“Society Improved the Way You Can Improve a Dynamo”: Charles P. Steinmetz and the Politics of Efficiency

Abstract

“Society Improved the Way You Can Improve a Dynamo”: Charles P. Steinmetz and the Politics of Efficiency JOHN M. JORDAN In the early decades of this century, when American technological development contributed to one wing of the Progressive movement a vocabulary of reform, Charles Proteus Steinmetz occupied a special position relevant to both technology and reform. As the second-bestknown electrical scientist in the country after Thomas Edison, Stein­ metz came to symbolize the era’s spirit of technical achievement, par­ tially through his development of a spectacular lightning generator. As an employee of the most powerful electrical-equipment firm in the country, he generalized from his experiences to devise a social theory calling for the replacement of America’s elected national government by corporate functionaries. As a non-Marxian socialist for his entire adult life, Steinmetz challenged class-based radicalism with a reformist politics that he felt could overcome class antagonism. So perceptive a cultural radical as Randolph Bourne found Steinmetz’s corporatist political reformulation compelling. The means by which a technical expert came to play such a sustained part in social and political thought are primarily linguistic. And no single word was more vital to Steinmetz’s eminence than the word “efficiency.” It provided the semantic adhesive that bonded all of his utterances about state and society. Efficiency, of course, is a simple mathematical relationship between parts of a machine process. Was society therefore a machine? It would seem so; Steinmetz wrote con­ sistently and vigorously in this metaphorical light.1 When society is a Dr. Jordan recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is completing a book on engineering and American political discourse. He thanks the readers of the essay—David Hollinger, Ronald Kline, David Nichols, John Staudenmaier , James Turner, and George Wise—and the Technology and Culture referees. Tor a helpful discussion of technological metaphor, see D. O. Edge, “Technological Metaphor,” in Meaning and Control: Essays in Social Aspects of Science and Technology, ed. D. O. Edge and J. H. Wolfe (London, 1973), pp. 31—59.© 1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3001 -0002$01.00 57 58 John M. Jordan machine, the premises of engineering—faith in the direct efficacy of logic, objectivity, certification of expertise, and quantitative preci­ sion—come to be the premises of social thought as well.2 Who better to organize such a society than a designer of machines: the engineer? While this literal application of logic rarely took hold, the lasting importance of engineering’s language and values to social thought has thus far been underestimated. While the political career of Her­ bert Hoover is the greatest example of this process, the writings of Charles Steinmetz illustrate the seepage of technical language into political discourse slightly earlier.3 His public visibility, his self­ consciously political use of engineering discourse, and his seemingly contradictory affinity with literary utopianism command attention as episodes in the linguistic transformation of technical reason into a tool of social organization. * * * As the son of a minor railway worker in Breslau, Germany, born in 1865, Steinmetz seems to have had an uneventful childhood. An apparently inherited hunchback caused relatives, especially his grand­ mother, to pamper him. At gymnasium, Steinmetz graduated first in his class, having mastered both mathematics and the Greek classics. Five years at the University of Breslau brought two important devel­ opments: Steinmetz completed the course work and thesis require­ ments for a doctorate in mathematics, and hejoined a group of young Socialists in the midst of Bismarck’s crackdown on the Left. Because he had to flee to Switzerland to avoid arrest for his political activities, Steinmetz never received his Breslau diploma. Yet the excellence and breadth of his technical education were to suit him well to America’s expanding electrification. Steinmetz, despite his physical deformity, was a gregarious sort and longed throughout his life for human fellowship. Partly because the Breslau student Socialists quickly and heartily embraced Steinmetz as one of their number, he often referred to these days as his life’s best. He edited the group’s newspaper for several months in early 1887 when one of its...