| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 57

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Stephen P. Rice, Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America (Berkeley: University of California Press 2004)

STEPHEN RICE's book takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of strange and wondrous sights in antebellum America. Manual labour schools, health reform schemes, steam boiler explosions, and even a chess-playing automaton fill the pages of his monograph. Just when you might ask yourself what all these disparate people and things could have in common, Rice offers an intriguing and provocative explanation. In these unusual cultural and technological byways, the emerging middle class began to establish social and intellectual control of the nation's new industrial order. By deliberately discussing work, mechanization, and class relations in places often far removed from the centre of industrial change, new middle-class Americans could stake their claims to authority and power in less contested arenas.

Rice begins his study with a thoughtful chapter on the popular discourse about mechanization in antebellum America. He traces two competing visions of the mechanical future — one where inventors are almost godlike, machines are almost human, and factory "hands" are almost slaves, the other where workers retain the power to manage the machines and where the human brain controls mere mechanical devices. Needless to say, many Americans in the growing ranks of factory managers and other middle-class occupations tried to avoid conflict by arguing that the social relations of industrial production were indeed cooperative and not oppositional. Head and hand, mind and body, human and machine could all work together in harmony.

Mechanics' institutes and technical education could serve as one way to improve skilled workers' knowledge and status, heal the growing rift between manual and mental labour, and still secure managers' prerogatives to direct operatives on the shopfloor. Another educational innovation — manual labour schools which strived to merge physical work with classical studies — formed at the same time as the institutes (starting in the 1820s). Just as strong hands had to be linked with knowledgeable heads, so the thinking man had to have a healthy body. In a world of divided labour, Rice traces the struggle to build and sustain whole people through education, training, and healthful living.

What exactly constituted these healthful habits for the new American middle class? Rice pursues that question in a chapter on popular physiology and health reform. Here again, debates about digestion and dyspepsia that seemed far removed from the industrial workplace revealed a series of arguments about individuals and society withstanding the pressures of mechanical labour. In fact, health reformers often used the metaphor of the human body as a machine to encourage people to take better care of their own biological factories. Critics of the industrial system also embraced this image to talk about humans being turned into mere machines, and those machines breaking down under long hours of labour at a breakneck pace.

Rice's final chapter shifts gears (pardon the pun) and looks at steam boiler explosions and the engineers who tended those boilers. The problem of steam engines blowing up on ships and in factories was both a technical and a human challenge. Here was the danger of unbounded technology staring down at people: raw mechanical power without control, a hand of iron without any reliable head to guide it, physical explosions leading to social dislocation and death. Political leaders eventually responded to the growing carnage with some of the first federal regulations for worker training, workplace safety, and public transportation. In particular, a 1852 law required that steamboat engineers be examined and licenced based on their technical training and moral character. In effect, these men had to be expert hands and heads, they had to display high skill and status, and they had to bring themselves and the machines they tended under control. Thus, once again, Rice argues that questions of power and authority were inscribed onto seemingly technical or scientific issues where the middle class could solidify its social standing without appearing to do so.

Rice thereby returns to his core thesis that middle-class formation in antebellum America took place through this broad popular discourse about mechanization, and that these discussions usually occurred on the periphery of industrial change rather than in the mechanized workplace itself. But it was the very elliptical and metaphorical nature of this debate, and this process of a class forming and articulating its own identity, that allowed the new middle class to consolidate its power without constantly provoking violent opposition. Educational and health reformers, and crusaders for steamboat safety defused class conflict over industrialization by transferring the debate to seemingly more neutral territory. Rice posits that American workers did not always see the middle-class hands at work in these seemingly disparate discussions, movements, campaigns, and regulations — just as American audiences did not see the hidden man in the chess-playing automaton.

Rice's presentation is often rich, complex, subtle, and nuanced; but it also raises rather basic methodological questions. Start with the most fundamental matter of chronology: when exactly is "early industrial America"? Rice implies that he is following the traditional antebellum periodization of 1820 to 1860, but the temporal parameters of this study remain uncertain at times. Moreover, Rice often ranges back and forth across the decades in search of revealing sources and quotes, but then loses any sense of whether the discourse on mechanization (especially in the first chapter) changed over time. He also pays little attention to regional differences, or the impact of gender on men and women's perceptions of industrial change. One would think that, in antebellum America, Northerners and Southerners might have different attitudes toward the coming of the machine in their midst.

This study is clearly focused on middle-class formation; but that process did not take place in a vacuum, even when some Americans tried to move the arena for debate far away from the actual sites of technological and socio-economic change. How readily did workers acquiesce to this change of venue, or to the model of cooperative social relations between hand and head, mind and body, and men and machine? Were working men and women somehow oblivious to what the middle class was doing away from the factory floor? Or were workers insisting that questions of power, control, and authority in the new industrial order had to be confronted directly at the point of production? Open class conflict may well have been avoided because, to put the matter crudely, labour could not get management into the same ring to settle the score man to man. And all this metaphorical bobbing and weaving was exactly what the middle class wanted. But steering away from a fight may not be the same as consolidating your power, or fooling the other side so they do not know how strong you are becoming. Workers were probably often well aware that the middle class was trying to avoid confronting many of the problems associated with rapid industrial development; but labour did not have the leverage to insist that these thinkers and schemers consider the reality of workplace dangers — except when a steam boiler exploded.

Finally, there is also the question of intentionality. That is, how aware were all these middle-class folks about what they were supposedly doing? Did they have a clear sense that they were building their own power though mechanics' institutes, manual labour schools, and health reform campaigns? Rice is under no obligation to produce historical "smoking guns" proving conclusively that every American who enrolled in one of these efforts was trying to promote his own class identity. In fact, Rice continually explains that he is talking about an often indirect and uncertain process. But he also asserts that mapping class relations onto these less contested terrains was not mere happenstance. Middle-class Americans gained a safe haven to work out many of their own conflicted emotions and consolidate their claims to social authority. Yet Rice can never quite say how much these particular citizens were cognizant of their growing power, how deliberatively they built mechanisms for increasing their control over society, or how consciously they concealed their class identity even as they strengthened it.


David A. Zonderman North Carolina State University

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