TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 185 lished a national and institutional base for North American science that shaped its agenda and its culture for decades thereafter. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt Dr. Kohlstedt teaches in the Program in History of Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota. Making Arms in the Machine Age: Philadelphia’s Frankford Arsenal, 1816— 1870. By James J. Farley. University Park: Pennsylvania State Uni versity Press, 1994. Pp. xv+142; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $32.50. The Army Ordnance Department’s Frankford Arsenal in Philadel phia opened in 1816 and operated as a military installation for some 160 years. One of several arsenals opened after disastrous ordnance supply problems in the War of 1812, Frankford’s initial role was inspection, storage, repair, and distribution of small arms purchased under contract. After the Mexican War, Frankford emerged as the army’s principal center for small arms ammunition testing, develop ment, and manufacture. Covering the period before 1870, James J. Farley seeks to use the arsenal’s history to illuminate a number of familiar issues in American industrial history. He focuses on the role of the Ordnance Department in the emergence of 19th-century American manufacturing; the social and institutional context of inno vation; worker reaction to the processes of industrialization, and the effects of those processes on workers; and on the relationship be tween the arsenal and surrounding communities. Farley effectively describes the growth of arsenal management un der a series of often gifted ordnance officers. Moving beyond the department’s concern for making or buying uniformly high-quality war material, he makes several important points bearing on the occa sionally testy debate over military influence on the “American system of manufacture.” The first, already noted by several historians of the national armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, is that military systems of control over costs, materials, workers, and output were extremely advanced compared to those that prevailed among antebellum Amer ican industries. Farley does not explore the influence of Ordnance Department managerial techniques and provides insufficient compar ative material to evaluate the importance of Frankford Arsenal’s ante bellum technological advances. He is much better at documenting how arsenal commandants not only depended on the application of military bureaucracy but also relied heavily on the talents of artificers, mechanics, and master armorers for administrative as well as techno logical or manufacturing guidance. He does this best in discussing the arsenal’s development of mechanized percussion-cap manufac ture (for shoulder arms) under Major P. V. Hagner in the 1850s. Drawing effective contrasts with management styles at nearby pri vate factories, Farley notes the less paternalistic or obtrusive ap 186 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE proaches of Frankford Arsenal commandants and supervisors. He emphasizes the nonexploitative aspects of arsenal employment, ar guing that employment of women and teenage boys was relatively secure and well paid, with opportunities for career advancement—at least for the boys. Many of the boys at Frankford were sons of arsenal workers, essentially brought into the business as apprentices. He knows far less about the women, who probably first appeared during the Civil War. This lack of information reflects a critical flaw in the book: an unexplained chronological framework which may have prevented him from pursuing his interests in community and other social contexts for industrialization. He appears to be correct in arguing that the period before 1870 saw the arsenal develop the management, production, and civilian labor relationships that charac terized the last century of its history. However, he is unable to de scribe some of these relationships in much detail because they emerge far too late in a periodization to which he adheres rather rigidly. Prior to the Civil War, most of the two to four dozen arsenal workers were enlisted men, retired enlisted men who became civilian supervi sors, and the sons of arsenal workers. Information on communityarsenal relationships in this period is limited, and Farley’s statements about a somewhat hostile antebellum local environment are often speculative. By restricting himself to limited pre-1871 primary mate rial, he cannot trace the emerging post-Civil War role of civilian workers and their community. Farley’s descriptions of large-scale industrialization are also...