Machine-Age Ideology

Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911-1939

John M. Jordan

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780807857366, 9780807821237
• eBook ISBN: 9780807876039
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this interdisciplinary work, John Jordan traces the significant influence on American politics of a most unlikely hero: the professional engineer. Jordan shows how technical triumphs — bridges, radio broadcasting, airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers, and electrical power — inspired social and political reformers to borrow the language and logic of engineering in the early twentieth century, bringing terms like efficiency, technocracy, and social engineering into the political lexicon. Demonstrating that the cultural impact of technology spread far beyond the factory and laboratory, Jordan shows how a panoply of reformers embraced the language of machinery and engineering as metaphors for modern statecraft and social progress. President Herbert Hoover, himself an engineer, became the most powerful of the technocratic progressives. Elsewhere, this vision of social engineering was debated by academics, philanthropists, and commentators of the day — including John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Lewis Mumford, Walter Lippmann, and Charles Beard. The result, Jordan argues, was a new way of talking about the state.

Originally published in 1994.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

PART ONE

PREDECESSORS

1880–1910

You see, getting down to the bottom of things, this is a pretty raw, crude civilization of ours—pretty wasteful, pretty cruel, which often comes to the same thing, doesn’t it? … Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations between capital and labor, our distribution—all wrong, out of gear. We’ve stumbled along for a while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways, but we’ve got to start to make this world over.

THOMAS EDISON

1 ORIGINS OF AMERICAN RATIONAL REFORM

The politics of efficiency, social control, and planning originated in tangible causes and effects, not in mass movements or charismatic leadership. Even the philosophical bases of social engineering—pragmatism and Veblenism—begin with human action and emphasize performance. The rational reform impulse stressed present-tense problem solving, not historical precedent. European predecessors like Comte and Mill influenced a few important individuals—especially Herbert Croly, who was actually baptized into Comte’s religion of humanity—but most Americans tried to redesign society with little sense of intellectual genealogy. Antitheoretical theory begat apolitical politics.¹

Rational reform drew its vigor from intellectual, professional, and material sources: Lester Frank Ward and Thorstein Veblen, academic social science, and engineering successes. In each instance, social change hinges on the appropriation of apparently scientific technique rather than on virtue, votes, or received wisdom. These innovators influenced later generations to continue to flee social ideology and personal metaphysics toward scientific control and existential certainty. Within both theory and practice in late nineteenth-century America, similar themes reappear, always grounded in the ever more evident power of applied science.

WARD, VEBLEN, AND THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY

Lester Frank Ward, who anticipated many aspects of rational reform, differed markedly from later generations in his firsthand knowledge of natural science—he published several volumes of botanical and geological material and worked with John Wesley Powell as a paleobotanist. His acquaintance with scientific progress made him revise Comtean positivism to keep pace with the promising developments of the late nineteenth century. By understanding “the operations of a state” as “natural phenomena,” Ward could begin the move toward a theory of social engineering. After politics was viewed as nature, it could be manipulated to fit human design: the “inventive stage embraces the devising of methods for controlling the [social] phenomena so as to cause them to follow advantageous channels, just as wind, water, and electricity are controlled.” Ward’s linkage of scientific inquiry to control influenced a significant body of twentieth-century social thought, but few of his contemporaries.²

Ward substituted a scientific (in the Comtean sense, a positive) understanding of human agency for William Graham Sumner’s Darwinian combative randomness. In Ward’s theoretical state, science would enable citizens to differentiate themselves from animals by the application of knowledge. The beginnings of political engineering appear in Ward’s earnest prose of 1893: “Every wheel in the entire social machinery should be carefully scrutinized with the practiced eye of the skilled artisan, with a view to discovering the true nature of the friction and of removing all that is not required by a perfect system. … The legislator is essentially an inventor and a scientific discoverer.” Note that the word engineer never appears; Ward called on the skilled artisan as his ideal. Before social engineering could become a possibility, reformers needed living examples of empirically based control over natural forces.³

……..

“It is what they used to burn folks for.” So wrote Ward of Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), the American thinker who most completely challenged the status quo by exploring the future of the technical state. The essential elements of his concept of society—an anthro-utopian world of consumer plenty, rational technique, and demystified authority—appear repeatedly in the works of later followers. Veblen’s political thought connected the nineteenth-century Utopian tradition to the empirical social sciences of the early 1900s.⁴

It is initially useful to consider Veblen in relation to the pragmatic tradition. He studied under Charles Sanders Peirce, worked alongside John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, and read William James closely. Sharing the pragmatists’ stress on truth found in meaningful human action, Veblen named the tendency toward usefulness the “instinct” of workmanship. He defined human life as a series of causal actions, the meaning of which is found in their effects. Veblen also drew upon Darwinian science, aspiring to analyze society as an evolving set of institutions and processes—at times the words appear to be interchangeable—where survival is proof of exhibited fitness; he wrote that “the evolution of social structures has been a process of natural selection of institutions.” In Veblen’s view, science encouraged “matter-of-fact” habits of thought: the scientist sought to analyze a situation in terms of strictly observable cause and effect, not progress toward a far-off goal.⁵

Despite assuming the pose of the scientist, Veblen created in his economic anthropology not so much a science as an epic allegory. The Norse sagas he so admired exemplify the scope, moralism, and poetic license that Veblen mimicked in his own writing. His timetable of human events was, at best, hypothetical, even given the state of academic anthropology at the turn of the century. When he wrote of “an unbroken cultural line of descent that runs back to the beginning,” Veblen operated not on the evidence of field studies, archeological digs, or linguistic analysis. The construct began with the “golden age” of savagery, in which humanity was peaceable and cooperative and which functioned in much the same way that the fictive state of nature did for Locke, Hobbes, and the other contract theorists. Because the governing factor in Veblen’s theory of cultural development is the state of man’s technology, he posited that with the advent of new tools of killing, acquisition by seizure implied the origins of private property, and eventually the state evolved to protect property rights. As industrial technology improved, however, human institutions were always in arrears; never was a given cultural arrangement adequate to the capabilities of current tools and techniques. Thus, for Veblen, adjustment is a primary value: always his critique of culture is aimed at “archaic” institutions inadequate to current exigencies. Change—in a Darwinian sense, never in the process of reaching teleological goals—was the solitary imperative.⁶

Because the species possesses an instinct of workmanship, people can change their world through the discovery of new technology. “Man’s great advantage over other species in the struggle for survival,” Veblen wrote, sounding a lot like Ward (whom he cited), “has been his superior facility in turning the forces of the environment to account.” Veblen replaced “economic man” with another fiction—man the worker—who retained the instinct of workmanship which “disposes men to look with favor upon productive efficiency and on whatever is of human use.” In his essay of 1898 on the topic, Veblen elaborated: “All men have this quasi-aesthetic sense of economic or industrial merit, and to this sense of economic merit futility and inefficiency are distasteful. In its positive expression it is an impulse or instinct of workmanship; negatively it expresses itself in a deprecation of waste.” Before phrases like home economics and social efficiency captured cultural aspiration toward techniques of political renewal, he constructed an illusory anthropology embodying the efficiency criterion.⁷

Veblen argued that because culture begins with the advancement of its tools, “the scope and method of modern industry are given by the machine.” Indeed, he made industrial development the raison d’etre of human societies; for a thinker who opposed teleology so strongly to espouse technological fetishism is but one of the puzzles of Veblen’s work. “The collective interests,” he wrote, “of any modern community center in industrial efficiency.” But instead of meeting material needs with efficient production, capitalist industry was marked by personal, qualitative, and status-conscious habits of thought. The “pecuniary” mindset adopted by the captains of finance and industry overruled the impersonal, quantitative, and use-conscious mind “disciplined” by the machine. In other words, the expression of the instinct of emulation, in large measure through competitive display, negated the impact of the instinct of workmanship encouraged by the machine process. Even though science enabled humanity to shed archaic rituals and beliefs, the pecuniary instinct denied the industrial imperative to make goods, leaving Western culture to lag further behind the rapidly advancing state of the industrial arts.⁸

The growing cultural authority of the scientific method appealed to Veblen, whose substitution of an allegedly scientific rationalism for a religious one foreshadowed similar developments within social science. In both modern technology and modern science, he wrote, “the terms of standardization, validity, and finality are always terms of impersonal sequence, not terms of human nature or preternatural agencies.” A movement toward “precise objective measurement and computation” discounted “postulates and values which do not lend themselves to that manner of logic and procedure.” The empirical scientist stood as the final authority in such a culture. Accordingly, Veblen adamantly encouraged the abandonment of the conveniently vague metaphors of classical economics—which allowed the construction of theories “without descending to a consideration of the living items concerned”—in favor of empirical methods; glorification of some literally invisible hand should, he contended, give way to examinations of concrete relations of exchange. His own work, however, relied only rarely on precise statistical data, leaving students like Wesley Mitchell and Robert Hoxie to the mind-numbing plug-and-chug of rigorous quantitative analysis. Veblen, meanwhile, continued his unsystematic but suggestive reasoning.⁹

Not only did “opaque cause and effect” generate an ethics for Veblen, it was his metaphysics as well. Despite disclaimers about a “morally colorless” standpoint defined by scientific observation and logic, the very survival of materialist reasoning proved its evolutionary fitness. Anything “not consonant with these opaque creations of science is an intrusive feature in the modern scheme, borrowed or standing over from the barbarian past.” As frequently happens in his writing, the letter of the text must be distrusted: “The machine process gives no insight into questions of good and evil, merit and demerit, except in point of material causation.” Here the “except” is precisely the point: the very logic of the machine, built on a chain of causal sequences, contains its own moral imperative. With knowledge linked to control and inquiry tied to application, Veblen located moral perfection in mastery of causal sequences, in process rather than in teleology.¹⁰

How would such reasoning affect politics? Veblen wrote relatively little on the topic, for his was not a particularly programmatic social criticism. Citizens supported the state, he contended, for two reasons: patriotism and profit. In keeping with his habit of damning the archaic, Veblen argued for an industrial government, one able to curtail pecuniary tendencies, “absentee ownership” in particular. Self-proclaimed political scientists would seem to be logical inheritors of his mission, but in 1906 he called the discipline only a “taxonomy of credenda,” a particular insult because taxonomies were a legacy from pre-Darwinian science; their static analyses failed the test of evolutionary capability. Because Marx was handicapped by a have/have-not dichotomy, he too lost favor. Veblen’s insistence on a breakdown between pecuniary (money-making) and industrial (goods-making) pursuits led him to consider industrial socialism. In 1893 he suggested that the “whole trend of the modern industrial development is distinctly socialistic.” By 1905, Veblen would write of socialism, possibly a non-Marxian variety, as the “manifestation of machine-thinking for politics.”;¹¹

The evidence for Veblen’s conventional socialism remains inconclusive, however, insofar as he never clarified his terms or committed himself to existing movements. Instead, his politics relate closely to the Utopian tradition. He studied Henry George while an undergraduate, translated Ferdinand Lassalle’s Science and the Workingmen for the socialist International Library Publishing Company, and read Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward aloud with his wife. While he later attacked single-taxers and other believers in “cultural thimblerigs” (shell games), Veblen never used Bellamy’s concept of nationalism in any but a favorable context. Veblen’s world of maximized production, noncompetitive consumption, and demystified bases for belief and action closely resembles the world of 2000 in Looking Backward. Consider Veblen’s view that socialism is “but the logical outcome” of evolving democracy in the modern age; Bellamy had argued that a bloodless, logical transfer of power would begin the Utopian age. Veblen’s approving use of Bellamy’s term for socialism—“the Nationalist state”—also had to be deliberate in an age of Bellamy clubs and other efforts to make real the promise of the book. Or compare Veblen’s paraphrasing of socialism as “the industrial organization of society” to the primacy for Bellamy of the “industrial army.” ¹²

In such a world, rationalized allocation of goods would lessen competitive displays of property and free much of the work force for production of more essential goods. This similarity involves the core of both Veblen’s theory and the appeal of Bellamy’s Utopia. In addition, Veblen’s dismissal of national boundaries in both The Theory of Business Enterprise and his World War I writings mirrors Bellamy’s espousal of the popular belief in a “loose form of federal union of worldwide extent.” Finally, the categories of waste outlined in The Engineers and the Price System—salesmanship, production of superfluous goods, systematic dislocation due to conventionally misguided business strategy, and unemployment of men, materials, and equipment—follow Bellamy’s categories. He had pointed to “mistaken undertakings,” “competition and mutual hostility” within industry, “periodical gluts and crises,” and “idle capital and labor” as prime causes of waste. Now dismissed as oppressive yet sentimental, Bellamy influenced the social thought of the next half-century to a degree as hard to imagine as it was significant.¹³

Veblen literally looked backward to the Viking saga for his lost ideal society. Unlike the arts and crafts movement, which he attacked for finding “salvation” outside the machine process, Veblen wanted to retain that process because it discouraged the institution of private property. When industrial society could produce so many goods that scarcity would no longer create emulative value, and when humans no longer felt the need to compete through possessions (or in any other medium), meaningful community would return. “The most ancient and most consistent habits of the race,” he wrote, apparently discarding his condemnation of archaic traits, could return, and “the ancient bent may even bear down the immediate conventional canons of conduct.” Later in his life Veblen appears to have backed off some of his Bellamyite conceptualizations, but he retained his belief in the social good of maximum industrial production.¹⁴

Veblen had a wide and profound impact on American thought, in social engineering circles especially, in the first half of the century. The works of Wesley Mitchell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lewis Mumford, Walter Lippmann, and Max Lerner bear his mark. Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means began their monumental study The Modern Corporation and Private Property with a footnote to Veblen. Malcolm Cowley and other New Republic editors found in their informal poll of “books that changed our minds” in 1939 that Veblen’s name came up more than any other (Charles Beard was a safe second, followed by Dewey, Freud, Spengler and Whitehead in a tie, and Lenin in seventh). The Theory of the Leisure Class was the most frequently mentioned mind-changing book in lists from such intellectuals as Kenneth Burke, Robert Lynd, and Thurman Arnold. Rexford Tugwell wrote the Veblen essay in a collection devoted to poll winners.¹⁵

What sorts of judgments might the late twentieth-century reader render? Balance is difficult, for Veblen’s strengths are solidly embedded in weaknesses. His prose style delights when...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 Predecessors, 1880–1910
• Part 2 Definitions, 1911–1918
• Part 3 Implementation And Redefinition, 1918–1934
• Part 4 Reconsideration And Retreat, 1934–1939
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index