Harpers Ferry Research Articles

His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid (review)

84CIVIL WAR HISTORY Despite his active political role, Grant took much time with his private interests. Never a rich man, he spent much time in supervising activities at his farm in St. Louis through the mails, advising on the sale of horses and improving the blood line of his cattle (he was an expert horseman and judge of livestock), obtaining adequate "insurence" on his investment, and advising on planting (19:28, 30-31, 60-61, 237-38; 20:127-28, 224-25, 259-60, 323-27). He sold his home in New York City to General Sherman (14:122-23; 20:121, 219) but retained a home in Philadelphia, which he leased out (19:35-36), and a vacation home on Long Island (19:219-24). Grant speculated regularly in land, not always successfully, through agents like longtime friend Charles Ford and his father-in-law, Frederick Dent (19:228; 20:76-77, 138-40, 144-47, 177-78). He even took a little time to go trout fishing (20:166-67). As The Papers ofUlysses S. Grant reveal, by taking the oath of office 1869, the new president moved into what would become two of the most controversial terms of office it was ever a chief magistrate's misfortune to bear in American history. It is an onus that Grant continues to bear, although, led by William Hesseltine, some historians have been more forgiving ofhim in the last part of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, many of his personal desires on poUcy were blunted by men of ill will in and out of the administration and by Grant's misguided notion that Congress alone represented the will of the American people. This belief led Grant to be molded by events, a quality emphasized by Brooks D. Simpson. Regardless of one's view of the results of the Grant administration, the president himselfstill comes off as a quiet, honest, firm, and decent man with a strong public and private equanimity. But, as noted by Bruce Catton, Grant usually epitomized the American character rather than rising above it as great executives must. William L. Richter Tucson, Arizona His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. Edited by Paul Finkelman. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Pp. xii, 354. $65.00 cloth; $19-95 paper.) The late ProfessorWilliam B. Hesseltine liked tojoke aboutwhether the Lincoln theme had been exhausted. The publication of another book about John Brown might well raise the same question, but this one is different and makes a unique contribution. Among its contributors are Daniel C. Littlefield on blacks and John Brown, Wendy Hamand Venet on the response of antislavery women, Peter Knupfer on how theraid affected Northern union, PeterWallenstein on theraid's impact on Southern politics, and Seymour Drescher on European reaction to the raid. Several of the essays discuss details of the Harpers Ferry raid. Bertram Wyatt-Brown summarizes the findings of the other essayists and also discusses BOOK REVIEWS85 the vital role of religion in Brown's thinking as well as his mental state. Robert McGlone's essay deals with the question of Brown's possible insanity and of how Virginia's Governor Wise and others reacted to it. Each essay adds to our understanding of the subject. EspeciaUy valuable is Paul Finkelman's discussion of the aboUtionists, who attempted to reconcile their nonresistance with support for Brown by placing blame for the violence on the slave power rather than on the Uberator. Brown himself aided that process after his capture by assuming the role of a gentle Christian martyr. In his essay on the return home from Philadelphia of Southern medical students, James Breeden documents the depth of anger and horror that many Southerners felt after the Harpers Ferry raid. In the final essay, Charles Joyner appUes the sociological theories of Victor Turner to the Brown theme, concluding that Brown's martyrdom made the i860 election "a referendum on the future of slavery" and the Civil War "a war against slavery." The John Brown legend endures in popular thought, an excellent example of terrorism-become-acceptable that helps iUuminate contemporary events as well. Each individual and group found special meaning...

Angel of Light: Interpreting John Brown

Angel of Light: Interpreting John Brown William E. Cain (bio) Paul Finkelman, ed. His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. xii 354 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). As the biographer Stephen B. Oates has noted, John Brown is “one of the most controversial figures in American history.” 1 Many have condemned Brown as a madman for committing gruesome murders in the Kansas territory in 1856 and for plotting insurrection at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, while others have honored him as a warrior-saint who sacrificed his life in an inspired but doomed attempt to free America’s slaves. In His Soul Goes Marching On, Paul Finkelman and nine other historians chart “responses” to Brown during the period of his imprisonment and trial and its immediate aftermath, showing vividly the ways in which he clarified, complicated, and heightened the slavery crisis and arguments for and against secession. This is an excellent collection — diverse, wide-ranging, richly detailed — and an important contribution to scholarship on the Civil War period. Part 1 of the book performs the tasks of summary and overview. Finkelman launches it with a cogent preface that surveys Brown’s life and abolitionist activities and comments on the significant work that biographers (e.g., Oswald Garrison Villard, W. E. B. Du Bois, Oates) and scholars (e.g., Benjamin Quarles, Jeffrey Rossbach) have done. Bertram Wyatt-Brown comes next, with a suggestive piece that outlines the themes of the collection and meditates on the “heartening and horrifying” meanings of Brown’s action (p. 11). He scrutinizes Brown’s strange, brooding, obsessive personality and the hold that Brown exercised over northern writers, intellectuals, and reformers. Part 2 focuses on “Northern supporters of Brown.” First, Finkelman describes the “antislavery response” and the process by which Brown was “canonized” as a Transcendentalist and Christian hero (p. 43) — a process to which, Finkelman keenly points out, Brown himself contributed through the nobility he cultivated in his writings, speeches, and conduct in prison and the courtroom. Daniel C. Littlefield follows with a superb study of African Americans’ responses to Brown, whose raid intensified debates about alliances between black and white abolitionists, the meaning of black manhood [End Page 606] and masculinity, and the place that violence should or should not occupy in the campaign against slavery. As Littlefield shows, African Americans were caught in a dilemma; if they resorted to violence, they were portrayed by whites as “aggressive and unprincipled savages,” but if they submitted meekly and relied on moral persuasion alone, they then were seen as weak, acquiescent, incapable of the kind of righteous resistance that white colonists had undertaken during the Revolution when they battled the British (p. 88). Wendy Haman Venet concludes Part 2 by sketching responses to Brown by northern antislavery women, including Harriet Tubman, Lucretia Mott, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Abby Kelley Foster, Susan B. Anthony, and, in particular, Lydia Maria Child, whose correspondence with Virginia governor Henry Wise and Margaretta Mason (wife of Virginia senator James Mason) sold 300,000 copies in pamphlet form and was reprinted in many newspapers. Part 3 consists of three illuminating essays on “Northern and Southern opponents of Brown.” Peter Knupfer studies political alignments in the North and Brown’s jolting effect on them. He treats the problems that Brown’s raid caused for the Republican party as it sought to present itself as a moderate force — opposed to slavery extension but not intent on abolition in the slave states themselves — and as its leaders prepared for the election of 1860. But even more, Knupfer delineates the attempt by northern conservatives, Democrats, and constitutional unionists somehow to meet the threat of national disorder and disintegration that antislavery agitation fostered and that, to them, Brown starkly epitomized. In the next essay, Peter Wallenstein concentrates on southern politics and the quest for sectional unity, as proslavery forces addressed the triple danger they perceived in their four million slaves, nonslaveholding whites, and the Republican party. Brown’s raid, Wallenstein explains, dramatized the evil of “Black Republicanism” and the peril of slave revolts that, it was said, northern whites would kindle but that might...

His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid.

His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid.

Terrible saint: Changing meanings of the John Brown Fort

Interpretations of national icons, including John Brown, often present themselves as timeless, rather than as the last link in a long chain of historical revisionisms. From generation to generation and from region to region, interpretations of John Brown have differed. This analysis demonstrates that the engine house, occupied by Brown and his followers during his attempted capture of Harpers Ferry, is an unstable sociocultural symbol among the white community, while it has been a stable icon among the black community. Its meaning and locations changed as the social and political atmosphere changed in this country.

His soul goes marching on: responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry raid

His soul goes marching on: responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry raid

His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid

His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid

Flexibility and Mass Production at War: Aircraft Manufacture in Britain, the United States, and Germany, 1939–1945

Flexibility and Mass Production at War: Aircraft Manufacture in Britain, the United States, and Germany, 1939-1945 JONATHAN ZEITLIN The relationship between military enterprise and mass production is a central theme in the history of technology.1 Military demand, military finance, and military ideology, it is widely agreed, provided a crucial stimulus for the technological breakthroughs necessary for mass pro­ duction. The origins of the “American system of manufactures” during the 1830s and 1840s, as Merritt Roe Smith has shown, lay in the U.S. Army’s determined quest for a rifle with interchangeable parts, itself inspired by the earlier visions and experiments of military engineers in 18th-century France.2 During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as David Hounshell has demonstrated, American industrialists successfully adapted the techniques of “armory practice”—notably, sequential manufacture of interchangeable parts using special-purpose machinery, jigs, fixtures, and gauges—to high-volume production oflight, standardDr . Zeitlin, associate professor of history and industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, is completing a book on flexibility and mass production in the British metalworking industries, 1830-1990, with support from the Guggenheim Foun­ dation and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He is grateful to the following friends and colleagues for generous provision of advice, comments on previous drafts, research materials, and unpublished manuscripts: Herrick Chapman, David Edgerton, John Guilmartin, Howell Harris, Gary Herrigel, Paul Hirst, I. B. Holley, Jr., David Hounshell, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ned Lorenz, Eric Schatzberg, Jim Tomlinson, and Jacob Vander Meulen. The usual disclaimers apply. 'For a general survey, see Merritt Roe Smith, “Introduction,” in Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (Cam­ bridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 1-38. ’Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), and “Army Ordnance and the ‘American System’ of Manufacturing, 1815-1861,” in Smith, ed., pp. 39-86; Ken Alder, “Terror and Technocracy: The French Origins of Interchange­ able Parts Manufacturing” (paper presented at the Society for the History of Technology meeting, Uppsala, Sweden, August 16-20, 1992). For a dissenting view that argues for the independent origins of the American system in the private sector, see Donald R. Hoke, Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector (New York, 1990).© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3601 -0002$01.00 46 Flexibility and Mass Production at War 47 ized equipment such as sewing machines, typewriters, agricultural implements, bicycles, and ultimately automobiles.3 Both military and economic historians also concur that the resulting capacity of civilian firms to manufacture large numbers of standardized weapons became increasingly central to the conduct of industrialized warfare, while the great munitions drives of World War I in particular played a key part in diffusing mass-production methods from the United States to other combatant powers such as Britain, France, and Germany.4 World War II, by all accounts, marks the apogee of this symbiosis between mass production and military prowess. For the Allied victory surely de­ pended, as contemporaries themselves believed, on the ability of American (and Soviet) mass-production industry to turn out military aircraft, tanks, and other weapons systems in unprecedented quantities.5 Historians of technology are well aware that international military rivalries have often centered on complex weapons systems such as naval battleships produced to customer specifications in small batches or single units using skill-intensive methods. And they have likewise docu­ mented the importance of military objectives and material support for the development of flexible, general-purpose technologies such as computers and numerically controlled machine tools.6 Yet the prevailing view has been that the military’s overriding concern with what Roe Smith calls “uniformity and order” has shaped and reinforced two central premises of modern industrial management: control and standardization. Insofar as military procurement objectives are recognized to diverge from the mass-production model—for ex­ ample, by emphasizing performance over costs—this has often been seen as an institutional distortion of normal economic processes that inhibits defense contractors from competing successfully in civilian product markets. For contemporary critics of the “baroque” technolo- 'David...

The Engineered Factory

The Engineered Factory LINDY BIGGS The story of the rational, engineered factory as conceived by indus­ trial engineers is a new chapter in the history of mass production. We know about the 19th-century changes in technology, about the revolutionary conception of interchangeable parts and increasing di­ vision of labor, but we know little about how 20th-century industrial engineers organized the increasingly complex components of mass production as they redesigned the factory.1 Much of the history of modern production technology involves the factory in some way—the machines, the workers, the managers—but the factory building—its design, layout, and construction—has re­ ceived far less attention than the manufacturing process or its prod­ uct.2 The factory building can be viewed in at least two ways: as an artifact of industrial change and as a dynamic element in the produc­ tion process. In this article I examine the latter, the way factory design became increasingly important to production in the early 20th cen­ tury. As engineers began to consider the factory building as a major component of the production process, the building became part of production technology, considered by some engineers to be “the mas­ ter machine.” Behind the changing attitudes about the factory at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century lay the new and rapidly growing profession of industrial engineering. Through their strong Dr. Biggs is associate professor of history at Auburn University. 'See Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), and David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production (Baltimore, 1984), for development of interchangeable parts and mass production. 2Notable exceptions are John Coolidge, Mill and Mansion (New York, 1942), on the development of Lowell, Massachusetts; Reyner Banham, Concrete Atlantis (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), on American industrial architecture and its relationship to modern archi­ tecture; William Pearson, American Buildings and Their Architects (New York, 1986). See also Jennifer Tann, The Development ofthe Factory (London, 1970), on the early English factory. Daniel Nelson gives minor treatment to factory buildings in his Managers and Workers (Madison, Wis., 1975); and Alfred Chandler acknowledges the significance of factory planning and design in The Visible Hand (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), but does not elaborate the point.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3602-0013SO1.00 S174 The Engineered Factory S175 belief in systemization and rationalization, industrial engineers tried to solve complex problems in production and industrial organization that plagued turn-of-the-century manufacturers. The engineers changed almost everything about the factory—the design of the buildings, the layout of machinery, the organization of work, and the system of management. * * * At the end of the 19th century, American industry was outgrowing its factories and management practices. The late 19th century saw factories grow from small-scale operations, often owned and man­ aged by one family, to large-scale complex manufacturing enterprises owned by corporations and run by specially hired managers. New management theories, introduced by F. W. Taylor and others, ad­ dressed the changes that came with the new scale and complexity of industry. The new management techniques sought, among other things, to reduce costs by tightening the chain of command in facto­ ries and intensifying the work process. Daniel Nelson writes that engi­ neers who took over managerial positions turned to rational manage­ ment as they realized its importance to successful business.3 The industrial organization, as well as the management and marketing techniques perfected during this period, became and remained the foundation of modern manufacturing and business administration. These changes in production scale and management altered social and labor relations as well. The corporate owners knew little or noth­ ing about the factory, its workers, and its operations; they cared pri­ marily about dividends. Similarly, the industrial managers hired by the corporation could not know the workers, or their work, the way that the owner-manager of the small factory had. As the new condi­ tions transformed industry, the professional manager had to find solutions to old problems as well as new ones that grew along with factory size and production volume; problems barely noticeable in the old...

There’s trouble a-Brewin’: The brewing and bottling industries at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a brewery and bottling plant operated in the town of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Archaeological excavations recovered beer and soft drink bottles once used by these industries. Considering that the brewery was operational in Harpers Ferry for over 10 years and bottled soft drinks and beer, it was surprising that relatively few bottles attributable to the brewery were recovered from the excavations. In order to understand this phenomenon, this study examines the historical context of the brewery, its associated bottling plant, and the people who worked in these industries. The Harpers Ferry brewery bottles recovered from the excavations are described and compared with bottles from regional breweries and bottling plants. Various possibilities for the lack of bottles are considered, including financial problems of the brewery, popularity of the product, and temperance.

Floral history by the back door: A test of phytolith analysis in residential yards at Harpers Ferry

Phytolith analysis was used to reconstruct two centuries of floral history for the yards of two structures at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia: the first master armorer’s residence and an armory worker’s house. The decay-in-place tendency of phytolith deposition provided insight into both general conditions of floral assemblages and specific floristic patterns in the adjacent lots of the respective residences. Contrasts between prehistoric flora and that resulting from impact of European arrival was evident in the phytolith record. Phytolith analysis also revealed specific aspects of landscaping—or the lack of it—as effected by the sequence of occupants in the houses.

A la Russe, à la Pell-Mell, or à la Practical: Ideology and compromise at the late Nineteenth-Century dinner table

This article examines the material forms that graced late 19th-century dinner tables and surveys the various styles of dining that flourished during this period. Ceramic and glass dining items available during the 1880s and 1890s, and their associated practices, reveal broader societal mechanisms at work than merely supply and demand. How these materials and practices were incorporated into everyday context-specific social strategies is the primary concern of this article. Ceramic and glass data from two archaeological investigations of a boardinghouse and the residence of a wealthy and influential family, both dating to the end of the 19th century in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, will be used as a model for this inquiry.

Interdisciplinary approaches to the meanings and uses of material goods in Lower Town Harpers Ferry

Recent archaeological excavations performed by the National Park Service at Harpers Ferry have contributed significantly toward understanding domestic life during both the 19th-century armory period and subsequent commercial development of the town. Many studies have focused on technical industrial development of cities, although few studies have highlighted the effects of industrialization on everyday life. An interdisciplinary approach provides insight into issues related to health, hygiene, diet, consumer behavior, landscape, and gender relations.

Sanitation and parasitism at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia

One focus of historical archaeology at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, West Virginia, is tracing the development of sanitation at the town through the 1800s and 1900s. Historical documentation indicates that there was a degree of resistance to the modernization of village sanitation. This study attempts to verify this resistance through examination of privy soils for parasites indicative of fecal-borne disease, specifically the helminth species Ascaris lumbricoides and Trichuris trichiura. The presence of these parasites in the early 1900s would indicate that fecal-borne disease due to poor sanitation continued to be an aspect of town life. The analysis revealed the eggs of both species in all three privies, indicating that resistance to modern sanitation resulted in the maintenance of fecal-borne disease.

Diet and prehistoric landscape during the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia: A View from the old master armorer’s complex

Examination of pollen and macrofloral remains from possible garden and yard areas yielded evidence for a variety of weedy plants, such as buffalo bur, crab-grass, clover, purslane, mustard family, and nut-grass. The makeup of the forest during the early historic period was similar to that in the prehistoric, although evidence indicates that the forest was apparently thinned during the 1800s.

Social dynamics and structure in Lower Town Harpers Ferry

From a small transportation crossroads at the confluence of two major rivers, Harpers Ferry grew into a thriving 19th-century industrial and commercial establishment. A federal armory manufactured guns here from the turn of the 19th century until its destruction during the Civil War. During this period, the master armorer occupied Block B, the focus of this study, in Lower Town Harpers Ferry. After the war, Block B became part of the commercial center of the town, as well as home for leading entrepreneurial families and transient boarders.

The health and sanitation of postbellum Harpers Ferry

This paper examines the documentary and archaeological evidence for health reform in 19th-century postbellum Harpers Ferry. The analysis reviews the cultural logic embodied in the national health reform ideals, a late 19th-century social movement aimed at abolishing unhealthy living conditions. The model that guides this analysis is based on the premise that cultural categories and principles cannot be viewed as normative sociocultural systems regulating human action. As a result, social action and therefore cultural interpretation must be seen as an active and contested discourse. The diverse interpretations of the national ideals of health reform as suggested by the documentary and material evidence for Harpers Ferry are explained as conscious decisions framed in particular social, economic, and political contexts.

Changing social and material routine in Nineteenth-Century Harpers Ferry

The transition from an agrarian to an industrial society was accepted at different rates among 19th-century Harpers Ferry residents and workers. Incorporating or excluding the segmenting principles of industrialization into domestic life created dramatic changes in the domestic lives of armory workers. Domestic archaeological assemblages are compared for two master armorers: one who supported the earlier task-oriented system of production, and the other who attempted to change the armory into a more systematic and modern industrialized facility. Distinctive differences between the assemblages appear and are attributed to changing perceptions of industrialism.

A boardinghouse madonna—Beyond the aesthetics of a portrait created through medicine bottles

Medicine bottles, examined within a larger context, provide an opportunity to explore how material culture influences, reinforces, and reflects late 19th-century gender roles. Bottles from one of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park’s late 19th-century privies reflect the gender role of a mother. Available information limits this paper to the examination of a 19th-century ideal. Examining the ideal through both archaeological and documentary evidence, however, reveals the apparatus of ideology and the effects of the ideal in practice. A mutual relationship between genders becomes apparent as does the need to maintain the interrelatedness of gender with other structuring principles of culture.

The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS249 various ways the American victory. Jackson and McClellan occupy center stage, with others making brief appearances at the expense of the hapless Mexicans. It is almost to be expected that the book begins to lose cohesiveness thereafter . Careers took various turns as officers went on a variety of duties. Waugh had to pick and choose which ones to follow. His selections will not win unanimous approbation, although most of them are solid. Since the author's roots are in the soil of "Stonewall" Jackson's hometown , that graduate of 1846 dominates the book. His every military move receives close attention—perhaps too close for the book's framework. Why it was necessary to describe the May 23, 1862, "battle" of Front Royal so minutely, while completing overlooking the 1862 Peninsular campaign of George McClellan, is a mystery. Another instance of imbalance is with the earlier discussion of events at Fort Sumter. The detail given to that episode hardly seems justified, when the only 1846 West Pointer there was Truman Seymour. His activities were minor. The above is not so much criticism as it is a warning that those West Point classmates do not receive equal shares of attention by any means. Indeed (as is so often the case in historical reporting), some of the thirty-four graduates whom Waugh selected are on the list because they left written records of their actions. Save for the West Point years, Waugh relied on printed sources—especially primary material in such periodicals as the Southern Historical Society Papers. His choices of "eyewitness" accounts were not always the best. John Esten Cooke and Henry Kyd Douglas, neither of whom ever let truth stand in the way ofa good story, should always be read with extreme caution. One major factual slip mars the work. Waugh devoted a chapter to the saga of Jackson in the spring of 1861 squeezing the timetable of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad until he could trap all ofthe trains in the area of Harpers Ferry. This is a staple of Civil War History. It is also without factual foundation. A regular use of "couldn't," "didn't," and other contractions is a detraction that seriously weakens the text as a whole. A sprinkling of dangling participles adds to the damage. The publisher should have known better. Waugh has introduced a new kind of Civil War history here. It is a blend of anecdote and analysis from thirty-four different directions. That should give it appeal for almost any Civil War student. James I. Robertson, Jr. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism. By J. David Greenstone . (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1993. Pp. xxxiii, 312. $24.95.) David Greenstone, a University ofChicago political scientist, left behind this incomplete manuscript when he died in 1990. His students have skillfully and 250CIVIL WAR HISTORY lovingly brought it to publication. Challenging Hartz's liberal consensus notion , Greenstone rearranges familiar details about antebellum politics in order to reformulate our understanding of the nature of the liberal tradition particularly as it confronted slavery. His main points are two: that there were three liberal traditions in America. The original one, which Hartz described, with its belief in individual rights, private property, and government by popular consent, was largely uncontested. But "a pervasively liberal culture need not be monolithically consensual" (50). In the years after the revolutionary generation , it diverged into two distinct, but each still liberal, casts of mind. One, which Greenstone labels humanist liberalism, represented here by William Leggett, Stephen A. Douglas, and, most of all, Martin Van Buren, was secular and rational. It stressed a utilitarian calculus, the satisfaction and aggregation of individual preferences, and sought mechanisms, such as popular sovereignty and especially the political party, to achieve such satisfaction . The second cast of mind was religiously rooted. Reform liberalism, represented here by John Quincy Adams (chapters on others in this tradition —Daniel Webster, Lydia Child and Frederick Douglass—were never written), articulated, in addition, a moral imperative, a duty to help people develop and enhance their capacities beyond their appetites. "Whereas humanist liberals stress[ed] consent to institutions that resolve[d] disputes over preferences, reform liberals emphasize...

Custom Design, Engineering Guarantees, and Unpatentable Data: The Air Conditioning Industry, 1902–1935

Custom Design, Engineering Guarantees, and Unpatentable Data: The Air Conditioning Industry, 1902-1935 GAIL COOPER Factory air conditioning appeared in 1902 as an industry dominated by custom design, and air conditioning remained that way for nearly thirty years. Each installation was unique, specially designed to fit a particular set of circumstances. Thus Carrier Engineering Corporation assured prospective customers in 1921 that “it is customary for engi­ neers who specialize in the design of such equipments to treat each problem individually and develop the most efficient equipment for the specific requirements of the client.”1 This approach to production established the overriding importance of engineering expertise within the industry, and the resultant centrality of technical knowledge to business success conferred on engineers both a shaping and controlling power over the emerging technology that was unbroken until the appearance of mass production. Custom design has been less well studied than mass production.2 Perhaps that neglect stems from an association of tailor-made products with a bygone era of craft production. Custom production may seem a historic relic, superseded by mass production. That sense of the new pushing aside the old appears as early as 1832 when Charles Babbage made a distinction between “making” and “manufacturing.”3 In his Dr. Cooper, assistant professor in the History Department at Lehigh University, is working on a history of air conditioning in the United States. She is grateful for the assistance of Dr. Anne Millbrooke and United Technologies, as well as the help provided by the staff of the Cornell University Archives. In addition, a Junior Faculty Fellowship from Lehigh University greatly facilitated access to archives and is acknowledged with thanks. 1 Weather Vein 1 (May 1921): 42. 'See David Hounshell, From theAmerican System to Mass Production (Baltimore, 1984); Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post, eds., Yankee Enterprise: The Pise of the American System of Manufactures (Washington, D.C., 1981); and Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977). 'Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed., The Works of Charles Babbage: The Economy ofMachinery and Manufactures (London, 1989), 8: 85-86.© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/94/3503-0002$01.00 506 The Air Conditioning Industry, 1902-1935 507 discussion of Henry Maudsley’s work for the British navy, he describes a system of “making” that included the production of single-item goods with general-purpose tools to the specifications of the client at a relatively high cost. This description of making, or custom production, and the language to describe it prevailed for nearly a century. In 1914 Frederick Halsey, longtime editor of American Machinist, self-consciously used the same terms in his machine shop text to distinguish between the work of the shop and the work of the factory.4 When they sat down to write their own book on shop practice in 1935, Joseph Wickham Roe and Charles W. Lytle borrowed heavily from Halsey and reproduced the “making” and “manufacturing” distinction, but this time with a difference.5 Substituting the term “building” for “making,” their characterization of custom production focused less on the methods of production and more on the distinctive economic and social relationships that flowed from its practice. “The two processes of production,” Roe and Lytle wrote, “from initial sale to final acceptance follow different courses.”6 Custom design pivoted on a direct relation­ ship between buyer and seller, devolving on the engineer an important role from beginning to end. In this system of production, according to Roe and Lytle, “the sale precedes the building and even much of the designing, and the engineer is intimately concerned in the selling as he must convince the purchaser of the superiority of his design.”7 Their description of custom production in all its commercial trappings vividly depicts the features of a vital system of production rather than the shadowy outline of a dying craft. Roe and Lytle’s assessment is useful not simply for their sensitivity to the economic facets of custom production but, more important, for their reportage of a modern variant of the building tradition. They conceded that “building methods will always have their place...