Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology by David E. Nye

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 595 Given the trend in current history books, I almost missed not getting bogged down and irritated by the incomprehensiblejargon of some other discipline. Happily, Platt writes clearly and the organiza­ tion carries the reader forward smoothly. The book is the product of painstaking research, vast reading, and careful thought. Students of city building, technological diffusion, business organization, and energy developments, among others, will value it, and it will be used at particular points in recent U.S. history courses. John G. Clark Dr. Clark is professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. His two most recent works are Energy and the Federal Government (1987) and The Political Economy ofInternational Energy (1990). Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology. By David E. Nye. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Pp. xv + 479; illustra­ tions, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95. In the best tradition of the social constructivist approach to the history of technology, Electrifying America details the story of how electricity became part of American life in the home, on the farm, in the factories, and in our consciousness. Drawing on technical reports as well as on popular literature and the arts, David Nye makes clear how Americans expressed ambivalence toward new electrified tech­ nologies: they cherished the new powers and conveniences that electrification brought while despairing, for example, over the way large businesses used electrical devices to control workers in factories. Technology and social concerns are the highlight of the book, which emphasizes the period from about 1880 to 1940. In its discussion of the emergence of streetcars, for example, the book describes the tech­ nical features of the vehicles that made them preferable to horsedrawn carriages. But most interesting, perhaps, is the discussion of how streetcar companies did more than simply transport people; they created new environments for work and play. By bringing people from outlying areas into city centers, they helped make possible shopping centers dominated by large department stores. And to create passen­ ger loads during lax ridership times and to provide demand for elec­ tricity during off-peak hours, the companies built amusement parks at the ends of trolley lines. At these parks, the normal social order was overturned, argues Nye. The companies “inverted central values of American society—thrift, sobriety, restraint, order, and work—and exploited technology for pleasure” (p. 129). Nye’s emphasis on electrification as a social process—and the individual and collective choices made by the masses of people—is highlighted in the chapter on the city of Muncie, Indiana. As a microcosm, Muncie witnessed its factories reorganized through the use 596 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE of electric motors and lights, its streets and homes illuminated effi­ ciently with incandescent bulbs, its workers displaced by some newly electrified industries and reemployed in businesses that emerged when electricity became widely available. Nye also effectively describes the social effects of radio’s entrance into the home: the device provided important communications links to the outside world, especially for farmers. And Muncie even makes a good case study of utility mis­ management and corruption in the 1880s and 1890s. In short, Nye shows how electrification enabled a host of transformations in Muncie and, by extension, in other American communities. The book’s success also depends on its cross-national studies. Electrification in the United States did not occur exactly as in other countries. Americans centralized electric power and depended on a marketplace to distribute a useful commodity. Often, the market theory meant that rural citizens did not enjoy the benefits of electri­ fication, since farmers could not (in the eyes of utility executives) justify the cost of building distribution systems to them. In other countries, governments organized systems that ensured electrical equity among all citizens, regardless of their distance from central power plants. As Nye points out, the American government in the 1930s, through the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Elec­ trification Administration, for example, stepped in and remedied the inequities of the marketplace but only many years after European governments had done so. Because it focuses on the social aspects of electrification, Nye’s book makes an excellent companion to Thomas R...