UTILITY WITHIN UNIVERSALITY
The intellect of the philosophe, in either Europe or America, never actively despised the application of scientific principles to ordinary affairs of life. Thomas Jefferson himself complained to Thomas Ewell
in 1805 that professional chemists wrote unintelligible nonsense to each other, “while the arts of making bread, butter, cheese, vinegar, soap, beer, cider, &c, remain unexplained.” Yet the disciple of the Enlightenment was apt to be nervously apologetic about the practical consequences of his knowledge. A last stand, or nearly the last, of this attitude was made by James Dean at the University of Vermont in 1810. The original vision granted to human foresight seldom, according to Dean, exhibited the least promise of ultimate application; while the philosopher should neglect no prospect of promoting the convenience of society, he should think first of “the pleasure of the investigation, or the gratification of curiosity,” and so “when utility presents itself,” it should be treated like fame accruing to the man of merit, something that comes unlooked for, if it comes at all.
One consequence which we may find appealing was that in the Revolutionary generation there is displayed a disposition to account for the useful results of science as a proof of mankind's inherently benevolent nature. Machines that save human labor are not profitmaking devices but benefactions to the race. The explorers of science, noted Samuel Miller, have, while principally concerned with gratifying their liberal curiosity, incidentally contributed to “the abridgment of labour; the increase both of expedition and elegance of workmanship, in manufactures; and the promotion of human comfort, to a degree beyond all former precedent.” Men like Peale and Jefferson found endless satisfaction in the prospect of scientific agriculture because it would ameliorate the condition of man. “To produce the best effect of labor with ease,” exclaimed Peale, “how vastly importantl” In that spirit Jefferson scorned to patent his moldboard, wishing it to be a gift to civilization; Peale likewise refused to patent his windmill.
Yet even before these two sages had left the scene, commentators were showing signs of anxiety over a shift of emphasis. Timothy Ford told the Charleston Society in 1817 that he would not insult it by predicating the inducements to the cultivation of science “solely upon the grounds of mere utility,” but he also resented in its name an English sneer that Americans have made some few advances in chemistry, but always “in connexion with some useful and gainful occupa- tion/' that they “have not yet found leisure to pursue it as a science of amusement.” Ford’s anger, however, is directed not at the charge of excessive utilitarianism, but at the idea that Americans could not combine successfully both the practical and the disinterested. Rapidly thereafter speakers on similar occasions are reduced to protesting that they do not undervalue "“the natural and mechanical sciences,” and wish well to the comfort of mankind, but after all the main function
of science is moral and aesthetic. Walter R. Johnson published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute in 1828 a noble but obviously doomed series “On the Combination of a Practical with a Liberal Course of Education,” and in a still more noble speech of 1831 contended, “It may be important to subdue the physical elements, and make them subservient to our wants and conveniences;—but much more so, to subdue the chaotic elements of human society to the form of a well regulated community.” The pathos of this and a thousand other idealistic protestations is in their all being confessions that the world of science in America had become radically reoriented: there was simply no longer any place in it for the large and benevolent conceptions of a Peale or a Jefferson.
In 1829 J^icob Bigelow published in Boston a book entitled Element's of Technology. It should be honored as a major document in American intellectual development; it has not been so esteemed because, of course, the technological revolution already extensively under way when Bigelow wrote has proceeded at such a pace that his little book seems rudimentary. Yet it is indeed curious that the highly industrialized society of twentieth-century America can be bullied by humanistic professors into remembering Emerson’s Nature of 1836, or even to cherishing the candlesticks and spinning wheels of our preindustrial past, and yet will not bother to salute in Bigelow a prophet more relevant to the later economy than either Emerson or Jefferson. Young Dr. Bigelow in effect declared the independence of the nineteenth century from the eighteenth—of the practical, materialistic, hardheaded, utilitarian age from that of ideology and benevolence. He lived to remember, in 1867, that in 1829 the very term “technology” was unknown and that he had been accused of crass barbarism. In the later year he could note that there was a thriving Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and that applied science had advanced “with greater strides than any other agent of civilization; and has done more than any science to enlarge the boundaries of profitable knowledge, to extend the dominion of mankind over nature, to economize and utilize both labor and time, and thus to add indefinitely to the effective and available length of human existence.” Though some passages in his expressed satisfaction with his age seem to come from the philosophes, his appreciation of the saving of human labor has nothing in common with earlier benevolence: Bigelow’s calculation is tough and rudely commercial. In his delight over having proved a true prophet, there is no occasion for him ever to mention that Emerson was related to the age, or for his paying any mind to the animadversions of a Henry Thoreau against the march of technology. Of what profit could it be,
Dr. Bigelow and the Boston of his time might well have asked, to give heed to impotent whimpers against “whatever may tend to increase the facilities of subsistence, and the welfare of those among whom we live”?
Bigelow's boldness in announcing the new era, along with his gracious tribute to history for having borne him out, obscures the slow stages through which the gospel of science was, in America, converted to stark utilitarianism. Looking back from the mechanical order that ultimately prevailed, these tentative struggles may seem not worth recounting; yet they are memorable in the history of American thought. What I find most striking in these endeavors to come to terms with the process is the insistence that mounting devotion to technology is compatible with the universal, the cosmopolitan character of the scientific intellect, and no mere glorification of the nation. Only thus could the national conscience afford to become nationalistic, relieved of responsibility for proving itself benevolent toward mankind in general, and concentrate upon improving American technology, trusting other peoples to look out for themselves.
We perceive how the new voice answered to the echoes of the old in a lecture by Robert Fulton given in Washington on February 17, 1810, on—of all things—“Torpedoes.” The inventor of the steamboat, having triumphed over his long ordeal of ridicule, was now listened to with solemn attention, whatever he published read with excitement. Fulton’s conception of the scientist was of no philosophe but of an “inventor silently laboring in his cabinet,” one who receives the “appellation of a projector,” toward whom the sneers of contempt “are in proportion to the magnitude of the object which he has in view, and its range beyond the limits of vulgar understandings.” Benevolence has somehow evaporated while Fulton depicts the man of science as one at war with the inertia of mankind, one who is right when all the rest are wrong. Strong enough to bear the contempt of society, founding his theories on the laws of Nature, he it is to whom mankind is indebted for not remaining as uncivilized as the aborigines of the American forest; “This to a man of science is a consoling reflection.” Fulton may, as even his friends would admit, have been a bit soured by his own experience; but he presented himself and his confreres as a type quite different from Franklin with his kite. He taught the public no longer to envisage the scientist as the worshipper of cosmic order, but as the hero who sacrifices himself for a specific invention from which the community will eventually profit enormously, but which the generality have been too stupid to recognize. What then are to be the relations between technology and democracy? With the mere breathing
of this questipn there opened a prospect which Jefferson had never so much as imagined.
The conception of science as primarily a form of contemplation was inevitably transformed into a more activist ideal by the lure of the vast continent, especially after the philosopher Jefferson had purchased “Louisiana." Partisans of science were bound to see it as a challenge to the conquest of the wilderness, though it is remarkable that they moved cautiously toward this argument, as though reluctant to cast loose from the moorings of pure natural philosophy. Yet they, like the lawyers, had to align themselves on the side of a future which would be artificial, urban, and comfortable, which would not be diverted by Natty Bumppo’s lament for the desecrated forests. In 1817 a society formed in New York for the encouragement of domestic manufactures endeavored to project the Jeffersonian dream of human felicity into a world where men would not sit under their vines and fig trees, but would go forth to shops and factories:
There cities, towns, and villages, centres of intersecting orbits through which domestic commerce will revolve, shall rise and flourish. And whilst the plough shall trace the silent furrow, the mill shall turn, the anvil ring, and the merry shuttle dance. The exhaustless stores of mind and matter shall be this nation’s treasury. Adventurous man, triumphing over the obstacles of nature, shall search the recesses of the stubborn mountain. The sounding tools, and the voice of human speech shall wake the echo in the vaulted space; where from the beginning, silence and darkness reigned; and the rich ore shall quit its hidden bed, and sparkle in the upper day.
To any demurrer that however eloquently the vista was presented, what really was proposed was that science enter into the service of economy, the answer would be that by furnishing the Republic with factories, science would make of the nation “a proud promontory, whose base is in the deep, whose summit strikes the clouds; the storms of fate may smite upon its breast, the fretful ocean surge upon its base; it will remain unshaken, unimpaired—type of duration—emblem of etemityl" The problem, however, still eluded the rhetorician. Could this technological majesty join with the starry heavens above and the moral law within to form a peculiarly American trinity of the Sublime?
Another decade more, and the question would be radically altered into a query as to whether the stars and the moral law could any longer keep up with the dazzling light of applied science. We should not be surprised that the lawyer in whose mighty intellect we have seen the heritage of the eighteenth century refashioned to the needs of nineteenth-century America would also be the one to announce a happy reconciliation of the mind to applicability. Judge Joseph Story
informed tlhe Boston Mechanics’ Institute in 1829 that the outstanding characteristic of this age is “the superior attachment to practical science over merely speculative science,” averring that this is true even in metaphysics! The jurist was, if anything, more blunt than the physician: until recently. Story declared in Bigelow’s vein, scholars “looked with indifference or disdain upon the common arts of life, and felt it to be a reproach to mingle in the business of the artisan,” but when at last they grasped the idea that applied science led to financial reward, they began “to devote themselves practically to the improvements of the arts.” And a good thing that was, according to Story. Both art and science have prospered by this victory of common sense. “The manufacturer, the machinist, the chemist, the engineer, who is eminent in his art, may now place himself by the side of the scholar, and the mathematician, and the philosopher, and find no churlish claim for precedency put in.” Story, from Harvard, could tell an audience of factory laborers that this “fortunate change in public opinion” has made it not only profitable but honorable for them to ply their trades, and to tell them that hereafter they would instruct the scientists rather than the scientists them, because in manufactures the wit of man is tasked to invent “cheaper, thriftier, or neater combinations.” He does not say anything about wages.
Story, the very type of the legendary “conservative,” is here, as elsewhere, the classic liberal of his century. In 1836 a Congressional Committee investigating the Patent Office produced a report which gives a sort of official sanction to the technological era. It points out, in flat chronological narrative without any apostrophes to sublimity, that the War of 1812 had been a blessing because of the immense impetus it imparted to American manufactures. Since then, it recounts, the development of “human ingenuity” in this country has been more spectacular than in any other period of recorded history—including ancient Egypt. The congressmen were prepared to be as amazed and reverent as any philosophe before the infinite perfection, but the glory they beheld was no longer the Creator’s simple plan of the universe, but man’s boundless knack for inventing. For them science had become nothing but technology; they had no sense that in marveling over the miracle they lost what the true savant would have considered the heart of the matter:
Who can predict the results, even in a few years, of that spirit of enterprise which pervades the Union, when, aided by the Genius of Invention, and propelled onward by powers which she alone can bring into exercise? The very elements are submissive to her will, and all the endless combinations of mechanism are subservient to her purposes.
In this atmosphere, the language of a Franklin, a Rittenhouse, even of a Samuel Miller, becomes desiccated, and if it survives at all, it is only that the dried husks may be filled with a new moisture, “American industry and enterprise, guided," according to the congressmen, “by American ingenuity and intellect," have achieved in thirty years “what would have taken Europe a century to accomplish."
There is no need here for reciting an inventory of inventions and mechanical improvements which daily staggered the imagination of Americans in the early nineteenth century. Men like Bigelow and Story delighted to intone the list, as ultimately did Walt Whitman. Because the catalogue continued, and is still continuing, to expand, these technological dithyrambs from the age of Mr. Justice Story may seem merely quaint; but examined for their rhetoric rather than for their comprehension of the processes of change, they remain case histories of the growth of the American mind, as important for modern analysis as debates in the Congress or as literary creations.
Most instructive, I should say, was the quantity, range, and repetitiousness of the celebration of the glories of steam. Words ring countless descants upon the majestic theme—not to any particular mechanism activated by this marvelous “motive agent," but merely to steam itself—the pure white jet that fecundates America. The imagery frequently becomes, probably unconsciously, sexual, and so betrays how in this mechanistic orgasm modern America was conceived.
The parabola of language may be said to spring from Thomas Fessenden’s Compendious View of Some of the Most Useful Modern Discoveries and Inventions of 1810, a bold assertion of utility, albeit still so contained within the framework of the Enlightenment as to vouchsafe only a bare mention to the steamboat while praising at length the cotton gin. Yet he did say that the most valuable gift philosophers have given to the arts of life is the steam engine, and this because, in contrast to the compass, the telescope, gunpowder—which were “productions of chance"—steam was from the beginning “the result of reflection," with every subsequent improvement being “the effect of philosophical study." Indeed, during the next three or four decades, the legend of James Watt and the teakettle was inflated in America to proportions as great as that of Washington and the cherry tree. And the stupendous conquests by steam grow with the legend:
It is on the ocean, it is on the rivers, it is on the mountains, it is in the valleys, it is at the bottom of mines, it is in the shops, it is every where at work. It propels the ship, it rows the boat, it cuts, it pumps, it hammers, it cards, it spins, it weaves, it washes, it cooks, it prints, and releases man of nearly all bodily toil.
It annihilates space, brings the world to a unity, and all this mighty power is acquired by a “scientific” knowledge of the air we breathe and the water we drink “so as to make these familiar objects work for man.”
Clearly the progression from Fessenden to this 1846 Discourse of the Baconian Philosophy by Samuel Tyler was, at least rhetorically, an intoxicating revel. And other voices joined the chorus. Steam “as a motive agency” is the greatest triumph of human ingenuity, Charles Fraser told the Mercantile Library Association of Charleston in an address on The Moral Influence of Steam: “it seems to be rather the effect of discovery than the discovery itself, that so widely distinguishes it from all others.”
While sectional animosities augmented in the nation during the 1840’s, spokesmen from both sides appealed to possible forces of union; and just as on each side they invoked the Revival, so also they called upon the conciliatory offices of steam:
Something was wanted to give a practical effect to the prominent theory of our government. The philanthropist regarded it as the last experiment of rational freedom, and trembled for the result. But an agent was at hand to bring everything into harmoqious co-operation, to vanquish every obstacle, to crown all enterprise, to subdue prejudice, and to unite every part of our land in rapid and friendly communication: and that was steam.
These words were spoken in Charleston, South Carolina.
At the same time that steam was proving incapable of warding off secession, in New York there appeared a massive two-volume summary of Eighty Years' Progress of the United States, in which steam still reigned as the presiding goddess—and in which the Confederacy could have, and should have, read its doom. The scene presented was one which not even Fulton in his wildest dreams had pictured, for not only are ships propelled by steam, “not alone in the large manufactory, the gallant steamer, and the rushing car, does the vapor of water show its strength and usefulness, but thickly strewn about our cities and villages, delving in mines, driving the rattling press, it helps all trades, and multiplies the power of man a thousand fold.” Under its magic touch, so an agrarian South might have learned, cities have sprung up, “and everywhere we see traces of the king of motors—steaml” And the king of motors took precedence over the queen of the sciences, and utility fought the war which astronomy could never have won.
For the galloping triumphs of steam (our two volumes predicted that the time would come when steam would no longer “frighten horses in our cities . . . for there will be no horses to frighten”)
there remained only one term through which the human mind could encompass the marvel. “Its introduction and gradual improvement,” said James Ren wick in his Treatise on the Steam Engine in 1839, “have required inventive talents o£ the highest order, and the exertions of genius the most sublime.” It has already surpassed the brilliant conceptions of poetry and the wildest fables of romance. Even so, it promises “to fulfill yet higher destinies.” As another acolyte of the machine expressed it, “These are only the precursors of other still more sublime accomplishments reserved for human genius—the dawnings of that perfection which futurity will unfold.”
Steam was a particularly rewarding theme for such chants because it appeared to contain an especial affinity for America. Or at least after 1807 patriots talked as though it had, even though America had not actually invented the engine. They more than compensated by exclaiming, “The honour of converting the agency of this wonderful machine into a new channel;—of applying its energies to the propelling of vessels on the water;—was reserved for a native of our own country—for an individual on ‘the wrong side of the Atlantick;'—for the American Archimedes;—the immortal Fulton.” Henry Clay’s “American System” could hardly have been conceived without the aid of the machine, and so he above all other orators elevated it to glory. Contrasting it with the struggling, barely moving keelboat. Clay described the gay, cheerful and “protected” passengers (in all these panegyrics the appalling number of explosions and the slaughter of innocent passengers were discreetly not mentioned) as the steamboat rushes past the outmoded contraption whose “scanty cargo is scarcely worth the transportation.” And, revealingly, the beauty of this spectacle for Clay is that both artificial economy and natural sublimity coincide in the American victory: “Nature herself seems to survey, with astonishment, the passing wonder, and, in silent submission, reluctantly to own the magnificent triumphs, in her own vast domain, of Fulton’s immortal genius!”
Celebrants of the steamboat always dilated on its immense utilitarian consequences, its bringing the inhabitants of the world near to each other, spreading the influence of religion, civilization, and the arts; but from the beginning, down to the great scenes of Mark Twain, the steamboat was chiefly a subject of ecstasy for its sheer majesty and might, especially for its stately progress at night, blazing with light through the swamps and forests of Nature. The Claremont was described by some who saw her in the night, said Fulton’s biographer in 1817, “as a monster moving on the waters, defying the winds and tide, and breathing flames and smoke.” Almost always there is explicit
delight that in this device man has overcome Nature. As a salutation in The American Journal of Science in 1818 put it, this creature, stronger than the largest animal, more manageable than the smallest, propels itself “against the currents, the winds, and the waves, of the ocean," and so on the very bosom of these most overwhelmingly sublime of natural elements establishes “the luxuries and accommodations of the land." For this Journal, from its inception fighting for the independence of the American mind, resisting the currents of enthusiasm from abroad which elevated the heart above the head with its “romantic" praises of Nature against civilization, staked out its battle lines by calling the steamboat “that legitimate child of physical and chemical science." Nor with Fulton as its model need the Journal submit to any charge of gross materialism, for in 1806 Fulton had refused a profitable invitation from the War Department because, intent upon his engine, as he wrote to the Secretary, “I labour with the ardour of an enthusiast." As steamboats extended their sway from the great rivers to the Atlantic, there were many who with intentional malice exclaimed over what “a magnificent FACT" is an ocean vessel: “How completely such a floating palace transcends the wildest dream of which the builder of the gigantic Pyramids or even Archimedes himself might be supposed capable."
Less spectacular than the steamboat, but still offering similar possibilities for literary improvement into another demonstration of the intellectual majesty of applied science, was the factory. Here also the revolution in rhetoric and in mental attitudes is as violent as that in the economy. Hamilton's Report on Manufactures in 1791 may not have been quite as prophetic as later historians have made out, but for something over two decades it seemed entirely chimeric. The dominant, or the dominantly vocal, thinking was enunciated by Jefferson in Notes on Virginia, that “artificers" were the panders of vice and instruments for the destruction of liberties. As late as 1813 Theodoric Beck, addressing in New York a society for the promotion of “Useful Arts," assumed that no patriot could for a moment wish “that the United States should become, in the strict sense of the word, a manufacturing country," for the disease, vice, and “diversified forms of misery" in those parts of England “from whence our hardware and cloths are obtained, are sufficient to make the most sanguine advocate of manufactures tremble."
While the change that transformed the national intellect thereafter may be told solely in terms of technology and financial opportunity, in its own terms it made its way through two dawning recognitions: one.
that the machine was compatible with piety, and two, that the factory was a victory for pure science and not a degradation of the mind. John Griscom in 1819 told of his marveling within a manufactory of cotton goods in Manchester at the genius which could bring into subservience to mankind so many opposing movements. “Can it be possible that any man can contemplate such a train of machinery . . . and regard all this as the offspring of thought and reflection, and yet remain a materialistl" As this mode of thought developed, it utilized little or nothing of Hamilton’s tough realism, but instead tried to smuggle the cause of manufactures under the canopy of Jeffersonian intellectu- alism. A Philadelphia magazine devoted its short life between 1812 and 1814 to pleading the cause of applied devices because they “would extend knowledge of all kinds, particularly scientifical.” It advanced courageously out of the Enlightenment, expecting the universe of the philosophes to be strengthened, never in the least overturned. TThe “tradesmen of Great Britain,’’ it declared, meaning the factory owners, can now “furnish more profound thinkers on philosophical subjects, more acute and accurate experimenters, more real philosophers thrice told, than all Europe could furnish a century ago.’’ The writer, probably Thomas Cooper, dared to hope that Americans might construct factories so they might also learn a bit of “mathematical and physical science,’’ but doubted that they would do much because of their unfortunate penchant for political disputation. It may well have taken considerable courage for William Duane in 1811 to tell the people of Pennsylvania that the legislature should not feel it any derogation of their republican independence to borrow ideas from European nations in order to improve roads and factories, and thus to give to the “rising youth, of both sexes, the foundation of knowledge, love of country, virtue and industry; they can so direct the energies and resources of this commonwealth.’’
When we seek to comprehend the processes of the American intellect, in this as in later phases, we must dwell upon the curious fact that the technological transformation of an agricultural society into an industrial economy was symbolized in such propositions as “The time has already [1814] arrived, when a general diffusion of the knowledge of Europe on these subjects, cannot fail of being highly interesting and beneficial amongst us.’’ Analyzed into its components, this statement tells us volumes about that hesitant period, though even it is exceeded in revelation by the speech of another short-lived society in New York “for the Encouragement of Domestic Manufactures,’’ this time in 1817, which grandly exhorts the “artificer and philosopher’’ to combine their endeavors, “to walk by the side of practice,’’ in order that
in factories America may follow its destiny; "The head that conceives, will soon find the hand that can execute, and nothing of the stock of intellect will go to loss." Was there any reason, therefore, why a republic which already had an Eli Whitney and a Fulton should cower in chagrin because it had not yet a Newton? "The power of generalizing will follow as of course."
In fact, the nation might say—virtually did say—that it could boast one as great as Newton, though in a different way—Francis Lowell. His feat of memory, of going through English factories, divining and retaining in his head the plans of secret machines, seemed to his fellow-citizens an act of patriotic espionage beyond all conceivable merit. When he got his textile mill operating in Waltham, he brought to behold it one of his backers, Nathan Appleton, subsequently to be father-in-law to the sweet Longfellow; Appleton sat staring at the spindles, struck dumb before this manifestation of the sublime. Lowell, the customary eulogy ran, was a man of genius; if Michelangelo gained imperishable fame as the man who placed the pantheon in the heavens, then "surely the thought of bringing the workshops of Europe to our shores, and of doing it, was as great, and of more importance, to millions of our race."
As the progress of industry more and more demonstrated what benefits it could confer on the populace, its defenders needed less and less to fear frank assertion of its claims against the still-dominant agricultural interest. "Manufacturing may innocently be inoculated on the agricultural system, without endangering the morals of the people," insisted Edmond Genet in an address in 1821 before the Agricultural Society of the County of Rensselaer on new sources of wealth. And we may look to the added advantage that by encouraging our own manufactories, we will "cure the vices of foreign luxuries."
The time has come, said Joseph Story in 1829, when the mechanic and manufacturing power will form the great balance between commerce and agriculture, "between the learned profession and the mere proprietors of capital; between the day laborer and the unoccupied man of ease." Though Jacksonians would sneer that such words only showed how Story’s concept of justice was subservient to the Whig program, even they could not deny his open assertion that this "practical science” was not only a source of pleasure, a means of securing rank and reputation, but also "one of the surest foundations of opulence.” Spokesmen for New England rather gingerly advanced their claims to keep time with the whirling mechanisms, but when we find that in the 1830’s Edward Everett felt he could safely adorn this revolution with the pomposity of his oratory, we may comprehend how
thoroughly economic insurgence had solidified its position: it was no longer vulnerable to the fragile darts of a Henry Thoreau. These ingenious and useful “arts/’ Everett declaimed, are both the product and the cause of civilization, and they “form the difference between the savage of the woods and civilized, cultivated, moral, and religious man.’' Everett was no longer to be intimidated by the charge that these engines were the creations of merely the last few vulgar years. On the contrary, “there is also a great deal, of which the contrivance is coeval with the ancient dawnings of improvement”; and Everett could conclude, as though he had indeed completed a heroic exertion of his own intellect, that “the moral and social improvement of our race, and the possession of the skill and knowledge embodied in them, will advance, stand still, and fall together.”
His was a lapse into the atmosphere of his boyhood to suggest even remotely the possibility of “fall.” Yet it is a revealing one, for it shows how even Everett was not yet entirely comfortable with what had been wrought. Through the opacity of his sensibility we discern what the pioneers of industry thought they were doing for the nation and what the masses were being persuaded to accept, even though with muted lamentations. Speaking in 1838, he reminded his audience that twenty years earlier the whole area of the city of Lowell comprised but “two or three poor farms.” Not more rapidly was the palace of Aladdin reared by the genius of the lamp than was “this noble city of the arts” built by “the genius of capital.” For years Everett, and after him his lesser colleagues, was adept at reciting the splendors of Lowell; “the palaces of her industry . . . her churches . . . her school-houses . . . the long lines of her shops and warehouses . . . the comfortable abodes of an enterprising, industrious, and intelligent population . . . her watery Goliaths, not wielding a weaver’s beam, like him of old, but giving motion to hundreds and thousands of spindles and looms.” But as generally happens in the effusions of Everett—what makes him, precisely because of his, mediocrity, one of the rewarding witnesses of the time—he betrays that he is defending a conservatism which, by its very dynamism, is transforming the country into an awesome monster—and that the instinctive wisdom of the democracy distrusts it. He gives the plot away—except, of course, that it was never a deliberate conspiracy—when he goes out of his way to excoriate those who have denounced the “capital” that has been the agent of this beneficent creation. Such critics wage war against a system spreading plenty throughout the land, and what is this
but to play, in real life, the part of the malignant sorcerer, in the same Eastern tale, who, potent only for mischief, utters the baleful spell which breaks the
charm, heaves the mighty pillars of the palace from their foundation, converts the fruitful gardens back to their native sterility, and heaps the abodes of life and happiness with silent and desolate ruins?
Everett’s device of presenting the industrialization of America, especially that of New England, as a miracle from The Arabian Nights was ingenious, but his resort to such a fable almost leads one to suspect he had his inward doubts as to whether Lowell was quite real.
A similar mixture of incredulity, excitement, and apprehension informs the countless lyric paeans to the glorification of the factory. Because most of our classic literature of these years is hostile toward, or at least resistant to, the machine, we forget against what a background of loud hosannas Thoreau and Melville wrote. The interior of a cotton mill, said Samuel Goodrich in 1845, reduces the beholder to admiring wonder:
The ponderous wheel that communicates life and activity to the whole establishment; the multitude of bands and cogs, which connect the machinery, story above story; the carding engines, which seem like things of life, toiling with steadfast energy; the whirring cylinders, the twirling spindles, the clanking looms—the whole spectacle seeming to present a magic scene in which wood and iron are endowed with the dexterity of the human hand—and where complicated machinery seems to be gifted with intelligence—is surely one of the marvels of the world.
The dedicated advocate of scientific agriculture, Henry Colman, constantly adduced the triumphs of technology in his speeches at country fairs as a means of overcoming the farmers’ reluctance to tamper with Nature by the use of fertilizers. And adding his voice to the celebrations of the factories of Lowell, Colman in 1836 extolled operations which, by the simple revolution of a wheel, wrought ends never to be effected by human power: “and all this, with an exactness and precision absolutely perfect, I may properly add, sublime.’’ Furthermore, let none confound the majesty of this spectacle with that of mountains or cascades, for it has a nobler splendor. In the harmony and the subordination of parts to the whole, “where each part retains its place, performs its duty and supplies its contribution,’’ the machine constitutes a picture of the ideal society; and so he concluded, “The moral spectacle here presented is in itself beautiful and sublime.’’
Indeed, one of the more moving manifestations of the American mind was its long effort to maintain a belief that moral benefactions were conferred by the mills and factories. The prized showpiece was the Lowell system for recruiting, supervising, and improving young
ladies off the farms, an experiment which, it was being said even into the i86o’s, proved that “a factory entailed no degradation of character, and was no impediment to a respectable connection in marriage." There were, to be sure, occasional low murmurings about the prospect of "industrial feudalism," as Frederic Lincoln admitted to an audience of Boston workmen in 1845, avoided by the
improvement of each individual to his full capacity. Assuredly, it was no answer to destroy the machinery: "If the physical resources of the country are becoming so greatly developed, the more necessity then, that those of man should be brought forward and carried to perfection." (Again, it is worth our notice, "perfection” is attainable through both the machinery of the Revival and that of the factory I) The ideal of America as a frontier and agricultural society was still so strong that even when intoning their chants, admirers of the factory had to move with caution. There may be much truth, said Lincoln, in Jefferson’s assertion that cities are sores upon the body politic, "but he must be a bold reformer who would advise us to demolish our edifices, or plough up our streets." The hiss of the serpent and the scream of the wild bird which would then be heard over the ruins, Lincoln ventured to surmise, "would be far less pleasant to the senses than the hum of industry, or the noise of traffic."
We can, in fact, observe the Jeffersonian mentality coming to terms with the industrial—and in the act of reconciliation admitting surrender—in the readiness of John Pendleton Kennedy to salute the factory and the factory worker as achievements of intellect—“the higher work of the higher intellect, and each kind in its degree, partaking of the dignity inherent in intellectual pursuits." Whereupon he yielded even further, abject even beyond apparent necessity. Hereafter men will find less urge to make lawyers or doctors of their sons, for the glories of those professions afford no renown greater than those of the steamboat and the cotton mill:
When I look upon this vast enginery, this infinite complication of wheels, this exquisitely delicate adjustment of parts, and this sure, steady, and invariable result shown in the operation of the perfect machine; when I contemplate the tools and implements by which it is made, the abstruse mathematics that have been employed in them, and the extraordinary acuteness of the intellectual power that has invented and contrived them—I am lost in admiration of the genius that masters the whole.
Thus the patron of Poe, who in Swallow Barn blessed the genial, slow- moving idyl of the Virginia plantation, acknowledges the victory already w'on a decade and a half before Appomattox. Even so, we must note that Kennedy in no way cringes before an inhuman contrivance;
he retains his dignity, as his America strove to keep its own dignity, by enlisting the factory into the cause of the mind, by voluntarily placing the banner in its hands, as though those grasping hands had not already rent it. He was convinced that for every hundred men capable of making a figure in professional life, “you will not find more than one who is able to comprehend and apply the intricate science and practical detail belonging to the highest branches of architecture and enginery.” We may find this deplorable treason to American principles or admirable recognition of fact, or a bit of both; whatever it be, it exemplifies the kind of reasoning by which the mind in America signalized its uneasy alliance with the technological revolution.
There was for a moment some hesitation about admitting canals into the empire of intellect. Digging a ditch would at first sight seem a merely physical exertion when compared with Francis Lowell’s stupendous feat of mind. The great Robert Fulton endeavored in 1814 to make the inclusion of ditch-digging irresistible by saying that he then intended to give all the aid in his power to the “sublime” enterprise of the Erie Canal—“for I deem that a sublime national work, which will secure wealth, ease and happiness to millions.” He encountered in this undertaking the same sort of opposition, or, rather, ridicule, he had fought against with the steamboat. A committee of the legislature, headed by Gouvemeur Morris and including DeWitt Clinton and Stephen Rensselaer, observed that canals would freeze in winter as easily as lakes, but supposed, heavily ironic, that champions of these useless projects intended to supply water “by their depth of intellect,” thaw ice by “their warmth of imagination,” all the while “insisting that whatsoever they think proper to approve of is sublime.” In due course apologists for the committee were to declare that Morris had used the language of fancy and imagination instead of “the cool course of argument” (he had thought the alignment exactly the reversel), and explained DeWitt Clinton's signing of the report by the fact that when he had studied in Columbia College in the 1790’s, “Science had not yet taken its just and proper standing by the side of Literature.” Happily, according to his biographer, Clinton was led by such pleas as that of Ferr Pell in 1816 to perceive, in “the cool method of philosophic discussion,” that the canal was “a stupendous and sublime work,” and thus called for the highest statesmanship. All might have been lost, proclaimed The Mechanics Magazine in 1833, “had not the soaring genius of a Clinton, in defiance of the vulgar prejudices of the day, predicted and finally executed a work that will command the admiration of ages, and stand a cenotaph to perpetuate his name to a
grateful posterity.” For several decades after his death the name of Clinton imparted almost a magic aura, not for any of his political deeds, but because he was believed to have wrought the miracle of the canal almost singleharided.
The completion of the Erie Canal authenticated the stamp of sublimity. A report of the passage of the first boat on October 22, 1819— from Rome to Utica—described the ringing of bells, the roar of cannon, the acclamation of thousands of spectators, and could only conclude that “the scene was truly sublime.” Charles Haines, addressing himself in 1821 to the subject of the New York canals, felt it proper to begin with a review of the great events of the age—“the reign of Napoleon, the reign of George III, and the reign of Alexander of Russia,” but he went on to ask, “yet, where is there a work of their hands which will compare in grandeur and utility with the great Western canal?” A South Carolina advocate for a proposed canal westward from Charleston was so carried away by prospects of sublimity that he foresaw eventually “internal communication with the Pacific ocean” through the Missouri River, with the East India trade anchoring at the mouth of the Columbia River and merchandise carried all the way across the continent to Charleston by this sublime web of canalsl
Once canals were absorbed into the universe of mind, they like the factories encouraged a few brave spokesmen frankly to refuse any longer to utter apologies for the supposed poverty of the American mind. Did we live amidst ruins, remarked Cadwallader Colden in his 1825 Memoir on the New York canals, were we everywhere confronted with evidences of present decay, we might be as little inclined to look forward as are Europeans; but our canals flow into the future. Therefore we should indulge in no foolish laments over the rude wilderness. Thanks to canals, “Instead of uncultivated wilds, we shall be surrounded by a country yielding all that is necessary to the comfort of man.” Even as Cooper, upon returning to Jacksonian America, was expressing his horror of American restlessness, George Wharton was telling the alumni of the University of Pennsylvania that it was a glory of America that there everything erected by man is periodically pulled down: in this country we consider “that rivers were made by the Almighty for the purpose of feeding navigable canals.” The naiads of classical poetry may be shocked at this, but in our philosophy the only question is how the space between two points can best be annihilated. “The line of beauty is any thing but a curve; and the windings of a river are regarded as evidence of the ignorance and want of foresight of dame Nature.” And finally Henry Thoreau, taking with his brother the canal from Billerica to Chelmsford in their week on the
Concord and the Merrimack, could remark that “Nature will recover and indemnify itself and gradually plant fit shrubs and flowers along its borders. Already the king-fisher sat upon a pine over the water, and the bream and pickerel swam below."
The railroad was not, unfortunately, an American invention, but this lapse in the providential design was quickly corrected, according to the literature, because "we, in this country, may boast of our superiority, not only in the extent to which the system has been carried here, but also in the admirable formation of its various lines," as well as of our improvements in “the structure and management" of the locomotive engine. On the Pennsylvania railroad, beyond Altoona, the track ascends one hundred feet to the mile, and so short are the curves that the locomotive is visible from the fourth car during parts of the climb, and this at the speed of thirty miles an hour; “No other nation in the world can show so great a triumph of civil engineering as this." Yes, we commenced by imitating English models, “but American genius is destined always to rise superior to imitation, and it is, in fact, only when it so rises, and trusts to its own gigantic plans, that the true power of American character shows itself." Literary prophets had been proclaiming this revelation for several decades, but if according to general opinion the results in the arts were, by i860, confusing, technological patriots could point to indisputable successes. The English engineer imitates Egyptians and Romans, and so works artificially, but “The American imitates nature, with whose great works he is in constant communication, and, like a spider, constructs a bridge light in appearance, but sufficiently strong to withstand the tempest and the storm, and bear with easy vibration, double, nay, triple, the load put upon it." Significantly, this account concludes: “Only an appreciation of the grandeur of such a fall as that of Niagara, could fit a man to construct the bridge that spans its river"—significantly because it shows that down to the crash of the Civil War the mind in America could happily interpret the railroad and the factory not as rejections of natural grandeur but as legitimate offspring of its spontaneity.
Above all, the force of Nature, the majesty of Niagara, were transmuted into machinery and locomotives by passing through the brain of man. The American railroad was a creation both of vital impulse and of mathematical intellect, of heart and head, here fused harmoniously, as poets had yet singularly failed to accomplish (or at least so wrote a hierophant in 1857 who obviously had never heard of Leaves of Grass). There never before was such an achievement, sang Charles A. Drake of St. Louis, never such a creation in any land, requiring
such an exhibition of human power as the race had never before put forth. His language speaks for what the revolution had wrought within the deepest consciousness of the nation:
It was by concentration, action, and transformation. Concentration of thought, purpose, will, means, and men—not futile and impotent, but quick with life, and taking shape in action, and that action tending, not to rebuild and perpetuate the old and decayed, nor to hem in what is, so that it should never be ought else, but to transform it into something better, and in the transformation to make it give forth new qualities, and put forth new and more exquisite beauties.
An orator who in 1841 commenced his address by exclaiming, “What varieties of elocution are not blended to make railroads sublime 1“ was not reproving his predecessors but girding himself to surpass them. For the next twenty years hyperbole outdid itself. Edward Everett may just possibly have heard echoes of Mike Fink and Paul Bunyan, though we may be sure he would resent any insinuation that he went to school to the tall tale; still, the stupendous panorama of the American railroads carried his classical rhetoric far into the realm of popular extravagance. In the West, steam communication invites personification:
Here we should be taught to behold him, a Titanic colossus of iron and of brass, instinct with elemental life and power, with a glowing furnace for his lungs, and streams of fire and smoke for the breath of his nostrils. With one hand he collects the furs of the arctic circle; with the other he smites the forests of Western Pennsylvania. He plants his right foot at the source of the Missouri —^his left on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico; and gathers into his bosom the overflowing abundance of the fairest and richest valley on which the circling sun looks down.
Here was surely a creature to roam the land of the mythologized Davy Crockett, who released the sun from an ice pack and returned to earth with a piece of daylight in his pocket. The public speech of the period everywhere resounds with these addresses to the railroad—the steam horse who mounts the Alleghenies “and awakens the slumbering echoes of hill and plain with his shrill whistle, at once the signal of his power and the paean of a mighty conquest in the march of engineering science.” The similarity between such cadences and those of both the tall tale and of Whitman reveals the temper of the times in a manner which must again and again be brought home to the historian and social analyst, and above all to the critical interpreter of American literature.
It is therefore significant that Edward Everett, pronouncing upon
the “beneficial” influence of railroads, felt obliged to contradict William Wordsworth, who had held that the seclusion of the Lake Country would be ruined by the panting locomotive. He was mistaken, said Everett, with an implied admonition to recalcitrants nearer home; though the quiet of a few spots may be disturbed, a hundred quiet spots are made accessible, and while the bustle of the depot may invade some shady dell, many “of those verdant cathedral arches, entwined by the hand of God in our pathless woods, are opened, for the first time since the creation of the world, to the grateful worship of man by these means of communication!” Repeatedly we have to ask whether this sort of speech was mere fretwork embellishment of the iron rail or whether it played a more essential part in the intellectual development. Chief Justice Taney's opinion in the Charles River Bridge Case resorted to no such argument, and decided against the old turnpike corporations simply because their claims would prevent the states from availing themselves of improvements “which are now add- I ing to the wealth and prosperity and the convenience and comfort of every other part of the civilized world.” But we may properly doubt that such a prosaic decision could have been rendered and accepted l^had not the atmosphere been permeated with the mystique of the railroad as something more wild and unimaginable than the most lurid creation of The Arabian Nights —“our modem locomotive engine, with its mile length of loaded cars, rushing over river and valley and through the very bowels of the mountain, making its scared echoes reverberate with its warning scream.” The sublimity of the beast was entirely compatible with its utility, for in that very union was the guarantee that railroads opened to America an unlimited horizon, since nothing could be “more beautiful than a community made happy by well directed labor.” For so profound a romantic as George Bancroft the railroad proved that mechanics, science. Nature, and genius could come together in a single triumph which, in its ultimate meaning, was a work of art. Michelangelo, he said in Cincinnati in 1857, held that all forms of beauty lie hidden in the marble, awaiting the hand of the sculptor. So the eye of Latrobe saw the capacity of the mountain and, scoffing at the ravine, “gave himself no rest till commerce had carried its safe and easy pathway in triumph over the mountain top, and proved to the world that there are no difficulties which true enterprise cannot surmount—that nature herself is in league with genius.” In this philosophy, which dreamed of all things possible on earth if not in heaven, there was no remotest chance that things could mount the saddle and ride mankind, for man's conquest of the mountain was not a violation of Nature but an embrace.
Every year, every month, brought forth some fresh advance of technology, but the next major one was truly an American achievement. Morse’s telegraph “stands alone in its brilliancy, and reflects more of honor upon the age and country which gave it origin, than has been derived from any other of the results of physical science.” For a while, however, it evoked a transitory perplexity, as with this writer in De- Bow's Review of 1846, because it was a victory over the powers of Nature. The steam engine was a wonder for mankind, but there was nothing in it which refused to accord with our preconceived notions of natural possibilities. But in the applications of the electric battery there is something “so gigantic and stupendous,” something so far beyond “all the conceptions which had ever entered into the brain of philosophy before,” that refuge had hastily to be sought in the one concept which might still prevent the mind from riot and preserve Nature as a friend: “Can we conceive of anything more sublime or grand?” Miraculous, inexplicable as the experiment did at first appear, on second thought it too could be made to demonstrate the union, in technology, of Nature and the intellect, at least the intellectual genius. “Let us not forget,” continued DeBow's in 1853, “that a fragmentary knowledge of our new electric telegraph had existed in the human mind for hundreds of years; it needed only a master mind to unite the elements; a master hand to forge the mechanical instruments, to show the wondering world the perfect work.” Michelangelo again, but this time in the person of American Morse, who earlier had practiced colossal sculpture 1 A few dour souls, chained by formal logic to the prosaic earth, might be so staggered by this invention as to say, with Calhoun, that “the subjugation of electricity to the mechanical necessities of man would mark the last era in human civilization,” but they obviously were merely confused. They missed the great point, which after a few years of adjustment the dominant American voices were able to repeat interminably, that the telegraph was indeed the supreme achievement of applied science because its end was “not the modification or transportation of matter, but the transmission of thought.”
As soon as the telegraph proved a success, ardent imaginations commenced to dream of its extension into a transatlantic cable. Thoreau snorted that the great invention would serve only to convey across the ocean the intelligence that Princess Adelaide had the whooping cough; but nobody paid him any heed, and the public waited in assured expectation that the shores would be linked together and eventually “the entire earth shall be incircled, and every important city connected
by the wires of the magnetic telegraph." Even in anticipation, prophets were considering as already proved the thesis that nobody could set “bounds to the inventive powers of the human mind" save God Himself. In 1858 there seemed to be some doubt whether even He could, Cyrus Field's cable showed, wrote Charles Francis Briggs, “that nothing is impossible to man, while he keeps within the sublimely imperious orbit of Nature’s laws." Joseph Henry kept his language under sober restraint, simply pointing out to the Council of New York City that the cable sealed the definition of the nineteenth century as that in which “the application of abstract science to the useful arts, and the subjection of the innate powers of the material world to the control of the intellect as the obedient slaves of civilized man" were accomplished. Such a concurrence of circumstances and energies would not have happened at any other period. Less scientifically sophisticated admirers of the cable were thrown back upon a kind of superstitious awe. The Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett exulted from the pulpit of the First Church in Boston that now we saw the ultimate in man’s power over Nature, that “the swift-winged messenger of destruction, the vital energy of the material creation," is brought under our control, and asked in rapture, “Who shall now describe the circle within which human ability must confine itself?" Science seizes upon the mysteries that formerly surrounded us; nothing can baffle its persistent scrutiny. With obvious relief Gannett announced that the cable closed the era of speculative inquiry, inaugurated that in which “mind asserts its superiority over matter, not in a spirit of self-admiration, but for the sake of enriching life." Neither Gannett nor his congregation realized that if he was correct, then by the same token they had come to the close of an epoch in religious thought as well as in metaphysics.