Streamlining America: A Henry Ford Museum Exhibit ed. by Fannia Weingartner

Abstract

174 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE mine current historical understanding of the movement, and, as a re­ sult, we learn little that is new about such familiar figures as Elbert Hubbard or Gustav Stickley. But Boris provides a wealth of telling de­ tail about many less familiar persons, institutions, and issues, includ­ ing societies that provided public schools with “uplifting” (and, ironically, mass-produced) art reproductions, art potteries that sur­ vived economically only by introducing Taylorist efficiency mea­ sures, lacemaking establishments that self-consciously sought to preserve peasant crafts but paid lower piecework rates than the gar­ ment industry in general, and experimental agrarian guilds that devolved into fashionable summer art colonies. Although these numerous biographical sketches and institutional case studies tend to become predictable in format as the book proceeds, Boris ar­ ranges them according to an overall structure that leads the reader progressively through her argument. She concludes that, even if the American arts and crafts movement never truly understood or confronted the problems of labor in industrial capitalism and eventu­ ally stimulated an upper-class search for beauty through mass pro­ duction, the craftsman ideal continues to inspire individuals who are not even aware of its origins. Jeffrey L. Meikle Dr. Meikle is associate professor of American studies and art history at the Univer­ sity of Texas at Austin. He has written on American industrial design and is now at work on a cultural history of plastics in the United States. Streamlining America: A Henry Ford Museum Exhibit. Edited by Fannia Weingartner. Dearborn, Mich.: Henry Ford Museum and Green­ field Village, 1986. Pp. 100; illustrations, bibliography. $19.95+ $1.50 handling (paper). Although prepared in conjunction with a “Streamlining America” exhibit (reviewed earlier in this issue), this volume is much more than an exhibit catalog. The book develops interpretations of stream­ lining that are more comprehensive, critical, and sophisticated than the ones presented in the exhibit proper but at the same time pro­ vides the reader with a nice summary of the exhibit as well. It is a col­ lection of six profusely illustrated essays, which, Henry Ford Museum President Harold Skramstad, Jr., notes in his preface, “are somewhat divergent in their points of view.” In the introductory essay, “The Beginning of the Streamlined Dream,” John L. Wright argues that streamlining became a broad cul­ tural symbol of modernity and futurism during the mid-1930s. Sev­ eral important examples of streamlined design burst on the American scene in a brief period and had enormous influence—the Chrysler Airflow (1934), the Queen Mary (1934), the streamlined trains City of Salina and Zephyr, which appeared at the Chicago TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 175 World’s Fair in 1934, and, finally, the DC 3 (1935). The historic roots of streamlining are more clearly delineated in the essay than in the exhibit. Two essays that take the reader on a quick tour of the exhibit make up half of the volume—Jane N. Law’s “Designing the Dream” and Donna R. Braden’s “Selling the Dream and Buying the Dream.” They include about three-quarters of the book’s illustra­ tions (thirty-nine color and 100 black-and-white photographs). Law and Braden nicely summarize the major exhibit themes, while the il­ lustrations allow the reader to view a representative sample of the hundreds of artifacts and graphics in the exhibit. Richard J. S. Gutman’s essay, “Streamlining the Roadside,” consid­ ers one topic neglected in the exhibit—the effect of the streamlin­ ing movement on architecture. Gutman briefly considers gas stations, diners, bus terminals, and commercial storefronts as exam­ ples of streamlined buildings. In “The Modern Aesthetic in Form, Fashion, and Photography,” Nancy Villa Bryk shows how the stream­ lined ideal extended to women’s fashions in the 1930s. The in­ creased emphasis on form rather than on ornamentation or color encouraged fashion photographers to produce radically different im­ ages. The volume concludes with William S. Pretzer’s provocative essay, “The Ambiguities of Streamlining: Symbolism, Ideology, and Cultural Mediation.” The exhibit argues that the streamlining phe­ nomenon is best understood largely as a symbol of modernity, a means of revitalizing demand during the Great Depression, and an important element...