| Reviews | The Journal of The Society For Industrial Archeology, 29.2

Reviews

America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings. By David E. Nye. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 364 pp., 26 illus., bibl., index. $29.95 hb (ISBN 0-262-14081-0).

The underlying thesis of cultural studies of technology is that innovations are more richly understood when seen in their social contexts. In America as Second Creation, author David Nye traces the stories surrounding four paradigmatic technologies: the axe, the mill, the canal and railroad, and irrigation. Each technology successively enabled settlement of homes, towns, and territories from the time of the early settlers down to the 20th century. The book surveys these developments and addresses their consequences through "foundation narratives": the stories that tell of how things came to be. It then follows the changes in these stories as society and technology evolve. "The narratives naturalized the technological transformation of the United States so that it seemed an inevitable and harmonious process leading to a second creation that was implicit in the structure of the world" (p. 6). Like the ancient tale about Prometheus, who stole fire for humanity from the Olympian gods and was punished perpetually, Nye's American stories describe, justify, predict, and critique our use of powerful tools. While the book focuses on the period of colonization through the early-20th century, the promises of technological expansion remain at the core of American attitudes. Taken as a whole, America as Second Creation reflects provocatively on contemporary life.

Nye is a social historian of technological America. A professor of American Studies at Odense University in Denmark, he has written prolifically on technologies of power. Nye is at home in synthetic scholarship, and his topics range from the national parks and world fairs to the space program and the atom bomb. His first book, Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at GE 1890–1930 (1985), focused on how photographic images became a tool of corporate ideology and identity. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology 1880–1940 followed in 1990, and three more books—American Technological Sublime, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies, and Narratives and Spaces—were published in 1998. All explore our fascination with the grand, technology-driven projects that have restructured both our planet and our psyches. As he notes in Narratives and Spaces, "this essay is less about [the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls] as it is about the self-conscious creation of points of view" (p. 13).

Points of view in America as Second Creation carry the high stakes of nation building, and Nye seeks to help us, as readers, to become self-conscious of our unstated agendas. He uses first-person accounts, novels, songs and films, painting and prints, advertising, and scholarship to uncover the origins and trace changing attitudes and conceptions. Paradigmatic voices such as Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, and Walt Whitman are cited throughout the book. Nye includes a respectable range of others as appropriate to each topic: Benjamin Rush on early settlement, Edward Everett and Henry George on land policy in the railroad era, and Henry Adams on questions of progress and decline. Women's fiction and first-person accounts, bits of diaries, and reportage are seamlessly integrated. The result is sometimes cacophonous but generally balanced, informative, and fresh.

Explanations of origins and "natural" order were, for millennia, a matter for religion. Emerging over generations, these stories co-evolved within a continuous culture and place. For European settlers in America, however, such a connection to place was impossible. An attitude of "second creation" developed in which, equipped with technology, "Man's duty lay in completing God's original creation" (p. 110). While alienation from local history was unique to colonists, other global factors amplified its effect. Changing concepts of space, changes in government, and new understandings of physics combined to secularize and rewrite stories about the natural order. Nye explains (p. 12):

The technological creation story rested particularly on four shifts in perception. Most important, traditional ways of dividing up land were abandoned in favor of an abstract grid. This redefinition of space was accompanied by a gradual rejection of regulated prices, an embrace of a free-market ideology, a shift from the psychology of scarcity to a belief in natural abundance and the adoption of a Newtonian conception of force, which was stripped of mystery or spiritual connotations.

The resulting idea of "free," infinite resources engendered a habit of consumption and expansion that remains dominant today.

As these ideologies were tested in practice, however, there were challenges and adjustments to their legitimacy. Nye structures the book on this dichotomy between dominant and marginal viewpoints. He devotes two chapters to each technology. The first focuses on stories of mastery and assimilation, and the second focuses on disturbance and dissent. Nye rhetorically asks (p. 41):

Were land, power and resources really abundant, or were there natural limits? Was there really a free market, or did monopolies such as railroads distort or control it? Was the space of America a neutral geometrical expanse waiting to be possessed and infused with power, or did Native Americans, squatters or other early settlers have valid claims?

This distinction between broad abstractions and local particulars, dominant and resistant voices, is at the center of Nye's approach. It is useful for research in material culture to sort out collective ideologies from individual circumstances, and polarities of strong and weak are certainly at work in culture too.

Dichotomies add clarity where the establishment of a farm may be contrasted with ravaging a forest by logging, or when productive mill towns may be criticized for environmental degradation and worker exploitation. The sources themselves, however, often speak with ambivalence. Irrigation projects, as Nye tells of them, were practically self-criticizing; the chapters on irrigation are distinguished simply by smaller private and larger state-run projects. As the narratives are assembled from many sides, we see that, while certain stories did dominate for a time, there were variants, rebuttals, and reversals. Above all, technological foundation stories were constantly evolving, inseparable from technological change. Most of this book is an exploration of multiple perspectives, and its structure does not always support its argument.

A wealth of material is packed into each chapter. In "Axe, Clearing, Cabin" we learn of the development of the American long-handled axe from its shorter English precedent and of its efficacy for clearing land. Both real and imagined "progress" is described by early observers Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Rush, Franklin, and J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and in the poems of Whitman and the paintings of Thomas Cole. The rustic log cabin is treated at length, from its early European origins (Swedish models proved best) through its role in legitimizing American presidencies. A remarkable set of engravings from the Pioneer History of the Holland Purchase of Western New York (1850) shows an ideal settlement sequence in four scenes. Each is centered on a cabin, first with a few animals among the trees, then in a larger clearing with stumps and outbuildings. The third shows a tidy cottage, fences, and a road, and the fourth is of several buildings, a stone bridge, and a carriage in an expanse of cultivated fields (pp. 65–66). The enthusiasm of the time certainly comes through these images and many other examples as well.

The companion chapter on the axe is "The Nurturing Forest." The clearing in the woods is here described as destructive of the land. Nye examines presidential candidate Horace Greeley (whose 1837 election newspaper was called The Log Cabin), John Muir, Edward Abbey, and the late-20th-century novels Ecotopia and Tracks. Forest management is touched on, and the stories of Native Americans are mentioned, but only in passing. We gain some perspective on current logging battles by reading the protests to deforestation and desertification in the 1850s from the U. S. Census Bureau and authors George Perkins Marsh, Frederick Starr, and Allen Lapham. In 1914 Paul Bunyan, a friendly giant with a blue ox, became the advertising image for the Red River Lumber Company. As a paragon of gentle strength, he marked a maturing of one strand of the axe story, the eco-friendly lumber company. The log cabin is revisited in several versions: first as a hovel for poor slaves (Olmsted, during a tour in the South), then as an image of dignity (Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin), and finally as the building style for National Park architecture. Along the way Henry Thoreau fans will learn, happily, that his cabin was constructed of previously used boards. "By 1900, the same axe that in the 1830s had been a new technology enabling the individual to carve a family farm out of the wilderness had become a representation of a simple life that had slipped away" (p. 90). Just as Americans rewrote the foundation story of railroading once we had adopted automobiles and trucks, the story of the axe has been recast in reaction to the suburbs, on the one side, and the National Parks, on the other. Looking back at the four scenes of settlement from the Pioneer History, it is ironic that New England has now more or less reversed that order of settlement back to the ideal of a lone cabin in the woods.

Networks of fascinating and shifting stories are repeated differently in subsequent chapter pairs on mill, canal and rail, and irrigation. This range of voices set side by side allows for some penetrating observations. For example, when describing the tangled state efforts to settle the West by coupling homesteading to irrigation works, Nye notes, "the national survey had chopped up the West into units too small for grazing but too large for irrigation, and the inherited common law had been devised to ensure equity in the well-watered world of rural England" (p. 241). While single-issue scholarship is essential for preserving knowledge of former life ways as well as for testing the accuracy of our records, the synthesis that Nye practices points to the causes and consequences of these issues and so to their larger social meanings.

The strengths and weaknesses of America as Second Creation arise together. The book suffers from its ambitious breadth, weak structure, and anecdotal indulgences. The reproductions are poorly printed, material is frequently under analyzed, and the many examples seem at times like random samples from an infinite field. But such a range provides much provocative interest, both in detail and in argument, and there are many insights into the social dynamics of material culture. Nye sincerely seeks to understand how our enthusiasm for technology has been shaped and sustained. As in Nye's other works, this book demonstrates our dependence on stories to understand our world. As tourists or historians of technology, we are always reading, or rewriting, another version.


	Todd Gilens

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