Wars of Incorporation

Abstract

In my first class in graduate school, a literature survey, the professor observed that the generalizations of the consensus interpretation of the 1950s were now outmoded, but he wondered if there would ever again be a manageable synthesis of American history, given the increasingly fragmented nature of the field. These two books bring very different approaches to this task for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his discussion of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, for instance, Maury Klein gives a detailed description of George Westinghouse's unprecedented display of electricity. Westinghouse installed 12 75-ton generators that powered a 250-foot Ferris wheel, an elevated railway, and 200,000 lamps. Rebecca Edwards also discusses the technology on display at the World's Fair, but in addition she notes that the anthropologist Franz Boas designed an exhibit of living people from nonindustrial societies, such as Penobscot Indians and Javanese people, arranged according to their supposed degree of civilization. Both of these details reveal important characteristics of American society in this period. But after reading Edwards's New Spirits, it is difficult to think of the story of industrialization in isolation from changes in the ethnic composition of American society, western history, and the growth of the imperial state. Klein lays out his thesis in the introduction: The broadest and most profound movement of the past century has been the irresistible tendency to transform every aspect of American life first into a and then into a larger business (p. 4). As such, his emphasis is on entrepreneurship and technology, although he argues that he is adding to existing accounts by discussing the ramification of methods throughout U.S. society and culture. In a prologue, Klein gives the concept of an economic hothouse, a