Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America.
Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America. By Stephen P. Rice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xiii plus 230 pp. $49.95).The miasma in the current thinking about the language and meaning of class in America, a subject at the heart of Stephen P. Rice's book, is painfully apparent in a series appearing as I write in the spring 2005. Serialized in the New York Times, and entitled "Class Matters," the series purports to examine "the role of social class in America today." (1) Nowhere is any class defined--middle, working, upper middle is each bandied about; never is there an upper class, and the presumption is that success is only to escape the working class. In one paragraph we are told "[t]hrough it all, one thing was certain: a factory job was [the] ... ticket to the middle class," and in another a bold headline proclaimed, "Diplomas' Absence Strands Many in the Working Class."
Rice's book is a welcome read that offers considerable insight both into this muddle and into the conservative thinking that celebrates the 'middle' in opposition to the working class. Against the analytic mishmash that dominates contemporary journalism, the book is also part of an emerging historiographic cottage industry that seeks to understand the formation of the American middle class in the first half of the nineteenth century. Mary P. Ryan's study of the Utica and Paul Johnson's history of Rochester shopkeepers tilled this ground. And now Rice, echoing Jonathan Daniel Wells' new account of the origins of the middle class in the ante-bellum south, (2) productively updates these accounts by interrogating the languages of class and the emergence of middle-class subjectivity in the ante-bellum north.
Minding the Machine looks at the development of a self-conscious middle class through the discourse on mechanization in the first half of the nineteenth century, most especially by examining the relationship between 'hand' and 'head.' Paralleling, but in contrast to working-class histories of the era, Rice focuses on those men (and he acknowledges his study is not of women nor the domestic sphere in which historians have usually located middle-class culture) who engage in and celebrate the distinctiveness and superiority of work with their heads and he traces the means through which they come to authorize and cement their political, social and cultural authority.
Rice elucidates the popular discourse on mechanization with a familiar account of the reception and debates surrounding Johann Maelzel's automaton 'chess player.' While engaging, the subsequent chapters on the Mechanics' Institute Movement and the Manual Labor School Movements are more original contributions. Drawing on lectures given at the Mechanics' Institutes, Rice illustrates how the divide between hand and head was used to figure new social relations of the industrial era. We learn little about the place of artisans in the Institutes, but these associations bridged the increasingly troubled and changing identities of the master-manufacture/artisan, and Rice illustrates how they become the home of the 'engineer' rather than the 'mechanic' by mid-century. Likewise, a chapter on the Manual Labor Schools tells fascinating stories of Lafayette and Oberlin Colleges in the 1830s and 1840s, noting how the "the conservative strain of the movement" celebrated the healthful effects of manual life (but not hand work?!) to "give expression to a harmonious vision of class."[89]
It is the last chapter of the book, however, that Rice is most inventive and convincing. Rice examines the public concern with steam engine explosions as a metaphor for conservative [read business] social fears of a social explosion during industrialization. Regulating engines then becomes a metonym for social engineering, and the engineer, in reinventing himself to solve this social problem, elevates his social status and authority in following the quintessential middle-class social trajectory. Until mid-century, engineers were held in low status, often thought to be drunk and lazy men as responsible for accidents as anyone. By the 1850s, 'trained' with 'knowledge' (which Rice notes was of little value to them on the job), they gained new authority as men of superior moral standing who could 'mange' the machine, and metaphorically, the hand worker.
Rice's book is a modest study, albeit on the not-so-modest subject of class formation. There are some lovely pieces to the book, and it is not to devalue it that I would suggest it raises as many important questions as it answers. For one, in contrast to Wells' southern case where the planters are a class in opposition above, there is no upper class here; Rice depicts a 'middle' suspended above workers with no other referent. Secondly, Rice acknowledges voices of opposition to this ideology, but only in passing. And, thirdly, it is one thing to describe elitist, anti-working class 'middle-class' ideology; it is another to accept its assumptions. Thus, as historians have problematically equated home ownership with middle-class status, it is not clear that in fighting for education and shorter hours to "do as we will," artisans and workers forsook the working class.
In addition, representing workers and the new middle as a binary through these conservative voices and in the case of the 'professionalizing' engineer, obscures many continuities and murkiness. Scholarship of the last generation has fought against modernization theorists who see the machine and factory as the hallmarks of the Industrial Revolution. Sean Wilentz's idea of metropolitan industrialization and Raphael Samuels' seminal History Workshop Journal essay on the Workshop of the World remind us of the overwhelming persistence of handwork in the industrial revolution.
Finally, readers of Rice's account need to consider three issues the book skirts: first, professionalization is a legitimizing project, an identity asserted as part of a status ideology, not itself evidence of the superiority of 'mind' work. Second, many emerging 'professionals' like engineers were dependent on bosses for a wage or salary, and in time, would consider unionizing themselves. And third, we need to unpack languages of class as markers of difference or as distinct social classes rather than class fractions: how do those imagining themselves as a 'respectable' labor aristocracy differ from other workers, what does it mean to say white collar professional-managerial workers hold 'middle-class values? These questions remain to be interrogated in the history of the role and formation of the middle class.
Daniel J. Walkowitz
New York University
ENDNOTES
1. David Leonhardt, "The College Dropout Boom: Working Class and Staying that Way," The New York Times, May 24, 2005: A1, 14-15; and Timothy Egan, "No Degree, and No Way Back to the Middle," The New York Times, May 24, 2005: A 15.
2. Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins f the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (Chapel Hill, 2004).
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| Author: | Walkowitz, Daniel J. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Journal of Social History |
| Date: | Jun 22, 2006 |
| Words: | 1100 |
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