Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 by Olivier Zunz

Abstract

362 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE analysis of the friendship between Edison and Ford that blossomed after 1915. Given the goals of this series, which is edited by Oscar Handlin, the book is a success. It is a boiled-down version of Matthew Josephson’s 1959 biography, amended and updated with the scholar­ ship generated by the ongoing publication of the Edison papers under the editorship of Reese Jenkins. My objections to the book will no doubt recommend it to others. This is very much a public life, which largely avoids Edison’s philo­ sophical and moral speculations. His inventions emerge as purely economic ventures, shorn of other meanings they had for the man whose library included novels and theosophical works as well as chemistry, and whose experiments occasionally veered in the direction of the possibility of thought transference. Melosi’s Edison is almost entirely a compound of economics and technique, and the American society that the book implicitly proposes is a nation driven forward by the cooperation of entrepreneurs and inventors, an assumption no doubt congenial to many readers. The genre of the life-and-times biography virtually dictates the fusion of the public and the private, eliminating or downplaying anomalies in order to achieve a synthesis. Such biographies have fallen into disrepute among many literary scholars, while they are still uncritically accepted by most historians. But if you want a short life-and-times biography of Edison, this is the best book available. David E. Nye Dr. Nye teaches at Copenhagen University and is the author of The Invented Self: An Anti-biography of Thomas A. Edison. His most recent book is Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (MIT Press, 1990). Making America Corporate, 1870—1920. By Olivier Zunz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. x + 267; illustrations, notes, index. $24.95. Modernization. Degradation of the working class. Bureaucratiza­ tion. Rise of the modern State. The Consumer Society. Whatever the label, historians have long recognized that a dramatic institutional and technical transformation took place in the United States between 1870 and 1920. For business historians the central phenomenon has been the rapid development of the modern, high-tech corporation. Labor historians have located here the origins of modern labor organiza­ tions, the deskilling—due to technological change—of the work force, and the advent of new roles for women. Students of professionaliza­ tion have reached similar conclusions about the decisive changes that took place in these years, as have scholars writing on educational institutions. Modern political reform along liberal lines also had its roots in this era. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 363 Olivier Zunz, a social historian at the University of Virginia, has made an important contribution to our understanding of the modern American society that began to emerge in these years, first with The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880—1920 (Chicago, 1982), and now with a book focused primarily on lower-middle-class formation in the wake of the corporate reorganization of the industrial economy. Drawing primarily on company records (Du Pont; the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad; Ford; the McCormick and International Harvester companies; and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company), supple­ mented by local papers and manuscript materials, Zunz skillfully delineates the impact of big business on the kinds of American people we can all remember from our own lives, the stories of our parents, and the best novels and movies set in turn-of-the-century America. We meet, for instance, Alexander Leisenring of Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, and the peripatetic Louis Wiener, a failed drummer who briefly worked the Illinois prairie country for the Arlington Collar and Cuff Company. We get to know Georgia E. Boyer, the Ford Motor Company’s first woman employee, and McCormick agent H. C. Addis, who said he feared grasshoppers more than the Grange in the 1870s. Lest you conclude that this is, like so many recent social histories, an interesting trip without an equally interesting intellectual destination, I assure you that Zunz uses his detail carefully to develop a general portrait of the lower middle class and to analyze the larger historio­ graphical questions scholars have raised about social...