Samuel F. B. Morse by Paul J. Staiti

Abstract

602 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Led by the Goncourt brothers, the French elites sought an alterna­ tive to the spiritually deadening industrial culture in an imaginative revival of 18th-century crafts. Their interest was fueled by a pressing concern to create highly personalized, organically designed domestic spaces as a buffer from the nervous exhaustion and mechanized routine of urban industrial life. The decline of France’s status vis-à-vis other industrial countries and new diplomatic alliances led some members of government circles to identify French craft production as a national patrimony whose revitalization would be the country’s salvation. Unlike the rapidly industrializing societies of England, Germany, and the United States, craft production in France after the Revolution of 1789 had remained well developed and could boast a highly skilled work force supported by wealthy patrons and the state. Producers of luxury crafts were open to modernizing their products through the use of new technologies such as mechanical saws. A private organization, the Central Union of the Decorative Arts, helped shift the character of design by urging that women take the lead in luxury-craft production and consumption and called for a feminization ofartistic expression. Decorative-arts reform culminated at the 1900 Paris exposition with Siegfried Bing’s Pavilion of Art Nouveau. Silverman’s book is rich in ideas that help move the question of the relationship between art and technology from the periphery to the center of discussions about the role of the arts in industrializing society. One of the innovative subthemes is the relationship between new psychological concepts of the irrational and innovations in artistic practice and imagery. It can be argued that the systematic use of special graphic techniques to gain access to the subconscious belongs to a technological age whose ethos defines all human activity as fundamentally mechanistic and utilitarian. In the discussion of the moral dichotomy contemporaries established between an unnatural geometric industrial style and a “natural” craft style, Silverman points out that the latter was really artificial. Supporters of the new style viewed “making art” as a strategy for dealing with industrial life. Miriam R. Levin Dr. Levin is the author of Republican Art and Ideology in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1986) and teaches in the Program in the History of Technology and Science at Case Western Reserve University. Samuel F. B. Morse. By Paul J. Staiti. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xx + 298; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliog­ raphy, index. $50.00. On first encountering PaulJ. Staid’s monograph, SamuelF. B. Morse, the student of the history of technology in the United States may well TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 603 wonder whether he has wandered into the wrong library stall, for the greater part of Staiti’s study is concerned with Morse’s art. Yet, despite its aesthetic thrust, this book should interest scholars concerned with technology and culture. Satisfied that the history of the telegraph has been adequately handled by such scholars as Carleton Mabee (The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse [1943]) or Daniel J. Czitrom (Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan [ 1982]), Staid has instead devoted himself to the question: “in what ways, both spiritual and conceptual, did technology follow logically from paint­ ing?” (p. 222). His discussion of Morse’s art is designed to provide an aesthetic and intellectual context for Morse’s famous invention. Religion provides the intellectual framework for Morse’s artistic and technological concerns. Educated in a rigorous Calvinism by a father who was one of the main architects of the Second Great Awakening, Morse absorbed the evangelicalism of that moral crusade together with its elitism, nationalism, and empiricism. Painting, in Morse’s view, was “the agent of redemption, and society [was] its target” (p. 7). Art, life, and eventually invention emanated from “divine wisdom” (p. 222). The telegraph was “the most explicit demonstration of God’s benevolent design for the future of man­ kind,” and Morse was the “high priest” responsible for creating a machine that spoke “the mythological voice of Jehovah.” Art and technology were “Christian instruments” that redeemed and unified society by “carrying divine messages of ‘peace and love’ ” and has...