| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Stephen P. Rice. Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 230. $49.95.
In this highly original and creative book, Stephen P. Rice uses a number of unusual sources to address the question of how "members of a nascent middle class manage[d] to promote and defend their social authority in the face of troubling and divisive questions about work and mechanization" (p. 4). In doing so he brings new insights to three well-studied aspects of antebellum American history: labor relations, class formation, and the impact of industrial technology.	1
Analysis of what might be described as the "head and hand" analogy forms the core of this volume. Daniel Webster used a variant of it when he told the Boston Mechanics' Institution about the need "to facilitate the co-operation of the mind with the hand" (p. 57). Rice convincingly demonstrates that these and other observations made at mechanics' institutes should be understood to refer to cooperation between managers ("heads") and workers ("hands"). Similar concerns animated antebellum educators who created manual labor schools such as Lafayette College to insure that future managers worked with their hands as well as their minds. Popular physiology textbook writers and speakers such as health guru Sylvester Graham also stressed the importance of physical exertion in coordinating mental and manual functions. For Rice, these and other examples represent a conservative, middle-class movement to emphasize social harmony and downplay conflict between mental labor(ers) and physical labor(ers). Unlike working-class radicals such as Seth Luther, who stressed the opposition between laborers and managers, these generally middle-class proponents of cooperation between head and hand hoped to legitimate their managerial authority while acknowledging the important role played by the hands.	. . .

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