Even before the Civil War, the westward trails were destined to be lined with tracks; the pony express and the covered wagon, like the mounted Plains Indian, would yield to the Iron Horse. For if the West of "myth and symbol," in Henry Nash Smith's apt te rms, provided one perspective by which Americans might view their society, the machine provided another. The two images fused into a single picture of a progressive civilization fulfilling a providential mission. As John Kasson has shown, many Americans b efore the Civil War had believed that industrial technology and the factory system would serve as historic instruments of republican values, diffusing civic virtue and enlightenment along with material wealth. Factories, railroads, and telegraph wires see med the very engines of a democratic future. Ritual celebrations of machinery and fervently optimistic prophecies of abundance continued throughout the Gilded Age, notably at the two great international expositions, in Philadelphia in 1876, and in Chicago in 1893.

The image of the machine, like the image of the West, proved to be a complex symbol, increasingly charged with contradictory meanings and implications. If the machine seemed the prime cause of the abundance of new products changing the character of daily life, it also seemed responsible for newly visible poverty, slums, and an unexpected wretchedness of industrial conditions. While it inspired confidence in some quarters, it also provoked dismay, often arousing hope and gloom in the same minds. For,

accompanying the mechanization of industry, of transportation, and of daily existence, were the most severe contrasts yet visible in American society, contrasts between "progress and poverty" (in Henry George's words), which seemed to many a mockery of th e rep ublican dream, a haunting paradox. Each act of national celebration seemed to evoke its opposite. The 1877 railroad strike, the first instance of machine smashing and class violence on a national scale, followed the 1876 Centennial Exposition, and the eve n fiercer Pullman strike of 1894 came fast on the heels of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.

It is no wonder that closer examination of popular celebrations discloses bewilderment and fear. In fiction and poetry, as Leo Marx has shown in his seminal Machine in the Garden (1964), serious writers before the Civil War had fastened on the image of a mechanical intrusion on a pastoral setting as a characteristic expression of a deeply troubled society. In the language of literature, a machine (railroad or steamship) bursting on a peaceful natural setting represented a symbolic version of the trauma in flicted on American society by unexpectedly rapid mechanization. The popular mode of celebration covered over all signs of trauma with expressions of confidence and fulsome praise. But confidence proved difficult to sustain in the face of the evidence.

Current events instilled doubt at the very site of celebration. A period of great economic growth, of steadily rising per capital wealth, and new urban markets feeding an expanding industrial plant, the Gilded Age was also wracked with persisting crises. An international "great depression" from 1873 to 1896 afflicted all industrial nations with chronic overproduction and dramatically falling prices, averaging one-third on all commodities. "It was," writes David Landes, "the most drastic deflation in the memory of man." A severe Wall Street crash in 1873 triggered a round of bankruptcies and failures in the United States, six thousand businesses closing in 1874 alone, and as many as nine hundred a month folding in 1878. A perilously uneven business cycle continued for more than twenty years, affecting all sections of the economy: constant market uncertainties and stiffening competition at home and abroad for business; inexplicable surpluses and I declining world prices, together with tightening credit for farmers; wage cuts, extended layoffs and irregular employment, and worsening conditions, even starvation, for industrial workers.

Recurrent cycles of boom and collapse seemed as inexorable as the quickening pace of technological innovation. Thus, even in the shadow of glorious new machines displayed at the fairs, the public sense of crisis deepened.

No wonder modern machinery struck observers, especially those associated with the business community, as in Charles Francis Adams, Jr.'s words, "an incalculable force." The tempo of crisis accelerated in the 1870's. Farmers agitated through Granger clubs and the Greenback Party against the government's policy of supporting business through deflationary hard money and the gold standard. Industrial unrest reached a climax and a momentary catharsis in July 1877, when fears of a new civil war spread across th e country during the great railroad strike. Provoked by a 10 percent wage cut announced without warning by the Baltimore and Ohio line, a measure to halt a declining rate of profit, the strike spread like wildfire to other lines, reaching from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and San Francisco. The apparently spontaneous work stoppages met with approval and support from local merchants, farmers, clergy, and politicians, tapping reserves of anger and wrath against the railroad companies. Workers in other industries joined the walkout, and for a short spell it seemed that the United States faced a mass rebellion, a recurrence of the Paris Commune of 1871 on an even vaster scale. In some communities (St. Louis, for example) committees of strikers briefly assumed control of government and railroad services.

The strike turned bloody and destructive, arousing a vehemence of response from big business and the national government even surpassing the wrath vented by strikers against railroad yards and equipment. The companies recruited local police and militia to protect their property, and pitched battles raged along the lines, although many militiamen refused to fire on the strikers, among whom they recognized relatives and friends. Finally, the newly inaugurated President, Rutherford Hayes, invoked his powers of military intervention and called out federal troops to protect "by force" (as he noted in his diary) the property of the railroad companies, among whose leaders he counted many of his closest friends and supporters. In the end, the strike left more tha n a hundred dead, millions of dollars of property destroyed, and a toughened company and government stand

against unions. Strikers were very often fired and blacklisted, their leaders fined and jailed. The War Department issued a pamphlet on "riot duty" and constructed for the first time a system of armories in major cities to house a standing "national guard ." Industrialization of the state's military force seemed a necessary adjunct to the mechanization of production.

The very extremes of effect lent to the machine an aura of supreme power, as if it were an autonomous force that held human society in its grip. In The First Centuty of the Republic, a book of essays published by Harper's magazine in celebra tion of the nation's centennial in 1876, the economist David Wells observed that "like one of our mighty rivers," mechanization was "beyond control." And indeed the display in Machinery Hall in Philadelphia that summer gave credence to the image of a floo d, though without Wells's ominous note. Here, in an exposition of machines removed from their working location, a profusion of mechanisms seduced the eye: power looms, lathes, sewing machines, presses, pumps, toolmaking machines, axles, shafts, wire cable s, and locomotives. The Remington Arms Company, declaring its versatility, displayed one of its newest products: Christopher Schole's new "typewriter," an astonishing device for producing neat, legible messages at the touch of a finger. The twenty-nine-ye ar-old Thomas A. Edison, already the wunderkind of invention, disclosed his "multiplex" telegraph, capable of carrying several messages on the same slender wire. And, most memorably, Alexander Graham Bell here gave the world first notice of the greatest w onder of electrical communication: the telephone. For sheer grandeur and sublimity, however, the mechanisms of communication could not compete with the two most imposing structures in the Hall: the thirty-foot-high Corliss Double Walking-Beam Steam Engine , which powered the entire ensemble from a single source, and its counterpart, a 7,000-pound electrical pendulum clock which governed, to the second, twenty-six lesser "slave" clocks around the building. Unstinted but channeled power, and precisely regula ted time: that cornbination seemed to hold the secret of progress.

The fairs were pedagogies, teaching the prominence of machines as instruments of a distinctively American progress. As Wells explained, mechanical progress followed laws of its own; it was not to be resisted. One of the leading economic writers of

the Gilded Age, friend and adviser to Presidents, a railroad trustee, and outspoken advocate of free trade (opposed to income tax as well as tariffs), Wells often appeared in the conser vative The Nation and the respectable Atlantic Monthly an ex positor of the machine age to the educated public. He argued, as he did in 1876, that legislation would prove useless against the flood of industrial goods: "Like the construction of piers and deposits of sunken wrecks, [they] simply deflect the current or constitute temporary obstructions." Even more difficult lessons lay in the daily transformationt of old patterns of work, of travel, of communication. For machines in fact performed their work within extended structures, serving as parts of evolving systems, assigned precise tasks by humans. Perceived as an incalculable force in its own right, reified, fetishized, even demonized, the machine thus found a troubled place in the culture of the times.

The idea of an autonomous and omnipotent machine, brooking no resistance against its untold and ineluctable powers, became an article of faith. The image implied a popular social theory: the machine as a "human benefactor," a "great emancipator of man fro m the bondage of labor." Modern technology was mankind's "civilizing force," driving out superstition, poverty, ignorance. "Better morals, better sanitary conditions, better health, better, wages," wrote Carroll D. Wright, chief of the Massachusetts Burea u of Statistics of Labor, in 1882; "these are the practicat results of the factory system, as compared with what preceded it, and the results of all these have been a keener intelligence." Wright's paper, originally given as an address before the American Social Science Association, bore the title "The Factory System as an Element in Civilization."

The events of the 1870's and 1880's, however, also elicited less sanguine accounts of what the factory system had wrought. Even Wright adopted a defensive tone, warning against the seductive "poetry" and "idyllic sentiment" of many critics: "I am well awa re that I speak against popular impression, and largely against popular sentiment when I assert that the factory system in every respect is vastly superior as an element in civilization to the domestic system which preceded it." Wright failed to ac-

knowledge, however, that his account of the superior benefits of the system did not include the opportunity of workers to change their status within it; his defense assumes a permanent class of wage earners, a prospect abhorrent to believers in republican enlightenment and progress. Not surprisingly, a growing number of Americans openly questioned whether industrialization was in fact, in Henry George's words, "an unmixed good." As if in pointed rebuke of Wright's arguments and images, George observed the following year, in Social Problems (1883), that socalled labor-saving inventions, the "greater employment of machinery," and "greater division of labor," result in "positive evils" for the working masses, "degrading men into the position of mere f eeders of machines." Machines employed in production, under the present system are "absolutely injurious," "rendering the workman more dependent; depriving him of skill and of opportunities to acquire it; lessening his control over his own condition and h is hope of improving it; cramping his mind, and in many cases distorting and enervating his body." True, George found the source of such evils not in machines themselves but in unjust concentrations of land ownership. In the end, he shared Wright's vision of the potential benefits of machinery, though not his conception of a permanent class of "operatives." George plainly perceived the process of degradation in factory labor as strictly mechanical, experienced as an effect of machinery. To a wide r public than Wright had addressed, George's views seemed irrefutable.

The record of seeing, of representing the machined either in imaginative writing, in polemical discourse, or in social analysis is a record as well of implied social theories and attitudes, of responses colored by ideological predispositions. Carroll Wrig ht addressed an audience which included enlightened manufacturers; he concluded his paper with a call for benevolent "Captains of Industry" to "carry the responsibility entrusted to them," for the "rich and powerful manufacturer ... is something more than a producer, he is an instrument of God for the upbuilding of the race." George, a native Philadelphian of middle-class birth who had wandered to California in the late 1850's, working as a seaman, printer, newspaperman, failing as a Democratic candidate for office and as the owner of an independent newspaper, wished to arous the nation to its plight, urging the adopdon of a "single

tax" against land rents as the solution to the paradox whereby "laborsaving machinery everywhere fails to benefit laborers." His Progress and Poverty, written in the wake of the destruction, violence, and frustration of the summer of 1877, fuses ev angelical fervor with simplified Ricardian economic theory; its simplicity of analysis and solution, its jeremiad rhetoric of righteousness and exhortation, helped the book find a remarkably wide audience. It reached more than 2 million readers by the end of the century. Appealing to a range of political sentiments and economic interests, George evoked a vision of older republican and entrepreneurial values restored through the "single tax" in the new corporate industrial world. Identifying "social law with moral law," he wished to show that "laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to a realization of the noble dreams of socialism."

George's picture of the failures of the machine and of its potential promise corresponded to the perceptions of a significant section of the society, particularly since he promised a change fundamentally within the existing order, the existing relations o f capital and labor. Among representatives of older ruling groups, the picture held less promise. "It is useless for men to stand in the way of stearn-engines," wrote Charles Francis Adams, Jr., in 1868. Adams, from one of the oldest Eastern families of p roperty and former political status, would soon join forces with the engine as corporate executive of railroad and other enterprises. His less sanguine brother, Henry Adams, wrote later in The Education of Henry Adams (1907), regarding his own "fai lure," that "the whole mechanical consolidation of force ruthlessly stamped out the life of the class into which Adams was born." Devising a theory of history based on "forces," Adams crystallized the technological determinism implicit in both the popular and academic thought of his time.

Determinism appeared not only in explicit theories and observations of the role of machinery in economic prognosis; it also appeared at a deeper level of thought, in less self-conscious processes of mind. Images of machinery filtered into the language, in creasingly providing convenient and telling metaphors for society and individuals. Carroll Wright's conception of the factory implied a more embracing image: society as a factory. He described the factory as a "legitimate outgrowth of the universal

tendency to association which is inherent in our nature." Buried here is a Spencerian notion of evolution from simple to complex forms, from independence to interdependence, from simple tools to intricate machines. The social division of labor, then, as e xemplified by machine production in factories, is made to seem natural, an inevitable and "legitimate" evolution. The notion of the self consisting of a material "mechanism" had been present in American and European thought since the late eighteent h century; now the image struck a note which resonated with perceptions of expanding factories, railroads, and dynamos. "The more we examine the mechanism of thought," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes in a Phi Beta Kappa address in 1870, "the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes." Acceptable because undeniable in the world of thought, continued the famous literary doctor and experimental scientist, this idea of mechanism must be rejected in the "moral world," which "includes nothing but the exercise of choice." Holmes responded to the "confusion" worked by "materialism" on moral issues, by insisting so forcefully on the priority of choice in questions of good and bad precisely because of the threat of "mechanism" to the very concept of a moral universe.

The prospect of a mechanization of moral choice raised fears particularly among Americans clinging to a Protestant belief in free will, in the efficacy of human effort, and especially in the value of a properly trained and disciplined "character." Preserv ation of a belief in a "moral universe" in which rewards and punishments flowed from character and moral choice assumed an urgency in these years of massive mechanization. For, as Holmes recognized, images of mechanism now appeared throughout daily life a nd everyday discourse.

"Whatever constantly enters into the daily life soon becomes an unnoticed part of it," observed Charles Francis Adams, Jr., about the railroad system, "so much a part of our everyday acts and thoughts that they have become familiar." Indeed, the familiari zation of American society with machinery represents one of the major cultural processes of these years, even in such simple matters as riding in streetcars and elevators, getting used to packaged processed foods and the style of machine-made clothing, le t alone growing accustomed to new harsh sounds and noxious

odors near factories and railroad terminals. The proliferation of new machines and machine-made tools for industrial and agricultural production marked an even more drastic upheaval in the forms, rhythms, and patterns of physical labor.

Perhaps more expressive of changing cultural perceptions because of its greater diffusion than serious or "high" literature, popular fiction and folklore in these years represented machinery especially in its sheer power and exemption from human vulnerabi lity. In regional folktales and ballads, such figures as the lumberjack Paul Bunyan, the railroad worker John Henry, the locomotive engineer Casey Jones pit their strength and skill and daring against the machine.

Dime-novel Western adventures depict orgies of shootings and killings with every variety of automatic repeating weapons, each named precisely. A magical machine, endowing its owner with ultimate powers of "civilization" against "savagery," the gun not onl y won the West in such fictions (as it did in fact) but helped make the notion of repeatability, of automation, familiar. Indeed, as recent scholars have remarked, the interchangeability of plots and characters in dime novels parallels the standardization of machine production that became a central feature of factory life in the 1880's. Dime novels also provided a field for technological fantasy; beginning with The Huge Hunter, or The Steam Man of the Prairies in 1865, these novels included inventors (often boys) as standard fare, along with robots (like the ten-foot steam man), armored flying vessels, electrified wire, and remote-control weapons. The fiction provided vicarious mechanical thrills along with fantasies of control and power. Machines are imagined as exotic instruments of destruction, only obliquely linked to the means of production revolutionizing the indus trial system.

The fictive imagination of terror, of technological cataclysm, served as a form of familiarization. The implications of a technologized world and its potential for explosion was not lost on more troubled observers, who felt themselves on a precarious bridge between an earlier America and the present. Like Holmes, the novelist William Dean Howells worried about the intrusion of mechanism on morality. Viewing New York City from an elevated car, Basil March in Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) has a sudden perception of a "lawless, godless" world, "the

absence of intelligent, comprehensive purpose in the huge disorder." March preserves his belief in a moral order, however, by concluding that such is the "chaos to which the individual selfishness must always lead," denying his earlier perception that "ac cident and then exigency seemed the forces at work" in the city. Howells's terror is hardly enjoyable; it arises from the sudden fear that moral choice, the acts of good people of sound character, might not prevail against the "accidents" of mechanized li fe. This passage and others from A Hazard of New Fortunes suggest how far toward cultural despair Howells had traveled since his response in Machinery Hall at the 1876 Centennial Exposition to one of the most colossal machines of the times. He wrot e then of the "vast and almost silent grandeur," the "unerring intelligence," of the Corliss engine, struck by its apparent gentleness. And when the thought occurs that this "prodigious Afreet" could crush its attendant engineer "past all resemblance of h umanity," it is swiftly repressed by an emotion of national pride in the "glorious triumphs of skill and invention" displayed in Philadelphia: pride, and a confident vision of cultural progress. "Yes," he writes, "it is still in these things of iron and s teel that the national genius most freely speaks by; and by the inspired marbles, the breathing canvasses, the great literature; for the moment America is voluble in the strong metals and their infinite uses."

Howells's nervousness about that volubility, even as he embraces it as benign, was shared by many among his readers in the Atlantic Montbly and Harper's, the most respectable of the middleclass journals of opinion and letters in those years. Indeed , nervousness provoked by modern mechanical life provided the theme of the widely read medical treatise by George M. Beard in 1884. A pioneering,work in the study of neurasthenia, American Nervousness builds its case through an elaborate mechanical metaphor: the nervous system is like a machine presently under strain in response to the pressures of the machinery of civilized life. Like Thomas Edison's central electric-light generator, wrote Beard (a friend of the inventor), "the nervous system of m an is the centre of the nerve-force supplying all the organs of the body." "Modern nervousness," he explains, "is the cry of the system struggling with its environment," with all the pressures exerted on striving Americans by the telegraph and railroad an d

printing press. Simply to be on time, Beard argues, exacts a toll from the human system.

A treatise on causes of the breakdowns, distemper, anxieties becoming more common among the urban middle classes, Beard's book reveals yet another cause, social and cultural rather than technological, or of a genuine nervousness the author himself shares. He explains that by American he really means only "a fraction of American society," the "four million" salaried "brain-workers," those educated few who strive for "eminence or wealth" and wrestle with dilemmas of religion in an age of science. Excluding "muscle-workers," the "lower orders" who may succumb to "insanity of the incurable kind" but not "American nervousness," Beard makes nervousness a badge of distinction. He also discloses another source of severe anxiety prevalent among middle- and upper-c lass Americans, that of impending chaos, the rule of accident, exigency, and rampant city mobs. "All our civilization hangs by a thread; the activity and force of the very few make us what we are as a nation; and if, through degeneracy, the descendents of these few revert to the condition of their not very remote ancestors, all our haughty civilization will be wiped away."

The fear of cataclysm implicit here is not so much technological as social: a fear manifest throughout the popular media after 1877 of uprisings and insurrection, of a smoldering volcano under the streets. For David Wells, writing in 1885, such popular di sturbances as the agitation for an eight-hour day and talk of socialism "seem full of menace of a mustering of the barbarians from within rather than as of old from without, for an attack on the whole present organization of society, and even the permanen cy of civilization itself." Henry George, too, concluded Progress and Poverty with a picture of potential collapse, of "carnivals of destruction." "Whence shall come the new barbarians," he asked. "Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges!" The association of social unrest with the imagery of technological violence, of new city crow ds with ignorance and contempt for culture (or regression to "savagery"), fired the imagination with a nightmarish narrative of impending apocalypse.

In all its guises, the machine had made the future seem problematic, and among the responses in the realm of culture were a growing number of future-oriented stories, utopian and science fiction. Some, like Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1889 ), portrayed class war fought with weapons of new magnitudes of destruction. More typical, as Neil Harris has shown, were tales of futures in which machines took charge for human benefit. On the whole, as Harris writes about the outpouring of futurist wri tings in the 1880's and onward, technology serves as "an enabling condition for the description of other worlds," the rational efficiency of machines teaching a lesson in eradicating human misery. Such works project modern anxieties about violence and dis order only to dispel them, often by fusing machines with mystical religions. Such a fusion "had a common objective: the allaying of human anxieties, and most of all, anxieties about aggression, accident, old age, and death." On the whole, this body of pop ular romance and utopian speculation fastened on science and the machine as a hope for rationality, for the control so wanted in present affairs.

This hope is strongest in the most influential utopian novel of the era, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). Joining romance to a detailed account of a future society, the book appealed precisely to anxieties about mechanization and sordid ci ties by constructing a rational Christian alternative in Boston of A.D. 2000, superimposed on the contemporary city. The book follows the conversion of its upper-class, disaffected hero, Julian West, to the new (but familiarly traditional) "religion of so lidarity." One of Beard's "nervous Americans," West awakens from mesmerically induced sleep (he suffered from the modern ailment of insomnia) in a sealed chamber deep in the recesses of his house, to discover himself in the future, a new house on the site of his own (which had been destroyed in a fire through which he slept, like Rip Van Winkle, into a new generation), and a new society in place. West learns from his host, Dr. Leete, that the new order had appeared simply and peacefully when Americans dec ided they had had enough of nervous-making economic crises, unhappiness, and threatening inequality. By a happy union of "solidarity" (the religious element) and rationality (the mechanical element), they devised a system of public ownership aptly called "nationalism." Taking its moral values from "solidarity," the

system obeyed the rational forms and dictates of the machine--- a logical evolution, Bellamy argues, from the factory system and corporate structures of the year 1887. Now the government is a Great Trust, and while local and family life has been decentral ized, production and distribution have been placed under complete state control.

"Nowadays," the born-again Julian West observes, "everybody is part of a system with a distinct place and function." Production is managed through an "Industrial Army," a compulsory work force organized in strict military fashion, with hierarchies of command (based on merit and effort). The period of service is regimented but brief, leading the English socialist William Morris to comment in a review that Bellamy still accepted the industrial capitalist notion of work as "a mere adjunct of life," rather than "the necessary and indispensable instrument of human happiness." Happiness in Looking Backward is identified entirely with leisure and consumption---the consumption of religious emotions of "solidarity" as much as of the cornucopia of goods produced by the productive system. That system, though its organization is described in detail, remains invisible; West never visits the actual factories, though he tours the giant warehouses or department stores, where people no longer waste their time " shopping"; they trade credits earned in compulsory labor for goods already ordered. "It is like a gigantic mill, into the hopper of which goods are being poured by the train-load and ship-load to issue at the other end in packages of pounds and ounces, ya rds and inches, pints and gallons, corresponding to the infinitely complex personal needs of half a million people." Infinitely complex, those needs remain measurable by standardized weights.

Bellamy's criticism aims at waste, haste, inefficiency, and injustice: at social organization, not at the machine. Like George's, his vision redeems the machine from a wasteful system. Moreover, in the most emotionally decisive maneuver of the book, Bella my further deploys the machine to redeem the nation: "to realize the idea of the nation with a grandeur and completeness never before conceived ... as a family, a vital union, a common life." Thus, West cures his nervousness in a restored family, peaceful ly consuming its machine-provided pleasures in safety and security--- that is, in a fable of socialism (though Bellamy avoided that inflammatory word) amenable to middle-class America.

Bellamy's is a fable of hope, of social happiness. Mark Twain's venture into speculative romance, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), is the obverse, its conclusion an unmitigated disaster of human carnage and emotional confusion. A complex and richly contradictory book, the novel also takes a backward look, into the Middle Ages. It pits nineteenth-century "ingenuity" and republicanism, in the person of Hank Morgan, against sixth-century superstition and monarchy. Foreman at a Hartford gun factory who is transposed to Camelot by a blow on the head from one of the "rough men" he supervises, Morgan combines in his person the republican ideology, fierce individualism, and practical inventiveness which had once, before the Civil War, seemed a stable set of bourgeois character traits. Inventor, businessman, and ideologue, Morgan sets out with sublime confidence to reform Arthurian England, to modernize its thinking and polit ics as well as its productive energies. Though at first a vehicle for satire aimed at the chivalric absurdities of Arthurian romance, and an assertion of the superiority of a down-to-earth practical wisdom against the inflated language and forms of defere nce associated with feudalism, Morgan soon takes up reform in earnest. Mechanism provides the chief image of his work, of his spectacular "effects" as well as his schools known as "Man-Factories," his newspapers, telephones, smoking factories, and stock exchange. Through all the comedy and exhortation to "freedom," as Darko Suvin observes, the book's imagery bursts with volc anic explosions, prefiguring the cataclysmic conclusion. Anticipating a counterrevolution by the Church, Morgan builds a fortification of electrified barbed wire topped with Gatling guns---devices borrowed intact from dime-novel fantasies of destruction. In the end, the Yankee and his small elite of faithful followers (who address him as The Boss) find themselves trapped behind "a solid wall of the dead---a bulwark, a breast-work, of corpses."

The Yankee's liberating project, as the industrial enterprise itself threatened to do in the eyes of Henry George and others, collapses in paradox: "We were in a trap you see---a trap of our making." In these final words of Clarence, one of the faithful, Mark Twain provides a grotesque metaphor for his own age. In the end, the book's argument itself collapses in a muddle, as neither Morgan nor Mark Twain is able to sort out the causes of

failure. But the predicament the book dramatizes, of machine-making a human future, resonated grimly with realities of the day. Had "to produce" come to mean "to destroy"?

Such figurative associations of machines with violence suggest profound tensions among Americans who, like Mark Twain, otherwise saluted modern technology as a boon to republican ideals. Metaphors of wreckage and self-destruction seem to express unresolve d cultural dilemmas, conflicting value systems such as those described by Leo Marx as "machine" and "garden," the values of mechanical progress and those of pastoral harmony in a peaceful landscape. But the coexistence of figures of destruction, of "dark Satanic mills," with those of unbounded Promethean production, also points in the direction of the Promethean effort itself, toward the character of the mechanization process. Subtle interweavings of destruction and creation formed the inner logic of the industrial capitalist system, a logic less conspicuous but nonetheless compelling in its consequences than the more dramatic versions of contradiction evoked by Henry George and Edward Bellamy. As analysts here and in Europe had begun to discover, that sy stem possessed a baffling unconscious energy which resulted in recurrent cycles of expansion and contraction, inflation and deflation, confidence and depression. Such aberrations seemed to follow from precisely those increases in productive power which ma rked the industrial world in these years.

If Americans seemed especially intense in their response to mechanization, especially obsessed with alternating images of mechanical plenitude and devastation, an explanation lies in the special circumstances of native industrialization, its speed, its sc ale, its thoroughness within a brief period. Suffering fewer social barriers, possessing the largest domestic region convertible to a national market without internal restriction, by the end of the century American industry rapidly surpassed its chief Eur opean rivals, England and Germany. Figures of absolute increase signified the triumph: the production of raw steel rising from 13 tons in 1860 to near 5,000 in 1890, and of steel rails multiplying ten times in the same years; total agricultural output tri pling

between 1870 and 1900. Agriculture showed the most dramatic and immediate evidence. A single mechanized farmer in 1896 was able to reap more wheat than eighteen men working with horses and hand equipment sixty years earlier. As output increased, more land came under cultivation (increasing almost fivefold between 1850 and 1900, from about 15 to 37 percent of the total area of the country), and the proportion of the agricultural work force (including owners, tenants, and managers) declined precipitously fr om its height of 44 percent in 1880. In the critical decade of the 1880's, the balance began its historic shift in favor of nonfarm labor; heavy Northern investment, in machines to produce cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, grain, and cattle (their steep profits flowing as capital into industrial expansion), stimulated this process of displacement into crowded cities already bursting with rural immigrants from overseas.

But such figures of expansion tell only the outside story. The inner story concerned not only absolute increase but a revolutionary rise in productivity. "We have increased the power of production with a given amount of personal effort throughout t he country," observed David Wells in 1885, "probably at least twenty-five, and possibly forty percent." In such figures the American propensity for mechanical improvement seemed to bear its most impressive fruit.

Of course, that propensity characterized the entire industrial world, but it had been a special mark of American manufacturing since its beginnings. With a scarcity of skilled labor, of craftsmen and artisans with accumulated experience in nascent industr ial processes such as spinning, weaving, and milling, American circumstances placed a premium on mechanical invention and improvement. Scarcity of skills together with cheapness of land had maintained a relatively high cost of labor in the young United St ates. Moreover, as H. J. Habakkuk has explained, the relative absence of customary work processes and of formal engineering and scientific academies provided incentives for invention, for the devising of machines and techniques to compensate for labor sca rcity. Without an inherited aristocratic social order, the new country held out more hope to entrepreneurs for social acceptance as well as material rewards. Many early industrial entrepreneurs had begun their working lives as craftsmen, mechanics with a knack for invention, and had risen to wealth and status as

a result of their mechanical skilI and entrepreneurial expertise. With mechanical efficiency a greater economic need in the United States than in Europe, and with business a freer field of endeavor, American inventor-manufacturers such as Eli Whitney and Elias Howe developed and refined the practice of interchangeable parts (originally in the making of small arms) considerably before their European counterparts. By the 1850's, the practical Yankee inventor-entrepreneur, the tinkerer with an eye on profit, had come to seem an American type, proof of the republican principle that self-taught men of skill and ingenuity might rise to wealth and social position.

The prominence of mechanical skill made it seem to many that the dramatic increases in productivity during the years of explosive growth after the Civil War arose from the logic of invention, of mechanical improvement itself. But new economic conditions i n fact marked a radical discontinuity with the past difficult for many Americans to grasp. The new breed of business leaders were often skilled in finance, in market manipulation, in corporate organization: entrepreneurial skills on a scale unimaginable t o most manufacturers before the war. Moreover, they conducted their daily business through a growing system of managers, accountants, supervisors, lawyers: a burgeoning structure of business offices increasingly removed from the machines and labor in the factory itself. The process of invention and technological change lay increasingly in the hands of university-trained engineers and applied scientists, representing an entire new institutional formation which had mushroomed during and after the war. And i ndustrial laborers now tended to be men and women without traditional skills, operators and machine tenders, with little hope of significant social improvement through their own talents and efforts. In short, the increasingly rigid social stratification t hat accompanied the dramatic rise in industrial productivity confused, angered, and frustrated masses of Americans, a growing percentage of them recent immigrants recruited into the very industrial system which seemed destined to dash their hopes of socia l improvement.

Technological determinism implied that machines demanded their own improvement, that they controlled the forms of production and drove their owners and workers. Americans were taught to view their machines as independent agencies of power,

causes of "progress." Machines seemed fixed in shape, definite self-propelled objects in space. In fact, however, machinery underwent constant change in appearance, in function, in design. Machines were working parts of a dynamic system. And the motives f or change, the source of industrial dynamism, lay not in phe inanimate machine but in the economic necessities perceived by its owners. Higher rates of productivity through economies of scale and velocity, through greater exploitation of machinery and reo rganization of both factory labor and corporate structures, were deliberate goals chosen by business leaders out of economic need. "Goaded by necessity and spurred by the prospect of higher returns," as David Landes writes, industrialists undertook a conc erted quest for higher productivity. That quest proved the inner engine of mechanization.

Even minute increases in the rate of productivity might result in greater market advantages. The American fascination with the machine either in its Promethean or in its demonic aspect tended to divert attention from the countless small innovations at the work place, changes both in machinery and the design of work, accreting into major new patterns of production. The belief that viewed "progress" as a relation between new machines and old, a matter of replacing the outmoded by the novel, obscured the tra nsformations of labor, of the human relation to production, each mechanical improvement represented. Technological change in these years consisted of a vast interrelated pattern of novelty, developments in metallurgy, mining, chemistry, hydraulics, electr icity feeding back into each other. The result was new materials-such as hard steel, new lubricants for high-powered machines, new abrasives for grinding, new machine parts such as ball bearings-and improved machines, turret lathes, and milling machines f or the precision-making of machines and tools themselves. With steam power prevailing in the 1870's, machines grew bigger and faster, and factories resembled jungles of shafts, belts, axles, and gears to transmit power from immense prime movers. By the la te 1880's, industrial applications of electricity had already appeared, especially after the development, by Edison and others, of a central generating source. Electricity offered new possibilities of conversion of power into heat, light, and motion, and permitted new efficiencies and economies in the design of factories, including decentralization, dispersion of

work areas, and assembly lines. In both the transformative (textiles, chemicals, food processing, glass making) and assembling (construction, clothing, shoe, machine making) industries, electricity worked major alterations in the forms of labor.

The most immediate consequences of changes in materials, power, shape and size and location of the machine, and the degree of skill necessary for its operation, were felt in the industrial plants. Unsettled economic conditions made manufacturers obsessed with efficiency, with the breaking of bottlenecks, the logistics of work flow, the standardization of parts, measurements, and human effort. Throughout these years, cost-accounting concerns became more prominent, until by the 1890's the corporate office v irtually dominated the work place, imposing demands for speed, regularity, and quotas of output. As a result, human effort fell more and more into mechanical categories, as if the laborer might also be conceived as an interchangeable part. Furious efforts to cut labor costs led to the announcement of severe work rules, the replacement of traditional craftsmen by unskilled or semiskilled labor: the effort, that is, to lower the cost of wages by increasing investment in the fixed capital of new machinery. S uch developments, including the redesign of factory spaces for the sake of greater mechanical efficiency, set the stage for several of the fiercest labor struggles of the 1880's and 1890's. The process of continual refinement and rationalization of machin ery, leading to twentieth-century automation, represented to industrial workers a steady erosion of their autonomy, their control, and their crafts.

In the record, then, of mechanical change lay an intermingling of production and destruction, the scrapping of old machines, old processes, and old human skills. An inevitable wreckage accompanied the "progress in manufacturing" David Wells had described as a "mighty river." That image hinted at unconscious meanings, the figure of speech disclosing more than Wells himself recognized. "Like one of our mighty rivers," he wrote in 1876 about manufacturing, "its movement is beyond control." All efforts at con trol would, "like the construction of piers and the deposits of sunken wrecks, simply deflect the current or constitute temporary obstruction." Wells employs such figures of speech to enforce his message against protective tariffs. Yet the figures intrude another message. The simile linking manufactur-

ing and "our mighty rivers" tells us, for example, that machinery shares a kinship with nature, especially an American ("our") nature. The simile also alludes to the association of machines with water power: steam had displaced water by 1876, but just sev en years earlier almost half the American manufacturing establishments drew power from waterwheels and turbines. In Wells's mind the process entailed calculated destruction for the sake of preserving profits. "Abandonment of large quantities of costly mac hinery," he explained further in an essay of 1885, is often "a matter of absolute economical necessity." Destruction of the old prevents "the destruction of a much greater amount of capital by industrial rivalry." Thus, the symbiotic relation between dest ruction and production illustrated a universal principle: "The destruction of what has once been wealth often marks a greater step in the progress of civilization than any great increase in material accumulation."

In these years the mighty river of industrial expansion threatened to take dominion everywhere, converting all labor to mechanical labor, to the production of commodities for distant markets. The spread of the machine meant the spread of the market: more of the continent and the society brought under the domain of political economy and its unconscious logic Wells explicated so vividly. Along with regional and local autonomy, age-old notions of space and time felt the impact of mechanization as a violent w renching of the familiar. As more efficient machine production required greater attention to uniform parts and units of measurement, standardization of basic perceptions infiltrated the society. And the chief agent of such cultural changes was, of course, the most conspicuous machine of the age: the steam-driven locomotive, with its train of cars.

It is not difficult to account for the prominence of the railroad as the age's symbol of mechanization and of economic and political change. Railroad companies were the earliest giant corporations, the field of enterprise in which first appeared a new bre ed of men-the Cookes, Stanfords, Huntingtons, and Hills-of unprecedented personal wealth and untrammeled power. Not only did the railroad system make modern technology visible, intruding it as a physical presence in daily life, but it also ofered means of exercising unexampled ruthlessness of economic power. In railroad monopolies, combinations, conspiracies to set rates and

control traffic, lobbies to bribe public officials and buy legislatures, the nation had its first taste of robber barons on a grand scale.

At the same time the railroad system provided the age with fundamental lessons in physical and economic coordination. Its physical plant in these years represented the very best mechanical invention and improvement: greater load-bearing capabilities, high er speeds, and longer trains, following from air brakes, automatic couplers, block-signaling apparatus, standard-gauge tracks. Although often overcapitalized in the 1860's (through "watered stock," a favorite device of Wall Street speculators), the railro ad system expanded into several national networks, providing major stimulation to basic industries like steel, construction, and machine making. In its corporate organization the system stressed coordination and interdependence, the railroad companies bei ng the first to rationalize their business offices into central- and regional-sales, freight, passenger, and legal divisions. Resolutely private entities, even though they thrived on outlays of public funds and privileges through government agencies, the companies organized themselves along strict military lines; indeed, former Civil War generals often served as presidents and directors of operations. They emerged by the 1870's as competing private structures employing hundreds of thousands of citizens as managers, civil and mechanical engineers, lawyers, firemen and conductors, yard and gang laborers. Models of a new corporate world, they seemed the epitome of the modern machine.

Their prominence in America also followed from unique geographical conditions: the vast spaces to be traversed as cheap land, before the Civil War, encouraged far-flung settlements. As George Taylor has shown, a revolution in transportation proved necessa ry before "the almost explosive rush of industrial expansion which characterized the later decades of the century." Unlike the European situation, where mechanized transport appropriated existing roads and horse tracks as it overturned an older society an d culture, here the railroad seemed to "open" places for settlement, for raw materials and transport to markets. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch observes about the American difference: "The mechanization of transport is not seen, as in Europe, as the destruction of a traditional culture, but as a means to gaining a new

civilization from a hitherto worthless (because inaccessible) wilderness." The American railroad seemed to create new spaces, new regions of comprehension and economic value, and finally to incorporate a prehistoric geological terrain into historical time .

The exact economic value of this massive process has been a matter of some controversy among economic historians, Robert Fogel arguing that the "net benefit" of the displacement of the canal system by the railroad being "much less than is usually presumed ." But there is no doubt that the railroad "increased the economic accessibility" of raw material. The railroads proved decisive in this era in facilitating that "interchange of matter" from one location to another (as Karl Marx put it), essential to industrial production. This change of location of raw materials and then of goods represented a radical breaking of spatial barriers, barriers of local and regional terrain and cultural difference. Thus, the external economy provided by the railroad in its increased velocity of transport included the incorporation of space and time as factors among the elements of production: the necessary act of overcoming barriers, of virtually annihilating space or distance by reconceiving it as time (places becomin g identified as scheduled moments of departure and arrival), emerging as the major capital industry in the age of steam.

The necessity of pushing aside old concepts asserted itself especially in the establishment of standard time zones in 1883. Until that year, "local mean time" ruled across the continent, as it did throughout the world. Each locale assumed responsibility f or setting its own time by tested methods of solar readings. Bells and clocks struck noon, for example, when the sun stood directly overhead: never exactly the same moment from place to place or week to week. Local life arranged itself in relation to the most influential community timepieces: church bells and steeple clocks, and after the 1840's, the cupolas and stark brick bell towers of mills and factories. The latter testified to a new importance assigned to time by the factory system, to promptness, r egularity of work habits, and most of all, to the conversion of work into time-wages occurring within factory walls. But stubborn local standards persisted, and overlappings of regional times set by the larger cities and local times in the hinterlands for med a crazy-quilt pattern across the nation.

The necessity of regulating times appeared with the railroad; especially after the first transcontinental hookup in 1869, the situation seemed increasingly eccentric, to the point of danger and economic loss. Obviously, a railroad passing from New York to Chicago could not adjust itself to the dozens of local times different from each other by fractions of minutes (11 minutes 45 seconds, between Boston and New York, for example). Railroad corporations set their own times. By early 1883, there were about f ifty such distinct private universes of time, each streaming on wheels through the countryside, oblivious of the others. Railroad-stations, which quickly became the most influential source of time in the larger cities, often displayed several clocks, each indicating the time on specific lines, and one declaring the presumed local time.

The issue came to a head in these years: not coincidentally, years of increasingly destructive competition in which the smallest factors of technical innovation in production or distribution might make the difference between success and failure. It seemed in everyone's interest to eliminate the disadvantage of eccentric time. The American Society of Civil Engineers joined with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and similar groups to give the approval of science to standard time zones. In 1882 the engineers reported: "Mistakes in the hour of the day are frequent. In every city or town, in every State, discrepancies are met which produce great aggregate inconvenience. Thousands of engagements are broken. Innumerable disappointments and losses result." In 1883 the railroads acted and, by joint decision, placed the country-without act of Congress, President, or the courts-under a scheme of four "standard time zones." This, of course, was "railroad time." Most communities adjusted their cl ocks at the railroad's behest (Chicago held out for a brief spell), and where local time did not immediately fall before the rush of the industrial machine, it remained only as a kind of twitch of residual "nervousness."