Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939 by John M. Jordan

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 423 evoke the sense of family fostered in many who lived there and who had not experienced the feeling before or since the dam building. The juxtaposition of a worker’s description of running the number eleven cableway across the top of the dam site, feet hooked into a rope and hanging hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, with his memory of going home, dead tired, to a house where the wind blew so hard the sand came in through the cracks and covered his face by the time he awoke, tells us perfectly what it was like to be part of the construction of the world’s greatest dam. Those interested in the technology of dam building will find Build­ ing Hoover Dam one of the best books on the subject; those interested in the culture of constructing large, ambitious projects will find this work equally satisfying. Karen L. Smith Dr. Smith is manager of Water Resources Management of the Salt River Project, Phoenix, Arizona, and the author of The Magnificent Experiment: Building the Salt River Reclamation Project, 1890—1917 (Tucson, Ariz., 1986). Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911— 1939. By John M. Jordan. Chapel Hill: University of North Caro­ lina Press, 1994. Pp. xv + 332; illustrations, notes, index. $39.95. John M. Jordan has taken as his theme the ideas of the “rational reformers” of the early 20th century who, contemplating the wealth of goods produced by industrial technology and shocked at the in­ equity and social conflict that persisted amid abundance, sought rem­ edies in the methods of science and engineering: the discovery of “facts” and “laws” that could solve not only problems of machine production but of human society as well. On some aspects of this movement a good deal has been written, but, relying on the papers of a number of exponents and on a wide range of secondary litera­ ture, Jordan has tried to pull together various sources into a compre­ hensive account of an intellectual current that flourished in certain circles in the 1920s, inspired much talk and some action in the New Deal, and fizzled out in the late 1930s. Adopting a personal approach, he analyzes the statements and theories of prominent engineers, writ­ ers, and scholars. After a discussion of prewar figures, especially Thorstein Ve­ blen—a major influence—Jordan describes the enthusiasm of many reformers for the wartime state-directed effort toward victory. (In reality, remarks the author, they believed in “the myth of a coherent system that never existed . . . the American technocratic dream was an illusion” [p. 103].) In the 1920s, “a curiously apolitical reform spirit” (p. 100) permeated public discussion as theorists of “social control” and “social engineering” gained self-confidence and prestige. Among such disparate personalities as Herbert Hoover, John Dewey, 424 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Rexford Guy Tugwell, William F. Ogburn, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Charles Merriam, and Mary Van Kleeck, Jordan traces a common thread of scientism and, with some exceptions, a tendency to elitism. Of particular interest are accounts of the role of foundations, espe­ cially the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, which funded The Encyclopaedia of Social Science and Recent Social Trends, and of differ­ ences among reformers on the social responsibilities of “science.” As Jordan observes (with Harold Laski), foundation aid tended to con­ fine investigations within the established order. After 1930, Jordan points out, the “social engineering model . . . enjoyed growing support” (p. 207). Among writers outside the New Deal, he considers carefully Charles Beard and John Dewey; the lat­ ter, though devoted to democracy, “provided logical justification to less democratic writers with whom he disagreed” (p. 231). Jordan’s treatment of the New Deal itself, however, is superficial and oddly selective. The National Recovery Administration, which, though hardly a “plan,” in its failure discredited the concept of planning, deserves more attention, and Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration receives only passing notice. While picking out absurdities in Arthur E. Morgan’s “Ethical Code,” Jordan devotes little space to the visions of Morgan, Morris L. Cooke, and others of a countryside transformed by networks of electric power and provides no appraisal of the results of their...