seventies, the determinism in his thinking was not stultifying. His work did not foreclose all historical alternatives to us and close off further inquiry. Rather, in pointing to the paramount importance of technological innovation, Chandler challenged us to examine the phenomenon more closely. Where did those technologies originate? What forces brought them into being? Might politics have played a role? Did other technologies serve similar functions in other times? Were politics and other social factors always quite so irrelevant? Surely the events of recent times, when we have all experienced firsthand the transforming power of technologies such as the internet, can only have heightened our interest in such questions. Perhaps they have also eroded our well-honed capacity to resist any suggestion that technologies, regardless of their social construction, might compel changes more sweeping than anyone fully intended and so forceful that even the most powerful and privileged among us cannot impede them.{20}

As for the particulars of his account of the nineteenth century, I would say that Chandler holds up rather well. We read him now in light of much fine work done by the econometricians, who not surprisingly wasted little time in turning their demanding gaze back on The Visible Hand. In the main, Chandler’s core ideas emerged unscathed or even strengthened from this trial by numbers. Jeremy Atack and John James confirmed that consolidation in the American economy fit the patterns Chandler predicted and likely yielded the sorts of benefits he assumed. Alex Field suggested that the telegraph, and the modern corporation itself, functioned as capital-saving innovations, an interpretation that essentially amplified the importance of the processes Chandler had emphasized. Growth theorists such as Moses Abramovitz deepened our understanding of the immense contributions of railroads and other capital-intensive industries to American productivity growth, in ways that also fit comfortably within the Chandlerian frame. Important studies by Gavin Wright and Nathan Rosenberg, among others, point to the importance of natural resources and broad-based technological learning about how to exploit them as critical elements in American industrial performance. Though drawing attention away from the firm, in many respects they complement Chandler’s own thinking about the importance of learning to use anthracite coal. Perhaps the most serious challenge from this quarter comes from a few close accounts of particular manufacturing processes, which have raised doubts about whether core technologies always yielded quite the economies of scale Chandler assumed. But these point toward fruitful refinement, not crumbling foundations.

And what of politics, the question Professor Scheiber quietly posed for me so many years ago? Having since devoted an inordinate amount of effort to the issue, I hesitate to comment briefly here. But clearly, politics mattered more than Chandler allows. They mattered because they influenced the core technologies in ways he left largely unexamined, and they mattered because the consensus in favor of capitalist development was far more tenuous than Chandler implies. Disputes over capitalism persisted well into the events he chronicles and likely had far more to do with the timing of change than Chandler indicates.

But again, we do well to keep in mind Chandler’s interests and purposes as a historian. Chandler sifts, extracts, and reduces. He shakes the trees of the past until all but the most tenacious leaves and limbs fall to the ground, and in the remaining nakedness we see more clearly just what supported them. We know, of course, that much of life exists in the foliage. Much of the rich tapestry of human experience remains unexamined (and undetermined) in this core Chandlerian narrative. Even in the realm of technology and innovation, Chandler has only so much to say. He may suggest why railroads and other industries steadily pursued techniques to yield higher throughput, and explain that this effort often drove them to make massive investments in machinery. But he cannot tell us why a railroad chose one technique and not another, why some used air brakes or automatic couplers while others persisted with older methods, and what this meant for the humans involved in operating the trains. Nor can he tell us what it was like to ride the rails or hang out at the freight depot. Outside the realm of professional management, he sheds little light on what it was like to live in a culture undergoing rapid compression of time and space, of communities being rapidly reconstituted.

No matter how much order Chandler may discern in the past, a tremendous amount remains negotiable. In helping us identify those broadly felt, less resistible tendencies inherent in certain technologies, Chandler does not alter that essential truth. Rather, he helps us comprehend more clearly precisely what remains in play. In telling us what to expect, he keeps us from spinning our wheels about matters that were largely foreclosed, while sensitizing us to recognize the many things that fall outside those core processes and beg for further explanation. Some may find this constraining; I find it empowering. That is why I will continue escorting budding historians to The Visible Hand for years to come.

{1} Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

{2} For evidence of this continuing vitality, see Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin, “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 404–33; “Symposium: Framing Business History,” Enterprise and Society 5 (2004): 355–403 (which includes Richard N. Langlois, “Chandler in a Larger Frame: Markets, Transaction Costs, and Organizational Form in History,” 355–375; Lamoreaux, Raff, and Temin, “Against Whig History,” 376–387; and Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Neither Modularity nor Relational Contracting: Inter-Frim Cooperation in the New Economy,” 388–403); Alfred D. Chandler Jr., “Response to the Symposium: Framing Business History,” Enterprise and Society 6 (2005): 134–137, and “Preface to the Paperback Issue of Inventing the Electronic Century,” reprinted in Enterprise and Society 6 (2005): 138–143; and Louis Galambos, “Recasting the Organizational Synthesis: Structure and Process in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Business History Review 79 (2005): 1–38.

{3} Remarkably, history repeated itself one year later. While I was taking Scheiber’s course in legal history, he announced one morning that Morton Horwitz had won the Pulitzer. This time the offhand comment suggested the pendulum may have swung too far in the opposite direction.

{4} Soon the cohort at Penn would include others with similar interests, such as Eric Schatzberg and Amy Slaton.

{5} Leslie and Seely were also influenced significantly by a previous visiting scholar from MIT, Lynwood Bryant.

{6} Cochran’s contribution, Business in American Life, appeared in 1972. Cole never completed his study.

{7} On Chandler’s technological determinism, see Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). For my own response, see Steven W. Usselman, “Determining a Middle Landscape: Competing Narratives in the History of Technology,” Reviews in American History 23 (1995): 370–377.

{8} The concomitant appearance of Noble’s provocative book was enormously fruitful for those of us operating at the boundaries of business history and the history of technology. Noble explored many of the same themes as Chandler, but cast them in a strikingly different light. Noble also connected these themes much more directly than did Chandler to the emergent body of work in the history of technology, where scholars such as Hugh Aitken, Eugene Ferguson, Thomas Hughes, Edwin Layton, Bruce Sinclair, Roe Smith, and Anthony Wallace were teaching us to look at engineers with greater nuance and sophistication. Whereas Chandler had highlighted the importance of technology but glossed over the details of its generation and development, Noble instructed us to take a hard look at the process of innovation and the instruments through which corporations had asserted control over the course of technical change.

{9} Reading Chandler, one would have virtually no idea that during the previous dozen years an econometric revolution had swept through economic history. One of its earliest shots across the bow—Robert Fogel’s provocative Railroads and American Economic Growth, which argued that the railroad was not the indispensable engine of growth so many had presumed—had appeared in 1964. Apparently unperturbed, Chandler launched into his extended explanation of the railroad’s centrality, pausing only briefly to address the Fogel thesis in a single footnote. By the time Chandler’s book went to press, of course, the econometric approach had emerged in full bloom, and several critics from within its fold had subjected Fogel’s argument to close scrutiny and found it wanting. In characteristic fashion, Chandler deftly extracted from the many criticisms precisely those elements that reinforced his own argument. He cited evidence suggesting that Fogel had failed to appreciate how the speed and regularity of railroad transport had reduced the need to maintain large inventories and to sustain pools of otherwise idle labor during periods of slack transport. Chandler dealt similarly with Fogel’s 1974 study, Time on the Cross, written in collaboration with Stanley Engerman, regarding the management of slave plantations. Chandler dismissed the idea that plantations constituted an important exception to his generalization that the separation of ownership and management did not occur until after the Civil War.

{10} One voice from the STS community that did register strongly with us at Delaware was Langdon Winner, whose Autonomous Technology also appeared in the annis mirabilis of 1977.

{11} Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

{12} For an extraordinarily insightful and wide-ranging examination of these developments, see Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Oxford, 1996).

{13} Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (London, 1998), and Gary Fields, Territories of Profit: Communications, Capitalist Development, and the Innovative Enterprises of G. F. Swift and Dell Computer (Stanford, Calif., 2004).

{14} “Symposium: Framing Business History” (n. 2 above).

{15} Chandler, “Response to the Symposium” (n. 2 above).

{16} For a particularly compelling example, see Leonard S. Reich, “Lighting the Path to Profit: GE’s Control of the Electric Lamp Industry, 1892–1941,” Business History Review 66 (Summer 1992): 305–34.

{17} Chandler’s severest critics have stressed the power large firms exercised, both economically and politically, in negotiating terms of exchange, especially those involving access to labor and capital; cf. Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of the American Industrial Order, 1865–1917 (Baltimore, 1994), and William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, 1997).

{18} This line of analysis stretches back to the important work on flexible specialization pioneered by scholars such as Philip Scranton, Jonathan Zeitlin, and Charles Sabel. Their scholarship has gained added poignancy in light of subsequent developments in the recent American economy. On this point, see “Symposium: Framing Business History.”

{19} Chandler bases his argument on what he sees as the persistent importance of large integrated firms such as IBM, Intel, and Microsoft in the industries driving the communications revolution of the computer age. For further elaboration, see his Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (New York, 2001). Perhaps I should acknowledge here that Professor Chandler was instrumental in facilitating my own early research on IBM.

{20} Castells (n. 12 above) presents a compelling argument to this effect.

Professor Usselman teaches history of technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His book Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840–1920 (2002) won the Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. He will serve as president of SHOT in 2007–2008.

Volume 47 Number 3 (July 2006) | Copyright© 2006, the Society for the History of Technology

The Great Plains was published in Boston by Ginn and Company in 1931.{3} Response was overwhelmingly positive. The book was awarded the Loubat Prize by Columbia University, came close to winning the Pulitzer Prize, was twice on the Book-of-the-Month Club list, and in 1952 was selected by the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (the forerunner of the Organization of American Historians) as “the most important book in the first half of the twentieth century by a living American historian.”{4} Such rare popularity for a work of history didn’t validate Webb’s central claim, but that claim, obviously, had resonance. More importantly, the book began to shape American thinking about the West. Its publication even prompted the University of Texas to grant the author his Ph.D., at age forty-three.{5}

In The Great Plains, Webb attempted to show what happened when a “westward bound people emerged from a humid, broken woodland to live on the level semiarid plains where there was never enough water and practically no wood.”{6} Webb believed the three dominant characteristics of the Great Plains—treelessness, level terrain, and semiaridity—worked “from the beginning” their “inexorable effect upon nature’s children. The historical truth that becomes apparent in the end is that the Great Plains have bent and molded Anglo-American life, have destroyed traditions, and have influenced institutions in a most singular manner” (TGP, 8). Passages like this can make Webb sound like a crude geographic determinist, but his thought is more supple than that.{7}

Webb grounded his thesis in two basic ideas: that the Great Plains are radically different environmentally from the land east of the 98th meridian, and that in responding to this altered environment pioneers were forced to change both their institutions and their way of life. What people brought with them from the timbered east was markedly ineffective in the plains environment; they had to adapt or turn back. In The Great Plains, survival arises out of the interplay between pioneer and landscape, a ballet of cause and effect. The Kentucky long rifle, timber or stone fencing, wetland farming, water-based transportation, and small-farm cattle raising all had to give way, over time and through much trial and error, to their western counterparts: the Colt revolver, the Winchester carbine, barbed-wire fencing, dry farming, and open-range cattle ranching. An explanation of these adaptations constitutes the heart of Webb’s study.

Webb wrote The Great Plains in a state of “suppressed emotion,” a sentiment familiar to historians of the R. G. Collingwood school. “The succession of actors I saw more vividly than I saw real people. They had long been my people, and by understanding them I came to understand the land in which I had grown up.”{8} How many historians writing today would express themselves in these terms? The book is based largely on secondary sources, a drawback for any historical work, then or now. And Webb’s grasp of the material relies more on feeling, intuition, and personal involvement than on original research and a firm grasp of the facts. To Webb, being a historian did not preclude “advancing strong convictions.”{9} A literary sensibility permeates the work. Indeed, Webb, who prided himself on his style, started out wanting to be a novelist. The Great Plains is a treasure chest of phrases many a novelist would have been happy to turn. Like his cross-disciplinary attitude in general, Webb’s view that history was “a branch of literature”{10} put him athwart the conventions of the profession. His methodology certainly did not produce history in the conventional sense. In 1955, not long before Webb assumed the presidency of the American Historical Association, American Heritage asked him for an article on how historians write. He came up with this: “In graduate school the student is taught to select a subject of such small dimensions that it offers no challenge to the intellect, does not develop the mind, and has little or no significance when developed. He is encouraged to write without benefit of imagination, to avoid any statement based on perception and insight unless he can prove by the documents that his idea is not original.”{11} Webb never fell into the trap he so venomously decried.

The Great Plains is a monument to originality. Most of the book concerns development during the post–Civil War years in the West, but there is enough detail about earlier periods—for example, the history of the conflict between Spanish colonists and the Plains Indians—for readers to make sense of Webb’s thesis. In Webb’s narrative, Spanish colonization of the West failed largely because of the inability of Spanish fighters to defeat the Indians. The Anglo-American succeeded because his technology (the Colt revolver especially) offset any advantage Indians might have had as superior fighters on horseback. Adoption of the Colt, in fact, indicated to Webb that the Industrial Revolution itself was moving westward, a process that fueled his interpretation of plains settlement and nudged him into the school of Frederick Jackson Turner, who believed that the frontier was the primary influence in American history.{12}

As Webb saw it, the Industrial Revolution confronted “four major problems in the Plains country: (1) transportation, (2) fencing, (3) water, and (4) farming. The first was solved by railroads, the second by barbed wire, the third by windmills, and the fourth partly by farm machinery and by a new form of agriculture” (TGP, 272). Barbed wire, a technology that like the Colt was invented in the East, was adapted for use on the Great Plains. Extensive use of barbed wire “opened up to the homesteader the fertile Prairie Plains” (TGP, 317). But without water, homesteaders would fail. To succeed, they needed a mechanical device that would raise deep water to the surface. Such a device would also have to be economical, both to build and to operate, and “capable of making slow but constant delivery” of water. Again, technology came to the rescue. The windmill, in use since antiquity, was “adopted, adapted, and developed” (TGP, 336). Water flowed; settlers put down roots.

Webb’s account of how these technologies were used on the Great Plains still rings true. Today, of course, each technology would require a microscopically detailed book of its own. In the seventy-five years since The Great Plains was published, historians have corrected many of Webb’s oversights and filled in what he left out. Some have faulted him for being too much of a regional historian, for missing out on the emergence of a national empire.{13} Others, like agricultural historian Fred Shannon, were far more detailed in their objections. Webb’s friend, J. Frank Dobie, perhaps said it best when he wryly observed that Webb never did “let the facts get in the way of truth.”{14} This was a pithy assessment that Shannon, perhaps, took too much to heart in his well-known critique of The Great Plains. Yet no matter how much Webb’s account has to be fine-tuned or adjusted, the idea that the land made demands of the settlers, his fundamental thesis, still contains that shock of recognition so familiar to readers of Lewis Mumford, Sigfried Giedion, and Lynn White.

Webb’s study, in essence, is an “ardently nationalistic story of the Anglo-American civilization of the Great Plains” in which westward-moving Anglo-Americans defeat relentless Indians and Mexicans.{15} While it seems clear that Webb was not particularly racist by the measure of his own time, a modern reader can hardly fail to read him that way. Women are completely absent from Webb’s account of life on the Plains, and his view of Indians, not to mention the Mexicans that the Anglos also pushed out of their way, is commensurate with the thinking of his day, not ours. The Great Plains is a heroic narrative of the old school, which these days is an indictable offense. But Webb’s claim that “when the [Anglo-Americans] crossed over into the Plains their technique of pioneering broke down and they were compelled to make a radical readjustment in their way of life” (TGP, 507) still has merit. And his insistence that the key to an understanding of history of the West must be sought “in a comparative study of what was in the east and what came to be in the west” (TGP, p. 507) is practically irrefutable, given the path that empire followed. The Great Plains remains influential, a starting point for historians of the West, a touchstone in the burgeoning field of environmental history. So no matter how much Webb may have mishandled the facts—and there is considerable agreement on this front—his ideas prevail. And if in reading Webb Frederick Jackson Turner comes to mind, it’s no accident; the two delved in the same mine. In fact, a good deal of the criticism leveled at Turner’s frontier thesis—too sweeping, too allegorical—can be aimed at Webb, his intellectual twin. Each harbored a romantic sensibility and coupled it with a generalist bent.

Not that criticism of Webb had to await the passage of time or a change in the broader culture. In 1940 Shannon provided a comprehensive critique of The Great Plains that anticipates many objections that might be raised two generations later. Much of Shannon’s argument was correct: Webb was wrong about some plant species, but right about plains animals, especially the prairie dog; he was wrong again, at least partially, about the navigability of rivers and annual rainfall in certain areas, and he didn’t know much about mountains or minerals.{16} Shannon got very windy about Webb’s rather loose geographic definition of what constituted the Great Plains, a legitimate charge; he also maintained, a bit too splenetically, that Webb’s “contribution to methodology was unimportant,” that he employed “poetic license” rather than “judicial restraint,” and far too often was given to overstatement.{17} But Shannon was a man looking for trouble.{18} True as much of his criticism was, it never dawned on him that he was looking at a different type of history, or that he was missing utterly the spirit of Webb’s work. And his resort to ridicule, sarcasm, and overstatement did little to further his reasoned critique. For his own part, Webb didn’t attempt to counter Shannon’s every criticism. How could he? He responded by simply noting that Shannon had “failed completely to discover the method followed in the book,” which was to demonstrate that “conditions on the Great Plains were such as to exert a powerful influence on human beings. If these human beings came from a humid climate, with instruments adapted to a humid climate, they were compelled to modify these instruments, whether tools, weapons, or social and legal institutions, in order to solve the problems they faced on the plains.”{19} This is a notion not unfamiliar to students of technology.

Webb was never without defenders. John D. Hicks, who attended the symposium that gave rise to Shannon’s critique, accused Shannon of being “picayunish.”{20} A year later, John W. Caughey, echoing Webb’s own rejoinder, declared that Shannon failed completely to understand what Webb was up to in The Great Plains.{21} And, perhaps in the most spirited attack ever launched on Shannon’s critique, Avery Craven of the University of Chicago took Shannon to task for conducting a “classroom exercise” in methodology, for missing “the living, breathing world which Webb had caught and pressed into his pages,” and for demonstrating “why the historian has so often failed to make any impression on the wider public and the creative mind,” allegations Webb no doubt found amusing.{22} Any fair-minded reader, however, would agree that, tone notwithstanding, Shannon indeed uncovered many errors which indicated that “Webb was as unsystematic a scholar as he was imaginative an interpreter.”{23} But it isn’t quite true that Shannon failed to grasp the central purpose of Webb’s book.{24} He just refused to believe that central purpose, no matter how splendid or macrocosmically sound, could pass muster with a serious historian.

Reading Webb today is every bit as exhilarating as it was when I first read him in graduate school. There is something fundamentally right about what he has to say about the plains and about how they whittled on and shaped those who dared to go west. The power the physical environment exerts over human action is more on our minds today than at any time in recent memory, which perhaps helps bring Webb’s book, problematic and outmoded in many ways, to life. But it’s one thing for Webb to say that farm machinery had to be modified to work a different type of soil, or that in the absence of wood and water a society with different views of riparian rights and institutions more suited to life in a semiarid region had to rise up. It’s another to say that the Great Plains environment produced a different type of American, a claim that echoes Turner’s thesis. In “History as High Adventure,” Webb wrote that “No one respects Turner more than I, and no one is less patient with critics who take exception to some detail in Turner and argue from this small base that his thesis is wrong. There are few so foolish as to say that the existence of a vast body of free land would not have some effect on the habits, customs, and institutions of those who had access to it. That is essentially what Turner said and that is what I said. If Turner’s thesis is true, then mine is true; if his is a fallacy, then mine is also fallacious.” Both Turner and Webb saw the frontier as a crucible in which a westward-moving civilization encountered bewilderment and savagery and came away not just changed but improved, born again in the values—individualism, independence, freedom—Americans tend to see as vital to themselves as a people.

This is a romantic view, a story of triumph leading to empire. Nowadays we are more skeptical of ourselves as a people, and of the bloody history we have carved into this continent. The Great Plains was written during the era of the Progressive historians, in Richard Hofstadter’s phrase, and presents a vivid if oversimplified account of settlers and pioneers fighting for survival in a hostile environment. The Colt revolver, barbed wire, machinery for drilling deep wells, the windmill, all these made it possible for a people to thrive and to spread over an arid country. But Webb left important things out of his tale of courage and technological success, most notably its victims, the Indians who were vanquished, the Spanish and the Mexicans who were pushed aside. These are not minor objections. And Webb’s failure to acknowledge the role played by pioneer women is a real disappointment.{25} Culpably blind to some things, he was a man of his times, as we are surely children of ours.

Yet even where Webb wasn’t original, his description and interpretation of the Anglo-American movement into the Great Plains, and his understanding of how institutions grew and were modified in response to external realities—the absence of water, the endless expanse of treeless range, the unbearable flatness—has led to new discoveries, new ways of looking at the west. Frontier historiography has expanded exponentially since publication of The Great Plains. And while no historian today would employ the geographic approach Webb used, none can escape his influence. Webb’s insistence that the environment was the irreducible factor in explaining Anglo-American response to the West remains largely intact, if one doesn’t see that irreducibility as a purely geographic determinism. The new generation of western historians takes a more nuanced approach to the frontier. They are more sophisticated than Webb, more subtle, more willing to see the value in cultures that Webb failed to see at all. But no doubt they too labor under the weight of their own limitations.

Webb’s feeling for the Great Plains ran deep. He took a part of America that was steeped in mystery, if not myth, and helped make it intelligible. But to Webb, the settlement of the West meant the end of the frontier, the end of an expansion that, for him as for Turner before him, characterized America, maybe even made America possible. Is it any wonder that Webb viewed the closing of this frontier as a potentially irreplaceable loss? Despite the enthusiasm that fuels it, then, The Great Plains has about it a bleakness that is in keeping with the territory and what happened there. This, perhaps, is another reason why the book endures. It speaks to our sense of tragedy. As a historian, Webb was an iconoclast. He was also an original thinker. He preferred ideas to facts, and was prone to eloquence. The Great Plains is his testament, and remains a seminal work.

{1}Webb made this remark in his presidential address to the American Historical Association: “History as High Adventure,” American Historical Review 69 (1959): 265–81.

{2}The most extensive criticism, better characterized as an attack, was Fred A. Shannon, An Appraisal of Walter Prescott Webb’s “The Great Plains: A Study in Institutions and Environment” (New York, 1940); the volume also includes a response by Webb, a panel discussion, and a commentary by Read Bain. The quotes are from Webb’s rebuttal (p. 113), the only time he ever responded to a critic. Joe B. Frantz later summarized the tenor of Webb’s response by noting that Webb “did not think of the book as history but as art. And any intelligent person knows that art is not confined to the narrow precepts and practices of history.” Wilbur R. Jacobs, John W. Caughey, and Joe B. Frantz, Turner/Bolton/Webb: Three Historians of the American Frontier (London, 1965), 80.

{3}I have used the 1931 Ginn and Company edition, cited hereinafter as TGP.

{4}See John Walton Caughey, “Historian’s Choice: Results of a Poll on Recently Published American History and Biography,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (1952): 289–302, and also George Wolfskill, “Walter Prescott Webb and The Great Plains: Then and Now,” Reviews in American History 12 (1984): 302.

{5}Webb had received a master’s degree from the University of Texas in 1920 for a thesis on the Texas Rangers in the Mexican War.

{6}Webb, “History as High Adventure.”

{7}On Webb as environmental determinist, see, for example, Richard White, “American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985): 297.

{8}Shannon (n. 2 above), 114.

{9}Wolfskill, 301.

{10}Ibid., 301.

{11}Quoted in Wolfskill (n. 4 above), 304. American Heritage never published Webb’s article.

{12}Two years before The Great Plains, Webb had published an essay titled “The Great Plains and the Industrial Revolution” in The Trans-Mississippi West, ed. James F. Willard and Colin. B. Goodykoontz (Boulder, Colo., 1929).

{13}For example, Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire (New York, 1985), 12–15.

{14}Joe B. Frantz, “Remembering Walter Prescott Webb,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 92 (July 1988): 18.

{15}Wolfskill, 305.

{16}Shannon (n. 2 above), 6–27.

{17}Ibid., 10 and 33.

{18}Another eminent Western historian, Rodman Paul, recalls being “buttonholed” by Shannon, whom he barely knew. “Why is it,” Shannon (who had a reputation for being quarrelsome) demanded to know, “that there are so many quarrelsome people in the historical profession? Why, I’m the most peaceable man that ever lived.” See Paul, review of Kenneth R. Philp and Elliott West, eds., The Walter Prescott Memorial Lectures 10: Essays on Walter Prescott Webb (Austin, Tex., 1976), and Necah Stewart Furman, Walter Prescott Webb: His Life and Impact (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1976), Pacific Historical Review 46 (1977): 486.

{19}Webb, quoted in Shannon, 123–125.

{20}Shannon, 192.

{21}John W. Caughey, “A Criticism of the Critique Webb’s The Great Plains,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28 (1940): 442–44.

{22}Avery Craven, review of Shannon (n. 2 above), American Historical Review 47 (1942): 627–30.

{23}Paul, 486.

{24}In what seems to be rather unabashed praise, Shannon himself wrote (p. 10) that “This volume is a pioneer effort to apply a combined geological and technological interpretation to a phase of American historical development, and this theme is carried out more persistently than in any other book with which the present writer is familiar. Webb has attacked the problem with great enthusiasm, faith, and sincerity. His breadth of approach is admirable and the concept he set out to prove is magnificent.”

{25}Works that correct this oversight include Paula M. Nelson, After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900–1917 (Iowa City, Iowa, 1986); Glenda Riley, Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prarie and the Plains (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), and Deborah Fink, Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880–1940 (1992).

George O’Har teaches literature, writing, and courses on utopia and technology studies at Boston College. He is also a novelist.

Volume 47 Number 1 (January 2006) | Copyright© 2006, the Society for the History of Technology