Lord of Attention: Gerald Stanley Lee and the Crowd Metaphor in Industrializing America by Gregory W. Bush

Abstract

600 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE she makes a significant contribution to American history that elo­ quently demonstrates the necessity of addressing gender when writ­ ing the history of technology. Joseph J. Corn Dr. Corn teaches the history of technology at Stanford University. His most recent publication is “Work and Vehicles,” in Martin Wachs and Margaret Crawford, eds., The Car and the City (1991). Lord ofAttention: Gerald Stanley Lee and the Crowd Metaphor in Industrializ­ ing America. By Gregory W. Bush. Amherst: University of Massachu­ setts Press, 1991. Pp. xv + 224; illustrations, notes, index. $27.50. Gerald Stanley Lee (1862—1944) was obsessed with crowds. The “crowd” that tormented his imagination was originally a specter formed of unruly, un-Protestant urban masses, but it came to consti­ tute most of humanity. Lee spent his life, according to Gregory W. Bush, attempting to allay his misanthropic fears, straining to explain and control crowds. Struggling first as a preacher to revive the Puritan spirit in congregations he disdained, Lee eventually achieved a short-lived notoriety advocating “inspired” businessmen and politi­ cians and instructing them on controlling the crowds. By contrasting Lee’s modern crowd with his myths of old New England, Bush places Lee’s anxieties squarely within the context of disorienting industrial­ ization and urbanization. At first Lee tried to emulate the “heroic” Puritan ministers who harmonized communities with only their voices to carry their mes­ sages. However, his own preaching could not hold his congregations’ interest, much less control them. While he blamed materialism and the new popular media with which his puritanism competed, he also longed to use those technologies to project his own messages. Hence, in 1896, Lee left the ministry for “the pulpit of the book [which] admits of that more perfect freedom” his ambitions sought (p. 48). As Bush points out, ministers have often explored “new techniques of mass persuasion ... to evangelize a wider public” (p. 49). Lee’s own visions included reviving civic unity through rituals presented to the masses via motion pictures. What makes Lee’s story fascinating is his shifting interpretations of communication technologies and commercialism. Until the new cen­ tury, he saw himself as their victim and decried the declining potency of the preachers’ unamplified, unillustrated words. By 1910, however, Lee had empowered himself within the communication revolution by becoming one of its visionaries and apologists. He built a discourse replete with metaphors from technology. With these he explained the dulled modern minds that were “addicted to the dynamo habit” and tried to persuade them with “songs” of electricity, photography, and TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 601 mechanized power. Thus, the “poet of the modern man takes his cue from the silent machines the man has made. He sits at the feet of Electricity” (p. 83). Bush presents Lee’s “twisting” conversion from puritanism as opportunistic, as seeking new ways to control the crowd and to aggrandize himself as the prophet of elite agents of control. “Lee looked at what he saw to be the new power sources—technology, business leadership, and democracy—and readily found himself able to adapt his religiosity to it.” If, Lee wrote, a man “lives in an age of democracy, an age of crowds, he will make the crowd beautiful, or he will be crowded out of it. . . . If he lives in an age of machines, the machine shall be beautiful or he will be crushed by it” (pp. 83—85). Furthermore, “if our preachers are not saving us, our business men will” (p. 144). The means to these ends was “attention engineering,” that is, advertising and public relations. Building on this metaphor, Lee exploited technology’s legitimacy in the Progressive era to legit­ imate commercialism. He declared in 1909: “I would rather be an ad writer. . . . [T]he fate of the world is lying to-day in the hands of the men who can reveal and interpret their fellows, sketch them in big vivid words. . . . The man who can build sky scrapers with a sentence ... is the coming man. . . . To make men believe things without even seeing them . . .—the man who can do this is priceless” (pp. 124—25). Bush scrupulously explores Lee’s intellectual context...