161: John Jordan's Machine-Age Ideology

In Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911-1939, John Jordan argues that early 20th century "rational reform" was the product of the top-down, antidemocratic, technocratic politics of the machine age, and thus American liberal reformers in this era became less interested in helping the poor gain their voices as citizens than in engineering and controlling society.  Jordan's cultural history, which relies primarily on the papers of reformers, statements and theories of prominent engineers, writers, and academics, and popular lit sources, shows how technological language and notions of Progress, control, and hierarchy filtered into social reform and the institution of liberalism as a whole.

Jordan divides his study into three historical periods, each with its own reform projects.  He locates the origins of rational reform (1880-1910) in Progressive reformers and sociologists like Veblen, who want to make the relationship between reformers and society less political and more like the relationship between engineers and nature.  From 1910 to WWI, publications like Lippman's The New Republic and foundations like Russel Sage, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Corp start arguing that "disinterested specialists" well-versed in social science and technology should lead the masses; Herbert Hoover called on manly men to be "officers in the great industrial army;" and Taylor and other efficiency experts made the efficiency craze visible.

155: Martin Melosi's Sanitary City

In The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Martin Melosi shows that the technologies chosen for a city's sanitation infrastructure depended heavily on the prevailing environmental concerns, available technologies, money, and politics of the day.  Because most American sanitation systems were built around the turn-of-the-century, when permanence was more valued than flexibility, and because this infrastructure is costly (socially, politically, functionally, economically) to replace outright, American sanitation systems are path dependent in that they are constrained by choices made early in their construction, and they are also determinist in the sense that they shape/ constrain development around them.  Melosi thus argues that "to function effectively the American city has to be a sanitary city."

Working from the water management systems in several major American cities, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, Melosi traces the development of sanitation infrastructure through three phases:

• The "Age of Miasmas" (colonial times to 1880): basically, if you can't see or smell it, it isn't there; dilution of waste water will purify it.  

153: Walter Licht's Industrializing America

In Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century, Walter Licht complicates the process of industrialization in the United States during the 19th century by re-examining both the context of American industrial development and the composition of American industry.  In the first move, he situates manufacturing within a rapidly expanding market, which was fueled by a growing population, immigration, westward settlement, expanding cities, and developments in transportation and communication infrastructure; industrialization was a result of these changes as well as an active shaper of market relationships.  In the second move, he expands the focus of industrial manufacturing from large-scale industrialization to the broader business landscape of small factories, specialty shops, and regional diversity, which allows him to separate 19th century industrialization from late 19th century corporate consolidation.  Licht therefore deconstructs the old narrative of 19th century production-driven Progress, arguing instead for a declension from ordered mercantilism to a chaotic market economy that was only beginning to organize toward the end of the century.

Licht synthesizes business history, economics, labor history, and the history of technology to situate American industrialization in its economic, social, political, and regional contexts.  He begins in the early 1800s with regional diversity and the Jefferson/ Hamilton debates; examines the diversity of antebellum development in its mill villages, single-industry cities, diversified urban centers, and Southern "industrial" slavery; discusses artisan protests in Jacksonian American along with with evangelical reform;  charts the relationship between the Civil War and government-sponsored industrialization and transportation; and analyzes regional industrial diversity, the rise of Carnegie, Rockefeller and anti-monopoly politics, and the labor disputes, single-issue reform movements, and utopian critiques of late-19th century urban disorder.

Licht's relentless contextualization, breakdown of industry into regions, and insistence that the voices of workers, women, and immigrants be heard are a welcome relief to the usual histories of 19th century technology.

148: Howard Segal's Technologial Utopianism

In Technological Utopianism in American Culture, Howard Segal argues that a strain of utopian literature produced in American between 1833 and 1933 firmly linked human improvement to technology.  While technological utopianism may have been a marginal thread in popular culture, it had a huge influence on both European and American intellectuals' thoughts on technology and American movements like scientific management, the conservation movement, and technocracy.  In tracing the careers and writings of 25 American technological utopians, Segal hopes to make their ideas more accessible and also to show that utopianism is a useful tool for social criticism.

According to Segal, American technological utopianism has four unique characteristics that distinguish it from other utopian traditions:

• technological utopians envision a world very similar to the one in which they live; the difference is more quantitative than qualitative
• versus Europe, America in the 19th century was perceived as a place where utopia could still be built
• American technological utopians were less revolutionary and more practical than their European counterparts
• these writers used utopianism not to fantasize about the future but to critique and suggest improvements for present-day society.

95: Mark Smith's Social Science in the Crucible

Mark Smith's Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate Over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918-1941 brings the Progressive Era tension between advocacy and objectivity into the interwar years, and shows that there was no "consensual paradigm" shift toward objectivity in those years.  Instead, he uncovers a debate between objectivists and purposivists - er, between people who thought they could do social scientific research from an objective viewpoint and people who understood that knowledge is always socially produced - and investigates the debate via 5 intellectual biographies.  By situating these biographies in their social contexts with an eye toward the sources of scientific research funding, Smith thus reveals the process by which scientific objectivity itself became socially constructed.

The five major figures Smith investigates are Robert Lynd, Charles Beard, Harold Lasswell, Charles Merriam, and Wesley Mitchell.  Via leading journals, lecture series, books, private letters, presidential addresses to professional societies, and other documents, he uses these five case studies to explore the historical trajectories of both sides.  Objectivists argued that it was the job of social science to provide clear, unslanted, authoritative data to policymakers, while purposivists were interested in using social science to further their own ethical goals for society.  At the heart of his book is a rather plastic use of Deweyan Pragmatism to highlight the differences and similarities of the two approaches: objectivists claimed Dewey's argument that good techniques ensure good results, and they located morality in the consistently objective use of proper technique in social scientific research; purposivists argued that Deweyan morality dictated that research and knowledge had to be purposive, performed to solve a particular social problem, not to create knowledge for its own sake.

While Smith's main argument, that social science at this time was not stuck in a consensual paradigm, was been proven by history of science scholars in the 1970s, his intellectual biographies are strong, and his interpretation of Dewey is interesting.  Further, the debate that Smith outlines here over the role of subjectivity and morality in science is replicated today, perhaps tellingly, in politics: conservatives argue that we should rely on our values to help us use our freedom, while liberals say that we should use our freedom to determine our values.  In science, I suspect we have arrived at a disingenuous combination of the two.

77: Ruth Rosen's Lost Sisterhood

In The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918, Ruth Rosen investigates how gender and class affected the lives of men and women who were involved in the issue of prostitution in the early 20th century.  Her project is to write a history of prostitution from both above and below, so that she can combine the perspectives of the reformers and of the prostitutes into a broader picture of prostitution as it was understood and practiced.  Using a range of primary sources that include committee reports, surveys, studies, official public records, census data, vice committee reports, prostitutes' memoirs, and social workers' and missionaries' records, Rosen argues that prostitution as lived history primarily affected the working classes, prostitution as cultural symbol encompassed all classes of women.  Whether a woman had to sell her body in a loveless marriage for economic protection, for wages as an unskilled worker, or as a "sporting woman," "whatever the choice, some form of prostitution was likely to be involved."

72: Jane Hunter's Gospel of Gentility

In The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China, Jane Hunter argues that women missionaries in turn-of-the-century China were able to use missionary work to greatly expand women's sphere even as they supported submissive roles for women and lived relatively circumscribed lives at the mission.  Hunter accesses this paradoxical construction of American womanhood in China primarily via the letters and private papers of some 40 female missionaries from different denominations who worked in China from 1900 to 1922, when some 60% of Protestant missionaries in China were women.  She also includes information from interviews and the archives of two mission boards.  Because their status as outsiders in Chinese culture throws the missionaries' gender norms in high relief, the book highlights the feminization of Protestantism and the ways in which American womanhood intersected with work, religion, and cross-cultural exchanges.

71: Frederick Hoxie's A Final Promise

Frederick Hoxie's A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 argues that the attitudes and goals of policy reformers, educators, and politicians involved in Indian assimilation at the turn of the century changed radically in 1900.  From 1880 to 1900, the assimilation campaign combined ethnocentric intolerance with a "racially optimistic" belief that Indians should and could fully assimilate with American culture; after 1900, this optimism shifted to a pessimistic view that Indians and other "backward" people could never become fully equal to whites.  By contextualizing assimilation policy within a broader context of social upheavals and reform at the turn of the century, Hoxie links this shift in policy to a growing pessimism in American culture about the value of racial diversity as a result of economic expansion, industrialization, immigration, and urbanization.  He argues that with social institutions straining to serve increasingly diverse populations, after 1900 the old goal of maintaining cultural homogeneity and equality was replaced by a new social order that connected race and ethnicity with economic class.  Assimilation from 1900 to 1920 thus meant assimilating into society as the other to American whiteness.

65: Nicola Beisel's Imperiled Innocents

In Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America, Nicola Beisel links Anthony Comstock and moral reform crusades to class formation and nativist fears regarding increased immigration in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in the Gilded Age.  Working from mostly published primary and secondary sources on anti-vice campaigns against abortionists, 'free love' advocates, gambling halls, and obscenity, as well as archival sources like the Josiah Leeds papers, Beisel argues that "moral reform movements... are properly seen as struggles over class reproduction."  In other words, anti-vice reformers were far less interested in the well-being of the people they tried to reform than they were in keeping vice and corruption from polluting their children and endangering their elite status.  By extension, vice reform revealed fears about both declining parental authority and an increased immigrant presence.

51: Paul Boyer's Urban Masses and Moral Order in America

In Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920, Paul Boyer argues that between 1820 and 1920, urban reform shifted from voluntary efforts concerned with individual morality to professionalized/ institutionalized concern with environmental factors.  With this shift, reformers' values and programming shifted as well, from nostalgic, rural, and religious to urban and secular.  This transition tracked a larger shift in American society from rural to urban culture, even as both the reform movement and the larger culture retained elements of earlier generations' religious millenialism.

Boyer's book is solid, well-documented, modernist history that works to dissolve divides between rich and poor, urban and rural, and old and new reform movements.  He traces four stages of American urban reform between 1820 and 1920:

• Jacksonian era: evangelical leaders, funded by businesses and professional groups, use Bible societies, tract societies, and Sunday schools to recreate rural values and community for displaced urban dwellers
• Mid-19th century: new institutions, like the Children's Aid Society and the YMCA focus on the city in the belief that cities contained the resources for their own reform
• Gilded Age: the reform community splits; new groups like the Charity Organization Society and early settlement houses are divided over whether they should focus on individual morality or environmental issues and whether they should pursue 'coercive' or 'assimilative' reform
• Progressive Era: reformers push aside their differences and focus on reforming the urban environment. Crusades to reform municipal government, abolish saloons and organized vice, establish local parks and playgrounds all proliferate to instill ideals of citizen loyalty and virtue

Social reform dies down in the 1920s, as people finally see the city not as a threat to the social order but as the new social order itself.  They then start to celebrate diversity, cultural pluralism, and the city's resources for both pleasure and reform.

Boyer makes several claims about the causes and implications of this trajectory.  First, urban reform gets institutionalized in large part because unlike in rural towns, where a single rowdy drunk dude could easily be stopped by a few capable townspeople, the huge numbers of people in cities seem to necessitate large reform apparatuses; with urbanization, individual problems became social problems.  Further, although he documents many reform movements that crossed social classes, he suspects - as do I - that the people who benefited most from voluntary urban reform movements were the reformers themselves, who found in the reform community a refuge from the alienation of their new urban homes.  While the book could certainly use more voices from the urban masses themselves (if only to see what the reformers were up against), and while it pays surprisingly little attention to the missionary mind (a la Bob Abzug), it provides a solid history of reform movements and would be in good company with Levenstein or Roediger's studies of the same time period.