Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America by Howard P. Segal

Abstract

1026 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE breath fresheners. Specialist drivers and designer/mechanics were common, and the most successful cars belonged to entrepreneurpromoters who might or might not be their own drivers. The most successful of this new breed employed a blend of technological inge­ nuity and showmanship to achieve star status. The locus of drag rac­ ing moved away from California. Drag racing received its final—or at least current—commercial gloss in 1975 when Wally Parks cut the NHRA a sponsorship deal with the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, giving drag racing a firm commercial footing and enabling Reynolds to outflank the ban on television advertising of tobacco products through television coverage of races. The above synopsis only touches the highlights and is particularly deficient in technological detail, one of the strongest parts of Post’s account. His informed analysis of the often counterintuitive, and at times counterproductive, ways in which racers tried to improve power, traction, acceleration, and control is absorbing. So are his accounts of the clashings and meshings of the personalities who made the sport: his treatment of the entry of women into drag racing is particularly good. For the aficionado, there are exhaustive appen­ dixes listing speed and elapsed-time records, and the dates, sponsors, and winners of major events. The documentation is meticulous: thirty-seven pages of endnotes plus an essay on sources. The numer­ ous photographs, judiciously selected and beautifully reproduced, add immeasurably to the book (the dust-jacket color prints are gor­ geous). The preface, an insightful essay on the interplay of technol­ ogy and culture, makes an important historiographical contribution and is well worth reading in its own right. Even—indeed, particularly—if you have little or no interest in drag racing, I recommend High Performance as a classic study of evolving high technology in cultural context. John F. Guilmartin, Jr. Dr. Guilmartin is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University and the author of A Very Short War: The Mayagüez and the Battle of Koh Tang (College Station, Tex., 1995). Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America. By How­ ard P. Segal. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Pp. xviii + 245; illustrations, notes, index. $40.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). This is a disappointing book from a fine scholar. The occasion is the author’s fear that the spectacular weaponry of the Gulf War has revitalized the Whig theory of the history of technology: the convic­ tion that technological achievement leads inevitably to social improve­ ment. Following Leo Marx, Howard Segal believes that technological optimism stems from the desire to reconcile industrial imperatives TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1027 with pastoral longings. Unlike Marx, who thought that Americans gave up trying to construct a synthesis of machine and garden after the Civil War, Segal thinks that symbolic engineering still drives his­ tory and politics, and he subdivides Marx’s “middle landscape” into categories of urban, suburban, and regional planning. For Segal, these visions embody a complex conservative faith that technology does not fundamentally alter American social and political institu­ tions. He endorses that faith, arguing that technology reflects cultural agendas far more than it shapes them, and finds an ally in the late Lewis Mumford, whose proposed “Alternatives to the Megamachine” countered excessive optimism. Mumford promoted the viability of regional communities, decentralized lifestyles, and slower rates of change. Mumford also considered utopian thought an important tool of social criticism. Three essays in Future Imperfect look at fictional utopias that mute optimism. The first attributes the enduring appeal of Edward Bel­ lamy’s Looking Backward (1888) to its evocation of a nurturing regional landscape rather than technological promise. The second applauds Mary E. Bradley Lane’s feminist Mizora (1890) for suggesting that technology can fielp construct ajust society without becoming an end in itself. The third discerns in Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian Player Piano (1952) a nostalgia for a simpler technological era, that embodied in the 19th-century machine shop. A fourth essay, “The Machine Shop in American Society and Culture,” which contrasts the ethos of the autonomous artisan with the collective professionalism of the engi­ neering fraternity that superseded it, is the book’s...