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1 Comment »

1. [Following is the text of Bob Post's comment on session V, with Carroll Pursell and Ruth Cowan]

   “History and the Society for the History of Technology”

   This wrap-up is called “Technology and Culture,” and Carroll has made a persuasive case for addressing the history of technology (or, rather, technology in history, per David Edgerton) as both cultural practice and cultural production. How can I disagree? Leo Marx, David Nye, Roz Williams, Schivelbusch, these people have written classics, and I have a favorite cultural historian of technology that Carroll didn’t mention, Margot Henriksen, whom I’ll quote in a minute. Theirs is not the only way to address technology in history, but Carroll is not arguing for an approach that will “sweep away all the other ways in which we have studied our subjects over the years.” Just one word of caution about where cultural history veers over into cultural studies: if you could see some of the books that come into T&C for review that address technology via cultural studies, you’d likely be distressed. No, it’s not the jargon, it’s the absence of—actually, the apparent contempt for—any history.

   I want to say just a little more about that phrase “technology and culture.” Carroll notes that “technology is not simply embedded in our culture, it is a distinctive part of it.” That being so, he says that the title of our journal may foster a misapprehension that technology and culture are somehow separate and distinct. Maybe so, but it’s kind of remarkable that the journal got that particular name in the first place, rather than—well, say, History of Technology. As with so much else about SHOT, the story begins with Mel Kranzberg, whom Carroll once called “the mother of all founding fathers.”

   It’s apparent that from the time Mel first started thinking about a new journal in 1957, or 1956, or maybe even earlier, he had in mind the name Technology and Culture. But to many of his initial cohort this was not the obvious name, or even a desirable name. This was probably true with Lewis Mumford, and definitely true with one of the collaborators Mel came to rely on most closely, the Smithsonian’s Bob Multhauf. Both Mel and Multhauf believed that engineers would comprise a key SHOT constituency, maybe the key constituency. But Multhauf believed, further, that engineers were “wary of the word ‘culture’ and will not subscribe to a journal of that title.”

   Twice the issue had come to a vote and twice Mel was prepared to announce that the name was settled. And twice Multhauf had objected. Finally, by the winter of 1959, the question was no longer academic, as Mel was anxious to select a publisher and sign a contract. So he agreed to conduct a poll, not only among the advisors he had already drawn together but also among leaders of the big engineering societies, the mechanicals, the civils, the electricals, and so on. For this purpose he established a committee that included Multhauf and SHOT president William F. Ogburn, and he drew up a ballot. Here’s how the cover letter read:

   “The newly-formed Society for the History of Technology is in a quandary in regard to the name of its proposed quarterly journal, and we are appealing to you . . . to help us decide upon a title. Originally given the title of Technology and Culture, the journal must acquire a permanent title as the date of publication approaches—and there is disagreement among our members about this point.

   “Some claim that the word “culture” will frighten away possible subscribers from the engineering profession. We are . . . eager to appeal to engineers, for the journal hopes to publish general articles dealing with the relations of technology and society and culture as well as more specialized articles on the history of technological processes and devices. Others claim that Technology and Culture tells exactly what the journal will be about . . . and that it is understood that we are using “culture” in the anthropological sense defined by Edward B. Tylor almost a century ago: ‘Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, laws, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’”

   Appended was the ballot with six possible titles listed: Technology and Culture, Journal of the History of Technology, Technology and Society, Technics, Technologia, and finally Vulcan (as in the Roman god of fire and metalworking). Technics would have been Mumford’s idea, of course, and Technologia was Multhauf’s, maybe Vulcan as well. Following each title there was a list of pros and cons, the words here almost certainly Mel’s. The cons are the most telling, often the most fun.

   For Journal of the History of Technology: “Long and unwieldy name; uninspiring; does not indicate the broad sociological, anthropological, economic, and humanistic content of the journal, but emphasizes just one aspect of the society’s interests.”

   For Technics: “No general agreement on the meaning of the word; will mystify rather than awaken interest of potential reader; cannot be said to cover the range of interests in technology and its relations with society and culture, but emphasizes only the technical element.”

   For Vulcan: “There is already a publication of this same name, published in England; difficult to cite in footnotes because of need to distinguish [between them].”

   For Technology and Society: “Tends to identify journal with one entitled Science and Society, which has a Marxist tinge, so that potential readers may think of the journal as being concerned primarily with the relations of technology and social classes.”

   Voters were asked to indicate their first three choices, with a first-place vote worth three points, second worth two, and third worth one. Some respondents indicated their choices all the way from one to six, among them Leonard Carmichael, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. (Imagine the most recent Smithsonian Secretary taking an interest in such a matter.) Many respondents penned in comments. Abbott Payson Usher wrote: “If the engineers are likely to turn away from the title Technology and Culture, it would be hazardous to use the title. A long title that is merely descriptive does not seem objectionable. The scope would be indicated by the editorial staff.” Usher voted for Journal of the History of Technology first, Technology and Culture second. John Kouwenhoven voted the opposite way and remarked “who says engineers are ‘wary of the word “culture”’? I’ll bet the engineers vote in favor of ‘Technology and Culture.’”

   It was close. Technology and Culture scored 85, Journal of the History of Technology 67, Vulcan 24, Technology and Society 23, Technics only 6. Mel pronounced the issue settled and moved on to the selection of a publisher for T&C, with yet another committee−this one including Lynn White−which ultimately recommended that a contract be signed with Wayne State University Press in Detroit. (Hence, T&C’s five-year “blue” period.)

   * * *

   I’ve detailed this episode partly to suggest the import of the word culture to Mel, and partly to give some sense of how richly revealing the Kranzberg Papers are. And how foolish it is for anyone who doesn’t know this to make pronouncements about SHOT’s innermost being. (And, yes, I mean you, Paul Forman.) They provide extensive evidence for just about everything concerning the aims, the means, and the motives of SHOT’s founders.

   And their politics, too, and that brings me to Ruth’s paper. One of Mel’s most poignant exchanges took place in 1969, following publication of John McDermott’s essay in the New York Review of Books. Mel had written Gene Ferguson (who was newly arrived at the University of Delaware), saying that−in response to McDermott−he felt that someone needed to stand up and be “an apologist for technology.” Ferguson wrote back, saying that this would be ill-advised because McDermott “touched the central issue” of the time. He went on to say how disappointed he was at the failure of Emmanuel Mesthene’s Harvard Program on Technology and Society “to be more than pious and optimistically vague.” (Later, Ferguson’s colleague George Basalla called it “bland and sterile.”) At Delaware, Ferguson added that he was trying to inaugurate “some kind of program that will disarm or derail apologists for technology.”

   Mel was moved to respond at great length, writing about his distress with the campus revolt, and with “this general hue and cry against ‘technology,’ as if it were an autonomous and independent variable in our society.” “When I think of technology,” he added, “I don’t think of any monolithic entity which pursues its own ways regardless of institutions, societal values, and what have you. . . What I want to do is engage in reasoned discussion of the interrelationships between technology and these other institutions, concepts, individuals . . . .” McDermott was worth hearing out, yes, but there was so much more to be said about the relationship of technology and culture. Technology could be humane, just as Paul Goodman said in his letter to the NYRB in response to McDermott.

   * * *

   So, two of SHOT’s leaders, and two dear friends, had been forced into a wrenching dispute by McDermott’s essay and by events in the world in which they lived. Which makes me think that we should not let this occasion pass without taking brief note of SHOT’s origins in historical context. McDermott’s essay was published almost exactly a decade after Mel sent the first issue of T&C off to press. And it was not just any decade, it was the sixties! Which might in some sense be considered to have begun in 1957−the same year as SHOT−what with events in Little Rock, publication of On the Road, and the launch of Sputnik, about which Wally McDougall wrote: “No event since Pearl Harbor set off such repercussions in public life.” Two months later, the U.S. Air Force fired its first Atlas ICBM and began arming B-52s with medium-range ballistic missiles. Just as SHOT was getting off the ground, there were headlines concerning Vanguard I, continued atomic testing at Eniwetok, establishment of the North American Air Defense Command, the atomic sub Nautilus crossing under the North Pole, “the peaceful uses of outer space,” and the creation of NASA.

   In the wake of Sputnik, Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act for government-backed student loans and support of education in science and technology. But the immediate context of SHOT’s early years was a world on the edge—the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, Tonkin Gulf a little later—and growing increasingly ambivalent about technology. When John Kennedy was inaugurated as President, he jettisoned Ike’s relative caution in international affairs, a move foretold in his exploitation of an alleged “missile gap” during his campaign. Even though Eisenhower had approved a strategy that ultimately aimed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads at targets in Soviet Russia, he also bequeathed one of the most memorable phrases in American history when he warned about the dangers posed by the “military-industrial complex.”

   But JFK knew no such caution. Margot Henrickson, in a compelling book titled Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age writes this: “Grasping the opportunity offered by the nation’s post-Sputnik panic over declining American technological strength, Kennedy took the offensive in the cold war. He reinvigorated America’s weapons and space programs, and he demonstrated a bellicose willingness to confront the Soviet Union–whether in Berlin or in Cuba.”

   Three weeks after Alan Shepard went into space, JFK committed the nation to landing a man on the moon, an uplifting prospect even to Paul Goodman, as Ruth points out. But he also brandished America’s atomic arsenal, and a program for encouraging construction of “family fallout shelters” was an explicit recognition of the possibility of thermonuclear war. (Henrikson is splendid on what she calls “the bomb shelter craze.”) At the same time, RAND’s Herman Kahn was proposing a new way of thinking about such a war. If 80 million Americans were to die, it would take fifty years for economic recuperation, but if 60 of that 80 million could survive in fallout shelters it would take only ten years.
   In the shocked dialogue that followed publication of Kahn’s book, On Thermonuclear War, Ralph Lapp declared that “any optimistic appraisals of survival were a fantasy,” Sidney Hook countered that this point was irrelevant because America’s anticommunist values were more sacred than “life as such,” and then more and more people began to wonder whether the whole notion of fallout shelters might be, literally, insane.

   So it was, that just as SHOT was getting up and running, omens of technological disaster were everywhere. Is it any wonder that within a short time we were getting books like Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle? Or movies like Seven Days in May, and Fail Safe, and Dr. Strangelove? Fail Safe was actually the most powerful, because it was not teeming with lunatics, as was Dr. Strangelove, but both movies made it obvious that the relationship of technology and society had assumed a significance that involved the fate of the earth.

   Everybody who joined Mel Kranzberg in getting SHOT established understood this, and yet there was hardly a hint of such apprehensions to be found in SHOT’s new journal. Mumford had been warning of “the technological dehumanization of life in the atomic age” for years, and he did express such concerns in T&C. But otherwise the journal, and the SHOT conference programs year after year, and the flowering monographic literature, were virtually devoid of anything dark and satanic, or even mildly suggestive that technology could be dehumanizing. With few exceptions, the scholarship depicted technology solely as an enabling factor in human culture, not as a threat, not as a force that (as Mumford put it) “tend[ed] to cramp and dwarf our life.”

   Technology’s triumphs in public health, communications, and material comfort were already well heralded. What the times seemed to cry out for were forceful analyses of the ways that technological activities could be disabling. But then, and for many years to come, the writers who ventured such analyses—whether wildly exaggerated or deadly accurate—had virtually no connection with the history of technology as an academic enterprise: Theodore Roszak, Jacques Ellul, Barry Commoner, E. F. Schumacher, Edward Abbey, the list goes on and on, and of course includes John McDermott with his technology “as the opiate of the intellectuals.”

   I’m wondering whether Mel Kranzberg, for all his success at getting SHOT up and running so quickly and so vigorously, somehow failed in one key regard. Even in the face of a never-ending nightmare in Southeast Asia, Mumford’s visions of “demonic compulsiveness” were echoed scarcely anywhere in the emerging professional literature. (The most eminent contributor to the inaugural issue of T&C was Cyril Stanley Smith, a veteran of the Manhattan Project. But Smith stayed centuries away from the atomic age, his article addressing the metallography of chain-mail armor.)

   In 1969, even if a radical caucus failed to gain affirmation of an antiwar resolution at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, much of the rest of the academic world was more engaged with contemporary issues−and when engaged historians looked at SHOT they could not detect much interest in imparting a sort of critical edge to its analyses that the times seemed to demand. Most historians of technology knew that even Henry Ford had conceded that the machine could be an agent of oppression, and many postwar narratives framed technology as oppressive, or sometimes much worse, perilous to human autonomy if not life itself−George Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face,” Sigfried Giedion’s “mechanized barbarism.” But almost never was such imagery present in the professional history-of-technology literature. If scholars in other academic constellations had any familiarity with this literature, about the best that could be said was that it seemed to reveal a profile that was “simultaneously creative and narrow.”

   True, what appeared in T&C was, as Ruth points out, rigorously “evidence based,” not “evacuated,” not 10 percent technology and 90 percent ideology, as in the case of McDermott’s NYRB essay. And Ruth notes, further, that McDermott’s dire message failed to resonate with her students. But I wonder what would happen now. So much of what McDermott wrote about authoritarian technocratic elites and an overweening imperial government rings so true today. Political engagement: Are we not remiss in failing our obligations today, as McDermott made Gene Ferguson realize four decades ago? Historians of technology, I was told by a reporter not long ago, are considered mainly useful for “providing anecdotes.” We ought to be able to do better than that.

   “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of scientists, the hopes of its children. . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross.” —Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

   Comment by bob post — October 26, 2007 @ 12:22 pm

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